Ctd.... You can frame it in material terms. Modernity grants life without children more extensive pleasures than existed for most people in the past—you can take a vacation, you can summon up any movie ever made on Netflix. There’s much more that you can do instead of having kids. It also removes the strong economic incentive, the prospect that kids are going to work on your farm or run your business. There are more economic costs to having kids and fewer economic benefits. That’s not a complete explanation, but it’s a strong one. The question then is what pushes against this tendency? The left tends to say, this is a material problem and so it requires material solutions. I agree with some of that argument. But the evidence is that those policies cost a great deal. You can’t spend $2,000 per child and expect to get anywhere.

Some conservatives would say that the core issue in modern life is intentionality. There’s an interesting divide here. On the libertarian pro-natalist right, there are some who argue that people do think intentionally about having kids but they leave it too late; what’s needed is a technological solution, pushing the menopause out. For me, it’s a cultural question: you need norms and scripts that encourage people to think intentionally about having kids. Even in a world where everyone got fifteen more childbearing years, you would still need to create stronger cultural structures that encourage family formation. How you do that is, of course, an impossible question. Then there’s the reality that, as I mentioned, something has changed in the last five or ten years that is not about political economy. The Scandinavians were doing okay, and now they’re not. East Asia was doing badly, now they’re doing terribly. Maybe it’s something else, but it seems likely to be a question of technological shock. But if people are not having kids because digital life makes it impossible for the sexes to get together, then redistribution—giving them all an extra $5,000—is not going to help. And this is where I really don’t have definitive answers. But it is killing us, literally, in ways that I wouldn’t have anticipated even ten years ago. So, with technology we’re exiting decadence upwards, towards dramatic change. With demographics we’re exiting it downwards, towards collapse.
And politics?

With politics, I’m just not sure. Trump and the populist revolts have succeeded in defeating attempts to restore the status quo. With Biden’s win in 2020, Trump could appear as a spasm of resistance that had failed, and we were going back to the post-Cold War normal. We’re not in post-Cold War normal any more, and I don’t think it’s coming back. We’re in a weirder zone; and, once the left figures out what it’s doing, any left-wing politics is also going to be weirder than resistance liberalism. During Trump’s first term, the internet still acted as a tool of political consolidation and control. A few social media companies policed speech; there were some wacky outsiders, figures like Bronze Age Pervert, but they were marginal to the culture. In the last four or five years, it feels like that has broken down and the media landscape is now totally fragmented, in ways that no one can police. It’s, like, Hey, antisemitism! There’s antisemitism on Joe Rogan; you know, Luigi Mangione has a lot of fans. There is no mechanism to police that sort of weirdness. So, in that sense, politics is more destabilized than it was even in Trump’s first term.

Does that mean that a new form of politics has emerged—a post-decadent politics? If doge is tremendously successful, and Republicans sweep the 2026 midterms and consolidate a new majority, then maybe you could say that. I would not bet on it at the moment. It’s unclear what the effects of tariffs, doge, deregulation and everything else will be. But what I would bet on is more actual political instability, as opposed to fake political instability, over the next ten or twenty years. So, at the very least, decadence is being shaken. At the same time, American culture still feels decadent to me—movies, tv, everything. The internet is a tool of decadence, it traps everyone in an eternal present and kills off certain options for creativity. I don’t see anyone finding a way out of that yet. So, if you asked, what’s the most persistently decadent part of American life right now, I’d say pop culture and entertainment.
A few responses to that. First, why should ai not be as much a tool of decadence as the internet? As you know, it just takes what’s already there, in the sense of being trained on an extant digital corpus. It’s literally decadent in the sense that you only get what you already have. And in the way that the internet didn’t really grow the economy as much as everyone thought, why won’t we see the same—with the main difference being that we’ll never talk to a real person at a call centre again? Second, and more broadly, one thing you mention in The Decadent Society as a possible exit from decadence is space exploration. But what could be more tellingly decadent than a latter-day resuscitation of this burned-out dream of the American mid-century? Isn’t reviving that frontier a kind of ‘greatest-hits’ retrospective enterprise? Surely the most striking example of a nation’s emergence from decline in recent decades is that of China, which did so by incorporating elements quite foreign to its previous traditions: Soviet state socialism and Western-style capitalism. If American society were to emerge from decadence, why should we think it would do so by harking back to its own national traditions, rather than something completely different?

To work backwards: generally, escapes from decadence are remixes, they’re neither whole breaks nor whole returns. So I would argue that China’s emergence from decadence was a mixture of adopted Western elements from outside, state socialism and Western capitalism, with a revival of a particular version of Confucianism—capitalism with Confucian characteristics. That has hit some limits, but it did produce something distinctive for a while. The Renaissance itself was a merger of recovered Greco-Roman culture with new scientific advances; it looked back and it looked forward. With the space programme: if all we do is go back to the moon and potter around there—and maybe that’s all we can do—then that would seem decadent; just re-playing the greatest hits. A Mars colony doesn’t seem decadent, but the question is: can you get one?

Something similar applies to economic policy. I wrote a column at the time of Trump’s second inauguration, about Musk and Vance: the populist, protectionist Vancean impulse and the vaulting Muskian impulse of technological ambition. I argued that if conservatism was going to be successful, it would be through some new mixture of the two that would be different from the fusion of the 1950s. Now, there’s a version of that which could be unsuccessful; where tariffs slow growth and kill the stock market; where thousands of government employees get fired, everyone hates that and it fails. But if you’re looking for an escape from decadence, you’re looking for remixes, taking things from the past and marrying them to new ideas. The same would be true on the left; you would expect a new and successful left-wing politics to draw from the New Deal and Civil Rights traditions, but also import some entirely new model of politics: to be non-decadent, it would have to do something new.

On ai, I think it depends on how far the technology actually goes. If it stops where it is now, then I agree, it seems likely to resolve itself back into decadence, into internet slop—ai scriptwriters for terrible Netflix shows, no one ever speaking to a real person again, and so on. If it goes further, though, even if it has bad social effects—even if it destroys us all—it wouldn’t be decadent. If we’ve invented a robot mind capable of curing cancer, I don’t think that’s decadent any more. But there’s a related point, which gets us back to demographics. ai could deepen decadence to a point where it just yields collapse: a world of ai porn, ai girlfriends, ai entertainment, ai old-age retirement homes, and so on. That’s a world that gets everybody to South Korea really fast. It’s not a terrain of stagnation; it’s somewhere worse. Even a limited form of ai probably gets us somewhere worse than the decadence I was describing in 2018.
How does the rise of charismatic Christianity fit into this? What are its political effects? And why, in this secular age, is this extreme form of religious expression, which seems at once anti-modern and almost postmodern, so successful—in the Americas, and in Africa, as well?

You could say that it is well adapted to the landscape of religious competition, in a way that more hierarchical forms are not. It’s non-denominational, it’s start-up-oriented, it’s entrepreneurial and merges well with a gospel of upward mobility, an emphasis on getting your life in order—quit drinking, get a job, these kind of things. In that sense, it’s more nimble and individual-oriented than other forms of Christian faith. And then, in the marketplace it supplies a real proof of concept in a secular world, in that you are clearly more likely to have a religious experience in a Pentecostalist church than in most Protestant and Catholic ones. And that’s important, not just as marketing, but as a counterpoint to disenchantment. The world may seem secular and disenchanted, but you can go to church on Sunday and speak in tongues. You’re going to get a word from the Lord, the Holy Spirit will enter into you. That’s a powerful thing to offer. As a kid, I saw it happen to my own parents. That’s not the only reason that I’m religious today, but I am, in my own way, a testament to the effectiveness of charismatic Christianity as a counter to a disenchanted world.

In terms of its political effects: the problem with supernaturalism is that, as an epistemology, it lends itself to a general openness to weird beliefs in every shape and form. It’s anti-intellectual. Once you’ve accepted that the pillars of secular knowledge have various holes in them, you see the holes everywhere. This isn’t just true for religion. People who have one bad experience with the medical consensus become open to every weird idea about medicine—this is rfk Jr, all the way. Once you have accepted that the supernatural can intrude on your life, you become more open to every kind of strange theory. I think it is correct to think that the supernatural can intrude, but it does also create epistemological dangers for thinking about politics. Under decadent conditions, fewer people are going to believe in the devil; under non-decadent, revivalist conditions, more people will believe in him. But with that come big risks that don’t obtain at the end of history. The end of history is a tamer and safer world.
How would you characterize the divergent ideological families of the right and far-right clustered around the second Trump Administration? How stable is this coalition?

During Trump’s first term, there was a lot of intellectual ferment on the right, partly because there was so little content at the top that everyone could project their own theories—Oren Cass and Julius Krein versus, say, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. The second Trump Administration has more energy at the top that people want to associate with. But an unsuccessful government will quickly alienate many of the groupings that currently support it. In addition to the older tendencies, you could distinguish three new factions. First, there’s a kind of neo-neoconservatism which is really just anti-woke liberalism that’s moved right. Let’s call that the Free Press constituency. Then there is the alienated-populist masculinity constituency, the Joe Rogan constituency. The Free Press grouping is more likely to become alienated and swing politically away from maga. The Roganites are more likely to become alienated and depoliticized, or else could drift towards conspiratorialism. You see some of this already, with Rogan entertaining the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who’s into quasi-antisemitic conspiracy.

Then there is a technocratic faction, in parallel to the Ezra Klein–Derek Thompson abundance-agenda liberals, coming out of Silicon Valley. These people expected Musk to be their champion, to some degree, and are currently perturbed and disappointed by what doge is doing. They are state-capacity libertarians, very invested in the idea that the government should spend less on old-age pensions and more on scientific research. I think they are torn right now between justifying some of the things the Trump Administration is doing, and feeling that it’s all just about Elon’s obsession with headcounts in Federal agencies, which is not what they’re all about. Of the older groups, religious conservatism, which I suppose is where I belong, is adrift right now. There is a cultural interest in religion, which may be a post-decadence indicator. But religious-conservative politics doesn’t know what it’s doing right now. It’s won some victories and is playing defence around them, on abortion, for example. But it has jettisoned some of its compassionate conservatism and is subordinate to populist impulses. Religious conservatism has a lot of voters behind it, but is not a big player in the debates of the Trump Administration.
Who in your view should be regarded as the Trump Administration’s key intellectuals? Would Vance, not just as office holder but as writer and thinker, be a significant figure?

How much influence Vance will have remains to be seen. The people with the most influence over policy right now are Trump himself, Stephen Miller and perhaps the Vice President. Of course, we’re only a couple of months in, but overall I don’t think this is an administration that’s trying to translate some broader intellectual programme into policy. The things it’s doing bear some resemblance to some of the ideas that were argued about by populist and nationalist intellectuals, by the people writing for American Affairs, by Yoram Hazony. Those views have had some influence, but to understand the fundamental formula, it’s better just to think of it, so far, as an expression of Trump himself. There’s a particular vision of government reform, embraced by Musk, that dovetails with older libertarian small-government ideas. But it’s a weird fusion of that with Musk’s Silicon Valley ‘fire ten people and then rehire them’ model. I don’t think you would have predicted the doge experiment by reading the journals of the right from 2016 or 2020. You might have predicted it by combining a little Grover Norquist with what Musk did at Twitter.

There was a lot of intellectual work done on the right around the idea of how to capture and reshape institutions. If there was a through line of new-right projects and arguments, prior to Trump’s return to power, it was the idea that the gop should not just be a limited-government party—it was interested in using the tools of government to advance its own ideas. A lot of what is being done now is just a return to government cutting, but with a stronger dose of the friend-enemy distinction. It’s cutting plus trying to figure out how to purge your ideological enemies from the government. But that combination is ultimately much narrower than what my reading of the new right would have been. The ambitious thing would have been to use the Department of Education to further a conservative view of what study could be. Dismantling the Department of Education is just what Reagan wanted to do: it’s typical fiscal conservatism. The fact that we’re back to ‘if we cut this everything will work out well’ is a disappointment. Remaking the Federal bureaucracy is not what’s happening, as far as I can tell, with the National Institutes of Health cuts or Centers for Disease Control reorganizations. It’s just saying, ‘How many people can we fire without having the institution stop working?’ None of that seems like the culmination of a grand intellectual new-right project. It’s classic conservative government-cutting married to trying to eliminate wokeness and dei.

To the extent that there is a bold new set of ideas, it is arguably the policies on trade. There, you do have a group of dissident intellectuals, from Oren Cass to Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, and some figures on the left, who are having their moment. The President does seem to want to reorder the global trade landscape, but even there, is it actually their ideas at work? Or is it just that Trump himself has believed that trade deficits are bad since the 1980s and now he’s in power, he’s going to do something about it? There are ways in which, even there, the intellectual argument feels stapled on to Trump’s own impulses and desires. There are these factions, there are the populists, there is the tech right; it’s hard to say where religious conservatism is going; it’s hard to say exactly where libertarianism is going. Finally, I’d just say again that we’re only two months into the Administration, so all analysis will probably look a bit foolish a year from now.
Your brief in the New York Times is essentially domestic politics and culture, but as current crises on campus show, historically not for the first time, wars abroad can generate turbulence at home. Trump and Vance have launched an unprecedented attack on the liberal-imperial ideology that has long served to hallow American overseas power, replacing its pastoral-custodial pieties with national-imperial swagger. Should one of these discursive brands of empire be regarded as preferable to the other? There have been quite a few critics of us foreign policy, many of them more conservative than radical in outlook—Barry Posen, John Mearsheimer, Christopher Caldwell, David Hendrickson, Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne—with little time for either. How far do you differ from them?

I think of myself as a custodial realist rather than a custodial liberal, if that makes sense. The writers you’ve named have pungent critiques of the failings of American empire. My take on this is similar to my view on decadence: a system can be non-ideal, but you don’t just want to unwind it; you need to be careful while you’re changing it. For all its flaws, the American empire is a force for a certain kind of stability in the world. Trump is right that there are a lot of free-riders in the system but we’ve also benefited from it a lot; we’re not doing badly. I’m sceptical of attempts, left and right, to leave the empire behind. I’m attracted to the version of Trumpian foreign policy that wants to rebalance American commitments rather than abandon them. I’m sympathetic to the view that Europe needs a stronger security architecture while the us operates more in the Pacific, at least on a ten- to fifteen-year horizon, because the big challenge is managing China. But within Trumpism there is also something more like a McGovernite ‘Come Home America’ plus a dose of Monroe Doctrine imperialism—it wants to withdraw and simultaneously consolidate American power. Greenland and the Panama Canal are synecdoches for that impulse. Let the Europeans and East Asians take care of themselves, but, by God, we’re going to control our own hemisphere. I have some long-term sympathy for that vision of a greater North America, but I don’t think tariffing Canada and bullying Denmark is a good foreign-policy strategy. I would prefer the realist mode to the Jacksonian mode. But we may be getting full Jacksonianism.
How would you weigh the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with reference to a decadent empire’s ability or inability to maintain a Pax Americana?

One could imagine a synthesis of Biden’s Ukraine policy and Trump’s impulses that would be correct. The us overextended itself in making guarantees to Ukraine that it was never going to be able to fulfil; like our failures in Afghanistan, that was an example of imperial overreach. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, it made sense to support the Ukrainians. The failure of the Biden Administration was not recognizing the moment to cut a deal—which is hard to do. But there was a window, when Ukraine had regained a certain amount of territory, when the Administration should have said, ok, this is the frontier of our empire. Ukraine is never going to be in nato, it’s not going to get all its territory back; but they could have cut a deal to end the war in a way that would have allowed Ukraine to retain territorial integrity. There are people in the Trump Administration who want to do that. But there is also an impulse to just wash our hands of this. The outcome will depend on which impulse prevails. But Russia is in a better position now than it was two years ago. A Harris Administration would have ended up pushing in a similar direction. But Trump’s wash-his-hands impulse might leave Ukraine in a more unsustainable position than it should be.

And Gaza?

There, too, there’s a version of the Trump position which says we’re broadly on the Israeli side, but we’re not letting them just set the agenda, that could be correct. But the absence of a solution for Gaza is an intractable problem. Biden was in an impossible position, caught between his own base and the Republican Party, and his own senility and inability to be an effective actor on the world stage, which made America basically a bystander. Notwithstanding rising sympathy for the Palestinians, America’s going to retain a basic pro-Israel alignment for the next twenty years, but within that it needs to exert more influence over Israel than Biden was able to do. But toward what endgame, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be Jared Kushner.
To describe Washington’s role in the war in Gaza as that of ‘bystander’—given that the us has supplied Israel with tens of thousands of massive bombs and the aircraft dropping them to obliterate the Strip, together with the requisite diplomatic coverage operation at the un and elsewhere—isn’t that a euphemism of the kind you otherwise tend to avoid?

‘Bystander’ in the sense of the Biden Administration not exerting any clear strategic influence over Israel, over the conduct of the war or over the larger regional drama. That largely reflected Biden himself being effectively checked out as a major actor in his own presidency. The us remains a patron of Israel and remains directly involved in the conflict. By virtue of being a hegemonic power, the us is not a bystander in any absolute sense.
So, you’d say that under Biden, the unique and extremely supportive relationship of the us to Israel went on autopilot?

Yes. It would have been very surprising if the fundamental us alliance with Israel had been adjusted negatively after the attacks of October 7th, given America’s longstanding conflict with Iran. What was notable was that the us seemed to exert no tangible influence on the war. It seemed to have no concrete sense of what it wanted strategically from Israel, or as an outcome to the conflict.
But under another leader—a President Bernie Sanders, for example—do you think the relationship would have been adjusted as the casualty toll mounted in Gaza?

A President Bernie Sanders might have exerted a stronger restraining influence to limit the scope of the war. I don’t think he would have radically changed America’s overall relationship with Israel, though this is obviously highly speculative. But just as Trump struggled in his first term, I suspect there would be more foreign-policy constraints on a President Sanders than some of his supporters imagine. I don’t think that as president he would have ended up taking an especially radical line. It would be more like one standard deviation to the left, whatever that means, of Biden’s policy. I’ll be honest, I haven’t studied all of Bernie’s pronouncements in the last six months, but he seems to me to be somewhere between the overtly pro-Palestinian campus left and the hawkishly Zionist Democratic establishment.
In 2020, you wrote that the protest wave of that summer represented a second defeat of Bernie Sanders’s attempt to return the left to its pre-seventies emphasis on class struggle, an effort that was vanquished by a more recent race-and-gender approach. At this point, do you see the movement behind Sanders as a flash-in-the-pan, or as something that will re-emerge in American politics in one way or another?

I think it will re-emerge, but material conditions are not propitious at the moment. There was a window for aggressive economic-policy ambition in the mid-2010s, created in part by an environment of persistently low interest rates, which helped give rise to both Sanders and Trumpian populism. The dilemma for the economic left now is that under inflationary conditions, where do you find the money? That’s part of the appeal of mmt: you don’t need to find the money, you can just spend it. But mmt always had a proviso, that you can spend the money until you get inflation. One of my basic beliefs about all economic-policy visions is that they can be directionally correct without being comprehensively correct. So, mmt as a descriptor of the world from 2011 to 2020 was directionally correct: there really was a lot more fiscal space than either the Tea Party right or the Obama Administration thought. But then the situation changed, and mmt doesn’t have a lot to say about an inflationary environment.

Here we can perhaps see the resilience of decadence. Just as I don’t know how Musk can actually cut Medicare and Social Security to make his libertarian transformational change, I don’t see how the Democratic Party can get Americans to sign on to the tax increases necessary for a Sanders programme. The Sanders vision worked in an environment of fiscal space, and it could make a big comeback when those conditions return—but they’re not returning yet. With this caveat: if there’s a big ai-driven step change in growth, that could create such a space, because it will create new inequalities, new sources of wealth and therefore, maybe, new demands for redistribution. But you need something like that. Sanders can’t just walk out there tomorrow and win the presidency on Medicare for All, because there is not a strong enough constituency. For that to change, you need either borrowing space, new forms of wealth that are amenable to taxation or a 2008-level economic crisis. Absent that, I don’t think you can conjure that constituency into being through the force of eloquence alone.