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We warned you last month to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” In a recent study conducted about consumer products, researchers concluded kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants, which you do not want anywhere near your hot food. After the article was published, its author received reports, possibly exaggerated, of people in Burlington, Vermont, throwing their black plastic spatulas out en masse. You should too.

That article was just the appetizer. This episode of Radio Atlantic is the entire meal, coming to you in time for Thanksgiving. We talk to its author, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, about every other plastic thing in your kitchen: cutting boards, nonstick pans, plastic wrap, slow cookers, sippy cups. Read it before you cook. And prepare to hassle your plastic-loving hosts. Politely.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Well, it’s Thanksgiving—the day on the American calendar centered most around food, when we gather together to cook for our families and friends. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about our kitchens and the things in them that we should maybe be worrying about.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, we’re here to ruin your Thanksgiving. A little bit. Just kidding. Mostly.

What I’m talking about is an Atlantic story from a few weeks ago that hit a nerve with people.

The headline of that story was, “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula,” and I’m joined in the studio by the author of that story, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, who writes about science and the environment. Hi, Zoë.

Zoë Schlanger: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: Um, I have a black plastic spatula.

Schlanger: Oh no.

Rosin: I do. I’ve been using it for so many years that I can’t—you know what, Zoë? I have two black plastic spatulas.

Schlanger: Because the first one started melting?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Because the first one just ate into my brain, and I didn’t—

Schlanger: It told you to acquire a second.

Rosin: It told me to acquire a second. Exactly.

So, okay. You said the black plastic utensils are “probably leaching chemicals” into our cooking, and I want to understand why. But I will say that your story opened up a whole bunch of worries besides the spatula that I want to run by you, not just for me, but for a lot of my friends. And I’m sure that happened to you as well.

Schlanger: Oh yes.

Rosin: Yeah. Were a lot of people writing you?

Schlanger: Everyone was texting me. Someone texted me that the entire town of Burlington, Vermont, was throwing their spatulas out the window at the same time.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You know what? I absolutely believe that. That’s an incredible image. Were people texting you like, What about this? And what about that? And what about this other thing?

Schlanger: Absolutely. There’s a lot of discussion about how to tell silicone apart from plastic, whether different color plastic was okay, which, like—spoiler alert—probably not, but black is worse.

Rosin: I feel like what’s going to happen on Thanksgiving—sorry, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. We really do wish you the best and most peaceful Thanksgiving. People are going to be sneaking into—if they’re not the cooks, they’re going to be sneaking into the kitchen of whoever is cooking and, like, monitoring their kitchen utensils and implements just in case.

Schlanger: I love that.

Rosin: Anyway, it’s better than political arguments, so it’s not so bad.

Okay, let’s start with what you wrote about. Why should I throw out my black plastic spatula? Which by the way, I haven’t done. It’s only because you’re here with me in person in the studio.

Schlanger: So I have to convince you?

Rosin: You have to convince me face-to-face because it sounds like other people you know have thrown theirs out, but I haven’t.

Schlanger: So the reason black plastic spatulas are particularly concerning, and I will caveat this by saying you should really throw out any plastic spatula you have of any color, but black plastic has this particularly noxious place in our product stream because it can’t be fully recycled.

Recycling plants just ignore black plastic. They can’t really see the plastic that’s black, because they use optical sensors. So that means, instead of coming from a clean recycling stream, some black plastic products seem to be made out of dubious recycled products, particularly e-waste—electronic waste—often abroad with very little oversight.

And electronics are imbued, often, with flame retardants. So we’re talking about, like, the black plastic housing on your computer monitor or your cell phone or your keyboard. Those can all have flame retardants in them to keep them from catching fire. And flame retardants are associated with a huge range of health hazards, from cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues.

And then they may end up remolded into implements that are touching your food, which they were never meant to be part of. And then you use those implements with heat and oil, which are all things that encourage these compounds in the plastic to migrate out of the object. And then you just eat a lot more of those gross things.

Rosin: Wow. That was a lot. I’m going to slow that down, so I understand. Okay, there are so many facts I learned there. I just want to make sure I learned them correctly. Black plastic is probably recycled from electronics?

Schlanger: Right. Not all of it is. Certainly there could be new, pure black plastic that is not coming from recycled e-waste, but there’s no way to tell.

Rosin: Now, regular plastic in a recycling facility gets rid of these toxins—is that what happens? Like, it can notice them and get rid of them, but in black plastic it just can’t be treated properly?

Schlanger: No, actually. There’s lots of toxins in all recycled plastic, but we’re mostly just talking about flame retardants here. And in the U.S. and in lots of other places, there are laws against or rules against combining electronic waste with the general-consumer recycling flow. So really, these flame retardants are never supposed to get into your consumer products, but they are.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s the black plastic. It can have flame retardants in it. It might come from e-waste. What about gray, white, red—all the other color spatulas? I do have two black ones and one gray one. So what about those?

Schlanger: Why plastic, though? It’s just, it’s—well, first of all, from a purely utilitarian perspective, plastic’s just a terrible thing to use when you’re dealing with a hot pan.

I mean, the thing melts. It’s just not a very durable product. But plastic of all colors probably has stuff in it that you don’t really want interacting with your food. I mean, at the very bottom of this long list is microplastics. If you have a piece of plastic that you’re using regularly in the kitchen, it’s sloughing off microplastics into your food.

Rosin: No matter what? This is nothing to do with heat. It’s just giving off little flakes?

Schlanger: It’s, like, use.

Rosin: Dandruff—just like plastic dandruff is coming off.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) Exactly like dandruff. I mean, one thing I also noticed in people’s kitchens is how common a plastic cutting board is. And that’s just you slicing chunks of plastic into your tomatoes every single time. And I get why people have it. It’s easier to make it sanitary, and they wash quite well. But it’s just not worth it. You can use anything else.

The other problem with most plastics is that there are other molecules in that material—in that base polymer—that are added there to make the plastic flexible or make it really thin, and those things are broadly called “plasticizers.”

They include things you might have heard of, like phthalates, that have also been associated with lots of harmful health outcomes. Basically, there’s no good plastic, particularly not in your kitchen.

Rosin: Okay, so no cutting boards. I’m not going to give you “no good plastics” yet. I have to go through it a little slowly. What about storage containers? Like, I have just a million plastic storage containers.

Schlanger: Can you tell me more about them? Are they hard and sturdy, or are they like what you got your takeout in, like, seven months ago, and you’re still using them?

Rosin: Both? (Laughs.) Both. I have a couple of these very hard ones with the click-in tops, but then those get lost because those are the most used. So they end up in my kid’s backpack, and they end up at school. And so then we just revert to the 3,000 takeout containers that we have sitting around.

I can already see—I already feel bad. Okay. What’s coming?

Schlanger: I mean, I get it. It’s like, there’s so much convenience to this. So typically, my understanding is—one rule of thumb is that harder, sturdier plastic is maybe shedding fewer phthalates than the very flexible ones, but they could be shedding other compounds of concern.

And the thing about containers is that if you’re putting something in that container that is fatty—if it has an oil, an animal fat, anything like that—lipids encourage these compounds to migrate out of the plastic and into the food. These plasticizers I was talking about are lipophilic, meaning they easily transfer when in contact with fats. So we’re often putting our leftovers in these bins, and, almost always, those have some kind of fat. And then it also depends if you’re heating things in that plastic. Heat is something that degrades plastic quite readily.

(Laughs.) I see you smirking and—

Rosin: —I am going to confess something now. This is what I think happens to most of us: We know, and we don’t know. So we sort of know what you said, and then it goes into a short-term memory hole.

So what I know and don’t know is that my son loves leftovers. He loves leftovers. Like, he’ll take it over anything for lunch the next day. Of course he microwaves it. Like, of course he puts it in the takeout container, takes it to school, and then microwaves it. That’s like a perfect storm, right?

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s not the best. It’s great that he is eating leftovers. We don’t like food waste either.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Schlanger: Yeah. Microwaving plastic is one of those ones that I just don’t do anymore.

So heat degrades plastic. Cold—my understanding is that cold actually makes plastic a bit more chemically stable, at least in the short term. But then, I have seen at least one paper that found that the cycle of heating and freezing, if you use the same container to do both many times, will also enhance degradation and also enhance those plasticizers leaching out.

And that was a study that was looking at, actually, farmers. They put these big plastic tarps over their fields to suppress weeds, and those get heated and frozen over and over again. So I assume you could apply that to consumer plastic goods too. It’s all polymers. It’s all the same base material, but that was done in farm fields.

Rosin: Interesting. So is where we’ve landed with plastic, no plastic at all? Or, Use the hardest plastic you can find? Like, what about those very sturdy plastic containers, or are we just going for Pyrex glass?

Schlanger: I have now transitioned entirely to glass in my own kitchen. And I think that that’s more of a risk-tolerance thing. We all do things that will slowly kill us, and it’s sort of choosing which things those are. I mean, we’re bombarded by problematic compounds in every aspect of our life, and you cannot eliminate them all. So if you want to use your sturdy plastic containers to store fat-neutral things, like crackers, that’s probably fine.

Rosin: I think what you’re saying is that I should send my son to school with his leftovers in a glass Pyrex container.

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s heavier, which is a pain, but I’m saying yes, definitely.

Rosin: You’re saying yes.

Schlanger: And I don’t know how old your kids are, but some of these things matter a lot for children, because one of the big concerns about plastic additives getting into our bodies is that they mimic estrogen and can have endocrine-disrupting properties, meaning they mess with your hormone system.

And for a developing hormone system in a child, that’s especially crucial. It’s also crucial for pregnant people or people of childbearing age. So there’s different moments when it’s really critical to avoid this stuff.

Rosin: Okay, so we have to throw out those plastics. We do have to cook, though. We’re back preparing the Thanksgiving meal. What is a substitute for the plastic spatula? What kind of spatulas do you have?

Schlanger: I have silicone spatulas—they’re great—wooden spatulas, and stainless-steel spatulas.

Rosin: Interesting. I just got my first wooden spatula. My friend’s mother, who lives in Norway, gave it to me, and it was made by hand by her neighbor on the farm. And I don’t understand why I’ve never used a wood spatula before. It’s fantastic. Like, it’s so good.

Schlanger: It’s a great material. I think people hate that you can’t really put them in the dishwasher, but you just rinse it off. No big deal.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So silicone. Is silicone always okay? What is silicone?

Schlanger: Silicone, to my understanding, is made out of a number of things, but notably silica, which is essentially sand, which is the same thing that glass is made out of.

So as far as we know now, silicone is inert. It’s considered not reactive with food or with body material, with fat, or anything like that. So I think all signs right now point to silicone being a very good choice. I know that at very high temperatures, I think if you’re baking at above 400 or 500 degrees, silicone can emit a gas of some kind that might be a problem, but if you have to bake in something that isn’t stainless steel or ceramic or cast iron, that’s not the worst thing in the world. I’m pro-silicone for now. I mean, maybe we’ll learn something else later.

[Music]

Rosin: When we return, Zoë and I keep going through the kitchen list, from sippy cups to gas stoves.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So no plastic spatulas. Sort of no plastic storage containers. I asked people on Instagram—I posted your article, and I asked people on Instagram, and I got a lot of questions from people about other things in their kitchen. So can I run them by you?

Schlanger: Please.

Rosin: Okay. No. 1: sippy cups. They’re always labeled as BPA-free plastic. I remember that. Even when I had little kids, everything was BPA-free. Does that make a difference?

Schlanger: In a way, it does. BPA was researched intensively. We know it’s bad, and so everyone’s trying to avoid making things with it. But then what companies went and did was create a bunch of alternatives to BPA, which at least some research finds is not any better than the BPA. The way that chemicals are regulated in this country is: No one has to really prove they’re safe before they go in the market.

And so we have a trickle of information coming out that suggests that the replacements aren’t any better. I would say no to plastic sippy cups.

Rosin: Whoa. Whoa. You said it, though. Okay. Just to be very accurate about this, you said “a trickle of information.”

So there was a kind of panic about BPA. People created replacements for BPA. But we just don’t know yet if they’re better, and the early signs are that they may not be. Is that a fair summary?

Schlanger: Exactly. There was this moment in, like, 2015, 2016 when there was a smattering of studies coming out highlighting the BPA replacements and looking at their potential toxicity and finding that they might just be as endocrine disrupting as BPA was. So the thing with BPA is that it mimics estrogen in the body, which is not something you want to keep adding through your diet.

And it’s associated with all kinds of issues—thyroid issues, fertility issues. And researchers on these few studies I saw back then found that the replacements were as estrogenic or more so.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. I really want to Google, What is a safe sippy cup? But instead, I’m going to ask you. Do you know what a safe sippy cup is?

Schlanger: I was actually talking to this pediatrician about this for a story, and she was talking about how the rest of the world gives their kids things in stainless-steel containers. Like, it’s just, you know—you don’t have plastic plates for kids. You just have stainless-steel ones that they can throw on the floor.

And I know they make stainless-steel ones with, like, the silicone sippy tops and stuff for kids now.

Rosin: It’s interesting. I think we think of stainless steel as something—like metallic. There’s something that we resist about stainless steel, like it’s going to taste different or something. But you’re saying it’s safer.

Schlanger: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. “Oh yeah,” you say. That means it’s definitely safer. (Laughs.)

Okay. Another one that people ask me a lot about—a lot, actually—were the black plastic lids on coffee cups.

Schlanger: This just occurred to me recently. I mean, yeah. Presumably, if it’s black plastic, there is a chance it came from that material stream of recycled e-waste. And the last thing you want is scalding hot, foamy, creamy coffee passing through a little black plastic hole into your mouth. It’s not ideal. So I actually just got coffee right before this and did not take a lid.

Rosin: Yes, this is absolutely true: Someone sent me that request on Instagram—Please ask Zoë about black plastic coffee lids—almost at the instant that the barista in the place that I was put the black plastic coffee lid on top of my coffee, and I had the same reaction you did. I was like: Of course! And just flipped it right off again.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh boy. Okay. So No. 2 on Instagram that people asked a ton about—I bet you can guess: nonstick cookware.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: So many questions about nonstick cookware. Are there different kinds? Do I throw it out the second it has a scratch on it? Like: What do I do about nonstick cookware?

I think there’s a whole bunch of sort of short-term memory-hole feelings about it. Like, Ah, I kind of read this thing. But then, I like my pan, so I forgot about it.

Schlanger: Yeah. So I’d start by saying that the issue with nonstick—Teflon is one brand name for this, but there’s a bunch of them—nonstick pans are coated in a class of chemicals called PFAS. And these are also coating things like our raincoats, our hiking boots. Just anything that is nonstick is basically made out of these compounds that we’ve now found are very bad for our health in high concentrations.

So the people who are really affected by this are the ones living near a plant that made PFAS, and now their water supply has been contaminated for 30 years, or people who live near an Army base where they are using a lot of firefighting foam, which is full of PFAS. But then you zoom in on people using individual products, and it becomes a little hazier.

We do know that the PFAS in your pan becomes unstable at high temperatures. So there’s lots of warnings on these things that you’re not really supposed to use them to cook at, you know, temperatures higher than 400 or 500 degrees.

But who doesn’t accidentally leave their pan on the stove sometimes and scorch it, and then it smells terrible? You’re breathing in fumes from PFAS, most likely. You mentioned scratched coatings. It’s super easy to scratch. Actually, the No. 1 response to the “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula”—when I was like, Just get stainless-steel ones—people were like, But it’ll scratch my nonstick pan. And just, my response to that is: Throw out your nonstick pan.

But we can’t necessarily ask everyone to do that. I get that. It’s so convenient to make an egg in a nonstick pan. I haven’t done it in years, but I hear it’s great.

Rosin: (Laughs.) That was amazing, Zoë. That was a great judge-but-not-judge.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I don’t mean to sound judgy, but honestly, cast iron is just so much better.

Rosin: I’ve recently come to that conclusion. I noticed that my first reach for everything, including an egg these days, is my cast-iron skillet. So I’m like, Why don’t I just get a few more of those and call it a day, you know?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: So you do not use nonstick pans?

Schlanger: So I grew up in a house with a parrot when I was young, and bird owners know that cooking with nonstick pans could result in the death of your bird, so I just grew up not having them around.

Rosin: Why?

Schlanger: I think it’s because the gas volatilizes. PFAS, the nonstick compound, its fumes get in the air, and birds are much more sensitive than humans, like all small animals.

Rosin: This is a literal canary in a coal mine.

Schlanger: Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

Rosin: I feel like that image, more than anything you’re gonna say, is gonna convince people: If they had a bird, that bird would be dead. So these are real.

Schlanger: I mean, yeah. I feel like it’s the kind of thing with, like, dogs and chocolates. Like, they won’t die every time. But there was a chance, so we didn’t have it in the house. But there was never a discussion about it being bad for human health. It was just like, No, you have a pet bird. You can’t have nonstick.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. So no nonstick pans. Another one that came up, and this is specifically related to Thanksgiving: marinating things in plastic. Like, it is something that people do. It’s something that people do on Thanksgiving. Is that a problem?

Schlanger: I wouldn’t do it. My understanding is that—I was thinking about, like, sous vide bags too, you know?

Rosin: Yeah, like brining turkeys or sous vide bags. There’s a whole bunch of ways that meat and plastic have to do with each other.

Schlanger: It would violate my personal rule about, like, putting fatty things next to plastic, because I just know the chemistry of that means it encourages migration of compounds out of the plastic and into your food.

But my understanding is that the bags specifically designed for this are considered food grade and often can be labeled “phthalate-free” now. So there is knowledge about this in the consumer market enough for companies to make things that are less harmful. That’s not to say they’re not potentially problematic.

I mean, the way I think about this is: Everything could affect you negatively a little bit. And we are so bombarded by problematic things in our everyday life getting into our bodies, and you just want to lower your dose. So it’s kind of choosing how to lower your dose.

It’s not that your turkey bag is going to kill you. It’s that you’re just adding a little extra, and you don’t need to.

Rosin: Right. So if you needed to brine something, and you put it in, say, a glass bowl with plastic wrap on it, is it just that—oh God.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, so no to that, just because the plastic wrap would touch it. So in fact, you should just use tinfoil, is what you’re saying.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm. Or you just put a plate over it. Like, you don’t even need all this stuff. You know, plastic wrap’s gone through all these iterations. It used to be made out of much more harmful stuff, and then they eliminated some of it. I just avoid it.

Rosin: Really? You have no plastic wrap?

Schlanger: No.

Rosin: So you’re making a cake. What do you put over it? You just put a cake topper?

Schlanger: A bowl.

Rosin: You put a bowl or a cake topper? Okay. I’m trying to think of any other use I have for plastic wrap, particularly on Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: I wrap—you know, you get cheese, and you have to wrap it in something, so it doesn’t go bad immediately. I have—this is going to make me sound so crunchy—but I have those beeswax wraps. It’s like cloth waxed in beeswax, and that’s what people—people used to just use wax paper for everything. You can just do that.

Rosin: And you can reuse that, so that’s good. Okay.

I’m already imagining some of the people listening to this podcast walking into the kitchen of their parents and friends and causing all kinds of trouble. And this one is real trouble, but I’m going to ask you anyway, because a couple of people asked me about it: natural-gas stove.

So like, hassling your friends or parents about their natural-gas stove would be, like, a really, really low move. But I’m going to ask you anyway. There’s just so much talk about this. It was a big deal, like, a year ago. What about it?

Schlanger: So we know it’s not great to be in a home with a natural-gas stove. We know that it is associated with higher rates of child asthma, just breathing problems in general. You’re inhaling things like benzene. That said, many people have them. I have one. I’m a renter in New York. There’s no way I’m not going to have a gas stove. I can’t ask my landlord to buy a beautiful induction stove for me.

But one thing that makes a big difference is using your overhead vent, just gently turning on your family’s overhead vent while they’re cooking can actually take a lot of the problematic compounds out of the air.

Rosin: Oh really?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: Okay.

Schlanger: It’s not totally a fail-safe. It doesn’t get it all out. It would be nice if we all had induction stoves. But I also get, it does sometimes feel good to cook over fire.

Rosin: Yeah. One day I will make the transition, but I’m so used to seeing the fire. But I understand.

Schlanger: I will say that that is a really elaborate PR job by the natural-gas industry too. Do you remember this? There was this moment when they were, like, hiring Instagram influencers to promote gas stoves and things like that.

Rosin: Because it’s one of those things that seems good and natural but is the exact opposite. Like, it looks like the thing that you should be cooking things on, but in fact, it’s the unnatural option.

Schlanger: Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. So what else are we missing for Thanksgiving that we don’t know about? One just came to me: parchment paper. I bake a lot with parchment paper.

Schlanger: As do I. And I only recently learned that some parchment paper is coated in PFAS. That’s what makes it nonstick. So you actually want to check. And I recently got parchment paper that’s coated in silicone instead and is nice and nonstick because of that, and it doesn’t cost any more.

Rosin: Oh really? You have to look online and see what it’s coated with. Interesting.

Anything else we’ve forgotten about the Thanksgiving dinner? Let’s just do a tour. So you walk into an average kitchen. There are containers with plastic wrap on them. We’ve already covered that. There are things that have been cooked with nonstick pans. We’ve already covered that. There are deadly spatulas. We’ve covered that. (Laughs.)

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Anything else that we are forgetting for a typical Thanksgiving meal that could kill you?

Schlanger: Right. None of this is going to kill you, but I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy a slow cooker and pressure cooker, and I really wanted to get an Instant Pot. And then I went online and looked at their disclosures on the website, and it turns out those can contain PFAS. I was really surprised by that because the basin of an Instant Pot is just a stainless-steel bowl, but my assumption is there’s something in the lid that is in the food-contact surface that is also PFAS.

So just basically, many, many other kitchen appliances are coated in a nonstick layer of PFAS. I also tried to buy a toaster oven, like, for the counter, so I wouldn’t have to turn on my gas oven every single time I wanted to bake something, and a lot of those—the entire interior is just coated in PFAS.

Rosin: Interesting. So how do you figure—so your rule is: Very much limit plastics to almost no plastics, and definitely no PFAS.

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: And how do you know if something has PFAS? Like, I wouldn’t have guessed about an Instant Pot, which I do have, or about a toaster oven, which I don’t have. But I wouldn’t have guessed about either of those.

Schlanger: They put it on their website. If you look in, like, the Materials and Care section of most of these things, it’ll let you know.

Rosin: Okay. So maybe now that we have—would you say, is there any way to say that we haven’t ruined people’s Thanksgivings? Like, no. We’ve made them less stress-free? Possible? Depends when they listen to this?

Schlanger: Well, it’s so important to remember: Stress is also a major health hazard, so I don’t want anyone to get super stressed out about this or blow it out of proportion. You’re not going to die because of any of this, but you are just accumulating things you don’t need in your body.

Rosin: Your kitchen is just slightly less stress for you. Like, you look around your kitchen, and because you’re attuned to microplastics, you just don’t see them everywhere. So in fact, for you, it’s less stress.

Schlanger: Yeah. I walk around all day. There’s so many inputs to my body I can’t control. But at least I can control the ones in my kitchen.

Rosin: Right. Your kitchen is a little sphere of control. I actually really like that idea.

Now, I’m having a Friendsgiving this year, and I am now actually gonna drive to my friend’s house who does most of the cooking and “evacuate” the dangerous utensils from his kitchen.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I hope he thanks you and doesn’t get really pissed off. That could go either way.

Rosin: (Laughs.) As I fling away all his spatulas.

Schlanger: Are you going to bring him replacements?

Rosin: I guess you’re right. If I throw away all his spatulas, before I do that, I have to bring him silicone replacements for sure.

Schlanger: That seems only reasonable. I will say, you know, on other Thanksgivings, my two sides of my family have very different ideas about all this. So there is, like, one home I’d go into where basically everything is, you know, natural products and the other side where everything would be microwaved in plastic.

Rosin: Wow. So how do you handle that situation?

Schlanger: You just mostly have to live and let live. It’s like, also, you know, if I’m their daughter, and they’re not reading my articles, there’s not much I’m going to do, you know?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. I didn’t realize that was your actual parents. That’s funny. Yeah, I suppose the last thing we should do is give advice to people who walk into a kitchen, and everything has been, you know, baked in the microwave in plastic containers.

Schlanger: You just eat that meal, and go back to your own kitchen, and think about your own choices. I mean, okay, this is all to say: You eat in restaurants all the time. Restaurants are using plastic constantly. It’s really just like, you lower your own dose when you can.

Rosin: Yes. I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about policing everybody’s plastics and everything you put in your body. It’s about controlling what you can. And your own tiny or big or however size your kitchen is, that is a sphere you can control, so you might as well do that. And that’s a lovely thing. And everything outside of that, don’t worry about it.

Schlanger: I think so. I think that’s the moral here.

Rosin: Okay. Excellent. Thank you, Zoë.

Schlanger: Thank you.

Rosin: Happy Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: Happy Thanksgiving.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the turkey. Enjoy the mashed potatoes. Enjoy the stuffing. And enjoy all the plastic you’re eating.

When Mean Girls, the musical remake of the 2004 film, hit theaters in January, the film appeared to shock audiences for, well, being a musical. Theatergoers recorded the moment that their fellow viewers realized what kind of movie it was; in one video, the crowd groans loudly as soon as a character starts singing, before laughing at their own reactions. But the studio behind the remake wasn’t surprised by these responses. “We didn’t want to run out and say it’s a musical,” Marc Weinstock, Paramount’s president of global marketing and distribution, told Variety of how Mean Girls was advertised, “because people tend to treat musicals differently.”

They certainly haven’t always gone to see them in theaters over the past five years. In part, cinema closures during the coronavirus pandemic’s various waves contributed to weak box-office returns across the board, regardless of quality or classification. Even the Best Picture–nominated, Steven Spielberg–directed remake of West Side Story failed to turn a profit. But on top of low ticket sales, the backlash to and mockery of poorly made entries such as Cats and Dear Evan Hansen—adaptations that once seemed poised to become surefire hits, given their popularity on Broadway—seem to have left studios anxious about the genre’s viability. At least, the way that studios are marketing these movies lately appears to indicate nerves: Promotional campaigns have been disguising the films’ true identity, relying instead on what else might make them recognizable, especially when they’re part of an existing franchise. Mean Girls’ title graphic features a tiny eighth note inside the a as the lone hint at the remake’s Broadway origins. The first trailer for Wonka, the backstory of the Roald Dahl character, didn’t show anyone singing a single word. The Color Purple billed itself as a “bold new take,” without clarifying what that take would be. (The film immediately answered the question by opening with a duet.)

But Wicked, which opened this past weekend, has worn its genre on its sparkly sleeve. The film’s trailers have featured its renditions of the beloved Broadway production’s ever-popular songs, and its seemingly endless promotional barrage over the past months—have its stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande ever not worn green and pink, respectively?—has included lyric videos featuring performances from the film. As it turns out, Universal’s unabashed embrace of Wicked captured the film’s ethos: This is a full-throated movie musical, balancing the crowd-pleasing appeal of extravagant sing-alongs with quieter, more private character moments. And it didn’t have to fool audiences into seeing it: Last weekend, the film topped the box office, raking in $114 million domestically and $164 million worldwide—the highest-grossing debut for a movie adaptation of a Broadway production in history.

[Read: The fairy tale we’ve been retelling for 125 years]

Wicked’s stage show is based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, which reimagines L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz through the eyes of the Wicked Witch of the West. In Maguire’s telling, she was once the young outcast Elphaba, who developed an unusual relationship with the bubbly blonde Galinda (future Glinda the Good Witch) before becoming Baum’s notorious antagonist. Both the book and the Broadway version ultimately span years of plot machinations, but the Wicked film has chopped the story in half to handle its heft; Part 2 is set to arrive in theaters next year. The movie also streamlines the show’s first act—into a straightforward coming-of-age tale of two women who build a deep bond—which ensures that the film still feels complete.

The resulting adaptation satisfyingly combines the grandiosity of a musical and the intimacy of filmmaking. Big sequences make clear just how different the women are: Introverted and withdrawn, Elphaba (Erivo, marvelous) conveys her innermost thoughts through towering ballads; extroverted and self-obsessed, Galinda (Grande, hilarious and spectacular—sorry, lar) expresses her overdramatic tendencies through vivacious numbers. The camera, meanwhile, carefully reveals how Elphaba and Galinda’s connection evolves, showing that Galinda’s forced smiles eventually reflect true kindness and that Elphaba is often holding back tears while trying to put on a confident front. A lingering shot of them meeting each other’s gaze in a mirror carries as much power as one of their stirring harmonies.

The director, Jon M. Chu, who previously made the gorgeous but underseen In the Heights, also knows how to take advantage of a film’s wide canvas. Oz may be a familiar backdrop, but Chu borrows from a diverse array of musicals to conceive the world of munchkins and talking animals. During “The Wizard and I,” Elphaba twirls atop a cliff like Maria in The Sound of Music. The camera tilts and whips around during “Dancing Through Life” to track the performers’ Busby Berkeley–like choreography across a rotating set. And the surreal, underwater Ozdust Ballroom, where Elphaba and Galinda dance a duet, looks like it’s built to host dream ballets. At times, the maximalism threatens to overwhelm the film, but excess makes sense for this fantasy realm, even if the visuals can’t quite compare to The Wizard of Oz’s stunning explosion of Technicolor.

[Read: Hollywood’s new crown prince of musicals]

Maybe that sense of escapism is why, even at a lengthy run time of 160 minutes, Wicked has become both the buzziest adaptation of a Broadway show in years and a bona fide hit with critics and crowds. Unlike other movie musicals, which tend to tweak the original soundtrack or apply a “realistic” sheen to a genre built upon sensationalism, the film celebrates its medium rather than straining to justify its use. Making the sequel just as successful will be the bigger challenge: As those familiar with the stage version know, Wicked’s second act covers a much more convoluted plot that not only retells The Wizard of Oz but also wades more deeply into political allegory. (Oz’s denizens worship a con artist who calls himself the Wizard.) And with this installment’s hyper-focus on Elphaba and Galinda’s sisterhood, it leaves plenty of subplots, revolving around a large cast of supporting characters, unresolved. Even the overarching theme of Wicked itself has only barely been introduced. “Where does wickedness come from?” a character asks early on. This first film doesn’t offer a response.

In place of an answer, however, is a testament to the true power of a movie musical—perhaps best encapsulated by the film’s rendition of the Act I closer, “Defying Gravity.” The song became Wicked’s signature anthem quickly after its Broadway debut; its message about embracing individuality and its culmination in Elphaba taking flight for the first time have carried musical-theater fans to emotional highs. Here, it’s the film’s finale before its year-long intermission, and it’s just as magnificently rendered, buoyed by Erivo’s tremendous vocals. But unlike the stage version, this one also includes close-ups of Elphaba picturing her younger self in a reflection right before she figures out how to soar. The shot captures how far Elphaba has come: She yearned for so long to be seen for who she is, but she couldn’t get there until she saw herself. It’s a moment so small yet so sentimental, demonstrating why the movie-musical genre should endure. On a big screen, a character such as Elphaba is no longer just belting before an enthralled audience, playing to the back row. Now she gets to let everyone into her mind.

Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. The first episode in this collection is from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life. The Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans talks with host Arthur Brooks about how to think differently about the time you crave and the time you actually have.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber. I’m one of the co-hosts from How to Know What’s Real. This new season of the How To series is a special one. We’ve assembled some of our favorite episodes from past seasons: a best-of collection around the themes of slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives—things I know I can use some reminders about. Each week over the next six weeks, we’ll be sharing an episode from our archives. And here’s the first. It’s from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life, and it’s called “How to Spend Time on What You Value.” Take a listen as host Arthur Brooks and producer Becca Rashid explore what might be holding people back from finding and taking advantage of the free time we all seem to crave.

[Music]

Rebecca Rashid: Okay, Arthur, I have a question for you.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah?

Rashid: If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it?

[Music]

Brooks: How would I use it or how should I use it, Becca?

Listener Submission 1: If I had an extra hour a day, I would spend it sitting somewhere in nature.

Listener Submission 2: Wow. I’d find time to FaceTime my mother.

Listener Submission 3: If I had one extra hour every day, I would spend it walking around my city aimlessly.

Listener Submission 4: For me, sometimes my commute requires me to leave when it’s dark and then to get home when it’s dark. But if I had an extra hour, it would be beautiful to walk down, you know, a light-, sunlit-drenched paths with my wife.

[Music]

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: How would you use it first? And then I’ll ask you how you should use it.

Brooks: I’d use it to work.

Rashid: Oh, no.

Brooks: I would work more. Yeah. For sure. And look, it’s not that bad. I love my work. I’m crazy about my work. I dream about my work.

Rashid: Hm.

Brooks: It’s great. I, I—look, I’m working right now. Can you believe it?

Rashid: Right. [Laughs.]

Brooks: It’s the best thing ever.

Rashid: That’s true.

Brooks: But it doesn’t mean that endless hours of work are going to give me what I need, because it’s a well-established fact to any listener of How to Build a Happy Life that I’m kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that, or whatever the pathology tends to be thinking back to the episode of Anna Lembke. What should I do with the hour? I should use it in communion to build love in my life. I should use it to pray, to read scripture, to spend time with my wife because now we live alone—now that we’re empty nesters—to talk to one of my kids, to call one of my dear friends on the phone. That’s what I should do with it. And, you know, maybe I would, actually. You know, come to think of it, when we’re done here, I’m gonna call a friend instead of going back to work.

Rashid: The “how you would use time” and “should use time” is the big struggle, right? I think, especially since the start of the pandemic, our relationship with time has changed so drastically. There is either too much time that you don’t use wisely or you feel crunched for time in a way that all the things you would want to do are no longer an option. There’s no right answer, but I’m curious, are you applying yourself in a way that’s useful in every waking moment?

Brooks: When you have a time problem, like the coronavirus pandemic gave us all, where we became incredibly unstructured, we could use our time much, much more according to our own desires than we were ever able to before. It sounds great, but it turns out that it separates people more or less into two groups. You can call them the strivers and the fritterers, and again, you can’t necessarily tell them apart in the workplace when there’s things that you have to get done and there’s an exoskeleton that’s called your workday in the office. You got to get your work done. And so you’re a responsible professional and you do it. You don’t just, like, waste all your time and not go to the meetings and people are waiting for you. You do those things, but when your time is yours, you figure out which is your vice. Now the world pats you on the back when you’re a striver. Congratulations. It’s unbelievable. So it’s a problem when relieved of the exoskeleton of the traditional workplace, your work sprawls across your entire schedule. That’s my problem. The fritterers are a little bit different when you’ve got that extra hour. It’s just too hard to get to the thing when you just have to get your work done. So a lot of people have found that they fall behind. They get a lot less done. They doomscroll a lot …

Rashid: Right.

Brooks: And if you waste it, woe be unto you because that’s the perfect pattern for actually frittering away the day.

Rashid: Mm.

[Music]

Brooks: Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time. Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we’ll use it wisely, whatever that means, but it doesn’t work that way. The reality is that many of us don’t really know how to use our time at all. How can we bridge the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? Let’s dig into the research on why people like me overschedule themselves and become too disciplined, while others feel like the days, months, and years are kind of slipping away.

Ashley Whillans: I think everyone should go to therapy.

Brooks: I don’t want to! I’m not a Millennial.

Whillans: I am. [Laughs.]

Whillans: My name is Ashley Whillans, and I’m an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on time, money, and happiness.

Brooks: Ashley Whillans is a colleague of mine at the Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.

Whillans: You know, a lot of research is “me-search,” and we study the things that we struggle with. And as a happiness researcher, I was doing all of this academic research when I started my job five years ago on the importance of prioritizing time for happiness, for personal relationships. Meanwhile, my relationship was totally falling apart.

Brooks: Ashley studies one side of the time problem, the one that busy strivers face—those who try to make the most out of every waking moment. And you know who you are. She’s a fellow happiness researcher whose work covers time poverty, a term she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ashley walked us through her concept of time traps: the traps that motivate us to spend almost all of our time on work and productivity. So I want to figure out what explains this. And what to do about it.

Whillans: So I had this partner of 10 years. We were going to move to Boston, start a new life together from Vancouver. And this person left me in Boston after three weeks because they said that I was spending all my time in work and that there was no relationship to be there for. And meanwhile, I was giving talks all over the country on the importance of valuing time. I was, inside, crying about this, like, dissolution of my most important relationship up to that point in my life, and then preaching about the importance of putting time first. Eighty percent of working adults report feeling “time-poor,” like they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. This affects our relationships, our physical health, our ability to feel like we’re making progress on personally important goals.

These are the time traps that can make us time-poor. One of them is this busyness as a status symbol, this cult of busyness that’s pervasive in the United States in particular, where if we feel like we have any time in our calendar, we feel like a failure. We feel lazy. When we see our colleagues having a lot of things in their calendar, we confer to those people high status. Wow. If they never have a spare moment, they must be really important and valuable to society.

My data suggests that the most time-poor among us are, in fact, those who are struggling to make ends meet. I’ve done research in Kenya, in India, in the U. S. among single-parent households. And we do see that individuals in those groups who make less money are more time-poor because the system is working against their time affluence. They live further away from their places of employment. They have shift schedules that are constantly changing. They have less reliable access to transportation and child care. So this is a whole other conversation, a whole line of work where I’m trying to move the policy conversation on not only thinking about reducing financial constraints, but also thinking about reducing time constraints to help those with less thrive as well.

Brooks: And it’s interesting, you know, here in the United States, you go to a party, you meet somebody and the icebreaker is, “What do you do?,” which means What do you do for a living? What do you do to spend your time? And it’s like, “Yeah, I’m a CEO; I work 80-hour weeks.” People think you’re a big shot. In Spain, the icebreaker question is “Where are you going on vacation?” It would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe irrelevant to say, “How do you make your money?” Right? And yet, you’re suggesting that this is really not about money. It’s really about time. It’s really about the fact that we’re so busy, which is a way to show ourselves and others that we’re highly in demand. And so the root of this problem philosophically is—well, it is philosophical, isn’t it? Because it’s the philosophy of how we value ourselves, right? Isn’t that at the root of what we’re talking about here?

Whillans: Yeah. This doesn’t happen in European countries like Italy, where actually it’s the opposite. People who have more vacations seem to be doing something right in life. I’ve talked to so many colleagues about my findings, and they say things like, “Well, I thought, you know, when my kids moved out and went to college that I would finally get around to doing those hobbies that I always had wanted to do. And instead I just filled those additional hours with work. And I don’t know why.”

And then we would have these conversations about how productivity has become our habit, and we don’t even know how to enjoy our free time. We’ve lost this habit. And they asked me, “How do I start to pursue a passion? So that I don’t fill every spare moment I have with work, because that’s all I’ve been doing.” And it is like we have to almost retrain ourselves to have leisure as a habit so that our defaults are not work emails, work meetings, but instead our defaults are family, friends, exercise, active leisure activities. And we really, especially in North American culture, need to be pushing against work as our default mode of operating.

Brooks: For happiness reasons, is what you’re talking about.

Whillans: For happiness.

Brooks: Yeah, for happiness reasons. Let me get back to this really interesting question of you. So you were thinking about time and then you experienced the bitter fruit of not having enough time for your personal relationship. So, you know, no doubt it was more complicated than that. But did you make any life changes pursuant to that really terrible experience?

Whillans: Yeah, but I think my life changes don’t sound that dramatic. I’m just trying to adjust a little bit around the margins to make sure I have time for things that matter to me outside of productivity. So I don’t work on the weekends very much anymore. I have a kid who’s one year old. I have a husband that I love. I also don’t work for the first hour in the morning. I will use that time to invest in myself, read, meditate, go for a walk, exercise. That first hour is mine, not my employer’s. And as a function of those two rules, I have to be a lot more careful about what I say yes and no to. But I’ve tried to almost have a quota strategy. I’m not hard-and-fast about this, but I will work on one paper at a time where I’m really working on it every day, not 15 papers that I’m sort of working on, kind of all the time. So I think the experience of being at the lowest point in my life and trying to put some of these strategies into practice are about small things that I do every day that are nonnegotiable for my happiness.

Brooks: You’re clearly putting your work within boundaries, and this is a key point that you’re making, is that work is within boundaries because you’re setting up your budget and you’re living within your budget. Treat [time] like a scarce resource the way that you would if you were on a fixed income, because you’re really on a fixed income of time. So has it hurt your work or has it made your work better and made you more efficient? Is there a cost?

Whillans: So one thing that I learned early on—and there’s research to substantiate this—is that it is better to compare yourself to yourself, as opposed to compare yourself to others. So for me, I think something I did was really heavily guard my attentional resources as well. What am I going to pay attention to in terms of other people’s successes? Because in my field, there’s “no good enough.” Nothing you’re going to do is going to feel like enough, is going to be enough, is going to guarantee success and awards and accolades. In terms of net productivity, yes, I do get less done now. Absolutely. Especially since having a kid. No question, I am not as fast.

But I also don’t hold myself to those same standards as when I was working all the time, and I think that’s really key for my own feeling of satisfaction. My ideal self looks different now—there’s research on this too—my ideal self used to look like working all the time, being on a plane every week, and publishing as much as humanly possible. That was my ideal self, and my actual time use looked pretty close to that. And then I realized that might be good on one dimension of my life, productivity, and really hurt other dimensions of my life: well-being, social relationships that I know as a happiness researcher matter a lot for happiness.

So I changed my ideal. My ideal now looks like publishing a couple of impactful papers on projects I care about that I think are going to matter. Not traveling very much and making sure I have time to spend with my friends and family and investing in myself every day. So I also had to change the aspirational goal. I had to change what my ideal self looked like so that my time use now is matching a different ideal than what my ideal was before.

[Music]

Brooks: For my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was doing what you were doing five years ago at the beginning of your career, but never stopped. And she’s confessing to me that she’s got a cordial relationship at best with her husband. She doesn’t know her adult kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn’t been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore, that her young colleagues don’t trust her decision making, because it’s not as crisp as it once was.

She’s like, “What do I do?” And I said, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You need to use your time differently, you know, than you are!” And I said, “Why don’t you do what you know you need to do?” And she kind of stops and says, “I guess I prefer to be special than happy.” How much of that is going around?

Whillans: At least she admitted it. I feel like something that’s very difficult is that to have this realization, right? You have to understand what you care about and want, like truly, what you value. Maybe for this woman that you talked to, she did truly value being the richest and having this productive life more than she valued gaining or improving in these other areas of life. And she seems like she’s actually somewhat self-aware about that, right?

My economist colleagues say: “Write down a model, Ashley. Write down a model of exactly how I should spend my time to be happy.” I say, “I can’t do that because I don’t know what you value.” So for us to be spending time in the so-called right ways, we have to know what we truly value. So we have to do that self-awareness, reflective component first. And then once we know what we truly value, research suggests that the more that our lives on a regular basis look like our ideal. So what your last seven days looked like in a time diary, and how close that is to your ideal time use, minimizing that discrepancy is hugely important for life satisfaction and for the amount, on average, of positive mood you experience on a regular basis.

Brooks: You know, for a lot of people—they might say they wish they had more free time and they could relax more and spend more time with their families, but they don’t actually know how to do that. Using your time in leisure is a very special thing. It’s, you know, you look at it philosophically: Aristotle made a big comparison, or made a big distinction, between work, recreation, and leisure. Now, work is productive activity. We all know what that is. Recreation is a break from work to make you ready to go back to work. Leisure is, in and of itself, something worth pursuing. Now, Josef Pieper, the great 20th-century philosopher said that leisure is the basis of culture. I mean, these are people who elevated leisure, and yet, you got to know how to do it.

Whillans: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s something that we do have to build a habit around, and that’s where trying to change 10, 15 minutes, 30 minutes seems a lot more possible and achievable. Going back to behavioral-science literature, you want to be thinking about setting a concrete goal. And part of the reason, in my research, we often trade money for time—so we’ll go after money instead of going after time, because money is concrete. We know the value of $1,000, and we know how to count or track three hours, five hours, 10 hours, and turn that into productivity in our minds. What does it mean to have more free time? That is an abstract concept.

What does having more leisure time even mean or look like? So when we’re trying to actively set ourselves up for success in these domains that are more abstract, like spending time with friends and family, we need to concretely write down what that means.

We like to maximize measured mediums. This is work by Chris Hsee at the University of Chicago. We go after the things that we can count and track. That is the way our brains are wired. So we do that for work, why can’t we do that for our leisure time, too? Setting a goal of one hour of exercise.

Active leisure is particularly good for positive mood. Active leisure is things like exercising, socializing, volunteering 15 to 30 minutes—mapping out what 30 minutes more of social-connection time looks like for you and being very specific about it and putting it in your calendar. We need to be a little bit careful with that suggestion, because as soon as we start counting our leisure, we enjoy it less.

Brooks: And now at the same time, of course, I mean, exactly the contrary: You can overschedule your leisure in such a way that it becomes a task. I was a CEO before, and it was just, it was a grind, man. I mean, it was. I missed a lot of my kids’ childhood. I just did. But at the same time, I made a commitment. So I get up in the morning. I exercise every morning for an hour. I go to Catholic Mass every morning with my wife, and I do travel most weeks. I travel about, you know— I make about 50 weekly trips a year and that’s a lot, but I’m never traveling on the weekends. I probably missed three weekends a year, and I don’t work at night. And part of the reason is because I learned all these things that you learned at 32—I learned at 55.

And so, you know, woe be on to me. Nonetheless, my quality of life has dramatically increased for exactly putting those boundaries in place. Now, when I schedule my leisure too rigidly, I find that I start to get stressed out when things start to impinge on it, which is one of your points as well. You got to stay flexible on these things. Part of the benefit that you’re getting cognitively and psychologically is more flexibility in your life and less rigidness in your life, right?

Whillans: Yeah. I love the research that shows that if you schedule too many leisure activities in a day, it literally feels like work and it sucks you out of the present and then you worry if you have enough time to drive across town and meet your friend for brunch after you’ve had coffee with another friend or family member. And so you want to actually—exactly—capitalize on this idea of building in flexibility. So if we start to be too rigid with our personal goals, that makes them feel like work, and basically what my research shows is that when you’re in the experience of doing something, you have some free time, you want to do activities that you say are intrinsically motivating, that you feel like you’re doing because you enjoy it. That’s how you’re going to capitalize on leisure.

It doesn’t matter as much what the activity is. And there are some leisure activities which generally are better for well-being—like exercise, socializing, volunteering, tend to be better, on average, than things like passive leisure activities, like watching TV, resting, relaxing, which aren’t as enjoyable or don’t produce the same gains in mood. But it also matters how you feel about that activity. So really what matters is whether you feel like you’re doing the leisure experience because you want to, or you feel like you’re doing it for some other reason. So these people who are walking around, convincing themselves to go to church because it’s good for their productivity are not going to enjoy the experience of church to the same extent as someone who’s going because they truly enjoy it.

Brooks: How about, you know, we’ve touched on this a little bit, these semi-leisure activities. You know, there’s leisure and then there’s leisure. Remember, Aristotle says there’s work, there’s recreation, and there’s leisure. And recreation is to get you ready to work. And so, yeah, restorative to what? Restorative to life? No. Restorative to go back to work. And a lot of people will say, “Why do you work out so much?” They say, “You know, it’s just great for my work.” But what about people who are using work as a pretext for leisure? Are they sucking the life and happiness out of their leisure by turning it into just recreation?

Whillans: When you’re in the moment of a leisure experience, you will enjoy it less if you think you’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. And extrinsic motivation is, definitionally: You’re doing something because someone else told you, or you’re doing it for an external reason, like you think you should because it will be good for your productivity; you think you should because your mom wants you to—

Brooks: Are you going to make money? Are you going to get more fame? Are you going to get more power? Or whatever down the line. And a lot of the studies will assume that spending time with your family is intrinsic and going to work for money is extrinsic, but that might be exactly the opposite. Is there a difference in time scarcity and busyness and status between people my age and people, let’s say, in their early 20s today?

Whillans: My data suggests that we get better with time as we age. So this is also consistent with Laura Carstensen’s work on socioemotional selectivity theory. We start to gravitate toward things that are meaningful as we get older and we’re less likely to seek out, do this novelty-seeking exercise. And so in my data, reliably, people who are older tend to be more likely to value time over money and happier as a result. And part of what’s driving that isn’t simply the realization of what matters to us. It’s also that we’re typically more financially secure. So there is this very real component in my data whereby financial insecurity, not feeling optimistic about our financial futures, drives this need to fill every single moment with productivity. And that is more common among younger people with school debt trying to move up the career ladder.

And research suggests that we undervalue our future time. So this can also make it difficult for us to choose time in the future when we’re planning our schedules. We know that the value of $500 is going to be as good as—well, okay, we might have to inflation adjust these days, but okay—the basic idea is that the value of $500 now is going to be the same now, three months, six months, a year from now, that’s how we think about money. We just know it’s going to have value across time. That’s pretty invariant. Now, when it comes to time, we’re like, Time right now really matters. I’m so busy, overwhelmed, a million things to do. Time in three months? Nah, I don’t really need more time then. Look at my calendar; it looks free compared to now. Six months, even freer. So the extent to which we value or give our lives meaning through work directly is correlated with how time-poor we feel and the extent to which we fill our calendars as a way to give our lives meaning.

Brooks: Now say something to our listeners here who might be saying, “I don’t know what I intrinsically enjoy. I can’t think of anything intrinsically enjoyable to me, because I’ve been so extrinsically motivated for so long. I’m a Homo economicus. I’m just, I’m a machine.” What do you tell that person on the voyage of discovery? It sounds like you had to go through this, Ashley.

Whillans: Yeah. do a time audit. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What things did you do across the day, and how did you feel while you were engaging those activities? And then look at which activities brought you the most positive mood. You could also do this through gratitude—so there’s research on this showing that people who take time to reflect on what they’re grateful for tend to be more self-aware.

So at the end of every day, just think of a few things that made you feel grateful. And in that day, maybe that was a quick conversation with the neighbor. Maybe that was, in my case, hanging out with my kid and thinking That was pretty great. Maybe it was listening to a really interesting podcast on a topic you hadn’t heard before. And then you’ll be like, Oh, it seems that I must enjoy those things. I should probably try to do more of them.

It seems simple, but honestly, it wasn’t really until I started to create some separation in my life such that I wasn’t just getting up every single day working and then trying to decompress at the end of the day by drinking. Because let’s be real. That’s what happens. There was no space in that schedule that I used to have of “work, work, work, drink, go to bed, work, work, work, work, drink, go to bed” to even have a thought about What in that day did I enjoy? Because I wasn’t even taking a second to pause, reflect, and think about what was bringing me joy and satisfaction on any one particular day. And this is also good for work, right? Because it’s going to give you a sense of the things at work that you love and enjoy. And maybe you should try to do more of those and less of all the other stuff.

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Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who helped make this show what it is. We asked how you would spend one extra hour per day doing something intrinsically rewarding. And here’s what you said.

Listener: If I had an extra hour each day, I would go home to my studio apartment, I would close the door, put on the little bolt lock to make sure I’m safe, and then I would just sit in that silence. And do absolutely nothing. But I think just that within life, there are all these things you need to do just to survive and maintain some level of relative sanity—like eat, which means you have to cook food; and sleeping; and connecting with people, which means driving your car to see friends; and calling your parents; and doing all these things that, um, I guess we tell ourselves we want to do it because we have to, and in a way it creates happiness, whatever that is. But I feel like all of that keeps us from actually sitting in the moment and thinking, like, What is happening? Why are we here?

Brooks: If you look back in the old days before we were so unbelievably distracted by tech, we were doing something in those days too. You know, when I rode the subway in the 1980s in New York City, I always had something to do with me. I wasn’t just, I’m going to go on the subway and stand there doing nothing. I had a book. I had a newspaper. I was, you know, whatever—I was listening to my, to my Walkman. Remember those?

Rashid: Yes.

Brooks: And I have to say, I get the sentiment of the caller, which is, Here’s what I would do if I had an extra hour. Well, guess what? You have 10 minutes where you could do that and you probably aren’t. And that’s the difference between would and should. Would and should are very different when it comes to our time. So the question is, what’s the disconnect between what we feel like we should do and what we probably would do with that extra hour and that has everything to do with our expectations for ourselves. And this is one of the reasons that meditation is really hard for people who are beginning practitioners, people who are sitting in meditation and the only direction that they get is “think of nothing.” You know, “Empty your mind.” Well, you know, it’s hard to do.

Rashid: Why is it so hard?

Brooks: Because we’re not made for it. Humans are not wired to do nothing. My colleague and friend Marty Seligman, who teaches, who’s one of the pioneers in the science of happiness field. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens; we should call ourselves Homo prospectus because our state of nature is for our brain to engage in all of this incredibly complex stuff about how to build a better future. “What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to do for a living next year? What am I going to say to my spouse?” And that occupies us so very, very much that even when we’re trying to do nothing, we’re not doing nothing.

Ashley Whillans told us about how to use our time in a smart way. That means scheduling these things that are ordinarily unscheduled. How funny we go through life and say, I’m going to treat my happiness as a nice-to-have. And if I have a little bit of extra time, I’ll think a little bit about it. No, no. [Laughs.] This is serious business. Put it in your schedule. Put it in your schedule. Absolutely. Every single day. Learn how the science works, and then take the serious time that it takes. Be time smart, as Ashley Whillans calls it, and take the time to do that work, because the payoff will be potentially greater than the payoff for anything else you could do in that time.

[Music]

Rashid: That’s all for this week’s episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A. C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson.

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Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to Season 3, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Next up in our special best-of collection about how to slow down, we’ll look at what it means to really rest.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: There is a very long history across pretty much all cultures and religious traditions about things like the spiritual value of rest, right? The idea that there are connections that we can make or things we can understand about ourselves, our place in the world, the nature of our lives that only come when we’re resting or, you know, when we’re still.

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The question of whether to have kids sits at the awkward intersection of intensely personal decisions and important policy issues. That dynamic can lead to societal confusion. Policy makers and researchers debate how economic policies can stop birth rates from declining, while individual people ask themselves how they want to live their life and whether that includes children.

To express overt concern about why women are having fewer children can imply that the good life requires childbearing and rearing. As a result, those left of center—especially those who value pluralism—have largely opted out of debates about the merits of parenthood. After all, a fulfilling and valuable life can include children, but it doesn’t have to.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Anastasia Berg, a philosopher and co-author of the recent book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Berg wants to rid the left of any discomfort it might have with engaging in conversations about, well, what children are for.

“If we look at the kind of things that leftists are committed to, be it climate change or significant social and political reform—if it’s education, if it’s welfare—these are the kind of things that presuppose the possibility of a human future,” Berg argues. “And what we hope to do in part, at least, is to liberate people who identify themselves politically in that way to also just have the courage to embrace the role of children in human life without thinking that … immediately commits them to a conservative, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-equality stance.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2023, nearly half of childless adults under 50 didn’t want kids. That was a 10-point jump from five years earlier, according to Pew Research Center. In that time, the public conversation about having kids has felt dominated by conservative voices—whether it’s Elon Musk, who has at least 12 children with three different partners and called the birth decline “one of the biggest risks to civilization,” or J. D. Vance, who seems to have a particular disdain for the childless.

J. D. Vance: We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

Demsas: As a result, I’ve seen many on the left begin to disengage from caring about this issue at all.

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My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

This is a very different conversation than our usual episodes. My guest is Anastasia Berg, philosopher and co-author of the new book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Anastasia isn’t focused on investigating the economic or other structural factors for why people are increasingly opting out of parenthood.

Anastasia rejects the focus on the causes of declining birth rates. She even rejects the idea that she particularly cares what the birth rate is. She instead heads down to the level of the individual. How are individual people understanding, explaining, and avoiding the conversation about child-rearing? And why should the left view itself as part of the project of caring about this at all?

I hope this episode gives you a different way to engage if you’re visiting with any pushy relatives this week.

[Music]

Anastasia, welcome to the show.

Berg: Thank you so much for having me.

Demsas: So your book is kind of provocatively titled What Are Children For? I want to start with why you wrote this book. And who is it for?

Berg: So the book came out of conversations that my co-author and best friend and I, Rachel Wiseman, were having in our late 20s and early 30s, respectively, and we were both dealing with the personal ramifications of this question, wondering what shape our own lives are going to take and also struck by a certain kind of shallowness or dissatisfying qualities of the way we saw the public conversation about the role of children in human life was happening at the time.

And so we started off with a short article called “On Choosing Life” that really focused, in particular, on kind of the satisfactions we had with a discourse around climate change and how climate change is giving us reasons not to have kids. And then we just saw the public response to it, the enthusiasm for a kind of investigation that was both sort of stylish and interesting and provocative and thoughtful, but also one that wasn’t sneering. And that, combined with the sense that we ourselves just started to scratch the surface of the sources of ambivalence and what kind of ethical and philosophical resources we might have to address that ambivalence to help people work through it—that kind of combination seemed like a good ground to write a book.

Demsas: So the focus on birth rates or why people aren’t having more kids has largely been, I think, seen as a concern dominated by right-wing thinkers and spaces—whether it’s sort of, like, rationalist, tech right people, and Elon Musk has been a big part of this conversation, or more of those trad-wife, classic conservative right people. Even kind of registering concern about the decline in fertility codes as right wing. But you see this as a progressive issue, one that left-leaning thinkers should engage seriously with. Why is that?

Berg: Yeah. That’s a great summary of where we stand on the political positioning of this question. So I think there are two things we need to notice. While there are a lot of aspects of the conversation, our children are indeed political.

There are two things that I think transcend politics: The first is that what is at stake really is just the shape of one’s own personal life. And when I say that, I don’t mean that is not, in itself, political and has political aspects. But the idea that we should decide what our personal lives will look like just because of our political allegiances—like, that’s something I think we should be suspicious of. And the second thing is that what is at stake is also a deep philosophical, ethical question, which isn’t just, Should I have children? Is it morally permissible for me? But it’s the question of the value of human life in the present and in the future.

So one thing I like to point out is that despite many differences between people on the left and the right, most of them are still in agreement about the following, and it’s a commitment to just the bare idea of a flourishing, robust, good human future. And I think from that perspective, we can recognize that this question—Should we concern ourselves with the future of humanity? Is human life the kind of thing that we should perpetuate into the future, despite suffering and despite our own failures, ethical and political?—that is a question that I think that people who are liberal or progressive, the answer is a robust yes.

If we look at the kind of things that leftists are committed to, be it climate change or significant social and political reform—if it’s education, if it’s welfare—these are the kind of things that presuppose the possibility of a human future. And what we hope to do, in part, at least, is to liberate people who identify themselves politically in that way to also just have the courage to embrace the role of children in human life without thinking that, as you were saying, immediately commits them to a conservative, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-equality stance.

Demsas: But there’s this view that the declining number of kids actually represents progress—that progress for women, in particular, who aren’t anymore saddled with, like, one vision of the good life, which is to get married, have a family, pop out as many kids as possible, and then find your meaning in that. But then, of course, the secondary aspect: No matter how egalitarian men or workplaces get, there’s just no way to equalize the costs of having kids to a woman’s body for being pregnant and birthing children, particularly, I think, under a regime where we no longer have Roe v. Wade.

And people have often seen this as a narrative of progress, and of course we see these sorts of correlations between highly educated groups and declining birth rates. So why isn’t this just a standard story of progress? Why don’t you see this as just another step in feminism liberating women from having to consign themselves to motherhood?

Berg: Let’s begin with where the book begins every time it picks up a possible explanation or a narrative that is driving ambivalence about having kids. And it starts with the kind of concerns that people themselves are raising. So it was really important for us not to start with the kind of explanations for declining birth rates you might hear that are kind of purely causal explanations. So people say, Women are more educated, or, The sperm counts are declining.

And one of the things we noticed is that no one—when they’re talking about their own ambivalence or their own uncertainty—no one starts by talking either about their own declining sperm counts, or no woman that I’ve spoken to has said, I’ve reflected on my years of education, and hence, I can’t make up my mind, or, This kind of gives me an answer to the question of how many kids I should have.

And so we wanted to start with the things that they really cared about. When we talk about women and men, about the things that would have made it easier for them to navigate the decision, about why they decided as they did, the question of the role of motherhood in a woman’s life—with the possibility of leading a fulfilling life, of determining one’s own future, of being equal to men—that was one concern, but it wasn’t the only one.

And so the first thing that we want to say is that we need to understand that we’re faced here with a lot of women and men who are having difficulty, so much as thinking through this question. That’s really our concern. So our concern is not an objective concern with a declining birth rate. We kind of leave it to others. Economists can explain to you what is the problem with an aging population, and other people can explain to you why a society can sort of overcome those issues.

But what we thought is a problem is that there is a question of incredible significance to human life, both, as I was saying, on this very subjective level and on this grand level—a huge existential question. And people are expressing a real difficulty of navigating it. And we thought, Here’s a place where we can help.

And so on particularly the question of progress, I think that we are many—and we were naming them—there are many arenas of progress in this kind of field. There are also things we wanted to point out that we think more progress can be made, even from a feminist perspective. So one of the things that we point out is that, at least in liberal and progressive circles, there is a growing understanding that men should take equal part in domestic labor, in housework and childcare. But there is a very different understanding of what men’s role is when it comes to the deliberation and decision making around children.

And in particular, we’ve placed almost a taboo—kind of it felt taboo on liberal and progressive men to even consider this question as one that is relevant to their life, let alone raise it in conversation. So we’ve spoken to men who said, you know, When I think about raising the question of kids with a potential partner, I immediately feel creepy and oppressive and controlling. Now, that seems like, on the one hand, a right kind of impulse. On the other hand, we’ve spoken to the women who are partners to those men who are telling them, Whatever you want, honey. And they describe being very frustrated and isolated, alone with that decision.

Demsas: But I think many people on the left, maybe even folks who have not, you know, come across your work yet, are open to the idea that people may just choose not to have children and that they might be ambivalent about having children, and that would be fine. Why are you seeing this as something that people should be concerned about?

Berg: So to be clear, again, the very fact of the declining birth rates is not something that we’re directly concerned about, nor do I, in putting forward the book, hope to help people embrace children in their own lives. I hope to help them navigate the kind of ambivalence that we found many are finding troubling.

So we’ve spoken to hundreds of Millennials and Zoomers and Gen Xers, and they’ve talked about the difficulty and hardship of navigating that question. And that means not knowing how to raise it with themselves, not knowing how to raise it with their partners, not knowing when they meet the kind of standards of readiness that can seem only higher and higher and murkier and murkier in their professional lives, in their personal lives, in their romantic lives, so much so that they never know if it is appropriate for them to raise the question of children. So for those who feel like they are in a happy place vis-à-vis the question of children, it doesn’t matter if that means a confident yes or a confident no. That’s great.

We found that there is a large and, in fact, growing swath of the population that is finding this question harder to navigate. It’s them that we wanted to offer a kind of space, a kind of dialogue to enter into in the same way that we wanted to find it when we ourselves were and still are, in many ways, grappling with the different aspects of this question.

Demsas: You’ve sort of glanced on this answer, but I guess I want to get it directly: Why do you think people aren’t having kids? And I don’t mean that in the sense there have always been reasons why people haven’t had children. But why do you think we see a clear decline in the number of children that people are having in younger generations?

Berg: I think to answer that, I’ll take us a little bit through the things we think about in the book. What we always try to do is start with the kind of reasons that people are finding very salient (i.e., they’re in the forefront of their minds), the things they’re thinking about, the things that give us an answer to the question, Why are you not having kids?

However, we also find ourselves wanting to push a little further than the kind of way that an argument first presents. Let me give an example: One thing that looms very large in the U.S., certainly, and also in places like the U.K. is the economic reasoning. People are worried, ostensibly, about the affordability of children. When you start talking to people more, you find that, at least as often as people are worrying about actual affordability, what they’re more worried about is meeting a standard of readiness. And that standard of readiness is very, very high. So one of the things we like to point out is that there is a cliché kind of stereotype of millennials, in particular, as immature—they’re eternal children. And as part of that narrative, they point to the fact that they’re having fewer kids, and they’re saying they don’t want to have kids. They’re kids themselves.

Against that, we want to point precisely to what I was talking about a second ago, which is the fact that they hold themselves to such high standards of maturity, of success and readiness, suggesting that, in a way, they’re almost too mature, as opposed to immature. And we see that across different aspects of their life.

So we see that in their financial and professional sense of self. We see them in their personal growth, so the idea that, My 20s have to be about self-exploration and self-fulfillment, and only when I’ve accomplished all of that, only when I am myself, only when I am sufficiently psychologically kind of come to my own self can I think about having children.

The same thing happens romantically. People are postponing the milestones of relationship and are holding their relations to very high standards of readiness, of stability and security, before they so much as think about having kids.

I mention all of these because I think one of the phenomena that we’re not thinking about seriously enough is not so much how any one of these explanations drive someone to make a kind of very intentional decision, Okay. I’ve considered my options. I’ve decided not to have kids. That happens. People certainly do that. But for a lot of people, that’s not what happens. What happens is that this self-evidence of a logic of postponement—postponement until we meet those standards—is putting off not just having kids but so much as thinking about having kids.

And so what happens is that people are starting to think about children as something that they should actually kind of concern themselves with quite late—and, in fact, later and later. And as that is happening, we see the decision whether or not to have children—and certainly how many children people are going to end up having—decided for them, not by them.

That’s what I care about. What interests me is the sense that people are having this decision made for them in a way where they are then left frustrated by it, not the case where somebody has weighed their lives and decided, I have a greater calling. I have a different vocation. I’m consciously making the choice early on, resolutely, that I would like my life to take a different shape.

Demsas: This is sort of the thesis of your book, and it’s even the tagline, “on ambivalence and choice,” this idea that ambivalence is really a driving reason for your concern for why people are putting off children. As you’ve said, it’s not that people have decided, I don’t want kids, but that there is this kind of failure to be able to even engage fully with the question. I wanted to ask you how—

Berg: Let’s just qualify that. I do not think that it is never the case that no one makes a conscious, intentional decision. They certainly do, in the same way that we still have people embracing kids, and people are telling us, It was never a question for me. It was so obvious. I lived my life accordingly. What we’re focused on is a growing part of the population for whom this is not the case.

Demsas: And I think that what I wanted to ask you about is where you learned that ambivalence was really driving a lot of people’s decision making here, or lack of decision making. Can you talk to me about the surveys you did or what sorts of research you’re pulling on?

Berg: Sure. Our approach in the book was wide-ranging, which is to say it was very important for us to hear from people. So we invited them to answer, first, written surveys, and then we followed up with a few dozen of them in kind of longer interviews.

This was mostly educated, middle- and upper-middle-class Americans that mostly leaned to the left, so liberals and progressives. In our conversations with them, we found evidence for it, but we also looked at kind of a wide array of both social studies data—so looking at people who have investigated directly the growing ambivalence, the lifting of a parenting mandate in America and globally, the kind of wide-ranging surveys of people’s life priorities—and also some of the stuff that is most rewarding for Rachel and myself, given our own interests, has been looking at things like the motherhood-ambivalence literary genre.

So this was a literary genre that grew over the past couple of decades. It’s associated with figures like Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Rivka Galchen, and others. In the writing, for the first time, they’re taking motherhood, the difficulty of thinking through the choice, and then the difficulty attending the experience of growing up, mothering early infants—young infants, excuse me—and making it the focus of their artistic and intellectual explorations, so much so that the genre got its own title, this kind of genre of domestic or motherhood ambivalence.

We also look, similarly, at a growing, kind of exploding literary genre of what’s called “climate fiction” or “eco lit,” so ecological literature, seeing the kind of evidence for ambivalence, not directly about having kids, although sometimes, but ambivalence about the very value of a human future. So these are works that consistently represent human beings as kind of completely abject, which is to say they’re neither deserving of a future nor are they capable of bringing a better future about. For us, that was also a very interesting touchpoint in this exploration of this growing ambivalence.

And then we also looked at the popular cultural examples. For example, we wanted to figure out not just how pregnancy, let’s say, or motherhood are depicted, but also looking at questions like: What kind of women do we see represented in our popular films and media? And in that context, we point out that, if until recently, women would play the roles of the second fiddle. They would be the mother and the wife and the secretary. We now have them taking center stage. They’re protagonists of their own dramas and action and comedy.

However, it is remarkable how rarely those protagonists are mothers. So whether or not they’re the stoners of Broad City or they’re political operatives, like in Scandal and House of Cards, or they’re spies in Homeland or they’re superheroes, you can be anything you want to be as a woman, if you would just kind of watch the TV for the message, unless you try to be a mother.

And the mothers who are depicted are either highly, highly ambivalent—so Homeland, I think, is an example where she is a mother, but she’s abandoned her child, in effect—or they’re very, very bad ones. Fans of Succession can reflect on how we see the character of Shiv get pregnant at the very end of the show and how hard it is to be happy for her—let’s just put it that way.

So we want to point to the fact that we’re also having this kind of cultural messaging that is signaling that there is a big conflict between the possibility of any kind of self-fulfillment, in particular to women, and the possibilities of motherhood, which we think are incredibly important.

And maybe I’ll add one of my favorite pop-culture examples, and it’s that both Friends and Girls, which are both kind of age-defining shows in their own way for Millennials, they both basically end on the trope of an unexpected pregnancy. In Friends, it’s Rachel almost at the end of the show. In Girls, it’s Hannah having an unexpected pregnancy, and the minute she gives birth, the show ends.

And they suggest two things that I think are representative of a big mood in our culture. And the first is that once you have a child, our interest in you, as an adult, ends in a way that is particularly threatening to women. Your life as an intellectual, creative, socially exciting person that we would have an interest in—that’s over for you. And secondly, I think the fact that it’s an unexpected but embraced pregnancy speaks to the anxiety of choice. I think there is such a fantasy—I don’t think it speaks to some direct wish for everyone to get accidentally pregnant. I don’t want to suggest that. I do think it speaks to a kind of indulged-in fantasy—of, Maybe this could just be decided for me.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, Anastasia helps us figure out if the choice to have kids can ever be a rational enterprise.

[Break]

Demsas: I think this ambivalence is something. I mean, I do not have children. I do want to have children at some point. And I think this ambivalence is something I’ve noticed in conversations with friends and people in my peer group about when they’re thinking about having kids. And when I read your book, I saw a lot of that reflected, but I tried to go and look and see if there was some data that would help illuminate how ambivalence was playing a role.

And one surprising thing I found—and I wonder how you would react to this—is there’s a Pew poll earlier this year that looked at adults over 50 and adults under 50 who did not have children. And when asked why they never had kids, people 50 or older were most likely to say, It just never happened. But for those under 50, they say pretty clearly that they just don’t want to, or they want to focus on other things, or they list specific concerns about the world, affordability, or the environment.

Doesn’t that sort of indicate, contra to maybe our experience here and what I’m talking about in my experience with my friends, that rather than ambivalence, younger people are actually pretty clear about why they don’t want to have kids?

Berg: Yeah. So I thought that the poll is very interesting. It’s interesting because that’s not how I interpreted that particular data point, although you could.

So what I saw is the possibility of speaking about one’s experience—let’s call it kind of a journey of figuring out what one’s with children—with a way that was, I actually thought, in many ways, less defensive of older people who are able to say It didn’t work out for me.

So one of the things and this just corroborates that data: Until very recently, the second most common reason that people gave in the U.S. and the U.K. for why they didn’t have children—so people who are childless—was, I just didn’t find the willing and suitable partner, after, I didn’t want to have kids. What we see, which I think is consistent with the thesis of ambivalence, is that there is a growing embrace of other kind of, as you’re saying, priorities and projects and other shapes that a life can take, and less of a possibility of embracing the circumstances of life.

And why I think that is significant is that one of the things that we point out in the book is that many times when you talk about why people aren’t having kids, they talk about opportunity costs. Until not very recently, people thought of themselves essentially intergenerationally, and they thought of children as something that belonged to the very framework of human life.

So we can think of, at a moment—maybe it’s a moment that’s eroding, itself—but the way college featured in the lives of many Americans, so it’s the kind of thing that you do no matter what it will take from you. Maybe it’ll be easy. Maybe you’ll have to take on incredible, crippling amounts of debt. But you’re going to go for it. And that’s what children were. It wasn’t the thing that you put this question mark over and you weigh against your other project, you weigh against your other goals. It was something that you participate in because it belonged to the very framework of life.

And in lieu of that, what we see today is the fact that the children question becomes a question like any other question—like a career question, like an education question, like a Where am I going to live? question. The kind of things that we bring this framework, we compare it to other things, and once we start doing that, we’re going to be feeling the cost of making this very difficult and completely life-altering decision.

Demsas: What that raises for me, though, is: Why is that bad? Why is ambivalence about having children bad?

Berg: Put it this way: The very fact that this is a kind of question that’s going to be very hard to navigate—it’s going to bring up a lot of things. A person is going to want to consider many, many things before jumping into it. None of that is bad.

The bit that seems bad is the bit where that ambivalence becomes debilitating—where, because it’s so hard to navigate, on the one hand, and because there’s a kind of celebration of the ambivalence for its own sake, as if that’s the sophisticated position to take if I’m intellectually and professionally and artistically ambitious. If I have those kinds of aspirations, then being unsure about kids is almost how I’m supposed to be responding to this question.

When we combine these things, what we find is a kind of unhappiness, not the unhappiness of the proverbial childless cat lady. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is the unhappiness of feeling, I don’t know how to start thinking about this question. I don’t feel comfortable raising it with my partner.

That is a huge problem. I don’t feel that there are the kind of public resources to navigate this question, because anything that I find when I look for them is conservative and reactionary. So I think that is the problem, which is why, when we thought about the subtitles or how to talk about the book, every time somebody said, Well, do you want to talk about overcoming ambivalence? I said, Well, I don’t want to. You know, ambivalence is worthwhile. We want to take it seriously.

Demsas: You’re ambivalent about overcoming ambivalence.

Berg: I’m ambivalent about the ambivalence. And one of the things I like to remind us of is actually the original meaning of ambivalence. So ambivalence, kind of originally in psychoanalysis, it meant the ability to have opposing feelings about one of the same objects, a positive and negative. I think today when we talk about ambivalence, a lot of times what we really mean and refer to as a kind of negativity. It’s like a courage of negativity. So when we say the eco lit novels or climate fiction are ambivalent, what we really mean is that they’re very, very negative about human beings.

And I think a lot of times when we talk about ambivalence about motherhood, what we talk about is the kind of the courage of negativity, which, in some ways, is long overdue. True ambivalence, the ability to really have and contain and work through both valences—the fears that attend a decision to have children, the things it can raise for us personally in terms of our ambitions, in terms of our families, in terms of the kind of big ethical concerns we care about—that doesn’t seem to me to be bad. When it’s debilitating us, when it’s—again, I really like this phrase—when it’s contributing to having that decision made for us and not by us, that’s when I worry about it.

Demsas: You view your project with your co-author as trying to kind of lift the ambivalence so that people can make a decision, so they can actually engage fully with this question about whether or not they should have children on their own. And in order to do that, you sort of attack some of the reasons why people say they don’t want to have kids. Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker calls your book “a corrective to liberal neuroses about having kids.” How do you feel about that tag?

Berg: Yeah. That’s a great question because, as I was saying before, I think there are parts of Jay’s characterization—we also went on his podcast—that we were happy to embrace, and part of it we wanted to kind of hold off on. He said, This really gratifies a debate bro in me. I think that’s not in The New Yorker. That might just be on the podcast. And we said, Oh, that’s nice, Jay. That’s really not all that we want to do.

And that kind of goes to what I was saying before. A lot of people are taking cheap shots at people not having kids today, including our newly elected vice president. And it seemed to us, as people who were ourselves struggling with the question of the role of children in our own lives and in human life, that that kind of attitude would not guide us through our own ambivalence. So it is true that we look at the kind of dominant narratives and scripts and arguments that are not helping people think through this, that make this decision harder to navigate. But I wouldn’t say we attack them, and certainly not the people who hold them. And in fact, what we often do is allow people to, I think, productively move through them.

So notice, again, I’ll recall an example and use a new one. When I was talking about the financial concern, the point isn’t to just say, Well, look—by the way, the Nordic countries. Look at them. Every material hurdle to having children has been lifted. They’re not having kids. End of story. So whatever people are saying when they’re talking about finances might just be bad faith, and that’s it.

No, I don’t think it’s just bad faith. I think those concerns are looming very large for people. What we wanted to understand is why and how. What we found was, as I was saying, a concern with a kind of ideal—a mirage, perhaps—of sufficient readiness that was underlying what often presented itself as just talk of money. The mirage is that I can ever be so rich, so successful that I would be completely confident in my choice to have children. That is the potential mirage, because a standard could be so high that we’ll never know if we’ve ever reached it.

Demsas: And so why did those standards change?

Berg: I think that’s a great question. The reason why it’s hard to answer is because we see it across very different arenas of life. Like I was saying before, people, when they think of their own personal development, they’re thinking, I need to be very mature, very stable. It’s kind of jokes around adulting—so, I’m not there yet. We see that in romantic relationships, so the idea that we have to be in a relationship for a very, very long time before we ever progressed to the next stage.

So people are taking longer to vet potential partners, taking longer to go exclusive, taking longer to introduce them to their parents, taking longer to move in, to get the pet, to get the child. So how to explain the change? More locally, we can think about the kind of upheavals that the Millennial generation, in particular, had undergone. It does seem to be very much the case that there is this myth of readiness that we certainly didn’t see before that I think is truer and more interesting than the kind of dithering, immature, Millennial caricature that we’re used to.

Demsas: Well, one of the big concerns—and this is, as you mentioned, what really kicked off your decision to write this book—is this idea that people are afraid of bringing children into the world because of climate change, that they’re worried about the idea that you are consigning your kids to a world where it’s unclear how their stability will look like, whether that’s literally the changes that will occur with weather, whether it’s floods or droughts or hurricanes or whatever it is, but also just that there’s tons of costs that children may add to the planet by increasing pollution.

You know, you cite one person saying that this is a good reason that people can proffer, but it’s hiding their actual underlying ambivalence. Why isn’t that, by itself, a reason that you find credible that many people are using to not have kids?

Berg: Again, I definitely don’t characterize anything through the paradigm of, like, they’re hiding one explanation with another. And that’s really important to emphasize.

What we do is we quote a kind of academic, ecological activist who had studied the decision processes of people who are environmentalists vis-à-vis the decision to have kids. And what he found was that for those for whom children were a positive prospect—they’re leaning towards kids—they will talk about climate change as a reason to have children. They’ll say, I’m having children so I can raise people who are responsible vis-à-vis the environment.

And people who are leaning against having children will cite the environment as a reason not to have children, along the lines that you mentioned. And moreover, they consistently said that they will then emphasize that reason of their deliberations in order to affect positive change around them. That doesn’t seem to me as something to be sneered at, and I wouldn’t call that as hiding. I would call that as trying to use your personal choice to have these larger ramifications to show other people that the damages of climate change—the cost that it exacts from us are not something in the distant future. It’s something that is happening right here and right now.

Briefly, the reason why we think that that is the case for most people is because all the data—both our kind of more local and qualitative conversations, as well as large surveys of how people are ordering their preferences and how much is climate change figuring in their procreative choices—as of yet, climate change is not featuring as a significant driver of the decision to have kids or have fewer children.

Although, of course, there wasn’t a month that would go by without us being able to find in The New York Times an op-ed along the lines of, Can I have children, given climate change? So it was very much the way that the public conversation was framed, but it just wasn’t what was—and still isn’t what is—driving the personal, deliberative choices.

Demsas: One implication of your book, I think, is that ambivalence can sort of be cured by more rumination. When Rachel, in the intro, asks her mother about how she decided to have a family, her mother responds, “I always knew. It was never even a question.” And to me, part of what your book is trying to do is it’s trying to help you shed some of these mirages around whether you could ever be ready financially to have a kid, or this idea that, you know, climate change necessitates you not having children. But is it really a rational enterprise, whether or not people choose to have children?

Berg: That’s a fantastic question. So the way I think about our project is as one that can actually do something quite limited. Does it have anything to say about what is the shape that your own life should take? No. I hope the book can show people that for most people, it is the case that they are, in fact, committed to the possibility of a good human future. And as such, that might be something they want to contribute to directly in some way. But what way you do that, that’s up to a person to navigate.

As for how to navigate that choice, I do have something to say about that, but we don’t say it in the book, which is: I’m a big pluralist as to the actual personal reasons for people to have children. And the reason I am is not just because I’m generally a pluralist, and it’s a very personal, fraught decision you shouldn’t judge people about. These are all good reasons to be a pluralist, but that’s not why I’m a pluralist here. It’s because one thing that you can realize without having kids—but having a child, really, this is one thing it really brings home—and it’s the fact that whatever it is that you’re thinking you’re doing it for, whatever you’re trying to get out of it, whatever was your motivating reason, having the child can never be reduced to that.

So maybe you did it because you really like the company of kids, but no matter how much you like the company of kids, parenting is going to confront you with a lot of things that are not just the joys of the company of children. Maybe this is your vanity project—you wanted the child to do everything that you never could do. Well, no matter how many times that child succeeds in doing that, parenting is never reducible to the vanity project, inherent, you know, that one can find in having a child.

And I think that’s true for anything. You wanted a pension plan? Trust me—there are other ways of going about it. And this one is going to bring a lot more. And it’s because what’s at stake in having a child is not any of your goals. It’s another human being that you’re going to enter into one of the most intense and intimate relationships that human beings can enter into. And so that’s why I’m, really—I’m a pluralist.

And I’m with you in thinking, in some sense, that means that you can’t quite enter this rationally, not necessarily, as we hear sometimes philosophers say, Because it will transform you. That’s one thing that can happen. It’ll transform you so much that how could you even kind of rationally choose it? You don’t know who you’re gonna be on the other end. I think it’s because whatever you’re trying to get out of it, another human being and that intensity of a relationship and that responsibility that you’re going to be taking for them is going to absolutely exceed that. So whatever is helping you jump over that ledge, that’s really cool by me.

Demsas: Well, so you just glanced at it, but I think one of the reasons why I feel that it’s very difficult to even enter into the idea of whether or not to have children in sort of a cost-benefit analysis is, is L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experiences. Just to summarize briefly for our listeners, the idea is that, you know, before undergoing a transformative experience, you cannot imagine what it would be like. If your cost-benefit analysis is wholly changed by the event, your preferences, your goals, your personality—it’s just completely different once you’ve entered into parenthood. If this is right, doesn’t it kind of call into question even the idea of trying to figure out if you’d be happier or not with a kid? And I know that you are a bit skeptical about this line of reasoning, so I’m curious for your take here.

Berg: Right. So you said, if this is right. So if this is right, yes, that’s correct. I don’t think it’s right—not that it’s not right sometimes. I think it’s not necessary.

And we should say, to Laurie Paul’s credit, her biggest claim, I take it, is about transformative experiences and the challenges they present to rationality. Parenthood, and particularly motherhood, is an example. And the reason why I kind of use a funny tone to use that is, I think, something that L.A. Paul definitely did not intend, but oftentimes culturally we talk about motherhood as a transformative experience, by that, meaning exactly what you mean and more.

We even sometimes mean that not only do you get a new identity you could not predict the significance of in advance, but, in fact, this comes at the cost of your other identities, perhaps identities that you liked and worked very hard to cultivate. And so somebody is now telling you: Not only you’ll have new preferences you can’t predict, but maybe you’ll lose touch with the things you care about most.

One thing that’s really important to notice, even before we get to my own kind of objections to the necessity aspect of this claim, is that it has a very strong kind of, I think, ultimately, a sexist undercurrent. We don’t talk about fatherhood as being transformative, nowhere as frequently as we do about motherhood being transformative.

Again, it’s a case where the intention is right—we want to be able to see women, acknowledge the special challenges that they undergo. But in the process, oftentimes what we’re doing is we’re sort of reifying the tie between parenting and women. And we’re reinforcing the idea that for them it is significant, meaningful, and important in ways that it might not be for men. So that’s something I really want to push against.

And then I just want to introduce the claim that motherhood can be all those things, but it might not. And luckily, the way to show the falsity of a universal claim is you just need one counterexample, so I do it in my own person. And so I share that, in fact, I don’t think that the experience of motherhood has been a rupture in my life. I have no problem recognizing myself after having children. The same things that I cared about before, I care about now.

However, one of the things that I thought was so interesting is people who said to me, you know, I have been transformed by motherhood, but it didn’t happen in the way that you usually hear about it, which is either instantaneous with birth or something that’s kind of lodged in that first year of parenting, which is often how we portray parenting today. It’s all about being a parent to a baby. The transformation is one that happened over decades. It’s one that happened over the life of my child.

And I thought, Oh, wow. That is very poignant. That’s very interesting. And then I thought, But over decades, we all change. So the childless will, too, be transformed over decades of their life, by the projects they undertake, by the relationships they enter into. So that’s kind of my caveat now, is that I am more open to the long-term transformative potential of entering into such a significant relationship. It’s not a necessary one.

And I think this is so important to emphasize for two reasons, and I’ll rest there, which is, first I alluded to: It’s very anxiety provoking when the framing of the possible choice is whether or not to take on a new identity that might erase all others. And insofar as that’s not a necessary framing, I think it’s very important to introduce it to others.

And the other thing is that once you undergo the experience—and you see the prevalence of this narrative of sort of utter, complete, rupturous transformation—but you yourself don’t recognize yourself in it, you might feel like you’re doing it wrong. And in looking at responses to the book, it has been really interesting and, I admit, gratifying to hear from other women who are mothers, I have found in what you described a narrative that I could identify with more than I could identify with many of the narratives that I saw around the idea of the necessarily transformative power of motherhood.

Demsas: I wonder, then, how you think about what happens to someone when they finish reading your book, right? So let’s say they’ve removed the mirages that you want to take away from them, and they’re free now to engage fully in the question of whether or not they actually want kids.

At some level, I feel like, if I were to just—and you know, I guess this is hinted in my earlier questions—but if I was just, like, to kind of tally up the costs of having a kid, even putting aside sort of the transformative-experiences point, I think that if I were to just say, Okay, the potential risk of what will happen to my career, to my body, and then, of course, just the necessary risk, even if everything goes well, of all the costs of raising a child, of saving up for their future, I think even freed of some of the ideas that you’ve talked about here, most people would rationally assume that children don’t fit in with their lives. Do you agree with that, or do you think that that’s not what you find in your experience?

Berg: Well, it’s not what I found in my experience, given the choices I’ve made. But my hope is that while reading a single book cannot transport you to a different age to which we do not want to be transported, for many other reasons—where having children, you know, you just a kind of unthinkingly engage in this activity and make the choice—I do hope that the fact that we provide an analysis, that helps them see that the frames of evaluation that they’re bringing to the children question are not the only ones possible, that by reminding them that what’s at stake is, in fact, not just this personal experience for them, not just sum some satisfaction that they’re going to be enjoying in their own lives, but that what’s at stake is ultimately how they will or will not be contributing to a human future, which by the end of the book I hope to have shown is something that most of us are, in fact, concerned with to one degree or another.

So once you’re at the end of the book, and you kind of realize, Actually, I’m not indifferent to what happens, to put it a bit crudely, after my death. I’m not indifferent to the possibility of there being not just more human beings but, in fact, human beings that live a kind of existence that I, as a human being, can be proud of, not just something I should be ashamed of, as we kind of talked about is represented in that eco lit.

I think then you are confronted with the questions: What are you going to do about this? How are you going to be contributing to that future? This is vague, because, as I said, this is not a book for somebody who wants, at the end of it—I got, recently, a question about a decision procedure. There is no decision procedure that we can offer you, by the end of which you’ll be like, Oh yes. Okay, I see now. It makes sense for me to have kids.

In fact, I would put things more strongly than you did. I think considering the kind of risks a person takes on themselves in having a child, which, just to kind of remind all of us listening to this conversation, is every possible horrible, bad, and tragic thing that can happen to you can happen to your child. And then, bringing a child to the world, you’re becoming that much more vulnerable. Like, for every child, you’re becoming vulnerable in another person. I think it never makes sense if what we think about making sense is this kind of weighing of pros and cons or an instrumental calculation of how to increase satisfaction or minimize risk. It does make sense once you think of your own existence as something that’s not reducible to you just maximizing your satisfaction across your own lifetime.

And I think the book helps you recover a sense of that perspective and raises that question for you, and how you’re going to answer it is up to you. Although, it is a conversation that one-on-one I do love having, so people can reach out to me for heart-to-hearts about what shape their own lives should take.

Demsas: Well, that’s a great part to go to our last and final question. What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Berg: I really wanted to answer this by saying, “having children,” but just in the sense of, like, I love my children. I stand behind my choices.

I wanted to use the question, though, to say basically what we were just talking about, which is that the considerations of the book, those lifting of norms, those reminding us of different perspective, reorienting us to the fact that what’s at stake is the future of humanity—all those things can only get you so far. And the nitty gritty reality, not of, I don’t know, the diapers and the crying that we see—as I was saying, we see parenting today represented just through infancy—but of the whole arc of the life of a parent.

And in particular, the one thing I think is truly universal in parenting—this is my big controversial claim—is that nothing is universal in parenting. You don’t necessarily become a better person. Only some people do. You don’t necessarily relive your happy childhood. Only some people do, etcetera, etcetera. What’s universal is that you become inalienably vulnerable to the risks, pains, sufferings, and tragedies that can befall another human being. And in doing that, in entering this incredibly intimate and demanding relationship, it’ll always sort of exceed in its wonder, in its joys, but also in its pains and in its horrors, anything that we can write in a single book.

Demsas: Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Berg: Thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Donald Trump’s decision to tap Pete Hegseth for his Cabinet is one of his nominations that some are reading as pure provocation. Aside from being a veteran, Hegseth has little qualification to lead the Department of Defense. He’s a Fox News host who has written a screed against DEI in the military. He has faced an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies, but the Trump team is not balking. “We look forward to his confirmation,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, said in reply to news reports about the allegation. At another time in our history, many lines in Hegseth’s latest book alone might have disqualified him on the grounds of being too juvenile. In the introduction of The War on Warriors, he criticizes the “so-called elites directing the military today”: “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy-asses.”

Focusing on scandals and inflammatory rhetoric, however, may serve as a diversion from a bigger, more alarming strategy. The real danger of Hegseth’s appointment lies in the role he might play in Trump’s reimagined military. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with the staff writer Tom Nichols about Trump’s grander plan to centralize control. “He’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump,” Nichols says.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There is such an overwhelming amount of noise around Donald Trump’s proposed nominees—their histories, their scandals, their beliefs—that it’s easy to lose sight of one important pattern, which is Trump placing people in charge of critical Cabinet positions who are utterly loyal to him, so ultimately the real control of those agencies lies with the White House.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today we are going to talk about a key pillar of that strategy to centralize control: Trump’s plans for the military.

Rosin: Okay. Ready?

Tom Nichols: Ready.

Rosin: Our guest is staff writer Tom Nichols, who’s a professor emeritus at the Naval War College.

Tom, welcome to the show.

Nichols: Thanks, Hanna.

Rosin: So there is so much to talk about in terms of Trump’s proposed appointments, but today we’re going to talk about military- and security-related appointments because they are such high-stakes positions. From Trump’s choice during this transition period, what are you picking up about his attitude towards the military establishment?

Nichols: I think his appointments, particularly for secretary of defense—and some of the rumors that have been floated out of Mar-a-Lago about prosecuting military officers and wholesale firings—these are really direct shots at the senior officer corps of the United States, and I think of it as a direct attack on our traditions of civil-military affairs.

He is trying to send a message that from now on, America’s military officers are supposed to be loyal to him, first and foremost, and not the Constitution, because he still carries a pretty serious grudge against a lot of top military and civilian people during his first term as president who got in his way—or he thinks got in his way—about doing things like, you know, shooting protesters and using the military in the streets of the United States. So he’s sending a pretty clear message that this time around, he’s not going to brook any of that kind of interference.

Rosin: So you think the source of his resistance or hostility towards the military are specific actions that they prevented him from taking, or is it things that, say, generals have said about him—negative things that they’ve said about him?

Nichols: Oh, I don’t think we have to pick between those. He believes in a world where he has total control over everything, because that’s how he’s lived his life. So, of course, he’s angry about all of that stuff—reportedly, you know, going back to things like Bob Woodward’s accounts, where he calls the defense secretary and says, I want to kill Bashar [al-]Assad, the leader of Syria, and James Mattis says, Yeah, okay. We’ll get right on that, and then hangs up the phone and says, We’re not doing that.

Rosin: Right. So he doesn’t want anyone to say, We’re not doing that, anymore?

Nichols: No matter what it is and no matter how unconstitutional or illegal the order, he doesn’t want anybody to say, We’re not doing that. And remember, the first time he ran, he said things like, If I tell my generals—“my generals,” which is a phrase he loves—if I tell my generals to torture people, they’ll do it. And of course, immediately, a lot of very senior officers said, No. No, sir. We will not do that. That’s an illegal order. We can’t do that. He doesn’t want to hear any of that guff this time around.

Rosin: So one thing is: He doesn’t want any future resistance from military leaders who might, you know, counter things he wants done. Another is: He seems to be purging from the past. NBC reported this weekend that they were drawing up a list of military officers who were involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, seeing whether they could be court-martialed. How do those two things fit together? Why is that part of the picture?

Nichols: Well, the most important thing about that report from NBC is: It’s not about Afghanistan. If it really were about that and people were looking at it closely—you know, you have to remember that a big part of why that was such a mess, and Biden bears a lot of responsibility for that bungled pullout, but Trump’s the guy who negotiated the agreement and demanded that everybody stick to it.

So this is not about Afghanistan. This is about two things: It’s telling former officers who crossed him that I am going to get even with you. I think a lot of this is just him trying to cut a path to get to people like Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And it’s also a warning for the future that says, No matter what you do, no matter where you go, even if you retire, I can reach out and touch you. So if you’re a colonel or a captain or a general or an admiral, and you think about crossing me, just remember, I will get you for it.

And that’s what I mean about an attack on civil-military relations. Because the other problem, and the reason this whole Afghanistan thing is such nonsense, is these were officers who were following the legal and lawful orders of their commander in chief. If this report is confirmed, it’s a huge muscle flex to say, There is no senior military officer who’s beyond my retribution if he doesn’t, or she doesn’t, do what I want done—no matter how illegal, no matter how unconstitutional, no matter how immoral. All I want to hear out of you is, Yes, sir, and that’s it.

Rosin: Can he do this? In other words, can you reach deep down enough in the military hierarchy to actually accomplish what he’s trying to accomplish?

Nichols: Sure. It doesn’t take many people. There’s a bunch of kind of legalistic stuff that’s going to be difficult. The military—and I’ve actually counseled other people not to get wrapped up in the legality stuff, because that’s not what this is about. This is an effort at political intimidation. But you’d have to find people who are going to hold an Article 32 hearing. It’s kind of like—the military has its own version of, like, a grand jury, and you’d have to find people willing to do that, but you could reach down and find some ambitious and not very principled lieutenant colonel somewhere who says, Sure. I’ll be that prosecutor. I’ll do that.

You don’t need thousands and thousands of people. You just need a handful of men and women who are willing to do this kind of stuff. And yeah. Sure—he can get it done. Remember, this is the president who decided that the military didn’t have the authority to punish its own war criminals and intervened and started handing out dispensations.

Rosin: Yeah. All right. Well, let’s talk about someone who encouraged him not to punish those war criminals.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: And that is Pete Hegseth, who he nominated for secretary of defense. Tom, in the circles of military people you know, how did people react to that nomination?

Nichols: Well, I’ve been careful not to ask anybody I know who’s still serving, because I don’t want to put them on the spot. But a lot of the people that I worked with and a lot of my colleagues from my days working with the military, I think the first reaction was something along the lines of: If this is a joke, it’s not funny. Are we being pranked? Are we being punked? I mean, the idea of Pete Hegseth running the Defense Department was so spectacularly bizarre—it’s right up there with Matt Gaetz running Justice.

And so now, as it’s sinking in, I think there’s a real horror here—and not just about what could happen in foreign policy. I mean, my biggest clench in my stomach is thinking about a nuclear crisis where the president really needs the secretary of defense—needs this sober and mature and decent man to give him advice—and he turns, and what he gets is Pete Hegseth. You know—

Rosin: Let’s say who Pete Hegseth is, now that you’ve painted the picture—

Nichols: Well, let me just add, though, that for a lot of my military friends and former military friends, there’s a whole other problem, which is: Unlike other departments, the secretary of defense holds the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

Rosin: Wait. What do you mean? You mean because, because—why? What do you mean by that?

Nichols: Well, because those folks who serve in our military are completely dependent on the DOD for their housing, their medical care, where they’re going to live, what places they get assigned to, you know, all of that stuff. The SecDef doesn’t make those decisions individually every day, but if he turns out to be a terrible manager, the quality of life—and perhaps the actual lives of people in the military—can be really put under a lot of stress and danger by somebody who just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s not like—Ben Carson’s a good example, right? Ben Carson was sent to HUD. He had no idea what he was doing. The department pretty much ran itself. And it’s not like the daily life of hundreds of thousands of people were going to be affected because Ben Carson didn’t know what the hell he was doing. That’s different than people who live under a chain of command to which they are sworn to obey, that goes all the way to the E-Ring of the Pentagon, to the chair Pete Hegseth would be sitting in. That’s a very different situation and very dangerous.

Rosin: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I mean, at HUD, you go home at 5 o’clock.

Nichols: Exactly.

Rosin: It’s not like that—it’s not like that in the Department of Defense. So it’s totally obvious to you and the people you know why he’s unqualified. Can we just quickly make that case? So he was a weekend host, Fox & Friends. He did end up serving overseas, and I think he has a Bronze Star.

Nichols: He was a major. Yeah, he actually was a major. I think he has two Bronze Stars. Look, I’m, you know—

Rosin: So how does that compare to other people who’ve held this position?

Just so we know.

Nichols: Well, other people who have held these positions had long experience in the national-security and national-defense realm as senior executives who have come all the way up. Look—I think Don Rumsfeld was one of the worst secretaries of defense ever, but he had served in related capacities and had administered a gigantic company that he was the head of. Now, that doesn’t mean he had good judgment, but he—you know, the Defense Department ran every day, and things got done every day.

Ash Carter was a well-known—for, you know, 30 years—a well-known defense intellectual who had contributed substantively to everything about defense, from conventional forces to nuclear weapons. I think one thing people need to understand is how much of dealing with the defense department is just dealing with the intricacies of money.

Hegseth’s going to sit at the top of all that, with no experience in any of this—not in budgeting, not in strategy, not in dealing with allies. I keep having these just head-spinning moments where I think about the first day in the office, and Pete Hegseth has to make calls to his equivalents, to his opposite numbers, as they do in this job. That’s another thing that you don’t do if you’re the secretary of HUD—you don’t call all the housing secretaries on the planet to say hello. Hegseth is going to be on the phone with the Russian minister of defense. He’s going to be on the phone with the Chinese minister of defense. The people that have had these jobs have had exposure to folks like that. This is a guy who’s done none of that— nothing. There’s literally zero background.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, what he lacks in qualifications and experience and everything else, he seems to make up for in this very forceful ideology that he has. I spent the weekend reading his latest book, [The] War on Warriors. Can we just talk about it for a minute?

I mean, here’s what I understand about it. He tells this kind of alternate history of the downfall of the American military. It basically adds up to DEI. It goes: While we were fighting in Afghanistan, we missed the real war, which was happening at home, which was, you know, women in combat roles and DEI all over the place—so basically, a war against what he calls “normal dudes,” who have always fought and won our wars.

Now, I’m going to torture you by reading one passage, and then I would love to get your opinion about how widespread this ideology is, this idea that the culture war has utterly shaped the military. Is he an outlier, or do a lot of people think this? So here’s the quote: “DEI amplifies differences, creates grievances, [and] excludes anyone who won’t bow down to the cultural Marxist revolution ripping through the Pentagon. Forget DEI—the acronym should be DIE or IED. It will kill our military worse than any IED ever could.”

Where do these ideas come from? Is this just sprouted from his own head, or is there—inside the military, as far as you know—like, a grand resistance against DEI initiatives?

Nichols: This comes from, like, morning editorial meetings at Fox.

Rosin: Uh-huh. (Laughs.)

Nichols: Because I worked with senior military officers, including a lot of my students who had just come back from deployments, and you just didn’t hear anybody talk this way about, you know, Marxism rampant in the Pentagon and DEI is destroying us—in part, because a lot of those folks were standing right next to people that Hegseth would say were DEI promotions. This is kind of the out-of-control bro culture that Hegseth came up in, and some of it’s just generational, I suppose, within the military. But what I found is actually that the military, for all of its flaws, is a pretty meritocratic institution.

Have there been cycles of this, where there’s a lot of sensitivity training and DEI issues? Yeah, of course, because we’re a more diverse country. I’m sorry, but welcome to the world of the 21st century. And what Hegseth and other guys are doing in that book—which is just kind of a big, primal, bro-culture yawp—is saying, I just don’t like this.

So I just think the idea that somehow Hegseth—he wasn’t chosen because of this. He was chosen because he’s a fawning sycophant to Donald Trump. He looks good on TV, which is really important to Trump. And he basically has made it clear, he’ll do anything Trump tells him to do, which is—I think you see this in all of Trump’s appointments.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So to summarize: He hates DEI. He pushed Trump to intervene in the case of those service members who were accused of war crimes.

What is this reimagined military? Like, how do you think Trump sees a reimagined military? What is the American military for? What is it doing under his vision? I mean, if it’s just window dressing—like, he wants a nice parade, and he wants a lot of military officers parading with him, and he wants it to look a certain way—that’s one thing. But if the intention is to use it for mass deportations or for turning against internal protesters, then that’s different. Then we’re living in a different country.

Nichols: And he just said that, right? He said, I’m going to do mass deportations, and I’m going to get the military involved. And one thing I can tell you that I know from more than 25 years of teaching military officers: They hate the idea of any internal role. The ethos of the American military officer is that they are there to defend the United States and not to be in the streets of the United States. And this is an old tradition that goes back a long way. And Trump just doesn’t care about that. He thinks it’s his private security force to be ordered around at his beck and call.

Rosin: I will say, about Hegseth: Most of the things in his book did not surprise me. The one thing that did surprise me is: It does seem to be a sustained argument for why the left is the actual enemy, like a foreign enemy. He talks about how they move, how they fight, how to root them out. I mean, the language is very resonant with Trump’s idea of “the enemy from within.”

Nichols: Right. I mean, part of the problem I had with it, you know, is that sometimes I—you just kind of stop and say, This is childish, right? That it comes across as this really sort of adolescent fantasy of, you know, the “internal enemy,” and how, you know, Christian warriors like me are going to save America, and all that stuff.

Rosin: And what men do and what women do and all that.

Nichols: Well, that’s the thing. I think, interestingly enough, if there’s stuff in the book that could really hurt him in terms of his nomination, ironically, it is the utter contempt with which he speaks of women not being in combat. And, of course, Hegseth knows better. I mean, in a foreign deployment, there’s a lot of places where a combat role and a noncombat role are separated by yards. Just ask Tammy Duckworth.

But, again, it’s this culture of, What would his future—because you asked what Trump’s future Army would look like. But, again, Hegseth—and I keep coming back to this word adolescent or juvenile—it’s lots of tough white guys with, you know, beautiful women cheering them on, going into battle from foreign shores to the streets of Baltimore or San Francisco, if that’s what it takes, all in the name of this kind of civilizational rescue.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we move from defense to intelligence. Who is Tulsi Gabbard, and what are her qualifications for the director of national intelligence?

[Break]

Rosin: Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s move on to her. She’s his pick for director of national intelligence. She also served in the military, the Hawaii National Guard. You’ve called her a national-security risk, but before we get into that, what does the director of national intelligence do? Why was that office founded?

Nichols: Right. After 9/11, after all the reports and postmortems, one concern was that every part of the American intelligence community, and there’s, like, a dozen and a half agencies that do this stuff—NSA, CIA, the FBI—that they weren’t talking to each other. I have to say, back at the time—I was against this, and I still am—they bolted on this big office called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that DNI is supposed to ride herd on all of these intelligence agencies.

Now you’re supposed to have this one person who represents the community, who kind of straightens out these internal squabbles and has access to everything, because the DNI sits on top of the CIA, the NSA, and all the other agencies. And that’s a really potentially powerful office.

Rosin: Okay, so good timing. It’s now a big and powerful office. That’s the job. What’s your reaction to the pick?

Nichols: Well, she literally has no experience in any of this—nothing, zero, like, not even tangentially. Her supporters say, Well, she’s a lieutenant colonel. Yes, and her deployments were as support missions to a medical unit, a police unit, and a civil-affairs unit.

She’s, even in the military, never had anything to do with intelligence, intelligence gathering, analysis—nothing. Her only other qualifications are that, you know, she was in Congress and attended committee hearings. But she wasn’t on the Intelligence Committee. So you have somebody who has no executive experience, has no intelligence experience, has no background in the field but is, just like Pete Hegseth, totally loyal, totally supportive, and looks good on TV.

Rosin: Right. And why is she a security risk?

Nichols: Because her views about people like Assad and Putin would really be disqualifying.

Rosin: Can you just—what are her views that she’s voiced? What has she said?

Nichols: Right. Putin is misunderstood. We basically caused the Ukraine war. There’s a kind of seriousness issue with Tulsi Gabbard, too. I find her sort of ethereal and kind of weird, to be honest with you. But she said, Zelensky and Putin and Biden—they all need to embrace the spirit of aloha.

Rosin: Oh, boy. Yeah.

Nichols: Yeah. So, you know, I’m sorry, but if you have a top-secret, code-word, compartmented-information clearance, I don’t really want to hear about how you think you should help Putin embrace the spirit of aloha.

With Assad, it’s even scarier. I mean, she has been an apologist and a denier of some of the terrible things he’s done. She met with him outside of government channels when she was a congressperson, and she took a lot of flak for that. And she said, Well, I just think you have to listen to everybody. You can’t solve these problems unless you go and listen.

Rosin: Yeah. So as far as you could tell, what’s the long game here? Is Trump just looking for someone who will stay out of his way so he can communicate with whatever foreign leaders he wants in whatever way he wants, and there won’t be anybody looking over his shoulder?

Nichols: There’s some of that. He resists adult supervision in everything, as he has in his whole life. But I think there’s something much more sinister going on here. If you really want to subvert a democracy, if you really want to undermine the thousands and thousands of people who work in the federal workforce and do things that are pretty scary—you know, investigate your enemies, send troops into the streets, and so on—the three departments you absolutely need are Justice, Defense, and the intelligence community.

Justice because you control the national cops, the FBI, and the national courts. The military because that is a huge source of coercive power, obviously. And the intelligence community because information is power, but also because the intelligence community is one of the other two branches that actually has people in it who have some control over coercive means, who have some ability to use violence.

So I think that he’s going for the trifecta of putting nakedly loyalist, unqualified people into these jobs as a way of saying to everyone in those departments, I’m in control. I run these. You’re going to do what I say. And forget the Constitution. Forget the law. Forget everything except loyalty to Donald Trump. And that means you at the CIA, you at the FBI, you at the Justice Department, the courts, the cops, the military. And I think that’s what’s going on here.

And I’ll add one other thing: If all of these nominees get turfed, that doesn’t mean the people coming in will be better.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You know what this is reminding me of? Our colleague Peter Pomerantsev, who writes about autocracy and democracy—he always talks about how fear and humor are closely linked in an eroding democracy. Because there is a sort of, like, troll-joke factor to some of these nominations, but underneath it is just this chilling fear that you described. Like, a strategy of the triumvirate of power, you know?

Nichols: Absolutely. And they get you used to it by doing things that are so shockingly unthinkable that it becomes thinkable.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I mean, imagine if we were sitting here, you know, five years ago. Actually, let’s talk about Hegseth again for one moment: Hegseth’s extramarital affairs apparently helped cost him the leadership of the VA.

Rosin: Yeah, you know, Tom, I was remembering that when I was first a reporter, the kind of thing that would sink a nominee was you failed to pay your nanny’s taxes.

Nichols: Or John Tower—drinks too much, hard drinker.

Rosin: And now we have a nominee with a sexual-assault allegation. Now, he denies the allegation, but he did end up paying the woman who accused him as part of a nondisclosure agreement. And it’s like, Nah, he’s fine, you know.

Nichols: Yeah, I know: Whatever. I mean, again, writing the kind of book he wrote would almost—the preface to that book should have been, I want to never be confirmed for anything ever.

Rosin: Right.

Nichols: Right? And this was my argument about why we shouldn’t have elected Donald Trump back in 2016. He wears down our standards to the point where vulgarity and crudeness and criminality and incompetence all just become part of our daily life. When I look back ten years, just in a decade of my life, I think, The amount of change that has happened in the political environment in America is astonishing, and purely because we have signed on to this kind of, as you say, sort of comical and trashy but chilling change, you know, step by step by step, every day. We didn’t do this all in one year. We did this, like, you know, the frog-boiling exercise.

Rosin: Yeah, I feel that way about the last two weeks. You glided by this, but I just want to say: Unless Trump gets around the usual rules, all of these nominees do still need to be approved by the Senate.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: So you would likely need four senators to oppose. What are the chances of that happening?

Nichols: My big fear—you know, I suppose I could start every sentence these days with, “My big fear,” you know. (Laughs.) One of my many fears is that Gaetz is the political equivalent of a flash-bang grenade that is just thrown into the room, and everybody’s blinded, and their ears are ringing, and they’re like, Oh my God, Matt Gaetz. What kind of crazy nonsense was this? And when everybody kind of gets off the floor and collects themselves, Trump says, Okay, fine, I’ll give you Gaetz. And then he gets everybody else.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I’m writing something right now, actually, where I argue that the Senate should take these four terrible nominations—Gaetz, Gabbard, Hegseth, and throw in Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.], who is not a threat to the existence of the United States but to the health and well-being of millions of its children—just take these four as a package, and say, Look—you’re gonna get a lot of other stuff. You’re not getting these four. That’s the end of it. Because if they go one by one by one, Trump will wear them down. And I think that’s what I’m worried about. Now, with that said, the Senate, you know, my old neighborhood—the one thing that the senators love is the Senate.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Nichols: Meaning, they love the institution.

Rosin: They love to have the power of the Senate, the decorum of the Senate.

Nichols: Yeah. They believe in the institution. I mean, you know, you can see it with somebody like Susan Collins. Susan Collins loves being a senator and loves the romance of the Senate itself more than, you know, than anything. And they don’t like a president walking in and saying, Listen—I want some guys, and the way you’re going to do this is with a recess appointment, where you’re going to go out and take a walk. They don’t like that. And I wonder if John Thune really wants to begin his time as Senate majority leader—one of the most important positions in the American government—being treated like a stooge.

Rosin: Well, that’s what we’ll be watching for. Thank you for joining me today, Tom.

Nichols: My pleasure, Hanna. Always nice to talk with you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thought I was trying to get him canceled.

What I was really trying to do was get him to talk about being a man. For much of his four-decade career fronting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has seemed a bit like a drag king, exaggerating aspects of the male id to amusing and terrifying effect. He performs in funereal formal wear, sings in a growl that evokes Elvis with rabies, and writes acclaimed songs and books brimming with lust, violence, and—in recent years, as he weathered the death of two sons—pained, fatherly gravitas. His venerated stature is more akin to a knighted icon’s than a punk rocker’s; he has been awarded a badge of honor by the Australian government and a fellowship in the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature, and was even invited to King Charles’s coronation, in 2023.

So when I met the 67-year-old Cave at a Manhattan hotel in August, before the release of the Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album, Wild God, I suspected that I might not be alone in wanting to hear his thoughts about the state of masculinity. Meaning: Why are guys, according to various cultural and statistical indicators, becoming lonelier and more politically extreme? I cited some lyrics from his new album that seemed to be about the way men cope with feelings of insecurity and irrelevance, hoping he would elaborate.

Between the long pauses in Cave’s reply, I could hear the crinkling leather of the oversize chair he sat in. “It may be a need that men have—maybe they’re not feeling like they are valued,” he told me, before cutting himself off. “I don’t want to come on like Jordan Peterson or something,” he said, referring to the controversial, right-leaning psychology professor and podcaster who rails against the alleged emasculating effects of modern culture.

Cave seemed taken aback by the idea that he himself was an authority on the subject. “It feels weird to think that I might be tapping into, or somehow the voice of, what it means to be a man in this world,” he told me. “I’ve never really seen that.” In fact, he said, his songs—especially his recent ones—“are very feminine in their nature.”

“I’m criticized for it, actually,” he went on. Fans write to him and say, “ ‘What’s happened to your fucking music? Grow a pair of balls, you bastard!’ ”

When Cave was 12, growing up in a rural Australian village, his father sat him down and asked him what he had done for humanity. The young Cave was mystified by the question, but his father—an English teacher with novelist ambitions—clearly wanted to pass along a drive to seek greatness, preferably through literary means. Other dads read The Hardy Boys to their kids; Cave’s regaled him with Dostoyevsky, Titus Andronicus, and … Lolita.

Those works’ linguistic elegance and thematic savagery lodged deep in Cave, but music became the medium that spoke best to his emerging point of view—that of an outsider, a bad seed, alienated from ordinary society. When he was 13, a schoolmate’s parents accused him of attempted rape after he tried to pull down their daughter’s underwear; at the school he was transferred to, he became notorious for brawling with other boys. His father’s death in a car crash when Cave was 19, and his own heroin habit at the time, didn’t help his outlook. “I was just a nasty little guy,” he told Stephen Colbert recently. His thrashing, spit-flinging band the Birthday Party earned him comparisons to Iggy Pop, but it wasn’t until he formed the Bad Seeds, in the early ’80s, that his bleak artistic vision ripened.

[Read: Nick Cave is still looking for redemption]

Blending blues, industrial rock, and cabaret into thunderous musical narratives, the Bad Seeds’ songs felt like retellings of primal fables, often warning about the mortal dangers posed by intimacy, vulnerability, and pretty girls. On the 1984 track “From Her to Eternity,” piano chords stabbed like emergency sirens as Cave moaned, “This desire to possess her is a wound.” Its final stanza implied that Cave’s narrator had killed the object of his fascination—a typically grisly outcome in Cave’s early songs. His defining classic, 1988’s “The Mercy Seat,” strapped the listener into the position of a man on death row. It plumbed another of Cave’s central themes: annihilating shame, the feeling of being judged monstrous and fearing that judgment to be true.

As Cave aged and became a father—to four sons by three different women—his vantage widened. The Bad Seeds’ 1997 album, The Boatman’s Call, a collection of stark love songs inspired by his breakup with the singer PJ Harvey, brought him new fans by recasting him as a romantic tragedian. More and more, the libidinal bite of his work seemed satirical. He formed a garage-rock band, Grinderman, whose 2007 single “No Pussy Blues” was a send-up of the mindset of those now called incels, construing sexual frustration as cosmic injustice. (Cave spat, “I sent her every type of flower / I played a guitar by the hour / I patted her revolting little Chihuahua / But still she just didn’t want to.”) In his sensationally filthy 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, he set out to illustrate the radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s appraisal that “the male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others.” (The actor Matt Smith will soon play the novel’s protagonist, an inveterate pervert, in a TV adaptation.)

But the Cave of today feels far removed from the theatrical grossness of his past, owing to personal horrors. In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff while reportedly on LSD; in 2022, another son, Jethro, died at 31 after struggles with mental health and addiction. “I’ve had, personally, enough violence,” Cave told me. The murder ballads he once wrote were “an indulgence of someone that has yet to experience the ramifications of what violence actually has upon a person—if I’m looking at the death of my children as violent acts, which they are to some degree.”

Nick Cave and his early band the Birthday Party at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, March 26, 1983 (Michael Macioce / Getty)

Music beckoned as a means of healing. The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album, Ghosteen, was a shivery, synth-driven tone poem in which Cave tried to commune with his lost son in the afterlife; by acclamation, it’s his masterpiece. Wild God marks another sonic and temperamental reset. Its music is a luminous fusion of gospel and piano pop: more U2 than the Stooges, more New Testament than Old. Compared with his earlier work, these albums have “a more fluid, more watery sort of feel,” he said. “Which—it’s dangerous territory here—but I guess you could see as a feminine trait.”

On a level deeper than sound, Cave explained, his recent music is “feminine” because of its viewpoint. His lyrics now account not just for his own feelings, but for those of his wife, Susie, the mother of Arthur and his twin brother, Earl. In the first song on Ghosteen, for example, a woman is sitting in a kitchen, listening to music on the radio, which is exactly what Susie was doing when she learned what had happened to Arthur.

“After my son died, I had no understanding of what was going on with me at all,” Cave said. “But I could see Susie. I could see this sort of drama playing out in front of me. Drama—that sounds disparaging, but I don’t mean that. It felt like I was trying to understand what was happening to a mother who had lost her child.” His own subjectivity became “hopelessly and beautifully entangled” with hers. On Ghosteen, “it was very difficult to have a clean understanding of whose voice I actually was in some of these songs.”

That merging of perspectives reflects more than just the shared experience of suffering. It is part of what Cave sees as a transformation of his worldview—from inward-looking to outward-looking, from misanthrope to humanist. Arthur’s death made him realize that he was part of a universal experience of loss, which in turn meant that he was part of the social whole. Whereas he was once motivated to make art to impress and shock the world, he now wanted to help people, to transmute gnawing guilt into something good. “I feel that, as his father, he was my responsibility and I looked away at the wrong time, that I wasn’t sufficiently vigilant,” he said in the 2022 interview collection Faith, Hope and Carnage. He added, speaking of his and Susie’s creative output, “There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness, that is not saying we are just so sorry.”

On the Red Hand Files, the epistolary blog that Cave started in 2018, he replies to questions from the public concerning all manner of subjects: how he feels about religion (he doesn’t identify as Christian, yet he attends church every week), what he thinks of cancel culture (against it, “mercy’s antithesis”), whether he likes raisins (they have a “grim, scrotal horribleness, but like all things in this world—you, me and every other little thing—they have their place”).

At least a quarter of the messages he receives from readers express one idea—“The world is shit,” as he put it. “That has a sort of range: from people that just see everything is corrupt from a political point of view, to people that just see no value in themselves, in human beings, or in the world.” Cave recognizes that outlook from his “nasty little guy” days—but he fears that nihilism has moved from the punk fringe to the mainstream. The misery in his inbox reflects a culture that is “anti-sacred, secular by nature, unmysterious, unnuanced,” he said. He thinks music and faith offer much-needed medicine, helping to re-enchant reality.

[From the October 2024 issue: Leonard Cohen’s prophetic battle against male egoism]

Cave has been heartened to see so many people evidently feeling the same way. Back when Jordan Peterson was first making his mark as a public figure, Cave devoured his lectures about the Bible, he told me. “They were seriously beautiful things. I heard reports about people in his classes; it was like being on acid or something like that. Just listening to this man speak about these sorts of things—it was so deeply complex. And putting the idea of religion back onto the table as a legitimate intellectual concern.”

But over time, he lost interest in Peterson as he watched him get swept up in the internet’s endless, polarized culture wars. Twitter in particular, he said, has “had a terrible, diminishing effect on some great minds.”

The artist’s job, as Cave has come to see it, is to work against this erosion of ambiguity and complication, using their creative powers to push beyond reductive binaries, whether they’re applied to politics, gender, or the soul. “I’m evangelical about the transcendent nature of music itself,” he said. “We can listen to some deeply flawed individuals create the most beautiful things imaginable. The distance from what they are as human beings to what they’re capable of producing can be extraordinary.” Music, he added, can “redeem the individual.”

This redemptive spirit hums throughout Wild God. One song tells of a ghostly boy sitting at the foot of the narrator’s bed, delivering a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy.” The album joins in that call with its surging, uplifting sound. The final track, “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” is a straightforward hymn, suitable to be sung from the pews of even the most traditional congregations.

But the album is not entirely a departure from Cave’s old work; he has not fully evolved from “living shit-post to Hallmark card,” as he once joked in a Red Hand Files entry. “Frogs” begins with a stark reference to the tale of Cain and Abel—“Ushering in the week, he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone”—and builds to Cave singing, in ecstatic tones, “Kill me!” His point is that “joy is not happiness—it’s not a simple emotion,” he told me. “Joy, in its way, is a form of suffering in itself. It’s rising out of an understanding of the base nature of our lives into an explosion of something beautiful, and then a kind of retreat.”

A few songs portray an old man—or, seemingly interchangeably, an “old god” or a “wild god”—on a hallucinatory journey around the globe, lifting the spirits of the downtrodden wherever he goes. At times, the man comes off like a deluded hero, or even a problematic one: “It was rape and pillage in the retirement village / But in his mind he was a man of great virtue and courage,” Cave sings on the album’s title track. In Cave’s view, though, this figure “is a deeply sympathetic character,” he told me, a person who feels “separated from the world” and is “looking for someone that will see him of some value.”

As with Ghosteen, the album mixes Susie’s perspective with Cave’s. One song, “Conversion,” was inspired by an experience, or maybe a vision, that she had—and that she asked her husband not to publicly disclose in detail. “There is some gentle tension between my wife, who’s an extremely private person, and my own role, which is someone that pretty much speaks about pretty much everything,” Cave said.

In the song, the old god shambles around a town whose inhabitants watch him “with looks on their faces worse than grief itself”—perhaps pity, perhaps judgment. Then he sees a girl with long, dark hair. They embrace—and erupt into a cleansing flame, curing the man of his pain. As Cave described this moment in the song to me, he flared his eyes and made an explosive noise with his mouth. In my mind, I could see the old god, and he looked just like Cave.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Nick Cave Wants to Be Good.”

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

How do you know when a democracy slips into autocracy or fascism or some other less-free and less-savory form of society? Do they hang out a sign? Post it on X? Announce it on the newly state-controlled news channel? In the run-up to Donald Trump’s election, and even all the way back to his first administration, people who study autocracies in other countries have shown us how to spot the clues. One reliable teacher has been Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc. and co-host of the podcast series Autocracy in America. Over the years, Applebaum has situated Trump’s musings in a broader historical context. She’s pointed out, for example, that when Trump fired government watchdogs in his last administration or talked about deploying troops against protesters, those are actions that other dictators have taken.

In the last few months of his campaign, Trump was free and open with his dictatorial impulses as he talked about punishing “enemies from within.” Now that he’s won, have we crossed the line into a different kind of country? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Applebaum joins political writer McKay Coppins to help us know how to find the line. Does this resounding win mean the electorate gave Trump a mandate to act on all his impulses? Does he mean what he says? And how will we know?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. So Donald Trump won. It’s looking like he won every swing state and, also, like there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost. He won even though, in the last months of his campaign, he was at his darkest and most crude. None of that mattered, apparently.

So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers: Anne Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy—hi, Anne—

Anne Applebaum: Hello.

Rosin: —and political reporter McKay Coppins. Hi, McKay.

McKay Coppins: Hey.

Rosin: So, McKay, what do we know about how he won? The particular coalition, the demographics—what do we know so far?

Coppins: Well, you just got at it. I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won—because the polls were so tight, and everyone was warning us to be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious—but the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group is something that I think most people were not prepared for.

Just to run through a few of the highlights: He made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls. It depends on which exit poll you’re looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between eight and 15 points. That is a lot less than Biden’s roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.

He made some more modest gains with Black voters, especially young Black men. A lot of Trump’s gains were concentrated with men. One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men; the other one showed him narrowly losing them. But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.

And so, you know, you take all this together, and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate. And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.

Rosin: And is it just men? Like, everyone you mentioned were men. It’s like, Latino men, young Black men—

Coppins: It definitely was. He definitely did better—

Rosin: (Laughs.) Sorry, McKay.

Coppins: (Laughs.) Not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men. Though, I will note that, coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris.

And we’re so early now that it’s still hard to tell from the exit-poll data how much that happened, but it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election. He won them narrowly, but there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp. That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.

Rosin: So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.

Anne, you have been helping us understand, over many years, what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy. How do you read this moment?

Applebaum: So I read this moment not so much as something new but as a continuation of things that we’ve seen in the past. I felt that, during the campaign, it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.

I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic. It’s called Autocracy in America. When he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines. He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs. He leaked classified information. You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, kind of deploying troops in American cities.

Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him, and then he hid them from the FBI. I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he’s above the rule of law, who’s seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security, clearance, guidelines, and so on.

And those things do represent a break with all previous presidents in modern history: Republican, Democrat, left wing, right wing—all of them. We didn’t have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.

The fact is that people either liked it that he was doing that—they found the transgressiveness attractive, along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them “vermin” and the “enemy within” and so on. Either that was appealing—and, of course, that kind of language historically has been appealing; it does appeal to people—or they didn’t care.

But that means that there has been a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for. And that shift clearly precedes Trump. I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term. He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power. But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.

Rosin: So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?

Applebaum: No. I mean, I thought from the beginning of this election campaign—I thought it was possible that he would win. I mean, I suppose, particularly the last couple weeks of his campaign, when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic, you know, I wondered whether some of that would bother people.

You know, the imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney, you know, talking about his enemies as the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood—these are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven’t been used in American politics before. So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.

But am I entirely surprised that they weren’t? No, I’m not. I think the population is now immune to that kind of language, or maybe they like it.

Coppins: Yeah, I would just say: I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era, is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that, in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed disqualifying.

He has managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay or, at least, that it doesn’t matter that much. And looking forward, I do think that’s going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.

Rosin: I mean, there’s one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is: We woke up today; we have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy. But we actually don’t. All we have confirmation of is that people either don’t care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don’t notice, they like it, or they don’t put it in a broader historical context, which is that these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world. Right? That’s all we know so far.

Applebaum: Yeah, that’s all we know. That’s all we know. We also don’t know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do. I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants. He talked about having people around him who were loyalists. That’s what political scientists would describe as “capturing the state”—so taking over government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody but making part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.

He talked about doing that. Will he try it again? Maybe, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him. As we’re speaking, we don’t know about the House, so we’ll see. They might make it easy. Will the judiciary support him? Some of it will. So will he do it? I don’t know.

General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff, has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about: We should investigate or get the IRS on—at that time he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe. Maybe now he’s talked about punishing Adam Schiff—who’s a congressman, now a senator, who he doesn’t like—or Nancy Pelosi.

Will he do it? Will he use the IRS to go after people? I mean, that’s another thing that happens in failing democracies. And it’s also something that has happened in U.S. history before, so it’s not unimaginable.

So I don’t know whether he’ll do these things, but it’s now on the record that he has said he would, or he said he wants to. In some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that. That’s what Project 2025 was, in part. And none of it bothered people, and so we have to assume that it’s a possibility.

Coppins: I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it’s worth noting that, while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy—and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue—a lot of voters were not thinking about these things, and they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies. For example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern. And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.

And while we can sit back and look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy. But I think it’s also good to point that out because Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate, coming out of this election, and say: I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power. He’ll implicitly say, They want me to abuse my power. They’ve given me permission to do whatever I want. And I think that it’s worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.

Applebaum: Yeah, but that’s not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you’re voting for stands for. And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy, and by deciding you don’t care about those things, you do give him that mandate.

Coppins: But my concern is that there’s a risk of a kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election, where we will decide that: Look—Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat, therefore he will be an autocrat, and democracy has failed.

And I think that it’s worth parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that a majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate. Whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been, I don’t think we should let—it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that, because he’s said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.

Rosin: Yeah. One way of seeing the vote is that it wasn’t at all a referendum on Trump. It was people saying: My life was better in 2019, so I’m going with Trump. And I think why what you’re saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, People who voted for him voted for everything he stands for. And what follows from that is a sense of alienation. Like, This is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.

Anyway, Anne, you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after “enemies from within,” whether they were immigrants, Democrats, or us, the journalists. And you have taught us to take leaders’ words seriously. And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, Oh, this is hyperbole. Stop taking it so seriously. So how do we know the difference?

Applebaum: We’ll know by his actions. Maybe it’s true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever—the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture—whatever it is that they’re angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them, and that was appealing to them. I’m sure that’s a piece of the explanation.

And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people, like The Wall Street Journal editorial board or the writer Niall Ferguson, who said, Oh, these things just don’t matter. It’s just hyperbole. You know, That’s just how he talks. So we’ll see, and we’ll wait for it.

Rosin: McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration, includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy. How much do you think that’s a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?

Coppins: I would take it seriously. I think that there is a risk that—because Donald Trump, realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign—that we collectively take him at his word, and I don’t think we should.

I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration. I reported, back in December, that, in talking to people in Trump world about future appointees, the watchword was obedience. They talked about how Trump felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him, to keep the train on the tracks. And he doesn’t want people like that in his next administration. He doesn’t want adults in the room. He doesn’t want James Mattises or Mark Milleys or John Kellys. He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or, out of a sense of ambition or cravenness, are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.

And so when you look at Project 2025 and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president, it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are.

A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles. And so I think, when we talk through his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy. So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement? It’s entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation.

Who does he appoint as attorney general? That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump world told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term betrayed him. So is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz? These are the questions that we’re going to have to be answering, and we’ll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those short lists emerge.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we’re going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.

[Break]

Rosin: Something else I’ve been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations. They are expensive. They’re actually quite difficult to carry out. They require a lot of manpower, local and national. Is that bombast? Is that a realistic threat? How will we know the difference?

Coppins: Yeah. Again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot, who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example. But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail: He said that he would build massive detention camps, implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.

He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who were suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs, without a court hearing.

He said he would end “catch and release,” reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy. And I think it’s notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.

Take all these together—I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders, and there’s not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress. There are some things, like building massive detention centers, that would require a lot of money. Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money. So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.

Rosin: Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you? Aid to Ukraine is one that I’m thinking of. Are there others where you’re going to be vigilantly watching: Okay, he said X. Is he going to do X?

Applebaum: Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category. It’s not about American autocracy and democracy. It’s a question of our position in the world. Are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp, which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp? Will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China? Or will we not?

And this, again, from Trump world, I know a lot of people who spent a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I’ll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it. And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are people in Trump’s orbit.

I mean, it ranges from, We’re just going to cut off all the funding, to, We’re going to give Ukraine to the Russians, to something quite different. There are people who said: No. We’re going to threaten the Russians. We’re going to tell them we’re bringing in a thousand tanks and a thousand airplanes unless you pull back. And so that’s another version that I’ve heard. There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia—you know, some deal. But honestly, I don’t know.

Rosin: But those are legitimate foreign-policy debates. You can be an isolationist democracy. Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be?

Applebaum: No, although there are connections and have always been—we haven’t always acknowledged them—between America’s alliances and America’s democracy. So the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies, that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War, was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened.

It’s well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil-rights movement was the feeling that: Here’s this thing we stand for. We stand for democracy. We stand for the rule of law, and yet we don’t have it in our own country. And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly. And it’s not a bad reason why that happened, but it’s part of the explanation.

You know, Who are your allies? Who are your friends? This affects, also, what kind of country you are and your own behavior. Who are your relationships? You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia and North Korea, then we’re a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.

Coppins: The only other kind of policy area that I’ll be keeping an eye on is tariffs. He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.

A lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation. And given that he was just elected, in large part, on voter frustration with inflation, it’s an open question whether he’ll follow through on this. He clearly does not believe—and this is one of the few issues that he’s been pretty consistent on his entire life—he does not believe it would cause inflation. Almost every economics expert disagrees with him.

And in his first term, there were people in the White House who blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did, in fact to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork. Will there be somebody like that this time? Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this? That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.

Rosin: And what are the bigger implications of tariffs? Like, that could just be a legitimate economic debate. Some people believe in tariffs. Some people don’t believe in tariffs. And it’s an experiment and, you know, economic protectionism.

Coppins: I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues, that certainly, to various degrees, there have been protectionist policy makers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades. It could cause a trade war. It could interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we’re imposing tariffs on. There are a lot of trickle-down implications.

But yes, I do think it’s important. And I like that what you’re doing here is separating the issues that are kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy. I don’t think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans, and so that’s why I think it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Rosin: Okay. There’s obviously going to be some resistance to Trump. Let’s start simple: McKay, who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?

Coppins: So, obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker, would, I think by default, become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.

If Democrats don’t take control of the House, I think it’s a very open question and, frankly, it’s one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago. Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era. The fact that he stayed in for so long, only to drop out in the final months of the election, meant that Democrats didn’t really have time to have the big intraparty debate about what they should stand for, who their standard-bearer should be.

That debate will be happening now. And it’s going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters. I also think it’s healthy to have these conversations. And I think Democrats, in some ways, are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention. And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it, because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating: Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.

One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that Democrats need to decide that they’re okay with a little messiness in letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.

Rosin: Anne, when other countries have faced a moment like this—a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it’s unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment—how do you move through a moment like that? Like, how have other countries successfully moved to a healthier place?

Applebaum: I mean, it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions. The only real example I can give: I live part of the time in Poland. We had an autocratic, populist government takeover in 2015. They did try to capture the state.

They did it pretty successfully. They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube. Poland has some state companies, and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on. They enriched themselves, and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again.

Remember that another sign of autocracy and a very, very important thing to watch for is corruption. Because when you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors general and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt. And we’ve already got that problem in our system, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

Essentially, what happened was the building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center-left to the center-right—kind of center-left liberal, center-right—of people who wanted something. It was, in part, an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn’t so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.

The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government. But it took eight years. It was a long process. And along the way, a lot of money was stolen. And the institutions declined, and the country is worse governed, and there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.

But there’s a look for coalitions. There was some internal soul-searching about what it was we did that—Why did we lose? But I’m not sure even how useful all of that was. I mean, what mattered, in the end, was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.

Rosin: Yeah. That is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don’t have to be for the restoration of democracy. They can be against mass deportation, against tariffs. Like, you can form coalitions, if you tell yourself, No, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies. That is not what happened in the last election, coalitions can form—popular coalitions—around all kinds of issues.

Applebaum: Yeah. I mean, you could have a coalition that really cares about women’s issues and women’s rights and abortion rights. And you can have another one that really cares about the environment. And you can have another one that really cares about corruption. And you link them together, and then you have a movement.

Rosin: Right.

Applebaum: And that’s sometimes more effective. I mean, democracy is an abstract word that doesn’t necessarily mean things to people. It has to be made real through something that people experience. And maybe that’s how we have to look at it too.

Rosin: Yeah. I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven’t quite touched on, is the truth-and-lies problem. I find that so overwhelming, like, the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6 and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio. And, as a journalist, I always find that an impossible barrier to cross. But maybe you’re suggesting ways to cross that barrier is: Well, people believe smaller truths.

Applebaum: It’s one of the ways. We now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities. For me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn’t so much Trump. It was Musk. Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social-media platform, was saying things that he must have known not to be true: falsehoods about immigration, about the election.

He was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them. And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power. He was showing us that he can decide what people think. And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren’t true seem true. And that—I’m afraid it was really successful.

Rosin: Right.

Coppins: And the other thing that I think we’ve seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, and make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try.

I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters. It wasn’t so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate. But they would throw their hands up and say: Yeah, they all lie, right? Who even knows what’s true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.

Applebaum: That is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It’s not so much that you’re expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or the horror of Western civilization. But you’re expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you’ve been told that you throw your hands up in the air, and you go home, and you say, I don’t know anything. I can’t be involved in this. I don’t want anything to do with politics. I’m just going to live my life.

And that turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.

Rosin: Well, Anne and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future. But now we’re back at this big veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end. Is there some way to turn that ship?

I’ll ask you again, Anne: How have people turned that ship when you find a culture, a populace that’s just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies? How have other countries successfully crawled out of that disinformation?

Applebaum: You build relationships of trust around other things. I mean, almost as we were just talking about, you find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people. That’s the only way.

Rosin: All right. Well, Anne, McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.

Coppins: Thank you.

Applebaum: Thanks.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

When the 1997 comedy Austin Powers needed a song to send up the swinging ’60s in its joyfully absurd opening sequence, the movie could have opted for obvious touchstones, such as British-invasion rock or sitar-drenched psychedelia. Instead, it used an offbeat bit of samba-jazz by Quincy Jones. This was an inspired choice. Jones’s 1962 song “Soul Bossa Nova” was certainly an artifact of its decade, reflecting a then-emerging international craze for Brazilian rhythms. But the track was more than just a time capsule; its hooting percussion and saucy flutes exploded from the speakers in a way that still sounds original, even alien, decades later.

Jones, the legendary polymath who died at age 91 on Sunday, spent a lifetime making music like this—music that defined its era by transcending it. He’s best associated with the gleaming, lush sound of jazz and pop in the ’70s and ’80s, as most famously heard on Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. But his impact was bigger than any one sound or epoch, as Jones used his talent and expertise to design a future we’re still catching up to.

Jones was born into wretched conditions in Depression-era Chicago: His mother was sent to a mental hospital when he was 7, leaving him to be temporarily raised by a grandmother who was so poor that she cooked rats to eat. When Jones was 11, after his family moved to Washington State, he and his brother broke into a building looking for food and came across a piano; playing around with the instrument lit a fire in the young Jones. He’d spend his teenage years hanging out with Ray Charles and playing trumpet with the Count Basie Orchestra; at age 20, he started touring the world as a member of Lionel Hampton’s big band. After producing Dinah Washington’s 1955 album, For Those in Love, he went to Paris to study under the famed classical-music teacher Nadia Boulanger, who’d also tutored Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

These early brushes with genius—and global travels that exposed him to far-flung musical traditions—gave him the skills he’d draw on for the rest of his life. Boulanger, Jones would often later say, drilled into him an appreciation for the endless possibilities contained within the confines of music theory. Mastery, she told him, lay in understanding how previous greats had creatively used the same 12 notes available to everyone else. Jones took this idea to heart. His work was marked by a blend of compositional rigor and freedom; knowing what had come before allowed him to arrange familiar sounds in ways that were, in one way or another, fresh.

Take, for example, Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party,” which Jones produced. The song is a key text of mid-century girl-group pop—Phil Spector tried to take the song for the Crystals—but what made it soar were the Jonesian touches: harmonic decisions that feel ever so off, Latin syncopation pulsing throughout. You can hear similarly eclectic, colorful elements in another American standard that Jones arranged: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s 1964 version of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which Buzz Aldrin listened to before stepping onto the lunar surface in 1969).  

Though schooled by classical academics and jazz insiders, Jones seemed to have a pop soul: He used precise technique not to impress aficionados but to convey emotion in an accessible, bold way. “The Streetbeater,” the theme song for Sanford & Sons, used prickly, interlaced percussion to conjure sizzling excitement; a tempo change in “Killer Joe,” from Jones’s 1969 album, Walking in Space, opened up an oasis of cooling flute. The 1985 African-famine-relief anthem “We Are the World” was a particularly gracious use of talent. Not just any producer could have brought 46 vocalists—including such distinctive voices as Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner—into one coherent, catchy whole.

Jones’s signature collaborator was Michael Jackson. It was a kinship that made sense: The two men shared a knack for rhythm, a sense of history, and perfectionism. “He had a perspective on details that was unmatched,” Jones said of Jackson in a 2018 GQ interview. “His idols are Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, all of that. And he paid attention, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.” For all of Jackson’s scandals and eccentricities, the music he made with Jones has never been overshadowed. The songs are just too intricately lovely, delighting hips and hearts and heads all at once, to be denied.

[Read: AI can’t make music]

As Jones settled into living-icon status, he tried to pass his wisdom to new generations. In 1992, he founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe; in 2017, he launched Qwest TV, a streaming service for videos of jazz performances. He kept working with young talents, such as Amy Winehouse in 2010 and the avant-pop composer Jacob Collier much more recently. Even so, later in life, Jones liked to gripe about the state of pop music. In his view, modern artists weren’t educated or broad-minded enough to break new ground. “Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain,” he told New York magazine in 2018. “Music is emotion and science.” He added, “Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?”

Yet clearly, he still has disciples today—though perhaps some of them are misunderstanding his lessons, trying nostalgically to imitate his work rather than studying his techniques to create something different. I feel, for example, conflicted about the Weeknd, a pastiche-y pop star who’s obsessed with recapturing the magic of Jones and Jackson’s hot streak. Jones himself appeared on an interlude on the Weeknd’s 2022 release, Dawn FM. He relayed a story about childhood trauma rippling throughout his adult life, and concluded by saying, “Looking back is a bitch, isn’t it?” The point, he seemed to say, was to use the past to keep moving forward.