On Libertarianism, Populism, and Progressivism: A Conversation Between Yascha Mounk and Shikha Dalmia
Why we need a recaliberation of the liberty movement
Dear Readers:
Earlier this month,
, founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion, an editorial partner of ours, invited me on his podcast, The Good Fight (that our readers should subscribe to because it is among the best out there). It was a wide-ranging and stimulating conversation that spanned everything from my earlier years in India, my embrace of but later disaffection toward libertarianism—and how Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party provoked that growing disenchantment with the libertarian movement—and what populism is and why I find it a particularly pernicious element within new forms of authoritarianism. We dig into the findings of ISMA’s recent survey measuring populist sentiment in America and conclude with where Yascha and I find ourselves today within the broad canopy of liberalism, thrashing out both our points of agreement—and disagreement.I greatly enjoyed our talk and hope you’ll find it interesting, too.
Editor in Chief
Shikha Dalmia
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We’ve been in conversation for a long time, so I’ve really looked forward to this. And I have a sense of your backstory, but I’ve never really had you tell it to me.
So you really were a member of the libertarian movement for a long time. You were a journalist at Reason Magazine and lived in that kind of libertarian world. What drew you to libertarianism originally?
Shikha Dalmia: I grew up in India, went to college there, and actually worked there as a reporter when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. India at that time was pre-liberalization, so it was very much in the thrall of a sort of Fabian socialist framework of central planning. Even though Indira Gandhi had made it her campaign pledge over and over again to eradicate poverty, it was nowhere close to doing that. This famous Hindu rate of growth was 2%. And India was also a very traditional society at that time.
Those two things, the traditionalism of India and the socialism of India, didn’t quite work with my rebelliousness. So when I discovered some libertarian thinkers—and Ayn Rand is the gateway drug for a lot of us—it’s very liberating, it’s exhilarating, the message that your life is your own to live the way you choose; that there is an economic system that doesn’t depend upon having to apply to the government for onerous permissions and licenses. Those are all very, very heady ideas. I went on to read Milton Friedman. When I moved to the United States for graduate studies, interestingly, I went to Louisiana State University for a degree in communications, and my professor was a man called John Calhoun Merrill. He was named after a segregationist. And interestingly, he did not have a racist bone in his body. He was my mentor. And he introduced me to other libertarian thinkers that I had not been familiar with: Hayek, who has been and will always be an abiding influence on me; Ludwig von Mises, there was this whole tradition of Austrian school of economics.
Mounk: Going back to what you felt was wrong with India, I first visited in the end of 2005 and I was in Kolkata, which at the time was changing quite rapidly. But West Bengal at the time was still ruled by the Communists. And so I think I still got just about a window into the old India. And I remember coming to a city, not just with tremendous poverty, but with the only car on the street being the Ambassador, which was the one kind of model of car that India used to have. And I accompanied a friend on a couple of bureaucratic errands, standing in line for hours in order to get some very simple bureaucratic process done and being treated like a worthless supplicant (unless, of course, you were willing to pay).
Take us a little bit into those frustrations and why you think that really held back India’s economic growth.
Dalmia: Yes, everything you described was my life growing up in India, we lived middle class lives and which was infinitely better than for those who were living below the poverty level. I think the formal definition of poverty is $1.50 a day. If you are under that, you’re poor. And there’s still rampant poverty in India. There are still 300 million people who live below that level. So even now when you go to India, the poverty is kind of staggering, visually. But what you just described was our life. To get a telephone connection, you either needed to be connected to somebody in the communications ministry, or you have to pay some “babu,” as we call them—enormous sums of bribes.
And our first car was, I think, 15 years old and it was a used Ambassador. I grew up in New Delhi. There was just this immense scarcity all around you. There was always a competition for goods on the one hand and for positions, economic opportunities, on the other. If you were the crème de la crème and managed to get into the IITs, Indian Institutes of Technologies, which were part of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Fabian socialist architecture, where he was trying to create these temples of industry—and he created these very, very meritocratic engineering schools—if you got there or if you got into a medical school, you were fine, but there were very few positions. And it was a classic mentality of socialism that if you allow too much competition, it’s wasteful. And of course the opposite was the case—the more markets you allow, the more supply of goods you get, the more you remove scarcity.
If you were anything other than a socialist, you were simply not taken seriously as an intellectual. And in that kind of an environment, you read Milton Friedman and you read Ayn Rand, and it opens your eyes in many different ways. They tell you there’s a better way, you can get rid of the scarcity. This is not the way of life. Poverty may be the default condition of humanity, but it doesn’t have to be the lived condition of humanity. All of that was very heady and eye-opening at that time.
Mounk: I think people by now will be convinced that you certainly at one point were a fully paid-up libertarian. And I think it’s clear that you still retain many libertarian instincts and yet you’ve undergone a very interesting ideological evolution, which in a sense is parallel to that of many other people I know, but in a slightly different form—paid-up conservatives, who were a clear part of the Republican alliance for very long time and who, when Donald Trump came along in 2015 and 2016, in a very honorable way, said, “This is where my political space is going. This is where my friends and colleagues are going. And this is where I shall not go, because the reasons to object to both his vision of politics and his personal conduct are deep enough to make that impossible for me. And I’m going to break with my political space, my political movement.”
In some ways, you’ve undergone a similar evolution, except that libertarianism is rather different from conservatism. And one might argue in the sense that the core libertarian institutions haven’t gone full pro-Trump in nearly the same way as the traditional conservative institutions. So explain to us why the rise of Donald Trump and what has happened in the libertarian ecosystem since have made you feel that it is no longer where you can hang your hat.
Dalmia: Libertarianism is the one philosophy that puts at the heart of its political project stopping state tyranny and guaranteeing individual freedom—those things go hand in hand, according to libertarianism. Conservatives put virtue politics, a virtuous society, at the heart of their political project, and progressives put equality and justice at the heart of their political project. But libertarians put state tyranny and individual freedom at the heart of their political project. So you would have thought when the closest thing to an authoritarian comes along in this country, libertarians would lead the charge against Donald Trump.
The Libertarian Party has been completely taken over by the MAGA wing, but the mainstream libertarian movement didn’t quite line up behind Trump like some conservatives did, right? And yet, there is not a single Never Trump libertarian you could name. The Reagan fusion of conservatism consisted of neoconservatives who were foreign policy hawks and paleoconservatives who were traditional conservatives and believed in traditional values. And then you had libertarians who were limited government, free market, individual liberty types. The neoconservatives and the paleoconservatives have actually spawned Never Trump movements. They are rump movements. They have broken away. But mainstream libertarianism could not actually support a single Never Trumper. There is no major intellectual among libertarians who is identified as a Never Trumper. The closest is George Will, and he works for a mainstream publication, The Washington Post. He doesn’t work for a libertarian outfit.
My formulation for libertarians is that they didn’t sell out to MAGAism. They didn’t start wearing MAGA hats, but they did abdicate. They didn’t do what you would have expected them to do. And that was like a huge wake-up call for me because I was constantly in the same conversations that I was having with socialists in India, saying, “No, this is wrong.” Now I was arguing something similar in my broader center-right circles and even libertarian circles as to why Trump is a fundamentally different kind of politician. And he represents really an existential threat to the values that we all hold dear. That was the breaking point for me with libertarianism. They just did not take the threat of Trump seriously enough.
Mounk: So help me understand this point, because I think it’s a subtle one. When you look at social conservatives, for example, 90% have gotten on board with Trump, and they are vocally pro-Trump, trying to use their influence to get him reelected. But then there are social conservatives like our friend David French who broke away from that and are making a stand of conscience in saying, “This is unacceptable to me.” In the libertarian space, you don’t have that stark division between the 90% and the 10%. Rather, you have people who say, “Well, look, we were always standing a little bit apart, we were never very easily part of the Republican coalition.” And so there are plenty of people within that movement who say they’re not going to vote Trump, right? I think probably a lot of libertarians and mainstream institutions do not vote for Trump. I would be surprised if a majority of them do. Perhaps a plurality, but I’m not even sure about that.
So I guess we can distinguish between three different reactions you might have. One is to go along with Trump as a propagandist. The Libertarian Party has done that, but when you look at Reason Magazine or the Cato Institute and so on, there’s very, very few people like that. The second is to privately vote for Donald Trump, but not make that a big part of your identity. There’s some, but it’s not even that many, right? The third kind of category, I guess, is someone who might vote for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, despite having deep disagreements with them on economic policy and things like teachers unions and so on—they might vote for them, but they’re not making it the center of their work. And it seems to me that that is really where your beef is, with that third category. Your target is the person who’s saying, “I’m just gonna focus on something else.”
Dalmia: Yes. That’s right. So this is partly my beef with libertarianism. As you said, libertarians had a very complicated relationship in this conservative fusionism. They do hold individual freedom and state tyranny as the heart of their political project. And with individual freedom, you have one strand of libertarianism which believes in radical self authorship, which puts it in sort of a progressive camp. But you also have a different kind of paleo-libertarianism, which actually believes in certain traditional values and a traditional order. And they think freedom is about affirming that and stopping the assaults of the left on this traditional order. So you have a paleo and you have a progressive wing of libertarianism. But libertarianism always saw its mission as “a pox on both your houses.” You both are wrong. You both don’t put individual liberty at the heart of your political project. You want to control individuals in different kinds of ways. Progressives want to take individual wealth and redistribute it. And conservatives want to mess with what you are doing in your bedroom. And we want government to be out of the boardroom and out of the bedroom.
But it was never an equal pox on both your houses. The fusion with conservatism meant that a fair number of right-wing-inflected libertarians joined the movement. And for all kinds of reasons, a lot of right-wingers became libertarians because they believed in states’ rights. And libertarianism has something to say about that. You know, libertarianism believes that the government that’s closest to the people is the most accountable form of government; therefore the more decentralized the power, the easier it becomes to control it. But what the states rights’ movement also did was give a hospitable home to all kinds of Confederate ideas. And they are all part and parcel of libertarianism, with the result that, when Trump comes along, libertarianism simply could not get out of its old mode of thinking.
Mounk: I do want to make sure that we cover one of the projects that you’ve had at your institute and at The UnPopulist, which is an interesting survey of Donald Trump’s voter base.
There’s obviously a complicated debate about who exactly should qualify as a populist, what it is that we should take as a definition of populism. I’ve talked about that many, many, many times in early episodes of the podcast. I still talk about it a lot in the classroom with my students where we reach these different definitions of populism and debate whether it’s a helpful term and what the best definition is. For the purposes of understanding this electoral cycle, how should we think about populism and what does that tell us about who supports populist candidates like Donald Trump right now in the United States?
Dalmia: As you said, populism is a highly contested term, right? But the reason my publication is called The UnPopulist is that I think there is something happening in the world globally, where you’ve got the rise of these strongman figures and they’re getting elected democratically. We need a name for it. And I think the closest term, despite all the disagreements, is populism.
Populism is a fundamentally insidious kind of a force because, in liberal polities, we depend on the people to guard their freedoms against the tyrant. But when the people actually elect one and then don’t care about their freedoms and what he’s doing to the system, that becomes a fundamental problem. Usually, if an authoritarian comes and takes away people’s freedom, you can expect the people to mount a resistance. But here they are saying, “You do what you want.” In the United States, we were completely taken flat footed by the phenomenon of Donald Trump.
Mounk: The experience of many of those countries, particularly with systems of proportional representation, is that these parties were basically always there. For a long time, they got 2 or 3% of the vote. Then they started getting 7, 10, and 15% of the vote, and people had time to get alarmed about this, whereas in a two-party system, it tends to work more as a hostile takeover. And so you can more or less ignore populism until suddenly it’s in charge of one of the major parties.
Dalmia: That’s right. And so we decided to actually do a poll on populism and create a model of populism and start creating baselines of popular sentiment. We constructed a model of populism, which has basically four elements to it. The people feel a very direct and personal connection with their leader, their candidate, or his policy, his or her policy agenda. They are okay with the leader doing an end-run around parliamentary procedures to promote this agenda. There is a certain level of grievance and hostility towards elites, governing elites and then other social elites. And there are out-groups who are considered to be fundamentally not part of the national community but whom the elites are in some ways coddling or privileging or not checking sufficiently. We created a 54 question survey, and YouGov administered the survey for us. And as you know, populism can be a phenomenon of the right or the left. And so our instrument is actually politically neutral. Regardless of where popular sentiment emerges in future, we’ll be able to pick it up, which is part of the purpose of doing this.
But what we found was, as was expected, Trump is far more populist than any other candidate. We actually also polled RFK Jr., because at that time he was still a candidate. And so there are 36% of Trump supporters who could be classified as hardcore populists. There are 29% of RFK supporters who are hardcore populists. And there are only 15% of Kamala Harris supporters who are populists. A couple of things actually stand out in the poll: Trump supporters, demographically, as one would expect, are older. Two-thirds of them are over 55. They are whiter, more Roman Catholic and Protestant. Many of them are born again. And they tend to be slightly less educated than the average American, but not that much. And they are much more patriotic. And they have far, far greater hostility to social elites. But on governing elites, which is essentially politicians and bureaucrats, interestingly, both Kamala Harris’ populists and Trump supporters are equal—they both hate politicians and they both hate bureaucrats.
Now, the reasons might be quite different, but there is this widespread skepticism of governing elites in the United States. And the other interesting element of the survey was that Kamala Harris’ supporters are actually just as much as Trump supporters and even slightly more willing to let her subvert constitutional parliamentary norms and use executive power to get her way. So there is clearly something brewing over there.
Mounk: So I think the survey is really interesting and insightful and you gave us a great overview of it. But what does it tell us about Trump supporters more broadly? I think the picture that emerges very clearly is that about 14 to 15 percent of the population are these populist Trump supporters, strong supporters of Donald Trump who are strongly supportive of not just executive overreach, but also of very worrying rhetoric about social out-groups; they are very unlikely to accept the outcome of the election. I buy all of that.
What I found puzzling looking through the poll or the question that the poll raised in my mind was what about the other Trump supporters? Because one thing that I’ve thought throughout 2016 to 2020 and for the last four years as well is, you know, I care less about the true fanatical Trump supporters than I do about the reluctant Trump supporters. When you look, for example, at the percentage of respondents who show that they have a populist attitude towards the social outgroup, there is a clear distinction between Harris supporters and the broader universe of Trump supporters, particularly on illegal immigrants. But actually, not many Trump supporters have those populist attitudes towards social out-groups (other than illegal immigrants). Fifteen percent about Muslims, that’s worryingly high. But it’s a minority. Nineteen percent about transgender people, again high, but four out of five don’t. Eleven percent about gays and lesbians, now we’re down to one in 10. Three percent about Jews or blacks or Hispanics; that’s one in 33.
So when we get to the broader universe of people who are voting for Donald Trump, but who may not have these negative attitudes towards out-groups, who may have some concerns about preserving constitutional limits, who aren’t fanatically in the tank for Trump, who probably are quite aware of his personal limitations, of the fact that he’s irresponsible—does the poll or your broader political thinking tell us anything about how to reach those people?
Dalmia: We were focused on measuring populist sentiment and his populist base because that’s something that other polls are not doing. But yeah, you are absolutely right. We were surprised by the attitudes towards other social groups, other than undocumented immigrants. I mean, this country has been consumed with conversation about trans issues and gay issues and there are quite a number of religious conservatives who are very worked up about those issues. But in the general MAGA-verse, they are not getting nearly as much traction as they are in particular right-wing circles. I’m not sure exactly what to make of them. But I still think what has happened is that Trump has really moved the Overton window on the rhetoric about undocumented immigrants. His rhetoric is off the charts: They’re “poisoning the blood” of the United States and they’ve got “bad genes.” And that pulls people who are in his orbit in that direction. He hasn’t yet gone after trans people and gay people in a similarly vicious way. Maybe we have made enough gains in convincing people that some space for trans presence and acceptance of equal rights for gays has now become part and parcel of the American political thinking and we don’t have to worry about it. I frankly am a little bit doubtful. Trans and gay issues may well be JD Vance’s issues. And if he proves to be an effective demagogue, he may well move the needle on that, right? Which is why our poll is so important, constantly monitoring these sentiments. So yeah, we’ll see how this goes, but if you look at the rhetoric of immigration and the sentiments towards immigrants, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush’s rhetoric about immigrants could not have been more different.
It’s sad and depressing to see how much things have fallen in this country. I mean, I was just watching this video between Reagan and George H.W. Bush, both of them are in this conversation. And Bush is saying things like “Mexican immigrants, they are good people, they are strong people. Many of my family members are Mexicans.” And Reagan was saying that the way to solve the border crisis is not to build a wall, but to open the border on both sides, that you have a free flow of people coming and going—Mexicans can come here on work visas, work and then leave. And that rhetoric is impossible now. I mean, you get laughed out of court in right-wing circles if you say something like that. Given how much our rhetoric on immigration has shifted, it stands to reason that attitudes towards immigrants are also shifting. And if the rhetoric similarly shifted towards the other social out-groups, who knows where the country would go.
Mounk: You founded the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, one of the main activities of which is to publish The UnPopulist, which is an editorial partner of Persuasion. And I think we’re complementary in great ways. We very much enjoy running some of your articles on our pages, and you do the same with our content. Now, we’ve had an interesting ongoing conversation about political and particularly, perhaps, editorial priority in this political moment. You’re an in-group critic of the right, who’s saying Donald Trump is very dangerous. Now, I come from the left and I obviously have spent a lot of the last decade explaining and arguing about why Donald Trump is dangerous and why authoritarian populism broadly is dangerous. We are completely agreed on that. But I started to look into the mirror after years and years of going around the world trying to make people understand this, and ask “Why is it that these figures are still getting so many votes? Why is it that the establishment and particularly the left and the center-left are so hated?” And so I started to focus a little bit more in the last few years on the threat of a certain kind of authoritarian ideology on the left, not because I think that it’s more dangerous than populism, but because of two reasons: because I think it’s also an independent danger, even if ultimately a smaller one, and because I think that to effectively fight against one, we have to fight against both; that the influence of these ideas is part of what makes it so easy for some of these dangerous populists to get elected.
I’m sure we have some political disagreements about economic policy, perhaps about immigration, perhaps about some other issues, but fundamentally I think we have a pretty similar worldview. And yet the focus of some of what we’re doing right now, generalistically put, is very complementary; less generally put, they’re going in different directions. I know that is a specific question, but I’d love to hear your reflections on this.
Dalmia: You’re right in your description of our relative projects. You’re an in-group performer on the progressive side, I’m an in-group performer or moderate or the center-right side. But I actually think that’s salutary because I fundamentally believe that both sides have to police their own and try and move them in a sensible direction, because if I try and do it to the progressive and you try to do it to the right, we would just intensify the culture wars, so it is much better that we each mind our own. That said, I will tell you one reason libertarians have gone so wrong is because libertarianism arose in the heyday of the Cold War. After World War II fascism had been defeated, socialism and communism were the new dangers to the world and to the liberal order. And that’s why the fusion with the right—the right was much more serious about dealing with Soviet communism than the left was at that time. But because it brought in so many right-wingers into the movement, there has been a fundamental preoccupation with the leftist enemy that just infuses libertarians. Their whole orientation is opposing the left. So what started off as an opposition to Marxism has now morphed into an opposition to what they see as a cultural Marxism. So everything about the woke left, every legitimate or illegitimate cause of the progressive left is just wrong in their view—not all of them, but too many of them.
You have the Ron Paul libertarians who are essentially foot soldiers in the right-wing, culture war army. And that has inflected mainstream libertarianism. The amount of headspace that cancel culture takes up in them is kind of amazing. If you look at the kind of people that mainstream libertarians are platforming, Chris Rufo, Dave Rubin, all kinds of people whom you and I would both agree are not responsible intellectual interlocutors, are respectable in libertarian circles. And that is a huge problem to me. So I’ve come to the point where I think you can’t really have a healthy libertarian movement because it has become so fundamentally preoccupied with the left that you just have to start something completely new which keeps a lot of their insights, especially on economic liberalism, but marries it with a responsible kind of progressivism, which is advancing liberal causes with liberal means as opposed to liberal causes with illiberal means. And so I think that’s where you and I agree and disagree a little bit.
To me, regarding the right and a lot of the libertarian right, both its means and ends are wrong. What does it want? An ethno-state of some kind, or a religious state, or some kind of a linguistic nationalism. Draconian controls on immigration are now not anathema in certain libertarian circles, and they justify it by pointing to the welfare state, because since you have welfare and you can’t have an open welfare state that immigrants can come and consume, your only option is to shut the border. So libertarianism has turned on itself in some ways. And so to me, we are at this moment where both the ends and the means are wrong, and there are many ends of the progressives that I can agree with. But I think their means are wrong and they are too impatient. They don’t want to use liberal means. They are not interested in changing hearts and minds and bringing people to their cause by making a case. They just want to use the commanding heights of the culture, because they don’t control the state, to get their way.
Mounk: That’s interesting because I was agreeing (with a footnote here and there) with about 95% of what you were saying until the last few sentences. Because I think we do have a fundamental disagreement about whether the ends of all parts of progressive spectrum really are ones that I share.
So there are many people who consider themselves progressive. In some ways, I consider myself progressive. Certainly I consider myself on the left. But I do think that there is a rejection of a universalist vision of society, a rejection of a vision of society that says that we are working towards a future in which certain categories of religion and ethnicity and sexual orientation become less important rather than more important. And I think many progressives now would say, “No, we envisage a society in which those things do fundamentally determine who you are, how you talk to somebody.” We should talk to each other differently based on the fact that I’m a white man and you’re, in their parlance, a brown woman. And that to me is anathema to our intellectual friendship and the kind of society that I want to build. And I worry that there is actually a way in which the vision of those parts of the left and of the right end up being more aligned than it seems. I think both of them end up being an excuse for indulging in a basic psychological mechanism that many human beings have, which is to prefer the in-group over the out-group; both ethno-nationalism and those forms of the identitarian left give you an excuse for saying “It’s fine for me to fight for my group’s interest over that of any other group without thinking about what we owe them.” I think that’s the only place where we have a genuine intellectual disagreement, perhaps.
Dalmia: Yeah, I guess we do. I mean, I moved in a much more progressive direction. So I consider myself like a Burkean progressive, where I accept certain progressive ends, but I want to accomplish them in an incremental way and in a way that does not tear down liberal democratic institutions. Look—I see progressives as inherently pluralistic and tolerant. And what they are fighting is the intolerance of the other side. And that I share with them. I think if their final endpoint was these siloed identities that you are talking about—you’re a brown person and you’re a black person and you are a trans or a gay—if that was their endpoint of what they wanted, I would agree with you. I don’t think that’s their end point. What the best of them are saying is essentially that when societies are set up, there are structures, and there are always dominant groups who manage to bias the structures that are set up. And it is an ongoing project to create an even playing field; these structures have inherent flaws in them and they affect different people in different ways; that you’ve got to take that aspect seriously if you are going to get a sense of how you create an even playing field.
Now, if they were going to say that black people should have an identity which never overcomes this idea of we’ve been affected by slavery even after we have made Herculean efforts to amend that situation and there is true equality among blacks, I would say you are right. I don’t think we are there. And I think that experiment still has to run a little further. To give you an example, I used to write a lot about affirmative action, and I was on the right on this because I came from India where I had seen how this quota system (it was an outright quota system) had really corrupted the politics in India. And when I came to the United States, I was reflexively opposed to any kind of minority preferences. When the University of Michigan affirmative action lawsuit was going on—I was actually writing for the conservative editorial page at that time—and the case at that time was whether minorities should get a little extra bonus points when they apply to make up for the disadvantages that they have faced. And I wrote against the University of Michigan and the plus points minorities received. And then I actually started examining university admissions practices. And it turned out that all kinds of other preferences are far more entrenched in university admissions: legacy preferences, development preferences, athletic preferences, all kinds of preferences are woven in that cut against a meritocratic system. And yet there we were: because dominant groups always have some advantage in setting the political conversation, this one set of preferences regarding minorities became a major political movement. And that to me is a problem. And I think to that extent, progressives are right that dominant groups’ own biases are opaque and they will make principled arguments and won’t even see that they’re making these principled arguments in a self-serving way because that’s just invisible. That sort of superstructure just exists. And so we have to cut through it and we’ve got to make very concerted efforts to do it. I think that’s fundamentally correct. Ultimately, you and I are in favor of a certain kind of universalism and there we don’t have a disagreement. I think our assessment of the progressive left differs a little bit.
Mounk: And I’m very tempted to go down that rabbit hole and perhaps we can do that over a beer the next time we’re in the same place. But I’ll leave it at that. I have a few disagreements with what you said, but I think my listeners probably know roughly what they would be. I will just remind people that, on affirmative action, my stance is one that I have about very few other areas of political life, which is just to burn the whole damn system down. I agree with you that every element of this from preference for alumni to preference for the kids of rich donors to preference for members of the football team to preferences for the second violinist in the university orchestra to preferences, at this point, for male applicants or female applicants (because God forbid that the gender ratio at these universities isn’t 50-50)—the whole damn thing is corrupt, start to bottom.
Dalmia: No, but I agree with you there, Yascha. My point was that if you want to get rid of preferences, get rid of all of them. Don’t selectively get rid of those preferences that help the most historically disadvantaged people, because that will make the system more fundamentally unjust and not more just. But if you want to get rid of all of them, that’s good, that’s fine. So we do agree on that.
This conversation appeared on The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, a podcast hosted at Persuasion. Sign up for The Good Fight to hear similar conversations with Yascha.
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