Liberty Law Talk

New York Times columnist and commentator extraordinaire Ross Douthat talks about our decadent age with Richard Reinsch. Richard Reinsch: Today we’re talking with Ross Douthat about his new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Ross Douthat’s name will certainly not sound unfamiliar to our listeners and readers. He’s one of our most cogent cultural and political critics. He writes for the New York Times. He’s the author of a number of books, including most recently, To Change the Church, about the Pope Francis pontificate, which anticipates well, I think, many of the changes Pope Francis has brought. He’s also the author of the book Privilege and Grand New Party, which is a wonderful book that has held up well. Ross is also the film critic for National Review, which I read your pieces many times there. Welcome to the program. Ross Douthat: Thanks so much for having me, Richard. It’s great to be here. Richard Reinsch: Great. So Ross, you’re into decadence. Tell us about the Decadent Society. Ross Douthat: So the Decadent Society is an attempt to, in a certain way, put a name on the weird anxiety that pervades the developed world, the Western world and the United States of America, where we have this combination of tremendous wealth and technological proficiency, which makes some people argue that these are the best times in the history of the world, but at the same time a lot of discontent, anxiety and ennui, which gets manifested in everything from the sort of populist and socialist rebellions in our politics, to rising rate of depression and suicide, and deaths of despair as they get called and so on. And so the argument I make in the book, is basically that we have entered a very particular kind of civilizational state that I’m calling “decadence” and I’m using that term to mean not chocolate dipped strawberries and weekends in Vegas, though those might be part of it, but a kind of stagnation, repetition, and decay at a high level of civilizational development. Richard Reinsch: One of the definitions, to talk about the definition of decadence you give in the book, you build on Jacques Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence, which I think came out in 2000. I remember reading it in 2001 and that book has stuck with me. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed reading your book because building on Barzun’s definition of decadence, Barzun talks about moving in fits and starts, but not really getting anywhere. The Decadent Society sees no path forward and it’s institutions function painfully. Maybe talk more about that because you also dismiss a definition of decadence that on my worst days, I find myself sort of glomming onto which is weak, sort of hedonistic luxuriating, weak and unable to defend ourselves. Unwilling to see the purpose in defending ourselves and so we’ll go into the good night, but maybe talk about that. Ross Douthat: Right. So yeah, I am very directly borrowing from Barzun and you could see this book, in part, as a sequel both to his book and in certain ways to Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History, which came out 10 years earlier. And the combination of those two arguments basically makes the case that Fukuyama was right, in a sense, not permanently and forever, but right that Western civilization has sort of passed beyond some of its great ideological debates and entered into a period of stability, that was also in danger of becoming a period of boredom and disappointment and sterility. And then Barzun, in a somewhat similar way, made the case that this is something that happens generally to civilizations at a certain point. That they enter into periods where their once vigorous institutions become sclerotic, where their ambitious explorations hit frontiers that they can’t necessarily explore. And for us, I think that’s the most obvious in the demise of the space age basically, that we went from a period where people imagined that the frontier was going to open further into space. And now that’s sort of left to Silicon Valley billionaires to pursue and maybe they’re getting somewhere. But there’s no cultural imagination around space travel the way there was in the 1960s. So frontiers are closed. Institutions don’t work that well anymore. There’s sort of a loss of both pride in the past and confidence in the future and it doesn’t go all the way to the definition that you suggest only because I think that people sometimes underestimate how long a decadence period can last. So there’s an assumption that because you have institutions that don’t work as well anymore because you have a loss of civilizational confidence, there must be a kind of iron logic to history where the barbarians are waiting at the frontier and they’re going to come in and put the palaces to the torch. And of course sometimes that happens. But you can also have empires and cultures go on a long time in periods that are essentially stagnant. The Roman empire goes 400 years from its Caligulan stage to the actual demise of the empire in the West. And in our case, we’re in this sort of unusual, not sort of, this entirely unusual position of being the first true world civilization, even more so than ancient Rome. And we also have a situation where a lot of empires and countries and cultures that might be seen as our rivals maybe are actually converging with us in decadence in different ways. That they aren’t poised to leap past us. And if that’s the case, then you could imagine what I call sustainable decadence as something that lasts if not centuries, at least some generations past our present moment where I’m writing. Richard Reinsch: So you’re saying, American civilization spreads its corruption, it spreads its decadence to others that it touches? Ross Douthat: I’m saying that there isn’t … that’s the darkest way of putting it, I guess. You could also say that the modern world’s experiment has achieved things like near universal literacy and high school education for most people. It runs out of obvious sources of dynamic new growth. And once it achieves a certain level of technological proficiency, it becomes a lot harder to figure out new world changing inventions. It’s hard to come up with the equivalent of the light bulb or indoor plumbing. And so as other societies gain those things, they converge with us. So China gets richer and more educated. India gets richer and more educated, but they end up in the same place that we’ve ended up. There’s no clear line of advanced path, this particular combination of wealth, technology and a slowly aging slightly exhausted culture. Richard Reinsch: I want to go back, and you mentioned it earlier, your take on the end of the Space Age. You have this sentence and I’ll read it, “Since Apollo, we have entered into decadence.” Why do you pin so much on, I guess, the decline of American government’s involvement in space exploration? Ross Douthat: Well, so first because the timing is right, right? So I start the story in 1969, in part because that particular peak of achievement, the leap to the moon also coincided with the moment or the period when the trends that I’m describing as decadence really began in earnest. So it coincides with the slowdown of economic growth that began in the ’70s and has defined the American economy, with a few exceptional periods ever since. It coincides with the first great wave of public disillusionment with government that peaked with the Watergate scandal, but then has sort of defined the country’s relationship to its government ever since. It coincides with the beginning of the birth dearth, with the Baby Boom generation giving way to a period of the low replacement fertility that has again, extended itself across the developed world ever since. So there’s a lot of the, at least somewhat measurable trends, I’m talking about, start in that period. So even if it isn’t directly connected, it’s a good place to start. But I do also argue that there is a direct connection that, and this is of course unprovable, but nonetheless I think it’s true that, the entire spirit of modern civilization and especially the American version of that spirit, has depended on an idea of exploration, going to the frontier as a primary or defining source of meaning. And sometimes this has strong religious overtones, sometimes it’s more secularized. But either way, there has been this sense that human beings have been given a world to explore and our societies thrive by actually exploring it. And so the moment … this is in certain ways a version of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis about where he argued that the literal closing of the frontier was this signal moment in American history. And I’m suggesting that he was probably right, but in that case, the at least temporary closing of the stellar frontier was also really important. And that the … at least some of the optimism of the post World War II era in the United States was conditioned on the belief that we were … that the frontier wasn’t actually closed that the language of John F. Kennedy, the new frontier, the language of Star Trek, the language of the 60s. The optimistic language assumed a human story that would continue beyond the earth and we haven’t found a way to do it. And then that means that we are stuck here with ourselves having fulfilled the admonition in Genesis, we have filled the earth and we don’t really know what to do next. And in that sense it’s not surprising that there is a sense of futility and stalemate in a lot of human endeavors since. Richard Reinsch: Do you think, when you think about that refusal, or, I say refusal, willingness to continue space exploration, do you attribute that to a failure of imagination, courage, hope, or big government? And one of the things, I was thinking of your book, and you just referenced Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis, I mean the conservative critique of Turner is, what he’s really saying is “Yeah, the frontier is closed and now it’s government’s job to manage us. To make our society a better one, more orderly, more equal.” Those things. Is that what leads us away from the space age and that heroic rambunctious spirit that would have been true in a pre-progressive America? Ross Douthat: I mean, I would like to argue that it’s a failure of nerve and courage and imagination, but you also have to concede that it was just a response to the reality of this space. Which, the reason that Americans went to the frontier in the 19th century, or the reason that Spanish and European explorers crossed the Atlantic was that there were clear political and financial incentives for so doing. And it took the full flower of the Cold War and that spirit of competition to get us to the moon. And then we got there and basically discovered that, while our technology at that moment was equal to that particular task, it wasn’t equal to the kind of things that science fiction authors imagined. You know, mining on the moons of Jupiter, or terraforming Mars or anything like that. So there are ways in which the people who said, “Well we don’t need to pursue the space program because there isn’t anything out there for us,” had a reasonable point. There clearly has to be some further leap of technological progress here on Earth to push us further into the stars. And some of that, I mean, we have made some progress. There’s the Elon Musk, those kinds of projects have improved our space life capacities in certain ways, but they haven’t been that transformational leap. So in that sense, I think it’s more the arrow probably runs the other way, where it’s first, the impediments to space travel become apparent and the view that we’ll be beyond Jupiter by 2001, to take Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s example, once people realized that’s not going to happen, then in turn, diminishes the incentives for daring ambition, rambunctiousness. And you know there was a lively argument, well into the late ’60s about whether the space program itself was a sensible use of resources. And if you watch the … I’m not sure if it’s in the Apollo 11, if it’s not in the Apollo 11 documentary, it might be in the Ryan Gosling movie about Neil Armstrong. They show protestors singing the song Whitey on the Moon. That’s sort of the view. Basically a Great Society view that, as you say, we need to make things equal here on earth before we go to the stars and that view then gets, in some sense, confirmed by the fact that we can’t get to Mars or build a moon base, or have a Mars colony. Richard Reinsch: Well, it seems to me too, supply creates demand in this sense that you give yourself a purpose. Or you give yourself a goal, an objective, a destination as a country, as to what you’re going to do and push for it. And that’s something in your book, resonated with me because I remember growing up in the ’80s and thinking, “Well, we really don’t take this stuff seriously anymore.” I remember going to visit NASA and looking inside a space shuttle and thinking, “This isn’t something we’re really going to do in a way that was true when my parents were growing up.” No one’s going to give Kennedy’s speech at Rice University now. That’s also the Cold War. I mean the Cold War is a part of this as well, but it just seems we did give up. And you know, the technological difficulties are well noted, but you know, as Peter Thiel might say, “Those are things that one could push for and try to solve if there was a will.” Ross Douthat: One could. Although he wrote a very kind review of my book, but he accused me of being too glib in saying that we need to start working on the warp drive because we have to recognize these immense impediments and possible impossibilities of that technology. Which is a fair point. But yeah, I think one of the arguments I try and make in the book, is that decadence as I describe it, is a very entangled phenomenon. So it’s very hard to say, “Here was the one thing that we needed to do differently to avoid ending up where we did.” So, right. Like you could imagine a president, a popular president- Imagine a popular president, a figure like Ronald Reagan, who made a Mars mission as important or central to American government as Kennedy and his successors did with the Moon landing. But could that have succeeded given the greater technological impediments to getting to Mars, the clear absence of short term economic benefits to the mission, and the waning of the Cold War, the disappearance for a time at least of great power competition? I’m not sure. I mean, I think you can look at something like the Challenger explosion as a useful book end. I basically say that the space age runs from Sputnik to the Challenger. I was four or five when the Challenger happened. I actually do remember it as one of my more vivid childhood memories. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, me too. Ross Douthat: But yeah, so you can imagine a counterfactual where the Challenger explosion, nothing happened. Reagan is more invested in the space program. Maybe the Cold War takes a different turn. You can spin those out, but at the same time, there are clearly powerful and sort of interlocking structural forces that have made it hard for us to just sort of go on to the stars as we imagined doing. Richard Reinsch: Returning to terra firma. And in your book, you then turn to the sociology, the economics, the politics of aging societies, which characterize every Western society except for, as you know, Israel. How does that factor in to decadence, the below level birth rates, replacement level birth rates, and in that factoring into who we are? Ross Douthat: So I mean, it’s another case of entanglement, right? Where, well, the birth rate part of it starts with a puzzle that I don’t have a definite solution for. And the puzzle is why have birth rates settled so low in the developed world, not only Europe and the United States, but even more so in the Pacific rim as well? And if you go back 50 years to what demographers were talking about as the Baby Boom sort of ran out of steam, the view then was of course, birth rates will fall. We’re no longer an agrarian society. We have more reliable contraception. We’re seeing various professional advances for women. Child mortality rates are much lower, so you don’t have to have nine kids to have five or four survive to adulthood. But the expectation was that birth rates would settle at around what people said they wanted, which would mean slightly above replacement level of two to 2.5 kids at that sort of normal birth rate. And instead people still say, women as well as men, that they want somewhere in that two to 2.5 kids range, but they aren’t having them. And the US was an outlier for a while. Still had replacement level fertility into George W. Bush’s presidency, but since the Great Recession, we’ve fallen off the cliff and joined Europe and East Asia. So clearly, I mean, I’m a social conservative and a Roman Catholic, so I have certain suspicions about what the Sexual Revolution did to people’s capacities to successfully mate and marry and have kids. I think it’s reasonable to see that something has gone amiss in sexual and romantic culture that seeped into this. But there is this mystery of why the richest societies in the history of the world, where in certain ways it’s never been easier to have kids, and we have assisted reproduction to help people who are infertile and all the rest, why in these societies can’t we maintain even a replacement level of fertility? Richard Reinsch: I want to read a passage from your book on this point because I thought it was really well said. You say, “The facts themselves are indisputable. People reacted to the social revolutions of the 1960s first by marrying less and divorcing more and having fewer children, more of whom were born outside of wedlock. And then eventually by marrying much less, having many fewer children, and even in trends from the last two decades having less sex, period.” That is a damning indictment, I think, of our situation or searing indictment of our situation. Ross Douthat: Yes. And it’s interestingly different even from what the social conservatism of my own teenage years suspected. Probably the first real conservative jeremiad that I read as a teenager flirting with right wing politics was Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Richard Reinsch: We have that in common Ross Douthat: And that was a book that basically argued that the social revolutions of the ’60s were unleashing a kind of moral chaos, and the implication was that we should expect the abortion rate to stay high, the divorce rate to stay high, the teen birth rate, which had gone up in the early 1990s to keep climbing. That we should expect out of wedlock births to become the norm. That we should expect this kind of permanent 1970s New York kind of social chaos. And that isn’t exactly what we’ve gotten. Instead, we’ve made that further turn that I tried to capture in the passage you read where we’ve stabilized things. The American society is more stable than it was when Bork wrote his book. The divorce rate has dipped. The abortion rate has dipped. The out of wedlock birth rate has finally leveled off. The teen birth rate has gone down. So in that sense, social conservatives should be celebrating except that what’s replaced that chaos is not a sort of renewal of the family. It’s not a sort of successful marriages and rising birth rates. It’s this age of a sort of retreat from sex itself in some cases. Certainly- Richard Reinsch: Japan. Ross Douthat: … from marriage, parenthood, and so on. Yeah, and it sort of we followed a trail that Japan, and to some extent South Korea, has seemed to blaze where virtual forms of intimacy substitute for the real thing, where men and women spend incredibly long periods of their lives single. And the internet has obviously entered in and interacted and driven some of it. It’s provided a kind of safe space for people to sort of enact fantasies that would be incredibly dangerous if enacted in the real world. But you can have sort of 1970s New York on your computer screen, and the real world is stable and safer, but it’s not clear that it’s happier. Richard Reinsch: You quote an economist I think at Clemson University, which I heard this critique when he first announced it, that the introduction of broadband correlates with the decline in sexual assaults and violence, meaning pornography itself seems to reduce sexual violence. You found that persuasive, I assume? Ross Douthat: I don’t want to express too much certainty because rape statistics are somewhat famously under-reported, and there’s a lot of argument and contest around their reliability. And then there are clearly a lot of ways in which the internet has enabled predation and human trafficking. But that broad trend does seem like it could be right. If you go back, as I do a bit in the book, and look at the arguments in the 1980s when you had this temporary alliance between religious conservatives and anti-porn feminists, the arguments then ran the other way. They were sort of versions of Bork’s arguments that basically porn unleashed passions, unleashed the libido in a way that would be tremendously dangerous for women especially, and would lead to this sort of looking for Mr. Goodbar, endless sort of predation in a freewheeling singles scene. And that again, we run a generational experiment with hardcore pornography, sort of a wild diversity of pornography beyond even the imagination of the Hustler era is now sex education for tons and tons of Americans, especially American males. And you haven’t gotten that kind of epidemic of sexual violence, or you haven’t gotten a new epidemic. Instead, the evidence seems to be… My friend, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, wrote a piece recently, a long piece for the American Greatness website where he tried to go through the sort of psychological and medical literature on porn addiction. And most of it seemed to run in the direction of numbing and impotence as the fundamental consequences of pornography, not widespread aggression. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, that’s what I read. I mean, I take it, just thinking about your analysis here, and you say in the book in the late ’80s, early ’90s a lot of the things social conservatives said seemed to be coming true about the fallout from the sexual revolution, and then we found a way to manage it. Managing it, being the internet, smartphones later, drugs, various medications, and also the welfare state itself. And has been well known with the rise of this category of prime working age men who are jobless at alarming rates, the opioid deal, but also the ways in which government itself seems to support them. And so I guess we’ve found a way to manage these problems, but yet if there is a human nature defined by love, relational capacities and needs, and these things don’t exactly go away either in the sense of what human beings need to thrive. But yet don’t find themselves in a culture supplying it, and certainly that’s true for certain populations. Ross Douthat: Yeah, I think that’s basically right. But I think we’re also sort of, in certain ways, the turn from the Bork era of social chaos to our era of numb social stability is relatively new. And so we don’t know what this will look like 20 years hence, whether there will be… You see among younger conservatives, for instance, much more hostility towards pornography than you saw 10 or 15 years ago. Sort of younger conservatives are less libertarian in certain ways on these issues in part because I think they’ve grown up in the world that porn has made. On the other hand, in most respects, American culture is trending in a more kind of pro medicate your troubles away direction, right? I mean, I think the spread of legal marijuana, it may be the right move in policy terms. It may be that the costs of marijuana prohibition were just too great. I’m open to that argument. But we need to be, I think realistically, it’s another way of mainstreaming a kind of numbed, detached, chilled out approach that where people can sort of drift through what are, in certain ways, supposed to be the most, as you said earlier, rambunctious periods of their lives, just sort of hanging out and not actually getting to either the kind of entrepreneurial spirit in their professional lives or a kind of romantic and ultimately sort of literally fertile spirit in their relational lives. Richard Reinsch: Talk about the aging society. We were talking about one social, cultural side, but there’s also you have an economic critique as well. And I wanted to get to that and also the politics of an aging society. Because I really enjoyed your chapter on policymaking, the form it seems to be taking. So the politics of an aging society is different, much different, than Schumpeter’s creative destruction mentality. Ross Douthat: Right. I think that’s a reasonable assumption that older people are for entirely rational reasons, but also for reasons that I think relate literally to their brain chemistry, are more risk averse and cautious and more attached to existing institutions than are younger people. And so it stands to reason that as society gets older, it’s time horizons shrink. Its risk assessments change. I quote the libertarian columnist, Megan McArdle, who was my colleague at The Atlantic a long time ago, and wrote a piece where she basically said, “Imagine two towns next to each other. We’ll call them Twilight City and Morningburg. And in Twilight City, the population skews towards people in their 60s, and in Morningburg it skews towards people in their 30s. And even if the two societies have exactly the same level of wealth, the same kind of technology, the Morningburg society is just going to be more dynamic, creative, more likely to take risks, more likely to make bets that can only pay off over the long haul. And the Twilight City society is going to be the reverse.” Now that’s then I think complicated a little bit by I think some of the anxieties that older societies feel in eras where transformation seems to be happening amongst the younger generation that they can’t control. Richard Reinsch: You find that playing out now? Ross Douthat: Yeah. I think some of the politics of immigration in Europe and the US, you have older people, not always older people, it’s a little more complicated in Europe, but certainly in the US, you have a lot of older people who have voted for Donald Trump and who have been supportive of the kind of rambunctious populous conservatism because they look at the changes to American society, the fact that they didn’t have as many kids, and you have in effect immigrants often sort of as the inheritors of society seemingly instead of their own descendants. All of that breeds a certain kind of anxiety about the future that can lead to support for at least a certain kind of disruptive populism. So it’s not as simple as old people always vote for the safest person, otherwise Donald Trump wouldn’t be president. But if Donald Trump set out to dramatically overhaul Medicare, those older voters would conspicuously not be in favor of it. And I think even the populism in Europe and the US is defined in part by its desire not to change the welfare state, right? That’s sort of, whether it’s Marine Le Pen in France or Trump here, there’s a rejection of entitlement reform. There’s a sort of rejection of some of the more free market oriented aspects of conservatism, and that too I think reflects the age composition of the people supporting those movements. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, we can’t even have a conversation. I mean, the last national politician to try it was Paul Ryan around even just slightly retrenching the welfare state. I mean, that’s just a nonstarter even though we’re staring at the abyss right now. And the only thing working in our favor is that America seems to be able to borrow in an elastic capacity on world markets. Ross Douthat: Yes. I mean, I look at our deficits as maybe more sustainable than some conservatives do. But I think of them then in turn as sort of part of how a sustainable decadence works. That in effect, we pay ourselves to give up the illusion of continued growth, right? That we have the illusion of continued growth, because we’re rich and relatively stable, and in part because our society is older, and so interest rates are lower. There are various ways in which an aging society oddly makes deficits easier to carry. But what that then means is that we have 2% growth propped up by immense deficits. Whereas, in the 1950s, they had 5% growth with negligible deficits. And that’s a big difference, and not a sign of fundamental economic health, even if it’s something we can carry for the time being. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, and it’s interesting just thinking about capital, not just financial capital, but things being rebuilt, replaced, renewed, regenerated. That doesn’t seem to be happening either. In your critique, we just sort of, we’re living off preexisting lines of capital. And you also had this critique, it’s a very succinct critique, that the 60s counter culture became the culture, but built nothing. It moved, I was thinking of Gramsci, they did move through the institutions and capture them, but what did they do with them? Ross Douthat: Right. I mean, I think I offer a partial defense of the Baby Boomers, in the sense that I argue that they really were a dynamic and creative generation. And that we owe most of our current political ideas to sort of movements that the Baby Boomers invented, including movements of conservatism in certain ways. But, also environmentalist of the left, feminism and so on, all come out of the Baby Boomer transition to adulthood. And so do most of our cultural forms, including Rock & Roll and the Blockbuster movie and so on. And these were real inventions. But, I think the problem is that the Boomer victory was too complete. As you said, that they, and in that sense, it’s really their parents and grandparents fault for not putting up enough resistance against this huge wave of youth culture that swept through America. So if you’d had more of a kind of creative tension between … just to take the universities, if you sort of maintained this sort of ongoing argument over what the canon should contain with the younger people arguing that it needed to change in various ways and older people defending sort of a traditional canonicity, that I think would have been much more healthy than the world we have where the idea of a canon sort of under Baby Boomer and post Boomer pressure just collapsed. And so now universities, it’s not that universities teach Toni Morrison alongside Shakespeare. It’s that they don’t teach either. And that’s in certain ways one of the core problems with the Baby Boomer victory. But then because there were so many of them, I mean my parents included there. I mean, I obviously love and admire many Baby Boomers, but they did and do maintain this kind of weight on our society. That sort of makes it hard to do new things culturally, it’s hard as the Democrats are finding out in this campaign cycle, to nominate anyone to presidency who isn’t over 70-years-old. And we’re all still living in the Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ imaginations even though those imaginations have run out of steam. Richard Reinsch: You mentioned Megan McArdle and I was thinking about when I was reading your book and you mentioned this, the Twilight City versus Morningburg, she had a great piece two years ago, where she went to Utah and she covered state government in Utah, the business climate in some of the larger cities in the state. Ross Douthat: Yep. I remember that. Richard Reinsch: And she said in talking about the families in Utah that she encountered, and she said, “This is America. This is the American dream. This is how I think America is supposed to work.” No Utah talk though from you in this book. Is Utah just too limited or is that something you don’t find convincing, or how might one extrapolate from that experience? Ross Douthat: No, I mean I think I mentioned Utah. I think my assumption is that there are two major spots in the rich developed world that I would say are not decadent by my definition. And those spots are the State of Israel and the Republic of Deseret, whatever you want to call greater Mormondom. And there… And some of this is just based on birth rates alone. Israel is the great outlier in terms of birth rates. It’s the only- Richard Reinsch: … 3.1- Ross Douthat: … only country with, yeah, with a birth rate, not over two, but over three. And that’s true for secular Israelis and not just the Orthodox, which is particularly striking. And then Utah represents a certain kind of religiously rooted, future oriented, large families, reasonably tech savvy kind of Americanism. Yeah. It looks like the pre-decadent America, which is why Mitt Romney, he seemed like a visitor from 1965, right? Or the year 1958, when he ran for president. You could imagine him not sort of in the control room at NASA, but as sort of a high level bureaucrat, running one of those mid-century programs. So yeah, Mormondom is clearly an outlier. I think there are, and I think the role of the LDS Church in that culture is one reason among many why I talk a fair amount at the end about religious revivals as plausible or potentially plausible paths out of decadence. The challenge for the Mormons is that one reason they’re able to sort of maintain their culture is precisely its geographic concentration, right? There isn’t sort of a similar Catholic core or Presbyterian core in the US that reflects that kind of concentrated influence. And there are some reasons why the Mormons have not grown at the rate that some people expected in the 1970s there. And this is true generally of right now … religious communities, especially traditional religious communities, have higher fertility rates than almost everybody else. But then they also lose a lot of people through attrition. So they sort of, they’re on the treadmill maintaining themselves without having the kind of dynamic growth that could transform their regions or the country, as yet. Richard Reinsch: So let’s think about how we might end and how we might renew. You kind of go through some things, global warming, socialism, this post liberal nationalist moment, and also Islam within Europe. And you sort of systematically considered each one. But I think ultimately you don’t really worry about each one. And I guess that’s consistent with your thesis, but maybe talk about that some. Ross Douthat: Yes. I mean, I think I spend a certain amount of time talking about possible forces that are sort of external to the world that I’m calling decadent. And that means mostly thinking about China and Islam. But the external force that I think is most likely to challenge decadence is the huge population imbalance between an aging sort of hyper decadent Western Europe and not the Islamic world particularly, but Sub-Saharan Africa, which is still growing at an extraordinary rate. And it’s totally possible that by the end of the century there will be 500 million Europeans and three and a half billion Africans. Whereas, 100 years ago there were probably more European than Africa. And that seems to me like the kind of unstable equilibrium that you should expect to lead to some kind of dramatic change, especially if climate change of some sort makes more of Africa or the Middle East less habitable and sort of drives migration. But, I think that combination if sort of climate change and population imbalance is the most likely sort of way that a force from outside the decadent developed world could transform at least the European part of it. And then internally, my assumption is that you need something somewhat disjunctive. You can’t just incrementally go forward with the trends we have now and expect to escape from decadence. You need an unexpected great awakening. You need a dramatic political realignment of the time that Trump and Sanders are sort of imagining. But, I don’t think they’re likely to achieve. And or you would need breakthroughs in inventions. I mean we were talking earlier about the space program. It is totally possible that in the spillover from Silicon Valley’s wealth, there could be innovations that would really change our capacities for space flight. It’s possible that in this sort of world of alternative energy and self driving cars and so on, you could get a real transportation transformation of the kind that we haven’t really had since the rise of the automobile. But I think you need something pretty dramatic to shift the trajectory that we’ve been on for the last 40 or 50 years just because there are so many different forces converging to make us decadent right now. Richard Reinsch: I suppose too, I mean I was thinking, you mentioned Peter Thiel’s review of your book. I once read something of his, something to the effect he rejected the etiology of mortality. So pointing towards AI or working towards a transhumanist future of some kind, could technology, maybe not transhumanism and that’s still, but something like that. Do you think that is too unpredictable to pontificate about on what could change the West? Ross Douthat: Well, there’s two things, right? One is that I’m … I suppose morally and theologically skeptical of those kinds of innovations than Thiel is. So I can imagine a world where you’ve got some dramatic genetic innovation, some dramatic genetic enhancement, that would not be decadent, right? If we suddenly had the superman from the wrath of Khan, or this sort of Star Trek imagination of the future walking among us and we were … it just was driving dramatic political conflict or maybe if they were, I think I say in the book, if China achieved some breakthrough where suddenly they were creating effectively in the race, that would not be decadent. I’m not sure it would be good, right? Richard Reinsch: No. Ross Douthat: I mean, so that, you can imagine things happening that would create dramatic, new moral and religious conflicts where Thiel and I, who are both critics of decadence right now could end up on in effect the opposite side. In the specifics of AI. I mean, I, without being a proficient expert in the study of consciousness, if such a thing is possible. I do think that the hard problem of consciousness is an even harder problem to solve in some way that makes brains malleable and replicable. Richard Reinsch: Uploadable. Ross Douthat: Right, then uploadable. Exactly. I suspect we will get to Mars before we upload our brain anywhere. But that could be my own bias. I would rather go to Mars than upload my brain. And I feel like some of those kind of imagined innovations have an ambiguity where it’s like the matrix, right? If you’re sort of uploading yourself fully to virtual reality, are you escaping decadence or are you making it permanent? And I’m not sure what the answer is, but I lean towards the making it permanent version. Richard Reinsch: Or what does technology really matter to us if it sort of obviates our personhood and our ability to use it well for our own thriving? Ross Douthat: Yes. Richard Reinsch: I think, just closing, my take on your book too is it’s really what you make of who is the human person and what is human nature? And in the condition of malaise and boredom, and there are no clear lines of advance. If man is fundamentally dangerous, then one could imagine all sorts of mischief breaking out, which would be maybe my challenge to your thesis. Who is man? If he is a dangerous animal, then maybe our end does come much sooner than you’re anticipating or writing about. Ross Douthat: Yes. And we’re … and then there’s also the unexpected variable, right? I think I mentioned pandemic scenarios in the book, but I obviously wasn’t expecting to literally be promoting the book during a global pandemic. So I think the interaction between the unexpected variable and the ever returning human nature, our mix of invention and perversity, it would not surprise me at all if in 20 years I look back and say, “Well, this book was a really accurate account of the world from 1970 to 2020, but 2020 to 2040 has been in fact quite different and not nearly as decadent at all.” I mean, I think the big unanswered question is basically, right now, is there’s a lot of discontent with decadence that exists on the internet. Like if you go to political debates on Twitter, people are exhuming ideologies from the 19th century and fantasizing about all kinds of new political arrangements and that’s sort of a new thing. I mean relative to even when I started working on the book, I’ve been working on it for a while. There’s more discontent, there’s more ferment, I think, than there was five or seven years ago. The question is, can that escape the internet and really affect the real world? Or is the internet itself just a great machine for taking people’s creativity and perversity and making sure that neither of them have that much effect on the actual institutions of society? And the Trump presidency I think has somewhat suggested that it’s more that, and if we get a Sanders presidency, we’ll get another test of the hypothesis. Richard Reinsch: Most indeed. Ross Douthat: But, a Biden presidency will just be sustainable decadence all the way. I think that’s fair to say. Richard Reinsch: No, I think that’s right. Ross Douthat, thank you so much. We’ve been talking with the author of The Decadent Society. Thank you for your time.

In a 2017 essay reprinted in his new book Twilight of the American Century, Andrew Bacevich comments Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us. He discusses this observation and more in this new episode of Liberty Law Talk.

Frequent contributor to Law & Liberty William Anthony Hay joins our podcast to discuss his new biography, Lord Liverpool.

Steven Smith returns to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book Pagans & Christians in the City.

Editor’s note: This podcast was originally published on January 27, 2016. A new episode of Liberty Law Talk will return on June 15th with George Will on his recently released book The Conservative Sensibility. Roger Scruton is certainly no stranger to Liberty Law Talk. His return is occasioned by Bloomsbury’s republication of his 1985 title, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, a book that caused tremendous academic controversy, threats against the publisher, and the book’s eventual scuttling by Longman, its original publisher. Scruton’s crime was to have attempted to take the New Left seriously, finding it severely wanting, if not absurd. We revisit the book’s fallout, discuss its ideas, and consider the state of contemporary Leftist thinking.

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and political commentator extraordinaire George Will comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his new book The Conservative Sensibility.

Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally published on August 15, 2018. Every book that Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger writes changes discourse on a subject. The author of Separation of Church and State, Law and Judicial Duty, and the award-winning and Supreme Court cited Is Administrative Law Unlawful? now turns his inquisitive mind to the liberal mind. He joins us to discuss his latest book Liberal Suppression.

One of our best scholars on constitutional interpretation and judicial power, Keith Whittington returns to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his book Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present.

Sam Gregg returns to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his new book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization.

We welcome National Review contributing editor, and former Assistant US Attorney Andrew McCarthy to Liberty Law Talk for a discussion of his recent book, Ball of Collusion. Richard Reinsch:  Today we are talking with Andrew McCarthy about his latest book, Ball of Collusion. Andrew McCarthy is a contributing editor to National Review. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Willful Blindness and the Grand Jihad. Before his writing and commentating, he was a lawyer. He was an assistant United States attorney in the southern district of New York where he led the successful prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and also participated in the prosecution of bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Andrew McCarthy, glad to have you on the program. Andrew McCarthy: Richard. I’m a real admirer of your work, so it’s a delight to be here. Richard Reinsch: Well, thank you so much. Now thinking about the title of your book and as we were discussing offline, I thought I understood the Mueller Investigation and yet I read your book, it’s incredibly complicated. There are a lot of players, a lot of facts, details, motives to keep in play here. So I’ll start with a basic question. What was or is the Ball of Collusion? Andrew McCarthy: Well, I think what the ball of collusion is, it is sort of a combination of a political narrative as it is melded with the tools of, or the arsenal of an investigation. So collusion came to the public essentially as a political narrative, which was designed to lead people to believe that there was a conspiracy, a very particular conspiracy, a cyber-espionage conspiracy between the Russian regime and the Trump campaign. And specifically, this was the operation that has been attributed to Russia by our intelligence community, which was designed to influence the outcome of the 2016 campaign. And according to at least the consensus of the intelligence community influenced it with the specific purpose of advancing Donald Trump’s candidacy and undermining Hillary Clinton. So that was presented to the public as a political narrative in the aftermath of the 2016 election. And to some extent before the 2016 election, but I think it was really promoted with a lot more urgency afterwards and then- I was going to say the other aspect of it is that it actually is a formal counter intelligence investigation where the background or the backbone to it, which I think was a protectual counterintelligence investigation, and I say protectual in the sense that it was really a criminal investigation, but they didn’t have a predicate crime. So the use of the counterintelligence powers of the government was the enabler which allowed the FBI and the Justice Department to look for a crime even though they didn’t have one. Richard Reinsch: Now, to put a fine point on it, you say at one point in the book, the Trump-Russia investigation was built on a fraud. What do you mean there? Andrew McCarthy: There was no evidence that there was … certainly no credible evidence that there was a counterespionage conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. There’s not even really to be blunt about it any evidence that the Trump campaign had the competence, and the wherewithal to be a participant in a cyber-espionage conspiracy. Nor was there ever any credible indication that Russia, which is quite expert at cyber-espionage ever wanted or needed the help of any American partners, not just the Trump campaign, but any campaign. The only thread on which that was built was a claim by a former British intelligence official named Christopher Steele, that there was this enterprise between the Trump campaign and Russia. And that was based on his claim by his own description of it was based on sources of his, some of whom were anonymous, all of whom were two or three or four steps removed from him in a hearsay sense. Andrew McCarthy: And when he got sued for libel in Britain, he himself said that this was raw intelligence that hadn’t been verified or corroborated and needed to be investigated. Yet this was the “evidence” that the FBI and Justice Department went to the foreign intelligence surveillance court on the basis of, so that’s why I say that the essential claim of a conspiracy between the two was fraudulent. That is not to say that there would no connections between the two sides. In fact, I spend a good deal of time in the book elaborating on those. But what we care about in law enforcement is not association or collusion, which is a weasel word. Collusion is just a concerted activity. You and I are colluding by having this conversation. What law enforcement and intelligence people are supposed to care about is conspiracy. And there wasn’t any evidence of that. Richard Reinsch: When did intelligence officials, law enforcement officials in the executive branch begin to investigate the Trump campaign? And, I guess we’re talking about, what was their concern to begin such a review or investigation? Andrew McCarthy: This is a really important question because it goes to I think the principle public confusion about the investigation, which I’m actually feeding into in a sense by calling it the investigation because I don’t think it ever really was the investigation as if it were a single set-piece in the way that we deal with the investigations, for example, when I was in the Justice Department where you have some criminal events or some threat to national security that you know of on the basis of some information that comes to the government’s attention, and as a result, you open a formal investigation. That eventually happened here, but I think it’s a late breaking development in the factual continuum that we have. The investigation I believe really began in the latter half of 2015 and was based on a combination of- Richard Reinsch: You said 2015. Andrew McCarthy: 2015, yes. In other words, after … I should put a marker on it. After Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, which if I’m remembering right, was around mid June of 2015. Richard Reinsch:  So you’re saying right away? Right away they were concerned with Trump? Andrew McCarthy: And when I say that I’m going on a variety of things that have been publicly reported, not the testimony that was given in congressional proceedings by John Brennan, who was the CIA director in the latter half of the Obama Administration, who says that he was getting, that is the agency was getting, streams of intelligence from foreign partners raising concerns about Donald Trump. And that those went back into 2015, and they became something that the CIA became very concerned about in the early quarter of 2016. But as I lay out in the book, I believe that particularly our European allies began raising concerns about Trump pretty early on after he announced his candidacy and there were allegations. This is one of the fascinating thread of the investigation that will be very difficult to get to the bottom of because as much as we want accountability for what happened here, these partnerships that we have with foreign intelligence services are based on mutual commitments that we’re going to keep the information confidential. So they have to walk the line, which was a difficult one to walk between keeping our government accountable and at the same time respecting the arrangements that we make in these intelligence partnerships that we have with foreign countries that actually are quite important to national security. So whether we’ll ever get all of the answers here, I’m skeptical about. What we do know, at least on the basis of what’s been revealed thus far, that reporting came into the CIA from various European countries. And I think my memory is that Brennan or other intelligence officials acknowledged that some of it came from the Baltics, from France, from Italy I believe from Germany as well. And we can see in the factual recitation, and the investigative activities that have been confirmed, that there was a lot of activity involving Great Britain. We have our closest intelligence alliance with Great Britain and our agencies do not operate in Britain unless the Brits have been given a heads up about that. And often we coordinate with them when we do act in their territory as they do when they act here. So, know that there was a lot of- Richard Reinsch: What do you think they were saying? Andrew McCarthy: I think Trump especially in some of the more explosive and controversial statements that he made early on in his campaign, and these really continued right through the election. But he was, to put it mildly, I think on the basis of his rhetoric, a skeptic about the utility of NATO and about the post World War Two world order that basically we, and our allies in western Europe have presided over and fortified for the last three quarters of the century. Trump certainly was skeptical about whether we were getting, we the United States, we’re getting the value of our investments in NATO. He suggested that our allies are all free riders. They don’t pay their fair share. We get entangled in too many foreign escapades at the expense of being able to attend to things in our own country and so on. If you couple that with the other part of Trump’s rhetoric that was notable, which was the very friendly rhetoric towards Russia and toward Vladimir Putin personally. I think this was jarring to a lot of our allies and was particularly jarring to our allies in the Baltic who are justifiably, I think fearful watching what Putin and his regime have done in Ukraine, watching what they’ve done in Georgia that there’s obviously a revanchist impulse in that regime. I don’t know that the Putin really believes he could reestablish the Soviet Union, but he certainly does want to grab back as much as he can about his near horizon. I think it be the allies obviously found all of this very alarming. Some of it was alarming because the idea that they would have to pay their fair share and pay what they’ve actually promised to pay into the NATO would put great strain on their budgets, they could give him what their and arrangements had been all these years. But I also think that there was genuine fear that Trump could number one, go soft on Russia, which would only encourage its aggression. And number two, create vacuums in the world if the America retrenched where bad actors have a tendency to just fill in when we scaled. Richard Reinsch: So you would say, I don’t know, this period, latter half to 2015, early 2016, our intelligence officials are watching Trump. They’re concerned about what’s going on, on the basis of these reports. Hearing from other foreign intelligence agencies. At what point though, to things pick up, I mean, you mentioned sort of the formal investigation, which is July, 2016, but I also gather from your book, they were taking a deeper look even before then. Andrew McCarthy: I think so. I think in terms of just aside from the geopolitical concerns, which I think are profound, there’s also specific information that comes into the CIA about the possibility that Russian money is actually going into the Trump campaign. And we suspect that that report comes from Estonia, but that has never been formally confirmed. There’s a lot of reporting about it, but whether it was actually Estonia or some other service, I hope we’ll find out someday, but we haven’t. So they were clearly looking at something that was more concrete than just geopolitics and around the same period of time, and now we’re talking about the transition from 2015 into 2016. You have this situation where Paul Manafort and Carter Page come into the Trump campaign, and they are figures who are of interest to our government because of their interaction with … Well, the way the government would say it would be, with people and elements who are connected to Russia and the Russian regime, as I argue in the book. I think with respect to Manafort in particular, it’s much more about Ukraine than Russia. And part of the narrative is … part of the political narrative as to exploit the fact that most Americans I think don’t appreciate the differences between the politics of Ukraine and the politics of Russia. We were very susceptible, I think, to the idea that because Manafort had these connections to Ukrainian oligarchs who were connected to a party that is generally pro-Russian that they were almost effectively KGB agents. And there’s a big difference between being a Ukrainian oligarch and a Russian operative. Richard Reinsch: No, I was going to say, so Manafort had … he had made millions of dollars as you document in the book representing or consulting Ukrainian politicians in particular heads of state in the Ukraine … It’s interesting too, you said he had actually counseled one of them to be much more in favor of the European Union for the future Ukrainian disposition as opposed to being within the Russian orbit. And yet, as you’re noting precisely because it’s Ukraine somehow that makes him open to being or being seen as a Russian agent. I guess when I read that, one of the things that you hear from people sort of in defense of investigating Trump or in defense of the Mueller Investigation was, it would have been hard for Obama intelligence officials to not be concerned on the basis of who Trump was aligning himself with. It just seemed odd. Andrew McCarthy: I think that there’s a fair point in that, and it’s an argument that is frequently made. I guess my pushback at that is, and I have said this for a number of years of writing about this. If you legitimately thought that a political campaign or particularly a political candidate for the presidency actually was or there was strong evidence that he might be an agent of a foreign power, that would be something that the incumbent government would not only … it would not only be permissible to investigate that, I think they’d be obliged to investigate it. So what we’re always talking about here is what’s the factual predicate and are we going beyond … do we have something other than mere speculation? And if there’s some hard evidence of traitorous behavior or at least loyalties to another government that could undermine our government. And I think you have to do more along those lines than speculate. I think there has to be some hard evidence because we have … to look at it from the other side, these counterintelligence powers that the government is given are awesome powers that are intended. The purpose of them is to protect the United States from foreign threats to national security. And we have a presumption against there being used in connection with American politics, domestic politics and there’s a long history that attaches to this, a little modern history that goes back to the 60s and 70s. The whole idea, the whole reason that we have FISA which I think as I explained, the book is a very imperfect solution to the problem that it was designed for. But part of the reason, I think a big part of the reason that we have it is because of the not only the potential, but the episodes of abuse of these intelligence powers. The overarching message with all of this is that, if you’re going to use counter-intelligence authorities in order to investigate people connected to a political campaign, that you better have very strong evidence that there is justification for it. And just to finish the point to go to what you originally were asking me about, I don’t have a quarrel ever with the idea that the government has, enough facts from the government’s way, that they have a reasonable basis to be concerned and even to dig some more and look some more. Where I think you have to start to draw the line is, if they’re going to use tactics like going to the foreign intelligence surveillance court or using informants and operatives to infiltrate political campaigns, then I think you have to have a much stronger basis than just mere speculation that something may be a myth. Richard Reinsch: So let’s talk about it, because this sort of leads into my next question, when the, I don’t know, formal or opening of a counter intelligence investigation, the Trump campaign in July of 2016, so we’re told when that happens, what’s the rule inside the Justice Department? Or is there a law or a regulation for, “Okay, we’re now investigating a presidential campaign of a rival party”? So automatically there are problems here. So how do we prevent abuse? How do you prevent abuse of investigating on a whim or for partisan purposes? And did the Justice Department in your opinion meet that standard? Andrew McCarthy: No, I don’t think they did. Their own regulations talk about investigations being factually predicated and they talk all the time about predicated investigations. But I think the closer that you look at the regulations, the more you realize that they’re written to give the government maximum flexibility so that they can justify virtually anything. And that what we’re really reliant on is having responsible people in positions of authority, particularly supervisory positions who are mindful of, not only the investigative imperatives, but also the other interests that have to be respected and guarded, particularly keeping political campaigns insulated from the use of intelligence techniques or law enforcement tactics. You’re really more reliant I think on people than on regulations because they write the regulations in a way that really is designed so that if there’s a problem that they can usually justify themselves. And I think if there’s one major failing that happened here, and this goes to actually what got me particularly interested in all of this. I mean, I’m very interested in the history of elections and the 2016 election in particular because I followed it so closely, but I was more interested in this episode from the standpoint of somebody who worked on national security investigations in the Justice Department, and as someone who was simply just interested in the history of the 2016 election. And what I was very concerned about and I continue to be concerned about is the abuse of our counterintelligence authority, and fact that I told people when we first started to learn about some of the things that had happened here, that they were crazy and that these things couldn’t possibly have happened, particularly the idea of going to the foreign intelligence surveillance court with a screen of opposition research that hadn’t been verified or corroborated. When friends of mine first raised the possibility that the FBI had done that. I said, “You guys are crazy,” and insisted that when the dust settled, what we were going to find was that the FBI will have done what the FBI always does, which is, they may have taken this opposition research that was sponsored by the Clinton campaign. A lot of people say that they shouldn’t be able to do that. I tried to push back on that by explaining, in my years as a prosecutor, I took information from the worst people that you can imagine. I took it from terrorists, the mafia, hitmen and fraudsters and you name it, we took information. But the point is you can take information from anyone- Richard Reinsch: But you got to verify it. Andrew McCarthy: What you do when you get the information right? And the more suspect the sources, the higher your obligation is to corroborate it and make sure that you’re confident about it before you do something like bring it to a court. So what I said was, what you’ll find is that the FBI will have taken those four or five or six facts that they need and make out probable cause. And when we’re talking about foreign counter intelligence, we’re not talking about probable cause of a crime, we’re talking about probable cause if someone is acting as a clandestine agent of a foreign power and what I said is they’ll vet these facts. They’ll go out and get independent evidence for it. They’ll talk to other witnesses, they’ll gather records, they’ll do with the bureau does. And by the time they went to the FISA court, this will no longer be Christopher Steele dossier. This will now be an FBI investigation. You’ll never even have to hear Christopher Steele’s name. And what ended up happening was what I said could never happen is precisely what happened. So one of the things that’s really- Richard Reinsch: So does that mean, lawyers for the government, and correct me, they’re trying to get surveillance on Carter Page, who works in the Trump campaign, has longstanding ties to Russia, tried to open an investment firm to invest in Russian energy. And the book documents how he had been questioned about various Russian issues by federal prosecutors in the past. So he’s of interest to them. But are you saying this memo is basically presented to the FISA court as is, with very little- Andrew McCarthy: Correct. Richard Reinsch: And they don’t disclose either from your book, if I remember, they don’t disclose that this is Clinton. The Clinton campaign had paid for this. That was left off I think. Andrew McCarthy: I’d be interested in your reaction to this, but my reaction to this is just as a simple matter of common sense. If you look at what we’ve gotten … what’s been redacted from the submissions that they made to the FISA court, the first submission, if I’m remembering correctly, the footnote about Christopher Steele and his potential bias and the aspect that he was working for Fusion GPS and how he came to the investigation and why they bring the information. The footnote goes on for about a page and a half. And just the footnote. And I always thought, just having been in front of a million federal judges over the years, if you’re taking a page and a half to avoid uttering the sentence, they are working for the Clinton campaign, you probably need to disclose the sentence that they are working with the Clinton campaign. I think what happened here is that they almost convict themselves of being disingenuous by the energy that goes into withholding information. It’s really quite astonishing when you look at what they filed. But they did essentially do the thing that I said would never be done, which is they took Steele’s information and they just basically cut and pasted it into FISA submissions or applications which are supposed to be called verified applications to the foreign intelligence surveillance court. And when director Comey, then director Comey, was asked by a Senate committee that he was briefing about why they would do that when Steele actually is not the source of any of the facts that the court was being asked to rely on for purposes of probable cause. He’s actually more like a case agent. He’s the accumulator of information from a bunch of sources who were three or four steps removed from him. And just so our listeners understand, Steele has not been in Russia for about 20 years. His cover was blown as an intelligence officer in the late 1990s. Richard Reinsch: For the British. Andrew McCarthy:  As I understand it. Right, yes. And he did run the Russia desk for MI6 for about four years in the early 2000s, but he ran it from London. He hasn’t actually been in Russia. And everything he knows that comes from Russia, it comes from sources that he has that are quite many steps removed from him and a number of whom evidently don’t know that they’re sources. They’re talking to other people who are talking to other people who are talking to Steele. That’s how attenuated it is. Richard Reinsch: Which raises the obvious question of was he being played? Andrew McCarthy: Yes. Well that is a big question. And judging from what we’ve heard a little bit cryptically in the testimony that Attorney General Barr has given in the few occasions that he’s been before congressional committees, it seems to me that that is one of the major things that the investigation that he has basically commissioned in the Justice Department. That’s one of the main things that investigation is looking into, whether Steele was a vessel for this information coming into our government. I think there’s a very good possibility that, that’s true. Richard Reinsch: I didn’t realize, and you raised it in the book, and I’ll butcher the Russian agent’s name, there was a Russian agent that defected to the British and Steele was actually his handler inside, or for British intelligence. Andrew McCarthy: He lived in England. Richard Reinsch: And he was murdered on British soil. So like Steele is … it’s like this guy is definitely compromised. And I guess maybe we’ll find out, was that taken into account at all by Americans dealing with the information they received from him. Andrew McCarthy: Well, there’s an interesting … I rely on some really good reporting that was done by Eric Felten, and I think it’s the time he was at the The Weekly Standard. But he points out that for years during the Obama Administration, Steele was providing information to the State Department through this guy, Weiner, who is an old sort of right hand to John Kerry, I think he was a former Clinton administration official, if I’m remembering. And he comes back to the government with Carrie, when Carrie becomes Secretary of State, and it’s through him that Steele starts to bring some of his reporting into the State Department. And the old Russia hands at the State Department say that they took Steele’s information with a grain of salt because they knew that a lot of his clients were Russians and that they felt that they were getting, as Eric put it, I think the Putinesque spin on things and that doesn’t necessarily mean that Steele was intentionally trying to give them the Putinesque spin. He may have just been being fun. I guess we’ll find out. Richard Reinsch: The question here too, I mean, just thinking about the sort of … Our own narrative sort of comes together and sort of hard to believe facts, our people in Washington in these positions you think would be much more skeptical than they were. Also, we’ve got our 28 year old master of foreign policy theorist, George Papadopoulos who ends up going to jail for false statements he gave to prosecutors, but he was really the linchpin for opening this formal investigation on the basis of conversations he had with an Australian diplomat where purportedly he says, “We’ve got emails from Clinton or we’re being told that the Russians are going to release emails and we know about it.” And of course the record is a lot more complicated, this guy was sort of relied upon as a direct connection to the Trump campaign and it’s supposed collusion with Russia. That in of itself is bizarre to me. And you write about that at length in your book. Andrew McCarthy: Well, just to deal first with the opening of the investigation, I think that was a formal paper reality on something that was ongoing for a long time before they actually formally went to paper and opened it. And the George Papadopoulos episode maybe the immediate cause, but it’s not the overall, cause. There’s a lot of reasons why they opened the investigation. And in terms of the political narrative, Papadopoulos became the subject of a lot of emphasis, largely because the Carter Page thread, which initially was in the media’s mind, the big home run of Collusion when the Steele dossier couldn’t be verified and became increasingly discredited, that story became discredited. And as I say in the book, Papadopoulos becomes collusion 2.0 at that point, because the Page thing has collapsed. The Papadopoulos story is just really remarkable. He is a 28 year old kid, who was so green that when the Trump campaign, for whatever reason, signed him on as a foreign policy advisor, and this is during a time when precisely because I think of the pro-Russia and NATO skeptical rhetoric, that sort of stuff that was coming out of Trump’s mouth and out of Trump’s campaign, the GOP, the Republican foreign policy really thumbs its nose at Trump, and nobody wants to be involved in that campaign. So they’re scrambling around for advisors because the media is asking, who’s going to advise you? And they bring in these obscure people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos at that point was still putting on his resume that he had participated in the Model UN, which I had to do some research on, it was a middle school project. But, he hadn’t really much experience, but because he was publicly held out as an adviser, he gets approached by this character called Joseph Mifsud, who I think is probably the most interesting figure in what’s a very interesting narrative. And he’s identified, I think in the last two or three months, former director Comey wrote a op-ed in the Washington Post that flatly said that Mifsud was a Russian agent. And as I show in the book there’s no evidence that he’s a Russian agent and there’s certainly scant evidence that he’s a Russian agent. Richard Reinsch: What do you think he was? Andrew McCarthy: I think he’s probably a British agent. I don’t know that he was an operative, but I think that if he was an operative, there’s a lot better chance that he was a British operative than Russia or any other. But I think it’s somebody who had- Richard Reinsch: Deliberately sent to spy on Papadopoulos? Andrew McCarthy: Well, this is what we don’t know. I mean, the frightening possibility here is that the Brits or that a British American intelligence operation targeted Mifsud at Papadopoulos loaded him up with information, which Papadopoulos then unburdened himself to the Australian ambassador Downer, who also has extensive ties to British intelligence. And then he takes the information and goes to the Obama State Department in the embassy in London. They feed him the information and then they take the information as the pretext for formerly starting the investigation. Now, I should underscore here, we don’t know that that happened. To my mind, as I say in the book, that’s the worst case scenario. But here’s what we do know, which is to my mind, disturbing enough. Mifsud has these Russian contacts. He knows people in the Russian government, but he’s basically an academic. There isn’t good evidence that he has intelligence ties to Russia. And that he’s got any reason to know what goes on in Russian intelligence. That he would have had any reason whatsoever to have known about Russia’s cyber-espionage operation. He has this conversation in London on April 26, 2016 with Papadopoulos in which he allegedly tells Papadopoulos that the Russians have thousands of emails of Hillary Clinton. There’s a couple of interesting things about this. First of all, our only evidence that Mifsud said that is Papadopoulos, who is not reliable. I mean the factual record is that he’s not reliable and he’s pled guilty. What he pled guilty to was misleading the FBI agents in the investigation. He is the only person who says that Mifsud mentioned thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton. I think that’s important to emphasize because it’s something that has not been covered at all that I can detect in the media, and is barely mentioned sort of in passing in Mueller’s report, which is that the FBI actually interviewed Mifsud a week after they interviewed Papadopoulos and Mifsud denied flatly that he said anything to Papadopoulos about emails. He says that he doesn’t know what Papadopoulos was thinking he’s thinking of but he clearly got that wrong. Now, he could be lying, possible. But the interesting thing about it, and this goes to my wondering about his connection to British intelligence. If there’s one thing that we learned during Bob Mueller’s investigation is that he knows how to bring a false statement case against people who lie to the FBI. Mifsud has never been charged. He made these statements to the FBI, and there was never any charge brought against him. Mueller never alleged that what he told the FBI about his conversation with Papadopoulos was untrue and he says it didn’t happen. That’s one thing. Second thing, let’s assume it did happen. The emails of Hillary Clinton that were publicly, notoriously being spoken about at that time were Mrs. Clinton’s emails from her own private server that Donald Trump was talking about all the time, the 33,000 emails that she had destroyed and didn’t turn into the government, that there was a lot of speculation had been hacked by foreign intelligence services and the like. If they were talking about Clinton emails, those are the emails that Papadopoulos said that he understood were being discussed. And the reason this is interesting is a few weeks after, I think it’s about two weeks after the Papadopoulos conversation with Mifsud, this is when Papadopoulos has this meeting with the Australian Ambassador Downer in the club in London where they’re having a couple of drinks and they’re having this conversation and we don’t know exactly what Papadopoulos said to Downer, to the ambassador. But we do know that Papadopoulos says that he didn’t mention emails and Downer does not say that he said emails. There was some indication from Papadopoulos according to Downer that the Russians had some information that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton that Papadopoulos thought for some reason they were going to release. And from that, now remind you, this conversation happened I believe in early May and Downer at the time thinks so little of it, he reports it to … his State Department reports it to the intelligence services and that’s the end of it. Flash forward about two and a half months. And then, Wikileaks puts out the tens of thousands of DNC emails that have been hacked by the Russians. At least that’s the allegation, whether that could be proved is another question. But let’s assume that if the Russians did it, Wikileaks puts this out, Downer sees that these emails have been leaked at the time of the Democratic convention and suddenly says, “Oh, that must have been what Papadopoulos was talking about.” So he tootles down to the American Embassy in London and tells them that he thinks that this conversation that he had with Papadopoulos must have been about these DNC emails that got released. But there’s a lot of reasons to doubt that Papadopoulos was told anything about the emails even by Mifsud. If they did discuss emails, they clearly were not talking about the DNC emails and Papadopoulos himself never mentioned emails to Downer that is completely a deduction, that Downer draws from the fact that there’s a report of these hacked emails in the international press. So the whole thing is built on a deduction by this Australian ambassador, that seems to be a pretty steep departure from what Papadopoulos was actually talking about, if what he was talking about was honest. That’s the basis for your investigation. Richard Reinsch: I mean, it’s amazing, so many personalities, so many facts, so many stories to pursue. You wrote a lot about, I remember reading this, if we move forward to the calling of Mueller to be the special prosecutor by Rod Rosenstein, who is deputy attorney general because Sessions had recused himself on the basis of advice from lawyers in the Justice Department, from handling any aspect of this Russian situation. Rosenstein appoints Mueller to be the special prosecutor. And you wrote that, Mueller himself or that Rosenstein himself had violated Department of Justice regulations in appointing a special prosecutor. He gave Mueller the authority to investigate any links and or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump and any matters that arose or may arise directly the investigation. He tried to cure it by writing a separate memorandum justifying what he did, but that was redacted. And just thinking about all the conversation we’ve had today, the facts, the deductions and logic, things like that. Why do you think, Rosenstein didn’t want to disclose why he called on Mueller to be the special prosecutor, the factual basis he relied upon? Andrew McCarthy: Because I think they relied on the Steele dossier, and the Steele dossier was already thought to be dodgy by that point. It was around that timeframe and thereafter that it was discredited. But we have good reason to think that when … what ends up happening, just to be clear on what the timeline is, in a remarkable bit of testimony in March of 2017 when he was still FBI director James Comey confirms the existence of the counterintelligence investigation and unbelievably identifies the Trump campaign as a subject of the investigation and suggests that at the end there’s going to be an assessment about whether any crimes have been committed. This violates virtually every rule in the book from the Justice Department, the FBI about proper commentary about people who haven’t been charged in about anything about other investigations and so on. But Rosenstein when he appoints Mueller basically adopts Comey’s testimony just described before the House Intelligence Committee. And it does violate the special counsel guidelines because, you’re not supposed to have a special counsel unless you establish both that the justice department has a conflict that’s so profound at can’t investigate in the normal course, and there’s a factual predicate for a criminal investigation, and it’s the crime that is the source of the Justice Department conflict. He didn’t lay out a, a predicate for crime or describe a conflict that the Justice Department supposedly had. What he gave to Mueller was the counterintelligence investigation that Comey had described. And then there was no basis in the special counsel regulations to assign a prosecutor or special counsel, a counterintelligence investigation. In fact, counter intelligence in the government doesn’t get a prosecutor because it’s not prosecutor work. It’s not designed to build criminal cases. So I think Rosenstein recognized that he had a problem, and it could become a bigger problem if Mueller were to proceed to bring any cases at that time, it looked like they were moving forward on Paul Manafort. There could be legal attacks made on the propriety of Mueller’s appointment. So I think in order to try to fix that problem Rosenstein issues this memorandum in the beginning of August of 2017 where he elaborates on the basis for Mueller’s authority to conduct the investigation. And as you say, most of that has been redacted, but we did get to see some of it. And the reason we got to see some of it is they had to disclose some of it in connection with Manafort’s prosecution. And what was disclosed about Manafort was that Mueller was given the authority to prosecute him in connection with his Ukrainian activities. And it also said in connection with the allegation that Manafort colluded in connection with the Trump campaign with the Russians. The only source that we know of for that allegation is the Steele dossier. So I think we can reasonably infer that the parts of the memo, the three or four fifths of the memo that we haven’t gotten to see yet because it’s so heavily redacted rely just as the Manafort part of it did on the Steele dossier as the basis for Mueller’s authority to conduct the investigation. In other words, that’s the factual basis to believe the crimes may have been committed, namely the Trump campaign, complicity in Russia’s cyber-espionage that only comes from Steele. And I suspect that it’s the reason the Justice Department hasn’t wanted to disclose that is it would have cast a lot of doubt, at least politically, if not legally on the propriety of Mueller’s investigation if heavy reliance was placed on the Steele’s dossier for justifying it. My attitude about this has always been if they would take what I regard to be the much more important substantive, dramatic step of relying on the Steele dossier under oath in connection with FISA applications, that is applications to the foreign intelligence surveillance court. To me, that’s a much bigger deal than the basis for an investigation. So there’s no reason in my mind to think that if they relied on the Steele’s dossier in connection with the FISA court, why on earth they wouldn’t rely on it to justify their investigation. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t, although I completely get why they don’t want to tell us. Richard Reinsch:  Do we learn anything from the Mueller report, from the Mueller Investigation about any of this collusion? Is there anything revealed? I mean, when people write about it, it turned into an obstruction investigation largely. And that’s sort of what we discussed after the Mueller report was released to the public. You wrote also about certain Russian companies Mueller indicted in which he made it publicly known that these Russian companies were indicted. One of them, Concord Management, wanted to defend itself in public, and wanted to defend itself in court, I should say. And dared Mueller to prosecute them, to actually bring charges against them in court. Did anything ever happen with that? Andrew McCarthy: They’re in court now. And what’s going on is the Russian defendants are demanding the discovery, and the Mueller Investigation is trying to not give it to them or trying not to give it to them in a way that they can’t disclose it to their principals who are in Russia of course. Just to give a quick background on this, Mueller thought that these indictments were freebie, they were more in the nature of press releases than indictments because everybody knew that Putin is not going to allow any Russians to be extradited to the United States for trial on any of this stuff. So knowing that there was never going to be any trial, they could be very extravagant in their allegations because they’ve never gone to be tested in court. But I think the mistake that he made was to invite three Russian companies, which are really shell companies. In addition to indicting Russian individuals, because unlike an American company, that’s actually a going concern, the Justice Department doesn’t really have a hammer that it can threaten a Russian shell company with, it can’t put it out of business, the kinds of things I can do to an American company. So what ended up happening was, as you point out, one of these Russian companies, Concord showed up in court and said, “We’re here, we’re ready to be tried. We need the discovery. Let’s have it.” And the prosecutors responded with the, I think the formal legal term is hummina hummina hummina because they clearly were not looking to try this case. And so what they have basically been doing for the month since that’ll happened is first trying to say that there was a question whether the Russian business had even appeared in court, even though they were sitting at the other table next to the prosecutors because they hadn’t been formally served. The Justice Department said that they had let the Russians know that they had filed these indictments, but they had never heard back from the Kremlin. Defense lawyers are there at the other tables like, “Well, we’re here.” That wasn’t going to work. And then they started to complain about the discovery. But I think the most interesting thing that’s arisen out of that, which hasn’t gotten enough attention either, is that this company objected. This is in connection with what’s the so called, which is the propaganda operation, the social media accounts that put out all these messages. And what they demanded, what Concord demanded is, “What is your evidence government that the Russian regime, the government, the Kremlin directed this operation because you keep saying it in press statements and you imply it in your indictment, what’s the evidence of it?” And the Justice Department tried to stiff on, and for a long time. The court finally said, “If you have evidence, you have to tell them what it is.” And they had to come back and say, “Well, gee, we don’t really have any evidence of that.” Richard Reinsch: Sort of a lack of seriousness almost within the Mueller team. Andrew McCarthy: Yeah, but this is a big deal. I mean, if they’re making a concession that the Russian government wasn’t actually involved in the social media plot, which is one of the two bases, one of the two bedrocks for the cyber-espionage campaign, the hacking being the other one. What I’ve said all along was I accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia’s probably responsible for this, but I don’t think they could ever have hoped to prove it in court beyond a reasonable doubt, and here we have the first time that anyone’s gotten a chance to call them on it, the government had to come back and say, “Well, gee, it turns out we don’t have evidence to tie this to the Russian regime.” Richard Reinsch:  That’s incredible. Looking at all of this, t was made, not that it was started by it, but it was made worse by, I think, features of the administrative state. Something like, the FISA court, which sort of tries to add a legal patina to executive intelligence gathering, which is something that can never really be justified legally. It’s a decision made by political actors who are accountable constitutionally, both to Congress and other people for their decisions. But the FISA court sort of gives them cover, legal justification for collecting intelligence. And FISA usually approves applications for surveillance 90% of the time. And so you have the Steele Dossier helping to justify surveillance of the Trump administration and indeed spying on the Trump campaign. Also, Special Counsel Mueller, and just the way in which the executive branch investigating itself with a prosecutor who has only light accountability, has a large budget, lot of lawyers that can be turned loose on someone they’re investigating, versus I think the constitutional way, which is congressional investigations being used to investigate and collect information. So Congress has to actually bear the burden, the public burden of investigating a president perhaps for impeachment. It seems to me all of this, what we experienced, I mean, obviously we’re in a period of hyper partisanship, but that’s actually a norm in American history. But it seems to me it’s the way in which we want to sort of squeeze politics into a legal box now that makes us worse. I think that’s an apt description. And I’ve been a FISA critic going back to when I was a prosecutor, when I happened to be in terrorism cases, which were among the few examples that you get FISA evidence actually being used in court. But I think FISA was a bad idea, driven by good intentions. It’s a reaction to the Watergate and the spying scandals of the 60s and 70s. But it’s a bad idea. I often talk about a decision, Justice Jackson wrote in the early 50s about the propriety of courts getting involved in executive branch intelligence collection. And Jackson makes two points, one of which FISA tries to answer years later. And the other, which I think FISA can’t answer. The first is that there’s nothing about being a lawyer or a judge that makes one expert in intelligence matters. It’s simply beyond the judicial function. It’s not a judicial function, it’s an executive function. And it’s a classically political function not in the pejorative sense of politics, in the distribution of power sense. So it’s not appropriate for judges who don’t have the institutional competence to involved in this. FISA tries to answer that by opening in one tribunal all of the different surveillance issues that would come up in intelligence collection with the idea being that the judges will develop expertise from handling all these cases. You can argue about how successful that experiment has been. But I think the other critique of Jackson is one that, FISA has no answer to and it can’t be answered. And that is that the most important decisions a body politic makes are the decisions about its security and those decisions ought to be made by the political representatives who are accountable to people whose lives are at stake and that you don’t want to divert them to the unaccountable branch. I believed he was right then. I believe that’s right now. And what you get with FISA is the judges know that they’re doing really an executive function and they’re tepid about performing it. Do you want to be the judge who … If the people who are responsible for protecting the lives of our citizens come into court and they say that we think al-Qaeda is experimenting with a weapon of mass destruction, that they’re going to explode in a civilian center. Do you want to be the judge to tell them they can’t have their warrant? Of course not. So the pressure is on them to approve. And it gives them a judicial Patina or the sort of gravitas of the court is stamped on the executive activity. We see it in this very investigation where when you call them on what they’ve done with the Steele dossier, which anybody who has had any experience in the Justice Department who looks at these facts and looks at them objectively, says, “What on earth did they think they were doing here?” What their comeback is, is always that four different judges signed off on me. Four Republican judges signed off on this, and I think it’s a fair question to ask. I hope somebody asks this in Congress who’s in a position to do oversight and do something about it. What was the core thinking when they review these warrants? I’ve read a million warrants, I’ve written a million warrants, and when you look at these, I think you have to ask, what were the judges thinking when they signed off on that? In defense of the judges who looked at this, there was a lot of information these warrants hadn’t seen yet. I don’t think there’s a whole lot in the probable cause section, but we need more disclosure before we can make a final assessment on how they perform. But I think it’s worth asking, if the FBI came in and said, “We’re not giving you a reason why you should believe the sources of information, who made the observations, the sights, and sounds, and the rest that we’re asking you to rely on for purposes of probable cause. And instead we’re telling you that the person who accumulated this information is credible.” Which is generally beside the point when you’re going to get a warrant. I think it’s worth asking. What made the judges think that was okay? Richard Reinsch: So I guess the next shoe to drop on this is the internal DOJ report. Andrew McCarthy: Michael Horowitz is the inspector general. Now, Attorney General Barr initially said his report, I think in fact in April or March, Barr said we might get his report by May. We still haven’t gotten it. My understanding, at least what they say in Washington is that more people came forward and there’s been more testimony for Horowitz to consider. But at least some credible sources say his work is substantially done and they were in the final strokes of writing that report, and we may see it within the next three weeks or so. Richard Reinsch: Well, Andy McCarthy, we’ll be looking to you for coverage and analysis. We’ve been talking with the author of Ball of Collusion.