Episode Details

Meghan is the author of many books — the latest being The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars — and she’s the host of her own podcast, Unspeakable. I hadn’t met Meghan until this week, but it was a pleasure. We talked about our generation; what it feels like, if anything, to be a man or woman; the truthful hyperboles of wokeness and Trump, the poison of Twitter, the lessons of facing death early, and the benefits of solitude. It was a blast.

To listen to two excerpts from my conversation with Meghan — on the difference between gender outliers and gender outsiders; and how both of us had near-death experiences — head over to our YouTube page. Listen to the whole episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed on multiple platforms.

Meanwhile, a reader looks back at our most recent episode:

I feel like Marusic and Hamid were the Colmeses to your Hannity; they were too polite and too bowled over to really respond strongly to your points — though Marusic did rally at the end. I should start by stating my credentials: I have none, aside from the fact that I have been teaching AP Government for about 20 years, and a course in Western political theory for about 15. That being said, I have a few points. 

1) While Trump was a norm-busting jerk that has taken complete control of his party, this is only an aberration when we look at modern politics, particularly the centrist consensus of the post-WWII era. Up until the 20th century, all sorts of crazy excesses went on throughout US politics, ranging from cooping to routine brawls on election day to paramilitaries suppressing the votes of blacks in the South. And Andrew Jackson called his defeat a “corrupt bargain” and raged against JQ Adams until defeating him four years later. All this is to say, America survived.

2) This brings me to the point of American survival. You have sounded so negative about American democracy and referenced the section of Plato’s Republic where Socrates argues that the tyrant naturally follows the democrat. You also reference the fall of the Roman Republic. But there is a major difference between our modern society and those of the ancients: the overwhelming majority of the people in pre-industrial societies were far poorer than any poor person in a modern democracy. 

These poor people (still found in developing nations) were one harvest away from watching their children starve to death. These individuals were far more susceptible to tyranny because they were desperate — just look at all the shenanigans that happened with the grain dole during the late years of the Roman Republic. To quote Bob Marley, “them belly full but we hungry / a hungry mob is an angry mob.” This is the reason why democracies were always so unstable prior to the modern era. This is why Rousseau proclaimed that democracy was a government only for angels. 

But if you want to look at the ancient world, look at Aristotle. Aristotle recognized that the key to building a successful state was a strong and robust middle class.  Indeed, Aristotle’s best form of government run by the many isn’t even called a “democracy” at all — he calls it polity or constitutional government. Again, Aristotle takes time to define democracy as rule by the poor. So, while the framers of the US Constitution were very worrie