Mike Rowe Is 'Shamelessly Patriotic'--But Not Stupidly So

The Dirty Jobs host and storyteller extraordinaire talks about his new movie, Something To Stand For, and being informed by history but not trapped by it.

Today’s guest on The Reason Interview is Mike Rowe, the podcaster, former host of Dirty Jobs, and star of Something To Stand For, which he calls a “shamelessly patriotic’ film that tells unknown stories about legendary figures in American history. Something To Stand For will be in theaters from June 27th through the 4th of July, and available online after that. I recommend watching it—and try seeing it in a theater.

The vignettes in the movie follow the format of his excellent The Way I Heard It podcast episodes, where he describes actual people doing incredible things but only reveals who they are at the very end of the piece. Mike is consciously indebted to radio legend Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, which ran in one form or another for about 50 years starting right at the end of World War II. If you grew up in the Boston-NYC-Washington corridor or in the bigger cities on the West Coast, you may not know Harvey, but if you spent time in the Midwest or South, Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story was every bit as much a feature of the landscape as the Mississippi River or the Great Lakes.

It’s pure, almost completely irony-free content, and I mean that in a good way. I’m a huge fan of irony and, if I had stayed in academia, one of my goals would have been to develop the concept of ironic nearness as opposed to ironic distance—I firmly believe that irony is what makes life bearable and even enjoyable; being able to roll your eyes or see the humor especially in the darkest moments allows you to stay in it rather than evacuate it. Irony is the oven mitt that lets you stay at the hottest of stoves.

Yet if you are completely soaking in irony like so much Palmolive dish soap, it dissolves almost all ability to commit and really be present or, to call back the title of Mike’s movie, to stand for something. I’m on the cusp of the Baby Boom and Gen X, whose hallmark was a detached form of irony as a defense mechanism. If you don’t give a fuck, nothing can touch you, right? I still fondly recall high school classes in the late ‘70s taught by quasi-hippies who had gone to Woodstock and various protests who would actually say stuff, We were out in the streets, man! They would shout at my classmates and me that we were apathetic and checked out and that we just didn’t care about anything. Inevitably, someone would respond, ‘Is this going to be on the test?’ or ‘Whatever,’ and the teacher would explode in rage, sometimes even storming out of the classroom. Sometimes I feel like this is the ultimate generational split, with Boomers and Xers on the side of irony and Millennials and Zoomers on the side of earnestness.

The starting point of my conversation with Mike is the decline of patriotism and trust in experts over the past 50 years, which is amazing and precipitous, especially among younger people. According to Gallup, ‘extreme pride’ in being American this century peaked in 2003 at 70 percent. As of last year, it was down to 39 percent. The same trendline is evident when it comes to people having trust and confidence in institutions like the federal government, businesses, churches, you name it.

My response to this is: Of course! We aren’t stupid! For virtually all of my life, major institutions have repeatedly shown themselves unworthy of our trust and confidence, even as the world has been getting better and better on a material basis (I go deep, or at least long, on the causes, effects, and cures for this in this 2019 Reason story, Everyone Agrees Government Is a Hot Mess. So Why Does It Keep Getting Bigger Anyway?). Forget about Vietnam and Watergate and revelations of MK-Ultra and Cointelpro in the ‘70s. In the 21st century alone, we’ve seen unbelievable incompetence and outright lying on the part of the government in terms of the War on Terror, the financial crisis, Covid, and more. The main reason we have less trust and confidence in government and many other institutions is because of the way their leaders have behaved, not because we’re super-cynical all of the sudden. They need to clean up their acts for sure, but the rest of us need to figure out fixes, too.

As an example, Mike and I discuss having been Eagle Scouts and the role that the Boy Scouts played in our adolescent development (I wrote about that in 2013 for the Wall Street Journal). The Scouts peaked in absolute membership in 1972 and their decline is multi-factoral but a big part of it is certainly the way the group failed to deal with a serious and ongoing sex abuse scandal while also blocking participation by gays in the name of protecting kids. The same can be said for the Catholic Church, which did everything it could to insulate itself from responsibility. Major nonprofits like the United Way had massive scandals and even supposedly uber-moral corporations like Volkswagen were found to be juicing numbers. It’s easier than ever to see the world through a glass, darkly. Some of our institutions can’t and won’t come back, and that’s fine.

But it’s not the end of the story, right? What we need to do is build new and better institutions and create more trust in our society, and also to acknowledge the plain fact that we live in a fundamentally better country than the one Mike and I were born into (we’re both 60ish). Not only are we vastly wealthier, we are more tolerant and kind and more inclusive in the ways that really count, in America and the world. When I think of the world my parents were born into in the 1920s, the one my siblings and I were born into in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and the one my own Millennial and Gen Z sons were born into, there’s no question that things are better now. Problems abound, but they are metaphysical and bounded only by our imaginations rather than ubiquitous deprivation and prejudice. ‘Most of the world, upwards of 4 billion people, enjoy a middle-class or better lifestyle for the first time ever,’ writes Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution. Forget about reducing extreme poverty—we’ve built a world in which a majority is middle class and thus able to guide their lives more fully. Amid all the non-stop complaints about chemicals turning frogs gay, religious prejudice against the supermajority of Catholic Supreme Court justices, the supposed rise of fat acceptance, silence as a form of classism, the scourge of microaggressions, failure to deliver healthy meals to student protesters, and so much more, where is the champagne?

And that’s really our dilemma as a society, right? How do you acknowledge all the massive progress of the past 10 years, 25 years, 50 years without becoming an uncritical cheerleader for the past and a kind of zombie conformist? How do you connect with people on the right and the left who seriously believe this is the worst of all timelines and that America is not just a uniquely fallen country but at its lowest moral ebb ever (or about to be)?

Part of the solution is found in the work of people like Steven Pinker and the authors of Superabundance, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley. They document how the world is getting better and why that has happened. We need to get the word out that in the big picture, things are very good. We are living not in time of diminishing expectations but one characterized by what I like to call the agony of abundance. We have more choices than ever in virtually all parts of our lives. We can either embrace that, with all the responsiblity it entails, or shrink from it and focus on relatively minor distractions that fill our lives with drama but not much satisfaction or insight.

I think a big part of the solution is also found in the work of Mike Rowe, who is patriotic without being jingoistic, filled with gratitude, and intensely interested in the people living around him. He’s the first to admit that he’s kind of a throwback to a mid-century way of being, a big, beefy guy usually wearing a Chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looks like he could have played for the football Giants in the late ‘50s. This is a roundabout way of saying that Mike knows history, is embedded in it, and shows respect for it.

But contra Faulkner, he knows that history is dead but that we can learn from it without being trapped by it. We certainly need to change the national conversation. Per Gallup, we’re back at late ‘70s levels of satisfaction with the direction of the country—in May, just 22 percent of us said we were happy with things. We need a new mindset.

By stressing the necessity of knowing history and your neighbors, and the need for gratitude over a sense of entitlement, Mike Rowe may help lead us to a social renaissance even in the midst of political polarization.

Below is an embed of the YouTube version of my interview, followed by Spotify and Apple podcast embeds and chapter headings, and a list of previous appearances by Mike on The Reason Interview.

0:00— Introduction
1:20— Rowe's new movie: Something To Stand For
6:29— Remembering the veterans of WW2 & Korea
10:30— Faith Popcorn and futurism
12:50— Boys Scouts & crumbling social institutions
19:13— Are we sheep or goats?
21:15— Generational disconnections for patriotism
27:28—Ad: Students For Liberty
28:29— Paul Harvey & "God made a farmer"
31:00— "The Way I Heard It" & expanding stories into movies
32:34— How do we acknowledge failings & still celebrate progress?
35:55— Grounding the American Experience in gratitude
38:38— "Embrace the Suck" so you can make new discoveries
41:50— Finding optimism for the future despite our sordid past
44:42— Mike Rowe is "skeptimistic"
45:58— The end has always been "near"
48:50— Gratitude & curiosity require humility

Previous appearances:

Mike Rowe on Well-Paying Dirty Jobs, Nonprofit Whiskey, and Male Decline, July 19, 2023

Mike Rowe Wears Trump's Robe, Fights a Drone, and Solves the Labor Shortage, October 21, 2016

Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe on the High Cost of College, December 13, 2013

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