Zooming In at The UnPopulist

Today on Zooming In at The UnPopulist, we’re diving into one of the most pressing issues of our time: free speech. Our host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by a special guest, Ken White—better known online as Popehat—a First Amendment expert, seasoned criminal defense attorney, civil litigator, and cohost of the Serious Trouble podcast. Together, they’ll explore some of the most pressing questions in free speech discourse today: Have we become too quick to label some speech as offensive? Are we idealizing a past where free expression was supposedly more open? And, most importantly, how can we foster richer, more nuanced conversations in an increasingly polarized world?Stay tuned as Aaron and Ken skillfully navigate these difficult waters. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Earlier this summer, the German far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, came in second place in Germany’s European Parliament elections, despite Germany’s postwar aversion to far-right populism. The AfD is known for inflammatory rhetoric about migrants and other marginalized people, and recently a member aided and assisted a full-blown coup attempt against the government … sound familiar?On today’s episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by UnPopulist contributor Tim Ganser to discuss how the AfD has capitalized on discontent, the limitations of technocratic or incrementalist politics, and what liberal movements around the world can do better to reach disaffected constituents, to reach those who feel abandoned. We hope you enjoy.© The UnPopulist 2024 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTubeLandry Ayres: Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.As the 2024 election draws nearer and Donald Trump’s second-term plans come into greater focus, critics of his, across the ideological spectrum, are torn as to whether Trump’s movement is continuous with historical fascism. Does the dreaded “f”-word apply to him? Or is it an unhelpful exaggeration?On today’s episode, The UnPopulist senior editor Berny Belvedere reconnects with his former Arc Digital colleague and international relations professor at the University of Illinois, Nicholas Grossman. The two discuss the propriety of using historically-weighty labels in our public discourse today, where to situate Trump within the not-so-grand tradition of authoritarianism, and break down how the Heritage Foundation-powered Project 2025 would fuel further democratic backsliding. We hope you enjoy.A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Berny Belvedere: Nick, do you believe terms like “fascism,” “Nazism,” “communism” are overused today? If so, why do you think they are?Nicholas Grossman: So, in a way they're overused and also not. “Nazi” came to be a word that just meant bad, the thing that we all agree on is bad, and can be used in very serious contexts and comedic contexts—like the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld, and all the running jokes and memes of Godwin’s law and “everything I don't like on the internet is Hitler” and anything else along those lines. So people do overuse it. But also, with “Nazi” in particular, it can reach a level where people then think that any lesson from Nazi Germany or any lesson from the 20th century more broadly is ipso facto wrong, that there's something inherently wrong about comparing the right-wing nationalist-populist movement that won an election and then lost power and then attempted a putsch and then reconsolidated and ran for power again, to America's right-wing nationalist-populist movement that won an election and then lost power by election and then attempted a putsch and then sought power again. That seems pretty ridiculous that you couldn't connect any of those.As for “fascism,” with thinking of it as this thing nearly everybody agrees was wrong that happened in the 20th century, when people try to apply it more loosely to things that are, say, authoritarian but not necessarily fascist … that could reduce the power of the word. But I think at this point, people using the word like Joe Biden used “semi-fascism,” to describe Trump’s authoritarian project … I don’t think is unreasonable.Berny: So when Biden used “semi-fascism,” how is it that that qualifier, “semi,” managed to successfully avoid the trap of requiring a perfect historical parallel while at the same time bringing in a term that has enough connotative heft to meet the gravity of Trump and MAGA's offenses? How is it that a word as simple as “semi” is able to successfully get us out of this jam?Nicholas: You know, that's a really good point. I hadn't quite thought about it that way, but it does look like the “semi” modifier has threaded that needle where it's a way of indicating, “Okay, I'm not saying this is literally Hitler and that we are headed for World War III and another Holocaust.” I mean, to pick a kind of obvious example: When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, there is explicit calls for genocide. In Trump’s largely ghostwritten books, you don’t see anything like the final solution for the Jews. That runs into the problem of, “No, you're being hyperbolic.” So “semi” makes it where, “I'm not saying it's exactly that. I'm saying it bears enough resemblance to that that we should think of it as serious and bad.” And given that I and many others do think of it as serious and bad, and in particular as anti-democratic and authoritarian, the “semi” adds a way to use a word that connects with a lot of people without running into those, “So you're saying this is literally Hitler” counterarguments.Berny: As an international relations professor who has taught classes on terrorism, you’ve argued convincingly that misapplications of that word, “terrorism,” can have real consequences and that therefore applying the word well, in a more narrowly defined way, is really important. Is the issue with misapplications of the word “Nazi” or “fascism” on that same level, or not really?Nicholas: You're right that I'm a stickler on the word “terrorism,” that it's something that I teach and have taught for a while, and I take issue with a common usage of it to be basically a synonym of “bad,” a synonym of “thing I don't like.” If you Google “Republican terrorists” or “Democratic terrorists,” you get millions of hits. I think it is important for us to be able to really understand that “terrorism” refers specifically to violent political actions targeted against non-combatants by non-state actors. It's important for conceptual clarity, but in particular for developing counter-strategies and executing them well.I tend not to use “fascism” as well. I stick more to something like “authoritarianism” because the usefulness about it is: Trump’s project is clearly authoritarian and there’s no ambiguity about it. He’s calling for the termination of the Constitution, saying, “I’ll be a dictator”—he’s quite open about it. You could have judged it from actions, but also now from statements. Whereas with something like the word “fascism,” that leads to debates that are potentially distracting. So I think it’s a mistake to really fixate on the word, to be very insistent upon it.My concern with the word “terrorism” is not throwing it around so often and so loosely that it loses its power. And I feel that way about “fascism” as well—as a word that we shouldn't throw around loosely. I'll give you a recent example of this. When some people were reacting to police shutting down various campus protests, some cases seemed, to me and to many others, like an excessive use of force, just the sheer number of manpower and police presence that was being used. I saw comments along the lines of, “Why would you be concerned about fascism? Fascism is clearly already here.” And, no, that's really not it. So, the police arrested a bunch of people and, if any of them are charged with a crime, they'll have a chance to defend themselves in court. And that maybe is bad—certainly somebody can criticize it—but it's also not fascism. There's a danger of a “boy who cried wolf” effect where, if you're constantly calling anything you don't like this maximal bad word, then when something that is actually like that thing comes around, people are less inclined to believe you.Then again, the lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not that wolves aren't real and you don't need to worry about them.Berny: We're going to focus on more than just the term “fascism” here in this discussion, but I want to stay on the term for just a sec because it is a prominent issue in our discourse that keeps popping up.So, we humans tend to be incorrigibly committed to clarifying our world by describing it, by capturing it linguistically. But there's an inherent limitation to doing that that seems to always rear its head. Calling something a “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi” initiative helps to situate it within a particular historical movement. But the downside to that is historical episodes, by their very nature, are in the minds of many people tethered to particular circumstances, the ones that they temporally existed in. So history gives us these movements that have a fixed shape. And that can somewhat frustrate new applications of those labels.The part that a lot of people are underestimating is just how incredibly powerful institutional authority is. This idea of, it's norms all the way down … the idea that powerful people should follow the law is a norm. It is only a law to the extent that the people in power enforce it. And if the people in power, just enough of the people in power, don't enforce it, then it might as well not be a law. — Nicholas GrossmanSo to continue with the Nazi example, when some form of discourse today, whether it's a meme or a trope, or some rhetoric that a politician uses, gets characterized as “Nazi” or “neo-Nazi,” skeptics who don't detect a full-blown, genocidal antisemitism in that discourse will suggest that the “Nazi” label is overblown or being unfairly applied. I think the same thing happens, though at a lower scale, with “fascism.”My own take is that proponents and skeptics alike of these terms have in mind different aspects of those movements when they apply the labels or when they hear the labels applied. So when Trump gets called a “fascist” or a “neo-fascist,” the idea isn't necessarily that he's literally continuing Mussolini's project or that he's done the same exact things Franco did in Spain or whatever. Sometimes it means that. But sometimes I suspect the term is applied because a commentator or analyst just wants to note that Trump has similar impulses or inclinations or beliefs. The idea isn't that there's a perfect or near perfect match between the concrete actions Trump has taken and the ones past fascists have taken—because those will always be indexed to a particular time horizon. I think the idea, instead, is that Trump's posture toward democracy, toward the nation, the individual's role within the nation, and so on, is meaningfully similar to past fascist leaders and how they viewed things.If institutions exist today that reliably frustrate Trump's ability to carry out a more full-bodied fascistic reign, more so than they ever did for someone like Mussolini, that doesn't suggest, and it shouldn't suggest, that Trump lacks fascistic tendencies. Because, of course, that's just something external. Trump has routinely praised Putin and Kim and the way the societies they rule over are organized around their whims and wishes. The fac

On today's episode, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia and senior editor Berny Belvedere are joined by guest Ian Bassin.Ian previously served as Associate White House Counsel under President Obama and is the founder and Executive Director at Protect Democracy, a cross-ideological coalition defending America’s system of government against the threat of authoritarianism. They discuss the challenges of recognizing and addressing threats to democracy when they don't fit traditional narratives, how to implement measures to slow down autocratic tendencies, and the importance of our rapidly shrinking civil society. We hope you enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today episode, Aaron Ross Powell is joined by guest Richard Rothstein,  a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. His latest book is Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.He and Aaron discuss the root of America's modern segregation, the role of the Supreme Court in its development, and what we can do to remedy it. We hope you enjoy it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today’s episode, Aaron Powell interviews Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a member of the Board of Directors at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a trustee of Freedom House.She recently authored a piece at The UnPopulist titled, “Right-Wing Populists Are Just as Bad for Business as Left-Wing Ones,” in which she outlines the folly and falsehoods that form the foundation of populist economics.In today’s discussion, they cover the story populists tell their followers about economics, how that same narrative has taken root in America, and what it takes to resist falling under the populist spell. Enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On today’s episode, The UnPopulist’s editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia and senior editor Berny Belvedere are joined by Matt Yglesias. Matt is a journalist, blogger, and podcaster who’s written for The Atlantic and Slate. He’s also a co-founder of Vox and now writes his daily Substack newsletter Slow Boring, which is dedicated to realizing a better world through rigorous conversations and a spirit of pragmatism.Matt joins us to discuss the media’s adversarial role in politics, how polarization and populism foster conflict, and what both the left and right can do to make sure our politics are more productive moving forward. Enjoy. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

It’s official: NATO has officially grown yet again. The international alliance now boasts 32 member states following the most recent additions of Finland and, as of this week, Sweden. But what are these Nordic neighbors getting into?Today we have the pleasure of bringing you a conversation between our Editor in Chief Shikha Dalmia and Senior Editor Berny Belvedere. While they have different positions on the benefits of NATO, this episode is less of a debate and more a conversation discussing the merits and drawbacks of arguments for and against it. With historical grounding and moral reasoning, they tease out nuanced and complex reasons for both positions, often with one another’s help. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

On our last episode, we heard from UnPopulist columnist and Director of Election Policy the Rainey Center Andy Craig on why he believes removing Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot is, in fact, not anti-democratic. Today, we wanted to give you the opportunity to hear a counter-argument.Today’s debate, which features both Andy and, for the opposition, the Washington Post’s Jason Willick, is not filled with bad-faith interruptions, name-calling, or any of the other shallow chaos associated with modern debates. Andy and Jason discuss whether or not January 6th was an insurrection, the merits of the argument that the President is not an “officer”, and what we can expect from the Supreme Court’s soon to be released decision.Further Reading:Allowing Trump on the Ballot Is What Is Truly Anti-Democratic by Andy CraigOn Ballot Access, Trump Shouldn’t be Treated as More Equal than Others by Andy CraigWhat a 1790s Rebellion Shows About the Campaign to Disqualify Trump by Jason WillickThe Antislavery Giant at the Center of the Trump Disqualification Case by Jason Willick This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

At the very end of last year, Donald Trump's presidential campaign hit a large roadblock when the Colorado State Supreme Court ruled him ineligible for the office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, also known as the Insurrection Clause, due to his actions during January 6th. While many of his opponents praised this decision as justice finally taking course, there has of course been backlash.A major complaint about the decision to take him off the ballot is that doing so would be anti-democratic, a circumvention of the people's will by unelected politicians in robes. Exercising judicial power to remove a candidate who has on occasion been leading in the polls does seem remarkably anti-democratic. Even some liberals have expressed some qualms about such a course like this. But are they justified in their worries?Today is our Editor’s Roundtable. Host Landry Ayres is joined by The UnPopulist's Shikha Dalmia and Berny Belvedere, as well as Director of Election Policy at the Rainey Center and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, Andy Craig.Read Andy’s piece for The UnPopulist here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

The Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, the nonprofit parent organization of The UnPopulist, recently fielded a survey to measure populist attitudes among Americans. The poll of 1,000 respondents was administered nationwide from November 17th to the 27th 2023, as a supplement to the weekly America's Political Pulse Survey conducted by the Dartmouth-based Polarization Research Lab.Last week, The UnPopulist published its findings, and they're fascinating. On today's episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by the survey's author, Tom Shull, Polling Director at ISMA. They dig into how the survey was designed, what it tells us about the state of American populism, and what questions still need answers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. I'm joined today by my colleagues, Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet for our editors' round table. Recent reporting has uncovered plans by Trump allies, and Trumpist think tanks, and other organizations to deconstruct the administrative state.A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: I think all of us agree that the administrative state is unaccountable and too large, so what's wrong with Trump's plans to reform it?Shikha Dalmia: Good morning, Aaron and Akiva. We haven't done this in a while, right? We are getting together in this format after a long time, but I'm surprised, Aaron, you didn't use the word “deep state,” because that's the term of art these days, right? What's wrong with the “deep state?” There are actually plenty of things wrong with the deep state, but we actually in the US don't really have a deep state.Deep state is an idea that was originally meant to describe the kind of bureaucracy we had in countries like Turkey and Egypt, which was controlled by the military and security forces. They engaged in all kinds of machinations behind the scenes to control civilian authorities and the populace at large. Their functioning was completely opaque and the subject of all kinds of conspiracy theories in the Middle East.That's not what we have here in the United States. What we have in the United States is a problematic situation, where those of us who believe in government of limited size and scope, the federal government is very large. It performs functions far beyond what, I think it's fair to say, the Founders originally visualized and the bureaucratic state, the administrative state, has grown apace.Now, if you talk to my friend Frank Fukuyama, he will tell you that actually, the bureaucracy is not large enough because the federal government's functions have grown far, far more than the bureaucracy has, and the bureaucracy simply can't keep up with providing the kinds of professional and efficient execution that it was meant to do. Now, regardless of what you think about that view, I think from our point of view, an administrative state that in its current form is quite problematic, but it is part of a bigger problem with the federal government.As the federal government was originally envisualized in this country, each branch had very specific role, and had very specific powers and functions. Each side was supposed to guard that, guard their functions in a very, very jealous way. The idea was that would allow the public at large to keep each government branch publicly accountable, and at the same time, each branch would provide a check on the other.Now, that actually has not how things have worked out in the United States. Over a period of time, Congress has delegated too much of its authority to both the president and the executive agencies under the president. If you think of the War Powers Act, it was supposed to curtail the president's war-making ability. But Congress has got used to giving very large authorization of power to wage all kinds of wars in all kinds of countries post 9/11. That was one huge usurpation of power by the executive, not intentionally, but in effect from Congress.Congress also writes very broad and vague legislations and then lets the administrative branch define them in any way it wants to. That essentially means, this is the critique of the administrative state, is that therefore the administrative branches have very sweeping legislative powers through their powers of interpretation that nobody can really control. Congress can't control the executive agencies and the president can't control the executive agencies either, because many of these people are civil servants and bureaucrats and they are protected by rules of a professional bureaucracy. So they become largely unaccountable.If you are listening to our conservative friends, there's an additional problem, which is that the civil servants tend to be somewhat leftist in their biases. They have an ideological agenda…to promote environmental legislation or equity legislation and what have you. All that becomes a problem for them. Now, I would be in favor of limiting the size and scope of the administrative branch if it was part of broader reform of government, where the Congress took back its legislative powers and therefore the administrative branches had to do less in terms of interpretation and execution. Then you could shrink the size of the administrative state too. But that's not what Trump is proposing.What Trump and the Republicans are proposing is not, in my view, a deconstruction, which is a term of art, or the rationalization of the administrative state. They want to co-opt and take over the administrative state for their own ends. Their ends are essentially twofold: To punish their enemies and rewards their friends. That's what the right has been saying it wants to do for a very long time.“What Trump and the Republicans are proposing is not, in my view, a deconstruction, which is a term of art, or the rationalization of the administrative state. They want to co-opt and take over the administrative state for their own ends. Their ends are essentially twofold: To punish their enemies and rewards their friends.”— Shikha DalmiaIn Trump's case, it means punishing enemies means not just ideological enemies, which is certainly a part of it, but actually, his personal enemies who have tried to hold him accountable for things like calling a mob to ransack the Capitol. He wants to go after Biden and Hunter Biden for purely political purposes. That's not really a reform of the administrative state. That's a co-optation of the of the administrative state.Now, how is he planning to do that? He's got a three-part plan to do this. The first part is that all presidents get to appoint 4,000 political appointments across federal agencies. That is not something that Trump alone would do, every president does that. What is different in this case is that most presidents will look for people who have expertise and merit, have some kind of claim to merit to run the agencies. That's not what they want to do. Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute and then Steve Miller's, I think it's America First Legal. They have a plan to install loyalist—Trump loyalists in these positions. That's a problem.The second part that they want to do is there are 50,000 employees who are Schedule F employees, and they are off-limits to the political branches in a certain sense. Trump wants to re-up his old executive order, which will essentially make them at-will employees and allow him to fire them. Again, if he was planning to do this in order to streamline and rationalize the administrative state, that would be one thing. That's not what it is. He [Trump] wants to flatten the points of resistance that he encountered in his initial first term that prevented him from implementing unconstitutional plans, many of which he still managed to do. For instance, on immigration and what have you. That's what he's trying to do. That's why it's all problematic from our point of view. Even though we want a smaller administrative state, we want a well-defined government with specific roles. This is not what that is.“He [Trump] wants to flatten the points of resistance that he encountered in his initial first term that prevented him from implementing unconstitutional plans … That's why it's all problematic from our point of view. Even though we want a smaller administrative state, we want a well-defined government with specific roles.”— Shikha DalmiaAkiva: I think those are excellent points, Shikha. I think one of the things that's important to emphasize here is the idea that there is a distinction between harnessing government for your own ends and making government smaller in general. That really the function of what Trump wants to do is to make government a tool of his own ends. One of the things that I think is critical here is that he doesn't really have a plan for what he wants to do in society. What he does is he has certain temperaments about who he likes, who he doesn't like, who his friends are, who his enemies are, and then follows those as a almost random or not random, but very disorganized set of policies to—what he wants to do is in a very disorganized way, punish his friends and reward his enemies and rather than enact any comprehensive plan of reform. In general, what he wants to do is change institutions wholesale so that they no longer serve the so-called “liberal elites” that he's so constantly in favor of attacking.Now, this resembles in many cases a similar plan that has been enacted in many European populist contexts in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and so on, where there's no real plan for what government should or shouldn't do. There's an idea that there are certain people in power who we don't like, certain outgroups, social outgroups—liberals, feminists, gay rights advocates, and so on. We want them out of power. Instead, we want to put in our own socially conservative, hardline, nationalist stormtroopers. In essence, what we have is a cultural fight over which culture should the institutions of government be wielded. Should they be wielded in favor of a progressive "woke agenda" or they should be wielded in favor of a socially conservative, regressive, reactionary agenda? Of course, independent of whether you're on one side or another, there's one question which neither side has asked, which is should the institutions of government be wielded for these purposes at all? It's clear that what Trump is doing is simply agreeing with the progressives that the institutions of government should be wielded in order to force people into certain modes of action and modes of being but he wants to do it on behalf of his own conservative, reactionary forces rather than progressive on

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Repressive regimes don't like critics, and they aren't satisfied to let their repression stop at the border. When they set their sights on threatening, coercing, or even killing critics who have fled to other countries, it's called transnational repression. My guest today is Annie Boyajian, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Freedom House, which tracks instances of transnational repression and helps governments prevent it.A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron: What happened to [Saudi Arabian journalist] Jamal Khashoggi?Annie: Great question. We would say that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is an emblematic case of transnational repression, which is when governments reach beyond their own borders to target critics in an effort to silence dissent. For Mr. Khashoggi, he was lured into a consulate in Istanbul where he was suffocated and dismembered in what is still one of the most shocking cases of transnational repression that we have heard. He was, of course, lured into the Saudi consulate as he was a citizen of Saudi Arabia and a well-known journalist and regime critic.Aaron: The response to this, I think, speaks to a lot of the issues that you raise in the article that you wrote for The UnPopulist because there seemed to be a lot of anger about this from U.S. citizens, shocked that someone who was a U.S. resident, that this would happen to them from journalists because he was a Washington Post journalist. Then nothing really happened. The perpetrators, the ultimate perpetrators, skated. There were no consequences. Why not?Annie: I would say it's the age-old answer to why things don't happen to other human rights abusers or corrupt actors, and it's because there are politics at play. On the one hand, I would say you did see something happen that was unusual, right? The FBI did an investigation and report that you had senators talk about publicly. That is certainly unusual. There were sanctions of varying levels of strength that were imposed on some of the individuals involved. To your point, the Crown Prince himself, the well-known architect of this, according to reports, nothing has happened to him and he's continued to be a player on the world stage.I think part of the reason that this issue shocked people and captured everyone's focus and attention is, one, it was incredibly egregious, but two, it really showed how human rights abuses in a country can have an impact, a global impact, in a way that other human rights issues don't necessarily show. It's just so evident because of the reaching into another country, because of the violation of sovereignty, how the security and human rights issues interact and interplay here. I think that's part of what was so shocking about it.Aaron: How often does this sort of thing happen?Annie: We have a database that looks at instances of physical transnational repression. That's things like assassinations, so the Jamal Khashoggi case, but also assaults, detentions, deportations. We have tracked, since 2014, 854 incidents of transnational repression committed by 38 governments in 91 different countries around the world. That is just a drop in the bucket. Our database does not include the indirect tactics, and that's things like spyware, and the use of spyware is so widespread right now, digital harassment, coercion by proxy.We do think that the database paints a clear picture of the threat posed by transnational oppression and what is happening. We do see additional governments engaging in transnational oppression as we track information in our database. In 2022, I think we saw two additional governments added.Aaron: You said 38 countries in the current date. How spread out is that? Is this something where there's a lot of it's happening across a lot of countries, or is it heavily concentrated among a small handful of regimes?Annie: Great question. I would say the majority of countries engaging in transnational repression are countries that are rated as not free in our Freedom in the World Report. Our top 10 offenders are responsible for 80% of all of the incidents we have in our database. That is China, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Tajikistan—I'm probably not remembering them all in order—but it's also Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Rwanda, Iran, that's the top 10. And 80% that's significant, but it's global. It's in Asia, it's in Latin America, it's in the Middle East, it's everywhere.This is partly because we are such a globalized world. We have tracked at Freedom House 17 consecutive years of decline in democracy around the world. That has been driven, in part, by worsening repression at home. Because we're so globalized, we see people flee, and it's easier sometimes for people to flee now than previously. It's also a lot easier for governments to engage in transnational repression. You can get spyware very cheaply. The digital age, where everyone needs to be online, and everyone is connected has made it very easy for governments to target dissidents and critics, even after they've fled abroad.“We have tracked at Freedom House 17 consecutive years of decline in democracy around the world. That has been driven, in part, by worsening repression at home. Because we're so globalized, we see people flee, and it's easier sometimes for people to flee now than previously. It's also a lot easier for governments to engage in transnational repression.”Aaron: Just staying for a moment on definitional questions, how narrowly tied to, I guess, the state does it need to be to count? What I'm thinking of is you can have an instance where the state leadership basically hires people or sends its own people off into another country to assassinate someone. It's like a very direct tie. Then you might have something like the Salman Rushdie situation, where it's more just we're going to foment a lot of anger at a given person and then hope violence against them falls out of it. Does that count as well?Annie: Great question. We do look at non-state actors who are tied to governments. For our definition, there would need to be some sort of clear linkage between the government and the actor. For example, when a government hires private investigators to surveil, technically, whether those investigators know it or not, they would be engaging in transnational repression. You also have instances where governments have been linked pretty clearly to organized crime or other individuals who are, thugs for hire who will go intimidate and beat people up. That would count.I think it gets a lot more tenuous if it's just anger fomented at someone like Salman Rushdie. That's less clear for the purposes of our database. There are indeed non-state actors who have been involved.Aaron: Can you talk a bit about the link between this and accusations of terrorism? I found that an interesting part of the argument of basically claiming critics are terrorists.Annie: Yes, absolutely. We see governments around the world copy laws or arguments made by democracy for their own purposes all the time. We definitely see this in the case of terrorism. The pervasive use of the term terrorist following the 9/11 attacks by the U.S. and other democracies made it easier. I'm not saying here we should not have called those individuals terrorists. I'm not speaking to that at all.There are a lot of governments now who the first thing they will do when you try to say, "Excuse me, you are targeting someone because they are a critic." They'll say, "No, I'm not. This person is a terrorist." They will toss all sorts of spurious charges at them. This in the case of Russia, of China, of Iran. The government of China is responsible for 30 percent of all the cases in our database. They'll say, "Oh, they're inciting violence or a national security threat. They're a terrorist."“The government of China is responsible for 30 percent of all the cases in our database. They'll say, "Oh, they're inciting violence or a national security threat. They're a terrorist."“It's one of the top things we see, one of the top excuses that governments use in going after critics. One of the things we talk about with policymakers is just being really aware and not taking some of these charges at face value, particularly when the government's making the allegations are ones we have documented as engaging in transnational repression.Aaron: Is the audience for this terrorist label? If I'm a repressive regime that wants to target a critic overseas and I am now publicly labeling that critic a terrorist. The people that I'm doing that labeling for, you've mentioned, to some extent, it's an excuse you can give to other countries. I was not just targeting a critic. This person was dangerous and I was therefore within my rights or justified. Is there also an element of talking to their own people in doing that? Even in authoritarian regimes, if you can convince the people that you're doing these things for their own good, that's an easier sell?Annie: Absolutely. Transnational repression is one of a wide array of tactics that governments use when they're trying to repress, and control, and manipulate their population. Particularly for individuals who only have access to state propaganda. Or only consume state propaganda for a variety of reasons, it's a very effective argument to make for their domestic audience. It's part of the reason why they do it. Definitely, in terms of the countries that do engage in propaganda, I think, the propaganda arm goes hand in hand with any charges of transnational or any allegations of terrorism.“Transnational repression is one of a wide array of tactics that governments use when they're trying to repress, and control, and manipulate their population.”Or any of the other charges they lob at

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In from The UnPopulist. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. Joining me today is Berny Belvedere, the new senior editor at The UnPopulist. We're going to chat today about the state of politics and the defense of liberalism.A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: Berny, let's maybe start with a bit about you.Berny Belvedere: Thanks, Aaron, for having me on. I'm really stoked to be here. So, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which, just a funny thing about that: the literal translation of Buenos Aires is something like good air. But really, I think, the key idea that that name tries to get across is something like friendly skies. It's the capital of Argentina. I didn't get a chance to know it too well—we left when I was four and a half, five-ish. We had an opportunity to become citizens really quickly here in the United States, so my parents took that opportunity and we went from Buenos Aires to Kansas City, Kansas, on the Kansas side of things. We're one of the few on the Kansas side of the divide. Then, for my high school years, we moved to Miami, Florida. So those are the places where I've lived. It's an interesting mix of different types of arrangements and social configurations, but it's also colored my approach to the kinds of places that I feel like society can build well. I've taken my love for suburban America from Kansas City. Miami is an international metropolis, very big on sprawl in a way that I don't quite prefer as much. I like a more densely concentrated type of city. Buenos Aires is just sort of European in its flavor, but also combining South American aspects as well.Those are the places I've lived. Intellectually, I've pursued both theology and philosophy at a pretty high level. I didn't get a PhD, but I went for graduate degrees in philosophy and in theology. In the past, I guess if we were in medieval times, it would have just been one field of study, but with the specialization of knowledge, it forced me to get a degree in each. Even the theology that I did was very philosophical in nature. I guess that [philosophy] would be my overriding interest. That's a little bit about my background.Lots of other stuff we could also talk about, though not the focus of this show. I'm married, got three kids, love sports and music, but let's stick to the stuff that the people want to tune in and listen to us talk about.Aaron: Your academic background is theology and philosophy, but you're now working as senior editor for a political journal, and before that, you were working on another political outlet. What's the connection?Berny: I've always been drawn to political philosophy. Even when I studied theology, I looked into the different traditions and what they had to say about the different polities and how society should be arranged—that was always a really interesting avenue of thought for me. In terms of now working for a journalistic outfit as opposed to some think tank or something else, I decided toward the end of my graduate degree in philosophy that a career in academia wasn't for me. The reason is partly vain, I'll admit. It's also partly, I think, morally okay. The vain part is I wanted to be a part of a broader conversation. Unless you become a kind of academic rock star, your work isn't going to be read by many people, maybe your fellow faculty in the department where you work, but that’s it.“We've got these structural features in place that complicate our ability to genuinely have good discussions and intellectually rich discussions. Same as it always was, but one hope, a techno-optimist hope early on, was that technology in the social media age would try to counteract that, but we're not seeing that at all.”I wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, so I pivoted to journalism where I've been privileged to be able to publish at some big venues and people interact with your work. They send you messages. Your thought becomes something that then someone else takes into consideration. Then that advances the conversation in a way where you're fortunate enough to be a part of an ongoing discourse about a topic.That always moved me, so I pivoted to that. I've been working in political journalism for a while. I founded my own venue, Arc Digital, in 2016, right before the election. Ever since then, I've been involved in online writing and editing.Aaron: Both of us then come from this background of academic ideas and enjoying those kinds of ideas, discussing them, communicating them and so on and both of us ended up leaning more into the popular audience's side of things than the strictly academic. When you look out at either the job as a political journalist or the state of political conversation, what role do you see for these kinds of ideas? Because we're in this weird time when it seems like on the one hand, ideological ideas are more dominant than it feels like they were 20 years ago.Particularly on the right, you're seeing the populist movement which has a much more ideological streak than the more bland Paul Ryan conservatism at least professed to have. On the left, you're seeing the rise of their own kinds of ideologies about the nature of power and privilege in society. These are the sorts of heavy ideas that we grapple with but on the other side of things, it feels like the interest in high-level conversation has declined. That politics has been taken over by id, that we have elevated politicians who don't just speak in soundbites but often speak in incoherent soundbites. How do we navigate that?Berny: I think that's a great question. From the beginning at Arc Digital, one of my goals was to take higher-level thinking, to take academic work—and I had reached out to members of faculties and different scholars—and distill some of this higher-level thinking into something that's more publicly digestible. Because that oftentimes represents really good argumentation that if you can just package in a way that is more palatable to the masses, it could influence thinking for the better.That's been, for a long time, a kind of holy grail for people with these sensitivities to stronger forms of arguments and intellectual discourse. This is the holy grail: Are you able to take some of the awesome stuff that's being published at the research level and show it to the masses in a way where they can be receptive to it and it can influence their thinking? I think that's a great approach that responsible publications ought to take. Some of their output should be scholarly stuff, again, made into digestible forms for the masses.I tried to do some of that at Arc. The UnPopulist does that really well where we work together with scholars and with editorial assistance and guidance we help the work come out in a publishable form where people can read it and get a lot from it. I think that's a burden of publications today that want to make a meaningful contribution to the discourse. We're up against it. You're right. We're up against a discourse culture now where the basest forms of political point-scoring have penetrated how you go about participating in it, and it has turned everything into an “own the libs” aesthetic or on the other side, on the flip side of that, whatever that might look like.Interspersed throughout all the attempts at high-level discussions and thinking, you get a whole lot of nonsense—so much of it, in fact, that it can feel like you're under a torrential downpour of it. You can't ever get to the good stuff because your feed [is dominated by this] and the people you follow [are drowned out by brasher voices]. You and I see this on the social media platforms that we're on. People are always complaining about the kind of deluge of crap that our feeds are now dominated by—and rightly so. It's partly a function of the way these spaces [are designed]—where tossing red meat to your followers is a way to increase engagement and increase your followership. Where not ceding a single inch to your opponents, even when you privately think that they've got something right, you know that if you do that, you're now subject to the blowback where people promptly unfollow you or they no longer see you as a reliable source for the position that they want championed.We've got these structural features in place that complicate our ability to genuinely have good discussions and intellectually rich discussions. Same as it always was, but one hope, a techno-optimist hope early on, was that technology in the social media age would try to counteract that, but we're not seeing that at all.Aaron: This sounds like a Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message" sort of argument. I'll just as an aside, I believe it was Ezra Klein who made this point on social media recently that the Marc Andreessen tech optimist manifesto, which didn't seem very optimistic but mostly just seemed very angry, was this interesting example of essentially the structure of Twitter colonizing the intellect and rhetoric of essay writing. That this essay was written in essentially a very long series of tweets, so not just short declarative statements, but also I think exactly the kind of thing that you're mentioning, which is rhetoric tuned to create engagement, anger, and that's spreading out.Some of it seems like this started with cable news though. I don't know that we can pin all the blame on social media, but this seems like a problem for us. The UnPopulist publishes long and thoughtful essays on a wide range of topics that demand careful engagement and focused attention. We're not writing super academic stuff, but this is not a series of tweets and it's not a series of rage-bait declarations. This is all happening in a digital space that seems to structurally further incentivize that. How do we get out of that from the political s

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. I’m Aaron Ross Powell. My guest today is George Mason University law professor and B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, Ilya Somin. Ilya recently wrote an article for The UnPopulist about the state of the Supreme Court—whether it’s become more politicized than it used to be, and why many of the proposals to fix it could be counterproductive, even dangerously so.A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.Aaron Ross Powell: Is the Supreme Court more politicized than it used to be?Ilya Somin: I think it depends on your definition of politicization. I think it is more politicized in the sense that there's more polarization between Republican-appointed justices and Democratic-appointed ones than there was say 30, 40, 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think it's more politicized in the sense that justices’ political views play a bigger role in their decisions than they did in the past. I think there's little evidence to support that. While the justices are not now, nor have they ever been completely free of political bias, I think they are much less biased than other governmental institutions are. That enables them to play a more neutral role than we would have otherwise if we weaken judicial power.“I think it is more politicized in the sense that there's more polarization between Republican-appointed justices and Democratic-appointed ones than there was say 30, 40, 50 years ago. On the other hand, I don't think it's more politicized in the sense that justices’ political views play a bigger role in their decisions than they did in the past.”Aaron Ross Powell: One of the things that frustrates me about the way that a lot of people talk about the Supreme Court and its decisions is there's this sense, I think from both sides, but you see it a lot from the left that justices make a decision on what they think the right answer or the best answer or the answer they'd prefer for a given case is based on their partisan political priors. Like, I'm a conservative, therefore I want to restrict immigration. Then when there's a case in front of them about immigration, they just reason backwards from that.It's like a disingenuous legal argument effectively when in fact, as we both know, these justices usually come in with a coherent and developed jurisprudential perspective and philosophy. They're originalists or textualists or living Constitution people, and they're often fairly upfront about what has political—it is more likely if you are a progressive that you're going to find living constitutional perspectives more persuasive than strict constructionist perspectives, but they're reasoning from that articulated theory.When you talk about them becoming more politicized in the first way—the politics of the justices are diverging, are we seeing a growing divergence in the underlying judicial philosophies? The living constitutionalists are becoming more extreme in their living constitutionalism—more hardcore—and the textualists are becoming more textualist in theirs?Ilya Somin: I don't think that's necessarily what's happening. I think it's simply that what we have is a greater divergence within the Supreme Court on both political ideology and also some issues of legal methodology as well. That translates into a bigger gap between the predicted votes of a Republican appointee versus a Democratic appointee than would have existed 40 or 50 years ago. Such a divergence is not completely unprecedented in American history, but it is different from what you saw in the immediate post-World War II era where, say, from the late 1940s until perhaps the 1970s or the '80s, differences between Democratic and Republican appointees were much more modest.It's not because the justices of that era were somehow less biased or more removed from politics. It's that within the legal elite of that era, with the possible exception of southern segregationists, there was much less disagreement over big major issues, either of interpretation or of political ideology than there is now, and also I think over time, as there's been more polarization between the political parties, there's also been more in the way of divergent litmus tests on—while both Democratic and Republican presidents, they want to appoint people who have strong professional credentials, they also have a series of litmus tests on how they want the people to vote on different issues.When they vet potential nominees, particularly for the Supreme Court, they will do what they can to make sure that they get somebody who's likely to vote the way they want on these issues. Not because that person is deliberately being political but in most cases because due to their jurisprudential and other views, they will tend to come out in that direction even if their motive is not to please the president that appointed them or the political party.Aaron Ross Powell: Can you talk about this in the context of the nomination and confirmation process? Your essay at The UnPopulist begins by looking at the changes there. Can you tell us how things used to look, how they look now?Ilya Somin: Sure. Nominations and confirmations have looked different ways, different periods of American history. If you look at that period, say from the 1940s to at least the late 1960s, and even later, most nominations with rare exceptions weren't particularly controversial. Many senators from the opposing party, usually a clear majority, would still vote for the most nominees. Often the questioning of nominees was pretty perfunctory. I mentioned the example of Byron White who was only questioned for about 40 or 50 minutes, and a lot of that time was spent on questions about his football career because he had been a professional football player before he was a judge.Obviously, if you look at recent years first, almost every recent nominee in the last 15 years or so, a majority of opposing party senators have voted against the nominee. The last nominee who got a majority of opposing party senators, I think, was Chief Justice Sean Roberts when he was nominated in 2005. Even with him, there was something, I think 22 Democratic senators devoted against him. Secondly, recent confirmation hearings have featured a lot of questioning and debate about controversial legal and political issues.Obviously, this next factor is less new, but some of them have featured issues of personal scandal like accusations against Kavanaugh, though there have been cases like that in previous history as well. Those kinds of things are more charged even than they would have been 50 or 60 years ago because the fear of Republicans with Kavanaugh was not just a Kavanaugh might be defeated, but the Democrats would somehow create a situation where they could string things out until the election and then maybe the Democrats would control the Senate in its aftermath, then therefore block Republican nominees.Just as in fairness, the Republicans in 2016 were able to block the Democratic nominee, Merrick Garland, for several months until the election happened. Then they were able to get their own nominee through instead. There has been an escalation of political conflict over nominations and also of senators voting against opposing party nominations, at least in most cases.Aaron Ross Powell: I want to get to the Merrick Garland move because that's obviously quite significant in the narratives about politicization. Before that, I want to ask if it's the case that politicians are now picking judges who are more removed from what used to be a consensus center than they used to be. They look more distinct from the guys that the other party might be picking if they were in charge.That's basically a demand-side change. Does that mean that we are getting less qualified nominees than we did before? Before, the selection criteria was, "I wanted to find the best possible justice" and now it is, "I want to find the best possible justice who aligns with my more extreme politics", that's going to narrow the pool of possible nominees.Ilya Somin: It's an interesting question. A lot depends obviously on what you consider a good qualification for a Supreme Court Justice and there's not a consensus on that. If you believe that what should be a good qualification is technical expertise on legal issues with an extensive background in those kinds of things, I think the nominees in the last 20 or 30 years are actually on average somewhat better than those from earlier eras because in addition to the greater polarization and vetting, there is also emerged the norm, which some people criticize of appointing people with extensive experience in legal theory and also in appellate court judging usually at the circuit court of appeals levels.“If you believe that what should be a good qualification is technical expertise on legal issues with an extensive background in those kinds of things, I think the nominees in the last 20 or 30 years are actually on average somewhat better than those from earlier eras.”We have almost completely eliminated the previous tradition of at least sometimes appointing professional politicians to the Supreme Court. Some the most important Supreme Court justice of the past, there is Earl Warren, Hugo Black, we can name other examples, had been professional politicians, not people whose main background was as judges or legal theorists. That's almost completely gone. It's hard to even remember the last time a career politician got nominated to the Supreme Court. Maybe the last Supreme Court justice who had experience in elected office, if I remember correctly, was Sandra Day O'Connor, who had briefly been a state legislator, but even that wasn't her main thing that she had done.If you look at the purely tech

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSSAaron Ross Powell: Welcome to The UnPopulist Editor's Roundtable at Zooming In. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. It's our birthday. The UnPopulist is now in its terrible twos, and so today I'm joined by my colleagues Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet to give a progress report on what we've accomplished in these last two years and where we see the current state of liberalism.A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity. Also our five favorite posts of the last 12 months.Aaron Ross Powell: Shikha, why don't you take us away?Shikha Dalmia: Thank you, Aaron. And thanks to Akiva and both of you for being here. It's an important milestone in The UnPopulist's life. As you mentioned, we are beginning our terrible twos, but I'm hoping that instead of throwing tantrums, we are going to make the “right kind of trouble” in the immortal words of John Lewis. But to give our audience a bit of a progress report: Two years ago, The UnPopulist was founded with a singular mission, and that was to defend liberal democracy from the rise of the illiberal populist right. And it was going to do so by using classical liberal thought. Classical liberalism, in my view, and I think I can speak for the two of you, offers the richest intellectual resources to fight tyranny and authoritarianism in all its forms. And I felt like it was being completely underutilized, if not misused in many, many ways. And so the idea was to both defend liberal democracy and also kind of re-articulate classical liberalism itself to make it relevant for this new threat that we were confronting. It was also my very firm belief that just like socialism in some ways was the defining threat of our times after World War II, this liberal populism of the right was going to be the threat of our generation or well, I'm very old, but future generations. And why is that? In my view, populism in some ways, or illiberal populism, poses even a more fundamental threat to liberal democracy than socialism. And the reason is it kind of changes the relationship between the government and the governed. A liberal democratic framework is centered around the power of keeping political authority in check. And one crucial part of the check are the people. I mean, “throw the bums out” when they get too tyrannical. The premise over there is that people are going to guard their freedom. They are going to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and an authoritarian. But that changes in a populist framework where the people actually join forces with the strongman populist figure. And instead of guarding freedom, their motive becomes to use the levers of power to attack their political enemies. And so in a fundamental sense, the whole relationship in a populist polity between all the various checks and balances and institutions of liberal democracy kind of changes. And to me, there is therefore no greater threat to liberal democracy than populism. “The premise over there is that people are going to guard their freedom. They are going to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and an authoritarian. But that changes in a populist framework where the people actually join forces with the strongman populist figure. And instead of guarding freedom, their motive becomes to use the levers of power to attack their enemies, their political enemies.” — Shikha DalmiaAnd so with that understanding The UnPopulist, as the name suggests, was incubated at the Mercatus Center two years ago, and it was on a two-year grant. And after that, it needed a new home. And so I'm happy to report that even as our audience has grown, we started with 650 subscribers. We are nine times bigger now and growing rapidly every day. You guys have been an invaluable part of it. Aaron, you almost from the inception and Akiva, you a little bit later. And as we grew, we felt like we needed a new home and we've created one and it's called the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism — ISMA. It is no physical building, there's nothing bricks and mortar, but it's a platform which will give us an operational base to expand ourselves and our activities as we go forward. The UnPopulist, let me mention, is just going to be one element of this new center. We are going to do other things. We have a new editorial partnership with Persuasion which is an awesome sister Substack publication founded by Yascha Mounk, a Johns Hopkins professor. He comes from the progressive side of the spectrum and he's worried about some of the progressive excesses and threats to liberal democracy. So just as we, or at least I, see myself as an internal reformer on the right, he sees himself as an internal reformer on the progressive end of things. So we have a editorial partnership with Persuasion and we'll be promoting content and each other's work. Another element of ISMA, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism is going to be a polling project that Tom Shull, our editor at large, is launching to study the appeal of strongman politics in the United States. That's something that isn't very well understood or tracked. And we feel we should be able to pick up trends when people are getting more attracted to strongmen figure. And another element is going to be a liberalism conference. So our readers will be familiar with the national conservative movement and other illiberal movements on the right. And they host their own conference every year. And we think we need a conference to make a strong and strenuous and vigorous case for liberalism. In the last two years since The UnPopulist was founded, I don't think our work [load] has diminished. I think it's actually increased because the state of the world has become, in my view, decidedly worse. Here in America, the Republican Party seems to reach new lows every few weeks. Jan. 6th was not a shocking enough event for the party and it didn't awaken it. After the event, Trump is still the favorite to win the nomination of the party. There are 91 indictments against him and instead of being embarrassed, the Republican Party seems to think that the problem is actually with the system that's trying to hold a rogue president accountable. You know, it's been the law and order party all this long except for when it applies to its own favorite politicians. Even if Trump were in jail, that would not necessarily be a barrier to his election. But if he were to somehow not be the nominee, the two people who are waiting in the wings are Florida Governor DeSantis and neophyte Vivek Ramaswamy. And both of them represent two different styles of populism within the GOP. De Santis has this nasty statist side where he wants to use the government to reign terror on his woke political opponents. And Vivek Ramaswamy has a different, what I call, paleo-libertarian style of populism where he wants to selectively withdraw agencies and curtail the federal governmentt so that that hurts his political opponents. Now, many of us are not opposed to reducing the size of the federal government, but the selective way in which he [Vivek] wants to do it to promote right-wing causes and diminish left-wing causes is very concerning. Add to that his kookiness and his conspiracy theory mindset, and his border hawkishness. And he is in my view and reincarnation of Ron Paul in many ways, who, the difference is that Ron Paul was an outlier when he ran in the Republican party, whereas Vivek Ramaswamy in fact speaks for the party. Meanwhile, if you look at, look around the world in India, my home, my native country. Modi, Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist and a strongman, populist figure, is a hands down favorite to win elections again for the third time next year. And then if you go around the rest of the world, things are not looking a whole lot better. In Turkey, Erdogan won again, even though the opposition put up a pretty valiant fight. He still prevailed and everybody now thinks Turkey is on sort of an irreversible path to certain kind of religious illiberalism. Gone are its secular commitments. And then if you go down the list, whether it is Italy, it is Hungary, Poland, the same thing is happening. In Germany, the Alternative to Germany which is a far right outfit, is the second largest party. It may well be in the governing coalition in the next elections. In France, even though Emmanuel Macron [who is considered a moderate] won, he's now in trouble and the National Rally and Eric Zemmour, two very far right figures, are gaining ground. In Italy, you have Giorgia Meloni. And to me, the most ominous sign that things are on a very bad track is that the European Union itself seems to be succumbing to far-right priorities and policies. Take its position on immigration. I mean, we care about immigration, but it's also sort of a bellwether issue.  And the European Commission, which used to be very opposed to stiff border controls around Europe, has now succumbed. Its [annual] border control budget, just to throw out one figure at you, has increased from $85 million to $754 million in less than a decade. Whereas earlier it used to talk about how we don't need to control Europe's border, now they are talking about “collective border security” and are doubling down on it. So given all these trends, I think The UnPopulist and ISMA have their work cut out for them. And so we are going to be doing this over the next few years and hopefully getting more support from our audience and our viewers and everyone else.Akiva Malamet: So I really appreciate what you said there, Shikha, and I think particularly the international focus that The UnPopulist takes is a unique emphasis in combining focus not just on America and on the West, but on the world in general. One country that wasn't discussed as much in your catalog of horrors is Israel. And I think of Israel as quite an important country because it

Today on our editor's roundtable, host Aaron Ross Powell and colleague Akiva Malamet are joined by special guest Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. He is not a lawyer, but we've invited him on anyway, to discuss the recent Trump indictment in Washington, DC. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today we have our editor's round table where host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet to discuss the Supreme Court's recent Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which invalidated university affirmative action programs. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Academic freedom is under assault, but who is mounting that assault depends on who you ask. The right has long argued that universities are controlled by the left with free inquiry as the victim. The liberal right, it turns out, doesn't much care for liberal education. The result is a wave of right-populist assaults on the very academic freedom they've historically claimed to support. To explore these issues, host Aaron Ross Powel is joined by Jonathan Marks. He's a professor of politics at Ursinus College and author of Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education.  ­­­­­­­ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net

Today, we have our editors' roundtable where host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Shikha Dalmia and Akiva Malamet, to talk about liberalism and the left. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theunpopulist.net