Justin Amash Interviewed Me for 3+ Hours

Check out this fantastic, exhaustive conversation about EVERYTHING, esp. the future of America. Plus: Remembering P.J. O'Rourke and understanding the Canadian Trucker protests.

Earlier in February, I had the distinct honor of being the second guest on former five-term Rep. Justin Amash’s new podcast.

Among many other highlights to his career, Amash is the only Libertarian to have held served in Congress. He started out a Republican, became an independent (controversially, he voted to impeach Trump!), and then affiliated with the Libertarian Party toward the end of his time in office (he chose not to stand for reelection in 2020). He’s not just my favorite politician (he’s considering running for the LP presidential nomination in 2024) but one of my favorite public figures. He’s principled and serious, but also funny, self-aware, and deeply committed to making not just the country but the world a better place. He’s the son of Middle Eastern immigrants (his father was a refugee), an Orthodox Christian, a father and husband—he’s exactly the sort of person we need to see more of in politics, deeply libertarian and knowledgeable about what life in the real world is like.

I’ve interviewed him over the years (most recently here), but on Feb. 9, the roles were reversed and the 41-year-old[*] lawyer-by-training cross-examined me for over three hours, about everything from the origins of my all-black uniform to my libertarian origin story to my drug use to my ideas about what sort of national identity might allow Americans to thrive as individuals and as a country.

On that last point: It seems clear to me that the older myths and stories we used to tell about ourselves—America as a haven for dissenters, principled believers in freedom, or individualists who would rise or fall based solely on their ability and effort; as a bold experiment in self-governance and Enlightenment ideals; as a nation of immigrants or land of opportunity; etc.—have lost their broad appeal and ability to inspire. At least since the end of the Cold War, the United States has splintered and fragmented along any number of social, political, and ideological fault lines. Such dispersion is not a bad thing, in an of itself, unless it leads to a polity that sees little or nothing in common with one another, other than anger and apprehension. Which is kind of where we seem to be or are heading, at least in terms of politics.

I’ve written a lot over the years about how much I hate appeals to “national purpose” and “national greatness”—all of my grandparents escaped Old Europe in the 1910s precisely to avoid being the human fodder for politicians’ visions of a greater Italy or Ireland (Great Britain, really, at that point)—but it’s also true that people in a country need to have some sense of basic solidarity and shared commitments if we are to trust one another and flourish. The decline of trust and confidence in America over the past half-century is a major reason why government is bigger than ever and social comity is nearing a low ebb, too. The current “successor ideology” (to use Wesley Yang’s term) is built around the notion that America is a uniquely awful country whose main/only reason to exist is to pay some form of ongoing reparations to representatives of all the groups we continue to oppress and to whom we deny full humanity (who we is varies depending on circumstances, of course). That’s not going to last, of course, because it is purely negative and divisive, but it can persist and do real damage until something more generative and positive comes along.

Justin Amash and I talk about that toward the end of his podcast. It’s an extremely wide-ranging conversation and a very interesting one (so I’ve been told). Please take a listen and subscribe to Amash’s podcast, which is housed on the new Callin platform (like Clubhouse but better).

Other links:

The great libertarian/conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke died last week at the age of 74, due to complications related to lung cancer.

I started reading O’Rourke at some point in the 1970s, when he was at National Lampoon, a magazine that, along with the first few years of Saturday Night Live, once fairly defined hip, cutting-edge comedy in these United States (the two sources co-mingled publicly in places such as the musical revue Lemmings, Animal House, and Caddy Shack).

Raised in Ohio in genteel lower-middle-classdom in the 1950s and ‘60s, O’Rourke went to Miami University in Oxford, a town I lived in for 20 years (full- and part-time) and we traveled in circles that overlapped at times (he was a longtime adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute). I had the opportunity to interview him many times for Reason. I was always nervous when interacting with him because he was so fiercely funny and caustic. He threw away more great lines in a half-hour than most of us could generate in a dozen lifetimes. Stuff like "Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” and “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." But in person, he was always incredibly kind, generous, and encouraging—something I’ve heard from many people who interacted with him. It’s a testament to his writing, too, that a ton of people who disagreed with him about politics still loved his books, columns, and appearances on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

What I admire most about his work isn’t his phenomenal style, it’s his commitment to go out and actually explore the world. He was often compared to H.L. Mencken (and encouraged the comparisons) but he’s better seen as a latter-day Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson (at his early best), and Joan Didion—as a “New Journalist” who did a helluva lot of shoe-leather reporting, of going out and talking to the people he was seeking to understand and explain. He was never the center of the story—the story was. Which is how it should be.

My favorite interview with him is from 2014, when he had published what I consider to be his best book, The Baby Boom: How it Got That Way and It Wasn't My Fault and I'll Never Do it Again. He’d started out thinking the book was going to be an acid-drenched attack on his own awful generation but it ended up being something so much better: A warts-and-all recounting of the good, bad, and ugly, of what the Baby Boomers wrought and a fantastic, loving engagement with Millennials too (Gen Z was not yet a thing). And also a fantastic discussion of the arc of his journalistic career, which illuminates a lot of the economic, political, and cultural changes over the past 50 years. Watch and read that interview here.

Here’s a video obituary I put together for Reason (Meredith Bragg did the video production). Click to watch; text here.

And here’s a video on the Canadian trucker “Freedom Convoy” I helped produce (with Regan Taylor and Isaac Reese). Click below to watch; full text and links here.

The main insight is that these sorts of protests—which I liken to the Tea Party, Occupy movement, BLM, and #MeToo—aren’t going away and they will never conform to a single set of ideological ends. Regardless of very different aims, they all reflect generalized anger and disappointment with the status quo and they all use new forms of social media to coordinate and organize what are, at least at first, mostly decentralized and leaderless movements. There is a new technology of protest available to people today and it’s going to be used in ways that annoy, frustrate, and anger elites. Even if such protests typically fail to achieve their aims, they change the way politics get done, and in a generally positive direction. Take a look and let me know what you think.

[*] CORRECTION: I misstated Justin Amash’s age in the first version of this.