Transcript 0:00 Welcome to the Liberalism.org Show. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies. 0:07 At this year's Flourishing House at South by Southwest, hosted by IHS, we brought together scholars, practitioners, and builders to explore what it takes for people and societies to flourish. 0:18 As part of that, I sat down with Virginia Postrel, author, columnist, and one of the sharpest voices on the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology. 0:27 We talked about her landmark book, The Future and Its Enemies, and what its thesis about dynamism versus stasis looks like nearly three decades later. 0:36 We explored why nostalgia distorts our understanding of progress, why the backlash against openness isn't really about economics, and how we can keep making the case for abundance, from the YIMBY housing movement to the surprisingly rich history of brushing your teeth. 0:52 [music] Welcome, Virginia. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. The Future and Its Enemies came out in 1998 and 1:10 talked about political conflict between the dynamists on the one hand and the stasists on the other. And as I was thinking about our conversation for today, 1:25 I realized that conflict that you were talking about in 1998, if we look back on 1998 now, it feels like, to many people, like a high watermark of dynamism and enthusiasm about the future. 1:41 There's like a nostalgia for the '90s that we see. My kids are wildly into the '90s. And so I was curious how we can think about that distinction, what your thesis looks like now in 2026, looking back on it. 1:59 There are two ways to look at it. One is to say it seems even more plausible now. The other is that I think a lot of people, when they read that book or, or particularly when they read it when it first came out, 2:14 misunderstood its origins. They thought that it originated with that-- the sort of spirit of the internet and early internet, the sort of dynamist spirit that was in the air that-- That's when the book came out. 2:31 That was not when I started thinking about the ideas. Um, I actually started thinking about those ideas in reaction to 2:41 a lot of the anti-growth sentiment and the general, um, downbeat elements about the, the economy and, and, uh, downsizing of jobs and all that sort of thing in the early '90s. 2:58 So in the late '80s and the early '90s, when I was living in Los Angeles, which is where I live today as well, uh, there was this huge anti-growth movement which got, uh, a lot of the ordinances passed that we since-- [laughs] They wanted to stop growth, and it took a while, but it worked. 3:19 [laughs] Uh, and that's one reason the h-housing-- we have a housing crisis. And, um, so that was an element. So 3:30 people look back with nostalgia on the '90s, but during the '90s, there was a lot of downbeat, uh, sentiment, not even just in the early '90s, but also even in the early internet days. 3:44 I mean, the-- there was this sort of left-wing green activist named Kirkpatrick Sale, who used to go around smashing computer. He'd give talks and would smash a computer with a, a sledgehammer. 3:56 He wrote a book, uh, it was partially historical, but it was about the Luddites and raw Luddites. 4:02 But at the same time, The Weekly Standard, which was the sort of new Gingrich revolution conservative magazine, they ran a cover story called "Smash the Internet" [laughs] with similar pictures. 4:17 So there was-- People now forget how much anti-growth, anti-tech, anti-dynamism sentiment there was in the '90s. 4:26 It's just that compared to today, there were a lot more people in the sort of political establishment, uh, on both-- of both parties who were very, uh, pro-technological change. 4:47 I-- Some of them were pro-dynamism, some of them were more technocratic, but they were embracing the idea of the new. So what's shifted now? I mean, I'm thinking back again. 4:58 We look back at the '90s, and so we've have-- forgotten the pushbacks that we saw, and what we remember is the dynamism, and we think about the dynamism largely positively now. 5:10 Like, there are people who object to the internet's gone too far, social media is having these deleterious effects, and so on. 5:16 But in general, we think that that technological revolution that happened in the '90s was a positive. Right. So why didn't we learn? 'Cause it-- we certainly haven't learned the lesson of dynamism versus stasis. No. 5:30 I-- Well, I think these are eternal fights. I mean, my most recent book is, uh, called The Fabric of Civilization. 5:38 It's about the history of textiles, and one of the things I learned researching it was the Luddites were actually the second wave of, of pessimism about, uh, the Industrial Revolution, that there was this earlier wave of people displaced from spinning jobs and worried about spinning. 5:55 Um, so these tensions are always there between people who- 6:01 Have a kind of confidence in the discovery process that happens with trial and error learning and with innovation and, you know, not every innovation is a good idea, not every innovation succeeds. 6:15 Uh, but there's a certain group of people who are comfortable with that, and then there's another group of people, um, and it-- I mean, some of this exists in all of us, um, who want stability or control. 6:28 They want a guaranteed outcome. Uh, and that is always around. And then the other thing that I didn't foreground as much in the book as I would if I were writing it today is that progress comes from discontent. 6:45 And so you never get to a place where everybody is, like, happy and cheery and [laughs] um, if you did, you would sort of worry about it. 6:54 Uh, so the-- that's another aspect of things, that if, if you wanna have growth and discovery and you're going to have change, and that change is going to make people unhappy, some people, uh, but it's also a way of making other people happy because they didn't like what went before. 7:16 You mentioned that most all of us feel some pull from both of these sides, some desire for the new and growth and change, and some desire for stability. 7:28 Does that then mean that this isn't, this isn't a heroes and villains story? That, like, one side isn't necessarily has it a hundred percent right and the other side is fully dismissible? Well, I, uh, I don't know. 7:41 You know, you always wanna say, "Well, everything is subtle." I think you can tell it as a heroes and villains story, um, in this sense, that 7:53 I am talking about the big social picture and allowing within a, you know, within a s-social organism to have experimentation, discovery, uh, new ways of doing things happening. 8:11 But within each individual's life, people want a certain elements of stability, and that's part of the dynamic system. 8:20 And I have a big chapter in the book about rules, and one of the ideas about r- one of the rules about rules is that you wanna be able to have nested systems of rules. 8:31 You don't just want to have the same rules for everybody under all circumstances. So, you know, you can have, um, different colleges with different rules, 8:44 uh, serving different audiences, or you can have, you know, McDonald's very prescribed about its, uh, what its franchisees have to do and what the menu is, and 8:57 individual one-off restaurants that are different every night. These things can both exist within a dynamic system. 9:06 I think that's one of the interesting things looking out and watching-- Like right now, one way we could characterize our current political moment is there was a stasis backlash, that the, the people who preferred stasis, or not even necessarily stasis, but, like, a return to some imagined prior status quo or stasis 9:27 got really upset and won out in important ways. And looking at it, so one possible answer you can give is, look, is the, like, basically diversity and the dynamism answer, which is, if you want this thing, 9:44 the, the awesome thing about liberalism, economic liberalism, political liberalism, social liberalism, is it enables you to have it. Someone can provide that thing. 9:54 You can go to the college that has the kind of character and admissions policies and style of teaching that you like, and then this other one can be different for other people over here, and that's fantastic. 10:09 But it feels like for a lot of the, that stasis backlash, that's not what they want. What they want is what they want, and they want everything else to look like. 10:20 They're uncomfortable with not just they, they got the college they like, but they're uncomfortable that there's a college over there that's different. 10:27 Right, and that's what I would say really makes it, it more of a heroes and villains story is it's not that people have different preferences and, and people are different, and different people... 10:39 You know, I've, I've been married almost forty years to a guy I met when I was eighteen, you know, it's-- and he was eighteen, and we're all happy, and that's all very stable and, um, other people, not so much. 10:52 [laughs] Um, uh, I don't have children, other people have children. That's great. The-these are... And, and this is a realm where there is a lot of freedom to, you know, forge your own life. But 11:06 when you are-- start to talk about things like international trade, for example, people want, in order to have the result they want, they think they have to close off the whole system. I think that they have, um, 11:26 they're cheating on the result they want, 11:29 uh, by using false nostalgia, partly because I'm from South Carolina, which is today a very prosperous, manufacturing-oriented state, and in the nineteen fifties was a poor textile manufacturing and farming state. 11:48 And so I don't have nostalgia for... And, and that's even leaving aside the whole issues about race. But just on the economic front, I don't have this sort of false nostalgia that everybody in the nineteen fifties worked 12:02 a incredibly well-paid unionized job and ra- had a Stay-at-home wife and three kids and a dog and a cat and a house in the suburbs and two cars, and never mind I never went on vacation, but we don't leave that part out. 12:17 Um, so I, I think that their liberalism 12:23 and dynamism, I would say, is a form of liberalism that foregrounds discovery and learning as opposed to other forms of liberalism that foreground justice or foreground equality or foreground liberty. 12:37 Um, I think liberalism includes all of these. Really, you want the whole package. But the, 12:45 it does require that open, that openness of the society, and that's why The Future and Its Enemies is a play on the open society and its enemies. So then what do we do about it? 12:59 As, as liberals who want to advance liberalism and see the world become more open, society become more open, and enable that dynamism, if we have this... 13:11 Because on the one hand, you can, you can tell this narrative that the reason we saw this backlash against liberalism is it didn't work for people. It didn't, you know, they, they lost jobs due to economic dynamism. 13:22 Their tow- their towns were hollowed out. Whatever the, the standard story, like there's an economic story. It's not working at the pocketbook- It's only true because Ohio is a spring sta- a swing state. 13:34 I mean, if South Carolina was a swing state, you'd be s- telling a different story. 13:38 It might not be a dynamism story, but it would be less about the evils of international trade and more about getting prayer back in the public schools. 13:47 So if that story is not correct or what you're saying, and I, I agree with you, is that a lot of the pushback is more basically fundamental rejection of the kind of world that liberalism necessarily entails, which is an open world. 14:02 And if it's an open world, it's necessarily a dynamic world because people, we're all different. We all have different preferences and tastes and desires of the course that our life takes. 14:11 And if we have the freedom to do that and wealth has enabled us to have more options to pursue, we're all gonna do different things. The world is going to be diverse and dynamic in a liberal society. 14:23 And if you have an objection to just diversity and dynamism, like that's what you're upset about. It's not that, you know, you can't get a high-paying job or whatever, but you just don't like that kind of society. 14:36 How do we, as liberals, address that, construct a counter-narrative to that? Right. Well, I think first of all, we're telling ourselves or buying into a story that's not true about what happened politically in the '90s. 14:53 There was a huge fight between dynamism and stasis in the '90s. This was when Pat Buchanan ran for president, when Ross Perot ran for president. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan shared antipathy to international trade. 15:08 Um, Buchanan a- and others at the time, National Review, running these very vicious anti-immigration campaigns that are actually, in terms of what they were tr- what they were saying they were trying to achieve, was much more extreme than what you hear, y- what people think the administration, the Trump administration is trying to achieve. 15:33 That is, they were saying we-- They wanted what Stephen Miller want, uh, which is an end to most forms of legal immigration. They didn't get that. There were huge fights in the '90s about this and what they got instead. 15:47 There was a compromise where, uh, literally the comp- the, the saying was split the bill, split immigra- illegal and legal immigration off and restrict, and, and restrict le- illegal immigration more. 16:01 Uh, so we did have these fights in the '90s. The-- There were compromises, but the more liberal side won. Um, I, 16:13 I think that what we have to do is keep on making, making the case and telling stories, and telling stories that are not all about things that are alienated, uh, that are far from people's lives. 16:28 Um, you know, I'm, I'm starting a new podcast. [chuckles] Everybody's got a podcast. But, um, uh, I've recorded it. It's not yet out, but with Charles C. 16:38 Mann, uh, called Everyday Abundance through the Abundance Institute. And what we're looking at are the stories of behind things you do every day. 16:47 Everything from brushing your teeth to driving your car and the rules of the road, these sorts of things that have dynamism and progress stories behind them, but they have become so much of our backdrop that we don't think about them. 17:02 And in the fabric of civilization, I, I said, you know, we have-- we, we enjoy textile abundance, so we suffer textile amnesia. We just-- And I, I have a play on, um, Arthur C. 17:16 Clarke's, uh, third law, uh, which is I say, "Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature." So we just take it for granted. So part of what we have to do is to 17:31 keep telling the stories of the fruits of liberalism, um, and, and upholding the flame. And, and you don't always win. I mean, you don't wi- You have to hope that you win over the long term. 17:45 And partly reality bats last, and there are, uh, you know, The Future and Its Enemies makes a positive case and a normative case. It is a normative case that 17:57 liberalism dynamism is good, but it's also a positive case in the sense of this is the way the world actually works. If you want things to get better, you need to allow these processes. And one of, 18:11 you know, again, I keep coming, the, the big success so far of the progress and abundance movement is in the, in the YIMBY world, getting more housing built. It's still a long way from where we need to be, but- 18:25 There is this increasing recognition that that stasis reaction where the dynamists lost. In, in California, we, where I live, dynamism lost in the housing debate in the 1980s and 1990s. 18:43 And look, there were terrible consequences, and now we're trying to reverse some of that. 18:49 And, and a lot of these other things that if, if you hear-- if you read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, a lot of the kinds that they're-- uh, kinds of things that they're talking about, and Klein in particular is like a super technocrat. 19:03 He wants, he wants the future, but it has to look exactly how Ezra Klein wants it to look, and, and he's gonna be in charge of it. 19:11 But a lot of the things that they talk about in that book are exactly the kinds of barriers to innovation and barriers to doing things that I talk about in the, The Future and Its Enemies, uh, just from a different perspective. 19:26 And that reminds me. One of the things that I would change today if I were writing The Future and Its Enemies, I would be much less pessimistic about how-- about the environmental movement. Because in the '90s, it was 19:43 completely stasis. It was all about control everything, stop everything, industrialism is bad, stuff is bad, prosperity is bad, wear a hair shirt. And since that time, there's been a much, 20:00 much more development of a, a sort of abundance-oriented take on environmental issues. So I have to ask because I'm intrigued, what's the abundance story of brushing your teeth? 20:14 The abundance story of brushing your teeth. Well, the original inspiration for that one, it's actually-- There's a-- It's, it's an hour long, so I'm just gonna tell you one. 20:23 But the original inspiration for doing that was that one thing I learned when I was researching The Fabric of Civilization was that the first commercially marketed use of nylon was not for stockings. 20:37 That was what was foreseen but was not the actual first thing on the market. It was for toothbrush, toothbrush bristles. So before the invention of nylon, 20:49 toothbrushes were made out of wood or bone or ivory or maybe silver, and the bristles were actually from animals. They were like boar bristles. 21:00 And aside from being disgusting [laughs], at least if you're not used to it, um, the-- All those things-- or, or those bristles absorb water, they catch in your teeth. 21:12 They-- There, there were a lot of problems, and so nylon bristles were, uh, marketed as a way of solving this, and they did. 21:21 And, you know, if you want to imagine a world without plastics, which a lot of people think would be better, and I definitely do not, uh, think about brushing your teeth with bristles plucked from animals, 21:36 who didn't give their permission, by the way, and, and a wooden handle. So the story then is if we're talking to the people who prefer stasis- Yeah... um, is 21:51 you wouldn't wanna go back to a world of boar bristles for your toothbrushing. But at the time that there was the switch, what that meant was change. Yeah. And, and that's a, that's a very micro example. Right. 22:06 But we can tell that story over and over and over again, and we can tell it on things that are broader scope or feel like bigger changes than the shift from boar bristles to nylon bristles. 22:18 That's only one piece of the s- [laughs] the story. Um, and, and so you're-- it's not just that liberalism is change for the sake of change, although if people wanna change what they're doing, that's fine. 22:34 Um, but it is change for this discovery process- Right, right... that makes your life- 'Cause-... better. Right. 22:41 And, and now we might have a new toothpa-- toothbrush technology, and you as a stasis-liking person might rage against the Waterpiks or the electric toothbrushes or whatever it happens to be, but, like, you wouldn't wanna go back to the boar bristles. 22:55 You liked that, that change. And so is part of the story then just making that clear? That the change is-- at some point, the change will feel like the new status quo- Well-... and it will be a better one. 23:09 But then you won't like it anymore. I mean, there is this, this line that I use in the book, which is from Henry Petroski, which is, um, is, "Form follows failure." 23:22 That is, anything that's invented, as soon as you have it, you see what could be better or you see what the problems are. And he also says, "The fu- future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing." 23:34 Because there's always this push. Every, every new invention that solves an old form of dissatisfaction, uh, creates new forms of dissatisfaction. People are never going to be happy completely with everything. 23:51 Um, and part of what-- I mean, it is hard when you don't have historical perspective because habituation is very important, and it is important to not going crazy, and it's also important to certain forms of liberal tolerance, uh, that you just get used to the things around you that maybe you wouldn't have picked. 24:15 Um, but the other thing I think from a fundamental political st-standpoint, just talking about electoral politics, I think there are a few things going on. One is that- 24:30 People w- want economic prosperity. That's very clear. And, and many of the people who voted for Trump in the last election, uh, especially if they hadn't voted for him in the past, they were voting on economic issues. 24:47 Uh, they didn't like inflation. They didn't like the cost of living. And dynamism devi- delivers economic prosperity, uh, not without disruption. And I, of all people, you know, I am by profession a journalist. 25:04 This is, I think, affects the internet, while it has been wonderful for the kind of person who is a journalist, and certainly my last f- several books would've been very difficult to write without the internet. 25:17 It has completely destroyed our livelihood. I mean, it is-- 25:23 It, it-- Nobody is making a living as a journalist except for a few sub, uh, in, in the marketplace, the unsubsidized marketplace, except for a few sub stackers who just have amazing talent and can just crank stuff out. 25:38 Um, the advertising market disappeared, um, and that, uh, you know, killed a lot of things. Uh, so that I can sit here and say the world is better off, 25:56 but I financially am worse off [laughs]. And a lot-- And I am one of the lucky ones compared to a lot of my, you know, former colleagues or, or professional colleagues. 26:07 And that's the world in which if you care about the future, you have to be willing to permit that. Um, you know, the original Luddites were not ideologues. They were not against technology. They were 26:22 weavers who had enjoyed a generation of being, um, particularly well off because spinning machines had made their raw material plentiful, and a golden heyday is what one, uh, historian calls it. 26:38 And then they faced the l- potential loss of their jobs, and they weren't happy. This is, this is the way things work, and when you try to hold it still, you are saying that, um, people in the future should be 26:55 significantly worse off so you can stay the same, which is kinda mean [laughs]. To close this out then, you mentioned 27:07 as a, a success of the dynamism story, even if one that happened in fits and starts, you mentioned the YIMBYism and, and the growth of YIMBYism as a political movement that has seen real political successes lately, even if there's a long way to still go on that one. 27:26 Um, and you mentioned the, the change in the character of the environmental- Right. It's still a fight. I mean, there's this- Absolutely. But, yeah. But we're seeing progress there. Right. 27:37 So I'm curious then, looking ahead, are there other areas that you see as 27:44 potentially particularly fruitful, or that you're particularly optimistic that this dynamism story can, if not win out entirely, see real success in the nearer term? 27:58 Well, I think the big question, uh, there, there are big questions around biotechnology and biomedical research and all of that. 28:06 There, there are a lot of things that are difficult in that system and difficult in both the academic system and, and the for-profit system. But I think the combination of AI and, and biomedical research is going to 28:23 push against-- It, it-- The-- In order to realize some of the gains that are potentially there, we're going to need to have reforms in the regulatory, uh, agenda and the regulatory environment. 28:37 Whether or not that will happen, I don't know. But one thing I do know is people don't like to get-- that get sick, and they don't like to die. And, um, that will push things in a, I think, mostly positive direction. 28:53 Also, on the negative side, that combination of AI and, and bioengineering, whatever you wanna call, will also pose some threats, like actual threats of manufactured plagues and stuff. 29:06 But that will only make doing the-- finding the cures more, more essential. Okay. On that note- Starting with-- On that, on that happy note [laughs] manufactured plagues [laughs]. Thank you very much, Virginia. 29:23 [outro jingle]
