I think that it's possible that the appeal of Tala Rico, something that we do talk about on the show, is that there may not be like a movement of religious reaffiliation in this country, right?

I think people sometimes on the left and right kind of overstate the degree with something like that's happening.

But I would say that there is a palpable sense of

spiritual and religious and existential angst in this country and a hunger for some deeper truths

or grounding in the face of like really profound technological and epistemological change, a sense of like, you know,

being lost in the wilderness and this version of modernity that we have right now.

And that that produces a sort of desire for deeper kinds of religiosity.

And, you know, people that we've had on the show before talk about how sometimes this manifests

in kind of woo-woo forms of religiosity or return

to pagan religiosity or various other things.

But the point is that like there's an unmoored quality to the American personality at the

moment and that it doesn't seem implausible that politicians who are able to tap into that

with some kind of language

of moral certainty, even of metaphysical certainty, might be able to benefit from that sense

of longing in the American character at the moment. I would say the way you formulated this

earlier was excellent. You described the way Tellerico

merges populism and religious rhetoric in interesting ways, or at least one iteration of populism.

This is a moment of moral urgency, and theological religious language can capture that in ways

that kind of narrow, technocratic liberalism can't. But populists can too.

And like, this is why the example of Bernie going to the Vatican was so interesting to me.

It was Bernie in the Pope, like joining hands to talk about labor. And there's more resonance

there than you might think because populism, it is a moral language. Bernie might talk about labor. And there's more resonance there than you might think, because populism,

...