Jonathan Rauch ‘82 was a contributor to the Yale Political Monthly during his time at Yale and was a member of the Yale Daily News Editorial Board. Rauch has since worked as an author, journalist, and political commentator, during which time he has advocated strongly for issues including same-sex marriage and offered insightful analysis about the state of American democracy. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor of National Journal and The Atlantic.
What do you remember about the Political Monthly when you were at Yale and also just campus in general?
In terms of the campus climate, it was amazing. Yale was a transformative experience for me. On the academic side, it was probably a 5.5 out of 5, it was off the charts good. And one of the reasons for that was the campus intellectual environment was quite adventurous. Most students were left of center. But they were liberal left. Not extreme progressive left. And everyone seemed accustomed to arguing. So you had David Frum who was a columnist at the Yale Daily News. He’s now famous writer at Atlantic. He was kind of a conservative provocateur in that period, and that was great. People did not feel as constrained.
The biggest controversy, that was political, that was meaningful, when I was on the editorial board at the Daily News was the 1980 election. Ronald Reagan was the Republican. And at that point, he looked to a lot of people, including me, like a dangerously reckless, irresponsible, and extreme candidate. The Democrats were running President Carter, who was not super popular with the left and, needless to say, the right. He was increasing the defense budget and kind of governing from the center, maybe even more center right than center left. And there was a third candidate in the race, who was John Anderson, who was a Republican congressman from Illinois but who was a liberal Republican — those things still existed. He was running to the left of Carter, and student opinion was primarily for Anderson. So a notable controversy broke out on campus and in the pages of the Daily News, between my faction which believed that every vote for Anderson was, in fact, a vote for Reagan, and the other faction which believed that a vote for Carter might as well be a vote for Reagan. And that was a big debate. We had it in the Yale Daily News and my faction won, and the Daily News endorsed Jimmy Carter with all his flaws. And the reason I remember that is, no, I don’t think it had any real world impact. But it seemed at the time, like a very important political proposition for all of us. We were encountering this not from the point of view of symbolic politics or cultural politics. We really thought it mattered who the president was in what and how Yale students voted. Most of them were voting in their home states, not Connecticut, so a lot of their votes were gonna really count. So I thought it was a very healthy political debate.
To what extent did your college experience and the intellectual rigor of it influence your career path and your career choice?
It was formative. When I arrived at Yale, I was more interested in music, but I didn’t have the talent. And discovered, when I started writing for the News, actually reviews and essays, I discovered that I loved writing, and I was good at it. I was the co-opinion editor at the News, and also discovered that that terrain was very favorable. And that led me to an internship in Washington between my junior and senior years. And that led me to a journalism career which is still ongoing.
Equally important, the intellectual work that I did at Yale was this formative. I just published this past June a book called The Constitution of Knowledge, which is about how we find truth and the attacks on that: disinformation, cancel culture, all of that. And that work is a direct outgrowth of the work I did at Yale as an undergraduate on history of science, which is where I wound up focusing, which is really about how humans set up systems to make knowledge. I’m still drawing down the capital that I’ve earned at Yale. It was a remarkable place. It may still be like this. I hope so. But when I was there, a thing about Yale was that there was a lot of exposure to faculty, and undergraduates were expected to do, in many cases, graduate level work, and often did. And so it was a no compromise situation.
How did your college years influence your political viewpoints and how you approach politics?
So when I entered college, I was a Ralph Nader style liberal. And those are kind of scarce now. But those were people who believed that you had to tame giant corporations because giant corporations and monopolies were screwing consumers, and they very focused on having strong government good regulation. It’s a little closer actually to Bernie Sanders-type progressivism than to work progressivism, which is very cultural and very focused on race and not the economy. Yale taught me that things are complicated. Number one, because of Yale’s emphasis on rigorous scholarship, which was heavily emphasized in my four years there, we weren’t really allowed to get away with easy answers. I’m not just talking about modern politics. And that really imprinted on me that my mission was to try to penetrate and analyze and that if the answer was obvious, it was probably wrong. And that also carried over into my journalism, and is still my creed.
The other thing that happened to me at Yale is I encountered smart conservatives, particularly David Frum, who is a close friend. And these are people who — I thought I knew a lot, they showed me I didn’t. They were saying things that seemed preposterous. But exposure to conservative thinking was not completely convincing and still isn’t, but it was a sea change in my coming to respect the conservative worldview.
There were also Reagan advocates at Yale: Three weren’t many, but they were very outspoken and very smart. Conservatives at Yale — it was true then, it’s probably true now — had to do a lot more work to defend their views. So they had read more. And that presented a great intellectual challenge. And then of course, you had the Reagan era, and that was unfolding. When I was there was the period when confidence in 1960s and 1970s style liberalism was in the process of collapsing as supply siders were fomenting an economic revolution. And Reagan was saying government is the problem, not the solution. It was a massive intellectual change. And conservatives in that era were where the intellectual action was happening. The opposite of what passes for conservatism today, which is anti-intellectual. You had the neoconservatives: people like Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal editorial page. Reagan attracted people like Jeane Kirkpatrick. So that was a huge challenge. You had this massive insurgent intellectual movement that was unfolding. And that came to Yale too — Robert Bork was there. He’s the extremely controversial Supreme Court nominee. So he was teaching at Yale. He was busy revolutionizing thinking about antitrust. So Yale was not a conservative place or libertarian place, but it was a place where conservatism existed and you just had to reckon with it. And that was the second big influence. When I got into Yale, I thought conservatives are kind of stupid. Libertarians are kind of weird. And when I left Yale, I thought: okay, this is a major intellectual movement.
I guess I’m gonna add something, which is the importance of Directed Studies in my case. As you know, Directed Studies is year-long exposure to the greatest that has been thought, and read in small groups with students who are particularly interested because it’s selective. And that was my first encounter with the great ideas. Obviously, people like Plato and Kant and right up to the present, and Tocqueville. So in terms of shaping me politically, understanding America, the big ideas…I think, when I got to when I was 17 and 18, I had the kind of understanding of America that you get from a civics course — you know, how to pass a bill and when the Civil War was. Yale gave me grounding in the big ideas on which our politics are still ultimately founded.
Can you briefly describe your work related to marriage equality and equal rights for queer people? How can students today work to advance this or other social issues in a similar way?
When the cause of same-sex marriage arrived in the mid-1990s, I recognized it as a potential breakthrough not only for legal equality but as a way to bring the benefits of family and community to homosexual people, especially the young. I myself didn’t come out or even internally accept I was gay until I was 25, and part of the reason I struggled so hard against my true self was my knowledge that being gay meant I would never have marriage as a legal and social destination for my love. Having lived that trauma, I believed that the opportunity to marry could transform life for millions of gay and lesbian young people (and adults too, of course), while also strengthening the institution of marriage and making the country a better, fairer place.
I thought the work I and others were doing might pay off in a couple of generations, if we were lucky. Or never, if things went badly. The first 15-plus years were brutally disappointing and frustrating. We were all astonished when the breakthrough came. I still am.
There are lots of ways to advance justice, but they’re not created equal. I agree with Mark Lilla that the contemporary left (especially in the university world) puts too much emphasis on protest and purism, and not enough on engaging the political system and making conversions in the movable middle, America’s moral swing vote. I wish students would spend more time building victories in local politics and less policing pronouns.
My own path has been to operate primarily in the world of ideas by identifying and making the most persuasive arguments for the best policies. Ideas are like a big bomb on a long fuse: They take a long time to penetrate, but once they do, they can sweep all before them.
Jonathan Rauch ‘82 was a contributor to the Yale Political Monthly during his time at Yale and was a member of the Yale Daily News Editorial Board. Rauch has since worked as an author, journalist, and political commentator, during which time he has advocated strongly for issues including same-sex marriage and offered insightful analysis about the state of American democracy. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor of National Journal and The Atlantic.
What do you remember about the Political Monthly when you were at Yale and also just campus in general?
In terms of the campus climate, it was amazing. Yale was a transformative experience for me. On the academic side, it was probably a 5.5 out of 5, it was off the charts good. And one of the reasons for that was the campus intellectual environment was quite adventurous. Most students were left of center. But they were liberal left. Not extreme progressive left. And everyone seemed accustomed to arguing. So you had David Frum who was a columnist at the Yale Daily News. He’s now famous writer at Atlantic. He was kind of a conservative provocateur in that period, and that was great. People did not feel as constrained.
The biggest controversy, that was political, that was meaningful, when I was on the editorial board at the Daily News was the 1980 election. Ronald Reagan was the Republican. And at that point, he looked to a lot of people, including me, like a dangerously reckless, irresponsible, and extreme candidate. The Democrats were running President Carter, who was not super popular with the left and, needless to say, the right. He was increasing the defense budget and kind of governing from the center, maybe even more center right than center left. And there was a third candidate in the race, who was John Anderson, who was a Republican congressman from Illinois but who was a liberal Republican — those things still existed. He was running to the left of Carter, and student opinion was primarily for Anderson. So a notable controversy broke out on campus and in the pages of the Daily News, between my faction which believed that every vote for Anderson was, in fact, a vote for Reagan, and the other faction which believed that a vote for Carter might as well be a vote for Reagan. And that was a big debate. We had it in the Yale Daily News and my faction won, and the Daily News endorsed Jimmy Carter with all his flaws. And the reason I remember that is, no, I don’t think it had any real world impact. But it seemed at the time, like a very important political proposition for all of us. We were encountering this not from the point of view of symbolic politics or cultural politics. We really thought it mattered who the president was in what and how Yale students voted. Most of them were voting in their home states, not Connecticut, so a lot of their votes were gonna really count. So I thought it was a very healthy political debate.
To what extent did your college experience and the intellectual rigor of it influence your career path and your career choice?
It was formative. When I arrived at Yale, I was more interested in music, but I didn’t have the talent. And discovered, when I started writing for the News, actually reviews and essays, I discovered that I loved writing, and I was good at it. I was the co-opinion editor at the News, and also discovered that that terrain was very favorable. And that led me to an internship in Washington between my junior and senior years. And that led me to a journalism career which is still ongoing.
Equally important, the intellectual work that I did at Yale was this formative. I just published this past June a book called The Constitution of Knowledge, which is about how we find truth and the attacks on that: disinformation, cancel culture, all of that. And that work is a direct outgrowth of the work I did at Yale as an undergraduate on history of science, which is where I wound up focusing, which is really about how humans set up systems to make knowledge. I’m still drawing down the capital that I’ve earned at Yale. It was a remarkable place. It may still be like this. I hope so. But when I was there, a thing about Yale was that there was a lot of exposure to faculty, and undergraduates were expected to do, in many cases, graduate level work, and often did. And so it was a no compromise situation.
How did your college years influence your political viewpoints and how you approach politics?
So when I entered college, I was a Ralph Nader style liberal. And those are kind of scarce now. But those were people who believed that you had to tame giant corporations because giant corporations and monopolies were screwing consumers, and they very focused on having strong government good regulation. It’s a little closer actually to Bernie Sanders-type progressivism than to work progressivism, which is very cultural and very focused on race and not the economy. Yale taught me that things are complicated. Number one, because of Yale’s emphasis on rigorous scholarship, which was heavily emphasized in my four years there, we weren’t really allowed to get away with easy answers. I’m not just talking about modern politics. And that really imprinted on me that my mission was to try to penetrate and analyze and that if the answer was obvious, it was probably wrong. And that also carried over into my journalism, and is still my creed.
The other thing that happened to me at Yale is I encountered smart conservatives, particularly David Frum, who is a close friend. And these are people who — I thought I knew a lot, they showed me I didn’t. They were saying things that seemed preposterous. But exposure to conservative thinking was not completely convincing and still isn’t, but it was a sea change in my coming to respect the conservative worldview.
There were also Reagan advocates at Yale: Three weren’t many, but they were very outspoken and very smart. Conservatives at Yale — it was true then, it’s probably true now — had to do a lot more work to defend their views. So they had read more. And that presented a great intellectual challenge. And then of course, you had the Reagan era, and that was unfolding. When I was there was the period when confidence in 1960s and 1970s style liberalism was in the process of collapsing as supply siders were fomenting an economic revolution. And Reagan was saying government is the problem, not the solution. It was a massive intellectual change. And conservatives in that era were where the intellectual action was happening. The opposite of what passes for conservatism today, which is anti-intellectual. You had the neoconservatives: people like Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal editorial page. Reagan attracted people like Jeane Kirkpatrick. So that was a huge challenge. You had this massive insurgent intellectual movement that was unfolding. And that came to Yale too — Robert Bork was there. He’s the extremely controversial Supreme Court nominee. So he was teaching at Yale. He was busy revolutionizing thinking about antitrust. So Yale was not a conservative place or libertarian place, but it was a place where conservatism existed and you just had to reckon with it. And that was the second big influence. When I got into Yale, I thought conservatives are kind of stupid. Libertarians are kind of weird. And when I left Yale, I thought: okay, this is a major intellectual movement.
I guess I’m gonna add something, which is the importance of Directed Studies in my case. As you know, Directed Studies is year-long exposure to the greatest that has been thought, and read in small groups with students who are particularly interested because it’s selective. And that was my first encounter with the great ideas. Obviously, people like Plato and Kant and right up to the present, and Tocqueville. So in terms of shaping me politically, understanding America, the big ideas…I think, when I got to when I was 17 and 18, I had the kind of understanding of America that you get from a civics course — you know, how to pass a bill and when the Civil War was. Yale gave me grounding in the big ideas on which our politics are still ultimately founded.
Can you briefly describe your work related to marriage equality and equal rights for queer people? How can students today work to advance this or other social issues in a similar way?
When the cause of same-sex marriage arrived in the mid-1990s, I recognized it as a potential breakthrough not only for legal equality but as a way to bring the benefits of family and community to homosexual people, especially the young. I myself didn’t come out or even internally accept I was gay until I was 25, and part of the reason I struggled so hard against my true self was my knowledge that being gay meant I would never have marriage as a legal and social destination for my love. Having lived that trauma, I believed that the opportunity to marry could transform life for millions of gay and lesbian young people (and adults too, of course), while also strengthening the institution of marriage and making the country a better, fairer place.
I thought the work I and others were doing might pay off in a couple of generations, if we were lucky. Or never, if things went badly. The first 15-plus years were brutally disappointing and frustrating. We were all astonished when the breakthrough came. I still am.
There are lots of ways to advance justice, but they’re not created equal. I agree with Mark Lilla that the contemporary left (especially in the university world) puts too much emphasis on protest and purism, and not enough on engaging the political system and making conversions in the movable middle, America’s moral swing vote. I wish students would spend more time building victories in local politics and less policing pronouns.
My own path has been to operate primarily in the world of ideas by identifying and making the most persuasive arguments for the best policies. Ideas are like a big bomb on a long fuse: They take a long time to penetrate, but once they do, they can sweep all before them.