Episode 27 - EU Parliament Member Johan Van Overtveldt on The Icarus Curse

It isn’t every day you get to talk to one of the 720 members of the European Parliament, one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union. For me, it has happened once: a week ago, when I spoke to Johan Van Overtveldt, now in his second five-year term representing Belgium in the Parliament and serving as chair of the Parliament’s budget committee. Van Overtveldt, who previously served as Belgium’s Minister of Finance, their version of America’s Secretary of the Treasury, is a conservative: at home, he’s a member of the New Flemish Alliance, and in Parliament, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.

European and American conservatives have their similarities, but the match isn’t perfect. I asked Member Van Overtveldt how he would categorize himself in American terms and I’ll let him speak for himself, but for now, think a generous Reagan, but supportive of gay marriage and concerned about climate change.

Prior to transitioning into politics, Van Overtveldt worked in banking, he worked in finance, and he spent decades as an economic journalist. There’s a reason he was minister of finance and is now chair of the budgetary committee—he really knows his stuff, and he has the industry connections and pragmatic approach you’d expect of someone who spent a career outside politics.

Van Overtveldt has also written a number of books. His first came from his dissertation—he received his PhD in applied economics from the University of Antwerp—which he wrote on the Chicago School of Economics—Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and so forth.

I spoke to him about his most recent book, The Icarus Curse: How Western Democracies Derailed and How to Get Back on Track. The basic premise is that western democracies, very much including the United States, have been living beyond their means for generations, and are reaching a point of true policy exhaustion. What started as John Maynard Keynes’s innovation of deficit spending to stimulate aggregate demand when demand fell—like during a financial crisis—became an excuse for politicians to make promise after promise after promise—without, it should be noted, ever fully delivering what people have now come to expect of their government. In 1964, 77% of Americans trusted their government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time; by 1979, that was 27%, and it hasn’t exceeded 24% since before President Obama took office. Only part of that is about the mismatch between what people have come to expect of their government and what the government can actually deliver, but it’s a real part.

This isn’t one party’s fault. On the one hand you have Democrats: happy to spend, but ultimately uncomfortable with raising taxes; on the other, you have Republicans: happy to cut taxes, but less good at actually cutting spending, and there’s a strong argument to be made that what they are trying to cut—it’s not just fraud, waste, and abuse—is exactly the sort of public investment spending you shouldn’t be cutting. President Trump and congressional Republicans argue that the Big Beautiful Bill will stimulate the economy so much that tax revenues will eventually wipe out what the Congressional Budget Office projects as an additional $2.4 trillion on the deficit side of the ledger over the next ten years, but how confident are you that’s actually the case? I’m not an economist, I’m not an actuary, and I’m not a politician, but it sounds more like wishful thinking than real math.

Ultimately, the pied piper is going to come calling. There will come a financial meltdown, or a war, or a series of natural disasters that we don’t have the borrowing capacity to simply paper over. So what do we do? How do we gird ourselves against the unpredictable crises to come? Well, those questions are why I wanted to talk to Johan Van Overtveldt.

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Episode 26 - Ben Connelly on Traditional Conservatism and Why It Matters

What does “traditional conservatism” mean to you? How has conservatism changed since President Trump came on the scene? Did it need to change?

One of the downsides of having just two mainstream parties, one of which has permanently claimed the mantle of conservatism and the other that of liberalism, is that those words come to mean whatever the parties say they do at the particular moment. What “conservative” and “liberal” mean today is different from what they meant in the 1920s, and 1960s, and 1980s. Is that a problem? Well, it depends. I’m not of the view the parties should never depart from traditional principles, but I do think it’s helpful to know what those principles are, and to understand when and why they’re being laid aside.

It’s also helpful to have clear and articulate exponents for each set of principles, people that can serve as reference points so we have a sense of where we’re going and can effectively question whether we should change directions. I am not a traditional conservative; Ben Connelly, a writer based in a city I love very much, Charlottesville, Virginia, is. He writes two Substack newsletters: Hardihood Books, an online magazine for short fiction and persuasive nonfiction, and Carrying the Fire, where Ben, under the pseudonym John Grady Atreides, defends “the principles of American conservatism, which George Will rightly described as the project of conserving the American Founding. In a world of actors seeking to destroy and uproot, conservatism (rightly understood) preserves and protects that which is good.”

To Ben, preserving traditional conservatism means extolling the virtues of free enterprise; individual liberty and natural rights; ordered liberty; limited government; civil society; American constitutionalism; the rule of law; American leadership abroad; strong defense; patriotism; Western civilization; tradition and a measured pace of change; religious faith; and, well, virtue. Ben comes by his views and intellectual heft honestly—his father is a celebrated emeritus professor of politics at Washington and Lee University.

I had Ben on the podcast for a fun, highly informative conversation on traditional conservatism: what it is, why it matters, what its limitations are, and how it differs from the conservatism of the modern Republican Party.

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Episode 25 - Griffin Gooch on Restoring Trust in Religious Institutions

Trust in the government is low, and has been for a long time. Moral individualism, a sort of autonomy from traditional authorities, is high and rising. Where some have lost their faith in institutions, others never had it.

A major part of that story is the decline of participation in religion. As of a 2021-2023 survey period, approximately 30% of Americans attended religious services weekly, down from 42% 20 years earlier. Though there is some indication members of Generation Z are significantly less likely to identify as atheists than their parents, they are more likely to identify as spiritual, not necessarily as religious. From data courtesy of Substack’s own Ryan Burge, the writer and scholar behind Graphs About Religion and the author of multiple books regarding Americans’ church attendance and non-attendance, Gen Zers are the least likely to attend weekly and the most likely to attend never; I am not aware of a reason we should expect that to change anytime soon.

Griffin Gooch is a self-described “almost fully-trained theologian”—completing his in-process doctorate at the University of Aberdeen will make it official. Griffin teaches at Northpoint College in Michigan and is the brains behind no fewer than three separate Substack newsletters:

* Reality Theology with Griffin Gooch, where his “aim is to connect academic disciplines that try to describe reality (psychology, sociology, philosophy, personal development, artistic studies, and so on) with a theological worldview.”

* The Remarkable Ordinary, where Griffin publishes “ordinary stories of Christian kindness, hospitality, and integrity[,]” with the aim of providing “anti-moral failure, anti-church scandal, anti-Christian hypocrisy journalism.”

* The Deadly Seven, a “collaborative, limited run Substack on the Seven Deadly Sins and their relevance to twenty-first century modernity.”

As an elder member of Gen Z, former committed atheist, and now-even-more-committed Christian—and a good, good man—Gooch seems well-situated to speak to the fundamental question at the heart of all of this: once institutions have lost—perhaps forfeited—the people’s trust, how do they get it back?

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