Ep 420: Nick Gillespie on Culture, Choice, and the Pluralist Case for Liberty

Doug Stuart: Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I am your host, Doug Stuart, and I am pleased to have a very special guest on with us. His name is Nick Gillespie. If you’re a libertarian for more than five minutes you probably know exactly who he is, but he is if, if you’ve been a libertarian for, if you’re not a libertarian or you need to know who he is, he, he’s an editor at large at reason.

He’s co-author of a book called The Declaration of Independence, how Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America. He’s host of the Reason interview with Espi, and he’s been part of the libertarian movement for decades. And I, I wanted to have him on here to discuss his personal journey, his views, and you know, how he sees the direction of the libertarian movement.

And then, you know, explain his baffling amount of encyclopedic knowledge on pop culture. ’cause that’s actually more important than I think a lot of people realize. Nick, I really appreciate you coming on and have this conversation.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, it’s, it’s a real pleasure, Doug. Thanks for having me on, and thanks for what you guys are doing at LCI.

It’s really interesting stuff.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, thank you. You’ve been, you’ve been a a promoter of ours from time to time throughout, through x through freedom Fest. You actually moderated a, an important discussion we had in Memphis a few years ago. So, you’ve been, you’ve been a little bit of a part of, of helping us get our message out there, so I appreciate that.

Yeah. I wanted to start a little bit on a personal note because, you know, over the years I’ve listened to you talk about, you know, all kinds of things, whether it’s reason Roundtable that you’re on, or whether it’s just you talking with a guest on your own show or just interviews you’ve been on, that when, when the topic of immigration comes up you get a little irritated with the anti-immigration sentiment.

And of course there, that’s, that’s pretty rampant right now. Libertarians are even somewhat susceptible to this from time to time, and I have a sense that given your, what seems to me a pretty emotional reaction to it, it’s not just about the right libertarian position, there’s something more, more important to that.

And my guess is it has to do with you be, you know, coming from a family of immigrants. Yeah. So, I, I think I wanted to start off with just getting a sense of your personal history and why, why that particularly gets you fired up.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. You know, it, it is interesting and from a psychological position or, you know, perspective, you know, when you start talking about something and you get choked up or angry or happy for nuclear reason, like, you know, it’s channeling something.

Yeah. All four of my grandparents were, and immigration is certainly that for me. All four of my grandparents were immigrants. My father’s parents were from Ireland and my mother’s parents were from Italy. And they all showed up in new, in, in America, like in and around New York City in the 19 teens.

And that has, you know, that that’s a big part of who I am and the way that I think about myself. Partly because they were all coming here for, you know, more opportunities. They weren’t quite political refugees or asylees, although there was weird stuff going on both in Southern Italy as well as Ireland at that time period.

And also World War I was looming and all of that kind of stuff. But for me, immigration has just, you know, it, it may be more important than freedom of speech in a lot of ways. Freedom of mobility. I think if you believe in kind of libertarian values of autonomy and self ownership and the ability to create the world that you wanna live in, you know, being able to migrate freely is pretty.

Important there. I also, on top of that you know, I’m a big believer in kind of cultural ization and hybridization. And I think that, you know, the societies and the groups and the movements that do best are ones that are constantly bringing in new people with new experiences, new voices, new ways of being.

So for me, immigration and migration are just really important. On a personal level, I, I was born in Brooklyn in 1963. I grew up in New Jersey. I’ve lived all over the country and I’ve, you know, I tracked at some point I had, I had moved like more than 8,000 miles for a combination of school and work all around the country.

I ended up back in New York. I moved back here in 2018. But that kind of freedom of movement really, which is what I think immigration is about, you know, is really important to me. And I see. In, you know, certainly over the past decade, a real anxiety about new types of people coming here, people who couldn’t possibly assimilate, people who are, will never be American et cetera.

I see like an intensified anxiety over that Oftentimes, you know, race out outright racist claims against people or, you know, just a belief that we have too many people here already and we have to keep it out, you know, where we only can leave Yeah. People in. And that deeply worries me and offends me.

I, I have a, a doctorate in American literature and I wrote about, among other things about nativist tropes in American literature in the 19 teens and twenties. Particularly in a book like the Great Gatsby, which, you know, I think is a phenomenal text that still explains a lot of what’s going on in America and rumbling around there in the background of that book is this fear that America.

Is being over, you know, is being overrun or being swamped by lower orders, whether it’s blacks migrating from the south into New York, or you know, Italians and Greeks kind of muscling in, in Jews especially as well muscling into New York and kind of destroying this great place. So this is a cyclical fear in American history and it’s one that leads to the end or the diminution of a lot of basic freedoms.

You know, that I think any libertarian should be worried about. Yeah, if I may, yeah. Just sort of put it out there. ’cause I oftentimes get accused of just, oh, you know, being like, well, I’m an open borders guy. Like, I don’t believe borders should exist or should matter. I’m not talking about that. I, what, I’m talking with something that chase Oliver, the libertarian party candidate for the president in 2024, talked about, you know, what we should do is return to something like Ellis, the Ellis Island model that was in place from the Yeah.

About 1880 to about 1925 on the East Coast where you show up and if you are healthy and you don’t have any, you know, clear you know, physical or mental illness or criminal record, you come in and you don’t, you don’t get handouts, you don’t get, you don’t get welfare, you don’t get that, but you’re allowed to make a go of it here in America.

And I think, you know, that’s what I’m talking about. Yeah. The southern border under under Biden and to some degree under. Under Trump before him, as well as Obama and George Bush was a mess. Like we, we need to have more orderly legal immigration, and that gets rid of illegal immigration, which brings a lot of other problems that are, that have nothing to do with immigration any more than, you know, alcohol.

Alcohol trade does not lead to organized crime, except in when we’re prohibiting it, you know? Right, right. You know, if we made it easier for more people to move here legally the country would be richer. It would be more interesting. We would we would just, you know, every, everything would be better, literally.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. I, I would agree with you and I after Dave Smith and Alex Rastas debate, I had Alex on to talk about this, and one thing that we, we discussed was the, the, the position that you just described, which is that sort of Ellis Island. System turns off some libertarians in a way because it’s like, well, see, you’re admitting that the government ought to control it.

And I, and I kind of point out, you know what, that’s not really a, here’s what we would like. It is a rhetorical way of saying. Back that we now in the future know that back then that didn’t harm America by now. Right. And so it’s a way of sort of shifting the Overton window, I suppose, in a way that says, okay, this is actually something that worked for America.

You could see that the results were not disastrous despite all the nativism that was run rampant. And so there’s this rhetorical idea that you know, you, you’re, you’re moving somebody’s id not idea, but like way of thinking along, even if they’re not, you know, necessarily gonna buy in. Because I know that, you know, chase Oliver and, and Alex Rasta, both you and I would also say, Hey, that would be better than yeah.

Than simply what we have, what we have today.

Nick Gillespie: Well, and then the alternative is always like, oh, well you’re saying the government should regulate it. So I’m against that because I’m a libertarian, but. I think that the government should round up and deport all illegal immigrants, right? Like so, right.

What are you, what are you, what are you complaining about? What are you talking about? Other thing that comes up a lot is that people will say you know, well, you know, back in the 19 teens, we didn’t have the welfare state we have now, and until we get rid of the welfare state, we can’t have. You know, more robust immigration and it’s kind of like, particularly from a libertarian perspective.

Yeah. You’re saying I’m choosing the welfare state over the free movement of people. I like to say, you know, we should build a wall around the welfare state, not around the United States. Yep. Yep. People like Alex and others can show that immigrants, legal, or illegal, but especially illegal, consume fewer public goods than native born people.

And you know, and in that virtually every economist, even ones who do not like large scale immigration, will admit that immigration on balance adds to the economy. It, it, it lifts all boats. Yeah. Even

Doug Stuart: the ones who have found negative impacts, they’re, they even admit they’re negative, they’re negligible.

Right.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Yeah. So, and, and again, you know, it’s immigrant immigrants are always, and this is not just true in America. I mean, this is true in the Bible. It is true, you know, throughout human history, like newcomers or strangers in strange lands are blamed for everything that goes bad, you know, according to the people Yeah.

Who are complaining about them. And, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that like immigrants are, you know, they’re not bringing disease. They’re not bringing crime, they’re not bringing drugs. And, you know, to the extent that any of that is true, it’s kind of like, well, the, if to the extent that we import drugs from outside of America, it’s because Americans want drugs.

And like, then you’re not gonna solve that problem by, you know, blocking people who are, you know, crossing the border, looking to work you know, and to, to better their lives and the lives of their children and, and you know, yeah. Other people. So.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. How did your how did your views growing up as a Roman Catholic influence some of your views on even immigration or just anything?

How, how was that influence? Well,

Nick Gillespie: it’s interesting. I, I was raised Catholic and I, I think a lot about this. I, you know, I have a, an abiding interest in religion, not as a, not as a believer really, but as you know, somebody who understands how religion functions for individuals to build community and identity, and to have a sense of, you know, just like meaning in the world.

And I find my parents, because they, they were both you know, from Catholic families and they were, they were poor in the ni they were both born in the 1920s. They grew up in poor immigrant ghettos in New York City and in Waterbury, Connecticut. My mother, as a matter of fact, didn’t speak English until she went to grammar school.

And her parents never learned English and her parents, who again showed up here around, you know, in the mid 1910s and died in the late seventies, early eighties, lived their entire lives in a world where they could get by every day doing, you know, business and going shopping, only speaking Italian.

But the Catholic angle which is something I didn’t fully appreciate until years later. Being Catholic was both, you know, that was one of the reasons why they were considered not American and like worthy of being marginalized. And, you know, being Catholic, you know, Catholics now any Catholic who complains about.

Prejudice against Catholics is just full of shit. You know, and then even William F. Buckley, you know, who turns a hundred this year? And there’s been a lot of, you know, stuff about him. There’s a new biography, well into the eighties. He would keep saying, you know, the only the last acceptable prejudice was prejudice against Catholics.

And it’s, it’s simply not true. Catholics are the single largest religious denomination in the country, and they, you know, I, I mean there are is it a majority of Supreme Court justices are Catholic or it’s pretty close to it, you know, it’s like. Catholics, Catholics run everything, you know, like it doesn’t matter.

And it, it’s also not a predictor. See, letting them

Doug Stuart: in wasn’t a problem for America. Yeah. I mean, I guess depending on where you sit,

Nick Gillespie: maybe it was, yeah, yeah. I mean it did, they did help destroy the wasp, you know, ascendancy. But that was dying anyway for other reasons. Yeah, mostly ’cause wasps wanted to marry Catholics, you know, it’s like, oh, these are like new interesting people with better food, you know, or something.

But, but the, the function of Catholicism, I think for my parents in, when, when they were younger and then the town I grew up in, Middletown, New Jersey was about 50 miles outside of New York. And everybody I met there pretty much was Catholic. And I went to Catholic Grammar school in Catholic high school, and it formed.

It was a, you know, it was a serious source of identity and kind of power in the sense of like, okay, you were part of a community, so you, you had support, you had protection, you had a history and a kind of, you know, way of thinking about stuff. And that was very important. And it was interesting, my parents who, you know, again, my father was an altar boy, you know, doing the Latin mass and all of this kind of stuff.

At a certain point they were probably in their fifties, I guess. You know, they stopped going to church and like the Catholic church no longer structured their lives, like, I mean, all of our social life, so much, you know, our education was funneled through that, et cetera. And I found that kind of interesting.

But like, you know, when you, I, I have tell this weird story one time my family we were watching gone With The Wind was on tv. And you know, so like Gone With The Wind is a lot about, it’s about a lot of really big things. Some of it, you know, in a, in a way it is a grotesque version of America.

It is a grotesque version of American history, et cetera. But my parents’ takeaway from Gone With the Wind. There’s a scene where Scarlett O’Hara is at Tara, and somebody’s sick, and a priest comes and says, mass because her father might be dying or died. And, you know, and the O’Hara’s were Catholic. And my parents were like, Hey, look at that.

You know, they’re Catholic. Like that was like, their big thing was like, look at that. You know? That’s

Doug Stuart: cool. My parents would point out when they when they saw that like NFL athletes were Christians, they’d be point out, oh, he’s a strong Christian. Yeah. You know? No, I get that. Yeah. Do

Nick Gillespie: this with everybody and you know, Italians do it.

Like, it’s ended now, but you know, in any era when, you know, people like Dean Martin or like major entertainers would hide, you know, their, their Italian name with some kind of like more Anglo name. Hmm. You know, you point out with pride, but you know, so that that’s how Catholicism in a lot of ways was important to me growing up.

It kind of gave me an alternative history of the United States like, or an alternative way of being, which I think we may have talked about this in very various contexts, but it also meant because there was anti-Catholic. Prejudice written into all of the early laws of the, you know, the, the colonies in the states of America, with the exception of like Maryland and Georgia.

We were taught in Catholic school, weirdly, like everything, what America was, was a place of religious freedom and tolerance. And so every year I would learn about Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut. Mm-hmm. And Ann I’m sorry, I’m blanking on her name now. Ann Hutchinson you know, the great religious dissenter in the ma from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

And that set me on a, on a track towards libertarianism in a weird way. And the Catholic church is not particularly libertarian or anything, but that focus on the idea that people should be free to come here first and then to practice religion or live their lives the way they want to. And so inadvertently that was you know, growing up Catholic.

I think was a major contributor to why I became a libertarian. And every year we had terrible history classes. Like we would always start at, you know, the beginning of American history of like European contact, and then we would get to maybe, you know, maybe the Revolutionary War, maybe you know, uh mm-hmm 1800.

And then we would start over the next year. We never like picked up where we left off. So it was just this iteration, it seems like, you know, for a dozen years, like, you know what was really great, people like Roger Williams and Hutchinson and Thomas Hooker because they believed in religious freedom and that’s a good thing.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Yeah. So you. You obviously aren’t Roman Catholic anymore, and you are a libertarian. It sounds like the way you’re describing your, your Catholic upbringing, it sort of paved the way to be more about free movement, free people, free re yeah. Free practice of religion. Yeah. How did that I can

Nick Gillespie: also, I should add, I mean that the Catholic church again, you know, in the Catholic church contains multitudes, right?

Sure, yeah. And it’s depending on the country you’re in, it functions in different ways. In the US I think it was mostly you know, a force for things like more immigration. And, you know, during the eighties or seventies and eighties the role of the Catholic church and like bringing in Vietnamese boat people because South Vietnam was a Catholic country or had a, a large Catholic population, you saw this opening up of, of communities. A friend of mine who grew up Catholic in Dodge City, Kansas, there’s a little Saigon in Dodge City, Kansas, which has tremendous Vietnamese food because all of the Catholic churches there were like, yes, send us as many Vietnamese people as you can. And that was a model of Christian charity and Catholic charity and openness, I think, which has also really stuck with me, specifically regarding immigration.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. So did, did libertarianism find you or were you looking for it as you, you know, when was that in your, in your journey?

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, that’s it’s an interesting question and I, I would say it’s a mix of things. You know, like I, to some part of me believes that, you know, libertarians are kind of born or you’re born with a predisposition towards individualism.

And kind of the idea that like, okay, if you know I should be allowed to live how I want, and that also implies letting other people live the way they want. Right. Not always, but hopefully it does. And I think that emphasis on you know, on kind of toleration that was weirdly, ’cause, you know, the Catholic church in Europe is certainly not a tolerant or was not historically a tolerant institution.

Right. I’d say. And, you know, yeah. And, and, you know, but it’s, it’s so fascinating to me again about religion because like the Catholic church in Latin America. Is very different than the Catholic church in, you know, central Europe under communism. And it’s, you know, it, it, so it, it performs different types of function in the same way that a kind of evangelical or independent Protestantism obviously functions differently, both for its adherence as well as in the world then kind of mainline Protestant denomination.

Mm-hmm. Right. And that, you know, and then like. If, you know, in Italy, being Catholic means something very different than being Catholic in, in England, right. Where it’s like Yeah. At a persecuted minority or, or a suspect minority. Yeah. Yeah. And so, in any case, the, the, you know, growing up Catholic in the context that I did, that opened me up to the idea of kind of toleration and then it’s like, what are the frameworks for that?

And, you know, the real framework which I wish America had paid more attention to when it was being developed, and I wish we would pay more attention to it. Now, really for me, comes from Roger Williams the founder of Providence, Rhode Island. And the the person who got the charter for Rhode Island and was, you know, wrote the first track in the English language for.

Fully secular government where, from what I understand, and I, you know, read a lot about him. I mean, he believed that the pope was the antichrist or a werewolf and, you know, all of the puritan kind of prejudices of the day or beliefs of the day. Yeah. But he still insisted that religion and politics should be separate spheres because politics will just, you know, will taint and poison mm-hmm.

Religion and, you know, history obviously, I think, you know, proves him. Right. And so, you know, what he called for in the bloody tenant of persecution this phenomenal 17th century tract was, you know, a complete separation of that. And the idea that, you know, getting rid of establishment clauses for anything.

And it’s just like, you know, you should be allowed to worship freely and then live freely as long as you’re not impinging on other people and treating people equally. He, you know, his relationships with the Indians around him are also, you know, phenomenal. And, you know, weirdly, so, you know, this is just a weird way of saying that from a Catholic schooling, I ended up becoming like, you know, the world’s biggest Roger Williams fan boy.

And that’s, he is a proto libertarian, I think, in that he has very deeply held personal beliefs that he wants to be free to develop and live within. But he also recognizes like, you know, we need liberal tolerance and, and pluralism in order to secede as a society really. And so that was run rumbling around in the back.

And then the other thing about the Catholic education stuff is that like I learned an alternative history of the United States, which was all about how, you know, there were these groups that were not really fully appreciated, but were doing all sorts of work because to this point, like I, you know, we always learned about Charles Carroll of Carrollton who was the only Catholic sign of the Declaration, an absolutely minor player.

He is from Maryland. His brother John Carroll was the founder of Georgetown and was like one of, I, either the first bishop or. Archbishop in like Colonial, okay. America or you know, English Anglo America colonies. But you know, like you, you, you key in on all this weird stuff going on and I think there’s something that predisposes one towards libertarianism when you start to realize like the official mainstream rece receive story glosses over a lot of weird and interesting kind of things that are going on below the surface, or, or that Yeah.

Official attention. And then, you know, the, the really, the big, and, and so I liked that, you know, and I would turn that against my Catholic, you know, school teachers when they would talk about something and I’d be like, well, what about this weird revolt or this subculture that was doing all kinds of interesting stuff?

Yeah. You know, and they weren’t harming anybody and, you know, the, the state or the church would try and like wipe them out. And then, you know, but really when I was in high school, my bro, I have an older brother who went to college and he started reading Reason Magazine. And introduced me to it and I was like, oh, this is really cool.

Like, I liked what reason was, you know, writing about and the way they were doing it. And I started thinking of myself as a libertarian, a small l libertarian, not particularly political. I believed in things like free speech and, you know, immigration or freedom of movement and the right to run your business the way you want to and things like that.

But you know, that’s, those things primed me and then, yeah. Okay. It was really when I went to, you know, when I was, by the time I got to college, I would say if somebody said, are you conservative or liberal or Republican or Democrat, I would say I’m Libertarian. And then when I eventually went to grad school for English Lit and American Lit and Cultural studies in the late eighties, that it became more pronounced because this was a period of, well, you know, what was called political correctness, which kind mm-hmm.

The political correct period in the late eighties through the mid nineties, trained the professors who are now presiding over kind of woke universities and sure realized I was not a left winger and there was a small cadre of kind of hyper conservative people who were conservative aesthetically, but also socially, and I wasn’t that.

And so it libert being libertarian became more important to me really in early adulthood.

Doug Stuart: In, in the eighties. Was that sort of environment, I would imagine it’s like fairly Marxist in, in sort of the ideology of the professor.

Nick Gillespie: You know what’s fascinating and I’ve got an interview op with a guy named Mark Pennington mm-hmm.

Who’s a British academic who just wrote a book about Michelle Foucault, who, you know, a left wing French theorist who was the most influential kind of social writer in the social sciences, in the humanities the last half of the 20th century, about how Foucault and Friedrich Hayek are really. Very similar and intertwined in interesting ways.

And I totally believe that. And I was pushing that line when I was in grad school with, you know, very little. Yeah. Impact. But the, what I was gonna say is the, the people I met in academia were not Marxists. Marxists were, Marxists weren’t always have been a very small subset of people on the left in academia, but, and most, most people on the left in academia are not as systematic as Marxist.

And they do not, it’s much more about things like identity politics or kind of consensus politics. Marxists are radicals in the, in similar ways to libertarians, you know, and, and I ended up hanging out a lot more with the actual Marxists than with mere leftists because they were not, their commitments were weird.

And, just kind of inconstant, like they would, you know, they, they would vote for Bill Clinton, you know, that type of thing. Like, as opposed to Marxists we’re like, no, bill Clinton is terrible. You know, like, we need a radical reformation of society. And like, while I disagree with, you know, most of their methods of analysis and certainly most of their goals you know, like I, I could have a better conversation with those people.

Okay. Yeah. All right. I see. So, and, and I will say the, I’m sorry to Yammer on. No, you’re good. I haven’t talked about this stuff in a long time, but the election, I was in grad school for the election of 1988, and this is one of like, it’s, it’s a big moment I think where you know, there had been eight years of Ronald Reagan and like, you cannot underestimate how, you know, what, you know, how Trump won.

And people are like, how could Trump win? I don’t know anybody who voted for him. When Ronald Reagan. Beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then things went bad for a couple years, but then when he beat Walter Mondale in 1984 and everything seemed to be going well, you know, like the economy was growing, like, uh uh, Americans were optimistic again.

Academics felt like they were in internal exile. It was really like the, the aliens from the old show V if you remember that at all. Like, you know, it was a bunch of aliens who take over the planet. And, you know, they felt like they were in a, in an occupied country. And they knew when, you know, Reagan though, Reagan was like a black swan.

He was you know, charismatic and a good communicator. George HW Bush was you know, paper mache oph. He had no you know, he had no charisma. He had no anything going on. He would be defeated by the great Mike Dukakis, right? The, the, you know, the Colossus of Massachusetts. You know, who best strode the world like a God.

And when George HW Bush won and won easily over Mike Dukakis, people in academia freaked out. ’cause they were like, oh my God, like this. It’s not going back. Yeah, we’re done. Yeah. In country. And they flipped out. And I think that’s when a lot of people in academia were like, oh, we have to become really politically motivated and activated, because otherwise we’re gonna, you know, we’re, we’re gonna be like in Stalins Russia.

You know, even if they were like, oh, well, you know, Stalins Russia really wasn’t that bad when you think about it, so,

Doug Stuart: yeah. Well that was also the time of the rise of at the beginning of the critical theorists too. Yeah. Yeah. And, and who were basically, they did latch onto the whole, like, the point of Marxist analysis is to change the world, not just understand it.

That’s right. And so did, did those coincide in your mind too?

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And you know what, what is interesting though is that Marxist analysis ultimately is about class and the, and the position of like, it’s about economic classes that dictate a political and cultural superstructure, right? I the critical theorists in general, but then especially the ones who emerged in the late eighties and are still around today, it’s much more about identity and it’s about race.

You know, everybody would say, we’re gonna look at things from the posi perspectives of race, class, and gender, but they never cared about class, and it was always about race. Ethnicity and then gender, which morphed from a kind of feminist analysis to a much broader kind of set of identities that had to do with sexual orientation more than gender per se.

And as a result, like they ended up being at odds in many ways with the Marxists, because the Marxists were like, no, we, you know, it’s economics is everything and it’s class position. And, and then these other people were like, no, it’s not. I, you know. Do you think that’s why they

Doug Stuart: ignored the class component of that?

Absolutely. ’cause they became oppositional. ’cause it seems that’s a, that’s very oddly missing in some of the policies, prescriptions that identity politics typically do. It’s like, it’s all about, look, look at the, look at the outcomes of black people. It must be evidence of systemic racism. But it’s like, well, hang on, you’re not doing a class analysis.

You probably have something to balance that with.

Nick Gillespie: I now, and this I think, you know, Bernie Sanders is interesting in this sense of like, Bernie was a class warrior until you know, you know, when he started running for president, especially the second time with the rise of identity politics in 2016, he was still talking mostly about class and about, you know, we have to help people, you know, poor people and lower income people.

Mm-hmm. And again. You know, most of his prescriptions are terrible and would actually hurt poor people and lower income people. But he was focused on class in the 2020 race. He, you know, there’s a, a moment, I think it was in Seattle, where he almost literally gets pushed off the stage by a couple of Black Lives Matter Act, black Lives Matter activists.

And when he emerges a couple weeks later, he is talking about identity politics. He has given up class. And I think, you know, that that’s telling, and that was kind of the last gasp of, of a class-based politics. And I, I think, you know, from a libertarian perspective, you can do meaningful class politics in terms of like, if you believe, and I, I certainly lean this way.

You know, the reason why I am a capitalist or why I think capitalism is good is because it gives more opportunities to people like me. I grew up lower middle class. I was the my father didn’t even graduate high school. I was the first generation of my family to go to college. And like, I think a capitalist society loosens things up more and allows for more mobility or individualization of who you end up being.

Like that’s why I, you know, I am in many ways a libertarian because from a class analysis level, I think it gives more opportunity for more people to move up and out of wherever they’re from. You know, it’s class is something nobody, you know, it, it, it’s, it, it’s never been a popular means of.

You know, politics or identity, because the, the thing with class is like when you move from being lower class or lower middle class to upper class, you are ashamed of where you come from. Hmm. You know, and you’re ashamed in a way that you know, it’s just hard to glamorize you know, bad taste, especially in the academy.

And that’s what I saw again and again where it’s like, you know, if you’re upper, if you’re raised upper middle class with upper middle class preferences and aesthetics and things like that, like you, you can’t look at. You know, people from you know, Appalachian, Ohio or you know, Kentucky or, you know, white, white, lower class, white ethnic, you know, white trash.

It’s very hard for people, regardless of racial and ethnic or gender identity to romanticize those people if they didn’t come from that. And if you come from it, you’re kind of like, yeah. I, I, I don’t want to dwell on that too much. JD Vance strikes me as Yeah. An interesting figure in this.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Okay.

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When you use code LCI 50, you get half off your first order and you’ll also be supporting the work here at LCI. So I, I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit about libertarian philosophy and postmodernism, because you’re one of the few people, and I know you, the day we’re recording this is the day after you released that interview with, was it Mark Pennington?

Yes. Yeah. Which, which I listened to and just thought it was really appropriate to, to listen to the day before we’re having this conversation. Yeah. Well, although I, I went to buy his book and then realized I had to also feed my family, so, oh yeah. Yeah. It’s an, this academic book.

Nick Gillespie: But it’s like 90 bucks or something.

Yeah. I was like, oh, okay. May, maybe later there’s done a lot of interviews like chat GPT or something like that. Yeah.

Doug Stuart: Okay. I’ll do that. I’ll do that for sure. But I do recommend check it out. I, it was, it was exciting interview to, to, to listen to. You’ve been pretty open and positive and, you know, anything I’ve heard you talk about, about the term, what you’re, you’re using the word postmodern.

Libertarianism. Yeah. What, what do you mean by that? Because I know a lot of libertarians might see that as an oxymoron.

Nick Gillespie: Oh, yeah. Or, or, you know, like you, I mean, if you’re broadly on the right, however you define that, you know, the one thing you know for sure. Is that postmodernism is terrible and it’s a, it’s as bad as communism Marxist.

Yeah. It’s, it’s a Marxist leftist Yeah. Homosexual plot or something. Right. So here and then throw in

Doug Stuart: pedophile and you’ve got all of the Yeah. You’ve got every ingredient they think that exists. Yeah,

Nick Gillespie: yeah. You know, and, and, and maybe, you know, among the, the edgier Christians or Protestants, you know, it’s also kind of Catholic.

Right. I dunno.

Doug Stuart: You know what, you know, it’s funny, I know you’re, I know you’re joking, but my, my personal introduction to understanding postmodernism from a more broadly Christian perspective that’s not negative was from a Roman Catholic.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and it’s funny because the Catholic church is actually a, not a postmodern institution.

And let me, you know, lemme No, of course. You know, it’s very hierarchical and it’s total is like, you know, it will tell you how to live every aspect of your life because, not, not from divine revelation, but from the institution of the church as it’s built up. You know, over 2000 years or whatever they claim.

But you know, postmodernism for me or to be postmodern is to have incredulity toward meta narrative. This is a phrase that. A French philosopher named Jean Leotard talked about in a book called The Postmodern Condition that came out in the late seventies. And, and basically what incredulity toward meta narrative means simply is like a radical skepticism towards truth claims, particularly of, of stories or of systems of knowledge that seek to explain everything in all of its particular.

So, like, you know, here is something that I think libertarians, you know, rightly you know, when they hear something is totalitarian or totalis, you know, they get a little bit antsy. Like who, you know, how can something, how can any one thing explain everything, every jot and tittle, every little detail, every, you know, burp and fart and, you know, moan and human existence, right?

Like, yeah, no, and, and the, the big series. In the enlightenment, kind of in the enlightenment tradition coming out of the 19th century, the, the big three theories that seek to do that are Marx, Freud, and Darwin. You know, so genetics, you know, you can explain everything through evolution in genetics or through economics or through psychology.

And, you know, to be postmodern is to say like, yeah, I don’t know. That sounds like you’re doing a little bit too much work. And ironically, the and I talk about this with Pennington in this, the first Hayek book that I read was a book called the Counter-Revolution of Science Studies on the Abuse of Reason.

And it is his long, it’s pretty impenetrable in a lot of ways. It’s from 1952 or so. And it, it is a study of how French and German enlightenment thinkers said, okay, you know what? We’ve, like now we’ve discovered how biology works and how physics works and how chemistry works. Like we understand the natural sciences.

Hmm. Just as those things are governed by laws, so too must human society be governed by similar axiomatic laws where, you know, every action has a, you know, a counteraction, you know, and all of this kind of stuff. Like, so we can figure out the laws of human societies and then use those to speed up or slow down or redirect where we want society and civilization to go.

And Hayek, I think, pretty convincingly says, you know, if that is what, you know, if that’s the enlightenment that leads to things like the gulag, it leads to things. Mm-hmm. Like hyper planned economies, it leads to treating individuals not as ends not as means to an end or excuse me, not as ends in themselves, but as means to an end.

The end is this grand plan. And it might be religious people, it might be economic people, it might be political people who say, you know what, like our society is this and we’re driving towards this goal. And you either become part of the pro, you know, part of the program or you’re part of the problem and we’re gonna get rid of you.

You know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna say you’re insane. We’re gonna put you in prison, we’re gonna kill you. We’re going to spend a lot of time converting you so that you think the way you have right things so that you’re doing the work we want you to do. And you know, to me, Hayek, this is really before I encountered postmodernism in an academic context.

And I was like, wow, like Hayek, you know, I buy this and that’s. You know, liberalism as opposed to kind of socialism. And Hayek talks about this also in you know, in various books. But liberalism is not seeking to explain everything and to force people to live one particular way. It is a structure, a political and social structure that facilitates a lot people being left alone and kind of figuring out things.

Mm-hmm. And as long as you’re not gonna crash the whole system, you know, you should be allowed to live how you want, you know, to the greatest degree possible. So in a, in a way, what postmodernism is then, to me, you know, it stresses the limits of human knowledge rather than the extent, and it, it, it takes in.

An attitude of of humility rather than hubris towards policy and planning and telling people how they must live, you know?

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, I mean, you’re bringing up the Hayek quote that is often used about economics, about what is it? The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.

And that like encapsulates the whole, like, I guess maybe a postmodern ethos toward a totalizing state. You know, somebody justifying, well, state has to do this because X, Y, Z. Yeah. And it’s like, well, no, you here’s some economics that, that are, that are based in, are rule, maybe not rules based, but they are, they, they have an order to them that we’re not going to, that merges.

Yeah.

Nick Gillespie: Rather than it’s enforced. Like it, you know, it emerges bottom up rather than enforced from top down. Right. And, you know, I think you know, and, and it was interesting and then, you know, I actually, in graduate school I encountered Fuko and I was like, God, you know, this guy sounds a lot like Hayek where he’s talking about, you know, the ways in which top-down structures and, you know, get imposed on people or systems of knowledge turn into systems of power where it’s like, you know, at various points people say, well, this is sanity and this is insanity.

And we’re gonna define that scientifically which really is mere, you know, preference in, in a lot of cases. And then we’re going to take people we deem insane. Or impure or whatever, and we’re gonna put them in total institutions where we either torture them until they say the things we want them to say or we keep them out of mind, et cetera.

And I think that’s a, it’s a, you know, it’s a, a very fruitful conversation where we

Doug Stuart: exterminate them.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, you know, that’s and, and it, you know, this is also, I think, you know, people like Hayek and Fuko certainly, and, and, you know, all of us, I really, in the wake of, not just of the Holocaust, which was, you know, the mechanized systematic approach, like using kind of techniques of mechanical and industrial production to exterminate people in the Soviet Union who had the same.

Kind of attempt to like, rationalize all aspects of society and use scientific methods of management ex, you know, and mind control and things like that in order to create a particular world. And, you know, and they failed. I mean, they’re, and they’re morally repugnant. But there, you know, in the case of the Soviet Union, it also did not work.

And we would do well to understand that and then to look at the places where, you know, in contemporary American. And so, you know, it’s nothing like these things, but where people are trying to assert more and more control of over other people on the grounds that like they are misguided or they’re doing the wrong thing.

You know, and then we need to, you know, sanction them. We need to reeducate them. We need to move them out of society or, you know, kill them. I mean, this, these are all, yeah, you know, me, this is all like what libertarianism in a lot of ways is about,

Doug Stuart: there’s a, there’s a growing trend right now to be sort of anti-liberal.

I think was it, forget his name. He’s the one he, he wrote after why Liberalism failed Patrick Deneen. Yeah. Yeah. You have, I think it’s, is it John Gray?

Nick Gillespie: And Is Deneen is Deneen at is he at Notre Dame or one of them? Yes, I believe so. Yeah. Suspiciously Catholic institution. Yeah. Right, right.

Okay. The, you know, and this is true that the Catholic church was not a fan of liberalism in the 19th century, as, as liberalism started to kind of dominate things. You know, the idea of limited government and the separation of church and state you know, and kind of free markets. They hated socialism.

Yeah. You know, they, you know, the. And, and this is not to paint with too broad a brush, but like the Catholic church is not a liberal institution. It can, it can live within liberal societies, but like, you know, it’s like, no, it’s our way or the highway. And yeah. So, but, but so I, I can see why certain types of Catholic thinkers, not all of them, and you know, there are so many, you know, there are so many Catholics including Hayek, I believe, who was raised Catholic or, or.

Kind of was Catholic, but you know, that that really pushed liberalism as, as a governing philosophy. But like, you can understand why certain types of Catholic thinkers would love to get to a world post liberalism because it would free them up to start dictating moral, you know, morality in all of society as opposed to using persuasion.

They can start using coercion and things like that.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah. You, you and I often have the same reaction when we hear, ’cause I’ve heard you react to this on, on interviews, have the same reaction to people who say that a post postmodernity and modern capitalism has robbed us of meaning. And I was, I’ve been recently watching the show, mad Men and, and one of the, one of the characters was reading a book by Barry Schwartz, and he, he actually quotes the book.

He says, is the number of choices grows further, the negative escalates until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to terrorize. And I just thought, right. No, it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s okay to have 45 types of deodorant on the shelf, Barry.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And, and also, you know, I think about it, it’s, you know, ’cause Barry’s Barry Sanders, Barry, I, you know, I wish Barry Sanders was Bernie Sanders. We would be in a, you know, line. I just realized

Doug Stuart: what I did there. Sorry. Yeah,

Nick Gillespie: yeah. You know, I meant to say Bernie Sanders and I’m reading just anyway.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s, no, but you know, Barry Sanders is, is the real deal the classic figure. And he, I wish he was a national politics to say the least. But, you know, the way I see it is that it, you know, modernity or, you know, this proliferation of choices and options is terrifying in a lot of ways because it means like, God, every day you have to reset the defaults on a lot of stuff.

You know, it’s like as if you went into Windows every day and you had, or you know, some kind of you know, you know, some kind of computer system. I don’t know where your car presets. And every day you have to reset them. Yeah. Because there’s so many options. Like you can look at that as wearying or you can look at it as liberating and Yeah.

You know, Bernie Sanders did say at one point, you know, like, what, what sense does it make to talk about like 45 flavors of deodorant and, you know, different types of toothpaste and shoes, what kids are going hungry as if these two things are in any way related. And like, the fact of the matter is, is many few people in the globe are hungry now because there is more capitalism and market, you know, free enterprise around the globe.

But it’s like, I don’t know, like, you know, ask somebody, like, if you are not, you know, heterosexual, like, does having more options of sexuality, is that liberating or is that like, oh, I, I can’t make sense of the world anymore. I have too many, too many choices. You know, I, I, and yeah, I hear you. This, you know, because it’s like, yeah.

You know, like, and, and the fact is, is that we come up with ways to. Kind of make choices and live with them for a while, so we’re not resetting every dial, you know, on, on our windows you know, or every, every toggle switch on our Windows system every day. You know, we’re comfortable with that. Yeah. Yeah.

We use shorthands and heuristics, but it’s great to have these options so that you can be like, you know what? I want to try something very different. Or, yeah. You know, this flavor of Axe body spray speaks to me. It’s like, it’s good to have the 45th Axe body spray flavor.

Doug Stuart: You know, I, I think the sophisticated version of that argument to give a little bit of difference there Yeah.

Is that the market has given, has done something to the makers, you know, the, the company Johnson and Johnson or whoever makes deodorants. Yeah. The incentive to hire scientists to make more flavors of deodorant to help their bottom line, as opposed to those scientists being incentivized to help world hunger.

I mean, that would be the Bernie Sanders probably sophisticated argument if he could make it. Yeah. I

Nick Gillespie: mean, the, the problem with that is just that we, you know, we have fewer hungry people now than we did when we, when we didn’t even have deodorant. So, you know, it’s like these things are really delinked.

But then you, so you’re

Doug Stuart: saying that more deodorant, just, just to be clear, you’re saying that the fact that we have more deodorant means more people are not going hungry? I’m, yeah. Right.

Nick Gillespie: Exactly. And they smell better

Doug Stuart: too, you know?

Nick Gillespie: I don’t think they’re

Doug Stuart: the same.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Sorry.

No, but you know, the other way of thinking about this, and I, I think about this a lot in a in a religious context.

Like, you know, because it’s, it’s, you know, you can look at the banality of consumer products are like, it is kind of nuts. Like, you know, how many, how many types of nut butter do you need? You know, how many, how many types of coffee, you know, all of this kind of stuff. And it’s like, I, yeah, I like it, but I can understand people being like, you know what, we don’t need, you know, all of these flavors of ice.

Yeah. Plus gelato, plus sorbet, you know, et cetera. But when, when it comes to things like religion. You know, like, do you, do you want to say, you know, what the problem with Protestantism is or the problem with Christianity because it’s like you’ve got the Orthodox church and like an endless pro, you know, procession of like, subdivisions of that that, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of different types of Catholic both acknowledge, un acknowledge then Protestants and then all of the other groups that may or may not really be part of the Protestant tradition.

And it’s like, oh, it’s just too much. It’s driving people crazy. And it’s like, no, it is a reflection of free people being able to. Invent themselves and discover what is true for them or what is meaningful for them and pleasurable for them. And the only bound I think that should be put on that, and you know, in this, it’s not as clear cut as it might sound, but like is, are you actively harming other people who have rights that are equal to you?

Right. Yeah. To yours. Like there are limits in a liberal society, you cannot be fully tolerant of intolerance or of totalitarianism or something. But like, you know, there’s so much room for choice and evolution and experimentation. Yeah. To me, like, and I see this in my own lifetime. To go in almost every area of activity.

You go from having a couple of options, if any, to lots and lots. And I don’t know, like, you know, my, I come from peasant stock. I mean my you know, I can only trace my family back to my grandparents, but I know that where they came from, they were peasants, they were surfs, they were the people who were expendable and had no agency or very little agency.

And it’s like. I’m kind of digging this and I want my kids to have more agency. Yeah. And it does, you know, this, the one thing I will say is that like, we need to make this pivot, not only to embrace it, but then to build up the kind of institutions and education and kind of mindsets that allow people to flourish in this kind of world.

Because you need different, you know, you, you need to be able to handle choice. You need to be able to facilitate self-directed you know, kind of exploration of options and things like that. And then also to go back to the actual Barry Schwartz, the the Swarthmore psychologist who wrote the book, the, the Paradox of Choice.

You need to learn how to satisfy. He talks about like where you make choices and then you, you’re not constantly thinking, rethinking them and doubting them, but like, yeah, you know, you make a choice and live with it and you can revisit it later, but like, you’re not paralyzed by choice, which I, I think, you know, actually most people are very capable of capable making provisional contingent choices and then reevaluating them a little down the road.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Gillespie: What

Doug Stuart: do you, what do you think of the current state of the Liberty movement as it is now? I mean, we’ve, we’ve come, we’re a few years past a libertarian party reset, or, you know, reconfiguration. We’ve had you know, we’re, it’s been around for decades. You’ve been part of the movement for a while.

Your description of why you’re a libertarian and some of the things that appeals to you is, is, but one of the many ways that libertarians tend to communicate that some, some better than others. Where do you think that, you know, what is, what is the state of this and what direction you think this might be going?

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. You know, I mean, I would say that the state of the Libertarian movement is pretty fractured and fractious. And I think that that reflects a broader problem with politics and kind of, you know, I, I tend to think of libertarian with a small l as, as a social movement or a cultural movement.

Mm-hmm. More than a political movement per se. But, you know, whether you’re talking about conservatives or progressives or liberals or libertarians, like there’s, all of them are confused right now, and all of them have been broken up and, you know, it would be, it would, it would be saying too much to say that Donald Trump is the guy who came in and like broke everything.

I think he is more a reflection of the dead end of a lot. Like we’re in a moment and I, I really don’t know how to articulate this more succinctly and I apologize for, you know, it being very fuzzy but. You know, we’re, we’re at a moment where we need a different way of conceptualizing politics from, you know, right and left, um mm-hmm.

Or from liberal and conservative. And one, one is the party of big government, one is the party of small government. It’s like, this is not, it doesn’t explain how, you know, we’ve been governed for the, certainly for the past 25 years, but especially even more than that. And that new set of arrangements hasn’t come into being now.

I mean, you know, American power, it’s shifting though,

Doug Stuart: right? Like the, my gen, my generation is seeing this shift and we’re like, hold on. Like I just inter I interviewed, it’ll come after out, after this interview with Liz Brown. Yeah. On the whole Maha movement. And like in 15 years it totally flipped. And everybody’s like, wait, how does this.

This is all reconfiguring. So

Nick Gillespie: now, you know, the, the, you know, the, the people who are talking about food purity and like industrial foods are bad, are on the right. Whereas, you know, 20 years ago they were like the pinkos running food co-ops, you know, and by the way, there’s, you know, one of one, I think one thing that would help America be a better nation and be more comfortable with itself is to watch King of the Hill you know, straight through.

Okay. And new season out. But there’s an episode where Hank Hill, who is like a very standard kind of conservative, like with a heart. Middle American and and there’s an episode where he joins a food co-op because he’s sick of the bad meat that gets butchered at mega Low Mart, which is kind of like a Sure.

A Walmart on steroids and, you know, everything is corporatized. So he goes to this hippie co-op because they have really good butchered, hand butchered artisanal meat. Yeah. And then hilarity ensues. But like, king of the Hill would solve all sorts of things. It’s, it really. Okay. That’s everything about America, you know, in, in all sorts of different ways.

But yeah, we are we’re in a, we’re in a place where. You know, the old, the old prayers, the old gods are dead and they don’t make sense anymore. And what has emerged that is new is not yet clear. I used to talk, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, that it was less about right and left and it was more about choice versus control.

I think on some level I would like that to be the dividing line of as we move into a new era, this is. These are the signs. Are you, do you wanna control more things or do you wanna give people more choices? And that’s going to explain things and, but I don’t know that that’s happening. But I, you know, and I think a big part of it’s generational.

Like if you go back and you look at, you know, after World War ii, the greatest generation, like the people who were born in and raised in the Depression and fought in World War ii, they had a pretty strong run where, you know, the, the economy took off. They tended to be more deferential to expertise and to centralization in business.

You know, as well as other aspects of the economy and, and of social life. They were more conformist. They got kind of replaced by the baby boom, which tended to be more individualistic and wanting to find its own path. And, you know, all of these are very broad. Brush the baby boom. Is done. Like, you know, and I, and I say this as part of I’m, I’m in the second to last year of the baby boom.

But like the baby booms reign of, you know, of innocence or terror, however you define it, is coming to an end. And, you know, we’re starting to see now. You know, people on the, you know, it, it, it’s not gonna be right or left. I mean, like a lot of the battles now I think are generational, where people who are millennials and Gen Z versus Gen X and baby boomers, you know, they’re fighting over resources real and imagined, and opportunity.

I think a lot of younger Americans you know, expected to be moving up more in, you know, in work ladders and things like that. They, they expected to be further along in their lives than they are right now. And it may not be because the boomers refuse to die or refuse to retire. The economy has shifted.

So we’re, we’re in a, you know, this is fascinating actually, but it’s also, it’s very angry. It’s very polarized and there is a huge amount of smoke, but not a lot of like, you know, clear pathway to what comes next. I hope that people will take more seriously these ideas of like. You know, the, the, one of the most important ways to think about stuff is like, do you have more choice or are you being controlled more?

And when you think about that socially, when you think about that economically, when you think about that politically, it starts to open up new ways of talking about stuff. And you know, and, and I think it, you know, I’m, I’m stacking the deck there. I mean, libertarians are, are the group that wants more choice.

But to go back to your larger question about the libertarian movement, like, you know, there’s you know, just says there are a lot of conservatives who, you know, five years ago or 10 years ago, were all about free trade and immigration, and now are, you know, nativists or they wanna close the borders to goods and people, you know, you see a lot of that in the libertarian movement.

I mean, you know, that whole debate between Dave Smith and Alex Rasta, whatever else you can say about it is you have, you know, Dave Smith is a libertarian. He identifies as a libertarian, he’s part of the libertarian movement. And he was like. You know what? We gotta, we gotta shut the borders. We gotta, we, we have too many immigrants.

Like, and that is, you know, that’s the sign of a movement that has not figured out the next set of points that are a consensus of like, yes, this, this is what it is means to be a libertarian.

Doug Stuart: Is that a new phenomenon? I mean, you’ve been around in this movement a lot longer than I have. Is that a new phenomenon or is there always these sort of sort of views coming in and out and people are sort of still arguing and wrestling with, you know, what’s the right view?

What’s the more way to think about it?

Nick Gillespie: Yeah, I, I mean, you’re right to raise that question and to raise it is really to answer it and say yes, you know, but, but I think there were points where, you know, reason motto Reason was founded in 68 and its motto is, free Minds and Free Markets. And to my mind, that’s a pretty good working definition of like what it means to be libertarian.

Yeah. And I think of myself increasingly, you know, less dogmatically, here’s a checklist of 10 policy pro positions, and you have to agree with me on all 10, and then you’re a libertarian. If you disagree with me on one of them, then you are cast out, you know, and you’re awful. And it’s more directional.

But you know, are we. Are we moving in more directions of freedom at the individual level? Because it’s like, I mean, you know, clearly government spending, which is something that both Republicans and Democrats and liberals and conservatives agree with. Like, you know, because when they bend in power you know, like it government just keeps growing and spending more and spending more.

And that’s, that’s a real issue. I think as important though, is like, are you shutting down the ability of individuals to participate in society or to find their own way? You know, that to me is like a core libertarian value. And I think, you know, yeah, it’s so to roundabout way of saying yes, there’s always been tension and, you know, there’s never been one true form of libertarianism or conservatism or liberalism, progressivism, et cetera.

But I think across the political spectrum right now, you see all of these categories are loose. Because people are, you know, no, but nothing is settled. Like we’re, you know, we’re in a, a period of flux and that that brings with a really great opportunities, but it’s also, you know, it’s anxiety inducing, it’s kind of terrifying.

Yeah. And you’re gonna end up with more things where, you know you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who started this century as an anti-vax, left wing environmental lawyer, you know, who was clearly on the left and hated Republicans and conservatives, is now, you know, the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

J JD Vance has said really positive things about Biden’s antitrust Chief. And about how like we gotta start policing corporations that are too big. Like, you know, that’s not literally, that’s not your father’s or grandfather’s Republican party. Yeah, yeah. But there it is. Right? And on the left, I think you’re gonna start seeing people to some degree, like Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, who is much more free market oriented and, you know, he’s very pro-immigration and he is very pro capitalism and then like reducing business regulations.

So like, you know, we’re, however the parties end up you know, sorting themselves Yeah. Start seeing new coalitions that won’t make sense from the perspective of 25 years ago.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. Do you have a few extra minutes? I, I wanna get to something I know is important to you if you have a little bit more time.

Yeah. Okay. You, you’ve often been sort of ribbed sometimes on the Reason Roundtable about your, just your encyclopedic knowledge of things like pop culture. And you know, over the years I’ve noticed that it, it is probably more indicative of something important to you rather than just, you know, me knowing, you know, you Nick knows knowledge, it’s great and stuff, but I, I wanna be like, man, you’ve gotta be at least twice your age because you, you know so much and like, I don’t know how you have time to even imbibe all of this information.

And so I Yeah. What explains

Nick Gillespie: this, I must have gotten the an early government brain boost chip that just implanted memories. You know, and I’m, I’m lucky that way. Yeah. But no, and I also, as I get older, I find myself, you know, forgetting, you know, things that are really important in names and dates and things that matter.

Okay. And I can remember like a Bugs Bunny Oh, you know, plot or something. Yeah. From, you know, something that would’ve been made 20 or 30 years before I was born. So it’s like. My priorities are kind of whack. But you know, part of it for me is that I, as I was saying earlier, I, I was not I’m, I’m not political with capital P and I wasn’t that way as a kid.

Like I was interested. I’m interested in, you know, art and music and writing and film and video and like forms of creative expression. That’s like what I’ve always been interested in. Before I, when I graduated co in college at the, I went to Rutgers in New Jersey and I was the entertainment section editor of our newspaper and a book review editor.

And, ’cause I just read a lot and watched a lot of, and and listened to a lot of music. And then I worked as a journalist at like music magazines and teen magazines and, you know, I like pop culture. You know, that was all before I went to grad school. And I keep an interest in that because I feel like.

That’s where, you know, that’s how, that’s how we talk about ourselves. That’s how we communicate. That’s who, how we become who we are. Expression. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it’s, you know, and it’s not like, oh, well we know who we are and then we seek to express it perfectly. It’s like through the act of creating music or buying music or going to a concert or talking with people about music, we find out more about who we are and what we like and what kind of world we wanna live in and, you know, and belong in.

And, you know, so it’s like constant, you know, we’re constantly redefining ourselves and thinking about ourselves and gaining more knowledge. And so, you know, for me, pop culture has always been that. And I was, I, you know, I never, I grew up never really making a distinction between high culture and low culture.

And then, you know, one of the people I worked with in in my doctoral program was this character named Leslie Feedler, who is one of the great cultural theorists or cultural studies people of post World War II America. And he very explicitly refused to make distinctions between high and like low culture.

What, what explains that? Why is that? You know, I think what he saw was that high culture, excuse me. High culture is something that comes out of an earlier era in America, but also, you know, civilization where high culture was something that you could only imbibe in if you were educated, if you were wealthy, if you were connected to the aristocracy or the court or the right people, because, you know, it might be in Latin, it might be, you know, to go to certain types of performances, cost a lot of money, or they’re invite only.

And so like high culture, you know, when people talk about, you know, having class and having high culture and, and good aesthetics, a lot of the times that’s just the way of separating themselves out. From the masses. And what happened, you know, in, in world history and certainly in American history starting in the 19th century, but then really ramping up in the 20th century, is that things became democratized.

You know, people who had no connection suddenly became rich. And, you know, things like p the paperback book as a technology emerged and it allowed, you know, lower income people to read. And it was often trashy stuff, but then they kind of liked it, and then they like refused to apologize for it. And everything became kind of mixed and blended and blurred in a way that’s really interesting to me.

So, you know, I, so I, I consume a lot of different types of culture and I like that. And yeah. You know, you had asked me what in pop culture, like in some questions beforehand, what in pop culture. Has had the most lasting influence on you personally. And I was like, oh, that’s a great question. And I was thinking you know, like for me, bugs Bunny cartoons, which, you know, I grew up watching on reruns and I don’t know how I watched as much TV as I did as a kid because like I was always out, you know, I was like, you know, digging, you know, digging you know, underground forts and climbing trees and playing baseball, you know, doing

Doug Stuart: all the unsafe things nobody does again, does

Nick Gillespie: today.

Yeah, yeah. You know, bike ramps. Well, you know, on my spider bike where my friends and I would put on football helmets and then, you know, break our arms because we made ridiculous evil, Knievel style jumps, all of that kind of stuff. But I watched an amazing amount of tv. You know, most of it was in reruns, but Bugs Bunny.

Was a really early and profound influence because Bugs Bunny first, you know, his wise cracking and like, in order to understand what he’s saying or referring to, you have, you have to learn a lot of stuff because, and especially given like, you know, like his cartoons are like, I guess from the forties mostly, or the early ones, and like who, you know, to understand who the people are that he’s making fun of.

Like, you know, that becomes a quest, et cetera. But I like the fact that you know, bugs Bunny was an, an instigator, a you know, a trickster figure. Mm-hmm. And that to me, that’s what pop culture is kind of about. Like it forces you to, to kind of engage the world more fully and on all sorts of different levels, high and low, you know, comic and tragic and all of that.

And you know, that to me is kind of the template I think.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Do you, do you think culture has, I mean, what level of shaping do you think the cult that pop culture? I mean, maybe you object to the idea of pop culture, I don’t know, but the No, in terms of shaping American politics and American way of looking at the

Nick Gillespie: world.

Yeah. It’s you know, in the nineties and I started working at Reason in 93 one of the big issues in the nineties was the effect of popular culture on behavior and particularly bad youth behavior. So, mm, yeah, this was cable. Cable TV affected its rollout. You know, where it became a national phenomenon in the late eighties and early nineties.

And suddenly, you know, you, you had all of these people talking about how we need to rate TV programs and we need to shield our young people from the, the sex and violence that was everywhere on cable tv. And it’s like, you go back and look at it and it’s like. There’s not much sex and there’s not really much violence or it’s cartoonish, but, you know, UCLA and whole other major institutions spent a ton of time focusing on like, how do we categorize both the amount you know, an intensity of violence and sex on tv, and then how it, it makes people up.

And it was a replay of the comic book scare and the rock scare of the 1950s. I firmly believe. And, and, and then sorry. You know, as the internet came along, similar things and with video games, you know, that became a huge moral paddock in the nineties. I think, you know, having done a lot of work on that, I don’t think that popular culture.

Influences decisions, you know? And it’s like, you know, the dumb version of this is like Mark David Chapman. You know, the guy who shot John Lennon, you know, was holding a copy of the Catcher in the Rye. And he said, you know, catcher in the Rye instructed him to kill John Lennon because he had to get rid of ponies.

And it’s like, yeah, that’s never. How popular culture works and popular culture reflects societal concerns. It gives people places where they can kind of look at different ways of living and kind of commune and think about who they are, what we live in, which is kind of amazing. And this, you know, was unbelievable inconceivable when I was a kid, is you know, that we now can produce and consume whatever we want on whatever terms we want because the, the means of cultural production and consumption have been totally democratized.

I mean, like, look at this podcast that we’re doing the podcast form, but we’re on like this thing called the internet and we’re using this program called Streamy Yard and like we’re having a, you know, a a, a visual audio communication. Yeah. Across time and space, and then it’s gonna go up on something where somebody in Zambia might watch it, you know, like, what the hell?

Right. So we’re living golden age. It’s a pretty amazing, yeah. Yeah. I’m amazed as well. It’s very remarkable. And it’s, you know what, I think pop culture tends to reflect things more. It does, you know, all art, all, you know, everything has an effect. And you don’t know what the effect is. The, the, the consumer, the audience, the individ, the reader, the watcher, you know, is responsible for what they do with whatever they consume.

But like, it’s very complicated. And it’s just that I tend to think that art, broadly speaking, you know, expression is a way that we participate in community. It is not. It’s not like a drug that gets injected into us and then we become zombie fight, or we want this or that, or we act a particular way. And I think, you know, part of, part of what we bemoan about the current world, which is that, oh my God, we’re so polarized.

We’re, we’re in our little tribes, we’re in our little camps. Like, that’s actually the, that’s been the dream of, you know, of humans for their entire lives. Where like, you don’t have to, you’re not stuck with the tribe you’re born into. You’re not you. You don’t only have three channels and you don’t only have like three identities.

There’s a great anthropologist named Grant McCracken who read a book. Called Pude in the nineties online, and then he printed a version of it. But he talked about how, like what’s been going on over the past 50 years is the quickening speciation of social types. And it’s aided in things like we’re wealthier now, but we have more access to experimenting with who we are in displaying who we are and communicating with other people.

Yeah. You know, and like to my mind, you know, this is, and, and again, like if you look at mass critics of, of American culture right after World War II in the fifties. Two things were going on. And like, they, they didn’t try to kind of minimize the cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they were saying there is this mass produced culture, which is dumb and stupid and lowest common denominator, and it’s insulting and it dulls people and that’s terrible.

And then they were looking at the, the blow ups of like, you know, a beatnik culture and of the civil rights movement and of homosexuals and, and women feminists, you know, wanting to be seen like, oh my God, society is falling apart because now there’s like, there’s too much going on and like, how can you choose, how can you pick, like, we’re still in that world, kind of.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think it would be better if we said, you know, what is kind of amazing is that like we have an unbelievable amount of cultural freedom to live how we want. It doesn’t mean people are gonna like you, and it doesn’t mean taxes are gonna go down, and it doesn’t mean it’s gonna be pretty, or you’re gonna do it for more than a couple years, but like, you can go, you can start your own church, you can start your own, you know, you can start your own burning man.

You can start, you can live, you know, peacefully like the Unibomber without, you know, the bombing. Yeah. Right, right, right. Like it’s kind of amazing. Yeah. You know, and this is what I thought, like when people would talk about what’s the American dream? It’s like, I thought it would be, you know, that you would, you’d be able to do your own thing and, and, and in a community and in peace.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. Do your own thing and be like, people left you to do your own thing because they want to acknowledge that you have that right. And you can celebrate that yourself. Yeah. As well as you give it to others.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And, and that it’s, you know, ultimately too, in this I really, I’m talking to somebody who’s not in this conversation, but like.

People who rank on capitalism or libertarianism often be like, oh, well it’s so individualized and like, you become atomized and alienated. And it’s like, no, you’re, you’re doing it. We don’t have, you don’t have, that’s not a

Doug Stuart: guarantee. You, you can choose not to be. You can be a Catholic on Sunday in a bowling league on Monday, and then, you know, go play pinochle on Tuesday.

I don’t know. And which, by the way, to

Nick Gillespie: bring it back to postmodernism, at the risk of, you know, completely knocking out anybody who might still be listening. But that idea of, you know, this, this is the proper way to think about identity in, in our lives, which is that we, you know, we have a, each of us I think has a sense of self, like, and we know who we are through time and space.

So like when I look at pictures of myself as a kid, I can, I recognize myself there. I may not be able to fully access what I was thinking, but I know that’s me. But, you know, so I have a sense of self. But then we have these constant. Overlapping partial changing identities that make up who we are. And that’s kind of how we move our way through the world.

And it’s, and it might be, you know, I am Catholic on Sunday and I’m, and I’m in a bowling league and I’m a, you know, playing pinochle you know, and a and a million other things. And I’m, you know, and I’m in a, I’m part of a film society or, you know, a Scrabble team or whatever, you know, and I’m, I’m a, I’m a father and a husband and a parent.

Yeah. Plurals

Doug Stuart: identity.

Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Yeah. And like, and you realize like these things all kind of stack up in different ways. Things, you know, it’s a Jenga board almost like where, you know, something gets pulled out, hopefully things don’t crash, but like other things get added and like, that’s very postmodern to say, like, what we have is a lot of.

Partial overlapping systems of knowledge and of community and of identity. And when you stack them up, you get a fuller picture of who we are. But it’s gonna be changing as conditions change and as our desires change and as our circumstances change. And like learning how to be comfortable with that because it is hard.

Like sometimes, you know, don’t, you know, everybody wants something, you know, that will always be true and stable and there, you know, forever and ever. But, you know, that’s hard to find. And even, even in Christianity, like people’s, you know, the commitment to Christ is, you know, can stay completely constant and undisturbed.

But exactly what that means, changes over time. You know, at, at different points in your life.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. I mean, I, I think that relationship changes over time for every individual. It also, people come to Christ in different ways and their experience of Christ is you know, obviously personalized to a, to a large extent.

So, yeah. No, that’s true. Nick, I, I have taken more of your time than I asked for, and I really appreciate you giving us this. This has been just a fascinating conversation. It’s been very enriching for me. You, you kind of, you kind of, checked an item off my bucket list by telling me I asked you a good question.

So,

Nick Gillespie: well, a lot of them. Yeah. And I know, yeah, I’ve, I’ve talked about this in other content. I’ve become, like, the one thing I’m evangelical about, and I’ll, I’ll, ’cause I think your your audience would find it interesting is the Par Lager. Vistas novel Barabis. Yes. Which is just a phenomenal short novel that came out shortly after World War II by a Swedish writer, you know, and it’s about Barbi after he is ransom, you know, by Jesus.

And then. He is, you know, he has no idea who this guy is, and he has this unearned grace, freedom, and life. It’s like, what does he do? And it is just a phenomenal novel for believers, but also for non-believers because it’s, it’s a, it was part of what is broadly called Christian existentialism of like what we know.

Mm-hmm. We need to make sense of our lives. And it’s just, it’s a beautiful book that I think is just. You know, I don’t believe in required reading, but I think that might be at the top of my fictional required list. Yeah.

Doug Stuart: Well, I, you, you suggested it to me back in May when we, we met up in New York. Yeah.

For the soho debate that we’ve been referring to. And I, I went up, I bought it and it, it was a, it was a read that usually when I try to read books that are set in like the time of Jesus or the apostle era or whatever, that is like a fictional account that’s just trying to, you know, capitalize on, not capitalize, but you know what I mean?

Yeah. Work with that material. It somehow, it just was never appealing to me. And by page three I was like, well, this is great. Like this is, this is really substantive and rich. It’s contemporaneous and it became better. It’s contemporary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Well, I’m glad you liked it. Yeah. Well, Nick, thank you.

I appreciate this time and hopefully we’ll, we’ll see each other again when I’m in New York.

Nick Gillespie: That would be great. Thanks so much. And best to LCI and everything you’re doing. Thanks, Nick.

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