Prominent YouTuber and political commentator Dave Rubin made it big as a man with a fascinating personal story. Now, with the publication of his new book, he wants to become the champion for an ideology: classical liberalism.
I recently sat down with Rubin to talk about his journey, his new book, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, and his fight for classical liberalism more broadly.
To start, we unpacked the story he tells in this book about his political and personal evolution. Interestingly, the book was originally titled Why I Left the Left, but Rubin told me he changed the title because he wanted it to represent what he was for, not just what he was against. The first portion of his book still does tell the story of how Rubin went from a progressive gay radio host and host on the left-wing network on the Young Turks to an outspoken right-leaning commentator.
First, though, it talks about the painful journey Rubin had coming out (to himself) as gay. Perhaps the most jarring passage in the entire book is the one where Rubin describes how he actually blamed himself for the 9/11 terrorist attacks due to the guilt he felt after coming out. We discussed this jarring moment at length.
“This was the first person I came out to … it was about 12:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, and I was at the Times Square subway station,” Rubin told me. “I was at the shuttle train, and I told my friend I was gay. I went home … and woke up to a phone call from my dad, who lived in Manhattan, and he called me right after the first plane hit the Twin Towers. The first thing I thought was: Oh my god, I did this.”
“It might sound crazy … but I think it partly explains how dangerous living in the closet is,” Rubin concluded. “I liken that to the political closet of the day, where many good people are afraid that if they [reveal] their [mainstream right-wing beliefs] that their world will coming crashing down, that they’ll lose their job, or be called a Nazi or a bigot. It seems crazy, but it’s partly true.”
One remarkable takeaway from Rubin’s story is the direct comparison he makes between the intolerance and backlash he feared with coming out as gay and the intolerance he experienced from the so-called “progressive” movements as he started to drift away intellectually.
“My family … we used to argue and debate everything … foreign policy, abortion, taxes,” Rubin told me. “And yet, dessert would be served, and everyone was fine after. I never remember anyone storming out … there was a true tradition of let’s argue it out and then let it be.”
But Rubin talks about how this same tolerance simply wasn’t present in his LGBT and progressive media circles. He used to actually host a show on a gay-specific Sirius XM radio channel. “I was very much embedded in the gay world … I tried to be on the political channels, but it never happened, so when the Young Turks came calling … I took the call.”
“They were really pounding the pavement for gay rights, and that really seemed just to me,” Rubin continued. “It was the right kind of ‘progressivism’ because they were trying to progress people toward equality, in this case, marriage equality.”
“But what the progressives have morphed into is something else, which is we want to progress to the government doing everything, picking winners and losers, and take from some and give to others,” he warned. “Once I started speaking out … the very same people who would tell me they were for gays, suddenly they were telling me I’m a bigot and a racist and a horrible self-hating gay. It’s like … so, you only appreciate my identity when it works for you. Because I don’t buy into identity politics, which is their new religion, I’m basically the bad guy.”
One argument Rubin makes in the book that I pressed him on is whether it’s really now harder to come out as politically conservative than it is to come out as gay.
“I used to think it was sort of a cliche argument, and there was something about it I didn’t like,” Rubin said. “But in retrospect, I’ve come around to think that not only is it a very fair argument, but it’s why I began the book the way I did, talking about my sexuality and such, leading to the political closet.
“I can’t say this in starker terms,” he insisted. “It is a million times harder to come out as a non-leftist [to left-wing gays and progressives] than it is to come out as a gay [to everyday people.]”
This actually mirrors my own experiences as a gay conservative in liberal Massachusetts, but it still rings somewhat hollow to me. After all, no one is subjected to conversion therapy over their political beliefs. Few are disowned by their immediate families over such things (although many are “disowned” by friends), and far fewer people are targeted for hate crimes over politics than over sexuality.
“There’s always going to be a certain amount of hate,” Rubin replied, telling me about a time when he and his husband (then his boyfriend) were harassed by a drunk homophobe on the street. “But … that outlier, that’s very different than when you come out as conservative, to watch all sorts of people turn on you, to watch the people that you know turn on you. I think, as a general rule, you get more hate for [taking conservative positions] than for saying you’re gay in the first place.”
We moved on to discuss classical liberalism. It was his embrace of this ideal and his rejection of contemporary identity politics that first earned Rubin so much ire among progressives — that and the fact that he found common ground with many right-wing figures. Naturally, describing and advancing classical liberalism is a key theme of his book. He defined it to me as follows:
Rubin’s book and his career as a political commentator to date have largely focused on identifying the many ways the progressive Left has moved away from classical liberalism, with its embrace of socialism, collectivism, and identity over individual rights, anti-free speech attitudes, abandonment of due process, and more. In this aspect, almost all of his arguments ring true.
But Rubin also told me that “broadly speaking, it’s pretty much everyone versus woke progressives … on the Right, there’s a basic ethos of believing in the Constitution and individual rights. I’m not saying everything on the Right is so perfect or so spectacular … but the main dividing line is do you believe in freedom or authoritarianism.”
Here’s where I think Rubin gives the Right too much credit. He acknowledged the existence of “common-good conservatism” in our interview and stated that, for instance, in the debate over banning pornography, he comes down on the libertarian side, not the illiberal conservative side. However, he largely dismisses right-wing illiberalism as a fringe movement and pays it little attention in his book.
I wish this were as true as Rubin makes it out to be. In fact, the American Right is becoming less hospitable to classically liberal ideas. It’s absolutely true that many mainstream right-wing figures, such as Republican Sen. Rand Paul, commentators such as Ben Shapiro, and many others, still do subscribe to a classically liberal philosophy.
Yet with the rise of Trumpism, nationalism, populism, and theocracy in right-wing circles, there’s a growing faction on the Right that is illiberal in this sense. Consider populist Sen. Josh Hawley’s nanny-state regulatory proposals and quasi-socialist economic plans or the rise of Tucker Carlson’s newly populist ideology or the explicitly anti-liberal legal moralism of New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari. Combine this with the general embrace of anti-trade and anti-immigration views on the Right in recent years.
None of this is to take away from the valid criticisms of the Left that Rubin makes in his book or the underlying merits of the ideology he advances. But it does suggest that he may need to write a sequel.
