Why Religious Pluralism and Immigration Are Vitally Important For Liberty – Nick Gillespie

LCP Episode 420 – Nick Gillespie.mp3

[00:00:03] Voiceover: Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo. Expand your imagination and tackle controversy head on. Let’s stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It’s time for the Libertarian Christian podcast.

[00:00:22] 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 you’ve been a libertarian for if you’re not a libertarian or you need to know who he is, he’s an editor at large, at reason. He’s coauthor 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 Nick Gillespie, and he’s been part of the libertarian movement for decades, and 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, because that’s actually, uh, more important than I think a lot of people realize. Nick, I really appreciate you coming on and have this conversation.

[00:01:16] 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.

[00:01:23] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Thank you. You’ve been you’ve been a promoter of ours from time to time throughout through X, through Freedomfest. Uh, you actually, uh, 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 the 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, um, you get a little irritated with the anti-immigration sentiment. And of course, 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 being, you know, coming from a family of immigrants. So 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.

[00:02:27] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. You know, it is interesting. And from a psychological position, uh, or, you know, perspective, you know, when you start talking about something and you get choked up or angry or happy for no clear reason, like, you know, it’s channeling something. Uh, all four of my grandparents were. And immigration is certainly that for me. Uh, all four of my grandparents were immigrants. My father’s parents were from Ireland, and my mother’s parents were from Italy. Um, and they all showed up in America, like in and around New York City in the 19 teens. Um, and that has, you know, that that’s a big part of who I am and the way that I think about myself, um, uh, partly because they were all coming here for more opportunities. Uh, they weren’t quite political refugees or asylees, although there was weird stuff going on both in southern Italy as well as, uh, Ireland, uh, at that time period and also World War One was looming and all of that kind of stuff. But, uh, 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 want to live in, you know, being able to migrate freely is pretty important there.

[00:03:54] Nick Gillespie: I also on top of that, uh, you know, I’m a big believer in kind of cultural mongrelization and hybridization. Uh, 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. Um, so for me, immigration and migration are just really important on a personal level. 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 moved like more than 8000 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, um, 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 will never be American, etc.. Um, I see like an intensified anxiety over that oftentimes, you know, race, outright racist claims against people or, um, you know, just, uh, belief that we have too many people here already and we have to keep it out, you know, or we only can leave people in.

[00:05:22] Nick Gillespie: And that deeply worries me and offends me. I have a doctorate in American literature, and I wrote, uh, about, among other things, about nativist tropes in American literature in the 19 teens and 20s, uh, particularly in a book like, uh, The Great Gatsby, which 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, uh, you know, Italians and Greeks kind of muscling in, and Jews especially, as well, muscling into New York and kind of destroying this great place. Um, 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. Um, you know that I think any libertarian should be worried about. Yeah. If I may, just also to put it out there because I oftentimes get accused of, uh, just, you know, being like, well, I’m an open borders guy. Like, I don’t believe that borders should exist or should matter. I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about is something that, uh, Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party candidate, uh, 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 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, uh, 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.

[00:07:08] Nick Gillespie: 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. The southern border under, uh, under Biden and to some degree under, you know, under Trump before him, as well as Obama and George Bush was a mess. Like we we need to have more orderly, uh, legal immigration. And that gets rid of illegal immigration, which, um, brings a lot of other problems that are that have nothing to do with immigration any more than, you know, uh, alcohol, alcohol, uh, 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, uh, the country would be richer. It would be more interesting. We would, uh, we would just, you know, every everything would be better. Literally.

[00:08:00] Doug Stuart: Yeah. I would agree with you. And I after, uh, Dave Smith and Alex Nebraska’s 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, uh, 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 kind of point out, you know what? That’s not really a here’s what we would like. It is a rhetorical, uh, way of saying back then, 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 can see that the results were not disastrous, despite all the nativism that was run rampant. And so there’s this rhetorical idea that, um, you know, you’re moving somebody I’d not idea, but, like, way of thinking along, even if they’re not, you know, necessarily going to buy in because I know that, you know, Chase Oliver and Alex Nowrasteh, both you and I would also say, hey, that would be better than, um, uh, than simply what we have, what we have today.

[00:09:07] 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 what? What are you what are you complaining about? What are you talking about? The other thing that comes up a lot is that people will say, uh, you know, uh, 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, you’re saying I’m choosing the welfare state over the free movement of people. I like to say we should build a wall around the welfare state, not around the United States. Yeah, yeah. You know, people like Alex and others can show that immigrants, legal or illegal, but especially illegal, consume fewer public goods than native born people. Um, and, you know, and in net virtually every economist, even ones who do not like large scale immigration, will admit that immigration, on balance, adds to the economy. It it lifts all boats. Yeah.

[00:10:17] Doug Stuart: Even the ones who have found negative impacts, they even admit they’re negative. They’re negligible. Yeah.

[00:10:22] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. So um, 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, um, are blamed for everything that goes bad, you know, according to the people 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. Um, and, you know, to the extent that any of that is true, it’s kind of like, well, if to the extent that we import drugs from outside of America, it’s because Americans want drugs and, like, then you’re not going to solve that problem by, you know, blocking people who are crossing the border looking to work. Uh, you know, and to, to better their lives and the lives of their children and, uh, you know, other people. So.

[00:11:17] Doug Stuart: Yeah. How did your, um, how did your views growing up as a Roman Catholic influence some of your views on even immigration or just anything? How was that influence?

[00:11:26] Nick Gillespie: Well, it’s interesting, I was raised Catholic and I think a lot about this. You know, I have an abiding interest in religion, not as a not as a believer, really, but as, um, 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 were both, uh, you know, from Catholic families. And they were they were poor in the 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 19 tens and died in the late 70s, early 80s, lived their entire lives in a world where they could get by every day doing business and going shopping, only speaking Italian. Um, but the Catholic angle, uh, which is something I didn’t fully appreciate until years later, um, 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 being Catholic. You know, Catholics now, any Catholic who complains about prejudice against Catholics is just full of, um, you know, and even William F Buckley, you know, who turns 100 this year. And there’s been a lot of, you know, stuff about him. There’s a new biography. Well, into the 80s, he would keep saying, you know, the only the last acceptable prejudice was prejudice against Catholics. And it’s simply not true. Catholics are the single largest religious denomination in the country. And they, you know, I mean, there are. Is it a majority of, uh, Supreme Court justices or Catholic or. It’s pretty close to it. You know, it’s like Catholics, Catholics are on everything, you know, like it doesn’t matter. And it’s also not a.

[00:13:22] Doug Stuart: Letting them in wasn’t a problem for America. I mean, I guess depending on where you sit, maybe it was.

[00:13:26] Nick Gillespie: I mean, it did they did help destroy the wasp, uh, you know, ascendancy. But that was dying anyway for other reasons. Mostly because wasps wanted to marry Catholics. You know, it’s like, oh, these are like new, interesting people with better food, you know, or something. Uh, but but the function of Catholicism, I think. Um, for my parents in when they were younger and then the town I grew up in, Middletown, new Jersey, which is about 50 miles outside of New York. And everybody I met there pretty much was Catholic. And I went to Catholic grammar school and Catholic high school, and it formed, um, it was, 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. Um, and that was very important. Um, 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 50s, I guess, um, 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, etc..

[00:14:43] Nick Gillespie: And I found that kind of interesting. But like, you know, when you I have tell this weird story. Uh, one time, uh, my, uh, family, we were watching, um, Gone with the wind was on TV and, um, 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 in a way, it is a grotesque version of America. It is a grotesque version of American history, etc.. But my parents takeaway from Gone with the wind, there’s a scene where Scarlett O’Hara is that, uh, Tara and somebody sick and a priest comes and says mass because her father might be dying or died and, you know, and the O’haras 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 cool.

[00:15:34] Doug Stuart: My parents would point out when they when they saw that, like NFL athletes were Christians, they’d be like, oh, he’s a strong Christian.

[00:15:41] Nick Gillespie: Yeah.

[00:15:41] Doug Stuart: You know, I get.

[00:15:42] Nick Gillespie: This with everybody. And you know, Italians do it like it’s ended now. But, you know, in an 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, you know, you point out with pride, but, um, 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 various various contexts, but it also meant, because there was, um, anti-Catholic prejudice written into all of the early laws of the, you know, the colonies and 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 and, um. Um, I’m sorry, I’m blanking on her name now. Uh, Anne Hutchinson, uh, you know, the great religious dissenter in the from the Massachusetts Bay colony.

[00:16:53] Nick Gillespie: And, um, 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, um, so inadvertently, that was, um, 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 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, 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, Anne Hutchinson and Thomas Hooker because they believed in religious freedom. And that’s a good thing.

[00:17:54] Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah. So you you obviously aren’t a 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, free practice of religion. How did that.

[00:18:12] Nick Gillespie: Go, I should add, I mean, that the Catholic Church, again, you know, in the Catholic Church contains multitudes, right? Sure. And it’s depending on the country you’re in. It functions in different ways. In the US, I think it was mostly, um, you know, a force for things like more immigration. Um, and, you know, during the 80s or 70s and 80s the role of the Catholic Church in bringing in Vietnamese boat people because South Vietnam was a Catholic country or had a large Catholic population. You saw this opening up of, uh, you know, 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 is also really stuck with me specifically regarding immigration.

[00:19:09] 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?

[00:19:16] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. That’s um, it’s an interesting question. And I would say it’s a mix of things, you know, like I to some part of me believes that 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. Um, and I think that emphasis on, um, you know, on kind of toleration that was weirdly because, you know, the Catholic Church in Europe is certainly not a tolerant or was not historically a tolerant institution. Right. You don’t say, you know. Yeah. And, you know, but 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 Central Europe under communism. And it’s, you know, it’s so it performs different types of function in the same way that a kind of evangelical or independent Protestantism obviously functions differently, both for its adherents as well as in the world than kind of mainline Protestant denomination. Right. And that, you know, and then like, if you know, in Italy, being Catholic means something very different than being Catholic in England, right? Where it’s like, yeah, a persecuted minority or a suspect minority. Yeah. Um, yeah. And so, um, in any case, the, you know, growing up Catholic in the context that I did that opened me up to the idea of kind of toleration.

[00:20:50] Nick Gillespie: And then it’s like, what are the frameworks for that? And, you know, the real framework, um, 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, uh, the person who got the charter for Rhode Island and was, you know, wrote the first tract in the English language, uh, for fully secular government, where from what I understand and I’ve 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. But he still insisted that religion and politics should be separate spheres, because politics will, you know, will taint and poison religion and, you know, history, obviously, I think, you know, proves him right. Um, and so, you know what he called for in the bloody tenant of persecution, uh, 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. Um, 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. Um, he, you know, his relationships with the Indians around him, uh, 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 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.

[00:22:39] Nick Gillespie: But he also recognizes, like, you know, we need liberal tolerance and pluralism in order to succeed as a society. Really. Um, and so that was 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, um, who was the only Catholic signer of the declaration, an absolutely minor player. He’s from Maryland. His brother, John Carroll, was the founder of Georgetown and was like one of either the first bishop or archbishop in like colonial America or, you know, English anglo-america colonies. Um, but, um, you know, like you, you key in on all this weird stuff going on, and I think there’s something, uh, that predisposes one towards libertarianism when you start to realize, like, the official mainstream received story glosses over a lot of weird and interesting kind of things that are going on below the surface or that.

[00:23:54] Doug Stuart: Don’t.

[00:23:54] Nick Gillespie: Official attention. And then, you know, the really the big. And so I like 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, you know, and they weren’t harming anybody. And, you know, the, the state or the church would try and, like, wipe them out. Um, and then, you know, but really, when I was in high school, my brother, I have an older brother who went to college and he started reading reason magazine And introduce 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, um, and the right to run your business the way you want to and things like that. Um, but, um, you know, that’s those things primed me. And then 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, uh, English Lit and American Lit and Cultural Studies in the late 80s, that it became more pronounced because this was a period of, well, you know, what was called political correctness, Which kind of political? The political correct period in the late 80s through the mid 90s trained the professors who are now presiding over kind of woke universities. And I realized I was not a left winger, and there was a small cadre of kind of hyper conservative people who were conservative esthetically but also socially. And I wasn’t that. And so it being libertarian became more important to me, really. And early adulthood.

[00:25:50] Doug Stuart: In the 80s was that sort of environment. I would imagine it’s like fairly Marxist in sort of the ideology of the professor.

[00:25:56] Nick Gillespie: You know, what’s fascinating? And I’ve got an interview, uh, uh, with a guy named Mark Pennington, who’s a British academic who just wrote a book about Michel Foucault, who, you know, a left wing French theorist who was the most influential kind of social writer in the social sciences and 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 very little impact. Um, but, um, what I was going to say is 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. And most, most people on the left in academia are not as systematic as Marxists, and they do not. It’s much more about things like identity politics or kind of consensus politics. Marxists are radicals in in similar ways to libertarians, you know? And, um, 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, um, you know, just kind of inconstant, like they would, you know, uh, they they would vote for Bill Clinton. You know, that type of thing, like, as opposed to Marxists were like, no, Bill Clinton is terrible. Uh, 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, um, you know, like, I could have a better conversation with those people.

[00:27:41] Doug Stuart: Okay. Yeah. All right, I see.

[00:27:43] Nick Gillespie: And I will say that I’m sorry to yammer on. 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 a big moment, I think, where, um, 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. Um, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then things went bad for a couple of 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 Americans were optimistic again, uh, 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. Um, and, you know, they felt like they were in an occupied country and they knew when, you know, Reagan, though, Reagan was like a black swan. He was, uh, you know, charismatic and a good communicator. George H.W. Bush was, uh, you know, papier mache Mephistopheles. He had no, uh, you know, he had no charisma. He had no anything going on. He would be defeated by the great Mike Dukakis. Right? The, you know, the colossus of Massachusetts. You know who bestrode the world like a god. And when George H.W. Bush won and won easily over Mike Dukakis. People in academia freaked out because they were like, oh my God, like this. It’s not going back to.

[00:29:22] Doug Stuart: Yeah. We’re done.

[00:29:23] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. 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 going to, you know, we’re going to be like in Stalin’s Russia, you know, even if they were like, oh, well, you know, Stalin’s Russia really wasn’t that bad when you think about it.

[00:29:43] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, that was also the time of the rise of at the beginning of the critical theorists, too, and who were basically they did latch on to the whole like the point of Marxist analysis is to change the world, not just understand it. That’s right. And so did those coincide in your mind, too?

[00:29:58] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And you know what? What is interesting, though, is that Marxist analysis ultimately is about class and the position of like it’s about economic classes that dictate a political and cultural superstructure. I the critical theorists in general, but then especially the ones who emerged in the late 80s and are still around today. It’s much more about identity and it’s about race. You know, everybody would say, we’re going to look at things from the perspectives of race, class and gender, but they never cared about class, and it was always about race and ethnicity and then gender, which morphed from a kind of feminist analysis to a much broader kind of, um, set of identities that had to do with sexual orientation more than gender per se. And, um, 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. Um, and then these other people were like, no, it’s not.

[00:31:02] Doug Stuart: I think that’s why they ignored the class component of that.

[00:31:05] Nick Gillespie: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:31:05] Doug Stuart: Because they became oppositional. Because it seems like that’s very oddly missing in some of the policy prescriptions that identity politics typically do. It’s like it’s all about 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’d probably have something to balance that with.

[00:31:23] Nick Gillespie: I know, and this, uh, I think, you know, Bernie Sanders is interesting in this sense of like, Bernie was a class warrior until, uh, you know, uh, 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. 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 moment, I think it was in Seattle where he almost literally gets pushed off the stage by a couple of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter activists. And when he emerges a couple weeks later, he is talking about identity politics. He has given up class. Um, and I think, you know, that that’s telling. And that was kind of the.

[00:32:18] Doug Stuart: Last.

[00:32:18] Nick Gillespie: Gasp of, of a class based politics. And I think, you know, from a libertarian perspective, you can do meaningful class politics in terms of like, if you believe. And 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 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. Um, you know, it’s class is something nobody you know. 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, 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 up, if you’re raised upper middle class with upper middle class preferences and esthetics and things like that, like you, you can’t look at, you know, people from, uh, you know, Appalachia and Ohio or, um, you know, Kentucky or, you know, white, white, lower class, white ethnics, you know, white trash. Um, 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 don’t want to dwell on that too much. Jd Vance strikes me as an interesting figure in this.

[00:34:20] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Okay. So I want to I want to talk a little bit about, uh, libertarian philosophy and post-modernism because you’re one of the few people and I know the day we’re recording, this is the day after you release that interview with was it Mark Pennington?

[00:34:33] Nick Gillespie: Yes.

[00:34:34] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Um, which I listened to, and I thought it was really appropriate to, to listen to the day before we’re having this conversation. Yeah. Well, um, although I went to buy his book and then realized I had to also feed my family, so, um.

[00:34:45] Nick Gillespie: Oh, yeah.

[00:34:46] Doug Stuart: Yeah, it’s.

[00:34:46] Nick Gillespie: An academic book. Yeah, but it’s like 90 bucks or something.

[00:34:49] Doug Stuart: Yeah. I was like, okay, uh, maybe, maybe later.

[00:34:52] Nick Gillespie: It’s done a lot of interviews like ChatGPT or something, like.

[00:34:56] Doug Stuart: Yeah, okay, I’ll do that. I’ll do that for sure. Uh, but I do recommend checking it out. It was, it was exciting interview to to to listen to. Um, you’ve been pretty open and positive in, you know, anything I’ve heard you talk about about the term, what you’re you’re using the word postmodern libertarianism. Um, what what do you mean by that? Because I know a lot of libertarians might see that as an oxymoron.

[00:35:17] Nick Gillespie: Oh, yeah. 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.

[00:35:27] Doug Stuart: As bad as communism.

[00:35:28] Nick Gillespie: Marxist. Yeah, it’s a Marxist, leftist homosexual plot or something. Right. So here and throw.

[00:35:35] Doug Stuart: In pedophile and you’ve got all of the you’ve got every ingredient I think that exists.

[00:35:39] Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah. You know, and maybe, you know, among the, the edgier Christians or Protestants, you know, it’s also kind of Catholic, right. I don’t know.

[00:35:48] Doug Stuart: Um, 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.

[00:36:01] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And it’s funny because the Catholic Church is actually a not a postmodern institution. And, you know, of course, it’s very hierarchical and it’s totalist 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. Um, but, um, you know, postmodernism for me, ah, to be postmodern, um, is to, uh, have incredulity toward meta narrative. This is a phrase that a French philosopher named Jean Lyotard talked about in a book called The Postmodern Condition that came out in the late 70s. 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 particulars. So, like, you know, here is something that I think libertarians, you know, rightly. Um, you know, when they hear something as totalitarian or totalist, 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 moan and human existence. Right. Like. Yeah. No. And and the the big theories 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 and genetics or through economics or through psychology.

[00:37:43] Nick Gillespie: 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. Um, and ironically, the and I talk about this with Pennington in this, the first Hayek book that I read was a book called, um, The Counter-Revolution of Science Studies on the abuse of reason, and it is as long. It’s pretty impenetrable in a lot of ways. It’s from 1952 or so, and, um, it is a study of how French and German Enlightenment thinkers, um, 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. And just as those things are governed by laws, so too must human society be governed by similar axiomatic laws, where 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 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. And 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 problem, part of the program, or you’re part of the problem, and we’re going to get rid of you.

[00:39:33] Nick Gillespie: You know, we’re going to we’re going to say, you’re insane. We’re going to put you in prison. We’re going to kill you. We’re going to spend a lot of time converting you so that you think the way you have, right, thinks so that you’re doing the work we want you to do. And, you know, to me, Hayek, this is really before I encountered, um, post-modernism in an academic context. Um, 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. And as long as you’re not going to 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 post-modernism is, then to me, you know, it stresses the limits of human knowledge rather than the extent. And it it takes in an attitude of, um, of humility rather than hubris towards policy and planning and telling people how they must live.

[00:40:54] Doug Stuart: You know. 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 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 XYZ. It’s like, well, no. Here’s some economics that, that are, that are based on maybe not rules based, but they are they, they have an order to them that we’re not going to. Yeah.

[00:41:26] Nick Gillespie: Rather than is enforced like, you know, it emerges bottom up rather than enforced from top down. Right. And you know, I think, uh, you know, and it was interesting. And then, you know, I actually in graduate school, I encountered Foucault 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. Um, and we’re going to define that scientifically, uh, which really is mere preference in a lot of cases. And then we’re going to take people we deem insane or impure or whatever, and we’re going to 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, etc.. Um, and I think that’s, it’s a, you know, it’s a very fruitful conversation.

[00:42:27] Doug Stuart: We exterminate them.

[00:42:28] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately, you know, that’s uh, and, you know, this is also, I think, you know, people like Hayek and Foucault, certainly. And, you know, all of us 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. Um, in the Soviet Union, you had the same kind of attempt to, like, rationalize all aspects of society and use scientific methods of management, 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 they’re, 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 America, it’s, 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. Um, you know, and and we need to, you know, sanction them. We need to reeducate them. We need to, uh, move them out of society or, you know, kill them. I mean, this these are all, you know, me. This is all like what? Libertarianism, in a lot of ways, is about, um.

[00:43:54] Doug Stuart: There’s a there’s a growing trend right now to be sort of anti-liberal. Uh, I think, uh, was it I forget his name. He’s one he wrote, um, why liberalism failed Patrick Deneen. Yeah, yeah. Um, you have I think it’s John Gray.

[00:44:08] Nick Gillespie: Is Deneen at um is he at uh, Notre Dame or one of them.

[00:44:13] Doug Stuart: Yes I believe so. Yeah.

[00:44:14] Nick Gillespie: Viciously Catholic institution.

[00:44:16] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Right. Right. Okay.

[00:44:18] Nick Gillespie: 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, um, you know, and kind of free markets, they hated socialism, you know, they, you know, the 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. Um, and um, yeah. So but but so 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, um, 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 suasion. They can start using coercion and things like that.

[00:45:26] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you and I often have the same reaction when we hear, because I’ve heard you react to this on on interviews have the same reaction to people who say that a post-modernity and modern capitalism has robbed us of meaning. Um, and I was I’ve been recently watching the show Mad Men, and in one of the, one of the characters was reading a book by, uh, Barry Schwartz. And he actually quotes the book he says. As 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 Tyrannize. And I just thought, no, it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s okay to have 45 types of deodorant on the shelf. Barry.

[00:46:05] Nick Gillespie: Absolutely.

[00:46:06] Doug Stuart: Yeah.

[00:46:07] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And, uh, so, you know, I think about it, it’s, you know, because Barry’s Barry Sanders, I, you know, I wish Barry Sanders was Bernie Sanders. We would be in a you know.

[00:46:18] Doug Stuart: I just realized what I did there. Sorry.

[00:46:19] Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah. You know.

[00:46:20] Doug Stuart: I meant to say Bernie Sanders, and I’m reading just anyway.

[00:46:23] Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah. Um, but it’s. No, but, you know, Barry Sanders is is the real deal. Uh, fascinating figure. And I wish he was in national politics, to say the least. Um, but, you know, the way I see it is that, 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, uh, you know, you know, some kind of computer system. I don’t know. Or your car presets. And every day you have to reset them because you have so many options. Like you can look at that as wearying or you can look at it as liberating. And, you know, Bernie Sanders did say at one point, you know, like, what sense does it make to talk about like 45 flavors of deodorant and different types of toothpaste and shoes while 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 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 can’t make sense of the world anymore. I have too many, too many choices. You know, I.

[00:47:50] Doug Stuart: And this.

[00:47:51] Nick Gillespie: You know, because it’s like. Yeah, you know, like. 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, 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 ax body spray speaks to me and it’s like, it’s good to have the 45th ax body spray flavor. You know.

[00:48:31] Doug Stuart: I think the sophisticated version of that argument, to give a little bit of difference there, is that the market has given has done something to the makers, you know, 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.

[00:48:54] Nick Gillespie: 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.

[00:49:05] Doug Stuart: Know, you’re saying that more just to be clear, you’re saying that the fact that we have more deodorant means more people are not going hungry. Um, yeah.

[00:49:12] Nick Gillespie: Right. Exactly. And they smell better, too. You know.

[00:49:15] Doug Stuart: I don’t think they’re the same. Yeah. Sorry. Anyway.

[00:49:18] Nick Gillespie: No, but, you know, the other way of thinking about this, and I think about this a lot in a, in a religious context, like, you know, because 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? Um, you know, how many, how many types of coffee? You know, all of this kind of stuff. And it’s like, 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 cream, plus gelato, plus sorbet, you know, etc.. But when, when it comes to things like religion, um, 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, you know, procession of like subdivisions of that, you know, there’s there’s a lot of different types of Catholic, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, 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. Yeah, 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.

[00:51:01] Doug Stuart: Yeah.

[00:51:01] Nick Gillespie: And 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 serfs, 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. 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 need to be able to handle choice. You need to be able to facilitate self-directed, um, 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 Paradox of Choice. You need to learn how to satisfice. Uh, he talks about, like, where you make choices and then you you’re not constantly thinking, rethinking them and doubting them. But like, 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 think, you know, actually, most people are very capable of making provisional contingent choices and then reevaluating them a little down the road.

[00:52:39] Doug Stuart: Yeah. What 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. Uh, we’ve had, uh, 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 direction you think this might be going?

[00:53:10] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. You know, I mean, I would say that the state of the libertarian movement is pretty fractured and fractious. Um, and I think that that reflects, um, a broader problem with politics and kind of, you know, I tend to think of libertarian with a small L as, as a social movement or a cultural movement more than 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 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 really don’t know how to articulate this more succinctly, and I apologize for it being very fuzzy. Um, but, you know, we’re at a moment where we need a different way of conceptualizing politics from, you know, right and left, um, 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 certainly for the past 25 years, but especially even more than that. Um, and that new set of arrangements hasn’t come into being now. I mean, you know, American.

[00:54:38] Doug Stuart: It’s shifting though, right? Like, my my generation is seeing this shift and we’re like, hold on. Like I just I interviewed it’ll come after out after this interview with Liz Brown 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 now?

[00:54:55] Nick Gillespie: You know, the the, you know, 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, uh, and by the way, there’s, you know, one of what 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, uh, you know, straight through and new season out. But there’s an episode where, uh, Hank Hill, who is like a very standard kind of conservative, like with a heart, a middle American. And there’s an episode where he joins a food co-op because he is sick of the bad meat that gets butchered at Megalo Mart, which is kind of like a a Walmart on steroids. And, you know, everything is corporatized. So he goes to this hippie co-op because they have really good butcher and butcher artisanal meat, and then hilarity ensues. But like King of the Hill would solve all sorts of things. It really gets everything about America, you know, in all sorts of different ways. But yeah, we are, um, we’re in a we’re in a place where, um, 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.

[00:56:18] Nick Gillespie: 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. Um, 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 want to control more things, or do you want to 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 is generational. Like if you go back and you look at, you know, after World War Two, the Greatest generation, like the people who were born and raised in the depression and fought in World War two, they had a pretty strong run where, you know, the economy took off. They tended to be more deferential to expertise and to centralization in business. Um, you know, as well as other aspects of the economy, um, 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 say this as part of I’m in the second to last year of the baby boom.

[00:57:30] Nick Gillespie: But like the baby boom’s 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 you know it. It’s not going to 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, uh, you know, expected to be moving up more, um, 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. Um, so we’re we’re in 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 one of the most important ways to think about stuff is like, um, do you have more choice or are you being controlled more? Um, and when you think about that socially, when you think about that, um, economically, when you think about that politically, it starts to open up new ways of talking about stuff.

[00:58:57] Nick Gillespie: And yeah, you know, and and I think, you know, 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 um, you know, Jeff says there are a lot of conservatives who, you know, five years ago or ten years ago were all about free trade and immigration and now are, you know, nativists, or they want to 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 got to shut the borders. We got to 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 means to be a libertarian.

[00:59:56] 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, uh, 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?

[01:00:13] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. I mean, you’re right to raise that question and to raise it as really to answer it and say, yes, you know, but but I think there were points where, you know, reasons, 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 what it means to be libertarian. And I think of myself increasingly, you know, less dogmatically. Here’s a checklist of ten policy positions. And you have to agree with me on all ten. 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. Um, and it’s more directional, but, um, 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’ve been in power, uh, you know, like the 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? Um, you know, that to me is like a core libertarian value. And, um, I think, you know. Yeah, it’s so a 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, etc.

[01:01:46] Nick Gillespie: 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 period of flux and that that brings with it really great opportunities. But it’s also, you know, it’s anxiety inducing. It’s kind of terrifying. Um, and you’re going to end up with more things where, you know, um, you know, uh, 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. Jd Vance has said really positive things about Biden’s antitrust chief. You know, and about how like, we got to start policing corporations that are too big. Like, you know, that’s not literally that’s not your fathers or grandfathers Republican. Yeah, but there it is. Right. And on the left, I think you’re going to start seeing, uh, 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’s very pro, um, capitalism and then like, reducing business regulations. So, like, you know, we’re however the parties end up, uh, you know, sorting themselves like, start seeing new coalitions that won’t make sense from the perspective of 25 years ago.

[01:03:17] Doug Stuart: Yeah. No, that that makes sense. Do you have a few extra minutes? I want to get to something I know is important to you. If you have a little bit more time. Yeah. Okay. Um, you you’ve often been sort of ribbed sometimes on the reason round table about your just your encyclopedic knowledge of things like pop culture. And, you know, over the years, I’ve noticed that it is probably more indicative of something important to you rather than just, you know, me knowing, you know, you Nick knows knowledge. That’s great and stuff. But I want to be like, man, you’ve got to be at least twice your age because, um, you know so much and, like, I don’t know how you have time to even imbibe all of this information. Um, and so. Yeah. What explains this?

[01:03:57] Nick Gillespie: I must have gotten the, uh, in early government brain boost chip that just implanted memories. Uh, you know, and I’m lucky that way. Yeah. Um, 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. And I can remember, like a Bugs Bunny, uh, you know, plot or something from, you know, something that would have been made 20 or 30 years before I was born. So it’s like my priorities are kind of whack. But, um, you know, part of it for me is that I, as I was saying earlier, I was not, um, I’m not political with a 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 in college at the, I went to Rutgers in New Jersey and I was the entertainment section editor of a newspaper and a book review editor. And because I just read a lot and watched a lot of 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. Um, 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 how we become who we are.

[01:05:23] Doug Stuart: Expression.

[01:05:23] Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah. 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 want to live in and you know, and belong in, um, 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, uh, in my doctoral program was this character named Leslie Fiedler, who, um, 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 low culture.

[01:06:24] Doug Stuart: Well, what explains that? Why is that?

[01:06:26] Nick Gillespie: Um. 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 good esthetics, a lot of the times that’s just a 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 connections suddenly became rich. And, you know, things like 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, so I consume a lot of different types of culture, and I like that. And, you know, you had asked me, um, 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, um, 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.

[01:08:23] Doug Stuart: You were doing all the unsafe things. Nobody does does today.

[01:08:26] Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah. You know, bike ramps, 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 Evel 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 wisecracking and like, in order to understand what he’s saying or referring to, you have to you have to learn a lot of stuff because and especially given like, you know, like his cartoons are like, I guess from the 40s 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, etc.. But I like the fact that, um, you know, Bugs Bunny was an instigator, a, you know, a trickster figure. Um, 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. Um, and, um, you know, that to me is kind of the template, I think.

[01:09:38] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Do you do you think, uh, culture has I mean, what level of, uh, shaping do you think the culture that pop culture. I mean, maybe you object to the idea of pop culture? I don’t know, but no, in terms of shaping American politics and American way of looking at the world.

[01:09:54] Nick Gillespie: Yeah. It’s, uh, you know, in the 90s. And I started working at reason in 93. Uh, one of the big issues in the 90s was the effect of popular culture on behavior and particularly bad youth behavior.

[01:10:08] Doug Stuart: So this was.

[01:10:10] Nick Gillespie: Cable. Cable TV The affected, its rollout, you know, where it became a national phenomenon in the late 80s and early 90s and suddenly, you know, 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 a whole other major institutions spent a ton of time focusing on, like, how do we categorize both the amount, you know, and intensity of violence and sex on TV and then how it makes people up? And it was a replay of the comic book scare and the rock scare of the 1950s. Um, I firmly believe, um, and then I’m sorry, you know, as the internet came along, similar things and with video games, you know, that became a huge moral panic in the 90s. Um, 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, 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.

[01:11:26] Nick Gillespie: And he said, you know, catcher in the Rye instructed him to kill John Lennon because he had to get rid of phonies. 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 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 StreamYard. And like, we’re having a, you know, a visual audio communication across time and space. And then it’s going to go up on something where somebody in Zambia might watch it, you know, like, what the hell? Right. Um, so we’re living in a golden age.

[01:12:32] Doug Stuart: Pretty amazing. Yeah, I’m amazed as well. It’s very remarkable.

[01:12:35] Nick Gillespie: 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. Uh, and you don’t know what the effect is. The the the consumer, the audience, the individual, 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, um, it’s not like a drug that gets injected into us, and then we become zombified. Or we want this or that, or we act a particular way. Um, 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 don’t only have three channels, and you don’t only have, like, three identities. There’s a great anthropologist named Grant McCracken who wrote a book called plenitude in the 90s online.

[01:13:52] Nick Gillespie: 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 and abetted by things like, we’re wealthier now, but we have more access to experimenting with who we are and displaying who we are and communicating with other people. Yeah. You know, and like to my mind, you know, this is and again, like if you look at mass critics of of American culture right after World War two in the 50s, 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 blow ups of like, you know, uh, beatnik culture and of the civil rights movement and of homosexuals and, and, uh, 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?

[01:15:02] Doug Stuart: Kind of. Yeah.

[01:15:03] Nick Gillespie: 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, and it doesn’t mean people are going to like you, and it doesn’t mean taxes are going to go down, and it doesn’t mean it’s going to be pretty, or you’re going to do it for more than a couple of 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 Unabomber without, you know, the bombing.

[01:15:36] Doug Stuart: Like, right, right, right.

[01:15:37] Nick Gillespie: Like it’s kind of amazing, 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 in a community and.

[01:15:51] 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, um, as well as you give it to others. Yeah.

[01:16:03] Nick Gillespie: 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 without.

[01:16:19] Doug Stuart: That’s not a guarantee. 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 which, by the.

[01:16:30] Nick Gillespie: Way, to bring it back to post-modernism. At the risk of, you know, uh, 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 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 in a bowling league and I’m not, you know, playing pinochle, you know, 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 a, I’m a father and a husband and a parent.

[01:17:33] Doug Stuart: Pluralist identity. Yeah.

[01:17:35] Nick Gillespie: 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 going to 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 different points in your life.

[01:18:39] Doug Stuart: Yeah. I mean, I think that relationship changes over time for every individual. And also people come to Christ in different ways. And their experience of Christ is, uh, 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. Um, this has been just a fascinating conversation. It’s been very enriching for me. You kind of. You kind of checked an item off my bucket list by telling me. I asked you a good question. So, uh.

[01:19:08] Nick Gillespie: A lot of them. Yeah. And I know I’ve talked about this in other contexts. I’ve become like the one thing I’m evangelical about and I’ll. Because I think your, uh, your audience would find it interesting. Is the par lagerkvist novel Barabbas. Yes. Uh, which is just a phenomenal short novel that came out shortly after World War Two by a Swedish writer, you know, and it’s about Barabbas after he is ransomed by Jesus. And then he’s, you know, he has no idea who this guy is, and he has this unearned grace, freedom and life. And it’s like, what does he do? And it is just a phenomenal novel for believers, but also for nonbelievers because it’s it’s a it was part of what is broadly called Christian existentialism of like, well, we know 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 record.

[01:20:07] Doug Stuart: Well, you suggested it to me back in May when we we met up in New York for the Soho debate that we’ve been referring to. And I went, I bought it, uh, 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? Uh, work with that material. Uh, 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 contemporary. It became better.

[01:20:42] Nick Gillespie: Contemporary. Yeah.

[01:20:42] Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah.

[01:20:43] Nick Gillespie: Good. Well, I’m glad you liked it.

[01:20:45] Doug Stuart: Yeah. Well, Nick, thank you. Uh, I appreciate this time. And, uh, hopefully we’ll we’ll see each other again when I’m in New York.

[01:20:52] Nick Gillespie: Uh, that would be great. Thanks so much. And, uh, best to, uh, LCI and everything you’re doing.

[01:20:57] Doug Stuart: Thanks, Nick.

[01:21:00] Voiceover: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast. If you liked today’s episode, we encourage you to rate us on Apple Podcasts to help expand our audience. If you want to reach out to us, email us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com. You can also reach us at @LCIOfficial on Twitter. And of course we are on Facebook and have an active group. You are welcome to join. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.

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