Yoni Appelbaum On Migration Within America

Yoni is a journalist and academic. He used to be a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard, and also taught at Babson College and Brandeis. He subsequently served in many editorial and writing roles at The Atlantic, where he’s currently a deputy executive editor. He just published his first book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It’s an engrossing account of how zoning in America — yes, zoning — evolved from the Puritans onward. I was unexpectedly fascinated.

For two clips of our convo — on the racist origins of zoning, and how progressivism is keeping poor people in place — see our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised as an orthodox Jew in the Boston area; spending a year at a yeshiva in Israel; interning for the Gore campaign in 1999; working for the Public Advocate in NYC; studying the Gilded Age in grad school; discovering Ta-Nehisi Coates as a Dish reader and getting hired at The Atlantic through TNC’s comments section; mobility as a core feature of early America; the Pilgrims; how the Puritans branched off; moving to construct one’s identity; Tocqueville; American Primeval; the “warning out” of early American towns; Lincoln’s mobility; the Moving Day of pre-war NYC; Chinese laundries; violence against immigrants; the Progressive drive for zoning; Yoni defending tenements; Hoover’s push for single-family homes; defaulting in the Depression; FDR’s push for long mortgages; the feds distorting the market; racial segregation; Jane Jacobs vs central planning; Thatcher and public housing; the rise of shitty architecture; cognitive sorting; Hillbilly Elegy; mass migration and rising costs in the UK; how leftist regulations stifle building; and the abundance movement.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Chris Caldwell on the political revolution in Europe, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Nick Denton on China and AI, Francis Collins on faith and science, Michael Lewis on government service, Ian Buruma on Spinoza, Michael Joseph Gross on bodybuilding, and the great and powerful Mike White, of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

A listener reacts to my debate with Jon Rauch over Christianism on the right and the left:

I appreciated your conversation with Rauch about his new book, even though it seemed sometimes like you were very eager to have a different conversation than the one he wanted to have. While you kept pressing him on why he was so unconcerned with the incorporation of progressive politics into more liberal, mainline Protestant branches, the examples you provided seemed to answer the question for him.

For instance, I think it’s deeply weird to have a pseudo-shrine to Matthew Shepherd in a DC cathedral, but there’s nothing menacing about it. I cringe at the newfangled Progress flag every time I see it flying where I used to see the rainbow Pride flag (the preschool-level symbolism of which has somehow been lost on the activist brigades). But when it’s on an Episcopal church, for most people it’s simply a symbol of acceptance and safety for the people it purports to represent. “You are safe and loved and welcome to worship in this church without being told you are going to hell.”

Meanwhile, over in MAGA Christendom, they’re talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country. They’re talking about retribution against the enemy within. This is a language of unmistakable menace and hostility and intent to do harm — to the correct people for the right reasons, of course.

This is why Rauch is more concerned with the insertion of Trump and MAGA into the center of white evangelical religious life. I suspect Rauch will be more concerned about the Episcopal Church going woke when a violent mob of pink-haired, non-binary Episcopalians waving stupid, triangle-addled Progress flags and chanting “D-E-I” storms the Capitol in the name of pronouns.

Here’s a clip from the episode:

Here’s another dissent over my side of the pod:

This had to be one of the most defensive, adversarial episodes you’ve recorded. I know you and Rauch are old friends, and you’re clearly a kind person, but had I never heard the Dishcast before, your attempts to parse the Gospels rather than listen to him would have sounded like willful ignorance. Throughout, it seemed as though you were bent on purifying his opinions or rectifying his examination of Christianity.

Perhaps the most puzzling part was after the 42-minute mark. You agreed with Rauch’s core point that Christian values can be deployed in service of the Constitution, but then you bizarrely commented, “left-Christianity is just as politicized as right-Christianity.” The left has become a big problem, yes. But Rauch alluded to a truth I wish he had flatly said: wokeism simply did not emerge from the leftist church, so there’s no real comparison to the religious right.

As a recovering lefty living in a Midwestern gay outpost where every business flies transqueer flags, I can assure you that absolutely no one here is getting their lefty politics from their church. Even considering the Matthew Shepard shrine you mentioned, wokeism is mostly an import to churches, not an export. It’s the secular institutions that you rightly chastise where wokeism, lefty politics, and identitarianism has festered: colleges, media, etc. Despite your lengthy, distracting protest, Rauch is correct that for all the left’s problems, the leftist church simply isn’t all that culturally relevant.

This next listener is more sympathetic to my view:

Thank you for enlightening Rauch about the problem of aggressive left-wing Protestantism. Too few people are covering this phenomenon, and I’ve experienced it firsthand in multiple Protestant denominations — from New England to Dallas. There is an obsessional focus on “inclusivity” that paradoxically excludes all sorts of people who otherwise would be valuable, conscientious, loving members of a church community.

Because my own church became almost laughably woke, I made the difficult decision to leave the United Methodist denomination in 2023. Some aspects of church life felt engineered to expose anyone who held more conservative, traditional, or moderate political beliefs. The worship services, sermons, liturgy, adult education programs, and mission statement were crammed to the gills with all of this groveling leftist posturing: Progress flags, land acknowledgments, a reparations committee, the editing/omitting of any scriptural readings that contained “offensive” language (such as the word “master”), trigger warnings about “gendered references to God,” and name tags displaying everyone’s pronouns.

The purity tests administered by the church’s activist leadership struck me as eerily similar to the ones flung at Jesus by the Pharisees … which Jesus resoundingly deflected by calling them out on their first-century virtue signaling! How could this abject failure in pluralism have infected Christianity, which should be a model of pluralism?

One thing that especially troubled me before I left the UMC: there was plenty of outward contrition for the church’s complicity in systemic racism and oppression of the LGBTQ community — and yet, oddly enough, I never heard a single word in church condemning the UMC’s history of sexual abuse and misconduct, which the denomination issued a flaccid online apology for in 2024. There were no banners, messages, or symbolic gestures for these victims. It just reinforces my suspicion that “progressive” Protestantism is more about moral posturing around the most fashionable social justice causes than it is about nurturing a countercultural community of faith, confronting truly shameful transgressions, and safeguarding the most vulnerable in society — namely children, women, the sick, and the elderly.

In the Old Testament, when God gets fed up with the utter emptiness of Jerusalem’s atonement rituals, he speaks through the prophet Isaiah: “Bring no more vain offerings; your incense is an abomination to me; your new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure; it is all iniquity...” Both extremities of the politically performative church must come to terms with how their “vain offerings” have damaged the church’s overall credibility.

Amen, as it were. Maybe I should restate my view: Christianism is far, far more influential on the right than the left. But wokeism is itself a manifestation of buried New England puritanism, a new kind of religion, and this was easily imported into mainline Protestantism.

I also think there’s a kind of myopia with these people. Their flags of “inclusion” — the transqueer flag, for example — are actually flags of exclusion. They are telling you that unless you subscribe to the view that the world is fundamentally defined by the oppression of some groups by others, you’re not welcome. If you don’t believe in “intersectionality”, you have no place here. If you didn’t support BLM or back sex reassignment for children, you do not belong. None of these ideas are intrinsic to Christianity; but they are now orthodoxy.

In Provincetown, for example, the inoffensive rainbow flag has been replaced by the trans-queer-BLM flag, smugly called the “Progress Flag.” Lefties barely notice this; normies don’t either: it’s just an uglier update to them. But for anyone not signed up to the woke left, these flags say quite loudly: “You do not belong here; this is a space solely for left-liberals.” It’s the very opposite of inclusive. And it is designed to foster intolerance of alternative views. Most gays and lesbians, of course, have such a media bubble around them, and have it reinforced all the time, that they have no idea any of this is faintly debatable. I mean: they get their news from Rachel Maddow.

Here’s a clip on the growing tolerance of the Mormon Church:

Another writes:

I had to chuckle, Andrew, at your insistence that Mormons cannot be considered Christians because they don’t believe in things like the Trinity. As a former fundamentalist Evangelical, I almost always heard grudging allowance of their Christian label because they believed in: 1) the divinity of Jesus, 2) his death, and 3) most importantly, his resurrection. Only the strictest fundamentalist would deny them the label of Christian (albeit heretical ones) for other doctrinal reasons.

I am not a strict fundamentalist obviously. But denial of the Trinity and a belief that humans can become gods are way outside even the most liberal Christian lines.

This next listener looks to the Ross Douthat pod:

I was confused by your whole deathbed hallucination discussion and how that proves anything. When citing the “similarity” of experiences and stories of people whom have almost died, why is it not the power of suggestion. You would have to live as a hermit to not have heard these near-death stories of family as a person approaches death. Maybe that becomes their and their brain’s focus - because they have been expecting it.

Another adds, “Regarding your recent episodes with Junger and Douthat talking about near-death experiences, you might want to see this 2022 article: ‘First-ever scan of a dying human brain reveals life may actually 'flash before your eyes.’” This next listener focuses on another theme of the Douthat pod — theodicy:

I’ve just finished listening to your conversation with Ross Douthat — an hour-and- a-half of more entertaining craziness than I could have imagined from two writers whom I follow, um, religiously. Let’s leave aside the origin of the universe and the mind/body problem (two areas where the evidence is thin enough to admit a range of speculation) and jump to the problem of evil, which you guys passed over suspiciously quickly.

For starters, take the natural world, about which we do know quite a lot — for example, that it amounts to a global system whose inhabitants are able to survive only by eating each other. Wouldn’t you think an all-powerful being could manage to keep sharks from chewing on surfers and get the dog fed without anything first having to suffer a premature death?

In response, you offered just the sort of argument from personal experience that you’ve criticized in the exponents of victimology, but with an even stronger masochistic inflection: you believe in God all the more when He’s knocking the stuffing out of you! And Douthat seemed to suggest that a species of neo-Manicheanism might dispose of such objections by name-checking the forces of darkness. Somewhere St. Augustine is sitting up and exclaiming, “Hold on! I thought I set everybody straight on that stuff a long time ago!”

One more on that episode:

Recall that Douthat talked about how amazing it is that human reasoning and intellect was able to decode our universe (paraphrasing), and how improbable that all seemed without a god. Razib Khan makes the case that we actually may be more primitive than extinct Neanderthal or Denisovan lineages. There’s just so much we don’t know, and this isn’t necessarily proof of anything, but I suspect there are many, many more holes to be shot in Douthat’s brand of miracles and human exceptionalism.

On the recent John Gray pod, a listener dissents:

I was incredibly unimpressed with John Gray, and his fawning over the potentially “more morally clean” foreign policy of Trump. It is simply untrue that wherever the West intervened it abandoned its allies. Bosnia, Kosovo — an order was upheld. Estonia and other Baltic countries would already be overrun by Russia if one had not extended Euro-Atlantic institution to them. Poland would already be under the yoke also. The Kurds in north Iraq have had a fairly good run, as things go in that part of the world. Should I go on? Yes, we need to discuss the limits of foreign policy, but we cannot do that without some plausible version of the truth.

Of course, Gray is spectacularly wrong in betting on a “more morally clean” foreign policy, too, as within days of your episode being out, Trump announces a bizarro Gaza project, having already threatened a takeover of Greenland, and picked fights with Canada and Mexico.

A guest rec for the pod:

Oh wow, I initially thought there was some kind of mistake with your reference to “Jessica Riedl.” I’ve long known of Jessica (formerly Brian) Riedl as one of the very few true fiscal conservatives left in the country. I have great respect for her analyses. Please interview her at some point!

I’ve admired Riedl’s fiscal acuity for years. She has actual principles and is intellectually honest!

Here’s a reader dissent over last week’s column:

I’m disappointed but not surprised at your utter disdain for what Trump and Musk are trying to do. You’re being nuanced in an era where nuance has long since gone out the window. The woke NGO expenditures of USAID and the blatant attempt to spread LGBTQWERTY ideologies in other countries amounts to cultural imperialism.

But I want to focus on one particular line from your piece — about Trump’s “violation of norms.”