30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the Fall: Difference between revisions

Just before the great indooring due to the Pandemic of 2020, Eric sat down with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss his book "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success." Over champagne flutes filled with bubbly, the two discussed the various ways that the success and excesses of American Capitalism were now distorting the American Dream into a dystopian fever vision, making it far harder to wake up from this stasis in time to avoid the previous fates of fallen empires.  

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== Transcript ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello, this is Eric with a few words of housekeeping.

   

So, hopefully, that catches you up to where we are at least procedurally. We will be sure to let you know if there are any changes if you will kindly navigate to our new website at ericweinstein.org and leave us your email address for our mailing list so that we can keep connected to you in the weeks ahead.

As to what is on my mind, it is mostly this: The Awakening. On Joe's show, I talked about the end of what I termed “The Big Nap”—which I defined as the period beginning on September 2, 1945, and ending 75 years later on February 19, 2020—which signaled the end of World War II and the beginning of the slide from the peak of the stock market when the world began to accept that the Coronavirus was indeed a serious pandemic, respectively. The Big Nap, in this theory, is itself divided into three sections. First, the “power sleep” between 1945 and 1970, when economic growth was extraordinary, and the memory of World War II was still fresh. This was followed by the “mysterious transition” (for three years between 1971 and 1973, when the post-war magic suddenly evaporated) and the “deep sleep” (from 1974 up until the present day in 2020 at the time of this recording, characterized by what I've termed elsewhere, the “new gimmick economy” in which leaders at first look to restart growth but, sometime in the 1980s, actually gave up and began selling claims against the future so that a small leadership class could continue to pretend the growth was indeed continuing by transferring wealth from their descendants futures, and from workers who could not politically protect themselves from predation. The Big Nap—at least in the developed free world—was essentially characterized as a run of extraordinary relative good luck and serenity (at least by the historical standards set by previous world wars, pandemics, depressions and depressions), where the new gathering storm clouds of the Cold War threatened and menaced in the distance, but the skies directly above remained unprecedentedly clear. This created a bizarre developmental environment where the serenity of the Big Nap led to a worldwide epidemic of magical thinking among the expert and leadership classes that were raised during this time.

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A few words of context: the following conversation with New York Times conservative Washington columnist, Ross Douthat, author of The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, was conducted before the COVID quarantining and before Bernie Sanders had suspended his campaign. As such, it is interesting to listen to, in part as an unintentionally perfect example of his thesis. Here we are talking about his topic of decadence while being intentionally and self-consciously ironic—quaffing bubbly with champagne flutes for effect—but not fully realizing how bizarre this would look a short time later from the perspective of national internment during shelter-at-home orders. Even though the joke is on us in some sense, it has the air (when viewed on video) of a reel of film recovered from a celebration on the Lido Deck of the USS Titanic.

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Hello, you have found The Portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein and today I get to sit down with none other than Ross Douthat From the New York Times, op-ed columnist, and now, author of The Decadent Society. Ross, welcome!

'''RD:''' I mean, who are the experts? The think tank experts, then, are trying to achieve a set of policy goals that were sort of created 30 or 40 years ago. But under our system, you never actually achieve those policy goals, so you can go on championing them. Like, Republicans have been—to go back to the sort of the world of 10 years ago—Republicans have been arguing for the Flat Tax for as long as I've been alive. We will never past the Flat Tax for 17 different reasons. Therefore, it becomes just this sort of thing where you sort of cycle through arguments for it and arguments against it—it has no relationship to policy reality … Medicare For All might become the same thing on the Democratic side. And then the experts are … maybe they're denatured because they're engaging in rhetorical arguments with each other that don't have any bearing on legislation. …

'''RD:''' I think because it has a combination of fitting a certain kind of right-of-center American idea of justice—so it taps into some piece of part of the American Conservative worldview that's very powerful. And because it's one small manifestation of the way in which the sort of genuine upheavals of the 60s and 70s then got put on autopilot as the Baby Boom generation just, sort of, aged and remained dominant. So it might be that the Flat Tax finally disappears when the Grover Norquist generation of conservative operatives gets too old to have influence anymore, right?

'''RD:''' But some of those Boomers, like you know, they don't have three homes. But people living in the villages in Florida who are big Trump voters are prosperous Americans who could transmit more wealth, presumably, to their kids and grandkids.

'''RD:''' Right.

You can catch Ross on his book tour, hopefully. And please subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, and then head on over to our YouTube channel and not only subscribe, but please click the bell icon to be informed when our next YouTube video drops, and we'll see you all soon. Be well. Thanks.