Volts podcast: Will Wilkinson on libertarianism, pluralism, and America's political crisis

I have been reading Will Wilkinson’s writing since I was a baby
blogger, way back in the early 2000s. By then, I had already left
behind the libertarianism that gripped me in college, but Will
was still a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. I
disagreed with him about many things, but I always found him
rigorous and engaging.


Over the years, I’ve followed as he’s moved from Cato to the
center-right Niskanen Center (where he got canceled) to, now, the
Progressive Policy Institute, where he is a senior fellow. In the
process he left behind libertarianism for “liberaltarianism” and
now some some kind of synthesis that doesn’t quite have a name
but lands in the vicinity of social democrat, with an emphasis on
small-d democracy.


And of course, like everyone who’s anyone, he has his own
newsletter: Model Citizen.


There’s something nice about following a mind you admire as it
tries to work its way toward higher and better understanding — it
is so rare these days to witness anyone change their minds about
anything — and there’s something especially nice when it ends up
converging with your own thinking. I feel much more confident
about things I believe when Will articulates them.


Both Will and I have come to spend less time thinking about what
might be the correct or optimal political philosophy and more
time thinking about the workaday challenges of pluralism and
democracy: how people of different cultures, ethnicities,
genders, beliefs, and personalities, whose disagreements and
conflicts are unlikely ever to be entirely resolved, can live
together in relative peace.


All of which is to say, I’ve wanted to talk politics with Will
forever. We got around to it a few weeks ago and now I’ve finally
got the thing produced. If you're in the mood for almost two
hours of nerdy talk about Ayn Rand, rationalism, freedom, social
insurance, the relationship between markets and government, and
the perils of pluralism, strap on those headphones and travel
along.


(Note: several times in the pod I say “non-zero” when I mean
“non–zero sum,” which bugs me now, but what can you do.)


VOLTS


D: Hello, welcome to volts. I am your host, David Roberts. Today
I'm excited, as I have as a guest Will Wilkinson who is currently
a senior scholar at the Progressive Policy Institute, which is
sure to be of some amusement to those who have followed Will's
career which began at the extremely different Cato Institute. So
rather than try to explain Will’s whole history, which we're
going to get into, I'll just say that I've been reading Will’s
work for years now, and have been following his intellectual and
political journey that he's been on, which has paralleled my own
in a lot of ways. And so I thought I would talk with him about
that journey, and about where he's ended up, and how we move
forward in American politics from now. So we're taking on all the
big questions today. So thanks for coming, Will, we appreciate
you being on. 


WW: Thanks, Dave. I'm ready. 


DR: So before getting into the meat of things, just start by
telling us a little bit about where you're from and how the story
of Will Wilkinson that ended with you being a young, teenage Ayn
Rand enthusiast, what's the what's the origin story?


WW: Well, I was born the child of a poor sharecropper. Just
kidding. That's, yeah, that's The Jerk. which describes me pretty
well.


I grew up in a little town in the middle of Iowa - Marshall town
- it’s a small city of about 27,000 people. It's the county seat.
So that makes it locally important. And it's exactly the same
size as it was when I grew up there, which is interesting,
because the composition of the population is very different
today, but I moved there when I was five, because my dad had
taken a job as the chief of police. So my entire childhood my dad
was the chief of police in my hometown. My mother was a nurse for
a large part of my childhood, she stayed at home, but she also
worked as an obstetrics nurse and a home health nurse when I was
a little bit older. I’ve got two older sisters. You know, go
Bobcats. I don't know, what do you want to know about?


DR: It's so American. Well, it's a small town, the chief police
dad, the nurse Mom, it's, you know,


WW: It's like, I really liked encyclopedia brown books because
his dad was a police chief and his mom was a nurse. I grew up in
a John Cougar Mellencamp song, I even would suck down chili dogs
outside the Tasty Freeze, for real. So, one of the things that I
find interesting, and I've been working for a long time on a book
proposal of a version of this density divide paper that I wrote a
couple of years ago. And I've been using my hometown as a model
of things that have changed in the economy and how that's
affected where people settle. And I didn't know when I was a kid
that I was enjoying peak Marshalltown, Iowa; it was as good as it
ever was in its existence. And it was as good as it was ever
going to be. You know, it was a really healthy, vital little town
with small manufacturers. The schools were great, you know, just
like an incredibly active civic life - great little league, flag
football, all of that stuff. And, you know, most of it's gone
now.


DR: All things that seem to be sort of dying out.


WW: Not the Little League Baseball, that's not gone. But I mean
most of the manufacturing is gone, and the average level of
education in the town has gone down. One of the main employers
was a place called Fisher Controls, which makes governors and
valves. They employed a lot of engineers and a lot of lawyers,
people like that. And they really downscaled their presence in
Marshalltown. We also used to have a big Maytag air conditioning
plant, a bunch of different stuff, which employed executives and
hired lawyers and employed accountants and people with college
degrees. Most of that stuff has gone, along with the good
manufacturing jobs for, for people without college degrees. And
so we've got mostly shitty manufacturing jobs in food processing.


drvolts   5:11  


It's gone from a 90s John Cougar Mellencamp song to like a 2010s
John Cougar Mellencamp song.


Will Wilkinson  5:18  


Yeah, it's gotten a little, it's getting a little darker. But it
was, it was a lovely place to grow up. Really. And, it was a
conservative place. You know, my dad is a cop, which is a
conservative-ish profession. My mother was actually a more
political person and she was very conservative. For some time,
she subscribed to the Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum newsletter,
and that was just kind of background in my childhood. It's not
like our family was very political. My dad was one of those old
fashioned public servants who thought it was extremely untoward
to ever express a political opinion. Because his job was to look
after the safety and security of the whole town, and everybody
needs to believe that you're working for them. And you can't take
sides, right, so he wouldn't even tell us what his political
opinions were at the kitchen table.


DR: Funny. 


WW: Yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of ethos really has changed
in law enforcement.


drvolts   6:23  


To say the least. Well, let's start with both of us. You have
told this story of before you were sort of an enthusiastic
libertarian as a teen and ended up entering the professional,
libertarian world. I also had a brief period of enthusiastic Ayn
Rand enthusiasm, and libertarianism. And we're going to talk
about how you move past that, but I want to just take a moment to
take seriously what it is about libertarianism that attracts a
certain type of young man, like we were. Mostly men, mostly white
- not exclusively. Let's take a moment to take the attraction
seriously; what was it about it that clicked so hard for you and
made such sense for you at that moment?


Will Wilkinson  7:29  


You know, it's really hard to say exactly what it is. And I'm
very wary about the fidelity of memory. But what I remember, it's
actually kind of weird, how I ended up being a libertarian. I
grew up a member of the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints, which is a sect of Mormonism. I won't explain
that unless you want it explained. And I went to church camp
every summer for several weeks. And I've always been a weird
person. I mean, I've always been a bit of a free thinker. And one
day, at a campfire,  you know you'd sing all the campfire
songs, these silly songs at first, and then you get into the more
serious songs, Kumbaya and all that s**t. And then campers are
invited to get up and give testimonies, and mostly you get up and
talk about how God is awesome and how your life has been touched
and blessed and so on and so forth. You know, the RLDS, they're
now known as the Community Christ, they're not they're not
Community of Christ. They're not evangelical. You know, praise
Jesus, speaking in tongues sort of things, it's actually pretty
sedate. People would give their testimonies and I love singing
with a bunch of people. I feel like that's what I miss most about
church,


drvolts   9:02  


It's the best part of church.


Will Wilkinson  9:04  


I love it, I find it so nourishing to the soul. That is probably
one of the reasons why I'm desiccated and bitter. We'd sung all
the sweet campfire songs and I was filled with the spirit of love
and community and I got up and I really wanted to tell people how
much I loved them and I got up and said, you know, I don't really
know about this God stuff. But I love all you guys. I think this
is great.


drvolts   9:40  


The secular humanist credo!


Will Wilkinson  9:44  


Yeah, my mother was my Sunday school teacher and I don't know
what it is in my personality. I've got a weird combination of
just rigorous logic, this kind of relentless rationality about
“does this make sense”? And also this drive to please and to be a
good trooper for the cause. And so I legitimately wanted to be
like the best, you know, quasi-Mormon that I could possibly be.
And my mother would be teaching me the Bible or the Book of
Mormon. And I would just relentlessly cross examine her about,
“okay, so if this happened…” and then things don't make sense.
And I would end up cornering her by accident, because I was just
inquiring, like, well, how does this make sense? And she'd end up
crying, because we're good. And then I would feel so terrible,
because that wasn't my intention. But that kind of instinct came
out in that campfire. And the funny thing that came to that was
like, after, you know, the next day, one of the counselors, some
middle aged dude wearing sandals with socks, came up to me and
said, “Hey, you know, Bill”, I went by Bill. And he says “I think
there's this book you'd really like”, and I said “yeah?”, and
he's like, “yeah, it's called Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand”.


drvolts   11:19  


Mike, your quasi Mormon camp counselors turned you on to Ayn
Rand.


Will Wilkinson  11:23  


Yeah, and he was kind of conspiratorial and I didn't really know
why. But I was like, “okay”! So that summer I was maybe 15 or 16.
I picked up Atlas Shrugged. And, you know, it's the fattest book,
it’s 1200 pages or something like that. Anyway I dipped into it.
And I was like, “this is a slog”, and just set it aside. Fast
forward a couple years, after my freshman year in college at the
University of Northern Iowa, I ended up being a tour guide at the
Joseph Smith historic center in Nauvoo, Illinois, giving tours of
Joseph Smith's house. And, I thought “Oh, this is gonna be a long
summer”. There's nothing in Nauvoo, Illinois. It's not really a
town. It's this abandoned kind of ghost town. All the Mormons
lived there, and they left. There's this big historic site. And I
was like, this is gonna be boring, so I need to bring the biggest
book I've got. So I brought Atlas Shrugged, and it while giving
tours of Joseph Smith's house. And I spent all summer reading it.
You know, when you're a tour guide, you'd get the first shift and
you'd open up the visitor center, and you'd kick back at the
desk, and might be an hour, two hours before anybody comes in. So
you'd sit back and read your novel. And I was riveted by it, I
totally got into it. I decided I didn't believe in God, by the
end of the book, and the thing is, I was clearly never going to
really believe in God - I just don't have the god gene. I went
back to college, for my sophomore year, and ended up reading The
Fountainhead, and it really resonated with me. The thing that was
really captivating to me was the critique of altruism, believe it
or not. My church is this sweet-hearted, cosmopolitan,
internationalist, “all humans are one”, vaguely social justice-y,
even when I was a kid. It’s a really liberal form of Mormonism
(comparatively). But everything is about service. Everything is
about doing things for other people. And in my Midwestern milieu,
and that overall service Christianity you're not supposed to
stick your head up, you don't want to look like you've got a big
head or you're better than other people. My dad would always say,
“don't don't get too big for your britches”, that kind of thing.
What I found in Ayn Rand was permission to be awesome. That's
really what excited me down to the core of my being. This
argument, this justification for just f*****g going for it. Be
the best version of yourself that you can be and you don't have
to f*****g apologize to anybody. You don't have to justify it to
anybody. You just be awesome.


drvolts   14:56  


Right? It was the Uberman aspect you saw in yourself. Nobody who
reads these things is like, “Oh, I suddenly realized my cousin is
extraordinary” it's always “Oh wait, I'm extraordinary, at last I
can tell the world”. 


WW: Yeah, it's never, “I'm Eddie Willers” - that kind of pathetic
viewpoint character, who's supposed to typify the average guy.
We're all John Galt. Everybody who reads The Fountainhead is
Howard Roark. But it was really transformative for me and I don't
think in a bad way, because it's not really the Ubermensch stuff
because I was never interested in lording power over others or
crushing people under foot on my ascent to the peaks of
Promethean glory or whatever. I just thought it was amazing that
it was okay. That if I wanted to just do it for myself - if I had
aspirations, if I wanted to be a great artist, I should try to be
a great artist, right?


drvolts   16:11  


Well, that's a much more noble set of motivations and residences
than I can claim. I was about the same age and it was one of the
few times I was in my college library, literally just browsing
the philosophy section, because I had sort of like a young man's
interest in philosophy. Where did you stumble upon this? It's
called Marable College in some small town, Tennessee. It had 800
students when I went there, so there's no reason anyone ever
would have heard of it. But I stumbled across this book called
The Virtue of Selfishness. And I was like, oh, tell me more. Tell
me more. So I ended up reading all of Ayn’s non-fiction, and even
in my peak Rand enthusiasm I could never abide her fiction. I
still can't read a paragraph of it. It's so bad, but, but for me,
it was less “I can be extraordinary, I can do what I want. I
don't have to apologize to him.” For me, it's just like, “I can
be left alone and don’t have to mess with anybody else.” Nobody
messes with me, nobody owes me anything. I don't owe anybody else
anything. I think a certain kind of young man, especially with
that rationalist streak that you're talking about is often
coupled with a certain degree of emotional illiteracy. Or let's
say the way young men are socialized in the US, particularly
young men who are good at school, work, rationalist stuff are
often raised a certain way - not necessarily trained in emotional
literacy. So the idea that there's these two languages, there's
the language of propositions and reason and deduction, which is
very clean and makes sense and is all transparent and right
there. And then there's this other language of human emotion and
interaction that is conducted in body language and implication
and glances and girl stuff, right? And I just didn't speak that
language. I wasn't good at it. I felt insecure when it was around
like I never quite knew what was going on. And what Ayn Rand will
tell you is just that that stuff literally doesn't matter. There
is only the clear, rational meaning of the word on the page, the
deduction. It's all very clean, and there's nothing hiding behind
you. There's nothing you're not getting, right? All right there
in the open. It's right angles and clean lines. And that's what
drew me in is this perfect clarity. And it's a perfect clarity
that tells me “Yes, you can relax, you're not missing a bunch of
stuff. You're not failing to discharge a bunch of obligations
that you're only vaguely aware of, right, you're not failing on
an emotional level all the time. That stuff is a distraction for
weaker people.” You need to become of clear, sharp diamond-like
mind. And of course, you know, the young libertarian applies this
diamond-like rationalism, generally to other people's words and
actions. And maybe not quite so rigorously to their own. It's
comfortable but yeah, I had no ambitions. My only ambition was to
be left alone. And this is permission to be left alone. I still
remember like, reading all these non-fiction books getting
totally zealous like only an 18 year old college student can get
zealous, and then going and writing this Religion final term
paper, going into talk to my Professor, just explaining to him
with this super intense earnestness, like why Ayn Rand was right
and everything he had devoted his life to studying in practice,
was not only wrong, but wrong and obvious, in trivially obvious
ways. It's just ridiculous, right? It was all just ridiculous
man. I feel it's so embarrassing in retrospect.


Will Wilkinson  20:56  


Yeah. And you know, when I think back on it, one of the things
that I think is b******t that people do, when they ask “what's
your intellectual journey?” is that they'll tell you about
arguments, but if you know anything about how people come to have
beliefs, that doesn't have anything to do with arguments, it's
all identity. It's all what resonates with you, emotionally, and
so there's a special irony in getting attracted to kind of
rationalist stuff for purely emotional identity based reasons
that you are completely blind to yourself.


drvolts   21:34  


Yes, of course, and the promises that you don't have to ever
become aware of them, because A equals A at the root of it all.
You don't have to examine your own motivations. It's all very
clear.


Will Wilkinson  21:49  


You do have to examine your own motivations, David, because your
emotions are the output of sort of premises that you've accepted,
right? So you're responsible for your emotional reactions to
things, you have to make sure that you only believe rational
things so that you have the right emotions. If you are having a
wrong emotion, that means you believe something wrong. And so you
have to figure out what it is.


drvolts   22:11  


Imagine just Ayn Rand having these unwelcome emotions and just
thinking like I've got to extirpate these by reasoning harder,
I've got to reason harder!


Will Wilkinson  22:25  


She's a fascinating kind of tragic person. I will stand up for
Ayn Rand's literary quality. I don't think anybody knows how to
judge her because she is a genre unto herself. Like, clearly,
there's something going on there that people find incredibly
riveting and persuasive. She nails exactly what she says she's
trying to do. She's trying to write didactic moral fiction that
makes you believe something different. And she just crushes it,
by her own standards. But aesthetically, I think they're great.
They're great in a way that nobody can recognize because one,
she's Russian, you know, raised in Russia, educated in Russia,
she grew up in the same block as Vladimir Nabokov. Right? It's
sort of an upper middle class Jewish milieu in Leningrad, or St.
Petersburg. And really well educated, comes to the US, wants to
be a writer, writes for Cecil Mill, writes a bunch of movie
scripts, and they completely internalize a bunch of Hollywood
standards, including a certain kind of melodrama and kitsch.


drvolts   23:52  


Yes, capital R romanticism. I think that's what never really
resonated with me, that sort of romantic melodrama, I can't.


Will Wilkinson  24:04 


So it's a weird combination of Russian philosophical fiction.
There's a lot of Dostoevsky in her DNA but it's filtered through
Hollywood and the 1920s and 30s old right politics, like anti New
Deal politics. You throw all that stuff together and it's just
going to be a stew that's going to be repugnant to people with
fine literary standards of the time or even now. I think they're
amazing, weird books. They're a kind of experimental
fiction,  and I think they're just incredibly successful.
And I think people just don't give you know Ayn Rand enough
credit as an artist. Because they just don't want to judge her on
the criteria that she ought to be judged on, but I think she's
amazing.


drvolts   25:08  


Well, that's sweet. I'm such a Philistine. I read stuff like that
and I'm just like, “just tell me what you want to tell me.” Get
rid of the trains and the melodrama, I don't need a love story,
just tell me what you want to tell me. So that's why I went for
nonfiction. Of course, I have the same reaction anytime I read
almost any poetry or fiction.


Will Wilkinson  25:30  


I'm a huge dummy, right? Because all I really wanted was the
trains in the end, and the rape scenes. That's all. That's all.
Well, that's all I was really into. And somehow I got seduced
into a comprehensive philosophy, which is what she was trying to
do. Clearly I needed something else to believe in. I didn't want
to be a certain kind of really lame Mormon, who doesn't even
believe in the cool Mormon stuff, right? Like we didn't have the
“you get your own planet” and we didn't have the special
underwear, any of that stuff like that.


drvolts   26:11  


So I was raised Presbyterian, which is like, if you can name a
thing about Presbyterianism ahead of 99% of most people, 


WW: Just by faith, I guess.


DR: I guess it's not the dictionary definition, like generic
Methodist. So we could talk about Ayn Rand all day. But we're
falling behind. So let's move along. You were like a full on Ayn
Rand enthusiast, went into the kind of libertarian world, started
working at Cato, which is, you know, certainly at the time was
sort of like the commanding heights of libertarianism, and then
over time, I don't know exactly how long it took, but you have
described the process as basically, you arguing against all these
critiques of libertarianism over and over again, and eventually
just started thinking, you know what, these are pretty good
critiques. Describe for us the intellectual process by which you
were rationally persuaded against a view, which seems like a
vanishingly rare thing these days. It's like an exotic animal. I
want to hear all about it.


Will Wilkinson  27:34  


I guess it doesn't happen a lot like me. The backstory is, I got
super into Ayn Rand. I decided that being a philosopher was the
most important thing you could be because making sure that people
have correct premises is the only thing that's gonna save our
society - A equals A dammit. I wouldn't mind if people would get
around to being like “A equals A” I mean, that would be nice.
Because there's such a weird thing right now we're going through,
over the pandemic. It made some of my Randian instincts came back
in this weird way, where I'm just like, reality is what it
f*****g is, dude. You can't decide whether or not a virus is
contagious. It drove me crazy. I think there is something healthy
about that orientation toward them, you know, the existence of a
reality that's external to you that can't be changed by what you
think or say about it. Science needs that, we have to think that
we're looking at something that's not us. It is helpful. But I
wanted to be a philosopher. So I was an art major, I went to the
University of Northern Iowa on a full tuition art scholarship.
And I mean, I was the president of the thespian club, and I was
an arts kid. I was the you know, artsiest kid in my school and
won all those awards and Ayn Rand drew me away from it. Which is
tragic. I think it ruined my life. I should be a painter. I would
be a happier person if I lived in  rural Vermont and painted
giant paintings in a barn. I would be living my best life.
Instead, I just argue with a******s all day long on Twitter. And
I'm like, this is terrible. How did I get myself into it? And Ayn
Rand is how I got it. So I decided I am going to have to go to
grad school. So I applied, but I was a terrible student. I had
like a 2.9 GPA at the university, the third best public
university in Iowa. I couldn't get it, I couldn't get into the
University of Iowa. And I heard at the time, there was this dude.
Brian Leiter was writing these rankings of philosophy programs.
And I learned that one of the best terminal MA programs was in
DeKalb, Illinois at Northern Illinois University. So I applied
there .


DR: Ah funny, I got a terminal MA too. 


WW: I also didn't get into there. But I just decided, like, f**k
it, man, I'm just doing this, and so I just moved to DeKalb,
Illinois, enrolled at NIU as a, they'll take your money if you
just want to be like, as a graduate student at large or whatever.
And, I just took philosophy classes as if I was a grad student.
And, that worked, like, the next year, I got accepted to the
program, with full funding and everything like that. And it was a
great program, I did well, and then ended up going to the
University of Maryland for my Ph. D. program. And over all this
time, you know, I was like, you know, just a really zealous,
libertarian objectivist. You know, I had developed this big
social network of objectivist friends, early days of the
internet, I was on a bunch of, you know, email lists from Jimmy
Wales, of Wikipedia fame, the guys who started Wikipedia, you
know, Jimbo Wales, and then Larry Sanger, were just part of this
milieu, I would meet them at the Summer seminars for the
Institute for Objective Studies. And me, and all my friends were
like, friends from the internet, and they were like, objective
friends, and a lot of them are still my friends. Like, some of my
best friends are those people who are also not objectivist
anymore, but so that's where my heart was socially. But like, you
know, I'm all of a sudden in real philosophy grad school. And
I'm, you know, getting hit with stuff left. And right. Now, the
thing is, like, philosophy, moral philosophy, and political
philosophy wasn't what I was interested in, you know, I was doing
like philosophy of mind and language and metaphysics and
epistemology, the hard stuff that smart people do, not like this,
like sissy, you know, moral stuff. But like, you know, I had to
encounter all these arguments. And when I got to Maryland, you
know, kind of leveled up a level, at how difficult and
sophisticated things were. And at a certain point, I dropped out
to go work at a startup because I wanted to make it big, you
know, people giving stock options out. And this was like, right
before the internet bubble burst. So that lasted like, eight
months. But then I got a job at the Institute for Humane Studies,
which is like, you know, Libertarian Educational Foundation, and
got really deeply into the DC libertarian politics, scene, public
policy scene. And when I went back to Maryland, and I decided to
do political philosophy, and, you know, we had to read John
Rawls, and all this, narrow the standard stuff, and you had to
grapple with a lot of arguments against what I was doing. And I
was kind of dogmatically ideological, but because my self
conception was as a superbly rational person who could give you a
satisfying justification for my beliefs, I felt it was incumbent
upon me to be able to defend my views. And when somebody had an
argument that kind of made me come up short, you know, I took
that really seriously. Like, I was sure that I was right. And
then if I thought about it hard enough, I would figure out what
was wrong with what they're saying. And I always did that. I'm
very clever at shoring up my own flanks, right? Like, I always
did come up with an argument that would push it off, that would
find a way to, to just steal their argument of its intended
force. But after you do that, with 20, 30, 40 different
arguments, right, like, you have to make some tiny concessions.
Right, you have to be like, okay, I can give away this premise
that normally I would defend, but if I don't give this away, I'm
gonna have to give something much bigger away. But after you
start giving away a lot of these little premises, right, like it
adds up to something bigger, which is why like dogmatists are
really dogmatic, right, like, they're not going to give up any of
the little premises because, you know, they see where it's going
slippery slope. Yeah. And so over time, you know, like I dropped
out of grad school, got a job at Cato. And then at Cato, my job
was to be a professional libertarian apologist. That's what I
did. And so then I encountered a whole other level of people, the
public intellectual cohort. And I think this is really
significant because I think people's views change. This is
something people will say to you as a criticism, which is that
you wanted some other group of people to like you. You wanted to
go to cocktail parties. Right? You know, you hear the cocktail
party one?


drvolts   35:36  


Of course, yes. But this is, I mean, it's not as you say, It's
not wrong. And there's a reason that I actually think, especially
in that era, the libertarians were quite, you know, sort of the
money-ed libertarians were quite savvy about, creating not just
an intellectual superstructure, but a social superstructure that
people could be involved in and find friendships and find a life
find those cocktail parties, like they were very savvy about,
about playing that aspect of it.


Will Wilkinson  36:11  


So I was really deeply embedded in, you know, first I was deeply
embedded in this sort of objectivist community that I’d become a
part of online. But that is kind of a fringe of the broader
libertarian community. You know, they're considered kind of, a
little bit crazy. They're always around. When I got to Cato, you
know, I kind of mainstreamed a little bit. And in part, and that
was because of grad school, I, you know, started shifting my
views to kind of a more respectable form of classical liberalism,
but also to the more acceptable forms of libertarianism. And I
was, you know, embedded in these big libertarian institutions and
social networks. But I wasn't just embedded in those right, and
this, I think, makes a huge difference. Like at the same time,
this was the early days of blogging and the early aughts. So how
I got my job at Cato is how I came to know Brink Lindsay, we both
had blogs at the same time. But there would always be these
meetups with people just like what you had in common is that you
all had a blog. And so we'd meet up and you'd meet 


DR: That’s a decently reliable indicator of an interesting
personality. Yeah, at the time I would go to a party of bloggers,
especially at the time.


WW: Yeah, the early adopters were a certain kind of person. And,
and I really enjoyed those but like, but you just became socially
interested in other people who were doing similar things as you'd
like. So when, I had moved into DC and you know, I got to know
Matt Iglesias and Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes and all those people
really well, they were part of my social milieu too, you know,
there was a weekly poker game that would go back and forth
between Julian Sanchez house and the group house that I had with
a bunch of friends. That was a very mixed liberal and libertarian
affair, you know, and we just, like, shoot the s**t, right? I
really think that, Julian Sanchez, and me and, you know, a couple
of other people really had, you know, had a big influence on say,
like, Matt's views on on housing, or occupational licensing,


drvolts   38:32  


Occupational licensing.


Will Wilkinson  38:34  


I think that just the fact that he was socially connected with
libertarians where he was like, these are actually good
persuasive arguments. He wasn't convinced by libertarianism. But
there were some things that libertarians thought that he became
aware of, at a deeper level, and, you know, some similar things
with with Ezra, and they influenced me in turn, right, like, you
know, we’d argue cogently about things, and if you actually like
somebody, if you're part of their social circle, part of their
social network. It just makes you take what they say seriously.


drvolts   39:15  


Yeah, it's such a fundamentally different relationship than
encountering some schmo online who you then proceed to argue with
on Twitter, right? I mean, emotionally, it's such a hugely
different relationship.


Will Wilkinson  39:28  


Totally, totally. And so it really mattered to me that I, I
didn't know at the time, right, because, like, in a way I saw
Matt and Ezra as frenemies. Because they were kind of rivals.
And, I'm not a very comparative person, right, in the Oh, you
know, “they’ve got something that I want”, but I am very
comparative in that this person is my benchmark. I think I'm a
smart guy. I’m as talented as this person, and so if they're
doing better than me, that means I'm f*****g something up. Which
is like why Ezra always makes me feel like I'm f*****g up my
life.


drvolts   40:11  


Try writing at early Vox just surrounded by wonder kins plodding
along.


Will Wilkinson  40:18  


Yeah. And with stuff like that my view started to suddenly
change. And when I was at Cato I had been working on my
dissertation proposal, I'd gotten really deeply into Rawls,
because I was like, this is what the core of analytic political
philosophy is, you have to be conversant in Rawls, or else you
just can't be part of the conversation. You know, even if you're
talking about something else, you have to talk about it. There's
a certain jargon, you know, that because all of Rawls’ Harvard
students controlled all of the journals, and so they only wanted
to talk about stuff in their language. It's like any field. So I
said okay, I gotta become fluent in Rawlsian. And I got really
deep into Rawls actually, was super persuaded by a lot of stuff.
And, you know, and so I came on this project like, you know,
what, he's right about how to think about a lot of these issues,
you know, about what it means for society to be good. But it just
misses a ton, right? And I, over this time, I'd become like a
huge, FA Hayek fan, who I think is just an absolutely brilliant
person. And that had a huge influence me, he's a much deeper
thinker than people sometimes give him credit for, because he
gets used as a kind of cartoon figure as the bad right, but he's,
legitimately one of the most brilliant social theorists of the
20th century - got a lot wrong, but there's a lot that's really
deep in his stuff about cultural evolution, why it is that ideas
persist and stuff like that. That is really profound. But so I
was like, Okay, I'm gonna marry you know, I'm gonna make John
Rawls and Friedrich Hayek have babies.


drvolts   42:07  


Synthesis, right, this is the first, like, insofar as there's a
retreat from ideology, right, it begins there. Right. Okay. Other
people have some good points, I'll synthesize them and make them
better.


Will Wilkinson  42:20  


Yeah, yeah, exactly. And around the same time I was into this,
you know, we're kind of mutually influencing each other. Brink
Lindsay, you know, wrote this essay about left leaning
libertarianism for the New Republic that got titled
Liberal-tarianism. Because, like, you know, working at Cato, or
being libertarian, libertarians always say, you know, we're not
really left or right, you know, like, they want to claim this
kind of neutral ground sort of thing. And I was like, really into
that. And, and I took it seriously, which made me dumb.


drvolts   42:56  


Right? Well, if you just look at the words on the page, right, if
you just look at the ideas and the deductions and the
implications of the words themselves, it makes sense right? If
you're just ignoring all the social undercurrents and, you know,
psychological and emotional and political undercurrents beneath
it, you can continue believing them.


Will Wilkinson  43:15  


I came to see, pretty clearly - when you work at the Cato
Institute, you can't miss it. Then there's a broader social
world, as part of this organization called America's Future
Foundation, which is a youth club, young adults club for
libertarians and fusion-ist conservatives. And you know, it's
libertarian and fused with conservatives and I'm socially
constantly around Republicans, just constantly and so I was like,
okay, it's pretty clear to me that, I would go to other
libertarian things to the, you know, the Marijuana Policy Project
or whatever it was called, the weed legalization people who
probably did a better job than just anybody that was ever around.
They've had tremendous success, right? They were kind of
hippie-ish left wing libertarians, but that's just not what most
of it was right? And even a lot of those people were right wing.
And so I was like, I understand why this is the case
sociologically that, you know, republicans and conservatives and
libertarians were part of this cold war anti-communist coalition.
But man, as you know, the mid aughts. The Cold War has been over
for 15 years. Can we get past these contingent alignments, right?
So Brink and I are like we need to make good on this thing we
like if there can be libertarian conservative fusion-ism there
can be a libertarian-liberal fusion, and we pursued that. 


drvolts   45:05  


Did you have dreams at that point? Or did Brink have dreams? Or
maybe both of you have dreamed of making that into a bonafide
thing that was going to end up, you know, having its own
whatever, think tanks and yeah, in political presence, like, did
you think it could become that?


Will Wilkinson  45:24  


I'm not a very strategic person. So, so, yeah, I think that was
the fantasy that it would catch on and have influence. I think at
some point, maybe we could, you know, take over Cato, which was
short sighted. But, yeah, we had these monthly dinners that Brink
organized with Steve Tellus, a political theorist at Johns
Hopkins, that we just called them the liberal-tarianism dinners.
And it would be a bunch of, you know, people from Cato and other
libertarian ish people from around DC. For some reason people,
you know, Megan McArdle, visit some people who worked at The
Economist, and then just like liberal, you know, wonks people
from Brookings, people from cap, people from just, you know,
wherever, from the nation, from the New Republic. And so we,
through that process, Brink, and I got ourselves embedded in the
left of center, DC journalist, in a wonk, in public policy
circles, and a lot of those people became our friends. And that
changes you too, a lot of these people are just like smart people
who are really impressive. And I even feel like we were really
successful in pulling them in our direction. But the way it works
is that they pull you in their direction, as well. And the Tea
Party happened.


drvolts   47:08  


And yeah, I was gonna say part of this, part of this seems to me
- and this is what puzzles me about all the other libertarians -
is that among these other things going on, around them around the
kind of (well, I mean, you could see the undercurrents for
decades but it's we're busted out in the open is Tea Party) it's
just the Republican Party evolving in a way that is diametrically
opposed to whatever libertarian instincts remain in the party.
You know what I mean? Like exactly heading in the direction of
sort of irrational identitarianism and cultural resentment and
all that stuff like that, this is what I don't get is how you can
still be a professional libertarian and still be attached to that
party. I mean, it was plausible, I guess, you know, the early
aughts, certainly in like the 90s, or something like that. But at
this point, like, what is left of libertarianism in the actual
Republican party? 


Will Wilkinson  48:01  


I mean we've been having this completely hilarious discourse
about vaccine passports. And people opposing them on libertarian
grounds. And it's just incoherent. It's just completely
incoherent. Right? Like, we have to get the state to ban private
organizations from requiring proof of vaccinations. They've
completely lost their moorings, and to the extent that the right
doesn't have libertarian impulses, it has impulses that it sees
as libertarian, because they're things that they inherited from
the conservative fusionists like Ron Paul, who emphasized all of
the liberal aspects of libertarianism, right? Like Rand Paul was
still against the Civil Rights Act and things like that. Freedom
of association is so important, that it's just completely
legitimate for the law to do anything to rectify 400 years of the
enslavement and apartheid and brutal oppression, like, “no
freedom, no, freedom of association is too important”. But
everybody understands, and this is one of the things that took me
a while, but I did start to understand and this was because of
reading so much political philosophy and countering these
arguments over and over again, that we don't get to start from
Day Zero and the allocation of goods and resources that people
get, isn't a function of their individual initiative. Everything
has a history, and the history is broken, and actually one of the
people who convinced me of this the most was Robert Nozick. Who
says very radical things in Anarchy, State and Utopia. He's very
clear that his argument doesn't apply to the actual world, his
theory. He's, I mean, he's very frank about it. Right? Like, if
we had a just initial acquisition, you know, there's an initially
just distribution of goods, if we started from a point of perfect
equality, and then people made these voluntary exchanges that led
to inequalities emerging, then there would be no justification
for redistributing it, right? That's what he's saying. But he's
definitely not saying that he explicitly says that the
distribution that we have doesn't reflect a bunch of just
exchanges, it reflects a bunch of people stealing stuff from
other people, and taking that sort of thing really seriously
after a while, and seeing how irrelevant that is to actual
libertarians, 


DR: I was gonna say, so what? Like, what would happen if we all
started from square one and had you know, an initial just
exchange of resources and went from there like, so what, like,
who cares? What applies in that situation? It's not a human
situation that's ever happened or ever will happen? I would
summarize the arguments that led me away from libertarianism in
two ways, and you're sort of referencing the second one here a
little bit. One is on a personal level, this notion that I'm
responsible for what I do, you're responsible for it, I should be
able to do whatever I want to do unless it harms you. Right?
That's kind of the libertarian. And so you look a little closer
at, well, what are they? What do I mean to harm you? It's clear
enough? If I punch you, right, but what if I smoke a cigarette
and your kid is in the same room? Or what if I drive to work? I
emit some greenhouse gases, which in some incremental, very
distant, attenuated way, harms everybody on Earth. So then the
question then becomes, well, where do you draw the line of harm,
what counts as harm? And then the more you think about that, the
more you realize, all the philosophical work is being done, by
your definition of what counts as harm, which does not follow
from any of the libertarian  premises, it's just a moral
decision. It's, you know, it's a moral decision, what am I going
to count as negative harm and then what's too attenuated to
count, and where do you draw that line? Everything falls out of
that, and what you sort of realize that, this is what I realized,
is the basic sort of like John Muir, you know - you pull on one
thing, and you find it attached to everything - sentiment, like
everything I do, literally everything I do, affects other people
in some way or another. So what ought to apply were I an atomic
unit is irrelevant, because I'm not and no one ever is, or can be
in politics. You know, you want to maximize freedom, which, in a
clean world, where we're starting fresh, might be purely negative
freedom, right? You just don't impede people, don't mess with
people, don't prevent them from doing things. But in the world we
live in to truly secure freedom, if freedom means anything, if
freedom has any substantive content, it requires intervention by
the government, it requires active intervention by government.
And then again, you're just drawing a line of like, well, what
increment of last freedom in the past, justifies government
intervention today. And again, it's more or less an arbitrary
line where you draw like everything falls out of where you draw
that line. And it turns out the clean slate is totally
mythological. We're all always already meshed in all these
historical obligations and responsibilities and histories. And so
just the cleanness and clarity, which is what attracted me, as a
teen, I realized as I got older is like, in so far as that's
attractive and clean, it's because it's wrong and has no
application to the actual world and is not going to make me happy
and it's not going to make a good society. And you're sort of
like you referenced that in, you know, the clean slate stuff. And
so this brings you, I think, to libertarianism, which is, as I
understand it, this notion that yes, we want to maximize freedom,
right like the libertarians, but we acknowledge that merely
refraining right from mistreating people will not have the
intended outcome. Right? Right. You have to, you have to
purposefully create the conditions of freedom. So then you were
there for a while and liberaltarianism in it kind of never really
seemed to catch on. And you also say that you've kind of moved
past it, or would no longer use that term or sort of like, I
don't know, moved beyond it. So where was the fault in this
synthesis? Like, why did you end up sort of becoming dissatisfied
with it in the end?


Will Wilkinson  55:39  


Well, you know, that's hard, because I stopped calling myself a
libertarian when I still saw myself as libertarian, right, like,
it was a deeply embedded, deeply internalized aspect of my
identity. But at a certain point, I saw that the things that I
thought were so heterodox, I was kind of abusing the term if I
was applying it to myself, because, because a lot of people would
think that I wasn't if they knew what I thought, even though I
still felt that I was just interpreting liberty correctly. And
similarly with with liberal-tarianism, one of the main components
of that is something that I've called the free market welfare
state, which you want, markets that are innovative, not onerously
regulated, so that markets can be dynamic, prices can move
freely, you want the right regulations, you need to take care of
externalities and public goods and things like that. But we ought
to be aiming for a dynamic, innovative high growth economy,
because the humanitarian upshot of economic growth is immense.
And so that's something we ought to be going for and markets that
are competitive, and innovative and dynamic are a huge part of
that. But it seems clear to me from the political science
literature, that people will only tolerate that kind of dynamism,
that disruptive innovation that drives growth, if they are
insulated from the downside risks of all of this dislocation and
creative destruction. People aren't gonna tolerate having their
jobs offshored, you know, like having a new technology just
completely put your business out of business. Like if they don't
know what they're gonna do. Right? How am I going to feed my
kids? People want social insurance, it's the most freakin popular
thing in the world. You can't get around it, the richer people
get, the more government they demand. You know, it's almost a
law. And I forget what the name of it is, Wagner's law? It's not
really a law, but like, it's Wagner's consistent regularity.
That, as you know, GDP per capita goes up, demand for government
goes up. And a lot of that is that people want social insurance.
That's the most expensive.


drvolts   58:42  


This is part of something you've been writing about a lot lately.
This is part of what explains the deep strain of anti-democratic
sentiment within libertarianism is that if you give people the
choice, they do not choose libertarianism.


Will Wilkinson  58:59  


Yep. I mean, it really does come down to that. But it's
interesting, that's the view of basically anybody with a dogmatic
ideological theory exactly like you said, because people don't
choose it, you won't choose it right? So we need to have the
revolution, and, you know, install the party, because democracy
is gonna end up being counter revolutionary, right? Everybody has
the same problem, unless you're just going to be a consistent,
small d Democrat, where you just get to be like, “Hey, you know
what, I'm going to just freakin live with people disagreeing and
I think that people ought to get what they vote for”.


DR:Well, we'll, we'll return to that later, too. 


WW: Yeah. So if you stop fighting that, I mean, it's not just
that right. It's not just that people overwhelmingly demand
unemployment insurance and some kind of health insurance. That
has some like public backstop all of that old age insurance,
Social Security, Medicare, they want it bad, and they get it
(except for health care in the United States). But we're not
communists and it's not just that that stuff actually does enable
the economy to be dynamic, it's just really, really clear that
people are much more tolerant of market liberalisation, when
they're insulated from the shocks, So if you leave people
comfortable, you know, if I lose my job, I'm going to get
unemployment for however long, my kids are going to have public
education, even if I lose my job, my kids are going to have
health care, even if I lose my job, right, people stop worrying
so much about having dynamic markets is going to make them lose
their job, right? It's kind of obvious why it would.


drvolts   1:01:02  


This seems so common sense to me, I guess, looking back, now,
it's just any system, any living system, really any sort of,
self-maintaining system, you know, like in biology, look at
computer programs, it needs some degree of openness, and some
degree of structure and stability, right, and you want to balance
too much openness and you get dissolution, too much structure,
and you get decay, and rot. So you want a balance of structure
and dynamism and that seems trivially obvious when you think
about living systems in biology or even social systems. It's only
an ideologue who could ever sort of imagine like, going all the
way in one of those directions, is some sort of skeleton key.


Will Wilkinson  1:01:57  


But why it is that ideas of spontaneous order and emergent order
are so important to libertarians in a certain kind of
conservative because you have to believe that a certain structure
is going to emerge out of all these individual acts of exchange,
trade, and blah, blah, blah, you know, and to a large extent it
does, but the thing is, politics is just endogenous to all of it
all the time anyway, and the big fallacy is, you know, thinking
that there's some, that there's the market on the one hand and
the state on the other hand, and that they're antagonistic. And
this is another thing that just had a big effect on me, like I
started getting some economic history when I worked at the
Mercatus Center and other Kochtopus, libertarian organizations, I
ran a series of seminars that were led by Douglas North, who is a
wonderful - he died a few years back, he was in his 90s - but a
Nobel Prize winning economic historian, and I don't know why
exactly Mercatus was financing junkets on his behalf because he
wasn't really remotely libertarian, but, it was a prestige thing
for us. And, these seminars were amazing. It had some of the
world's best economic historians, a bunch of economic theorists,
amazing political scientists, you know, and I had to organize
these things and take notes. And it was a huge education, and I
learned a lot of economic history, and you start to see that, oh,
markets exist, because governments create them, right? Like,
yeah, they form a lot, you know, trade is always gonna happen,
right? Like, you can't stop human beings from being like “you got
a KitKat, you know, I'll give you a Reese's”. Right? Like, people
are gonna trade. And people are going to trade in complicated
ways. But a lot of forms of trade just aren't possible without
somebody creating a kind of infrastructure that makes sure that,
you know, contracts get enforced. 


drvolts   1:04:06  


Yeah, this is so fundamental to me, I wanted to stop and focus on
this point for a minute, because I've been thinking about this a
lot lately. You will have trade, you always have trade, trade is
just part of what humans do. If you want to scale it beyond
tribal trades with other tribes, if you want to do it on any
scale, you're gonna end up trading with people you don't know,
and don't have any social or historical connection to. You don't
have any of these sort of emotional or social bonds that might
help enforce rules or honesty or whatever. So if you want to
scale it up at all, you need rules that are separate from either
tribe, and that both tribes agree to subsume their immediate
interests to, right I mean, that's just like the basic structure
of non-zero cooperation. We're going to, together, submit to this
third party, this independent third party authority that consists
of a set of rules and some mechanism to enforce those rules. And
then you've got government. And to me this is the process by
which humanity is improving itself and building up and becoming
more complex and building up and outward, through these
mechanisms of non-zero cooperation, all of which involve the same
basic structure. And, to me, what's interesting about the US is
it’s the closest thing a country came to being founded explicitly
on that notion, right, we are not a tribe, or even a set of
tribes, we are just a set of rules and procedures through which
tribes can cooperate in a non-zero way. And to me, this is sort
of the key. The central tension in politics is that I think if
you look back over history, you'll see almost every advance in
human welfare came out of that, came out of that system of
non-zero cooperation and agreement to third party rules. You can
see it in science, you know, where I'm not right because I'm more
influential, or have this or that degree, we all submit to the
same rules of third party examination and peer review, and
whatever else. These rule-based systems have produced everything
that we love and is good, but they are always in tension with
tribal imperatives and tribal instincts and the sort of instinct
that if the rules tell me that I must sacrifice my tribes best
interests, then f**k the rules, my tribe’s best interests are my
are my thing, are my primary thing and any rules are secondary.
And that's sort of all of human history, the buildup of non-zero
cooperation, and then the periodic collapse of non-zero
cooperation, because of these tribal instincts. And that to me,
among other things, sort of renders this libertarian idea
ridiculous in that it is only these rules and these structures
and needs-enforcement mechanisms, which we call government, in
some cases, that enable what we call markets, sophisticated,
modern markets at all, or exchange of ideas or art or name it,
it's all everything good comes out of that.


Will Wilkinson  1:07:43  


On my podcast I recently had Virginia Postrel who is the former
editor-in-chief of Reason magazine. She’s just written this
absolutely riveting book on the history of textiles. It kind of
gets into the Political Economy of how we come to have the
fabrics that we wear, it's called The Fabric of Civilization,
it's a really good book. And, you know, you just look at
textiles, and just, you know, it's one of the most fundamental
things, every single culture in the world weaves, you know, in
some way. So, how does that scale up into trade and Nike, if you
follow that story, there's a certain point at which it's just
face to face exchange, and then extending trade routes, and then
there's a certain point at which you just can't do the non-zero
sum exchanges, they get too complicated, the assurance problems
get too hard How do you know that the other side is going to hold
up their end of the deal? How do you retrieve lost resources when
the other people screw you over? And immediately people come up
with institutions to solve those problems. And those institutions
are the law. States didn't exist to do this, right? States exist,
because, you know, people are tyrants and want to lord over other
people, and you know, princes fought over land and s**t like
that, but they ended up having to play this role, or somebody
else would, and they'd get richer and drive them out of business.
So all these, you know, principalities sooner or later had to
start providing these state services, and they all do because you
can't get out of it. And the funny thing is people, libertarians
and conservatives like to think of the United States as a
specially libertarian place, but in a way, it's especially not
because, I mean, the American state provides the the backstop
currency for the entire world like we provide the light, clear
shipping lanes is a global public good, that is mainly enforced
by the incredible threat of American naval hegemony. Right? The
American state is incredibly powerful. And the modern economy,
the modern global economy, not just the modern American economy,
depends critically on the American state, doing things, you know,
the Federal Reserve doing things, the Treasury doing things, the
US military doing things. The status quo is just, you know, not
even remotely libertarian, and a lot of this stuff that
libertarians, conservatives for some reason, a lot of like, the
military, or whatever are in the business of providing these
global public goods, but they tend to see market structure as
being something that's emergent and evolved rather than
politically chosen and implemented and sustained. I do find that
incredibly naive, and it's important to see just how political
all of our markets are, because one of the things that drives me
crazy is intellectual property law, you know, copyrights,
patents, they're just outright theft, right? They're state
enforced monopolies, they probably put a damper on innovation.
And they make us poorer. And they're obviously just fake, you
know, it's just the state is there, right? It’s just made up out
of thin air. And it makes a lot of sense. You want to incentivize
people to discover stuff, and you want them to be able to
internalize that portion of the overall gains as a certain kind
of compensation for their intrepid productivity and discovery.
But they don't have to be long, they don't have to be
restrictive. But the American economy is structured soup-to-nuts
by intellectual property law. Just absolutely. I can get arrested
for fixing my computer, it's just crazy.


And so once you understand that markets are political, just in
that very simple way that markets are structured by the legal
definition of property rights. And that we can be actively
involved in structuring them in different ways. Once you realize
that you can actually be more constructive about trying to build
the dynamic markets, you have to build them. Markets don't stay
competitive by themselves, for instance, they just don't,


drvolts   1:12:47  


Yes, there's no final structure that gets things right. That's
like, set it and forget it, right, which is another thing that is
an attraction, I think of libertarianism, especially to sort of
young left brain males is like, “get this system in place, and
then we're good”. At least to me this is pretty fundamental to my
philosophical development, there is no end to that, right. This
is what you mean by politics never goes away, there is no end to
the process of negotiation and amendment and updating and
fighting and contestation. And this is what pluralism means. It
is like that process of haggling things out with one another, is
not an interim state on the way to something else. It just is. It
just is human affairs. What’s the quote, “One must imagine
Sisyphus Happy”. Right. The longer I've sat with that the more
profound I think it is, and I think it has to do with this
getting comfortable with the ambiguity, and frustrations and half
measures that come with pluralism. And this I sort of like, I'll
skip a few steps since I definitely want to get to this. And this
gets to my central question about America these days. But, you
know, as I've thought about it and gone through philosophies of
everything, I'm very attracted to philosophies of everything.
I've just started thinking more and more lately, like, here's the
kind of thought experiment I run in my head, like, what if God
came down and said, “Hey, I'm real. I am in fact omniscient. And
like, your, your philosophy is correct. You got it, right. Like
all the other ones are wrong, objectively, metaphysically. You
are correct.” And I just think, well, what would change in the
world if that happened? If it turned out I not just thought I was
right, but I actually was right. And I actually did know the
right system. And the more I think about it, just nothing would
change. Like fake news, see that was changing the world. It would
be indistinguishable from me just thinking I'm right. And so I
would still end up having to negotiate with people who believe
differently than me, and find some way for us all to live
together, peacefully. So that process of politics, of pluralism,
of figuring out a way for people who believe different things to
live together peacefully, is the meat of the real thing. And it's
not some frustrating shadow on the wall of a true political
philosophy that we could someday reach. Right? It's like that is
the meat and potatoes of politics, the final state of politics is
haggling and fighting, just never quite knowing and never quite
getting the perfect measure. This philosophical pragmatism led me
to write in, in a similar way, sort of like Rorty’s whole point,
that he kind of thought himself out of analytic philosophy. I
sort of feel the same way. Like, at the end of the day, whatever
these truths are, you're still stuck in a world full of people
who believe different truths. So we've got to figure out how to
live together. And so figuring out how to live together as the
whole thing, it's not a frustrating distraction from the real
thing.


Will Wilkinson  1:16:44  


I agree with that completely like, and then that has been a big
shift in my overall outlook once that sunk in. You know, I've
written a lot about why libertarians are skeptical of democracy.
And it comes down to what you said before, the problem with it is
that people won't vote for libertarianism. But I, for a long,
long time, have had this kind of general skepticism about
democracy. You know people aren't really that smart. You know,
people are poorly informed. It's amazing what people don't know,
about politics. I love the factoid that, that this huge
realignment of working class whites came about just because
Barack Obama was black. And it's not just like that they were
racist. It's just they didn't know which party was the party for
like white people.


drvolts   1:17:43  


It's amazing how much poor analysis happens in political circles
by people who just cannot really conceive or internalize the
depth of public ignorance. So they have to create these other
explanations for things that happen.


Will Wilkinson  1:17:57  


I mean, I just find it amazing that just having a black guy as
president made a lot of union members be like, “Oh, that's the
party of civil rights, and the party for white people's interest
is the other party” like, people didn’t know. But if that's the
way it is, if there is such endemic public ignorance, you know
it's reasonable to be a bit wary of what democratic publics are
going to do. But in the end there's just no way to get around
people disagreeing. If you want to say that “oh, people have
these rights, or people have those rights” they're politically
effective, they're real, if enough people agree that you're
right, yes. Right. Like you're saying, it doesn't matter who's
right. Because you're not going to convince everybody that so and
so is right. So the whole thing, and that's the kind of the
Rortian point is that if people all just kind of agree that this
is a right and the courts agree, and the legislators agree and
people don't relentlessly campaign against the recognition of
this right and try to install judges who won't, then it's a
right, that's what it is for something to be a right, it has a
social reality, it's exactly the same as why our money's worth
anything. It's because everybody thinks it's worth something and
that's good.


drvolts   1:19:30  


Yes, but much like people don't understand money for partially
psychological reasons, like something about that terrifies
people, or just unsettles people on a deep, deep level. You see
this, you know, with traditionalists or religious people or even
sort of philosophical realists or whatever, just this idea that
like, wait a minute, if it's only real to the extent we agree
it's real, we're just marshmallows, we're in mush. There's
nothing to push off. There's no foundation, there's no sort of
hard thing to put your back up against to get the friction. It's
this ambiguous mush forever, that I think terrifies people. This
is why people want God or whatever, there's a ground somewhere
that we can find and get our bearings.


Will Wilkinson  1:20:29  


I mean, there's some fundamental psychological differences
between people who are tolerant of ambiguity and people who find
it very, very uncomfortable. I seriously think that the main
foundational, ultimate reason why I have been able to change my
mind a lot over time is that I'm extremely comfortable with
ambiguity in the end. I’m okay in a suspended state and I feel
that discomfort right now. I recently lost my last job, where I
was supposed to be a kind of proponent for a certain kind of
liberal-tarian-ism. And I was relieved to get out of it because I
don't like having to be the champion or a representative. I just
want to try to figure out what's right. I don't want to be
constrained.


drvolts   1:21:28  


Ergo [???]


Will Wilkinson  1:21:29  


Yeah, [???]. In one of my favorite essays, by the novelist,
Donald Barthelemy, who is the kind of patron saint of the MFA
program I went to at the University of Houston, it's a beautiful
essay called Not Knowing and this is about writing fiction but it
applies to just about everything; that art comes out of a certain
comfort with not knowing with being in this uncomfortable
suspended state of ambiguity. There's a similar thing as this
term from Keats, like negative capacity [sic]. It's one of my
favorite ideas.


drvolts   1:22:18  


Can we acknowledge that this is an unusual psychological feature?


Will Wilkinson  1:22:28  


I don't think it's unusual for a certain kind of person, like Ayn
Rand, fucked up my life. I'm supposed to be an artist, right?
Like this is how artists are.


drvolts   1:22:39  


For a certain kind of person, it’s more usual in like, art, or
poetry or writing or acting or something like that, right, which
is about humans and therefore must wrestle with ambiguity. I
think it's more unusual for that kind of person to go into
politics, right? Because people tend to be attracted to politics
through some theory that they think is correct and right.


Will Wilkinson  1:23:04  


Politics will just absolutely repel people with a great deal of
negative capacity [sic].


drvolts   1:23:10  


And fear, you know, I think we both acknowledge that these
personality traits are not fixed quantities, right? They're
variable based on circumstance, social circumstance, and things
like that. And of course, as we know, fear sends people in the
other direction, fear pulls people away from ambiguity and makes
them more desirous of clarity, more desirous of clear in and out
rules. I think this tolerance of ambiguity is sort of crucial for
humanity's healthy future but it's just so defeasible, it's so
easy. You have to engage your frontal cortex to do that, which
means your amygdala has to be a little bit quiet, you have to
calm these fight or flight systems in order to be able to
exercise the kind of frontal cortex thinking that can allow you
to see sort of the virtues of ambiguity and non-zero cooperation,
all these things, but it's just so easy to get people scared. I
don't know how good things ever happened in politics. I've talked
myself into a position where I think everything good is
miraculous. 


Will Wilkinson  1:24:25  


I mean, we've done the very common thing of seeing why our own
personality type is awesome. The height of the very high
openness, very low conscientiousness is the negative capacity
[sic]. That's the art style, that's the free associative, like
“try it out, you don't really care”, right?


drvolts   1:24:52  


I have that. But I also have that rationalist. The person who
craves clarity, the person who is attracted to libertarianism in
the first place, I also have that person inside me. And those two
people do not necessarily cohere.


Will Wilkinson  1:25:09  


They do, I mean this is something I've thought a lot about like
why are some of my best friends people that I met at the
objectivist camp when I was an undergraduate? And the thing is
because it turns out, they were like me, like, everything depends
on where you start. Right? In people, it's not people's fault. If
you started out reading Marx or you started out reading Ayn Rand
you'll get on a different track, but where you end up is going to
depend on what kind of person you are. And a lot of the people
who I’m still friends with from objectivist camp are people who
are really high openness. They're incredibly intellectual and
curious and they were really curious about Ayn Rand and
objectivism at the same time that I was, but that wasn't going to
be the end of their curiosity, it was the beginning. And then
they move on. But there's nothing inconsistent with having a
logical rationalist disposition and this all consuming curiosity
about different views and different cultures and things like
that. And if you've got that kind of personality you're going to
have a hard time sticking with a dogmatic tribe. But once you
figured out that they're doing something that doesn't make sense.
It's going to bug you.


drvolts   1:26:31  


So let me skip to what I think is the key, the central question
about America before we're done, because I really wanted to
grapple with this, and we sort of laid some groundwork. 


WW: Cancel culture?


DR:


Exactly, exactly. I'm talking about Dr. Seuss. No, you know, as
we said earlier, the US in its founding documents, and
theorizing, is a nation founded not on any tribe or class of
people, but on ideas - all people have dignity, all people have
rights, rule of law, not of man - which as I grow older think is
more and more important, more and more central to everything,
this idea that we're all governed by these procedures, these
objective third party arbiters. And that's how we make pluralism
work, right, we all submit to this shared set of principles and
values and rules. And within that, we can have our own whatever
culture, our own cultural ideas, our own religion, religious
freedom, our own freedom of philosophy and association, right? So
pluralism is going to live by virtue of these rules. And then
there's this other America, you might call it, the actual
America, which is very much founded by a particular tribe and
class of people, and in practice, has always violated its
principles and rules to elevate and maintain the dominance of
those people. You know, there's white money, property owning,
whatever, on and on. So there's this core tension in America. And
I have just started wondering, is that resolvable? So if you come
to America, with what they call thick cultural commitments,
right, you believe in Christianity, say, if you really believe in
Christianity, then it sort of follows that you should want
everybody else to be Christian. Right? It's sort of like it is
inherently totalizing, as most sort of like hardcore
fundamentalist philosophies or religions tend to be. And so can
you genuinely hold on to those thick commitments and also submit
to this thinner commitment to procedural-ism? Right? I mean,
that's kind of what America is, that's what pluralism is. You can
keep your thick commitments as long as you abide by these
procedures, these rules, these institutions, right. And that's an
inherent tension. And it's been resolved in the past, by
hypocrisy, right. It's basically through white men, running
things while saying words about procedural neutrality, and waving
their hands at procedural neutrality, but now demographics are
changing and people are starting to notice that and demand their
own piece of the pie. And so that test of those procedural
commitments is happening now. And I guess what I'm trying to ask
is, is it really possible for those thin commitments to
procedural neutrality, to a common set of laws and rules and
institutions, is it possible for that to be enough to sustain
human beings, psychologically and socially? Or do they need thick
commitments to particular tribes, particular Gods what have you,
particular histories. If they do need thick commitments, can they
then live together under these thin commitments? In other words,
I guess what I'm asking is, is true pluralism actually possible,
psychologically? Is it something that humans can genuinely do?


Will Wilkinson  1:30:57  


I think so. I think it's hard. This thick/thin tension isn't ever
going to go away, people do need thick identities. Very few
people are, you know, deracinated, cosmopolitan liberals with,
you know, a high tolerance for ambiguity who just think negative
capacities [sic] are the greatest thing in the world, right…


drvolts   1:31:18  


People like us could live within that world but I think we
established we’re freaks.


Will Wilkinson  1:31:21  


…ideologically relish contestatory democracy and pluralism. But I
think that is always going to be a minority view. What we're
going through right now, I don't really think it's a battle
between thick, white Christian identity and thin American
proceduralism. It's just the most normal thing in politics, that
politics is always distributively hot, right? It's distributively
high stakes, and the composition of our population has changed a
great deal and the relative power of a certain kind of white
person, white Christians, has precipitously declined. And they're
terrified about loss of control over the culture, and the economy
and their sense of status. And I don't think it's about
maintaining a thick Christian lifestyle, because religious
participation has fallen off a cliff and there are tons of
Trumpist conservatives who don't go to church, who will say that
they're Christian, but actually have no religious practice in
their life. So they'd probably be better off if they were
animated by a thick conception of the good and religion. I think
there's something nihilistic about this kind of person, just, you
know, getting on board.


drvolts   1:32:54  


It's a culture, though. I mean, it's a specific culture, right?
Pickup trucks, Arby's, owning the libs, yeah, yeah. You know.


Will Wilkinson  1:33:01  


Yeah cultural politics has replaced a lot of religion stuff, but
I think we're just going through a lot of turmoil because we're
at this inflection point where white Christians are already in
the minority, you know, population is going to be majority
non-white by 2042 or so, or just barely more than 20 years. And
the current coalition that is the Republican Party isn't going to
survive in a pluralistic democratic society that is as diverse
and multicultural as the one we are coming to have. And these are
death throes and they're dangerous places. This happens over and
over and over and over again, in history, where the dominant men
are the dominant group, where a majority falls into the minority,
and then they get nasty. Right, it happens again and again.


drvolts   1:34:06  


Yes, that is politics. 


WW:


Yeah, basically. And so I think it's gonna stay nasty for a
while. 


DR:


But the question I'm trying to get at is, I think there are
people who would argue, America worked, because there was a
dominant identity and culture. And it was defined at least in
part by openness to other cultures and by allowing other cultures
and colors and ethnicities and languages to come and sort of hang
out as long as they didn't get too uppity. But I think there are
people who would argue democracy really only works if there is a
primary culture, and if a primary culture falls and loses its
hegemony, it's going to be replaced by another one. There's no
such thing as a stable state with multiple, equally non-dominant
cultures. That's what I mean by true pluralism. I think there are
people who would argue that true pluralism just can't survive and
the throes are gonna end up in the replacement of one culture by
another.


Will Wilkinson  1:35:21  


I think you’re making a point that we went through in a different
guise, that a lot depends on social agreement. Facts with social
ontologies depend on the agreement and one of those facts is the
authority of the state, the legitimacy of a democratic system.
And people have to agree about it to have it. Agree enough about
it, for us to have it. And right now, we've got a lot of
disagreement, basically that the Republican Party is against
democracy, its theory is that the other party isn't fully
American, that they're citizens only in a technical sense, but
not in a moral sense.


drvolts   1:36:08  


The US is their culture, not the procedural, not the laws and
procedures, it's their culture, that is the essence of the United
States. And if their culture is dethroned, even if you have the
laws and procedures still in place, you don't have America.


Will Wilkinson  1:36:24  


Right? And so they're contesting the legitimacy of the laws and
procedures for this other reason, right? It's not like they have
some philosophical problem with majoritarian institutions. They
have a tribal problem with majoritarian institutions. And I think
it's true that in the long run, if you're going to sustain
liberal democratic institutions, there does need to be a common
narrative about what the country is and what it means. But I
don't think…


drvolts   1:37:01  


How thick that needs to be, I guess, is what I'm trying…


Will Wilkinson  1:37:03  


Yeah, but I'm skeptical of the thick/thin dichotomy. Because I
know what you mean by thickness in some daily practice sort of
way. If I'm really religious, and I've got to pray five times a
day and face Mecca, I think most people need that kind of
thickness in their life, but I don't think it's necessarily
political. Because the reasons those identities are political,
it's either people are threatened because they're in the
minority, and the majority is trying to stomp on their identity,
or what's happening now is you've got a majority that's dwindling
into a minority, and they're panicked and trying to hold on. But
I don't think there's a problem for most American-Muslims or most
American-Buddhists or most American-Jews in living a thick
religious life, for example. That's consistent with their
allegiance to a certain conception of America, like what you said
before, that there being this inherent tension between America's
ideals and America's history, I think is the story, right? That
is the story that everybody can accept, that thing that we can
all agree on, and that we can be proud of is that we have these
ideals that are beautiful. And that who we are, are people who
have struggled over time to make good on our ideals, so that they
apply to everyone. And everybody can buy into that in theory.


drvolts   1:38:48  


I just don't know. I mean, I guess everybody. I guess my cynical
suspicion is that if you're a minority culture or minority
ethnicity or whatever, obviously, that conception of procedural
fairness and pluralism is to your advantage. So in a system like
ours, it's natural that all kind of subaltern populations and
factions are going to proclaim allegiance to that set of values,
right, but then if they gain some power and dominance, if one of
them say, were to gain some special privileges or whatever it
just seems like those commitments would go overboard and they
would become committed to their continued power, you know. I
mean, it's only like a tool for subaltern populations trying to
get a piece of the pie. And I just wonder if it's enough, if it's
a stable thing.


Will Wilkinson  1:39:54  


It's not stable but this is just what we were talking about, that
of Sisyphus being happy. Right. That's just it, people are going
to disagree, they're going to get mad about it, they're going to
try to undermine the system when it's against their faction’s
interests. And you have to try to do whatever you can to have
systems where the coalition of the rest of everybody who has an
interest in maintaining the rules that some faction is trying to
undermine is sufficient to hold them up. The system will never
fall into a steady state equilibrium where we don't have to worry
about it spinning out of control, every system is sooner or later
going to spin out of control. The American system is weird in the
sense that it has persisted for so long, despite so many internal
tensions.


drvolts   1:40:51  


Yeah baffling, the more you learn about history, the more
baffling that fact becomes


Will Wilkinson  1:40:56  


…this government's collapse. Something I just wrote was that
constitutions don't survive because the framers were brilliant,
they survive, because they're always fucked up, they're always
inadequate, we can never anticipate how people are going to bend
the rules, how they're going to exploit them. But Hayek is right
about spontaneous orders, we don't know what order will emerge on
top of a set of fundamental rules when you first put them in
place. You don't know what factions are going to realign around
those rules and what their dynamics are going to be. So the
system is always going to tend toward some kind of
destabilization. And it is always about being creative and
flexible, about figuring out how to shore up the system. And
that's one thing Americans have been good at, we're good at
kludges. That's one of the things that annoys me about
conservatives these days is there's so much worship of the
framers and this originalist conception of the Constitution, when
seriously the fact that our country survives at all is because
we're pragmatic, we're we're arbitrary, we would just change the
rules. By definition, every constitution is living, they survive
by being changed so that they're not incompatible with the order
that is emerging. And so we've got this crazy kludgy patched
system, that somehow it's this jalopy that is flying and who
knows how it stays up?


drvolts   1:42:43  


Doesn't that terrify you though, doesn’t that terrify the
mechanic. Like, I don't know how this thing's running, but I'm
gonna get in there and f**k with the engine anyway?


Will Wilkinson  1:42:52  


I've become Zen about it, right. Of course, I'm terrified of the
plane crashing. And especially since right now, about 40% of the
country is just straightforwardly trying to crash it. So that is
alarming. But I just think that this is it. This is what life is,
this is politics and life is political. There's not a way out of
it, there's not a better place to go that's gonna be better
permanently. It's just what it is. And my parents, my
grandparents were alive with the worst war in the history of the
world. Everything f*****g fell apart, right? And there's nothing
that's gonna stop that from happening again, it will happen again
and you just have to try to be a finger in the dam and hope that
enough other people get their fingers in there. And sometimes
it's just gonna fail. You're just not going to get enough fingers
in the f*****g dam and it's gonna break and you're all gonna die.
And there's nothing we can do about it. Except try to put your
finger in the dam and try to convince other people to do it.


drvolts   1:44:05  


Right, right. Another thing that makes me uncomfortable about
that, but I guess I just have to get used to it, is for me that
vision of kludgy jalopy being held together by our patches as we
go forward, that's never done. This never fixed that. We're all
constantly fighting over that contested pluralism that never
resolves into any clean one system or another. I can get behind
that as that's life, as good as it gets. It's better than the
many tyrannical alternatives. Right? But I just don't envision
that idea or that vision, inspiring that many people. I mean,
it's terrifying. It's just inherently terrifying. 


Will Wilkinson  1:45:07  


Well I don’t think people have to think that's what it is. It's
not important that people see the system for what it is. Because
that's internal to this view, that people are going to disagree
about what the system is, and people aren't going to see it the
same way. And people are going to have fanatical absolutist
ideologies that they're going to try to ram through. And that's
just, we just have to live with it. People don't need to believe
that that's the way things are. I'm not making some Straussian
point that…


drvolts   1:45:39  


Yeah, I was gonna say we're tiptoeing up to Strauss.


Will Wilkinson  1:45:41  


No, because I'm not saying that there's something that people
need to believe to survive, and that we need to tell people to
mobilize. I'm going to just tell people what's true, this is how
the system is, this is how democracy is, don't worry about the
fact that our disagreements aren't ever going to resolve, that's
not a bad thing. It's a great way to live in a society where we
can hash it out, keep it within the rails of the political
system, rather than having it spill over into violence. If we're
yelling at each other and screaming at each other and 


we're not actually forming mobs and attacking the Capitol during
the validation of election results, then we're doing okay. If we
start f*****g attacking the Capitol while the elections being
certified, then that's bad. And the system will f*****g crash if
people keep doing it. And I think you can just tell people that.


drvolts   1:46:41  


Can you though because one of the things that polls are always
finding (well, this is interesting, it's not actually true across
parties) but you know, legendarily one of the things that
Democrats or Democratic voters in particular on surveys and polls
will tell you “Oh, I hate all the fighting” and I hear this from
normie friends too, non-political friends, just all the fighting
and squabbling, something about it bugs people and they wish
people could just be more cooperative and get along better. So
telling people that fighting and squabbling is like fingernails
on a chalkboard. That's just it forever. That's our life. Can you
really tell people that it makes them happy? I don't know that
people like that state of affairs.


Will Wilkinson  1:47:28  


I don't think people like it. But here's the thing. We're talking
about political ignorance before like most people aren't going to
listen. They're going to watch ESPN. They're going to watch Ohio
State like, you know, and get really depressed when they lose or
something. But like they're so they're not going to hear us. And
that's fine. That's part of it too.


drvolts   1:47:47  


All right. Well, thanks for coming on. Thanks for this
discussion 


WW:


It was a delight. Thank you. Yeah, let's do it again. Awesome.


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