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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses recent questions about President Donald Trump’s health and explores what a potential J. D. Vance presidency might mean for the country. He contrasts Trump’s impulsive, ego-driven style with Vance’s methodical, ideologically driven approach, examining how each wields power, pursues personal and political goals, and shapes domestic and foreign policy. Frum explains why understanding these differences is crucial for anticipating the challenges ahead.
Then Frum is joined by Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They discuss how societies decide what’s real, why disinformation has become a central political strategy, and living in a “reality-based community.” Rauch explains the dangers of the “fire hose of falsehood,” why authoritarian regimes weaponize confusion, and why, even amid today’s “machinery of lies,” reality still has the final word.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution and The Atlantic, and we’ll be talking about many things, but above all about his landmark 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge.
Before I talk to Jonathan, I want to open with some preliminary remarks about a shadowy future ahead for the United States. I am recording this talk on the 1st of September of 2025, Labor Day Monday. Now, rumor is rife this day that President [Donald] Trump suffered some kind of medical event over the weekend. I have, of course, no idea whether there is any basis for this rumor, and I’m not speculating about its truth or falsehood. But here are some hard facts. When Donald Trump entered office in January 2025, he was five months older than Joe Biden was when Joe Biden started his presidency in January of 2021. Watch any video of Trump, compare it to a video even from his first term, when he was already past 70, and you can see the evidence of time upon his body and mind.
Now, there are more than 40 months remaining in the present Trump term. It’s worth preparing now for what may lie ahead—preparing intellectually, I mean, for what may lie ahead—and specifically for the ways that an administration might change or this administration might change if Vice President [J. D.] Vance inherited President Trump’s office either before 2028 or after.
Now, I often use the following formula to describe the Donald Trump personality and the Donald Trump presidency. I’ve said he’s a head case first, a crook second, and an autocrat only third. Trump’s peculiar psychology often impels him to do things that are nonfunctional from any other point of view. One example: President Trump in his first term received a lot of political benefit from his close political association, his close working relationship, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Now in September of 2025, Trump is locked in a bitter personal dispute with Modi that has blown up a 30-year strategic partnership between India and the United States, and it’s reportedly all because Trump is furious at Modi for not nominating Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump’s very minor role in brokering an end to the India-Pakistan fighting in June of 2025.
The annals of the Trump presidency—first term and second—are thick with incidents that make no sense even on Donald Trump’s own terms. I mean, think about the story about the Qatari plane that Donald Trump has purported to accept on behalf of the United States and that is supposedly then going to be donated to the Trump presidential library, whether on the ground or in the air, after Donald Trump leaves office. Now, this so-called gift is going to cost the American taxpayer a billion dollars. It can be refused by any future Congress because a president or a person—anyone who’s an official—can only accept a gift from a foreign government with the consent of Congress, and if Congress were to pass a resolution saying the gift is not acceptable, then the gift would become illegal and unconstitutional. Now, why go through all of this for such a speculative benefit? I think it’s driven by psychological need more than any kind of rational desire for gain.
Now, if we imagine a President Vance, I expect we’ll see less of this kind of self-defeating behavior. Through his political life, Vance has pursued power fiercely, but astutely. He has reinvented himself again and again as opportunity beckoned, but he does not get distracted by delusions and fantasies the way Donald Trump has so often done. So he’s not a head case, nor is Vance the kind of impulse-driven pursuer of personal financial gain that Donald Trump is.
I don’t mean that a Vance administration would be an honest one. Vance is very much beholden to and often deeply identifies with men who seem to wish to use the United States government as a tool for their own massive self-enrichment. But I don’t see Vance engaging in the kind of petty chicanery, like making the Secret Service stay at a resort or hotel that Vance owns and then overcharging from their night in order to make a few comparatively paltry dollars. I don’t see him doing things like that, in that kind of self-defeating way. There’s no Vance meme coin, and there’s no instance of Vance putting his relatives into positions to pick up special favors and advantages the way some of Donald Trump’s relatives have done. That kind of thing is not the Vance style.
But what is ahead for a Vance presidency—whether before or after 2028—is for a leader determined to consolidate power, other people’s greed can often offer a useful tool. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin skyrocketed to power in the year 2000 by offering protection to the family and friends of the dying Russian President Boris Yeltsin. If they supported the maneuvers that brought Putin to the presidency, without a prior election, Putin would secure their wealth and privileges against the family’s loss of its grip on power and public office. The story is told in the book from Yale University Press, with the wonderful title The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, by veteran Russia correspondent David Satter.
You might imagine some kind of comparable or analogous deal being struck between an incoming President Vance and suddenly vulnerable members of the 47th president’s family. Unlike Trump, J. D. Vance has a lot of ideas about the external world that go far beyond his own vanity and his own wealth. Trump likes Putin and hates Ukraine because, apparently, Putin flatters him and because Ukraine defied or insulted him. Vance thinks much more ideologically. He fits both Ukraine and Russia into a much larger project to promote extremist right-wing rule across the European continent. He traveled to Germany in February to help that country’s far right in elections that same month. Then he spent his summer holidays in England to boost authoritarian nationalists over moderate conservatives.
Trump likes tariffs because he wrongly thinks foreigners are taking advantage of Americans and because maybe he enjoys the emotional surge of wielding arbitrary power. Did I say 25 percent tariffs? I’m doubling them and now I’m doubling them again. Oh, you said something nice to me. Okay, back to 25 percent. He loves that. Vance advocates tariffs, however, for much more grounded reasons. He has a vision of transforming the United States economy in such a way as to up-value the comparative—the relative value of male labor, devalue the relative value of female labor, and thereby make marginal men more attractive as partners in a big social-engineering project that is not ultimately economic, but that, it’s not just whimsical; it is part of a larger vision of how things should be, how the world should be. It’s an ideology, not a fixation, and not a twitch—something carefully considered.
Where Vance is continuous with Trump is in his preference for, or in his attraction to, or his willingness to use authoritarian methods of governance. Vance has made himself the face of Trump’s military deployments in Democratic-governed cities—Los Angeles and Washington, for now; Chicago, apparently, next; maybe others in the future. Vance mimics and even outdoes Trump’s derisive and sarcastic rhetorical style that denies dignity and respect to opponents and critics.
Trump has taken every side of the immigration debate over his career. He can flip-flop even on admitting hundreds of thousands of Chinese foreign students in the United States. One day, No. The next day, Yes. The day after that: Who knows? For Vance, it’s a matter of supreme principle to purge the country of unwanted foreigners by any means necessary, including the suppression of previously existing due process, which he’s defended in writing, for example, in this quote, from a tweet of April 15th this year. Here’s Vance: “Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?”
So since the goal is to deport a few million people per year, we have to do away with due process because there’s no way to achieve that goal while respecting due process, and even though due process is in the Constitution, out it goes. And that’s not a whim, and that’s not a twitch. That’s a matter of settled and sincere belief for which Vance is willing to pay a political price.
It’s important to understand, as we consider what may lie ahead between now and 2028 and after 2028, that not all authoritarians are the same. Some are flamboyant and bombastic. Others are methodical and purposeful. Some talk a lot. Others talk less. Some are motivated by personal ego, others, by ideological fanaticism. Some are driven by past vendettas, others, by plans to grab power and never let it go. Some are the past, and others are the future.
Had Donald Trump vanished from politics after the attempted coup of January 2021, Americans might congratulate themselves on surviving a bad episode in their country’s history as they survived the repressive panic after the First World War and McCarthyism after the Second World War. But Trump did not vanish. He returned to power, this time backed by a party and a movement united in support of his authoritarian goals and authoritarian methods. The American crisis of democracy is shaping up to be bigger than any one person, even a person as outsize as Donald Trump. The crisis will not end when Trump’s career does. The crisis may, in fact, be getting bigger, more dangerous, more institutional, more permanent. A crisis of the house divided as grave or graver than any since the Civil War.
And now my dialogue with Jonathan Rauch. But first, a quick break.
[Music]
David Frum: Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a contributing editor to The Atlantic. Those titles, however, don’t convey the weight of the reputation Jonathan has earned in 45 years in journalism. He has won esteem and admiration through the English-speaking world, with books and articles on subjects from gay marriage to nuclear power to modern Japanese life.
Looming over all those accomplishments, however, is his most recent book, The Constitution of Knowledge. The Constitution of Knowledge is a work of philosophy about the subject of how we know and how we’re entitled to say that we know. And in my opinion, it belongs on the shelf with [René] Descartes, [John] Locke, and all the other great thinkers on these important questions of the way the human mind works.
I’ve known Jonathan Rauch personally as a close friend since 1978, and although I’ve seen him acclaimed over those years for many achievements, The Constitution of Knowledge is his greatest, and the topic of our conversation today.
Jonathan, welcome. And I’m about to lower the tone dramatically.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, go ahead, but I just have to thank you for that outrageously overgenerous introduction. None of those accomplishments really matches up to the value of my friendship with you, David. You’ve been my spirit animal for almost 50 years.
Frum: Well, thank you. But now I’m going to lower the tone, so you may want to retract that remark.
So I discovered before we talked that you had not heard of the story I’m about to say, so I’m going to tell it in a little bit more detail, but you don’t need to know the details to see how I’m going to queue it up because what I want to know is, how does an adherent of The Constitution of Knowledge deal with the following problem?
There is a well-known podcaster named Candace Owens. Huge, huge following. Says a lot of weird things, a lot of crazy things, a lot of borderline, or even over-the-borderline, anti-Semitic things. But she’s in serious legal trouble right now because a lawsuit has been filed over her repeated, multipart accusations and claims that the wife of the president of France, a mother of three children, has in fact been a man all along and was “born a man,” in Candace Owens’s words, and “will die a man.”
Now, I’m not asking you to enter into the Owens-Macron controversy or to comment in any way.
Rauch: Oh, c’mon, can’t I really?
Frum: I want to know, how do you, Jonathan Rauch, leading exponent of the constitution of knowledge—how do you deal with a problem like this?
Rauch: (Laughs.) Well, first of all, I laugh. Second of all, I remind us that in a libel lawsuit, truth is an absolute defense. The third thing to say is, so what we’re looking at here could be just hilarious and amusing, or it could be quite sinister, depending on the context. It’s hilarious and amusing if it’s a tabloid story in which crazy people out for clicks say crazy things, and that’s their business model, and get sued for it. It is more sinister if it’s part of an entire information ecosystem that is in the business of spreading lies, exaggerations, half truths, and conspiracy theories for political gain. And sometimes those things will be funny and outrageous. Sometimes they’ll seem funny and outrageous like Hillary Clinton is running a juvenile sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a pizzeria, but they’ll turn out not to be funny when some guy shows up with a rifle and starts shooting. And sometimes they’ll be deeply sinister, as when they’re integrated into a campaign being run by the president of the United States and his federal government. So you tell me, is Candace Owens part of a larger industrial complex devoted to lying in politics, or is this a hilarious one-off?
Frum: You tell me.
Rauch: Well, okay, let’s set aside Candace Owens. Let’s go a little bit closer to the bone. In Donald Trump’s first term, he engaged in something that’s known in disinformation circles—we can talk about what that is and what it isn’t in the constitution of knowledge; we’ll get there in a minute, I guess—but he engaged in what’s known as a fire hose of falsehood, Russian-style, mass-disinformation campaign, and that’s where you put out so many lies, exaggerations, half truths, and conspiracy theories that people just throw up their hands. The media can’t keep up. No one knows what’s right or wrong. The fact-checkers can’t keep up. Twenty a day is how The Washington Post clocked his lies. You don’t do that by accident. You do that on purpose.
The second term looks a little bit different. Again, you tell me if it’s more sinister or less. I suspect it’s more sinister. In the first term we were seeing mountains of lies emanating from the mouth of Donald Trump, but we were not seeing mountains of lies emanating from the entire administration below him. We were seeing a lot of bureaucracies, places like, you know, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, doing their best to hang on to truth-telling. In the second term, we’re seeing cabinet officials—people like the attorney general and people like the secretary of Health and Human Services—we’re seeing official agencies all engaging in this same practice. And so now we’re seeing a machinery of lies. It’s coming from the government itself, not just Trump. That’s a change, and it’s a bad change. So does that answer the question?
Frum: Well, let me give you a concrete example, another concrete example. And this one is clearly not funny, not even a little bit. You’re the parent of a newborn child and you want to do the best for your child. And the doctor recommends to you that you go through a suite of vaccinations for the child. But you’ve heard one of your neighbors say that this is not a good idea, that the vaccinations will actually harm your child, whom you love more than anything. And so you go online to find out what the truth is, and maybe you go to government agencies, which are the most reputable, and you discover the government agencies, who used to be sure that you should do the suite of vaccinations, are suddenly endorsing the view that it’s complicated. You can’t be sure. There are a lot of risks here. You need to balance them for yourself using information from somebody other than the government itself. Where are we on that?
Rauch: We’re in a dangerous place. Or what if you’re concerned about foreign policy and you’re trying to understand what America’s stakes are in, for example, the fight over Ukraine, and the president tells you that this was a fight that the Ukrainians started. The complete inversion of reality. You’re apt to be confused, right?
Frum: Yeah.
Rauch: And that’s the point.
Frum: So what is this constitution that we are supposed to follow as our guide to solving this problem?
Rauch: Well, this might take a second because it’s an entire book in a nutshell, but I’ll try not to filibuster.
Every society from a small tribe to a large country has a problem with reality, which is people perceive reality differently and they get in fights over it. What’s true; what’s not true? In a small tribe, on something that’s got pretty much instantaneous feedback, like, Where is the next water hole? or, Where’s the enemy tribe located? Are they over the next hill? or, Is that a tiger in the bush?—you’re going to get quick feedback and you’re going to be fairly reality-based. But on the bigger, more abstract questions—which a lot can depend on—like Which God do we worship to make it rain?, you’re going to disagree.
Down through the ages, societies have mostly settled that question through violence, war, oppression. They rely on an authoritarian leader, a priest, an oracle—terrible, terrible ways to stay grounded to reality.
Starting in the time of John Locke and Galileo—and then in the 300 some years since then—we in the liberal West developed an alternative. I call it the “constitution of knowledge,” but it is a set of rules and norms and institutions that dictate how we go about settling our disagreements about reality and that show us a way to do that that keeps us grounded in reality and that allows us to settle our disagreements peaceably through structured persuasion. And what it does is—we call this science, but it’s broader than science; it also includes journalism and law and government agencies, and museums and libraries—but it creates an international system in which people follow rules to float hypotheses and refute those hypotheses and get trained up in how to do that. They’re not allowed to use coercion. They’re not allowed to end arguments. They’re forced to defend themselves. There’s a lot of structure that goes into that. If you just throw people in a room and say, Disagree. Come up with an idea of truth, you get 8chan, 4chan, X. You need tons of structure to make it happen. And that’s the constitution of knowledge. It’s all of these institutions and norms: everything from the academic journals to the legal standards, which you learned at Harvard Law School. How to write a footnote, how to structure an argument, publication standards, all of this stuff. And it defines what I call the reality-based community, of which the four long poles are: the world of academics, research, and science, number one; journalism, number two; law, number three; and government, number four. Government has to be tethered to reality, or it can just throw you in jail for a made-up crime, which, by the way, seems to be happening, at least to some people.
So that’s the constitution of knowledge in a nutshell. It’s the system we rely on to keep our society tethered to reality in a way that is peaceful and knowledgeable, preserves our freedom—and that’s what’s under attack. And by the way, has been since Galileo’s time.
Frum: So some parts of this constitution of knowledge look more robust than others. So, when the president of France and his wife come to court and present their case against Candace Owens and demonstrate the DNA hearings and show the biological relationship of Brigitte Macron to her three children, they will prove that they are right, that Candace Owens was repeatedly and deliberately and intentionally mistaken, and she will probably owe some money, if she doesn’t settle first. So that part of the constitutional community will work.
But to go to my example about the vaccinations: If you are a young parent trying to find out whether to vaccinate your child, the governmental part of that community is suddenly a lot less helpful than it was a year and a half ago.
Rauch: Well, that’s right. People don’t think about this, David, but over a period of decades, a lot of systems were put in place to try to keep the U.S. government reality-based, and that’s very important for a bunch of reasons. One is, you’ll make bad choices as a government if your choices are not based on reality. You’ll vaccinate the wrong people. You won’t vaccinate anyone. You’ll fail to approve the drugs that should be approved. You’ll get into wars and conflicts. You shouldn’t—on and on and on.
The second reason that we did that is basic fairness and justice, right? If government can make up facts about you, then it can do anything it wants to. This is what we learned from [George] Orwell and [Hannah] Arendt. The core of totalitarianism is the government’s ability to make stuff up. So we adopted things like the Administrative Procedure Act in the ’40s, and that sets up pretty elaborate systems that keep government tethered to facts. We put inspectors general throughout the government, dozens of them in multiple agencies with independence to say, Okay, is the decision-making here lawful and is it factual? We delegated courts so that if the government bases its regulatory decision on false facts, you can go to court; you can sue. You can say, This is false, and a court will find for you, and on and on and on. This is one of the great achievements of the modern liberal state. Fact-basing.
We now see an attack on that on multiple fronts. Think about DOGE. A bunch of amateurs are put in charge of reforming everything. They sweep in there and then they start putting up a website, trumpeting their claims, many of which turn out to be simply made-up. They exaggerate their savings by an order of magnitude. What you do with this is you quickly put in position two things. First, people don’t know what they can rely on, on something fundamental like vaccines or something like foreign policy. But second, after a while, you get to the real goal of this kind of campaign of untruth and disinformation. People throw up their hands. They say, I don’t know who to believe anymore. The New York Times is saying one thing, but the secretary of Health and Human Services is saying another. Is it safe to take this vaccine? Isn’t it safe? They throw up their hands and they stop believing in any facts at all. Once you’ve done that, you’ve demoralized your target population. You’ve made them feel it’s futile to fight back, to ever decide on truth. And that’s the ultimate goal.
Frum: Tell me about the other poles. I think there’s a lot of feeling in American society now that universities are not doing their job of being objective, fact-driven institutions of learning, but are adopting ideological missions of one kind, and now there’s this big counterreaction to push them to be ideological in a different way. Can the system work with one pole missing, or do we need all four to be working it together at the same time for the system to function?
Rauch: Well, of course, ideally, you want them all to be in good shape. Until January 20th, 2025, I was most worried about universities. Despite Trump’s attempt in the first term to warp the government scientific agencies, he mostly failed at doing that. Media has its problems, but it, I think, acquitted itself with flying colors in Trump’s first term. And indeed with some flaws in Biden’s term, in telling us what’s going on in the government—could be better, of course. Courts did best of all.
Academia was, I think, the most problematic area for all the reasons that you’ve just mentioned. One is there are fields now, the humanities and social sciences, where you see politicization, and even where you don’t see deliberate politicization, you see such an overwhelming ratio of progressives to all other points of view, that there’s no longer enough robust disagreement for views to really be tested. So things that just aren’t true begin to get promulgated. I’ve been worried enough about that to join the board of Heterodox Academy, which is an academic-reform organization and to join the advisory board of University of Austin, which is trying to set out a new direction and to really work on reforming this problem.
Trust in universities has dropped by, what, 20 percentage points, over the last five years, something pretty catastrophic, and that’s gotta be fixed because universities—you know, if there’s going to be a cure for cancer, it’s probably going to come out of our universities, out of our research establishment. And when it gets corrupted, a lot of bad things happen.
That’s true until January 19th, 2025. And now I think we have a bigger problem, which is that the U.S. government itself is under siege.
Frum: All right, so as a citizen of the society governed by the constitution of knowledge, what are your rights and what are your responsibilities?
Rauch: So let me see if I can answer this in a slightly larger context. Rights and responsibilities is the correct frame. We talk endlessly about freedom of speech, for example, in academia, and academic freedom. Freedom is easy to talk about. But there are three things that you need for the constitution of knowledge to work, and you’ve got to have all three of them. And all three of them are difficult.
The first is freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry. And that means on university campuses, when you’ve got two-thirds of students saying that they feel chilled, reluctant to express their true opinions for fear of social consequences, that’s a big problem. When professors are saying they’re afraid to speak out, that’s a big problem. So you’ve got to have freedom of speech, but we’re used to talking about that.
But you need two other things. The second is commitment to fact. The rule of fact in the constitution of knowledge is like the rule of law in the U.S. Constitution. Even when you don’t like how it comes out, even when you think it’s wrong, in the end, you accept the consensus on facts. You can challenge it. You can change it over time, but you don’t make up your own facts. You don’t invent footnotes. You don’t say any old thing. You abide by the rule of fact, and that is really hard to do. It’s way easier and more fun to make stuff up or a conspiracy theory or whatnot. But without that adherence to the rule of facts, we’re nowhere. So you need discipline, not just freedom. That’s the responsibility that goes with the right.
And then the third thing you need is diversity of viewpoint. This is a direct analogy to Madison’s “enlarge the sphere,” the need for pluralism to make constitutional democracy work. How do you deal with the problem of one faction becoming powerful and taking control? You have a lot of factions and you pit them against each other. Same thing with the constitution of knowledge. You have to have a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different people defending those viewpoints because we can’t see our own biases, but I can see some of yours and you can see some of mine. So we pit these viewpoints against each other, and that’s the magic of the whole system. That’s how we find our errors. If you don’t have viewpoint diversity, if, for instance, everybody in the sociology department believes—well, we won’t get into specifics, I can think of a few things—but believes the same thing on race or sex or gender, those assumptions won’t be questioned and mistakes will be made. So you’ve got to have all three of those things and they’re all in jeopardy.
Frum: What about taboos? Where do they fit into the constitution of knowledge? Let me give you a very concrete example from the history of religion. There has been a long, long debate about whether Jesus was an historical person, whether he existed, and whether the Gospel version of his life is true. Many different points of view have been aired on that. And we have long ago stopped murdering people if they say something that one faction or another doesn’t agree. In the history of Judaism, are stories like the Exodus from Egypt true? Is a story of the conquest of the Holy Land by Joshua true? Again, a lot of research, a lot of archaeology on those questions. Islam makes a series of historical claims about itself, and you can’t study those and the few in academic institutions that have ever studied them do so in a code so deliberately impenetrable as to make its books unreadable by outsiders.
And the reason they do is because everyone understands that, like Christianity before, I don’t know, 1789, unlike the history of Judaism, because Jews never had this power, you give the wrong answer to the question and you could be faced with deadly violence and probably the authorities will look the other way.
Rauch: Well, it depends what you mean by taboo, right? If you mean a social taboo, things that we think it’s just better not to talk about generally, like, what’s the evidence on race and IQ? You know, sometimes I’m okay with that. We don’t start from scratch in the reality-based community. We don’t get up every morning and try to say, Is the law of gravity still true today? Is evolution still true? Do we decide today to restudy the Holocaust? The answer is we don’t need to. Ideally you wouldn’t have things become cemented in taboos where you can’t question them at all, but very often we consign people who question established truth and facts and sometimes taboos to the margins. And usually they belong there because usually they’re nut cases, but not always. Okay.
But terrorism, violence, outright threats and intimidation have no place in this system. Of course, one of the first examples of using terrorism internationally to suppress an entire conversation was the stimulus for my first and maybe still most important book, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, and that was in February of 1989 when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini decreed the death of Salman Rushdie for writing a novel. Now, it wasn’t just about the novel, it was really about the ideas in the novel, and it was about the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could question the truths that the Ayatollah maintained. And that proved to be an effective campaign. A bunch of people were killed and a lot of other people were chilled. And that campaign is still going on. I was just two weeks ago giving a talk on the exact same stage where Salman Rushdie, a few years ago, was almost murdered by a knife-ist. I actually met the guy who was the first to rush the stage and get that guy.
Of course, this kind of violence, this kind of threat, has no place in the constitution of knowledge, and the whole point of the constitution of knowledge is it forces us, whether we want to or not, to settle our disagreements through persuasion. The very first thing it does—like the U.S. Constitution—is take violence out of the hands of ordinary people and say, That’s not how we settle disputes.
Frum: What happens when the authorities become selective in the extent to which they will deal with violence and not deal with violence? I mean, since October 7th of 2023, we have seen that, in the United States to a lesser degree, in Canada to a greater degree, in Europe and the United Kingdom even more, there’s certain forms of violence and intimidation that the authorities will look away from, perhaps because they’re frightened, perhaps because important elements of the authorities have some sympathy with the threats and intimidation. How do citizens of the republic governed by the constitution of knowledge deal with this problem?
Rauch: I’m tempted to ask if that’s a trick question because the answer is those that shouldn’t happen, right? Biggest example of that I can think of is, what, 1,500 people or so were convicted for attempting to overthrow the U.S. government. Many of them committed violence; many committed violence against policemen. The first thing Donald Trump did was pardon them all and say, That’s okay. And, and this is a shocking corruption of the social contract that we make with each other to protect a free society where disputes can be settled and we can be anchored to reality. It just shouldn’t happen. Now, of course, you know, it’s going to, but you don’t want to institutionalize it, and that’s what I’m afraid is happening right now in the U.S., maybe elsewhere.
Frum: One of the most misunderstood essays of all time is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” where he is remembered as having said, Once you get to a liberal capitalist society, that’s it. History stops. That’s not what he said. What he said was, Once you get to liberal capitalist society, ideological development stops. You can go backwards to barbarism and cruelty and savagery and oppression, but you can’t go forwards to a new dispensation.
So my question to you as a believer in this constitution of knowledge: Was that right? We hear a lot today about post-liberalism, about the desire to move to something beyond these rules that you described. This is offered not as a regression toward a barbarous past, but as an advance toward an even more promising future. Can the constitution of knowledge be time-limited? And is there something on the other side of it?
Rauch: I think Frank was right, actually, in the point that he was actually making, which you correctly summarize. He wasn’t saying conflict will never occur or recur, but he was saying that there’s no remaining alternative to liberalism—you know, small-L liberalists and free markets and liberal democratic government and science broadly defined—and that the alternatives are not as good. And they’ve all been tried and they’ve all failed. And I think since he wrote that article, what, 36 years ago, a lot of alternatives have been tried. Really, they’re old alternatives. Putin’s trying one, and Xi is trying one, and Iran’s trying one, and they’re all going to fail. I’m not so sure about China yet. We’ll see. But I’m pretty confident that that’s not a system that will endure in the long term.
So I think the same is true of the constitution of knowledge. There is—so what’s unique about the reality-based community, the rules of the constitution of knowledge, is that they’re open-ended and impersonal in the same way that markets are and in the same way that elections are. So everyone has to follow the same rules no matter who they are, which means that in principle, you can perform an experiment in Picton, Ontario, Canada, and someone speaking a different language in India can rerun the experiment and find out if you were right, or you can make an argument in a magazine and someone speaking Swahili in Africa can trace your logic and your cites and see if you’re right.
The only system that can set up a global network of hundreds of thousands of institutions and hundreds of millions of individuals trained to communicate with each other, to constantly exchange information in search of each other’s errors, is the constitution of knowledge, because it’s the only system that says what matters is your hypothesis, not who you are, and every hypothesis needs to be checked and rechecked before it’s admitted as fact.
No other system does that. No other system can turn all of humanity into a kind of global super-brain that literally transforms the capacity of our species to know and literally creates more new knowledge every day before breakfast than was created by Homo sapiens in its first 200,000 years. No system that relies on priests or politbureaus or monarchs or sacred texts or oracles can ever come anywhere near that.
Frum: What if we successfully break the global links, though? We are living now through a time where one of the big projects that the people in control of both the United States and China, two major powers, is to sever these kinds of connections: connections of information, sever connections of trade, sever connections of human contact. People who visit China tell me that it is striking when you go there how few Americans you now see. Whereas once you would’ve seen—20 years ago, you’d have seen many, many visitors and tourists and travelers and students, now it’s a very rare thing to see an American there. Trade connections are being severed across the Atlantic and across the Pacific. Social media’s creating these kinds of warring fiefdoms, with China locked, in its way, and tech oligarchs trying to control the American system, and the government of the United States looking for ways to commandeer those systems, to impose—they call them ombudsman—but really sort of truth commissars at major American media companies. Companies paying fines to the president if they say something he doesn’t like, especially if it’s true, in order to get permission for their corporate activities to continue.
We’ve seen periods of global integration collapse. The Roman Empire collapsed and left behind lots of little principalities. The Victorian world system that came to its apogee in 1913 collapsed and left us with half a century of nationalism and violence. Could it happen again? On the intellectual domain, not just the trade and material domain?
Rauch: So, it’s harder to make that happen in the intellectual domain than in the domain of, say, trade, where you can impose a tariff and something comes off a ship and you slap it with what amounts to a tax. Or the realm of immigration, where you’re dealing with physical bodies. Or for that matter, the realm of political nationalism, where you can bust up alliances, for example. It’s harder to do that in the realm of knowledge, just because knowledge can be transmitted electronically over wires.
So, one of the remarkable things that’s happened over the last, well, century-plus, but accelerating the last 20 years or so, has been international collaboration in science and journalism. Because what used to be quite difficult, which would be for, I don’t know, David Frum to collaborate with a scientist or journalist in China, is now trivially easy. If you can surmount the language barrier, you’re on Zoom, you’re co-authoring a paper, and so we’ve seen rapid rise, startling rise in international scientific collaboration, and that in turn has resulted in bringing on board lots of new minds, new thinking, new energy, new resources from places like India and Africa, which were kind of sidelined in the scientific community. So that process is hard to stop, right? Because it’s going to be electronic and collaborational.
Where you pay a cost—and I think are already paying a cost—is you do need some exchange of bodies. It is to the world’s benefit, to the benefit of humanity and science, if students from around the world can study here. Learn how to do science from the best people here, take that back home with them, and teach it to the people at home and then bring them into this global system of knowledge-seeking, or stay here and become leading scientists with the massive resources that are available.
The Trump administration seems to be doing its best to cut those ties. It is cutting the funding for scientific research, including global. It is making it difficult for foreign students to come. A lot of people are not coming at this point because they’re worried about getting nailed by immigration or losing a visa or losing funding. Francis Collins, former NIH [National Institutes of Health] director and others say we’re experiencing, for the first time in memory, reverse brain drain, where most talented minds are leaving America, looking for work in Canada and places that are in Europe that are eager to recruit them. And that’s going to hurt us as a nation, and it’s also going to hurt the search for knowledge because you want the best minds put to work where they can work most efficiently and productively. And in many cases, that’s still the United States.
Frum: What if the human mind is constituted in a way that it chafes at the constitutional knowledge and actually doesn’t want it? And we see lots of examples of how this could be so. People are drawn to conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories promise them that the universe is, even if malign, is organized by somebody. It’s not just a blank and impersonal thing that is utterly indifferent to our fates. There’s someone in charge, and that’s a reassuring thing. One of the reasons that the anti-vax deception finds winners is people want to believe that nature is benign, and that if we could just live more in harmony with it, we would be healthier and stronger. And, of course, we have seen that human beings—many of us, anyway—prefer to live in an orthodoxy enforced by some kind of supernatural guarantee than to live in all the uncertainties. That’s what the crisis of modernity is all about, right? That you have to live with uncertainty and you have to accept your neighbor’s certainty because you’re uncertain about your uncertainty. What if we’re not—what if it’s just trying to make us live in ways that human beings don’t want to live, and that rebellion against this, and maybe the system’s overthrow, is in our genes?
Rauch: Well, you can take off the what if part of that statement, because it’s just unquestionably true. The constitution of knowledge, in particular, and all three of these liberal systems—free exchange and liberal democracy—are profoundly counterintuitive. Chapter 2 of my book The Constitution of Knowledge is about the massive numbers of cognitive and social distortions that make it difficult for us to challenge our own assumptions, to even know that our assumptions need challenging. As Madison says—I’ll mangle the quote, but maybe you can get it—if all men were angels, we would not need a government. If people were naturally predisposed to question their mistakes, especially the things that they’re most certain of, to put their ideas up for critical review, to change their mind, or at least put up with it when society changes its mind, we wouldn’t need a constitution of knowledge, just as if we were all inclined to get along in a giant democracy without rules, we wouldn’t need a U.S. Constitution. It is precisely because being based in reality as a society is so difficult and so counterintuitive that we need these rules. It’s the reason it took 300 years to develop them to reach the point where they are today.
I often say—you know, I’ve been a free-speech nut since we were students together back in college. That’s almost 50 years. And what I’ve learned in that period is that the single most crazy, counterintuitive social idea ever invented is the idea that the government should not only tolerate speech that is wrongheaded, bigoted, offensive, but actually protect the speech. That is the craziest, most counterintuitive idea ever—redeemed only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social idea ever. But the result of that is that you and I will have to get up every morning and defend these principles from scratch. And we just have to be cheerful about that. And there will be attack after attack on the constitution of knowledge. It started with Galileo, who was thrown into house arrest because he believed in the Copernican system. And if the people now who are trying to sic on to the government into wholesale distortion of reality are defeated, there will be something else coming along behind them. And that’s just reality.
Frum: And that leaves you thinking that the future looks like what?
Rauch: Based on the past, the future looks good. It’s not automatic. We have to understand that the people who are fighting the constitution of knowledge—especially Donald Trump, but also the cancel-culture people, who have been very successful in the realm of academia, to some extent, journalism and corporate life—they’re very sophisticated people and they’re using very sophisticated, time-honored propaganda and cognitive-warfare tactics.
But we have a couple things going for us. One is that people hate to live in an epistemically polluted system where they don’t know what’s true and they don’t know what they can trust and they don’t know whether they can take the vaccine and they don’t know if anyone’s ever telling them the truth. This is an experiment that was tried in the Soviet Union and many other places. It fails because people hate it. Over time, they will gravitate toward sources that prove reliable. It’s not easy and it’s not always obvious.
There’s this also second thing that the constitution of knowledge has going for it, which is reality. Here’s the thing. If you stop vaccinating people for measles, guess what happens? You get measles. Then kids start to die. Then people look around and say, WTF? You can only suspend reality for so long before it hits you in the face. And that’s been the undoing of all the regimes throughout history, which have tried to manipulate reality: They get high on their own supply, they believe their own propaganda, they lose track of truth, they become arrogant about their manipulations, and they succumb to reality.
The best thing that we have going for us, for the constitution of knowledge, is there is no other system that can come close in terms of finding and discovering truth and keeping society moored to reality. That doesn’t mean we win automatically. And it sure doesn’t mean we win in the short run. [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin and, for that matter, Donald Trump can do what they’re doing for a significant amount of time and get away with a lot. But we are not where we are just because of hard work.
Frum: Do you think the loss of print as the preferred medium of communication compromises or even dooms your project?
Rauch: Well, as a longtime print journalist, I’m inclined to say, Duh. But I guess that would be self-serving. It doesn’t doom it; nothing dooms it. But it’s a problem. And that’s because print journalism has historically been the best at focusing resources to perform investigations, organizing editorial hierarchies that are careful about checking, creating newsrooms that are good at training the next generation in these methods, and having a business model that sustains that. The business model is now dead or dying. It’s getting very hard to support those enterprises.
Television has historically done good work, but it’s been less good at it. Social media is much less good at it still because the incentives are wrong, and don’t get me started on TikTok. And so it’s a challenging environment.
Frum: Jonathan, thank you. It’s always a pleasure. I always learn from you. I’ve been learning from you for a long time. And as you have said, so I feel that our relationship has been one of the primordial bonds of my life. And I’m grateful that we can, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine and your constitution of knowledge, that we can hope to limp along a little longer.
Rauch: It’s an honor to be with you and a special privilege to be joined with you in what is a long-term project to promote and protect the liberal principles that I learned so much about from you.
Frum: Thank you. Bye-bye.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Jonathan Rauch for joining me today on The David Frum Show. I hope that if you liked this dialogue, if you benefited from it, you will consider sharing it with others who might also enjoy it. And I hope you will consider subscribing to The Atlantic, which is the best way to support our work. And subscribe, of course, to this podcast, on any platform you use, video or audio.
I also want to take a moment for a correction for a mistake I made in last week’s monologue. I made a citation mistake last week. I quoted the journalist and author Walter Lippmann. The quote was accurate, but I sourced it to Lippmann’s 1922 book Public Opinion. In fact, the book came from another book, first published in 1920: Liberty and the News. I apologize for my error; it has been noted in the transcript of the monologue on the Atlantic website. Thank you so much for joining us on The David Frum Show. Again, please like and subscribe and share. I’ll look forward to seeing you next week back here on The David Frum Show.
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This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.