hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm here with andrew sullivan andrew needs no introduction but it is worth noting he has a new book that just came out called out on a limb selected writing 1989-2021 and i would say if you would like one single all-purpose introduction to andrew sullivan this is the book andrew welcome thank you tyler i'm thrilled to be here
and i think that's correct i mean it is a good the whole point of doing this book was to say okay you hear all this stuff about me well here it is this is this is the this is this is the actual bulk of the work and i hope i hope people dip in and out of it it's not supposed to be a first page to last page read but it's an attempt to sort of just clarify a little bit what i've been writing for the last
30 years and i'm hoping to show that there is a there is a consistency to it i'm not not entirely consistent obviously because i've changed and the world has changed but also as a way to just show the history of the last 30 years uh which because the thing is arranged chronologically so that's the idea of the book to just give a a good intro to my various obsessions passions beliefs
ideas and arguments over the the last 30 years now since i've nominated you as the most influential public intellectual of our generation i would like to start with some questions about the andrew sullivan production function okey doke so let's go back in time at some point you learn you are hiv aids positive how did that possible risk of premature death affect your productivity
over the longer run because you have done an enormous amount as is shown in the book uh it obviously didn't in fact it kind of propelled me to write more the the how well for example uh virtually normal i probably is a book i wrote in 1995 which was basically the first book laying out the arguments for overhauling the gay rights movement and making marriage equality and military service its central features
i would not have written had i not realized i had thought i had maybe a few years to live i i decided that if i was going to die in my mid-30s which is what everyone seemed to think would happen even though they were a little optimistic about it at the time but i wasn't um i wanted to leave something behind and so i wanted to leave behind my best argument for this simple civil rights
reform and they allowed me to take leave at the new republic in 1994. i was i sierra converted in 1993 and in fact the forward of the book has a little date under it which is the date of my serial conversion so that i put in the book a clear sign of why i was doing that in other words i felt i didn't have much time left and i needed to do everything i could and then also i just
also believed and felt that this was an enormous story this extraordinary plague that devastated a small community really in this in the context of very large communities really wasn't that affected and how that changed a lot of people's minds and hearts and how it was the thing that propelled us in a way to make the civil rights arguments of the next couple of decades i don't believe
that without aids we would have marriage equality today i just don't so if we fast forward to today let's say you were to learn that you had only four years left to live but most of it in healthy mind and body what is it you would do right now knowing that that's a really good question the the good news is that back when it happened to me before i realized that i was doing the work i
really wanted to be doing it was very clarifying editing the new republic right now i love to do what i'm doing but i will be honest and say i think i would take time to spend more time with my friends and my family i would try and travel some more because i haven't really done enough of that even though it's a little hard right now i'd probably up my intake of mushrooms i think i
would try and gain some perspective on mortality and i think i would become probably much more devout than i currently am but i these are suppositions um you kind of learn why not become more devout now right so because i'm a human being and and death is the ultimate uh reminder of ultimate reality and we can push that out of our heads all the time and carry on quite normally uh but the prospect of
dying really does concentrate not just the mind but the soul and you have to figure that out and of course i should feel those things now i should we all should and that's the paradox of this we know that you know there's there's a difference between a life of doing and a life of being and and sometimes because our default mode network kicks in as it were we spend much too much time doing
things than being something and and so that's the paradox i know there were moments in my life when presented with mortality i got a very crisper sense of god of my own life and the universe and then over time you just get caught up in the mundane and the everyday and the frustrations and and you lose that perspective now you've taken quite a few intellectual risks in your career
if you look at our intellectuals and public intellectuals as a whole what do you think is the most fundamental reason why they lack courage god is a good question tyler um i think i've been struck over the last few years specifically at how many journalists especially or public intellectuals are very much members of their own class and are extremely concerned perhaps more than ever what their own peers think
about them and so are actually very very vulnerable to social pressure and and i think that means you don't want to take risks if you want to have a good career in intellectual journalism you don't want to alienate your your peers and increasingly your peers are all taken from a pretty narrow socio-economic base who hold very similar opinions and that's become truer over the last 20
years and so the the career and psychological and social costs of going quote unquote out on a limb are quite considerable and i think i am lucky to some extent i mean to have a life that's really not socializing with all those peers i my friends are a very eclectic bunch of people and almost none of them is i mean a few of them are but a lot of them are not in journalism or in public
intellectual life at all what accounts for that what variable in you in them has led that to be the equilibrium well part of it has been gay because you inevitably develop a social network that is independent of your professional network because that's how you socialize in in many ways and from that you you generate a different kind of perspective and also i just i don't know i just i just get bored and
irritated by my peers and i i'd much rather listen and talk to someone with from a completely different perspective my best friend plays jazz piano for example and and we talk about everything we talk about politics but but he comes from a place where if i i can sit down with him and say what do you think about this you haven't processed this in immeasurably but what do you think
and most ordinary people outside of that circle will ask all sorts of very straightforward questions that my peers haven't even thought about and will see things from a different perspective i also think the fact that i come from basically a non-college educated family so that i grew up with people who didn't have those esoteric or those academic skills and certainly not the social
skills to belong in the upper middle classes same with me i might add well and so you get used to real conversations about people and you don't mistake credentials for intelligence um and you realize that people outside of the system may be more perceptive about what's going wrong with it than people buried within it and and so i just i i don't i just i'm i honestly find life more interesting
the more variety of people you get to know and meet and that means from all sorts of different ways of life and the good thing about being gay i will tell you is that that happens more often than if you're straight because it's a great equalizer and you're more likely to come across someone who really is from a totally different socio-economic group than you are through sexual and romantic attraction
and indeed the existence of this sort of subterranean world that is taken from every other particular class and structure then you would if you just grew up in a in a in a straight world where you didn't have to question these things and when your social life was bound up with uh with your work or with your professional peers so the idea for me of dating someone in my office would be absolutely
bizarre for example i i can't believe all these straight people that just look around them and say oh let's get married whereas gay people have this like immense social system that that can throw up anybody in from any way of life into your social circle so your non-gay friends you think are in some ways more conformist than your gay friends i think issues of sex aside right
there's a sense in which simply like well simply i think no because my non-gay friends it's also true that my non-gay friends who are not part of the elite are also similar to that um they have different perspective but yes i find them to be often more questioning more curious and more capable of asking basic questions and not taking things for granted than many of my peers which makes them better
which is why i think journalists were better off coming from ordinary people like working class journalists who knew people knew reality weren't caught up in ideology or orthodoxy or have any interest in their social peers and we're just interested in getting to a story or breaking a story or finding something out regardless of the consequences that's the kind of journalism i i kind
of like and and and finding a way to make yourself popular among certain elites is is it's just not something i ever wanted to do and i'll tell you this i'm also just not that big a socializing person i tend to have friends that are very individual one-on-one i tend to hang out with small groups of people i don't have parties i don't go to parties i'm just not a clubable person i've never
easily fit in to any institution that i belong to putting aside my personality i think yeah putting aside issues of sex but how do your conversations with your gay friends differ from those with your non-gay friends we are more candid with each other i think we're certainly more candid about affairs of the heart there's a a frankness and rudeness and sense of humor that is hard to
explain outside of its particular context but i don't want to give you the impression that my non-gay friends are somehow in some boring category they're not at all i'm talking more about my straight peers within my profession rather than my regular non-gay friends in real life so taking a hetero person such as myself if i want more of this element at the margin that you have with your gay
friends what's the needed input to produce that i think it's going to places you wouldn't otherwise go meeting people who are new finding a way outside your own circle of friends your own socio-economic status one thing i was talking to charles murray about actually uh was how he does this poker game that he plays with just regular folks in a casino and it's a regular thing he does that none of them
are from his way of life but it's a great way to get in touch with how people genuinely feel outside of the chattering classes and i think that's the that's the gain i'm not helping you very much here am i with the thing i mean i don't want to give the impression gay people are somehow more fun or i'm just saying you're more likely to randomly come across someone who's not part of your
scene or your class or your race for that matter as a gay person simply because as a gay man especially the the sexual and social dynamics are utterly independent of professional intellectual or ideological dynamics and so essentially you you become friends with someone because you've seen them a lot at a gym or at a bar or a restaurant and and it just becomes that it doesn't become what did you do what
do you do uh how do you make a living and so on and so forth you mentioned before mushrooms how do you think that self-medication whether it be mushrooms marijuana testosterone something else influences the actual content of your ideas of course it influences them i would here's here let me give you an example i'm a daily weed smoker i have been since i was 36 i was kind of a late
bloomer on this and for me what that does i never i never work under the influence of any substance so i this is always outside of the work hours i'm not crazy and i don't really drink anything so a weed will happen at the end of the day and what i find that marijuana does and to some extent uh mushroom mushrooms definitely do meditation does as well is that they suppress the ego
they weaken the ego and so if you write something as often do and finish it or a first draft and then smoke something and then go and take a walk and just let my ego disappear a little bit and let me look at what i've personally done as if i was looking at something someone else had done with that same kind of dispassion and then you're like i got that wrong or why did i miss that or that's stupid or
maybe if i turn the thing around you just you that's attached to your own pride and your mind is sort of taken out of its normal rut and you change your mind more yes yes um also true with something like mdma i remember for example writing virtually normal which was this very tightly argued cerebral book and then after i'd finished the gut of it i went to celebrate with some friends we went
out dancing i did some mdma and we and in the middle of this dance floor i was like you know what i haven't put in this book at all why i care about this subject why it matters to me i'm being too abstract here so that's when i went back and then i wrote the introduction and then the epilogue which were much more sort of less less intellectual and more experiential
and it they're the most popular parts of the book or you allow yourself to realize you might have made a mistake you might have made a you might have made just simply a factual error which which happens to everybody and you kind of wake up in the middle of night or you just realize maybe that judgment you became too attached to because you were too proud to let go of it and taking a moment to
take your pride out of it and take your ego out of it gives you some possibility after hours of of reassessing your work and also the thing that happened with blogging is that because you were constantly writing you had to constantly account for changes in mood in in argument and in your opinions and because it charts you day by day hour by hour so that was another thing that got me to
shift my opinions the testosterone i think does give you a certain amount of energy and i have to be careful because it's every two weeks it's only one cc it's not like a massive amount but the next two days i have to be careful i don't pop off on something and and it's funny my colleague chris beaudino used to used to tell when i just taken a shot because somehow i just fire off this
incredibly passionate rant or something so i have to be aware of that too but you know we are a function of everything i could just as well say that eating as i used to sugar and cookies all morning as i wrote the dish gave me this kind of wiry focus but we're all a mix of chemicals what kind of mental process do you use to try to decide if a new idea you have is just the result of bias from
substances or do you just think well some of them will be biased but it's more important to innovate so i'm going to double down on this how do those thoughts go i literally have a little book called ideas which is which is ideas i've had when i'm high and i write them down by certainly then i then i make sure i look at them totally sober and i would say about three quarters of
them are nuts and i throw them out and the quarterback we want you to publish in your last four years good ideas things i can't really say or think about but i i just let my mind wander and you know i'm just a curious person i love thinking about stuff and i think my mind can go down a rabbit hole um this was part of the problem with me for a long time i just i couldn't i had terrible insomnia until
i found cannabis in my late 30s some of us have brains that or minds that just won't stop and it can be an ordeal and so it's not for lack of i'm not going to not think while i'm on weed or even when i'm on mdma i find for example on mda mushrooms it's all theology for me it's all about god it's all about the relationship between the trinity i mean the possibility of the incarnation
these things are what i become obsessed with when i'm really on mushrooms or mdma or the hallucinogens yes it becomes all about christianity for a weird way you know it was herodotus who first suggested the idea of examining all ideas both when sober and when drunk who really if they were good it helps because we the more ways you can look at a topic the perhaps the more you'll understand
it to be honest and but i think the main thing is ego the main thing is the ego bias we don't want to be wrong and certainly if we've taken a position it's really hard for us to accept that we screwed up given that you didn't come from a fancy background who first noticed your talent and how it was kind of a shock when i was in elementary school and this this will tell you a certain
amount about me there's an exam that they they sit you can sit for back in those days called the 11 plus which was an iq test essentially and i was just a kid in elementary school and i was about to graduate and go to high school and they set this test and then my head teacher brought my parents in and i thought i was in trouble and it turned out i had like the highest score in the county or something and
that was when i was told i was very smart i mean i i wasn't really aware of it until then and then i got sent to this super magnet school uh which was wonderful and for people from all backgrounds who just were over a certain level of like you were kind of stuyvesant a kind of magnet school and then within the first month they graded everyone on all the topics and put the list
of 1 to 30 in the class on the wall and i was number one which was another huge shock to me so that's how i found out i was not really aware i was that bright but the system found me and this is why i'm a pretty passionate defender of sats and iq tests in general to find kids who otherwise would be missed especially kids from poor backgrounds who have native ability but haven't had a chance to show that and whose
parents could not have afforded and my parents could not afford to send me to any school where you'd have to pay so so that was that was how it happened now as an undergraduate you knew and were friends with neil ferguson and iall that neil what was he like back then pretty much the same we were a little wilder to be honest um we were a little bratier and a little more
interested in just comedy we published a little ramshackle magazine that poked fun at at the tops at the of the etonians we both sort of thought of ourselves a little bit as what we call grammar school boys we weren't part of the elite but we got in because of our brains and so we were a little contemptuous of one of our peers for example boris johnson who was also there at the same time i mean this is what
happens in england it's a very close it's a very small elite in a way and the other i mean i also went to high school sat next to kia stammer for six years um he's now the leader of the opposition so it's amazing in my own education just by chance uh became friends with the leader currently to the opposition and the prime minister yeah you knew him then what insight do you have into the boris johnson
administration that the rest of us would not that he's a charmer and a liar and and hilarious and on purpose hilarious yes that this is he was the he was an itonian who showed up a lot of the itonians people came from eating the highest sort of fancy school in britain and unlike the other italians who came to oxford and decided well we've got to downplay this we've got to be clear
we've got to wear like regular clothes and like and and and alter our accent no boris came and said instead of fighting it i'm going to just turn into a caricature of an upper-class twit you know have you ever seen the monty python schedule uh one of those and but did so with such a sort of knowing irony that we all kind of got the joke so it's the same act that he's doing now and i for one at the
time at oxford because we were both in the oxford union together which was the debating society where you got elected whatever and so i was elected president in my second year and he had a hard time but i was very much on his side because i just thought he was a talent and i found him funny and i could forgive him for anything really and i think i think that's why maybe having known
that side of boris and not being intimately aware as my peers in england were of all his shenanigans of all his lies of all his corners cut of all the betrayals that he committed i didn't see any of that and experience it when i went back to england and talked to all my peers about him they were so full of bitterness that they had begun i think to forget his basic charm and
that power and i saw that at oxford it's the same thing now and it's why he's a very successful politician more generally what is it that intelligent educated americans get wrong about british politics well they're they're wrong to think that it's somehow a more elevated discourse it's it's it can be at times but it's just as raucous as here i think brexit has been terribly misunderstood by americans
because they conflated it for understandable reasons with trump and and they conflated boris johnson with trump and simply not the case if you had had a less crazy i mean boris is not crazy at all he's a very smart person and he's also not like trump a complete outsider he's the insider's insider editor of the spectator you know oxford eaton mayor of london these are not outsider
positions and therefore dismiss dismiss it and don't really understand that in fact i think the tories have developed a very canny strategy to represent the the voices and feelings of those who feel they're left behind without abandoning an important segment of the elite and that's the role of the tory party historically has been to co-opt populism for elitism as it were as to as to
to prevent revolution by by co-opting and i think what boris has done in fact and one of the things you'll notice in britain is that the parties the far-right parties that were kind of getting gaining strength have collapsed and the tories basically own the entire right of center vote whereas the left is split between liberal democrats and the labor party and the greens
in a way that gives boris a constant advantage and that i think is not not very well understood do you think the united kingdom will split up in the next few decades as we know it probably i mean i i wrote a piece like 20 years ago i read it when i was going through the book reading things to see if i would include it in the book where i i basically predicted that i can't see scotland being part of the uk
past another 20 years and that was about 20 years ago but don't they want to leave and keep the pound and the queen and everything else yeah and just you know to say buzz off to the english yes where can they go really if you look at language every time they've come up to this decision it looks like they're going to pass it and they always pull back because in fact the arguments for
scottish independence are incredibly weak first of all the eu would not recognize it the eu is not going to have scotland as an independent state because they'd have to deal with catalonia and other elements in in in europe which the spanish for example would veto so i don't think they have a chance to get back in the eu even though they have this old you know the scots you go back to the 16th and
17th centuries the scots were always allied with the europeans against the english the french primarily against the english but so maybe i don't know um i do think that northern ireland has been effectively turned into non-uk by the by the trade barrier in the in in the irish sea which boris negotiated and so i think that northern ireland has definitely taken a step away from being
fully and in the union the way that scotland and wales are whether or not you agree with it but what is the most convincing version of british pessimism is it john gray is it roger scrutin is it fits james stevens someone else is it you who who or what is it because you're mostly optimistic yeah you know who's the pessimist where you're tempted to cross over to the dark side maybe someone like peter hitchens or
douglas murray who have a really bleak understanding of what's happening in europe with the muslim population and also a sense that traditional classical liberalism in britain is really under siege uh sorry that's a that's a that's a ferry boat blasting um from don't worry we've had trains across our episodes yeah um it's a good question um so i think that's what i would say to
that but the muslim immigration to britain seems to have gone acceptably well right i think that there are parts i think of england northern england particularly which have had some issues with not full integration i mean really some separate some separatists but yeah bradford um i think would be one of them and in which there have been some really ugly grooming child grooming practices and
ways in which the muslim community in those areas which came from very rural kind of backward areas of pakistan and they're not weren't quite ready for modern liberal democracy and there's some element in which that works but in general when i go to england i do think that it's pretty successful multi-racially but then i think america is too because i have a slightly lower expectation i think of human
nature than most people do but in general the english and the americans pretty easygoing about this you go to london and it's pretty easy going what they were responding to i think is the speed of change uh in which i mean one of the saddest things my brother ever said to me when i was over there a few years ago was talking about london and he said to me well you know it's not our capital city
anymore is it and it really struck me that that he felt that london was sort of a different country now that that it was an internationalist global kind of playground as opposed to england's and britain's capital city and when you look at the demographics you see that 40 percent of londoners were not born in the united kingdom and that is now in new york fine that's always been the case it is
it's a big immigration entrepreneur but this never happened to england before and so i think and if you go to to london you real and i recently it's very hard to hear an english accent or an english person in any service industry i mean it's quite remarkable of course in some ways that's a huge advertisement for london it's the place where every other european wants to go live it's a place
where people from all over the world want to live and it's a fantastic city but from the perspective of the coherence of england i think it happened a little too fast and a little and it was a little too much and that's the adjustment why is there so much residual british hatred of margaret thatcher so to call her maggie the milk snatcher you'll still hear that like who cares how long
ago was that the milk whatever what is it about her that so set off her enemies it's funny because i was i was a kid i was used to fight with starmer all the time about thatcher in the 70s and the passions were intense i think the thing is that she changed britain and she did it without a great deal of emollients as it were she just did it and and she did it in a way that profoundly
shifted britain from a socialistic to a much more capitalistic country and from what i felt was a incredibly stealthified class based country to a much more entrepreneurial and dynamic country and in the process of course consigned large amounts of what was decrepit and stultified and more abundant in britain essentially over and that included for example like the great coal fields of
the north which were which which were draining the public treasury and and and and forcing people to go down into mines and it was absurd from my point of view but there was the people really hated her i know i i just loved her and and and she became this sort of bet noir i mean remember she was she because she's such a formidable figure re-elected three times transformed the country a woman a tory
all these things just just were too much for some people to even begin to absorb i have a piece in the book called thatcher liberator they didn't even see her extraordinary pioneering work as a as a woman leader as a woman who who had a with a professional woman who earned a living as a chemist and a lawyer and and who took on the tory party i mean i think it's an amazing story myself and i
think she was more right than wrong about almost everything um with a few obvious errors but uh i don't get it i don't i don't get it either i still my peers in england will still get so upset about her she's been dead i don't get it what do you think are the main disadvantages women face in politics and are any of those reflected in in views on thatcher yeah well you know i mean there's
emotional space that women are allowed to inhabit just like barack obama knew he could not get away with being very angry very often if at all right right so what are those constraints for women you would think the constraint would be you can't yell you can't harangue you can't be aggressive and debate without backlash but she was all of the above i mean she was she she did
not make any concessions to her femininity in terms of being a politician and i and the house of commons itself just the format of house commons is so gladiatorial it's so much a theater that politics in britain has to have this kind of slightly parliamentary theatrical element to it and i think politics has often had that kind of dramatic theatrical element to it and that doesn't seem to come as
naturally to many women as it does to many men and and and that is a problem for female for women's access even though they've made huge strides in britain already had two female prime ministers for example as opposed to the united states um but one thing's interesting also that the thatcher and for example theresa may and also angela merkel they're they were not understood within their own politics in
the way that hillary clinton was understood within american politics it's just not that big a gendered gap in fact if you look at the the voting numbers you find that there is almost no gender gap between labor and the tories in britain it's very american phenomenon this idea that a woman in politics is somehow the symbol of feminism and of the breaking the glass ceiling and all
of that it's just not taken as seriously in europe as it is here now in the middle of all these conversations we have a segment overrated versus underrated i toss that name a place an idea you tell me if you think it's overrated or underrated awesome yes i'm ready go ahead elton john overrated or underrated oh just trying to figure out um i think he's rated pretty accurately to be
honest i don't think either i mean i think he's he's a great genius he's you know without bernie topping yeah okay overrated without bernie those lyrics are to beat david bowie over underrated undulated he was so smart this man had such a vast sort of erudition insight i mean i don't know whether he was seeing that murmur he made about the future of the internet he was smart about what was
coming than almost anybody else and the creativity of this guy i mean we have all these lame-ass non-binary people today and he was a man in the 70s utterly exploding differences to men and women being androgynous being while being incredibly heterosexual just just a fantastic individual that's why my dog is called bowie after him oh great charles dickens i think rated correctly what's your favorite book by him
by him i think david copperfield the state of utah over or underrated underrated why have you looked at the statistics there they're incredible i mean and i think here's here's a tribute to mormonism the one of the one of the great crises affecting america is this atomization this this lack of meaning this lack of community then the mormons have shown you don't have to do that now i've also
experienced the other side of that because i had a lot of time there with many of the gay groups there back in the 90s but again in utah they came to this wonderful utah compromise between the mormon church and the gay rights groups which really allowed both of them space to breathe romney i would i would dearly love that guy to be president if if we had a republican definitely underrated
theresa may over or underrated underrated because she was given a basically impossible task and she did as well i think as anybody could have and it was necessary i think to actually spell out uh how brexit would take place which required a certain process of the country and the country's elites running out of excuses to do it and that was always going to take time and she took the brunt of it
and i think she's underrated the way that john major for example is underrated as prime minister the musical group queen underrated i mean how could you how could you overrate queen i mean it's amazing freddie mercury is a as a figure is another gay icon to me um who i think is you know i mean a lot of people saw that that movie bohemian rhapsody but but the the songs
that man wrote i mean you we still sing them we still hear them they're still part of our culture and again another incredibly original gay man just for a gay man to conquer rock and roll with no real posturing about it it's a lot of the stuff that we celebrate to the first person people did it before under much harder circumstances and didn't sit around asking to get a gold medal for it and he came from a
very conservative background and yet he lived his life and if all those all those football fans and who chant his songs realize they're they're chanting this super gay man i find fantastic i love i love that mishmash i i hate the separatism i love when gay stuff is embraced by straight people and vice versa i just i love the possibility of cultural mixture and energy that comes from that
what's your favorite movie airplane why it i watch it every year because it's just so funny and stupid and and as a tonic if you're weighed down by the world especially if you're weighed down by wokeness or the kind of incredibly sensorious attitude that we have it's just so great to sit down and watch that every now and again and see see what they got away with and just the sight gags i'm a big
fan of sight gags and of uh slapstick and so airplane i'm not saying it's the greatest movie of all time or anything i'm just saying i'm particularly fun when i think of movies i'm particularly fond of the other one i would say that comes to mind if i'm being totally serious is this movie called um integrate silence which is philip groening's documentary on the monastery of charters the silent order
and which has never accepted any outsider in its entire history since the middle ages and he gets in um and just films their life their chanting their work the way they garden the way they the way they pray and there are this lasts for three hours and there are no words in it until the last 20 minutes and you are riveted throughout as an expression of spirituality
it's an extraordinary film who's the most interesting and underrated feminist thinker i i still like jermaine greer to be honest with you i i just like her candor her rigor her energy and her balls if i'm allowed to say that i'm not really allowed to say that anymore but her i guess you can now right we could talk about a lady's balls now the way we couldn't before but yeah no i
i i'm a big fan of her still fan of hers she did some tough stuff and she's now actually also taking some tough stance which i appreciate approve of now you often have described yourself as an oksadian right michael oakshott how would you approach political issues where it seems you have to choose something ideological and there's not an obvious way to do experimentation so take say the mexican-american war from
the 1840s how do you think about that are you glad it happened was it a big mistake is the yorkshire and framework adequate to handle that i'm not i don't know enough about the mexican-american war you know we took the land and didn't give it back right yeah yeah and you know it didn't belong to us right and you know it was a lot of land i'm not sure you need to know the details of
no but i but but okay i think as a itself would not fit an akshating understanding of what politics should do seizing land is not what uh oakshot's conservatism would be about but oakshot's conservatism is very european and not as easily applicable to the united states in its formative periods but sometimes it does seem to me that taking a bold ideological position on a public
issue in which it is not so easy to simply compromise or cut into or finesse is necessary what oakshot would say is the key thing is is such an act of radicalism actually a form of balancing so for example you could make an argument that thatcher for example came in with a very radical ideological agenda of shrinking the state lowering taxes cutting spending etc which was ideological so why does a tory
support it because the country had so gravitated towards an idea of socialism that in fact that kind of ideology was necessary pragmatically to return britain to its center as it were so sometimes radicalism is a necessary part of moderation and and how do you determine which incident or which moment in history or which decision is that decision the conservative and oak shot would say
you can't that that is where you see to what we might call prudence prudential judgment which is where we rely upon the individual politician the individual states person to have the judgment necessary to make the right call and it will not be prescribed in advance it will be hard to determine retroactively but in the moment a person able to make those kind of prudential practical
decisions is the person we should follow and the goal is to keep the society on an even keel not to disrupt it too much even though sometimes it takes radicalism to keep it on an even keel at the state level do we have akshati and legislators today in america well fewer and fewer because of the the way in which the gerrymandering particularly has made it more important
for incumbents to worry about primary opponents than their general election opponents but i do think and i'll echo david brooks here that there is more of it than you might imagine that that there are practical things that need to be done things that need to be rearranged as a society changes and moves and there are people in politics capable of doing that who have done that and certainly at a
state level that's increasingly the case um there are you know just complicated difficult things that require administrative skill and political judgment and i think that kind of political judgment which is not to be too s driven by ideology in all things but to allow the possibility of a prudential pragmatic adjustment is what oxalian politics is at its at at some point about
do you think the american southeast will walk away from the pandemic as the least traumatized or most traumatized part of the country it could be the most i mean i think the experience of uh of having had an opportunity to avoid a catastrophe and then walking right into it is potentially much more emotionally and psychologically traumatizing than just having something happen to you
that you had no warning for and that you couldn't have prepared for but which which knocked you out the way new yorkers i think were traumatized by 9 11 or indeed the first wave of of covid and life say in miami or nashville it seems to have returned to normal much more quickly than in san francisco and people have a more casual attitude about it that seems to be bad from the point of view of casualties but there's lower
unemployment more rapid bounce back i see that too my worry is that we're that the delta vera means that it's also going to mean a lot of death in the next month or two more much more death than might otherwise be the case and that we will we'll have to wait and see how that affects this understanding in general as you know i'm in favor of getting on with life and getting back to normal as quickly as
possible and i say that as someone who's particularly vulnerable to kerby but i've looked at the risks got my vaccination and i'm going to live my life with some reasonable precautions and so i kind of appreciate where they're coming from but i i'd seriously tile i don't understand why you wouldn't take a prudential measure to save your own life when it's available to you for free
it it doesn't quite i don't quite maybe that i'm so used to having my body medicalized that having another needle stuck in me feels so routine at this point that i can't understand the idea of people who really aren't part of a medical system having to subject themselves to it for the first time on the basis of a potential illness we'll see won't we i mean my hope is and it might be the case
you know the delta is going to blow itself out quite quickly as it seems to be happening in britain right now so they may not but i do think there's a chance that they're going to suffer terribly and suffer on top of that the sense that they could have avoided it which makes you doubly traumatized now you've supported both obama and president biden on the grounds that they
would help us get past the culture war it seems in a lot of ways culture wars gotten worse what's your view now is it it would have been even worse yet without those figures or maybe obama made it worse in ways i hadn't seen at the time or give us your current model i you realize i think that the individual president can't unravel these forces that have been propelling us now for since the 1960s really
um that was the sort of thesis of the obama support was that he could get us past this he's the first non-boomer or post boomer to really be able to slice through pragmatically these this this deep right left somewhere nowhere heartland coasts divide and so with obama again i look at it and i'm like i've really tried in my conscience to see did he really inflame racial relations or
or the culture war in ways and i honestly don't think he did i think he tried quite hard not to which is in stark contrast of course to trump and i think biden biden is i think biden is more at fault than obama even though obama was much more ferociously opposed um because of his complete embrace of critical race theory and and the diversity equity inclusion agenda um across the
government and elsewhere whereas obama was really very hostile to those things and resisted those things but i'm sobered up by the fact that i never fully understood how obama was as unpopular as he was in many parts of the country and i and i honestly can see some aspects of his personality could rub people the wrong way but his core decency always seems to me quite self-evident and and i have to i
have to conceive that simply that americans i always believed americans would be willing to elect a black president i underestimated how willing they would be to be governed by one and so some deep racial stuff i had underestimated came and came to the surface if we look at the world as a whole and recognize there's some globalized element to culture and just ask the
simple question the world as a whole should it be more woke or less woke which would you prefer as a whole well no pakistan right there's gay people are treated right right well no but woke does not mean socially advanced or progressive it doesn't it means it has a very clear view that that the west is essentially a construction of of uh it has been a construction of oppression rather than
liberation but it's a number of things that take like the 200 most woke people in san francisco and give them more influence like their views have more influence all around the world does that make for a better world or a worse world doesn't it make for a better world i think it i think it probably does if you if you're considering saudi arabia uh tyler i i belong definitely the faction
of people who want to see minorities and people who are have been previously marginalized in society being given the full opportunities to become absolutely fine full contributing members to our society you can do that through a liberal system in fact i think the liberal system is the best way to do that the least divisive and the more psychologically productive but so so in that in that if i could
find a way to make the world more respectful of those ideas i would but wokeness is not about that it is about the notion that the world is defined by oppression and that it's not just defined by oppression but defined by white oppression and i think if you took the lessons of the woke in terms of the inherent conflict between white and non-white that non-white world we're talking about a major non-zero sum
global conflict which the way that there would be a non it would be a zero-sum conflict in the united states if they really had their had their druthers and so no i'm not woke not globally but i do believe that it has a positive marginal product it may not be your preferred ideology maybe maybe it has a social marginally social product but i i i do prefer societies where women have
equality and choice in their lives i do believe in societies where gay people aren't murdered and persecuted um where anti-semitism is i mean all those things of course i'm a liberal i believe those things i just think the means by which you get there matters why has woken us done so well at least along our coasts in passing a kind of market test in many of our most productive companies now some of it's
the government governmental support but clearly it goes far beyond that right how has that happened what's gone wrong in the market well it's less the market than the elite market because the elites that have made these decisions this isn't coming from a wellspring of of of american suburbanites demanding that they go through struggle sessions on their complicity in white supremacy
that is not that it hasn't bubbled up from below here's why i think because the elites kind of have a martin luther king junior envy every generation wants to have that moral uh quality that sense that they are shifting the arc of history in a better way even though we've generally done about as much as we possibly can to do that in terms of within the possibilities of a liberal system
so there's that the need to feel worthy and need to feel that you're doing things it's also much more conducive to human nature to see people in terms of groups rather than individuals it's just much more it's much more comfortable for people to do that we are essentially tribal and so what wokeness appeals to in the way that the far right also appeals it appeals to tribalism and tribalism in
its crude sense of being able to identify people instantly as a member of your tribe or another tribe that is how humans have always lived so of course it's a it's likely to be more successful when you combine it with the sense of moral righteousness as well to tell people you can be tribalist and moral at the same time is an incredibly uh attractive way of life uh to be able to
see a white male and know instantly that person is part of the problem before you even before you even talk to them is hugely rewarding for a human the human psyche always has been always will be liberalism the achievement of seeing the individual independently of his or her group is hard it's counterintuitive and so it's always on the defensive in many ways and and whether it's a sort of tribal
right-wing racism or whether it's a a tribal left-wing neo-racism it's they're both more come more naturally humans than the liberal discipline last question you said toward the beginning you wanted to travel more let's say you had two free weeks all expenses paid no responsibilities no covert restrictions where would you go and why i would go to rome which i've never fully really discovered
i never really spent that much time in i would probably go to rio i don't understand south america very well and there's something about that city that really compels me and i would go to ireland because it's also an island where my whole most of my family comes from and i've never really spent time in the west of ireland where my ancestors came and you know my brother went around there
recently and he said you know it's funny i go into this little town in in in cork and they all look like us there was a sense of uh i'd like to get in touch with my ancestral roots by by glowering at the grim atlantic ocean and the steady rain in the bleak sky and get in touch with their grit and their resilience that's that's where i'd like to go those places how's that andrew
sullivan thank you very much and again andrew's new book the definitive statement of andrew sullivan it is called out on a limb selected writing 1989-2021 tyler you lived up to your reputation those are fantastic questions delivered with merciless speed and energy i'm so grateful thank you i'm afraid i didn't do as well as i hoped to but nonetheless thank you for having me great dialogue thank you