Marshall and Saga here welcome back to the re-alignment.

This week we brought conservative New York Times op-ed columnist and co-host of the argument podcast

Ross Duffett on the re-alignment. Ross is not just released a new book

It's called The Decadent Society. Probably became a victim of our own success.

So the Decadent Society is all about what happens when a wealthy

prosperous industrialized society stops advancing. What happens when economic stagnation,

political dysfunction, cultural exhaustion, you know, he's talking about how every movie out there

seems to be a reboot of a reboot or a new Star Wars movie continues to happen. If then you have

demographic decline in terms of birth rates. All of these factors come together and produce what

Ross describes as decadence. So this is a great fit for what we've sort of focused on with the

re-alignment because it's all about why is our society so unhappy despite all of the wealth and all of the sort of

material success all around us. We've covered a lot of books this season. We started with the new class war by Michael

Lind. We next covered the age of entitlement by Christopher Caldwell and now it's great to engage

of Ross's work because we think all these books should be read together. They're all using the year of

2020 to sort of look at the past 40 to 50 years of American history and see how those different

historical, economic, political, and cultural situations have built together into our present day.

Ross's work has always been very helpful for way. Sogard, I've conceived of the political

re-alignment. He wrote a book with Manhattan Institute President Reihans Alam back in 2008 called

Grand New Party and the book was all about how changing class coalitions would mean the Republican

Party and the Democratic Party would look very different than they did at the time. Now Ross and

Reihan definitely didn't predict Donald Trump exactly but their book definitely predicted the idea

that a Republican Party that would be less and less afloat would be open to a more heterodox

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