Liberty Law Talk: Recent Episodes
Sandra Stotsky
Civics centers have made significant inroads in public universities over the past decade, a significant source of hope for American conservatives. In their conversation with James Patterson, Professors Lee Strang and Paul Carrese explain why civics education is so sorely needed and discuss the practicalities of building centers for civic education, their reception within public universities, and the impact of AI on the mission.
Related Links Teaching America Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture by Paul Carrese What Universities Owe Democracy by Ronald J. Daniels, Grant Shreve, and Phillip Spector Justice by Means of Democracy by Danielle Allen
Senior Writer John McGinnis joins the podcast to discuss the latest term of the Supreme Court. From cases on presidential removal power to birthright citizenship, he concludes that the originalist majority is reshaping important jurisprudence—though not always in the way the media says.
Related Links Accelerating Democracy by John McGinnis "Blessed Are the Rich" by James E. Hartley, Law & Liberty book review Originalism and the Good Constitution by John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport Why Democracy Needs the Rich by John McGinnis
Is America the product of a long line of constitutionalism dating back to the Magna Carta, or a radical break with this tradition? Is it liberal or classical? Scholars and statesmen have been debating these questions since the Founding. In his book, Harmonizing Sentiments, Hans Eicholz explains how the American Founding wove together a number of these disparate but reinforcing threads.
Related Links Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government, Second Edition, by Hans Eicholz "The Jeffersonian Ideal," a book review on Harmonizing Sentiments by Michael Lucchese
Hillsdale's Bradley J. Birzer joins James Patterson to talk about the Declaration of Independence. They discuss the American colonies' devout Protestantism, their love of the classics, and their identification with the Anglo-Saxon constitutional tradition. Birzer concludes with a stirring assessment of why the Constitution matters.
Related Links The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty by Bradley J. Birzer Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson by Jane E. Calvert Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery by Cara Rogers Stevens Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition edited by Gary L. Gregg II The Language of Liberty by J. C. D. Clark
Conspiracy theories have always played a role in American politics, especially at the presidential level. In his new book, Stephen F. Knott explores the history of this phenomenon from the Jefferson administration to the present day. He joins Law & Liberty contributing editor James Patterson to discuss why presidents resort to conspiracy theorism so frequently.
Related Links Conspirator in Chief by Stephen F. Knoff "Conspiracy in the White House" by David Head, Law & Liberty (book review) Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy by Stephen F. Knott The Lost Soul of the American Presidency by Stephen F. Knott
Who was John Witherspoon? The only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon was a well-known fixture of political and religious discourse. Today he is, in Dr. Jeffry Morrison's words, "the most interesting Founder you've never heard of." Morrison talks with host James Patterson about his 2003 book, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, and more.
Related Links John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic: Catholicism in American Culture by Jeffry H. Morrison "The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men" by John Witherspoon Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730-1805 by Ellis Sandoz
Talking to guest host Pat Lynch, Virginia Postrel discusses her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, and its relevance to today's political landscape. They also discuss potential impacts of AI, the cultural significance of glamour, cheap clothes, and the Abundance movement. Lynch ends with the question: Will market liberals eventually find a home in America's political landscape?
Related Links The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel
The originalist majority on the Supreme Court is perhaps more open than ever to overturning what it considers to be bad precedents. In his new book, Carson Holloway argues that the justices should train their crosshairs on New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 decision that means statements about public officials are rarely considered libelous. He joins James Patterson to discuss the book, the history of free speech, and the future of originalism.
There is enormous pressure today for traditional conservatives (or anyone critical of progressivism) to write their names in the black book of the New Right and acquiesce to a politics of populist rage and federal overreach. Elizabeth Corey explains to James Patterson why she will instead engage in the quieter, more respectable task of cultural transmission and tending to her little platoon.
Related Links "A Quiet Refusal to Compromise," by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty "Beautiful Losers," by Elizabeth Corey, Public Discourse "Interpreting the New Right," by John Grove, Law & Liberty
Why do presidents have the power to pardon, and how is it typically used and abused? Sai Prakash and James Patterson discuss the pardon power's origins in British law, its usefulness in ending rebellions, and the unfortunate tendency of more recent presidents to use the pardon power to reward friends and donors, protect underlings, or generate political support.
Related Links The Presidential Pardon by Sai Prakash "The Personal Pardon Power" by Philip Hamberger, Law & Liberty "Is It Too Late to Recover the Founders' Presidency?" by Gary L. Gregg II, Law & Liberty
Law & Liberty senior writer John O. McGinnis joins the podcast this week to discuss his new book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich. Although they may be the focus of populist ire from the left and right alike, McGinnis contends that wealthy Americans play a vital role in counterbalancing majoritarian excess and serving as entrepreneurial "social prospectors" who can revitalize civil society.
Related Links Why Democracy Needs the Rich by John O. McGinnis "Blessed Are the Rich," book review by James E. Hartley, Law & Liberty "Liquidate the Rich?" by John O. McGinnis "Mother's Milk of the Revolution" by John O. McGinnis
Young Americans, and especially young men, are feeling economically disenchanted. As the national debt soars and interest rates remain high, the prospect of providing for a family (let alone buying a home) seems impossibly far off. Russ Greene explains part of the problem: "Total Boomer Luxury Communism," or a host of policies at all levels of government that generously provide for senior citizens while leaving the youth to pick up the tab. Greene talks about how we got here, what's needed to give millennials and Gen Z a chance, and why there's reason to be optimistic.
Related Links "What Is Total Boomer Luxury Communism?" by Russ Greene "Debt Politics" with Mitch Daniels (Law & Liberty Podcast) "What Social Security Should Do—and What It Shouldn't" by Sita Slavov (Law & Liberty) "Slashing Tax Rates and Cutting Loopholes" by Adam N. Michel (Cato Institute)
Law & Liberty is pleased to welcome our newest Contributing Editor, Luke C. Sheahan. To mark the occasion, Sheahan joined L&L Editor John Grove to talk about the central theme of his work: the freedom of association. They discuss the thought of Robert Nisbet, the relationship between civil society and the state, and the way the Supreme Court has treated association over the years.
Related Links "The West's Quest," Law & Liberty Podcast with Luke Sheahan "The Failure of Political Community" by Luke Sheahan Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet The University Bookman Why Associations Matter by Luke Sheahan Freedom of Association, Vol. I: In Theory, ed. by Luke C. Sheahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre Freedom of Association, Vol . II: Applied, ed. by Luke C. Sheahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre
Frank Meyer was the father of fusionism and one of the key builders of the conservative movement in the mid-twentieth century. That's despite spending his early years as a serious communist agitator. James Patterson and Daniel Flynn discuss the evolution of Meyer's thought and the impact of his legacy. Flynn's book synthesizes a large quantity of recently-uncovered material on Meyer, offering a more complete and nuanced picture than has been available heretofore. What lessons does Meyer's life and career offer for the conservative movement today?
Related Links The Man Who Invented Conservatism by Daniel J. Flynn "A Soldier for Synthesis" by Rachel Lu (Law & Liberty book review) "Fusionism: The Only Game in Town" by Alexander William Salter "Conservative Fusion," a Law & Liberty Podcast episode featuring Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade, hosted by James Patterson
In his recent book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, John Wilsey looks back to the writing of Peter Viereck and other great conservative minds to understand what it means to live a worthy life in a culture gone mad. On the Law & Liberty Podcast, he joins James Patterson to discuss the difference between that kind of conservatism and a more reactionary extremism, as well as the centrality of free exercise to the American constitutional tradition.
Related Links Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer by John Wilsey
When environmental policies were first enacted, they were often supported by staunch conservatives like Richard Nixon and then-governor Ronald Reagan. Why do so many today now view environmental conservation as belonging outside the scope of conservatism? In his recent October forum lead, "A New Environmentalism?" Steven Hayward traces how conservation efforts quickly became hijacked by extremists and what a conservative approach to environmental policy could look like. He joins the podcast to talk about this piece and why he is hopeful for the future.
Related Links October forum: "A New Environmentalism?" by Steven F. Hayward
What is Christian Zionism? Is it, as figures like Tucker Carlson claim, a relatively recent development in America's cultural history, or does a general support for the Jewish state have a longer history in America? The answer partly depends on how "Christian Zionism" is defined, but in this conversation, Sam Goldman explains to host James Patterson why support for Jewish political aspirations is part of a long tradition of Christian philosemitism that reaches back even to America's colonial period.
Related Links "Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Christian Zionism," Compact, Samuel Goldman God's Country by Samuel Goldman Tri-Faith America by Kevin Schultz
The English-speaking world has long enjoyed free speech rights unheard of in other parts of the world. But where did this legal regime come from? And as partisan strife becomes more heated on both sides of the Atlantic, what does free speech's future hold? In his new book, Law & Liberty contributing editor Adam Tomkins argues that understanding the history of our rights is essential to maintaining a free constitution. He joins James Patterson on the podcast to discuss his book, On the Law of Speaking Freely, as well as several pressing current free speech cases in the United Kingdom.
Related Links On the Law of Speaking Freely by Adam Tomkins "The UK's Speech Problem," by Adam Tomkins "From Heresy to Hate Speech," a book review by Helen Dale Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon Areopagitica by John Milton Adam Tomkins's Law & Liberty author page GB News v. OfCom
For most of the twentieth century, conservatives argued for a strong Congress whose closer connection to voters could check the grand delusions of presidential administrations. Now, however, everyone seems to have opted for Wilsonian, top-down executive leadership. Philip Wallach explains how we got here, why Congress remains indispensable for republican self-government, and what sort of structural reforms could help it reclaim its place in our constitutional system.
Related Links Philip Wallach, Why Congress (2023) Philip Wallach, "Choosing Congressional Irrelevance," Law & Liberty Yuval Levin, "Congress Is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be Weak," Commentary (2018)
Especially since the controversies of 2020, the commanding heights of American culture have been dominated by left-wing moral panic. In his new book, Adam Szetela analyzes this toxic mentality’s influence on the publishing industry specifically. Many writers are either drafted into ideological crusades–or else become their victims. In this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, Szetela joins James Patterson to discuss his book and the sorry state of American literature.
From colonial times through the twentieth century, Western civilization became America’s own cultural heritage, and it was always taught in schools and universities. Then, in the later part of the twentieth century, Americans turned on Western Civ. Why did that happen? What are the consequences for our culture today? What can we do now to recover that heritage? Professor James Hankins joins John Grove, editor of Law & Liberty, to discuss these questions in connection with his new book, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.
Robert Nisbet is best known for his books The Quest for Community and The Twilight of Authority. Luke Sheahan joins the podcast to discuss a new edition of Nisbet's lesser-known but perhaps most important book The Social Philosophers, a sweeping account of the history of community and its treatment by Western political philosophers.
What is the future of DEI? Does it have at least some laudable goals, and are there better ways to achieve them? What do the American people really want when it comes to tolerance, inclusion, and discrimination law? The Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen discusses all these questions and more with host James Patterson in this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Related Links “Fight Bias and Legalize Meritocracy,” by Robert VerBruggen
America is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that broke out in 2020. Not only was it one of the most deadly health incidents in our history, the strategies imposed by central planners to contain its spread also inflicted countless costs on everything from the economy and education to social life itself. Stephen Macedo, an author of a recent book evaluating the pandemic's aftermath, joins Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch to discuss the price of the pandemic on this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Although they understand themselves as missionaries to the marginalized, woke elites use their ideology of oppression to protect their own privilege and social status. Contributing Editor G. Patrick Lynch discusses these dynamics with Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke, and a shrewd diagnostician of elite hypocrisy.
Related Links We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi “Questioning the Oppression Olympics,” by Jesse Smith (Review of We Have Never Been Woke)
Driven in part by the revival of a classic knit sweater emblazoned with an American flag, "Ralph Lauren nationalism" has emerged as a trope among online talking-heads. Well-dressed political scientist Samuel Goldman is also known for his sharp takes on menswear. He joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent article for Compact magazine that tackled the concept. There may be something to the Ralph Lauren aesthetic that captures an essential quality of the American character, Goldman argues, but it's not exactly what the highly-online chatterers think it is.
Related Links "The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism" by Samuel Goldman
Neighborhoods are one of the most important human support structures, argues Seth D. Kaplan. Yet modern politics, economics, and social habits all seem aligned to undermine them. Discussing his recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Kaplan explains why neighborhoods are irreplaceable sources of human community, and why they are often in such bad shape today. "No government or philanthropic program can replace the benefits that the day-in-day-out love of parents and the continuous support of the community provide. Social services may address material needs and they may help mitigate specific problems after the fact, but they're rarely equipped to provide the care nurturing and targeted discipline that a supportive family and community deliver.”
Daniel DiMartino calls balls and strikes on the ongoing, highly partisan debate over immigration, legal and illegal. The border ought to be secure, and asylum limited to those who have a genuine need for it, he argues. But border policy ought always to bound by law. When it comes to legal immigration, according to DiMartino, we do well to avoid an economics of nostalgia and should welcome the kind of immigration that adds to American life. DiMartino also recalls a recent run-in with the residual cancel culture at Columbia University.
What Solzhenitsyn called "the ideological lie" was not limited to a single country, government, or movement. And it did not, unfortunately, die off in 1989. In his new book, Mahoney presents the lie as the replacement of traditional categories of "good and evil" with "progress and reaction," a change that ripples through political and social ideas in a way that opens the door to the replacement of truth by an imposed, false reality. Though we shouldn't pretend that America today approaches the kind of tyranny seen in the twentieth century, we should recognize that the totalitarian impulse is alive and well.
The drive to pursue wisdom is engrained in every human being, right? Many have believed so. But in his new book, Ignorance and Bliss, Mark Lilla argues that a certain "will to ignorance" is also part of the human experience. Like Plato's Thrasymachus, many often want to throw up their hands in resignation rather than commit themselves to the pursuit of truth, creating a tension in human life that is sometimes reasonable and sometimes pathological. Lilla offers an explanation for this phenomenon, drawing on philosophy, religion, psychology, and history. He joins James Patterson to discuss the book.
"Christian Nationalism" splashes across headlines regularly. But there is no clear definition of it. Is it just an epithet? A concept used for partisan manipulation? A real trend in socio-religious thought in America? Smith, Hall, and Williams consider different definitions, which ideas might be lumped into the category, and how it relates to American pluralism, historical Christianity, and contemporary populism.
Philip Rieff adopted the categories and language of Freud, but reinterpreted them in a way that supported culture and the moral life. Batchelder and Harding have edited a new volume of essays on Rieff, who they argue is a key thinker for any attempt to diagnose late modern cultural life. They join host James Patterson to discuss Rieff, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan Sontag, and unimaginable depravities.
Historically grounded assessments of the American republic’s relationship with religion require nuanced thinking and an appreciation for ambiguity. Unfortunately, those qualities don’t sell. So American history is replete with attempts to construct a simple narrative of a Christian nation or a wholly secular liberalism. Jerome Copulsky and Mark Noll join James Patterson to discuss Copulsky’s book, American Heretics, which examines certain strands of religious thinking that, in one way or another, have sought to overcome the fact of American religious pluralism.
Related LinksAmerican Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order
“Challenging the American Creed” – Mark Noll
TranscriptJames Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty, and this podcast, are published by Liberty Fund.
Today we will be speaking to Jerome Copulsky and Mark Noll. The subject will be Jerome’s most recent book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, published last October.
And a review that Mark published for us at Law & Liberty last November of the same book. We figured this would be a wonderful conversation about a really remarkable book, so I’ll just introduce our guests. First is Jerome Copulsky, scholar in residence at the Department of Philosophy and Religion, as well as a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. Mark Noll is Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and has written numerous books on the same subject as today’s discussion, perhaps from different valences. So, gentlemen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Mark Noll:
Thank you.
Jerome Copulsky:
Thank you, James.
James Patterson:
So I’ll open by asking Jerome to give us the elevator pitch, or the summary of the book, and then maybe have Mark explain what the sort of mainline of his review was. So Jerome, why don’t you go ahead and lead off.
Jerome Copulsky:
Great, thanks James. And again, it’s really delightful to be here with you and with Mark, to discuss the book and sort of the general set of issues about religion and politics in America. I guess the best way of framing it is, the book really attempts to provide a new way of thinking about perennial conversations or debates, about the relationship of religion and politics, through church and state, in the United States of America. And there’ve been two, broadly speaking, camps in this debate. One camp, we might call them believers in the idea of a Christian nation. They argue, in some way, that America was founded to be a Christian nation, that the founders were pious Christians, that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787, were meant to establish a Christian order. Maybe not explicitly, but at least implicitly. And that was generally accepted until the mid-twentieth century when that began to be eroded into a secular, humanist order. It is sometimes described that way.
On the other hand, there are people who argue that the founders envisioned a secular republic, that one of the most important things about the United States of America was this break from church-state traditions that prevailed in Europe, and this notion of the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment, as well as the regime of religious liberty. Which extended not only to Protestant Christians but to all religions, right? So, these two conflicting views of what the founding was, what the founders intended, and what kind of nation we ought to become. American Heretics looks at, I’ll call it a third tradition.
These were people, they were religious leaders, they were politicians, they were intellectuals who agreed with the secular story to a certain extent. They believed that the United States was not founded as an explicitly Christian republic but that it ought to have been. That somehow, the founders failed in either properly constitutionalizing religion or the very political ideas that had animated the American project were not truly Christian. So I begin at the time of the revolution with Church of England loyalists, and as I work my way up to contemporary post-liberals and national conservatives, to describe the ways in which these figures dissented from what I call an American orthodoxy.
James Patterson:
So Mark, this book covers a lot of ground. When you reviewed the book, what were your takeaways?
Mark Noll:
I thought that the project was very well executed. I tend to be someone who favors larger synthetic works myself, if they are well grounded in a wide range of primary sources and expert secondary sources, which is the case with this book. So they range from, as Jerome said, the loyalists in the 1770s, who rejected the American Revolution through a kind of miscellaneous crew in the nineteenth century, who wanted to see either what they thought was implied in the American founding made explicit or actually thought that the American founding had not had a kind of religious or Christian framework that it needed. And then right up into the twentieth century, and particularly after World War II, where we get actually quite a long list of people who either, like John Courtney Murray, the Catholic theorist in the 1950s and 60s, who said, “Well, if we just interpret Catholic theology correctly, we’ll see that it supports, in a kind of theistic way, the American founding.”
And then to a long list that Jerome expertly pulls together. Some of these people I’d not heard of, but I thought expertly showed why they rejected the liberal tradition and thought that the American polity, American society, and American nation needed, in all of the cases that he cited, a firm Christian grounding. So, the synthesis ranged widely. And obviously, with such an extensive range of protagonists, there are questions that could be raised about some of them in minor ways, but I thought the book was entirely successful in showing a continuous tradition of Christian-oriented thinkers who felt that either what was implicit in the American founding needed to be made explicit, or who felt that the American founding lacked entirely what it needed by way of a Christian framework, a Christian foundation. So yeah, to me, it was a really good book.
James Patterson:
Jerome, first of all, getting that kind of praise from Mark Noll makes me very envious. Second of all, what holds this tradition together? What Mark just described as one, I think you did too. But what’s weird is that you’re looking first at Anglicans. Is it that many Anglicans actually regarded the republic that the patriot cause wanted was Presbyterian, and then the Presbyterians don’t like the republic once they get it. And then the Catholics, I noticed there’s one funny line from L. Brent Bozell, about a Calvinist interpretation. And so these very different religious denominations, very different sense of political theology, how is it that they hold together so well?
Jerome Copulsky:
Yeah, I think that came out in the research, and a lot of the connections, the root structure of the book, developed organically. So I knew certain people I wanted to talk about, or certain traditions I wanted to talk about when I started the book. There are a lot that I discovered along the way. But I started with Church of England loyalists. It seemed like an obvious place to begin, at the beginning. And the argument of the loyalists, on the one hand, they saw the revolutionaries as essentially the next iteration, so to speak, of the revolutionaries of the English Civil War. So sometimes told, right? The Presbyterian Rebellion. And a lot of the loyalist Church of England propaganda against the patriot movement and the war was that, this was kind of essentially hardwired into the Presbyterian dislike of monarchy. But at the same time, they had to actually look at the ideas that were being enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that were broader than the ideas coming out of Presbyterian or Congregational New England.
The ideas that are articulated in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which is where I start, where human beings are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted to protect those rights. So this Lockean social contract theory, which, from the point of view of the loyalists, undermined their understanding of the cosmic order, with the king as God’s sort of vice-regent on earth. So they were both critical of the New England Congregationalist establishments, but they were also deeply critical of the revolutionary ideas that were being articulated. Now, when we turn the chapter to the early republic, and we look at some of the Scottish Presbyterians or the Covenanters, who supported the war, but were then disappointed with the Constitution that came out in 1787, the reason that they were disappointed was not because of the republican structure of the Constitution, not because of the architecture of checks and balances.
Their argument was that the Constitution failed to acknowledge God and failed to acknowledge Jesus as Prince of Nations. They believed that the article six, section three, the prohibition of a religious test oath on federal officers, meant that a federal magistrate, including the president, could be an infidel. And that the First Amendment separated church and state, but also protected religious liberty, which to them, was a protection of religious infidelity, of false worship, of false religion. Right? So for these reasons, and for another reason, they believed that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and they were early abolitionists.
So for all of these reasons, they essentially decided to become conscientious objectors to the United States of America. In fact, this was what defined the reform Presbyterians as a denomination, alongside other Presbyterian denominations. So they wouldn’t run for office, they wouldn’t vote, they wouldn’t serve on juries, they avoided the militia. They would pay taxes, but they believed they had no other choice. And they hoped that American citizens would come to their senses and change the Constitution by means of amendment, but they would not participate in that amendment process because they would not participate politically, at least until The Civil War.
James Patterson:
So Mark, when talking about the book, you actually pose a question about the nature of heresy, as stipulated in the book’s title, and its sort of operative term for the book’s argument. You say, “What does it say about the categories of heresy and orthodoxy, to observe that reformed, Presbyterian heretics on the separation of church and state, were among the very few white Americans who today would be considered Orthodox, and insisting that all Black, as well as white, were created equal?” What is it about this question in the nineteenth century, that makes the covenanters such an odd case?
Mark Noll:
Yes, I did in my review, draw attention to the covenanters, partly actually, as a way of affirming the strength of the book to roam in different places, in and indirect way, but then more direct at the end, makes a challenge to those who wanted to see a Christian framework. Well, what kind of Christian framework? Who would be allowed to set it? Would, for example, the Covenant Review of the necessity of honoring Christ as king have allowed Catholics to function in the societies? One of the interesting things about the Covenanters, which I’ll get to in just a moment, is that they were not only from the period probably 1800 to 1830, the nation’s most ardent, clearly spoken, theologically and ideologically rooted opponents of slavery, but they were also among the most vicious anti-Catholics in the United States. So you have a group that … I mean, actually, Jerome did a nice job in the book, in just a limited time, to sketch these people. But they’re really, really complicated.
He quotes in the book from Alexander MacLeod, who is one of the individuals who articulated the position Jerome has just mentioned, “If Christ is not honored as King, and deference is not paid to him in the Constitution, then we can have no part in this nation.” And in 1802, MacLeod published an extensive attack on slavery, biblical, philosophical, republican, that for the period, with just one or two other instances, was the most ardent defense of the full humanity, the full civil potential of Black Americans. So the heresy label does fit for Covenanters’ opposition to the liberal Lockean regime established by the Constitution. But from the standpoint of 2025, these covenanters look like the Orthodox party, because they are affirming the full humanity, the full civic potential of people who, in the early nineteenth century, very few other Americans did. So this is really not a criticism of the book per se, but it was to say that, the very sound tracing of a single theme does leave some complexities that remain to be discussed.
Jerome Copulsky:
Yeah, and I’d like to underscore that. When the Covenanters actually decide to get involved politically during The Civil War, they set up a number of meetings in Washington. And shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation is released, they send some ministers to meet with the president, to meet with Lincoln, to congratulate him on this and to push him forward, to make sure that the government follows through on the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation. So when they looked at The Civil War, they understood The Civil War through theological terms, as a punishment by God for the nation’s sins, for the sin of the Godless constitution on the one hand, but also for the sin of American slavery.
Mark Noll:
Mentioning Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation does lead me to a question for Jerome. And that is, the incident that he mentions, Lincoln handled characteristically. He was friendly, he engaged in some discussion, he indicated a kind of indirect approval for what the people were doing, but when they left, he left their document on the desk and did nothing about it. But the question is, do you think that Lincoln was as far from these Covenanters, in the sense of being Orthodox and they were heretical … When you read particularly the Lincoln documents from the mid-part of The Civil War onward, there’s an awfully strong theistic, if not exactly Christian, there’s awfully strong theistic background to what he wants to say about the future of the United States.
So someone who would want, in our day, a much more secular day, someone who’d want to say, “Well, Lincoln dismissed the Covenanters and therefore, is not heretical, in Jerome’s sense.” But boy, he sure looks, if not heretical, he looks like he’s pushing the boundaries of what a public official in the United States wants to say about the rule of God over the nations, and including the rule over the United States. So what I’m asking for, Jerome, is a little bit of Lincoln exegesis for us.
Jerome Copulsky:
Well, I would say that one of the things we can do is, we can look back. The Covenanters had a report of this first meeting with Lincoln, where they kind of reported back, they got into a kind of theological exchange. And the Covenanters were very sure of their position and very sure that they understood God’s providential working in this particular context. Lincoln himself was a bit more, I don’t want to say skeptical, but he wasn’t as willing to say as emphatically his position, or as his understanding of his position as the Covenanters were. And I think this goes back … If you reread the Second Inaugural, which is probably the most important theological, political document in American history, it’s not an Orthodox … It would not be a position that would necessarily bring joy to Covenanter ears. It certainly is not one that would bring joy to contemporary Christian nationalist ears. This notion that, well, God is here, but God’s purposes are not necessarily the purposes of either side of this conflict, and they may not be ever completely understood, or adequately understood by American citizens.
Mark Noll:
Yes, the way I put it toward Lincoln, in a couple of different places, I guess if you think you have a good idea, to repeat it, is Lincoln’s theism stands really closely aligned to the kind of providentialism that Jerome describes the Covenanters. But his sense of human capacities to understand the ways of God are very different from the Covenanters. And actually, for almost everybody else who was speaking publicly with great confidence about how they knew the Lord was determining American as … Lincoln is one of the very few people of his time who said, “No, I just can’t do that.” Jerome’s entirely correct that, on that score, he is very different from the Covenanters.
James Patterson:
In fact, Jerome’s book actually points to this very problem because one of the chapters is on the pro-slavery divines. And so when Lincoln refers to both, “Read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” he’s making a very clear statement about what’s going on, not just a rhetorical flourish. Who are these people, Jerome? Why is it the Presbyterians again?
Jerome Copulsky:
And here, it’s the group that becomes the Southern Presbyterians. And here I should say right off about how dedicated I’ve been to Mark’s scholarship, both in the amazing, enormous book, America’s God. And also in the smaller book on The Civil War as a theological crisis. So I focus on mostly Southern Presbyterian divines. The most influential one was John Henley Thornwell, South Carolina, but also Benjamin Morgan Palmer and Frederick Ross, and their understanding of what a Christian republic would look like. And I begin by, when the Confederate government comes together and drafts a constitution, one of the key differences between the Confederate constitution and the Constitution of the United States of America, is the fact that the Confederate constitution both directly acknowledges God, and also directly acknowledges the institution of slavery. And for Thornwell, this was a good thing, but he felt that the Confederate constitution didn’t go far enough, that the acknowledgement of God was not enough to ground the Confederacy as a true Christian nation.
And so he submitted a proposal to the Southern Presbyterians in 1861, that they tweak it a bit, to make it more fully Christian. And what’s interesting about that is he does make pains to express that this would not undermine the religious liberty of other white people living in the Confederacy, and that even a Jew could possibly rise to become chief magistrate. Now whether he fully believed that or whether that was an acknowledgement of the important role that Judah Benjamin was playing in the government, I don’t know. But the other issue that I look at with the pro-slavery theologians, was their argument that in a sense, the American Republic was set off on the wrong foot because it was animated by false theological ideas.
Those false ideas about the nature of human beings and the nature of civil government that were articulated in the Declaration of Independence. So in a work, entitled Slavery Ordained of God, by Frederick Ross, who’s arguing against Albert Barnes, who’s a prominent northern abolitionist, Ross argues that the claims made by Jefferson, which were now being used by abolitionists against the safeholding south, those claims were in fact unbiblical, were infidel arguments. And that in a way, the republic, a truly Christian republic would have to be set on biblical notions of natural hierarchy or providential hierarchy.
Mark Noll:
Just one footnote to expand upon what Jerome said is that, the Albert Barnes that Ross was arguing against was the Northern Presbyterian’s most ardent attacker, most ardent abolitionist, who did so with the full confidence that he was reading the scriptures correctly in supporting his abolitionism.
James Patterson:
Yeah. This ends up sort of justifying Lincoln’s whole reticence to make distinct claims, right? It’s when you have entirely antagonistic ideas proposed as God’s word, it starts to look like one of these people has to be wrong, and maybe the whole venture is mistaken. And the years that follow The Civil War, there’s an important transformation where, instead of there being an attempt to instate in the Constitution a sort of existing reality, which is a kind of Christian people, right? There’s a broadly Protestant America. There emerges a kind of newly secular institution. So this is the National Liberal League, a man named Abbott helps put together, and essentially tells the story that a lot of twentieth century, post-liberals believe was the real story, as you said earlier, Jerome. So why don’t you give us a sense of who they were?
Jerome Copulsky:
Yeah. So Abbott, Francis E. Abbott and the Liberal League, were essentially conjured up by this movement for religious amendment, which begins during The Civil War in the north, but then is reignited in the early 1870s. And it’s reignited because of major demographic and cultural changes that are happening in the United States, particularly the rising power of Catholics in cities, immigration of Jews, the rise of Mormonism, and the revelation of Mormon polygamy in Utah. And all of these things were challenging this de facto Protestantism that you described. And Covenanters then became the vanguard of a bigger tent movement of Protestants, and a fairly wide tent. It included not only Presbyterians, but Methodists, Baptists, I think there were even Unitarians involved in this movement. That were decided that a religious amendment was necessary, in order to protect and preserve this Protestant Christian heritage of the United States. And a heritage that was playing out in institutions, like Sabbath laws, the fact that there were chaplains for Congress, and the military and so forth.
So there was this fear that American Protestantism was going to be undermined. And the cause of that was not only these demographic changes, but also that non-Protestants were able to exploit the achilles heel in the Constitution, which was the First Amendment. So the fact that the country, that the nation could not establish a religion and protected free exercise, became a weapon for those who would try to, either on the one hand, assert their own religious rights, but also undermine or push out this longstanding, cultural Protestantism. So they form a movement which becomes known as the National Reform Association, the first NRA, to lobby Congress and the states to change the preamble of the Constitution to explicitly mention God, Jesus as a ruler of nations, and the Bible as the source of law. And from this, comes a counter movement, which is Abbott’s Liberal League. And the literary organ of that was something called The Index. And Abbott’s argument, and those who were affiliated, the leadership of the Liberty League, was that the founders had actually established a secular republic.
And the separation of church and state was one of the foundational things that they did, and he meant it in a very strong way. And so he looked at things that we just mentioned, prayers at the inauguration, for example, Sabbath laws, the chaplains at the Congress and what have you. And he saw these as abuses, that these were not innocent traditions, but they were actually abuses of the system that the founders had set up and that they needed to be suppressed, in order to preserve the legitimacy of the republic as they understood it. And so they promoted their own amendment, the religious freedom amendment. And what the religious freedom amendment would’ve done, would’ve taken the establishment clause in the First Amendment and applied them to the states as well. So it would not be, “Congress shall make no law,” but, “No state could make a law respecting establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise.”
But really, when it came down to it, Abbott believed that Christianity itself was a political problem, because Christianity promoted or imagined a political view that was at odds with the idea of the republic. The idea that, if God is king or if Christ is king, your citizens are naturally going to incline towards monarchy and away from republicanism. And so in some sense, what Abbott really wanted was not the removal of Christianity from the civic space, but something much more radical.
James Patterson:
Mark, what’s going on with Protestants during that same period? It’s just for the purposes of listeners. Because I know Jerome can’t address all of that and the book at the same time. Protestantism actually does a fair amount of pluralism in order to counteract this, which is something ironic, given Jerome describing that as kind of the orthodoxy that these heretics are revolting against.
Mark Noll:
The period between The Civil War and say the new deal, it is a trying time for American Protestants. The kind of reaction to Catholics, immigrants, Jews, that would lead to the formation of the American Protective Association, lead to Nathan Strong’s book, Our Country, 1880 something, shows a kind of nervousness, of fear that what had once been a securely Protestant place was not much of a Protestant place anymore. And internally, I think I trace it back to The Civil War, others trace it to the coming in of European biblical criticism and other things. Internally, Protestants are fragmented. So even though there’s a stronger movement to try to Christianize the public space, internally, Protestants are beginning to divide in the ways that they continue to be divided until now. So that maybe lobbying was becoming more effective for those who wanted a Christian amendment, but the resources in the Protestant world were actually being diminished.
James Patterson:
So we have a post-war environment in which American conservatism emerges as a response to the new deal, and then to radical social change in the case of racial, and then later, sex and gender politics. We get, during that period, one of my favorite heretics in the book, and this is my Catholic bias coming out. And this is L. Brent Bozell and the people behind Triumph. And in an important way, Jerome, they actually articulate what our contemporary post-liberals say about this country. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about these curious offshoots of National Review, and their sojourn in Spain? Franco’s Spain.
Jerome Copulsky:
Yeah. So Bozell … L. Brent Bozell Jr. was William F. Buckley Jr.’s debating partner at Yale. He then marries William F. Buckley Jr.’s sister. With Buckley, he writes a book defending McCarthy. He writes some articles for the National Review when it’s launched in 1955. He is tapped to be the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. He’s really one of the leading conservatives, new conservatives in America. And as he’s doing this, he is prepping a book on the Warren Court, critical book on the Warren Court. And I think his brother-in-law suggests that, “You want to live cheap and live well while you’re researching this book. I got the place for you to go. Go hang out in Spain for a while.” And he does. He takes that advice. And while he’s there-
James Patterson:
A faithful mistake.
Jerome Copulsky:
Buckley would certainly say this was probably a mistake. While he’s there, he falls in love. And what does he fall in love with? He falls in love with the Catholic thing and Franco’s regime. And he comes back to the United States. And this is during the time that Buckley and Frank Meyer are stage managing this fusionism at the National Review and in the American conservative movement, trying to find a way, both practically and philosophically, to bring libertarians, cold waterists, traditionalists together, in a united front against American liberalism. And Bozell begins to see that as a failing project. And it’s a failing project because, on the one hand, he thinks that the traditionalists are really serving just as fig leaves for this other project. But more deeply, that American conservatism, as it was coming to be, was really just a right-wing liberalism, that the founding project of the United States, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and then in the Constitution, in the Federalist Papers, this was not a continuation of Christian Europe in another key, but it was a break.
It was a radical break. And that radical break, the fact that the United States was founded on liberal principles, was the reason for its contemporary woes. And so by the mid-sixties, he breaks from the American conservative movement. He starts this magazine called Triumph. And by the late-sixties, Triumph takes a kind of radical turn against American regime as such. And he begins to publish a number of articles arguing for this position that the United States was founded, not as a continuation of the Christian tradition, but as a rejection of the Christian tradition. And if you go and you look at those articles which he’s publishing in 1967, 1968, and you compare them to Patrick Deneen’s, Why Liberalism Failed, you can see very clearly the idea is being reflected in this later, post-liberal work. The idea that the liberal ideas and the liberal regime that it sets in motion, is based on a false anthropology, based on a rejection of tradition. And that false anthropology sets in motion a regime which will then undermine itself and lead to contemporary decadence.
James Patterson:
Hey, Mark, what’s going on here? The Catholics get it in the teeth all the nineteenth century, they’re let in the door, and next thing you know, they hate the place. Why was this happening?
Mark Noll:
Well, post-war history is not where I feel really comfortable at home, except to say that there is a very interesting Protestant parallel to Bozell and Triumph, with the group spearheaded by a Rshtuni named Gary … His son-in-law, Gary Nash called Theonomy-
Jerome Copulsky:
Gary North.
Mark Noll:
Which is a fairly strong Protestant way of rejecting the liberal tradition altogether, and arguing parallel to Bozell, that the nation to preserve American freedom needs to be established on a reinvigorated reading of the Old Testament as a legal device. Now, interestingly, and maybe this would be parallel, I’m interested in what Jerome would think, at the same time, there are other Protestants, and I’m thinking particularly of Francis Schaeffer, who also appears in the book, who wants to assert a very strong Christian founding for the United States. But does that saying, “Well, the founding really was Christian, but it wasn’t acknowledged as such.” So Schaeffer wants to go back to the Reformation as the secret for the American success, with John Locke and companies as a very minor, secondary figure.
Now, since the sixties and seventies, I think it’s been the Schaeffer Protestant approach that has gained publicity, pointing toward the Christian America, Christian nation movements of our day, rather than the Rshtuni, which is to say that the American founding needs to be replaced by something directly Judeo-Christian. And I think we maybe see that with Catholics. I’d be interested in what Jerome says. And those who are willing to say that the American system as we have it today, simply needs to be strengthened by recognition of divine authority, as opposed to being replaced by something acknowledging a different kind of divine authority.
Jerome Copulsky:
So the story of the Reconstructionists is fascinating. And the link … One of the things I found in the course of the research was that Rshtuni actually published an article in Triumph.
James Patterson:
Yeah, there’s that crossover that my former student, Max Bodak, discovered. I couldn’t believe it.
Jerome Copulsky:
So there was that. And Rshtuni and North claimed, and I think there’s good evidence to this, that a lot of Schaeffer’s ideas, political ideas, were coming out of Rshtuni’s work. And there was a lot of grumbling on the side of Rshtuni that this was not acknowledged in his book, The Christian Manifesto. And North and Gary DeMar, in a response to that book by Schaeffer, essentially attack him for failing to follow through with his understanding of Reformation theology. That Schaeffer kind of ends up saying, “Well, I want the first amendment. I want the separation of church and state. I just want to halt the advance of secular humanism.” And for North, this is a failure of nerve. Now, this is where, I mentioned earlier my reliance on Mark’s scholarship in the chapter on the pro-slavery theologians.
And at this moment in the book, I think, Mark, you make a brief cameo. Because of your own work, your own sort of intervention in this debate, in 1983, where I think you, in that book, A Search for Christian America, you see how these political ideas are entering into the Protestant world at that time. Now called the New Religious Right. And the book is a kind of warning that A, there’s some bad history going on here and there’s some problematic theology going on here. That this desire for a Christian nation is not only historically problematic, but maybe doesn’t allow for the way in which Christians ought to engage in the political system that’s there. And so maybe I can sort of pitch this back to you for a moment.
Mark Noll:
Yes, that book which I did with a couple of colleagues was an effort to say, well, if you’re going to claim some kind of Christian origin for the US, you need to do it responsibly. And my own sense then and now is that, it’s very easy to find Christian elements in the founding of the United States, and that those who want to say we have a godless constitution or something entirely secular, just are overstating their case.
Yet, overstatement also pertains on the other side, to take a few random comments or a few statements made in the heat of the revolutionary struggles, as if they proved a distinctively Christian founding for the United States, just does not hold up to even preliminary historical inquiry. I must say, however, as a check to any kind of egoism and pride as an author, that our book did sell a few thousand copies, not like the few million that have been sold, however, by authors who want to find a very strong, explicit Christian founding the United States. So I live in relative comfort, but not in the kind of wealth that has come to people who make the much stronger argument.
James Patterson:
And that’s because it’s hard to resolve that ambiguity. You either want the certainty that the particular religious faith you have is in charge, or that it can never be in charge, and therefore, we must replace the regime where you will be in charge. And that seems to be a big problem that all of them are dealing with. And that’s kind of how you can go from Anglicans to Presbyterians, to Catholics. There’s this desire to allow people to be in charge atop a hierarchy. And in the absence of that, there’s this real fear that people are just going to go crazy. So what holds all these together? Is that right, Jerome?
Jerome Copulsky:
Well, first, I think on the question of ambiguity, it reminds me of some analysis in Mark’s book on The Civil War, on the theological crisis leading to The Civil War, which you had a pro-slavery reading of the Bible, you had an abolitionist reading of the Bible, and then you had, I think the Covenanters were in this space, a very careful, nuanced, contextual reading of the Bible. Which probably had the strongest arguments but was hardest to hear. Given the desire for absolutes, the contextual, careful reading of the slavery issue in the Bible was not heard. And I think that the careful, contextual reading of the religious influences and on the American founding, is something that is harder to hear in a particular environment where you want absolutes, where parties want absolutes. It was a Christian founding, it was a Merger-Dale Christian founding, or a secular founding. And to kind of get in there and to look at the different layers of the story, is harder to do.
Mark Noll:
That push for complexity, I think we referred to Abraham Lincoln’s very complex vision. It does make it hard to make those, I would say, genuine historical conclusions, a foundation for action, particularly in an internet world where something snappy, quick, uncomplicated is what seems to be driving public discussion. And on this question, driving it toward wanting to assert something very Christian. And on the other side, wanting to assert something very, very secular. And I think much of the history Jerome shows is that the debates were never that way of that kind of all or nothing. But were often debates as to what would be the best strategy to preserve what is good in the American founding. And the best strategy, some people said, “More explicit Christianity.” Some people said, “No.” But the nuanced positions were the ones that were easy to set on the table and forget about.
Jerome Copulsky:
On this note, it’s kind of ironic that the words, “Under God,” that get put into the Declaration of Independence in 1954, as part of a way of asserting America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and affirming that in the context of the Cold War, that’s taken from the Gettysburg Address. The Gettysburg Address is a much more nuanced claim. And the Second Inaugural is a much more nuanced understanding of America’s political theology than, “One nation under God indivisible, with justice for all.” So even Lincoln as a model, there’s the temptation to reduce it to something more palatable by the public.
James Patterson:
So we shouldn’t be surprised, given this analysis, that there is a resumption of this question in contemporary politics. We’ve seen this in the much published about Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism. So do you see these as just part of the same pattern, with the same kind of explanations? And what do you make of them, Jerome?
Jerome Copulsky:
Well, as I indicated earlier, I think that the post-liberals are, in a way, a contemporary iteration of the positions held by L. Brent Bozell and people around Triumph. I think that you can hear some of the echoes of Church of England loyalists, I think, and some of the arguments of the national conservatives and their desire for public-
James Patterson:
Just to interrupt, all the discussion of magisterial relations to the church, are straight out of some of the more erudite Christian nationalists, and their talk about magisterial Protestantism. I forgot to include that in the question, but that’s a great connection.
Jerome Copulsky:
And if we’re continuing to write the book today, I would turn to this relatively recent phenomenon of neo-reform, Protestant thinkers. I think it shows a continued frustration with not only a secular regime. I think that’s part of it. We’ve been talking a lot about secular versus religious. But I think on a deeper level, a frustration and a hostility to religious pluralism. So what the Reconstructionists wanted, what Catholic integralists want, what the Reformed Presbyterians really wanted, was not a kind of a broadly Judeo-Christian, religious society. They wanted something which they believed to be much more authentic.
They wanted a kind of religious monopoly. And to give an example of this, with the Christian amendment movement, on the one hand, some people who participated in that movement saw this as really a defensive measure. This would just shore up those long-standing practices. But the Covenanters believe that it would do something more radical, right? So if you have an explicitly Christian … Not only Christian but kind of Covenanter theology, in the preamble of the Constitution, when you make an oath to that constitution, you are making a religious oath, if you take it seriously. If you’re making an oath to the Constitution, it is now a religious test. So article six, section three, whether it is explicitly taken out or not, is rendered inoperative by that, I think. And I think that that’s what they wanted.
They wanted America to become a Christian republic through and through. And to be a Christian republican through and through, as they understood it, meant to suppress non-Christian religions, suppress infidelity. And if you go and you watch some of these theo bros on TwitterX, right? But you look at their postings, that’s what they want. They don’t simply want to be able to pray in schools or at football games. They want to create a thorough going, Christian nation and a thorough going, Christian society. And that’s a rejection not only of secularism, that’s a rejection of the very fact of pluralism that this country was founded upon.
James Patterson:
A friend of mine likes to say, “It’s liberalism when they do it to us, and the common good when we do it to you.” Mark, any last thoughts you want to give us about maybe either the question that, or the issues that Jerome has put forward? Or maybe the state, the discipline of studied American religion? You’re a person on whose opinions I rely very heavily, so I’d like to know.
Mark Noll:
Well, I did raise in the review, the very last paragraph in Jerome’s book, which is an interesting one. The first sentence of the last paragraph is, “If it is to endure, Americans’ liberal democracy will have to be sustained in the absence of a moral consensus or a clear cut, spiritual foundations.” I actually agree with the clear cut, spiritual foundations. More or less in line of what he’s just said, that the aspirations often foreseeing a Christian foundation are not really a kind of loose desire to have space to do what I think needs to be done, but actually a stronger sense that everyone should be doing what …
But then the absence of a moral consensus, I think that’s a harder bridge to cross because of how deeply ingrained, and you can find it in different ways in George Washington, and even in Madison and Jefferson, Joseph’s story, Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., right up to the present, the sense that the United States project does have a transcendent, moral backing. However, it’s wrong to over-particularize it. And I think if the desire to not over-particularize moves to saying, “Well, we can get along without a transcendent, moral canopy of some kind,” I just don’t think that’s right. I don’t necessarily believe that. So I’ll let Jerome have the chance to defend the last paragraph, or at least one part of one sentence in the last paragraph of his book.
Jerome Copulsky:
Yeah, I wasn’t writing a book that was defending a particular kind of non-foundational liberalism. I think that that statement is meant as a descriptive rather than a normative statement. I think that, for better or for worse, we live in a country that … We have 320+ million citizens and non-citizens, who don’t agree. And if we are to continue as a functioning liberal democracy, we’re going to have to find ways of agreeing without those metaphysical agreements. And I hope we are able to do it. What the book shows is that there’s been that strain of disagreement from the very beginning. This is nothing new.
It just may feel more widespread now. And I think I would go back and reaffirm what we were talking about with Lincoln, who in a way, maybe provides a model of the civic language, the civic, moral language that we should consider taking very seriously, maybe returning to. Which is a kind of civic humility, a belief in the project of liberal democracy, as we call it now, but a civic humility in the exercise of that project. So I guess that’s how I would come back and try to defend where I land at the end of the book.
Mark Noll:
Jerome, would it be possible, do you think, to write a comparable book, American Heretics: Progressive Adversaries of Liberal Order?
Jerome Copulsky:
Absolutely. And I think one of … I didn’t say this explicitly in this conversation, but I think it should have come out in the writing, that Abbott himself is a heretic. The reason why I spent so much time outlining Abbott’s argument against the National Reform Association wasn’t because I think he was right, but I think he was also, in his way, attacking the foundations of the American Republic. Now, again, he felt that the amendment was needed to protect his understanding of the republic, as did some of the people in the National Reform Association Coalition. But at the end of the day, they were both interested in taking out that plank of pluralism, whether it is pluralism that allows for people to live secular lives, or pluralism that allows people to live lives within their own religious communities.
James Patterson:
Is that the next book, Jerome?
Jerome Copulsky:
I don’t think it’s the next book. But the book focuses on political theology. We could write a book that focuses on secular ideology, against liberalism.
James Patterson:
Outstanding. The book is American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of the Liberal Order. Jerome Copulsky, Mark Noll, thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Mark Noll:
My privilege. Thank you.
Jerome Copulsky:
Thank you so much. It was great.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
A poorly worded tweet became a career-altering conflagration for Ilya Shapiro in a particularly egregious example of cancel culture. It prompted him to take a hard look at the state of legal education, which he now skewers in Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite. He and host James Patterson discuss the book, the atrocious impact critical theory and DEI has had on our law schools, and what the future might hold.
Related LinksBooks by Ilya Shapiro:
Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites
Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court
TranscriptJames Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. Today, my guest is Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. He was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that, vice president of the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. Today, we’ll be talking to Mr. Shapiro about his forthcoming book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, which should be coming out very soon after this podcast, so be sure to look it up on Amazon-
Ilya Shapiro:
Actually, by the time this airs, I think it’ll already be out. January 14 is the pub date, so Lawless: Miseducation of America’s Elites. Go get it in any and all formats.
James Patterson:
That’s right. For those of you who need a little bit of schooling about self-promotion, Mr. Shapiro has provided you excellent example. Be on top of all this stuff. Anyway, welcome to the podcast.
Ilya Shapiro:
Good to be with you, and it was good to recently hang out with you and talk deep thoughts at a Liberty Fund retreat about the future of fusionism, and I’m happy to discuss the illiberal takeover of hire and especially legal education here.
James Patterson:
It was a great event. Fusionism, as always, a topic I love to talk about, and it was great to hear your thoughts about it as well, but that’s all kept hush-hush. What’s spoken at Jacksonville stays in Jacksonville. This is a book that’s not merely addressing a public policy problem, but it’s one that has a bit of a personal touch to it. Why don’t you tell the audience who’s not aware of your experience with cancel culture about what maybe was part of the motivation for this book?
Ilya Shapiro:
Yeah, Lawless uses my so-called lived experience as a jumping-off point for discussing problems with ideology, bureaucracy, failed leadership, all of these. The morass of pathologies in higher ed, and especially legal education. I focus on that not simply because I’m a lawyer but because, while it’s sad and unfortunate for human civilization, if English or sociology departments go off the rails, law schools train the next generation of the gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions, so that’s very important, if they start disbelieving in the objectivity of truth and the rule of law is illegitimate and all these. … We’ll get into that. Anyway, my personal experience, what launched this endeavor. I had been at the Cato Institute for nearly 15 years, and the opportunity presented itself to take my career in a new and exciting direction and join Georgetown Law School’s faculty to direct their Center for the Constitution, which is an important center, as we’ve learned, because the rest of the law school is the center against the constitution.
Randy Barnett hired me, he founded that center, a giant in the legal academic world, especially in the libertarian legal academic world. Hired me to run the center, to teach some classes, have an inward-facing focus as well as an outward-facing focus to proselytize about originalism, and so forth. A few days before I was due to take that job, I was due to start February 1st, 2022, was when Justice Breyer’s retirement news broke, and my day job, my bread and butter is as a follower and advocate before the Supreme Court. My previous book, Supreme Disorder, also still available both in hard and soft cover. It talks about the politics of judicial nomination fights and all the rest of that. I was doing media that day, I think it was January 27th, and I was on the road, happened to be on the road in Austin, Texas.
If I was at home, this probably wouldn’t have happened, the book wouldn’t have happened, because that night, when I got back to my hotel room, I was doom scrolling Twitter, not a best practice, and becoming more and more upset about President Biden hewing to his campaign pledge to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Now, there’s nothing wrong in the abstract with appointing a Black woman to the Supreme Court, but I thought and still think that the president should consider people of all backgrounds and not limit their candidates for any job, whether it be janitor or Supreme Court justice, based on race and sex. I was stewing it in that upset and fired off an ill-advised hot take on Twitter, as we all tend to do, I think, from time to time.
I said, “Look, if I was a progressive Democratic president, I think I would appoint the chief judge of the DC Circuit, the second most powerful court in the land. A man by the name of Sri Srinivasan, happens to be an Indian American immigrant as well, but under today’s hierarchy of intersectionality, that won’t fly, and so we will be left with a,” quote, “Lesser Black woman.” Meaning that, if it’s not Srinivasan, as I was positing, everybody else was less qualified, but in the limitations of Twitter, the character limits and so forth, it came out as “Lesser Black woman.” Then I went to bed and things blew up overnight. My ideological enemies called for my head, an investigation was launched. It was four days of hell for me, personally, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone other than the Twitter troll who launched all of this cancellation attempt against me, Slate‘s legal correspondent, Mark Joseph Stern. I felt my entire professional life crumbling before my eyes. Everything that I’d worked for decades, my parents’ sacrifices in taking me out of the Soviet Union.
It was terrible, it was God-awful. Then the Dean of Georgetown, Bill Treanor, after slandering me with his initial statements about how what I said was appalling and we can’t tolerate his saying that no Black woman can ever be qualified for the court, which is not what I said. Anyway, instead of either firing me or vindicating me, saying, “Well, that’s protected by our free speech policy, even if I don’t agree with what he’s saying,” or what have you, he took a middle course. He punted, as, as I’ve come to learn, higher ed officials, law school deans tend to do. Punted it to the DEI office and the human resources to investigate me for whether I violated Georgetown’s harassment and anti-discrimination policies, which was bizarre, because it was an investigation of a tweet, and you apply … these policies are very short and straightforward, so you sign that to some junior law professor to look at it for half an hour and come up with a conclusion.
No, it ended up being a four-month so-called investigation with Zooms with these HR and DEI people with just banal questions, and what have you, which I detail in the book. At the end of which, these four months of purgatory, if you will, that followed the four days of hell, some junior associate in the big expensive DC law firm that Georgetown hired to advise them, Wilmer Hale, looked at the calendar and realized I was not an employee of Georgetown when I tweeted, and therefore, these policies don’t even apply to me. They don’t have jurisdiction, as it were, and so I was reinstated on that technicality. It wasn’t a vindication of free speech or anything else. I celebrated that, but then I read the fine print, this 10-page report from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action, which said that if I were to say something equivalent that caused offense, then I would be creating a hostile educational environment and I would be back in the star chamber.
Taking advice of counsel and Professor Barnett and my wife, who’s a better lawyer than all of us, I realized I simply could not continue. It was untenable, I would not be able to do the job I was hired for, whether in terms of writing op-eds or commenting in the media about, say, the challenge to Harvard’s affirmative action program that was ongoing in the Supreme Court at the time or other cases involving, I don’t know, a graphic designer who didn’t want to create a web page for a same-sex wedding, or any of these sensitive, controversial, political, legal issues. Somebody would call offense, there’d be another letter-writing campaign, and away we’d go. I realized that I had to quit, I had to resign, and as we lawyers do, I made a loud exit. I published my resignation letter in the Wall Street Journal, as one does.
Announced my next move to the Manhattan Institute on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, as one does, and I’ve been using this platform I’ve been given ever since to shine a light on the rot in academia and sound the alarm about these weaknesses in ideology, bureaucracy, leadership. Never intended to be a poster boy for cancel culture, but they tried to cancel me, I canceled them, and here we are.
James Patterson:
A big question I always had for you about this experience was, to what degree did you have, really, any confidence in the ability for a DEI office at Georgetown to actually promote diversity, equity, inclusion? Because it seems to me that its true operation was to enforce a ideological monoculture or compliance, and do so by creating a process-is-the-punishment situation where you’re going through all of these meetings. Is it really even trying to promote real diversity, equity, and inclusion, or is it just, like you said, a star chamber meant to extract judgment without due process?
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, as I write in Lawless, this is based in good intentions. I’m not saying that these inquisitors have malevolent motives. I mean, they might not have liked me, because they didn’t like my comments that didn’t fit into their rubric of privilege hierarchy, or whatever, but they want to make America a better place, they want to make Georgetown a better place, and so forth. But globally speaking, these DEI offices fail on their own terms. That is, campus climate surveys. … Now, I’m no statistician, so I can’t say it definitively, but there’s no correlation between the size of a DEI office or the number of staff, or its budget, and an increase in student feelings of belonging or comfort with diversity. In fact, there’s some indication articles that I’ve read that seem to say that there’s an inverse relationship. Far from failing, they actually cause harm in the very things that they would be doing.
Certainly my experience with this office, it was … After a while, after the shock of whether my whole professional career would crumble, and I started getting speaking invites and job offers and writing invites and things, my lawyer gave me the green light eventually just to keep doing my job, speaking about the Supreme Court and legal issues. Not talking about the investigation or Georgetown, but do my normal job. It became clear, the longer this went, that it was just a farce. Not that I was expecting very much of it going in, but I mean, to drag on for months and months, and it became apparent that the dean was just waiting for the students to get off campus, so when he made his eventual announcement, there wouldn’t be mass protests and what have you, is another aspect of this profile encouraged that’s a problem.
No, I mean, these DEI offices are just … Again, I’m not saying these actors are all evil or what have you, but the whole institution … They even have an industry group. The association, I forget what the actual name is. It’s something like the Association of Human Resources Professionals for Diversity Offices, or something like that. Thousands of members, and like the great political economist, Mancur Olson liked to say, “The growth of bureaucracy is the decline of nations.” Similarly, this educational bureaucracy, whether with private schools or public schools, is very much to the detriment of the core mission of an open inquiry advancing human knowledge. In this case, teaching lawyers.
James Patterson:
Yeah, the cultural climate of academic research is supposed to be one of relative openness and tolerance, because of the diversity of views and the multiplicity of disciplinary approaches, but it seems like there’s an attempt to enforce a orthodoxy here. Maybe not with, like as you said, bad intentions, but at least with unintended consequences. Did you find that your colleagues at Georgetown were at all concerned about these restrictions on them, or were they advocates for them?
Ilya Shapiro:
Very few people who supported me at Georgetown took public positions, or even emailed the faculty listserv. Nick Rosenkranz is one, Randy Barnett was in a delicate situation. He was working on the dean, there was no need him, he was hiring me. He necessarily played a different role, but no, the Georgetown faculty, they were the attack dogs who said I should be fired. David Cole, legal director of the ACLU, who’s always also on faculty at Georgetown, said that what I said was definitely terrible, maybe racist, but I shouldn’t be fired over it. Okay, that process argument is perfectly fine, but most people just … As you say, this toxic climate on campus, most people are just trying to keep their head down and not get caught in the cancellation crossfire.
James Patterson:
Yeah, that is something I’ve really worried about, because the purpose of university administrations, especially at universities as prestigious and long-lived as Georgetown, is to preserve the academic climate for faculty research and for student learning, and from what I gather, that is the opposite of what they’re interested in here. They’re really much more interested in sacrificing those two ends for the purposes of avoiding bad press and avoiding potential lawsuits, and it seems to me that sticking to your guns and showing that you will so is probably better for both of those purposes, both the academic mission and for avoiding lawsuits. If you’re willing to say that, “I’m going to play this game too,” I will defend myself, I’ll defend my faculty, I’ll defend my students who actually discourage people from coming after you, but because of all the caving, people know that it works, and so they’ll push even for something as absurd as trying to go for your ouster and then succeed. It’s maddening.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, to be clear, they didn’t oust me. You have a black eye to Georgetown and to Dean Treanor and everyone involved there, alumni still question him. There’s an impact on donations, I understand. He apparently curses my name and things like this.
James Patterson:
As it should be.
Ilya Shapiro:
Right.
James Patterson:
This is unacceptable behavior, they don’t deserve it.
Ilya Shapiro:
Karma is real. Apparently, this is not confirmed, but I was speaking at Fordham Law School soon after all of it concluded, and the scuttlebutt is that Treanor lost out on Fordham’s presidency, in large part over how he handled my case. He had come to Georgetown from being Dean of Fordham Law, and then he was up for the presidency and lost out on it. Anyway, all I did was right. Not quit right away and not grovel and bend the knee. I did apologize for poor communication. I said, “That was a poorly phrased tweet, I should have said it a different way,” and that’s it. I was invited to apologize further and start talking about systemic racism, and all these other tropes. I declined to do that. Just by holding out and saying, “Nope, I’ve got nothing.” Just by holding out until they had to make a decision one way or another ended up being the right thing, but you’re right, that university administrators, whether law school deans, department chairs, or provost presidents, these are largely not woke radicals or social justice warriors.
James Patterson:
Right.
Ilya Shapiro:
They’re careerist bureaucrats, and what they have to do to … Actually, they could do well by doing good, that is the right thing to do. Would help them both with PR, donations, all these other things if they have a policy and an established enforcement practice of not allowing these cancel culture inquisitions, what have you, to go on. To actually promote a culture of open inquiry and discourse and academic freedom, then that’s better on all sides. You see that from, say, the late Bob Zimmer at the University of Chicago, or the University of Chicago more broadly, which has been largely immune from these controversies. That happens to be my law school alma mater, so I’m proud of that. David Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt, who’s gotten national plaudits for kicking students out of his office who took it over during the pro-Hamas encampments, and all of that.
Or Ben Sasse when he was president of the University of Florida, how he handled certain protests, versus say, what happened at Columbia. I mean, it is not a high bar. It’s not rocket science, you don’t have to develop whole new complicated theory or new policies to deal with these sorts of issues. It’s just apply existing rules. Georgetown’s free speech policy does not need fixing, it’s great on paper.
James Patterson:
Yeah.
Ilya Shapiro:
On pixels, but Dean Treanor the whole time was wringing his hands through his final statement when he reinstated me, wringing his hands about how difficult these issues are, because it presents a tension between our core values of free speech and equity. Well, no. I mean, who exactly was I harassing? Joe Biden? I’m not exactly sure how all of that is supposed to work. These careerist bureaucrats turn out to be, in large part, spineless cowards, and that weakness encourages a further breakdown in the campus community. I’ve kept speaking in law schools and other academic settings, and university leaders come up to me and say, “What should we do?” I’m like, “Well, enforce your rules. Create a culture … You’re very good,” university leaders are very good at sending emails, having trainings, just establishing cultures to advance, whether it be public service, environmentalism, entrepreneurship. “Whatever your values are, of your institution,” they’re good at doing that. Well, free speech, academic freedom, these sorts of things, tolerance of views you don’t agree with. They can do that, but in so many cases, they just don’t.
James Patterson:
Yeah, and it’s also an immense waste of everyone’s time. You would think these people would have more vacation days available to them if they didn’t make everyone sit in Zoom calls. They could just take the afternoon off instead.
Ilya Shapiro:
Actually, you mentioned Zoom calls and the meetings with the inquisitors, this is the other extra perverse dimension to all this, or bizarre or ridiculous. This is spring of 2022, and Georgetown still had heavy COVID restrictions, so I never actually met in person with Dean Treanor, with the DEI officer, or anybody else, because we would’ve had to been wearing masks if that was the case. All of this was done over Zoom.
James Patterson:
Which makes it all the more surreal and disembodied, literally. This isn’t just about your particular case, but also how this case prompted you to take a very hard look at legal education, big part of what you’ve written here. Why don’t you talk about the law school as an institution in the United States and how this approach has really made its way into forming its graduates.
Ilya Shapiro:
It used to be, if anyone’s watched the movie The Paper Chase, which I encourage, it’s a movie from the ’70s about Harvard Law School and Professor Kingsfield, this very old-school professor, uses the Socratic method, asking questions of students to get to the ultimate point of his teaching. Law school used to be … The first year, you ran this cursus honorum, everybody takes torts and property contract, constitutional law, criminal law, legal writing. That’s it. Everybody takes the same thing, you run that rigorous gamut. For me, personally, that still was the case when I was at 1L. For me, I don’t think I necessarily got it, but 1L ended, and I passed and I survived. Then you go into your second year and you take more doctrinal elective. Securities, law, other topics in constitutional law. International law, these standard things.
Then the third year, it’s more wide-ranging. You either do independent studies and writing papers, or you take these more esoteric subjects. Sports law, say, entertainment law, advanced security. Whatever, things like that. It was all to understand and inculcate how our institutions work, the post-enlightenment tradition that the founders established, how our system of government work from a legal perspective, how to advocate zealously from your client, understand different perspectives. All of these sorts of things. That has shifted. Now, in many ways, students are taught to question the legitimacy of the law and the legal institutions itself. It’s bizarre, it’s dangerous, because if all of our institutions, say, are irrevocably imbued with racism, sexism, patriarchy, all of these different things, they need to be deconstructed and reconstructed in a year-zero revolutionary zeal. It’s very much like the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the French Revolution, or what have you.
That doesn’t say good things about these graduates, whether they’re going to be prosecutors, public defenders, judges, general councils of companies, nonprofits, what have you. I mean, it undermines the whole basis of American freedom, prosperity, equality, what have you. I mean, the notion that equality under the law is a white supremacist dog whistle, these things that these postmodern theories come up with. I’ll tell you, when I was in law school in the early 2000s, these … This comes from critical legal studies, from which critical race theory and queer theory are offshoots. We thought of these crits as a spent force. That was something from the ’80s, early ’90s, these weird flare-up of theories that had been long relegated to the sociology departments, or what have you. But it turns out that, as one of the chapters in my book, Lawless, is called, “Critical Theory Returned with a Vengeance.”
Especially in the last 10 years or so, the Obama Administration’s worsening of race relations, the Ferguson Effect from 2014, social media and the work that Jonathan Haight and Greg Lukianoff have documented about how that generation approaches things differently, is culturated differently. The election of Donald Trump, COVID, the killing of George Floyd, all of these things changed … Well, changed all of society, but really affected law schools in that particular way, in a very negative way. That is to the point where, as I write, Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw, the founders of critical race theory, have replaced Louie Brandeis and William Blackstone as avatars of legal education, which is very dangerous.
James Patterson:
Yeah. This is something I’ve thought about a few times, which is that the critical approach is really just one theory that you can apply from a bunch of different vantages, right? It can be critical race or critical queer, or whatever. It’s actually easier than the cursus honorum that you just mentioned. That’s hard, it’s hard to teach and it’s hard to learn. This might actually reflect a desire from both the faculty and the students just to have to do less work. Is this maybe what’s going on here, or is it that there’s a demand for this education rather than demand for someone who does securities and torts?
Ilya Shapiro:
Never discount the laziness of either students or professors, for sure.
James Patterson:
As a professor, I never discount it. I know myself too well.
Ilya Shapiro:
Yeah, there’s an intellectual laziness and there’s also just a lazy laziness in general. I think that’s part of it. Another part of it is bureaucracy, because … We’ve just been talking about the theory and the ideology from an academic perspective, and what’s taught, which gets covered a fair bit, but something that is less sexy is the bureaucratic growth and how there are now, in every institution, more non-teaching administrators staff than teaching faculty. Whatever is going on with the faculty, in terms of ideological discrimination in hiring, types of courses that are offered, how law is taught, the fact that, even though a majority of the Supreme Court and half the judiciary in general are originalists, but originalism is, at best, taught as in some sneering, snide way that really is a detriment to the students. Setting aside that academic intellectual part, the fact that the bureaucracies have exploded and, in the last decade, most of that bloat has come in the DEI space really does a further disservice, and it’s made these non-teaching staff who are not imbued or raised up in academic virtues or academic values is really troubling, because you have these structures.
Again, these deans who are inculcating culture, and what have you, having trainings, having all sorts of organizational sessions, orientations, handholding the safety-ism and the therapizing of education of higher ed, where students need a crying room to process the trauma of not just exam season, which is how all this started off 20 years ago, or what have you, but elections that didn’t go their way or the presence on campus of someone like me or someone else. Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford, who got shouted down because … It’s just these bizarre trends, which are driven by bureaucracy, even beyond, again, the concern that definitely exists from the academic faculty perspective.
James Patterson:
Students certainly know how to respond to those incentives, where a bureaucracy that’s mostly afraid of liability or complaint will leverage that administration against their own faculty members, so the faculty will end up caving lowering standards, and this is occurring even at elite institutions. What does this mean then for the next generation of attorneys and judges that are forthcoming?
Ilya Shapiro:
Right. I mean, even the deans of elite law schools cow at their supposed underlings who run the DEI offices or the university-wide ones. What it means is that students are not well-prepared to execute their jobs if it’s triggering and unsafe and improper to teach, I don’t know, the arguments against gay marriage, say, or about the graphic design or the cake baker that doesn’t want to work a gay marriage, or what have you, or the pro-Second Amendment arguments. In all of these spaces, the so-called politically incorrect positions, just so you can understand them, so you can be a more effective argument for your progressive side, “No, we can’t do that.” It makes for less-effective lawyers. It also makes for legislators and developments in the criminal and civil justice space that is really detrimental to society. For example, sentencing based on race in Canada, for example.
Certain places in California, you’ll get different sentences for the exact same behavior between two criminal defendants, the same behavior, same criminal record, they’ll be sentenced differently depending on what race they are. It’s the antithesis of equal justice under the law, for example. One other thing here I should mention. We’ve been talking about the head deans, we’ve been talking about DEI offices. The admissions office is also a component here in that, especially at the elite places, your Yales, your Stanfords, they screen for activists rather than scholars. If you write in your personal statement, “I want to change the world, I want to radically restructure these illegitimate institutions,” what have you, that’s going to give you a leg up versus if you say, “Well, I want to prosecute child molesters,” or, “I want to work on corporate antitrust to make corporations, American free enterprise, more efficient and fair for the consumer,” or something like that.
Sometimes they make headlines or somebody wrote, “Black Lives Matter,” 250 times in their personal statement, and then they got into … I forget whether it was Stanford or Yale, but these sorts of things. Admissions offices are also to blame in this degeneration of our system.
James Patterson:
There’s a weird problem with this, where you have … In the law school market of students and faculty, the most elite universities are experiencing even higher rates of application, and then lower-ranked ones are actually starting to kind of starve. But the question then becomes, are these elite institutions receiving high-rates application? Are they really elite if they’re not doing the job that you said they do and they’re producing inferior attorneys, people who … We could even joke that it’s a vast right-wing conspiracy to make the left’s attorneys worse, but that’s not it, right? It’s actually like internal incentives, as we talked about before. Would you really call Yale Law School an elite institution if it doesn’t even teach towards its first year and can’t even comprehend defending the Second Amendment rights that Constitution currently upholds?
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, we’ve seen, society-wide, the decline in respect and confidence in, well, institutions generally, but certainly higher ed more than most institutions. This has been especially highlighted since October 7th. How is it that the heart of antisemitism in our country is based in the most progressive, so-called educated spaces, and where, as Bill Ackman wrote in his evocative essay that came out the same day that Claudine Gay resigned the presidency of Harvard, “The antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine, the tip of the iceberg that signals pathologies that are there underneath.” The crisis in higher ed is very much in our national public discourse now. You’re right, the places that don’t merit respect are declining in respect. Conversely, places that … Again, it’s a low bar, where their leaders are actually doing their job and preserving the core truth-seeking mission of any institution, or preserving the teaching of law and respect for the rule of law, and things like that, are relatively rising.
They’re playing money ball. Your University of Chicago, your UVA, your Scalia Law School at George Mason are able to hire a professor, are able to entice students that perhaps they wouldn’t if your Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia were less pathological.
James Patterson:
You saw the appointment of the first non-Yale/Harvard Supreme Court Justice with Amy Coney Barrett. Is her appointment kind of a sign that we’re no longer being held hostage to this duopoly, because the products of that duopoly aren’t really what they used to be?
Ilya Shapiro:
I think there has been a bit of a vibe shift, if you will, and indeed, in general, the last decade, more students from below the top 10 or so schools have been hired to be clerks for the Supreme Court, for example, and other similarly prestigious positions, which makes sense, because your top person or your top 5 percent at Notre Dame or Alabama or any number of schools that are still good, but US News doesn’t consider them to be top 10 or whatever, are going to be better than your average person, say, at Yale or Stanford. I think that recognition is out there. A bit of a democratization, if you will, a bit of a decline in the fetishization of these other schools, but I’m seeing some green shoots even at these properly-maligned schools. For example, Heather Gerken, who is the dean of Yale Law and isn’t one of these careerist bureaucrats who does want to climb that greasy pole even further to become president of one of these Ivy League institutions.
She has seen the hits that Yale law has taken, and so recently hired Keith Woodington away from Princeton to … Given him a bunch of money to do a free speech, academic freedom center and other programming, and not just senior established faculty. Hired a young junior professor who had clerked for Alito, of all things. I believe in the same year that Dobbs even came down, the overturning of Roe V. Wade. Something like that would not have happened had it not been for all of this bad publicity or, for that matter, the dozen or 14 federal judges that said, “Because of your bad free speech climate at Yale, we’re not going to be hiring clerks from there.” My friend, Judge Jim Ho at the Fifth Circuit, and Lisa Branch of the 11th have led that effort, and then added Stanford after the shouting down of Kyle Duncan.
Added Columbia after their terrible policies with regard to antisemitism. Those things are having an effect, and I’m an all-of-the-above person, so we should try lots of different things, both internally and, as economists would say, exogenous shocks to try to force reforms in these institutions.
James Patterson:
I’ve heard more than once from people who’ve worked in the judiciary that it’s actually very difficult sometimes to take traditional elite 1L or 2L students into their summer clerkships. You essentially have to reteach them or even engage in a new teaching that they didn’t get, but were supposed to get in order for them to be qualified clerks. Judges don’t always have time for that, so it makes sense that they would do this not just because of a kind of ideological counterattack, but because they need to get their jobs done, and these clerks aren’t doing their jobs. It’s breathtaking that it’s taken this long for law schools to respond to these incentives, but it’s one thing to get negative write-ups in the conservative press, but it’s another when federal judges won’t take your students anymore. That’s really hitting them in where they live.
Ilya Shapiro:
Or employers. After October 7th, the 100 top law firms, 200 top law firms in the country had an open letter to the deans of law school saying, “We can’t hire people who protest in favor of Hamas and baby killers,” and all the rest of it, “I don’t know what you’re doing, what culture you have, but you have some problems. Go fix it.” These are not right-wing institutions, the nation’s leading law firms, 95 percent donate to the Democratic Party, et cetera, but they recognize that, A, they want students that actually know how to write a memo, and B, are not going to be just inveterate bigots of that sort. That’s heartening to see, because there is a bit of a problem otherwise, in the sense that there’s some thinking that … Well, like in the ’50s and ’60s, law firms would say that, “Well, we would love to hire Black lawyers, but our clients don’t want them.” That excuse is hard to maintain these days.
James Patterson:
As we wrap things up, what is really the future for all of this? One theory I’ve heard many times is that this a heavy administrative bloat, DEI-focused university was a product of 0 percent interest rates, and as things actually become more expensive and we start to hit a cliff in student enrollment, because of a population decline after the housing crisis, the justification for having all these effectively unproductive administrators on staff really goes down the tubes. But on the other hand, they’re the ones who make a lot of the hiring decisions, so you end up with maybe law schools without faculty. What do you think is going to happen here? There’s a pretty wide-open situation here.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, who was it that said that, “Something that can’t go on, won’t”? Is that one of Herbert Stein’s maxims?
James Patterson:
Yeah.
Ilya Shapiro:
I think Ben Stein’s father. Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, it’s going to take … We haven’t talked about the Department of Education, but they can do various steps in terms of investigating and actually withholding funds, not having these sweetheart settlements, as we’ve seen from the Biden administration as it’s going out the door, of places that deny their students their civil rights, their free speech rights, and all the rest of it, or removing the ABA’s accreditation monopoly, for example. There actually is some accreditation competition among, say, liberal arts colleges, but there’s not in law schools. The ABA is the only game in town, and that’s bad. I have a whole chapter in my book, Lawless, on the perversions and foibles of the ABA. The education department could get rid of that, you don’t need new legislation to do that.
I think, as there’s a recognition that some institutions are better than others, both from students, from employers, we are going to have probably some shifts, and state legislatures for that matter, with respect to public schools at least, have a role to play not in dictating what gets taught in the classroom, but in eliminating offices that are counterproductive and not funding structures that are value-subtracting. Just like they can decide that this school is going to focus on STEM, that school is going to focus on liberal arts, we don’t want these DEI structures, we don’t want diversity statements in hiring. There’s certain things that there’s a role to play for both the public and private sectors.
James Patterson:
Actually, before we go, I want you to say something about the ABA since you do have a whole chapter on it, and I’m skipping that. This problem with the monopoly and the ABA in terms of its accreditation, what would be an alternative? Or is there an emerging alternative potentially for accrediting law schools?
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, within any state, the state bar, which typically answers to the state Supreme Court, can, for purposes of practicing law within that state, say, “You don’t have to go to an ABA-accredited law school.” I think that’s only in place in California, ironically perhaps. Other states could do that, but other states could also … If the education department removes the accreditation monopoly, they could find other ways to accredit. Surely, there would be other accreditors or certifiers that would spring up, and schools could say, “Well, I’m approved by the Liberty Fund,” or, “I’m approved by this other new accreditor.” The state Supreme Court could figure out who exactly they want to allow to practice law to get a law license in that state. States can get together in a interstate compact to have reciprocity in that regard, but you would have a burgeoning market, a competition in accreditors that simply can’t exist right now.
James Patterson:
This is something I didn’t know. I did not know that this was a federally-backed monopoly through the bar. Am I understanding this?
Ilya Shapiro:
Yeah, yeah. The Education Department accredits accreditors, if you will. Gives their stamp of approval that, “You have the right to accredit these institutions,” for them to get federal funds and things like that.
James Patterson:
Fascinating. This is actually a really great idea.
Ilya Shapiro:
Just so neither I nor anybody else needs to reinvent the wheel, the Defending Freedom Institute, my friend Bob Itell over there has been doing great work, has put out a couple of studies about reforming accreditation. It’s a really wonky, really nerdy subject, obviously, but the work is all there.
James Patterson:
The book is Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. The author is Ilya Shapiro. Thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, thank you. In case your listeners want to find me, I also have a Substack, Shapiro’s Gavel. You can also go to the website of the Manhattan Institute, which is simply manhattan.institute. You might not be aware that .institute is a suffix, you don’t need org or com, or whatever, and you can find me on X, formerly Twitter, @ishapiro.
James Patterson:
The man himself, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
Anyone could be forgiven for not knowing much about Peter Viereck. The eccentric historian and poet was one of the first mid-century thinkers to robustly embrace the “conservative” label, but he fell out of favor with movement conservatives and has been largely forgotten. John Wilsey thinks that’s a mistake. He joins Law & Liberty‘s editor, John Grove, to talk about Viereck and his unique conservative manner of approaching the challenges of modern life.
Related LinksJohn Wilsey, “Peter Viereck’s Unadjusted Conservatism,” Law & Liberty
Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Winston Churchill
Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited
Peter Viereck, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment
John Wilsey, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (pre-order)
Claes Ryn, “Peter Viereck: Traditionalist Libertarian?” Law & Liberty
Robert Lacey, Pragmatic Conservatism
TranscriptJames Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
John Grove:
Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty. And I’m filling in today for regular host, James Patterson. Today I’m joined by Dr. John Wilsey. John Wilsey is Professor of Church History and Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as the book review editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He’s the author of several books, including American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of An Idea. Also God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. And coming this April, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. Last May, he contributed a piece to Law & Liberty called “Peter Viereck’s Unadjusted Conservatism,” which we will link to in the show notes. And I thought we would talk a little bit more about Viereck, who is a very interesting and unique kind of conservative. So John Wilsey, thanks for joining us.
John Wilsey:
Thanks, John, for having me. It’s great to be with you.
John Grove:
All right, so first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Viereck, his background, his career, his influence, or maybe lack thereof, influence such as it was, and a little bit about his personality because he had a bit of a unique personality?
John Wilsey:
Yeah, he was a fascinating person. He was born in 1916, and he died in 2006. So he lived … I don’t think he made it to 90. I think he made it to 89. So he lived a long life. He was one of the first in the new conservatism movement of the postwar period. He wrote a piece for … Oh, I think it was The Atlantic. I have it somewhere. It was a piece for … I think it was the Atlantic Monthly. I could be wrong about that, but he wrote it in 1941. He was just a young man, and he said … The title of the piece was “But … I’m a Conservative.” And as you know, back in those days, he observed that the word conservative was not a term that a lot of people used to describe themselves. In fact, the term conservative was a term that was received a lot like, people might say, reactionary today.
It wasn’t a really positive term, it was kind of a negative term, but he embraced the term. And Klaus Wren, I believe, gave him the credit for sort of reinvigorating the term conservative and popularizing it so that people use it and they’ve used it for a long time since the fifties, since certainly The Conservative Mind came out in 1953. But Peter Viereck was apparently one of the very first to identify himself proudly as a conservative in the post-war conservative movement. He was a historian. He got his PhD in history from Harvard, and he wrote his dissertation on an intellectual history of Nazism.
His dissertation was published under the title of “Metapolitics.” He dedicated the work to his brother, who he says on the front matter, he says, “To my brother, who died fighting the Nazis.” So, a fascinating situation there. His brother went into the army and fought and was killed in Italy during the war. His father, George, had a really interesting background as well. George had been a pro-German figure. He lived in America, but he was very pro-German. During World War I, he was sort of a partisan for the Kaiser during World War I and during America’s involvement in World War I. And then, in the rise of Hitler, he became an apologist for Hitler and for fascism and was an unapologetic fascist all the way through the thirties and the forties, despite the fact that both of his sons had joined the army.
Peter joined the Army as well, but he never saw any combat. So, the father was actually imprisoned. I can’t remember exactly what the circumstances were, but he was imprisoned for his Nazi sympathy during World War II and suffered a great deal of disgrace in regards to that. The two were also estranged. Didn’t speak to each other for several years-
John Grove:
Can imagine.
John Wilsey:
Over this, but they did have a reconciliation. For years, Peter tried to get his father to read his doctoral dissertation, Metapolitics, and his father refused to read it, but at the end of his life, he finally did consent to reading it when he was quite old and declining in health. And he read the book … And this is all a story that Klaus Wren relates that after he read the book, he said, “Peter, you were right.”
John Grove:
Wow.
John Wilsey:
So George, the father, not only did he reconcile with his son, but he also recognized how wrong he was.
John Grove:
Well, there’s influence for you.
John Wilsey:
Yeah. Oh gosh. It’s incredible. I wish I could have such influence over my children.
John Grove:
Right.
John Wilsey:
Anyway, so his family background is quite compelling, but as I say, he was born in 1916 and died in 2006. He was a historian. He was a specialist in Russian history and also wrote on fascism. He was a continental European historian, and he taught for many years. I think he taught for just under 50 years as a full-time professor. But then he stayed and continued to teach classes at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. I think he taught for a year or two at Harvard as well when he first started teaching. But he taught the bulk of his career at Mount Holyoke. And there are really interesting stories about him at Mount Holyoke. I have two sources. One is Lisa Bradford who teaches at Seattle Pacific University. She is working on a biography of Viereck, has been working on it for quite a few years now. And she was really helpful in my research on Viereck. And then also my own freshman advisor from my undergraduate days, Marion Strobel, who took him for several classes when she was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke.
My professor, Dr. Strobel, had him in the sixties, and then Lisa had him in the eighties. And listening to them tell stories about him as a professor was fascinating. I also got to talk to George Nash a little bit about him. George Nash was friends with Peter Viereck and George Nash has interesting insights on him as well.
John Grove:
What are some of those eccentricities as a professor because you’ve told me about these in the past?
John Wilsey:
Yeah, they were funny. And you just try to think about, “Could a professor survive today?” I don’t think he could. Okay, so he enjoyed climbing the trees on campus and the students would walk past and see Professor Viereck sitting up in a tree. He was late to class. Every time class met he was late. He was always about 15 minutes late and classes were 50 minutes to an hour or something like that. So he didn’t come for block classes. Sometimes I’m 15 minutes late to my class, but I have a three-hour class. When you have an hour class, it’s a little bit different, but he was always late. He never gave any feedback when he graded papers. He never returned any papers. Found out that-
John Grove:
You don’t get that today.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, yeah. They’ll get you on that one. You would find out how you did in the class when you got your report card at the end of the semester.
John Grove:
Yeah. I actually had a high school algebra teacher that was kind of like that, but fortunately for me, your grade was always higher than you actually deserved.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, yeah.
John Grove:
Which is probably how he got away with it.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, right. That’s exactly right. What else? He would wear a scarf, like a muffler, all year long even during the warm months.
John Grove:
I’ve seen a picture of him with a scarf on.
John Wilsey:
Yeah. Yeah. He was an eccentric guy, but the students loved him. One group of students that my professor told me about had invited … She was among them who invited him to dinner at someone’s house. I don’t know. It was at a home in town, and he was an hour late. They weren’t really surprised that he was late. But the reason why he was late was funny. Daylight savings time had passed about a week earlier, and he had forgotten to change his clock. So he had been an hour late to everything.
John Grove:
It could just be like he just doesn’t do daylight savings time.
John Wilsey:
He’s one of those people that just doesn’t … He can’t even, you know what I mean?
John Grove:
Yeah, right. So it sounds like, essentially, we might say he was an individual and-
John Wilsey:
He was.
John Grove:
Part of what sort of piqued my interest in this piece that you wrote and interest generally in Viereck is that specifically what you wrote about him really speaks to this question about the conservative and the individual, and I’ll get to that a little bit more directly as we go, but that’s something that sort of runs through some of his writing and some of the things that you’ve written about him here, that he appreciates rootedness, he appreciates formation of people by social authorities and so forth, like most conservatives do. But at the same time, he definitely has this powerful sense of the individual and he doesn’t lose sight of that at all. So let’s start maybe by just talking a little bit about what conservatism is for Viereck, and what it means to be conservative, I guess.
I’ll pull out this quote that you quoted in the Law & Liberty piece, which I think is a really beautiful quotation and I’ll see what you have to say about it. So this is Viereck, says, “The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure, self-expression through self-restraint.” That’s an interesting phrase right there, “self-expression through self-restraint.” “Preservation through reform, humanism and classical balance of fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux.” That’s also a phrase I really, really love in this quote, “a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux.” “And a fruitful obsession with unbroken historical continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law.”
So I thought we might just use that quote as a jumping-off point to say a little bit about Viereck’s understanding of conservatism, his understanding of freedom, and how freedom relates to continuity and order, because he seems to value all of these things, which today increasingly people talk about as if they’re very divergent and don’t go together. You have to choose one or the other.
John Wilsey:
Yeah. Yeah. I love … That’s one of the most beautiful statements, one of the most beautiful definitions of conservatism that he gave there.
John Grove:
I agree.
John Wilsey:
I’m just looking at it again. “Self-expression through self-restraint, preservation through reform, humanism and classical balance, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux—”
John Grove:
I love that phrase in particular because it’s got this word nostalgia that I’m going to bring up again in another context in just a second but that word nostalgia is in there, and yet it’s this nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux. It’s not like nostalgia for just the flux of a hundred years ago or just sort of the surface-level stuff that you can find maybe somewhere in the past, but it’s nostalgia for something permanent that’s sort of beneath the surface of things. It seems to me like that kind of gets at his notion of the freedom that a person experiences is that you have this sort of flux going on around you at all times that you can kind of get swept up in? And some people associate freedom with that, but then there’s also this permanent underneath. What do you think about that?
John Wilsey:
Yeah. So one of the things he talks about a lot and reflects on a lot is change, the nature of change in the world in time. He’s a historian, so he’s very interested in change. Change is part of the nature of things. It’s part of the nature of the universe. It’s not something that we try to resist as conservatives. It’s not something that we don’t like as conservatives. A lot of times, conservatives are regarded as people who don’t like change. Actually, I think it’s human nature anyway. This is me talking. I think it’s human nature that we don’t like change. Nobody likes change. Certain kinds of changes. I wouldn’t want my house to burn down; that’s a change. Nobody likes some kind of changes; everybody loves the familiar, and that’s sort of a conservative impulse is to love the familiar and to be drawn to the familiar.
But Viereck’s ideas were interesting when it comes to tradition. He talked about the difference between tradition and traditionalism, that conservatives revere tradition, but they don’t receive tradition uncritically. They receive tradition through a critical lens. So some traditions, because of change, are no longer workable, they’re no longer pragmatic, and they may be immoral. And so those traditions you jettison. But you keep the traditions that, as we will talk about in a second I think, that are those things that are rooted in who we are as a civilization. And I think that’s what he means when he talks about the permanent beneath the flux. There’s always going to be change—circumstances will change, technology will change, and culture will change. But as those changes take place, you have a bedrock, sort of a river bed underneath that the water flows over that river bed, but the river bed stays the same. Those things are the roots that we have that make us who we are and that we conserve.
So he does; he identifies the fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux as one of the conservative principles par excellence. And getting back to your original question about his individuality, the individual and the community, the society, shouldn’t ever be seen as these … It was seen as isolated for one another, I should say. Viereck was big on that. He thought that there needed to be a balance between the individual and the society, the public and the private, you might say. He was very Tocquevillian in that regard. When you strike the balance between the individual and the society, the individual and the community, then you have the conditions for freedom that are all set up for you.
John Grove:
And this sort of gets to the title of the book that you’ve focused the most on in this piece, The Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment. I think what you’re saying now is sort of getting to that question of unadjusted and over-adjusted. So in that book, he has these three sort of paradigms, the maladjusted man, the over-adjusted man and the unadjusted man. And I think this is where you’re going. So why don’t you kind of say what are those different types of people and why is the … I know one version of the book said that the unadjusted man is like a new hero for the twentieth century or something like that-
John Wilsey:
Yes. That’s right.
John Grove:
What are those three maladjusted, unadjusted and over-adjusted?
John Wilsey:
Over-adjusted, yeah.
John Grove:
And then why is the unadjusted man his sort of ideal?
John Wilsey:
He was very cautious about how the culture embraced technology and consumerism and post-war, as they say today, affluenza, we might say today. Especially with something like technology, he was fond of quoting Walt Whitman describing the railroad when Walt Whitman said, “We don’t ride on the railroad. The railroad rides on us.” In fact, I think he quotes that at the beginning of Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment. Yeah, “We don’t ride the railroad; the railroad rides on us.” He thought that if we simply receive all kinds of these movements in technology and in affluent post-war life, we lose something of our humanity. When we become over-adjusted to the culture, then we lose our roots, we lose our humanity, and we become sort of isolated from those who went before us and no good to those who are going to come after us.
John Grove:
And when you say the culture, this is sort of the flux in the line we were talking about before?
John Wilsey:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I hadn’t quite made that connection, but I think that’s a fair connection. Very Burkeian in the sense that he saw society as a contract between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born. He was fond of citing that line and Burke in his book on the revolution.
John Grove:
So, the unadjusted man is kind of able to keep some of the daily distractions at bay and not let that sort of define them. It would make sense then what the over-adjusted person is, the person that’s just kind of flying around. Just their entire existence is sort of defined by the forces around them.
John Wilsey:
That’s right.
John Grove:
But what would it mean, though, to be maladjusted? Because that one’s the one that sort of sits out.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, maladjustment; he didn’t like that either because maladjustment was being something like a misanthrope. Somebody who rejected society, who lived on an island. And he had those geographic metaphors. He said that a maladjusted man is a man who lives on the island, isolates himself from society, rejects society wholesale like a misanthrope, like someone who just doesn’t … He’s just not feeling it, as the kids say.
And then there’s the over-adjusted man who lives on the mainland. So the one who is defined by the culture, who takes his cues and his entire identity and just is blown by the winds of culture. The unadjusted man lives on a peninsula that is still connected to the mainland but far enough away, distant enough to where the man is able to know the culture be seen in the culture, but not of the culture. In the same sense as John 17, the high priestly prayer, “Be in the world, but not of the world.” The reference to the Lord’s high priestly prayer, I think is the best description or the best analogy to the unadjusted man. Certainly, Viereck didn’t advocate being a Luddite or completely withdrawing from the culture, but he was very suspicious of the new technology of television, for example. He didn’t like television. He thought that television would have deleterious effects on the culture. He wasn’t wrong about that.
John Grove:
Add him to the list of mid-century people that we read today that we sit back and think, oh my goodness, what would they say today-
John Wilsey:
Right. Exactly.
John Grove:
… if they say this about radio or television?
John Wilsey:
Yeah. He also didn’t like the mass construction of neighborhoods. He didn’t like that. I can see why. I can see why, looking back. And I’m kind of like that too whenever I see drive past places on the countryside that I’ve driven past many times and they’ve been farms and fields and I see that there’s bulldozers out there, they’re building a new subdivision. I don’t like that. I think that’s tragic. And I think that he had the same kind of a view.
So adjustment to the culture was also … There’s a subtitle to the book that he wrote, Unadjusted Man, you indicated a second ago when he first wrote the book in 1956, it was published under the title, The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans. And then it was reprinted in 2004 under a new title, The Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment, and then there’s a subtitle, Where History and Literature Intersect.
And I want to say real quick, I think it’s important to note, he was a historian, but he was also a poet and he wrote several collections of poetry during his lifetime. In fact, after about 1956, maybe, maybe 1960, he didn’t write any more works on history or conservatism at all, he wrote poetry. And he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for his collection, Terror and Decorum. So that’s just a side note, something that is fascinating about him.
And that’s one other thing about the unadjusted man is that he is a person who loves aesthetics, loves the beautiful things like poetry. That’s one of the reasons why he climbed the trees on campus was because they were beautiful and he wanted to drink in the beauty of the earth around him and climb the tree and look up at the sky and get up close to the tree and be part of it. That was something that he loved. He loved beauty for its own sake. People thought he was strange for that reason, and that was making his point. He wanted to be someone who loved beauty for beauty’s sake and in the world that’s moving in haste, chasing the almighty dollar, fascinated with the latest technological wonder, you don’t have time to stop and appreciate truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake.
So he wrote poetry for that reason, and he loved beautiful things for their own sake. That’s part of being unadjusted to the culture, is that you’re paying attention to the right things, the things that are true and good and beautiful, and recognizing that culture is passing, it’s flux as you said a moment ago. So he advocated for us to be unadjusted to the culture.
John Grove:
So that description, I think a lot of people would probably expect then his politics to be something that might get described as reactionary. And yet, in your sort of biographical sketch of him earlier, you mentioned he had this background of studying right-wing ideology, extremist ideology, of course right and left don’t work perfectly on Nazis and so forth—but what is usually described as a sort of right-wing ideology. And a lot of the book is actually very critical of what we would usually term as sort of reactionary politics. So he’s very critical of what he calls Americanism, and I think what he means is a really robust nationalist identity.
In particular, I wanted to pull out this one section of the book; I have the 2006 edition, which we should also warn our listeners about what we were talking about earlier. The 2006 edition published by Routledge has some strange editorial, or not editorial omissions, seemingly just accidental omissions, including the first three chapters of the book are not in it.
John Wilsey:
They’re just gone.
John Grove:
Which you have to go find somewhere else. So fair warning to anybody who’s about to go drop 45 bucks or whatever it is on Amazon.
John Wilsey:
Fair warning.
John Grove:
You’re not getting the whole book. But anyway, one of the chapters of that book hits very close to home in terms of the sort of ideological debates going on in conservatism today. It’s called the rootless nostalgia for roots. And this was written in 1956, and his target is a lot of first generation figures in the conservative movement, a lot of people that are sort of well regarded by people like you and me today. But this is what he says about the danger that a certain strand of what he calls the new conservatism might fall into.
So he says, “The main defect of the new conservatism threatening to make it a transient fad, irrelevant to real needs is its rootless nostalgia for roots. Today’s conservatism of yearning is based on roots that either never existed or no longer exist. Such a conservatism of nostalgia can be of high literary value. It is also valuable as an unusually detached perspective toward current social foibles.” So that kind of gets, I think, maybe to what you were just talking about, the sort of ability to rise above the noise of modern culture. But he says it does real harm when it leaves literature and enters short-run politics, conjuring up mirages to conceal sorted realities or to distract from them.
And so then he goes on to mention a whole lot of familiar movements and familiar people in that section. He mentions, for instance, an interesting discussion he has there is about the southern agrarians where he says that they’re a fantastic literary voice, like an essential literary voice, but if you use them as a starting point in politics, you’re going to fail. And then he also, then also, that’s where he uses the phrase “Americanist” as a sort of robust nationalist, he goes after McCarthy and McCarthy’s defenders. So there’s this sort of distinction he seems to make between … There’s this sense in what you’ve just described of the person who really wants to have a critical eye on the modern world, who does not want to be defined by the passing cultural fads. But at the same time in politics he seems to be saying you have to be able to live in the world that you inhabit. Is that his, don’t be maladjusted. You have to accept where and when you live, find a way to make your way, but don’t be defined by it.
John Wilsey:
No, I think that nails it. I think that nails it. And that’s-
John Grove:
You kind of talk about that. I’ll introduce this, then I’ll let you go. But you talk about it in this other phrase that he uses where he says the, by trying, I think this is connected to the rootless nostalgia for roots. These are people who don’t have actual real roots in their life today that they’re building on, but instead they’re sort of manufacturing pretended social roots from a hundred years ago, 200 years ago or something that they’re just making up and trying to build something around that. And I think that will lead then to the discussion that you made of what he calls the Ottantotts, O-T-T-A-N-T-O-T-T-S-
John Wilsey:
The Ottantotts.
John Grove:
So what were the Ottantotts, and why was that approach to politics not productive for Viereck?
John Wilsey:
Yeah, the Ottantotts, the Ottantotts. I tell you what, he’s a poet, he’s a poet.
John Grove:
That’s very true.
John Wilsey:
He can turn a phrase like no one can. I love this one phrase from that chapter that you were reading from where he says, he’s talking about Americanism, sort of of the America Firsters of his day, the isolationists.
John Grove:
We don’t hear that anywhere today.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, and I think he’s talking about the Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, “In the name of free speech and intellectual gadflyism, they are justified in expounding the indiscriminate antiliberalism of hothouse Bourbons and czarist serf-floggers.”
John Grove:
Yeah, yeah. I highlighted that, too. I’ve thought about putting that one as well. Yeah.
John Wilsey:
Oh, man. It’s just, he can turn a phrase. He’s wonderful reading. I tell you, it’s sad that his works are not in print and we have to rely on these very imperfect-
John Grove:
He’s very flawed.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, but going back to the Ottantotts, the Ottantotts, he talks about this in his book Conservatism: From John Adams To Churchill that he wrote in, I think he wrote it in 1956 as well, the same year as this one. Okay, so the Ottantotts: he gets that word ottantott from the Italian word ottantotto, which means 88 in Italian. And he’s referring to the King of Sardinia in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries during the French Revolutionary period, who was an ultra-royalist who was a follower of Joseph de Maistre’s sort of radical right-wing conservative ideology. And he tells an anecdote about how the King of Sardinia would go around muttering, “Ottantotto, ottantotto, 88, 88,” as if to say that if we can just go back to the world of 1788, the year before the revolution, then all would be well. So-
John Grove:
I quoted this, by the way. I quoted you in a piece I wrote a month or so after you published this. I quoted that very line.
John Wilsey:
Hey, well, thank you.
John Grove:
Yeah.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, it’s an amazing quote.
John Grove:
Mumbling 1788.
John Wilsey:
Yeah. People who do that are not rare. If only we could go back to 1960, prior to the 1960 election, and if we could only go back to before the hippies and whatever, pick something. If we could only go back to 1861.
John Grove:
Or 1788, or the referendum-
John Wilsey:
Or whatever.
John Grove:
Or whatever it is, yeah.
John Wilsey:
Just pick something. That desire to go back in time and have a perfect world, have this perfect setup before things got really bad, and all would be well, that’s an Ottantott expression. And he uses the word, the term ottantotto to describe these traditionalists, these authoritarians, these rootless rightists in search of roots. That chapter is fascinating because he’s talking about … He has certain people in mind. And I find it interesting that in his critique of the hard right, he talks about romanticizing conservatives like the Southern Agrarians. He takes shots at Russell Kirk.
John Grove:
He does, yeah. Which is we’re going to get to why he was and remains a controversial conservative in just a second here, and that’s one of them
John Wilsey:
At one point in here, and I’m trying to find where it is there, maybe you can help me. He is talking about new conservatives; he doesn’t name them, who start new magazines, and it’s just clear who he’s … I’m pretty sure he is talking about National Review and William F. Buckley.
John Grove:
Well, maybe this is a good time to turn to that since our minds are going in this direction. So he called himself a conservative. He was pivotal in bringing that term up out of the ashes. But boy, he criticized a lot of people that I’m kind of inclined to like. I mean, Russell Kirk.
And we were talking about this earlier before we recorded that he has good things to say about Russell Kirk too. It’s not as if he was just blasting Kirk left and right, but he has some heavy criticism of Kirk and a lot of other … We see that first wave of movement conservatives. And by and large, they, I think reasonably enough given what he said about them, they didn’t particularly like him either.
John Wilsey:
No, they didn’t like him either.
John Grove:
So he did not fall into the mainstream of twentieth-century conservatism. And as you say, he’d even stopped really writing about politics and conservatism for a long, long time. So what’s the key difference between Viereck and somebody like, let’s say Kirk, let’s not say Buckley maybe, but at least Kirk, because Kirk, maybe you do a quick read of both of these guys. They seem somewhat similar. I mean, Kirk’s going to-
John Wilsey:
They do.
John Grove:
Most of us would certainly not read Kirk as a sort of really actionary, although there are people, Frank Meyer also sort of criticized him for being that way. But instead as somebody who maybe is pretty similar to what we were just talking about with Viereck, you have to be attuned to the permanent things, don’t get swept up by society around you, but at the same time you do live in this world. So what would you say, why was there this big break? What kept Viereck from being a voice in the mainstream conservative movement?
John Wilsey:
Yeah, that quote that he has about Kirk that … He’s quoting Clinton Rossiter, who said, “Unfortunately for the cause of conservatism, Kirk has now begun to sound like a man born 150 years too late and in the wrong country,” and-
John Grove:
Which I’m pretty sure Kirk … Didn’t Kirk say something like that about himself once?
John Wilsey:
Probably, I don’t-
John Grove:
Like, “I was born in the wrong century,” or something like that. I don’t know, maybe. We would have to look that up, maybe he was riffing off these people saying that about him, sort of embrace it.
John Wilsey:
As you said, Kirk, I think he has more good things to say about Kirk than bad things. He was critical of Kirk in that he didn’t think that Kirk was tough enough against McCarthy. But then I sort of think that’s a little bit unfair because Kirk was not in the United States during the height of McCarthyism, and it’d be kind of hard for him to be a partisan against McCarthy from Scotland when he was writing Conservative Mind. So I don’t know. They had these disagreements, the two of them, but there’s so much more that they have in common than things that they didn’t agree on.
To read Kirk, to read say, Roots of American Order, for example, and then to read Conservatism: From John Adams To Churchill, certainly Viereck talks a lot more about European conservatism in that book. But to read the two, they really are complementary works. It’s difficult to see a lot of distance between them. However, when it came to Buckley, I think Buckley and Viereck did have some political differences, but they had some strong personality differences also.
John Grove:
I could see that.
John Wilsey:
When Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale, Viereck wrote a review of it for the New York Times, I believe it was the New York Times, and he said, “The book is valuable,” but, “Someday being intelligent and earnest, Buckley may give us the hard-won wisdom of synthesis.” Someday, be intelligent and earnest. Wow, that’s pretty rough. That’s not good. So he wrote a blistering review of God and Man at Yale, and Buckley was immediately anti-Viereck after that. So Buckley was an eccentric as well. He was a weird bird too in his own way. He could be quite elitist. And if you weren’t an East Coaster, then something was wrong with you, and so forth.
So the fact that Viereck was such an eccentric, I can’t remember if it’s [inaudible 00:39:32] or somebody who relates a story about the two of them we’re walking down a street talking and Viereck ran into a signpost or something like that, and it really threw Buckley off. It was very off-putting. You would never find Buckley running into a signpost. So Buckley didn’t like his eccentricities, he was put off by them. But the biggest thing, I think, and this was something that Frank Meyer said, Frank Meyer accused Viereck of being a fake conservative, a wolf in sheep’s clothing because he supported Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and in 1956, and he was also someone who did not support the jettisoning of the New Deal.
John Grove:
So I’m going to jump in right now and say, okay, I like a lot of what I read with Viereck, but gosh, I don’t know. Some of this stuff he says about the New Deal, “Well, there’s nothing like …” I look at the New Deal, I kind of … I mean, I’m sort of on the same page as some of those mid-century conservatives that say, “Well, this is the centralized state taking over what has traditionally been the purview of civil society, of families. People get old, guess what? Now, the government takes care of you. You don’t have families.” It seems like a very strong conservative in the Viereck vein, the conservative argument that the New Deal really does undermine the sort of cultural social authority that he seems to value.
So, one, why did he not see it as so bad? I’ll put another one out there: another conservative who seems to be very similar to my mind with Viereck is Robert Nisbet. I don’t know what their relationship was, but Nisbet, of course, is very critical of that New Deal direction. So, I wonder why Viereck does not see it as such a big deal. And secondly, I think I know the answer to this, can somebody like me who, I’m more on Nisbet’s wavelength on that, can I still value and find a lot of good stuff in Viereck, even if that’s a sticking point?
John Wilsey:
Yeah, I think you can. I think we all can, because we may disagree with Viereck on this, just as you’ve articulated, but Viereck had conservative reasons for supporting Stevenson and I wouldn’t say he supported the New Deal, but he did think that it was a mistake to get rid of it, to jettison it. And it goes back to what we were talking about with regard to the flux, the change, by the 1950s, the New Deal had been in place for 20 years, and the country had gotten sort of accustomed to the New Deal being a part of society, being an ingrained part of society. And he was a realist in that sense. He said that this is the world we live in, the New Deal is part of our world, and it’s a futile sort of position to take to say, let’s get rid of this because you can’t get rid of it.
It’s not realistic to pass legislation to divest the country of the New Deal. As complex as it is, and as far-reaching as it is, it’s just not realistic. It might be a similar kind of thing to talk about Obamacare today. You can’t get rid of Obamacare because it’s so ingrained in society now. It’s been around for a long time and people depend on it and so forth and so on. And so you can’t support an unrealistic set of policies. So his solution was to localize the New Deal, to take the New Deal and reform it and make it a bottom-up kind of a system instead of a top-down sort of a system. So to get rid of that—
John Grove:
So that sounds a lot better.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, to get rid of the centralizing impulse of the New Deal and to reform the New Deal in a way that the institutions of the New Deal would serve local communities, instead of being a 10,000-mile-long screwdriver from Washington, DC. He supported Adlai Stevenson, but he talks about this in that chapter, Rootless, Establishment for Roots, about how, for example, James Madison was somebody who was a dear friend of Thomas Jefferson, ultimately would join the Democratic-Republican Party, as he describes, became a liberal. And yet he wrote Federalist Number 10 and wrote pretty much half of the Federalist Papers. And the Federalist Papers is a conservative document and one of our roots in the American constitutional order.
So what he describes is that here’s Madison, who is a liberal, and he is sort of joining the cause of the Federalists in advocating for the Constitution. So you have someone, how should I say it, he’s from the other side. He’s not a conservative, but he’s joining the conservatives for this particular purpose. He talks about Adlai Stevenson as being a liberal, but he’s actually much more conservative than Dwight Eisenhower, who Adlai Stevenson was someone who could do good for the Democratic Party to keep the Democratic Party from rushing to the left and becoming radicalized. And he said that it’s also good for a liberal to come into the Republican Party to keep that party from rushing to the right and becoming extreme on the right.
John Grove:
That’s interesting because people talk about that very much today, that both parties have really sort of just been purged by and large of anyone that’s not pretty solidly in line with John Fetterman’s aside and a few other handfuls of odd ducks, but yeah. Well, that’s interesting and a little bit more nuanced than what I had gotten from a sort of glancing look at Viereck. So before we move on from Viereck then, what would you suggest to a listener if they want to read the first thing to read for Viereck. Would it be Unadjusted Man, or would it be the conservatism book, or what do you think is the best introduction?
John Wilsey:
I would say the best introduction is Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill.
John Grove:
And we’ll link to that in our show notes.
John Wilsey:
And that’s a reprint as well, but I think that reprint is a faithful reprint.
John Grove:
Yeah, it has all the charges.
John Wilsey:
I believe it’s Transaction that did it as well. Another one that’s great, and I think if you’re new to Viereck and you read Conservatism and you enjoyed it, the next step then to take would be to read his Conservatism Revisited. He wrote that in—
John Grove:
Right. I looked at that. 10 years ago I looked through that, I think.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, he wrote that in 1949. I think it was his first book that he wrote. And the edition that’s available to us now has a beautiful introduction by Klaus Wren. Very lengthy. I think it’s about 70, 80 pages where many of the stories I told I got from that introduction by Klaus Wren. Not the stories from his Professor days, those were from other sources, but Klaus Wren gives a really beautiful biography of Viereck. There’s also a book called Pragmatic Conservatism by Robert Lacey, in which he has a quite lengthy chapter on Viereck, I believe. I’m pretty sure it’s that book.
John Grove:
That’s a relatively recent book, I think.
John Wilsey:
That’s a recent book. So Robert Lacey did that treatment. So those are all good. And then of course, his poetry, I think the one to read is Tara Decorum. I’m not a poetry person. Some people are. I like poetry, I guess. I’m not anti-poetry. I’m no expert, but when it comes to his poetry, I think the one to get ahold of is the one that he won the Pulitzer.
John Grove:
Right. All right. Well, tell us-
John Wilsey:
The Unadjusted Man, it’s a classic and you can get that. And despite its flaws, it’s a fantastic book, but I would say read those two books on conservatism first.
John Grove:
Okay, great. So tell us about your next book coming up in April. And interesting, I knew you had been working on Viereck, and I knew you had been working on this other book. I thought they were separate, but you actually said Viereck actually takes, as you say, a starring role in this new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. So tell us a little bit about the book, maybe how Viereck fits into that, but just generally the book as a whole and why you wrote this one.
John Wilsey:
Yeah, thanks. The book is called Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. It is being published by Eerdmans. It comes out in April. And the thesis of the book is that conservatives are in the best position to conserve and preserve the American tradition of religious freedom. And so I take a sort of a Tocquevillian angle. Tocqueville said that in America, the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty are in harmony with one another, contrasted with in his native France, where they were at war with one another. So how did Americans maintain that harmony between the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom? And so in answering that question, I say, “Well, the conservative tradition is the path forward for that. Conservatives revere tradition, conservatives revere authority, conservatives revere order, conservatives revere freedom, all for the sake of human beings, human persons.” So conservativism is a humanistic disposition.
Viereck takes a starring role because in the first chapter, the chapter on what conservativism is, I actually look at Kirk and Viereck and sort of define traditionalist conservativism through the lens of both Kirk and Viereck. And I did that on purpose. I wanted to put the two together. I think that people who do know who Viereck was automatically go to this conflict that he had with several people in the movement early on, but I want to just insist that Viereck and Kirk are much closer than they are foes or partisans against one another. And I think that that demonstrates that conservativism is primarily pre-political and a disposition and not a set of ideologies. And when people like Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley accuse Viereck of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, they’re being ideological. They’re being false to their own confession, as it were. And so I think that putting them alongside each other is more helpful.
John Grove:
Sometimes, too, now talking 50, 60, 70 years later, some that personal animosity is no longer as alive. And so you can sit back a little bit more and say like, “Hey, how different really were these guys?”
John Wilsey:
Yeah, were they really? So, anyway, that’s the thesis of the book. I also look at some of the features of conservatism and how these things relate to religion and religious freedom in the American tradition. So it’s coming out in April, and I’m excited about it. I hope it’s going to be good. I think it’s good, but that’s-
John Grove:
Great. I’m sure it is. I’m looking forward to reading it for sure.
John Wilsey:
It doesn’t really matter what I think.
John Grove:
Right. Yeah. All right, well, John, thank you so much for joining us here. Had a great talk. And we will link to a lot of the books and references that we made here on our show notes. So check that out at lawliberty.org. So thanks again, and we’ll talk again soon.
John Wilsey:
Thanks so much.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
In the wake of the 2024 election, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels joins James Patterson to talk about the one issue politicians all try to avoid: the national debt. Though we have an impending debt disaster, both sides of the aisle avoid the hard choices that will eventually need to be made. Today, Daniels worries, it may be too late for a soft landing. We chose not to find solutions, and we’ll start living with consequences very soon. Daniels and Patterson also touch on the state of higher education, the election, and our evolving partisan dynamics.
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Related Links: Mitch Daniels, “The Day the Dollar Died,” Washington Post * Mitch Daniels, “I’m Talking to You,” Law & Liberty (2022 Purdue University Commencement Remarks) * The Future of Liberty, hosted by Mitch Daniels * Vance Ginn and Thomas Savidge, “Two Rules to Tackle America’s Debt,” Law & Liberty * Samuel Gregg, “David Hume and America’s Debt Disaster,” Law & Liberty*
Transcript James Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m James Patterson. Today is November 8, 2024. Today, our guest is Governor Mitch Daniels. Mitch Daniels served as a two-term governor of the state of Indiana from 2004 to 2012, and as the 12th President of Purdue University from 2013 to 2022. He currently serves as a distinguished scholar and senior advisor at Liberty Fund. He was elected governor in his first bid for any elected office and then reelected with more votes than any candidate in the state’s history. At Purdue, Daniels prioritized student affordability and reinvestment in the university’s strengths.
He ended 36 straight years of rising prices by freezing tuition and mandatory fees at 2012 levels for all students. The freeze is still in place today. As a result, the total cost of attendance is lower today than in 2012, even without adjusting for inflation and aggregate, student borrowing has declined by 37 percent. Prior to becoming Governor, Daniels served as Chief of Staff to Senator Richard Lugar, Senior Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush. He also was the CEO of the Hudson Institute and had an 11-year career as an executive at Eli Lilly and Company. Daniels earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a law degree from Georgetown. He’s the author of three books and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. He and his wife Cheri have four daughters and eight grandchildren. Congratulations. I should mention that he is also the host of the podcast, the Future of Liberty, here on Liberty Fund. My goodness, Governor Daniels, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Mitch Daniels:
After that long and dreary recitation, James, I hope we have some listeners left. If they’ve all fled, I would understand but thank you. It’s very gracious of you.
James Patterson:
I just read what they sent me, Mitch. … No, sorry, Governor Daniels. As a Native Texan, I get a little informal. So let’s get started. We just had an election, but I wanted to frame the election around something that I know is important to you and should be more important to the people of this country. Last September, you wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post titled, “The Day the Dollar Died is Coming. What’s the plan?” I thought we might open with you talking about the argument you present there and whether the results of the recent presidential election might have changed your views.
Mitch Daniels:
I haven’t changed my views because my views are based on arithmetic. And it’s pretty inexorable and certain. No, I mean, I thought a sadness of the most recent election was that what I consider the biggest threat facing the country, and I’m not alone in that, never got mentioned by either candidate and when it did … I’m talking about our national debts we’ve accumulated and are accumulating, and when it came up even tangentially, it only served as a platform for the two candidates to promise to make it worse. That is not to touch the so-called entitlement programs and things that will have to be touched eventually if we’re to avoid national ruin. So I understand why practicing politicians run away from this question, but as a nation, we won’t be able to do that much longer.
James Patterson:
Actually, that leads to my next question. Why do you think issues like the debt and budget deficits don’t play a bigger role in our politics despite the fact that we have a pretty proximate disaster running here? Is it that it’s just easy to kick the can or maybe they don’t even know?
Mitch Daniels:
It is too easy. It’s too easy to demagogue the issue. We’ve not found, or no national politician has found a vocabulary or chosen to use one that tries to explain to people that, for instance … people who are worried about this and want to act on it aren’t out to undercut the safety net and those who rely on it, we want to save it and save it from devouring itself, for instance. And so each person, it’s not that a few people haven’t tried to get Americans to think a little more about the future, a little less about the present, more about their children, a little less about themselves. It’s just that each time somebody stuck their head up tried to do that, it’s been a political cheap shot to take it off. And that doesn’t speak well of our maturity as a self-governing people. But you know this old saw that we won’t act on problems until there’s a crisis, I suppose is playing out again.
Before I wrote the piece you just mentioned, I’ve written a bunch and spouted off on this for many, many years. And during those years, I’ll say the last 15 or so, we’ve unfortunately I think moved past the point where we can deal with this without some pretty wrenching changes. We had that opportunity. If we’d gotten started back for instance, when the Simpson-Bowles Commission reported before President Obama walked away from it and torpedoed it. If we’d gotten started then there’d have been some difficulty as we tried to keep the promises we’ve made and social security and Medicare and other programs, but we could have moderated that. We certainly could have protected the most vulnerable people better than we’re going to be able to now. So just to compound this problem, James, something else has happened in those 15 years that … and I really don’t have an answer for this, and that is that our national defenses have atrophied.
While our adversaries have gained strength, and aggressiveness and appear to be allying with each other. And so we face a twin dilemma, it seems to me right now. If you consider as I do, the two fundamental duties of government, the reasons government comes into being in the first place, first to protect the safety and order of those to whom it’s responsible. And secondly, to dispense of collective resources. Those we confiscate from free people for what we believe to be important common purposes. We’re defaulting on both of those and now we have huge repair work to do on both fronts. And those two fronts are inconsistent with each other. So not trying to ruin everybody’s morning or whatever time the day they’re listening to this, but I think we have to face these challenges very squarely. And I hope despite the campaign that we just saw that the next administration and the next Congress will do so.
James Patterson:
How did we end up in this mess? It’s very unusual for nations historically to go into such debt during peacetime. I mean, certainly during some of this period in the post-war years we were at war, but not all the time and not necessarily at costs that would necessarily entail the size of the debt we have now.
Mitch Daniels:
Good question. It’s a reflection, I guess of the advance, if you call it that, of civilization. No country I can … no nation, I can think of that has reached the point we have reached. This year, we reached a more than symbolic threshold as interest payments on the debt surpassed our investment in national defense. And no nation that has gotten to that point before has come out of it well—in fact has really survived as an important world power. But those throughout history that have passed that point generally got there because of wars. England, fighting France and Habsburg Spain, and so forth. And we got there with the—I’m willing to credit—the best of intentions, trying to make certain that people were not destitute in their old age, things like that, but without the will, as it turned out, to fund those programs adequately. So now people are going to have to be told that many of the promises that were made can’t be fully kept and that many of the premises that they thought they understood were not true. I’m talking about the idea that somehow people have paid for their own retirement and so forth through social security, which is not the case for most.
James Patterson:
Yeah, and actually on that subject. In 2023, Nationwide sponsored a survey run by the Harris poll, and the results were pretty astonishing for people that don’t follow this stuff closely. Three fourths of adults over the age of 50 were worried that social security would run out in their lifetime, and that’s up from 66 percent 10 years ago. Additionally, one in five adults over 50 say they have no source of retirement income in addition to social security, and that’s up from 13 percent 10 years ago; and nearly half of Americans had a pension in addition to Social Security 10 years ago, but that’s only 31 percent today. What’s going to happen to these state-run retirement programs in the coming years? Are these Americans right to be worried?
Mitch Daniels:
Yes, they are. I think when—and it’s no longer if, unfortunately, as I said, we’ve procrastinated too long. When we’re not able to keep all the promises, then finally, we will start means-testing these programs in effect. That is to say, reducing or eliminating payments to the wealthiest Americans. That never made any sense in the first place to send a check every month to Warren Buffett or somebody, but by the architects of the program, they believed that they couldn’t honestly make this a welfare program or a program for the less well-off because it wouldn’t have enough political support. I don’t believe that. I think Americans will continue to support it, but that’s going to have to change, that’ll be one of the first things to change.
But you’re really raising the issue that’s always troubled me the most. Our debt is going to be—is already I think—but is going to be a serious economic drag on the country, as the government is forced to borrow more and more of the money that could otherwise be invested in the next technology or the next innovation or the next factory. That’s an economic problem. But I’m worried even more about the social costs, the sense of betrayal that I think will happen when these chickens roost. People will have a legitimate reason to say that they were misled and not well-served. I think history will judge harshly those who were in positions of national authority over the last decade or two since somebody last tried at least address this problem.
James Patterson:
Yeah. I always like to have some questions that I want to ask and you’re going in exactly the order here. This is going to really change our politics. We just went through what a lot of people were calling a vibes election in which the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, really avoided taking very specific stances on a lot of issues and the victorious Donald Trump avoided talking about at least this issue and focused on issues like immigration. I mean, when the chickens come out to roost as you put it, they’re not going to be able to avoid these things with vibes or alternative policy preferences. So how do you see this changing our politics?
Mitch Daniels:
Well, it’ll be a big shakeup, and these happen in history. The current generations haven’t seen it, but they’re inevitable ultimately. The last such change would’ve been the Depression and the New Deal, and it changed our politics. This will happen again, and it can be positive on the backside. We’ll just have to hope it is. But this is the story of history, with nations or civilizations rising to leadership and prominence, running into crisis of one kind or another. The question is, how do the elites of that time handle or not handle the challenge? And usually it results in the replacement of one set of elites by another.
Despite the fact that I wish that the candidates and the campaigns had confronted this issue you’ve just asked about directly or confronted it at all, I do think that this election was settled on really important grounds. The, I think relentless suppression of free speech and inquiry; people afraid to say what they think—what it turns out, a majority of people think about certain questions. I think the so-called vibes, that election you talked about to some extent meant that, that people just felt they were tired of being told that they were sexist, racist, misogynist, all these things for believing what they thought to be common sense, and turns out a majority of their neighbors thought the same.
James Patterson:
It’s especially difficult for, as you said, a majority of Americans to endure this when it’s pretty clear that experts at administrative agencies don’t know what they’re doing and want to conceal this fact by engaging in limits on free speech. And that’s what worries me when I was asking you the question about the politics of the national debt, is that there’s such little trust in much of the government that it’s unclear that people will be happy with any decision that Congress and the President would have to make. Or even worse, they’re right to suspect that Congress may not have the people in office that can make good law to deal with this. I don’t mean to be too pessimistic, but you’re the one with the experience in politics, so maybe let me know if I’m a bit too doom and gloom.
Mitch Daniels:
I can’t say that you are, but every new administration is a chance to turn a page and do things differently. There appears to be, as we’re speaking here, at least a temporary majority that is in a position to act. It’s been my observation that the time of greatest peril for political actors is the time of greatest triumph. They tend to over-read. The last administration certainly did, won a very, very narrow victory on the clear impression that they would return the nation to something more like normalcy, more like consensus, and instead veered into extremist policies on issue after issue. So I think they’re paying the price right now for that. The new administration, the new Congress could make the very same mistake if they aren’t thoughtful about it. But again, I think we are facing this dual threat, not to even mention other problems the nation is host to, this dual-threat that’d be very hard to reconcile the necessary rebuilding of our national security at the very time when we are borrowing money in unconscionable amounts.
James Patterson:
Well, what do you think are at least the best or the most likely policies for handling the national debt or the ones that you’d like to see?
Mitch Daniels:
I think the best available option that I’m aware of that’s practical would be the creation of another commission, this time with teeth. Congress can’t avoid the up and down vote on a package that’ll have all sorts of things people regret or dislike in it—there will be something for everybody to hate. And that’s an idea that’s been out there for a while. It has supporters. I don’t know whether it can gain any legs in the current Congress or not or with the President. But in terms of a practical near-term answer, I think that’s the one that would have a chance to at least start nibbling on the heart of the problem. The standard processes of Washington have proven that they’re not well configured to do that.
James Patterson:
Yeah. One of the ones that you sort of hinted at earlier about Warren Buffett getting checks reminds me of a story when I first moved down here to Ave Maria, which is right next to Naples, a major retirement area in Florida. I was getting my haircut at a salon/barbershop and a woman who came in a late model Mercedes explained to the woman cutting her hair that she just got her social security check and was going to go spend it at the Seminole Casino.
Mitch Daniels:
Yeah. I know.
James Patterson:
And I was like, the lady cutting your hair is paying her social security for you to drive your G-Wagon to the casino. That’s a lot to take in.
Mitch Daniels:
Odds are that the Mercedes owner didn’t even consider who was paying, who was funding that check of hers. She may be one of those millions of Americans who still believe that somehow, it was their money, they parked it themselves and now they’re just taking it out.
James Patterson:
Yeah, that is a common misconception now, unfortunately.
Mitch Daniels:
Well, it was intentional. It’s called in the social security literature, the noble lie, not clear to me how lies are ever noble, but the idea was we have to tell people that so they will maintain support of this program and that old myth has died very slowly and is still alive in too many places.
James Patterson:
So we’ve seen actually a lot of surveys where you have people who are millennials, Gen X, even Gen Z, don’t actually have any expectation of receiving anything like the retirement security that baby boomers came to expect. Do you think maybe that might actually make this easier to deal with since people have less of a stake in the idea that they’ll get this money?
Mitch Daniels:
It’s healthy and it’s realistic on their part, and if they are diligent about saving more money for their own retirement or their own later years, that’s a good thing in more than one way. But it won’t solve the problem that we have and will have more and more and more people taking out of the till and fewer and fewer people relatively paying in. And if the economy and where they’re earning their money doesn’t grow very, very strong, they won’t be paying in enough to forestall the day of reckoning. But no, it’s the right conclusion for today’s younger generations to come to and I hope they act on the obvious implications of it.
James Patterson:
So shifting to another subject that I know a lot of listeners to this podcast think a lot about, which is higher education. You were president of Purdue, which made you technically the boss of two of my friends from graduate school who I want to name, but they were very pleased with the administration you provided. What is it that conservatives maybe don’t understand or know about large research universities like Purdue?
Mitch Daniels:
They know a lot these days and that’s one reason that there’s been such a sharp decline in confidence, trust, support for higher ed. It’s come down as you know very sharply nationally and that decline is driven by people who describe themselves as conservatives, Republicans or otherwise philosophically on that side. So you say what don’t they know? They may not know how monolithic and how deeply entrenched the status quo is.
It took a couple, three generations to get to a point where the places which are supposed to be the sanctuaries for free inquiry and the competition of ideas and so forth, which in fact have as their raison d’etre, the advance of knowledge and knowledge only advances when you have different points of view. When everybody thinks the same thing, you get stasis. And so I think that people see the more flagrant examples of alternative viewpoints being stifled. They may not realize how many are never expressed just because it would be career limiting to do so.
They may not fully appreciate how intimidated the students are, not just by the faculty by the way, but when you ask them, they’re afraid of their own fellow students sometimes as much as the professor in front of the class. So there’s all that. Now, people don’t need any instruction in the inefficiency of higher education, the cost, and so forth. They see that close up and you’re seeing behavior change. You’re seeing rates of college going declining as people have belatedly come to question the value: “Am I getting enough for the high amount of money I’ve been asked to pay?”
James Patterson:
The trouble with making that assessment about the value is that as a lot of these younger Americans learn about what goes on at these campuses, they are a little afraid. They don’t want to have to take stands on issues they don’t fully understand or maybe is in the minority of what they perceive that college to have. And worse, they are more than aware of how easy it is to have themselves publicized all over the world just by being filmed at an event. And so the costs often seem to be not just in terms of the amount of student debt you’ll have to pay down, but also in sort of psychic or reputational costs. What is it that university presidents should be doing to deal with order on campus?
Mitch Daniels:
In all honesty, I don’t know how much of the flattening or decline in college-going relates to the ideological character. I mean, I know there are a lot of students who choose which school to go to on that basis if they’re aware enough or they’ve learned enough about the intellectual climate or environment. But it’s clearly being driven by the run-up in costs over such a long period of time matched on the other side of the equation, unfortunately, by a decline in rigor and quality.
The figures around grade inflation make you rub your eyes. There are colleges now where the average, average grade is 3.5, [3.]6, [3.]7 [3.]8. You ask yourself, how bad does a student have to be to get a B? In honesty, I have felt for a long time that the notion that we were promoting in this country, everybody ought to go to college, was flawed. And that we were encouraging too many young people to go that route as opposed to learning something beyond high school. And you can see the casualties in the low graduation rates that we have and way, way too many of those people did not advance themselves in life by spending one or two years in a school.
The odds are what all they came out with was some debt, or at least the lost opportunity to have been doing something else more productive in that time. So anyway, I think that the shakeout we’re seeing: we’re seeing schools shrink, we’re seeing schools merge, we’re seeing some schools disappear. It’s sad each time it happens, but it was absolutely understandable and probably necessary. I hope the survivors draw the obvious conclusions.
James Patterson:
Yeah, we’re two years away from the demographic cliff. We were talking about the fiscal cliff earlier. 2008, we had the housing crisis and the Great Recession begin and that’s when the American birth rate took a nosedive. And in 2008, you had 18, the average college-going age. It’s 2026 and that’s when the real deluge will hit and a lot of places are going to close. It’s weird because here at Ave, we’ve got maximum enrollment and a big reason for that is that we’re a confessional school that remains confessional. There are a lot of religious liberal arts schools in the mid-century back during the heyday of the Higher Education Act and GI Bill benefits that pivoted away from that. Is this maybe what you see the future here being: differentiation of services as well as maybe closures?
Mitch Daniels:
Well, this is how efficient markets operate. I’ve said to colleagues in more than one of the lives I’ve led. In business, our business hit a very prolonged period of difficulty. I was employed by the people of the state of Indiana at times during a period of very difficult national recession and so forth. And I made the, I think, obvious point that these are the times that sort the winners and losers, sort the best from the also-rans.
And that a business, a state, in this case, an institution of higher education, that recognizes what needs to be done, has the will and fortitude to do it, not only can survive but come out with a higher, let’s say, market share than it had. So I’m not surprised you’re growing. Purdue University is bursting at the seams. In fact, we’ve reached what I had always thought—I mean, we grew by 30 percent the years I was there, while the quality of students incidentally kept going up. And at our school, we have reached what I believe is just about the capacity that makes sense from an academic and quality of life standpoint. So we’re going to grow elsewhere now.
But that I think is what you’re most likely to see. And there will be schools that do very, very well that respond to the felt need and to the problems that have plagued the system most recently.
James Patterson:
So just taking a step backwards and just more talking to you about your own life and your own experiences as we near the end of the podcast.
Mitch Daniels:
This will drive away any remaining listeners probably.
James Patterson:
Well …
Mitch Daniels:
But let’s try.
James Patterson:
Now I’m self-conscious. Now, I don’t know if I should ask this question. Tell me about your hobbies. No, no. How has politics changed since you were in the mix?
Mitch Daniels:
Immensely. Yeah.
James Patterson:
Yeah.
Mitch Daniels:
One clear difference is there are enormous technological differences, so much conducted digitally and so forth now. It was not that long ago that I was in this world and I resisted using the so-called social media and so forth. Now it’s probably two-thirds of the game, I guess. So there’s all that. But of course the tenor of it has changed. I’ve said so often, right up until I was done, certainly in none of the three campaigns I was party to, a primary and two general elections—the only time I ever ran for public office—we never made a negative commercial. And I made a thing of that. I used to say that. It was an absolute guaranteed applause line right up to the end of 2012 to make this point.
I worked for Ronald Reagan many years ago, I used to quote him who said to a couple of us one day when we got a little too hotheaded, he’d say, “Wait, boys, we have no enemies, only opponents.” Which was a good rule, I thought, to try to operate by. And I had a few lapses, but generally tried to do that. And to your question, we conducted our campaigns that way. I used to say “we will show respect for our opponents, whether that respect is returned or not.” In a way that was about, my view, we were campaigning to govern not merely to win an election.
And we intended, and I claim that we made, enormous change in our state throughout our time there in service. And I thought it was essential, I used to say big change requires big majorities. Look at this last administration, they won by a whisker and then jammed enormous change down the throats of the American economy and the American people. And I think that’s, first of all, bad practice. And secondly, it’s not a way to make that change endure because if it spurs a reaction like it just did, a lot of that, what you did is going to get undone. And so that’s a big, big difference.
So for today’s candidates, it would be folly, I suppose, for somebody to campaign as we did. You would probably lose after an unending barrage of criticism and sometimes falsehoods and all, you’d spend a lot of money trying to defend and correct and refute these things. There would be somebody, this was the case back then, we always had people come around saying, “Oh, you can’t win like that. You got to tear that other person apart.” Happily, we managed to succeed without doing that. But I confess that that’s the currency of winning politics today.
James Patterson:
Yeah, the transition to social media really does seem to have not just made it more required for candidates to be on there, but also seems to have captured the imaginations or even the perceptions of the world by people on campaign staff. I remember the article about Harris’s failed 2020 campaign, talked about how her entire staff was very online. And I was worried about that happening with her this time, but it appears like her entire campaign staff was gone. They just didn’t have events for her or good messages for her. But most of the time, I do think there is this issue where people perceive the political reality of the world too often through things like X or Twitter or Instagram.
Mitch Daniels:
Well, by now, they’re bookshelves full of analysis about this, it’s come on us very, very quickly, but still its effects and I’m hard put to identify too many positive effects. On polarization, people both seeking out and being fed by some algorithm of things that simply confirm their own view.
James Patterson:
Yeah.
Mitch Daniels:
All sorts of things like that, the tone—we all know people will say something at a computer keyboard, they wouldn’t say to somebody in person, all of that. And it’s a reality. And one has to hope that those who would govern us well can find a way to succeed in that reality and yet lead us in a way that is not so polarizing, not so sometimes superficial. Because we’ve got what I always called 50-caliber issues that we have to deal with and that has not, as some of your questions illustrated, driven the content of the campaigns we have.
And granted, state-level elections can be about other things, they don’t have quite the yes-no binary questions that federal candidates have or are required really to speak to, they’re more practical. But I always saw our campaigns as one-of-a-kind opportunities to explain to people what it is we would do if we were hired. And if you do that and then happen to be chosen, you have every right and some basis then to move forward on that program. And nobody can claim that they were surprised or misled in some way. And so that is not, right now at least, the incentive that our national candidates seem to see in front of them. And I don’t fault them for dealing with reality as they find it.
James Patterson:
Thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast, Governor Mitch Daniels. I hope we have you on again soon. And again, those of you listening to this, please also listen to his podcast, The Future of Liberty. I have that right, right?
Mitch Daniels:
That’s correct.
James Patterson:
All right. Put also on by Liberty Fund. Thank you so much, Governor.
Mitch Daniels:
Appreciate it.
James Patterson:
We’ll see you guys next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online www.lawliberty.org.
Konstantin Kisin has emerged as a powerful voice opposing “wokeness”—in part because he has a unique appreciation for what makes Western civilization special. He and Helen Dale discuss the current state of wokeness, his own engagement with it, and the politics of the US, UK, and Australia. Ultimately, our moment calls not just for diagnosing Western malaise, but also gratitude for all the West offers us, and optimism for its future.
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Related Links Konstantin Kisin’s Substack * TRIGGERnometry Podcast, hosted by Kisin and Francis Foster * “We Went to America … What the Media Didn’t Tell You,” TRIGGERnometry episode on Kisin and Foster’s time in the United States * An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West * “To See Ourselves as Others See Us,” Law & Liberty (Helen Dale’s review of An Immigrant’s Love Letter*) * Helen Dale’s Substack
TranscriptJames Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Helen Dale:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty podcast, I’m Helen Dale, senior writer at Law & Liberty, a publication of Liberty Fund. I’m here in lieu of our regular host, James Patterson. Today, I am pleased to be joined by Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the well-known TRIGGERnometry podcast, with fellow comedian, Francis Foster. TRIGGERnometry started as a shoestring operation in 2018 and has grown to enormous size. Konstantin’s skill as an interviewer and conversationalist also means he’s worked as a foil for interlocutors as varied as Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson at their events and tours. He’s written a book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, which I reviewed for Law & Liberty in January 2023, and which turned into a surprise bestseller. He returned from the US last month after covering the election, and it’s fair to say he’s in demand, especially just before Christmas. So Konstantin, thanks very much for joining us.
Konstantin Kisin:
My pleasure, Helen, so it’s good to be on the other side of the microphone, so to speak, with you now, as you’ve been on the show many times now.
Helen Dale:
I’ve been on TRIGGERnometry twice, I probably should come back at some point.
Konstantin Kisin:
That is many times nowadays, but you are a very welcome guest, and one of my favorites.
Helen Dale:
Thank you very much. Start off with a sort of general question about your writing career, actually, because you are now, I think, the largest Substack in the UK, or very close, you and Matt Goodwin [inaudible 00:02:10].
Konstantin Kisin:
Yeah, I’m usually slightly ahead of Matt. I haven’t published an article for a few weeks, so he’s probably going to take over, which he deserves, he’s doing great work. Yes, what do you want to know about my writing career?
Helen Dale:
Yeah, it’s just, I saw a recent interview with you where you said you wanted your second book to be more optimistic than your first. How’s that going-
Konstantin Kisin:
Very badly.
Helen Dale:
… and why do you think it needs more optimism?
Konstantin Kisin:
Okay, well, so my second book, I have actually handed back the contract that I was about to sign for it, because I just didn’t have the time to actually write the second book that I wanted to. And also, the mechanics and the economics of the writing market, so to speak, have changed so dramatically that I make more from some articles I write financially than I did from writing the first book in its entirety.
Helen Dale:
That’s just dreadful. That’s really sad.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes, so you can see why the appeal of writing a second book has gone down, for someone who wants to write a really good second book, but I’m just very time-poor at the moment, and so, that sort of commitment is difficult. But the reason I think … To spend less time talking about me and more about the issues, I think that the concept for me was first and foremost, the realization that those of us who’d spent quite some time and a lot of energy doing our very best to articulate where we thought the western world was going wrong, had not done enough, nearly enough, to say what the correct path should be.
And a very good friend of mine, Winston Marshall and I, we hosted a dinner to which we invited a small number of people, all of whom in some way had been part of this movement. And I sort of went around the table and I pointed the finger of blame at each of us, and I said, let me start with myself, I wrote a book called, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, which is almost entirely about what’s wrong with the direction of the modern West. Louise Perry, a good friend of mine, was there, and I said, well, Louise, you wrote a book called, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. And Freddie Sayers from UnHerd was there, and I said, your … And before I even got to him, he was like, well, yes, we are called UnHerd, and on and on and went.
And it sort of became very clear that there’s a large movement of people who had got very good at saying, we are heading in the wrong direction, which I believe very firmly, but not very good at articulating the direction of travel that we ought to be on. And so, that needed doing. I think a lot has changed since the election in the United States in recent months, or last month, and a lot will change when the new administration comes in next month, but broadly speaking, I think … The book was going to have one of two titles, it was either just going to be called Gratitude, or it was going to be called, Can We Please Show Some Fucking Gratitude? It was one of those two options that I was toying with.
And the idea is, very briefly, that I think we talk an awful lot, or we have been talking an awful lot, about all sorts of privilege, male privilege, white privilege, straight, all kinds of privilege that is purported to exist in the world. And to some extent, I’m sure there’s elements of truth to all of those claims, elements of truth, even though the broad claims, I think are bogus. But the one privilege that we don’t talk about nearly enough is what Francis and I both call Western privilege, it’s the fact that we live in societies that are extraordinarily successful.
And when I had the great honor of doing a small tour of your country, Australia, the point was incredibly easy to make, I would simply say to the people that I was speaking to in the various cities there, I am making the claim, the Western civilization produces the things that human beings want, and I’m not making the claim that Western civilization is better on some sort of moral or ethical level, although there are claims that could be made of that nature. I just wasn’t interested in having that argument. But what I observe is that, until Tony Abbott, your former Prime Minister, stopped the boats coming, tens of thousands of people every year risk their lives in shark-infested waters to come to Australia. How many young Australians were getting on rickety boats and heading to neighboring countries in the region? And Australia, it seems to me, is the exact test case that you would use to prove the superiority of Western civilization at creating-
Helen Dale:
Australia is an astonishing place to visit, and I have to say, I mean, lots of people in the British press have commented about how incompetent Keir Starmer is, and how incompetent the Tories were before Starmer. You can’t just line Starmer up, he’s continuing with very bad governance, in ways-
Konstantin Kisin:
… Before I go on … Sorry, before we move, I just wanted to finish this point, that even if we take everything you’re saying about poor governance in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe, into account, nonetheless, the example I’m giving you is still true, there are tens of thousands of people risking their lives across the Mediterranean and across the English Channel, although that’s obviously mercifully less of a risk. And we don’t need to say very much about the United States, where millions of people are risking their lives and paying money to traffickers and being sexually assaulted, and all of that happening. They’re doing so because our societies are better, and if we could actually just be honest about that and remember that, and were grateful for that, and taught our children to be grateful for what they have, we might have some way of recognizing, what are the good things about our society, and therefore, preserving them and advancing them into the future.
Helen Dale:
Yeah, it’s interesting you’ve gone with the gratitude line, and at some point, if not a book, maybe the smaller pieces could go on your Substack, or just go on the TRIGGERnometry website that you do, or however you’d prefer to arrange that, because I actually think … Because I asked about optimism based on an interview I saw of you, and I’m going to come back to that with my next question. But gratitude is related to optimism, but it’s not the same thing. I mean, there’s an Australian expression that if you don’t know where you’ve come from, you will be all duck and no dinner, and gratitude captures that quality, I think.
But just coming back to the optimism point, I can remember Trump, when he launched his campaign in 2015, saying the line, sadly, the American dream is dead. That was in that initial talk, and later on, in 2016, he made some pretty dark speeches, he continued to make some pretty dark speeches. In 2024, by contrast, you and many others, it’s not just you and Francis here, have commented on Trump’s optimism during the campaign. What do you think is behind that shift? That’s a big shift, I mean, he’s a major public figure.
Konstantin Kisin:
Well, I think that frankly, the argument on the fact that we are heading to disaster has been won, and I don’t think anyone really would dispute, clearly, among the sensible majority of people in America and many other Western countries, that the direction of travel over the last 8, 12, 20 years, has really been terrible, and that we can’t continue going in that direction. We can’t continue to have countries with open borders, we can’t continue to reintroduce race essentialism into the way we administer our societies, we can’t continue to position men and women as enemies in some sort of moronic battle of the sexes, we can’t continue to replace meritocracy with victimocracy, we can’t continue to undo the Western project. And I think it wasn’t Trump, but just the entire scale of our public discourse, has made it undeniable that this is the case. And when I was in the US, there was this overwhelming sense of optimism now, including among people who actually didn’t vote for Donald Trump.
If you look at, say, the business community, people who are CEOs and executives, when you talk to them, they are excited as hell about the next four years. Even if some of them will say to you privately, look, Trump’s incredibly obnoxious, and I think he’s, whatever, I don’t like his rhetoric, I don’t like his style. I disagree with him about this, my wife is a … Whatever. But ultimately, there’s an incredible sense of excitement about the fact that, in their world, they see that business opportunities are going to be there for them to create jobs and build companies and grow the economy.
If you look at the team that he built around him, the interesting thing, this is a fascinating thing that Francis and I both observed, but I actually think I should give him credit, because I think he’s the one that pointed this out more prominently, almost everybody, other than JD Vance, in the team that Donald Trump has built, is a former Democrat, including Donald Trump himself. Donald Trump is a former Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democrat, RFK is a former Democrat. Elon Musk is, from what I understand, a former Democrat, certainly not a Republican by any stretch of the imagination. Vivek, former … All these big names that he managed to attract are people really crossing the aisle and saying, enough. Enough of this, enough of managed decline, enough of this insanity.
Helen Dale:
There’s an element of, I’m thinking of an expression that Carl Benjamin uses on The Lotus Eaters as he says, congratulations, you’ve elected Donald Trump, a 90s liberal. And it’s true.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yep, and that’s what I am, too. I’m a ’90s liberal, have always been a ’90s liberal, and somehow in the modern world, there is a huge appetite to call me right-wing, even though I haven’t really changed my positions at all, but the world, as we all know, has changed dramatically. But anyway, the point about optimism is, in America, among the millions and millions of people who voted for Trump so overwhelmingly in the last election, there is a feeling that, we don’t know exactly, but there is at least a very good chance that Donald Trump in his second term, for various reasons that we can get into, may well be the antidote to the ideology of managed decline, which has permeated and infected the entire Western elite world.
Helen Dale:
Yes, that, I think, is very true, and just coming back to two earlier points, the point about gratitude and the point about open borders, you’ve spoken widely on this issue, on the issue of immigration, and I have been on TRIGGERnometry discussing Australian policy, abrogating the refugee convention going back to the 90s, that kind of thing, and this is something that Australia has done very well, and it does form the underlying substrate of your first book. You spoke very positively about your experience of immigration, what is a reasonable response to people who hate their country, whether they’re locals or as Australians, say, fresh off the boat? Because you get both sorts.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes, well, I think that those are two different things and have to be treated differently, necessarily. First and foremost, I think … you have to be very careful when you’re saying this, but ultimately, I do believe that the overwhelming majority of people are good and well-intentioned, which means that if they hate their country, it is something that they’ve been taught to do, right? Because it’s not a natural thing for human beings to hate the place in which they live. I don’t believe that’s a natural thing. And as I look around at young people who do have that worldview in the UK and in other countries, I can see that they have been indoctrinated into this.
And I know this from personal experience, because I remember I was staying with a friend of mine many, many years ago, long before I was involved in any sort of political commentary or anything, but even before I was a comedian, and I picked up a book that he had on the shelf, which was called The People’s History of Britain, and it was written by a woman whose name I no longer remember, but it was the most incredible, fascinating book about British history, told in such a compelling way.
And I thought, wow, surely someone’s had the idea to franchise this to other countries, because I’d love to read The People’s History of Australia, The People’s History of America, The People’s History of France, and so on. And so, I went on the internet and I bought, without looking, The People’s History of America, by a man called Howard Zinn. And I opened it, I read halfway into the first chapter, and I realized that this was a “why you should hate America” manifest.
And that isn’t to say that some of the issues that he was highlighting in the book were irrelevant or not true, but to present them entirely without context, to present them without a comparative analysis of what was happening elsewhere in the West, and the rest of the world, frankly, to present them in this entirely decontextualized, disembodied way, and to inflict this horrific visual imagery onto the minds of young people would undoubtedly produce a generation of people who hated their own country. And that one book is an example of a much broader theme that has swept through academia across the Western world, which has taught young people the … the narrative about slavery in the UK for example is, as you well know, that there was no slavery, and then the British Empire came along and invented it and then well-meaning and wonderful woke people came along and ended slavery, which of course is entirely the opposite of everything that’s true.
Slavery existed throughout human history. The British Empire practiced it just like others, but then actually for very moral reasons due actually to abolitionists who are mainly driven by their Christian understanding of human nature, spent a tremendous amount of blood and treasure to end the slave trade, not only within its own borders, but actually across the world as much as it could. And we’re not taught about the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which was much worse than that and, and, and. You know all this, and I’m sure your audience does too, so I don’t need to go on about-
Helen Dale:
I always used, whenever I hear this completely bonkers impression of British history, this is very much British history, and particularly British naval history, and my father was in the Royal Navy during World War II, so we actually have military naval service in the family in a genuine, nasty, hot war. I hear people saying this and I go … because I started out in life as a classicist, and I just go, “Julius Caesar would like a word,” considering how much money that man made out of all the slaves which were captured people, men mainly in Gaul.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes, quite, and we could go on further. For example, there’s this very fashionable narrative in Britain now about the Empire. Now, of course, no empire is perfect or without atrocity, and so on. But I’m reading for example, right now, the book right in front of me on my table, you won’t be able to see, but is The Third Tom of Winston Churchill’s History of World War II, in which actually something that most people don’t know becomes very clear, which is that all the imperial countries in the parts of the colonial world that Britain at that time controlled, many millions of people in places like India volunteered to fight against an enemy that actually in many cases had nothing to do with them. There was no reason for Indians to be fighting in North Africa as they did, for example, other than quite a lot of people across the world who were part of the British Commonwealth felt a very strong affinity with the mother country.
This is of course even more true of Australians and New Zealanders who were heroic in what they did. So my broader point is coming back to the original question, sorry, I’m meandering, is that young people for two generations at the very least, and you might correct me and say that it’s more, have been taught things that were deliberately designed to make them hate their own society. And so the first question is how do we rapidly change what we are teaching children and young people in schools and universities? Because we have to live with these people and we have to change the entire conversation around what our history is.
This is why history is so important. If it destroys people … if you can find a way to destroy people’s history and their belief in the fact that their country and history is good, then they will naturally hate it and there will be nothing you can do about it.
So the first part with people who are of our society is education, education, education, education. And we have to undo and redo the things that are being taught. As for people who have come here, my answer is very politically incorrect I’m afraid, Helen. But as someone who enjoys what I call immigrant privilege, which is the ability to say things that other people are not allowed to say, I would say this to anyone coming from any country, including people like me.
If you want to come here from Russia as I once did, and impose your values on this society or demand that your values be incorporated, for example, we in the UK are currently having a debate in Parliament about whether we should allow cousin marriage. This is a complete barbaric practice that the West did practice in medieval times among kings and queens. But broadly speaking, this isn’t something that-
Helen Dale:
As a general rule, just as a matter of history, cousin marriage was gotten rid of in the Roman world, the pagan Romans hated it. They wanted people not to work through their kin groups. They wanted people to participate in civil society through associational behaviors, what we would consider clubs and societies now. And that then passed into Christianity.
Yes, there were people in both the Roman world, posh people, and then in the Christian world who bent the rules, who got papal allowances, dispensations with the Habsburgs. And that’s why you had all the inbreeding. And it’s also why you were inbreeding amongst the Julio-Claudians, but it was hated in their religion in both societies, and it was hated by the great bulk of people. That’s why it can be quite shocking to read Roman writers like Suetonius or Tacitus when legislation … Because specific legislation had to go through the Senate to allow it in the Roman world. And they expressed this extraordinary disgust and people don’t realize how rare that extraordinary disgust at this behavior actually is.
And classicists and anthropologists aren’t even sure why the pagan Romans developed this hostility to what farmers call line-breeding, but they did very early. It appears extremely early in their law.
Konstantin Kisin:
And there are historians, as I’m sure you know who’ve actually argued that the entire foundation of western civilization, and its extraordinary comparative success is the end of cousin marriage. Not because of the genetic dimension of it, but because it forced people to cooperate beyond their familial groups. And it therefore created the ability for meritocracy as opposed to clan-based.
Helen Dale:
And a powerful civil society, people coming together in associations by choice rather than because they’re related to people.
Konstantin Kisin:
And the central idea of the West, when people ask me what that is, I believe it’s the sanctity of the individual. And it seems to me that there’s a very direct line that can be drawn from one to the other. But in any case, my broader point is when you have an MP in the British parliament who’s one of these, let’s say pro-Gaza, he was elected on a pro-
Helen Dale:
One of the Gaza Independents, I wrote a piece about them for Liberty Fund, and that’s what I’ve been calling them.
Konstantin Kisin:
When he stands up in Parliament and insists that we must respect the cultural particularities of certain communities when it comes to first-cousin marriage, the answer should be, “No, no, no.” We’re not going to respect the cultural particularities of communities that want to marry their cousins. That’s not what we do here. No. And if you don’t like that, please go to a country where you can marry your cousin and do it there, and we will be very happy to provide a flight for you to do so free of charge. Very happy to. Very, very happy to. I will do a fundraiser for anyone who wants to go, leave Britain, and go to a country where they can marry their cousin and stay there. I will do a fundraiser. I’m sure you’ll chip in, Helen. I’m sure many of our listeners will contribute as well. Right?
The same can be said of the debate where, not a debate, but certainly a Labour MP stood up and insisted that we need to bring forward blasphemy laws in the UK. Now, the UK has had blasphemy laws in the past, and I thought we were over it. So again, if you want to bring back something from the dark ages of the religious worldview of which we now all I think are happy to have got rid, well, if that’s what your view is, again, I insist that you avail yourself of the opportunity. There are many, many countries in the world which do have blasphemy laws, particularly about the religion, about this, which this gentleman’s concerned. Please take the opportunity to move to one of those countries.
So my view, I’m afraid, as I say, is incredibly politically incorrect, which is if you don’t like it here, you should leave.
Helen Dale:
Bumper stickers, you see that in Australia, “If you don’t love it, leave,” with an Aussie flag. But Australia is the sort of country where you can still get away with saying that.
Konstantin Kisin:
By the way, I have to say this, this is not a rule I apply only to other people. If Britain ever gets to the point where I don’t like it and frankly it is on that trajectory, then I will leave. I will not sit here and whine endlessly about how Britain has gone down the toilet. If I come to a point where I feel like it’s not just going down the toilet, but we are now deeply embedded in the toilet and there’s no way out, I will leave. And that’s what people should do if they’re not happy with the country in which they currently live. But equally, of course, we all have an obligation to try and make the country in which we live better. Hopefully, that is what we are doing.
But yes, the one thing that’s become very unfashionable to say, and again, politically incorrect, but I will say it, and I think it’s important to say as an immigrant, immigration is a two-way street. Immigration is when we give you something and we expect something from you in return. Immigration is not this honor we bestow on you by virtue of your humanness or by virtue. … It’s a privilege. You are chosen out of the billions of people in the world who actually would quite like to live in a prosperous and successful country like Britain or America, you are given a unique opportunity, and in exchange for that opportunity, you are required to fulfill a number of very obvious, to me at least, obligations in the same way that when you go around to your friend’s house for dinner, you have an obligation to maybe bring a bottle of wine or a bunch of flowers or a card, to help with the plates afterwards or to offer your assistance in some other way and perhaps one day to invite them around to your house. Right? This is universally understood.
Well, when you come to live in somebody’s house and they allocate you a room in that house, do you not have the obligation to perhaps attempt to adjust to the way of life that people have there, to perhaps shed some of the things that you did in your house and now find that actually you’re willing to do more of the things that people do in this house? Do you not have an obligation to respect the rules that that house has? Do you not have an obligation to teach your children gratitude for the opportunity that you enjoyed?
All of these things seem to me incredibly obvious, to learn the language of that house if it’s not the native language of … We could go on and on, but ultimately the point I’m making is, people who come to this country and their descendants, this is very important, and their descendants have a duty to integrate, have a duty to do everything in their power to become part of the society, to which they’ve come, to contribute to it, to pay taxes and to become good citizens of that society and to try and make that society better.
That is an obligation that seems to me to be incredibly obvious as something that we should not just suggest, but actually demand of all immigrants that come to our country. And it seems to me something, frankly. … The fact that it has to be demanded is itself a travesty.
Helen Dale:
Yes. Although it has. … Because aware of the history of immigration policy in Australia, because it is so striking in a global context, even going back to just after the Second World War and perhaps even before the Second World War, there were issues in Australia with people who came to the country, and these were mainly Europeans at this point in the country’s history, there were issues then. I remember my father telling me when I was a little girl of people having to be told, “No, you can’t do that in this country.” And you would get the oddest things. You would get, for example, people from Britain who were posh and were used to getting respect. They would try to get Australians to use a courtesy title and that kind of thing if someone had some aristocratic background, did not go down very well at all.
Later on as part of the same process … there were incidents, for example, where high-caste Hindus would demand a degree of deference that they were used to getting in India. So very similar to posh Brits, very similar behavior here, and had to be told, “No, no, Australia is an egalitarian country. You must not do this here. You are at real risk, particularly if you do it in a context like a pub or that kind of thing of actually starting a fight because Australians really resent it.” But people, even going back a long, long time have had to be told these things. It doesn’t come naturally.
Konstantin Kisin:
No, it doesn’t. We have a saying in Russian, which I think is very apt for all of this, which is, “You don’t go to another monastery with your own code of conduct.” And when I go to America, I don’t start lecturing Americans about whether they should have guns or not or whatever else. I appreciate that they’re a different culture and a different worldview. It’s my job when I’m in America to understand how people think there and to adjust myself so that I fit. It doesn’t mean I have to let go of everything that makes me who I am, but if I am going to spend time in America, if the American people through their government see fit to grant me a visa to be there, then it’s my job to act like an honored guest in the house. And an honored guest in your house has both obligations and privileges. It seems to me an incredibly obvious thing that almost is weird to have to say out loud.
Helen Dale:
And it’s also worth pointing out too, that even among liberal democracies, so if we just confine ourselves to the systems of governance that exist amongst the world’s liberal democracies in the Americas and the Commonwealth, and in Europe, they’re quite different from each other. You will have noticed Australia is very distinctively governed. Australia is probably the most different, but all of those countries have very different ways of doing things. And you finish up with odd situations like the country that Australia most resembles is Switzerland, despite the fact that the history and the climate and everything else, but it’s because of the system governance that both countries have chosen. So there’s that too. They’re just different.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes, exactly. And that’s why, coming back to your original question of what we do with people who refuse to adapt is with people who are here and who are of this place, we have to do everything we can to educate either them or if it’s too late, the next generation. We just have to make sure that our history is being taught properly. And for people who refuse to integrate, they must be given every opportunity to find a place in the world that fits to their needs and preferences better than this one.
Helen Dale:
Yes. Just on the travel point, because you were in America for the elections, and I know you and Francis have jointly recorded a podcast about this, which is very much worth watching, and there will be a link to it in the show notes so that people can have a look in their own time. But I’d like to ask you for a further reflection, if I may. To what extent do people on the progressive side of US politics appear to be learning any lessons from such a decisive electoral defeat? Are there any signs of them doing what the UK’s Conservatives are still having to do, and they’re doing it very publicly because they were so awful, we have to acknowledge this, but is there any sense that, amongst on the other side of politics in the United States, that progressives, and I’m not going to call them left because it’s so odd in America, but that progressives are learning something. Are they acknowledging why they lost?
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes and no. I think we saw certain things of the kind that might be seen as that. For example, AOC removing pronouns from her Twitter bio. But then, I don’t know if you saw the case of Daniel Penny, I imagine as a lawyer, you have quite a lot to say about that, I imagine. But the narrative on that side of the left remains that this was an innocent Black man murdered in cold blood by an evil white man. But I do see BLM, for example, not having nearly as much purchase.
Now, is that because progressives have woken up or is that because everyone knows that the right is currently in charge and you’re just not going to be able to get away with it? I don’t know. I think truthfully, Helen, we will not know until … I feel like we are in one of those moments when the dust is in the air and we don’t know how it’s going to settle yet.
It also fundamentally, of course, depends on how the Trump administration performs because I was on Chris Williamson’s podcast, Modern Wisdom, recently. I don’t believe it’s out yet. But he asked me a question, I actually, I’ve been so enthused by the time I spent in America and the sense of optimism that I hadn’t considered this question, but it is one worth considering, and I think that’s partly because it’s not an eventuality that is impossible, which is, what happens if Trump fails?
Helen Dale:
Because he largely failed in his first term. The blob got him, basically.
Konstantin Kisin:
The blob got him, you might say, and there are some very strong reasons why that shouldn’t happen again, which we can get into if you like, but theoretically, that shouldn’t happen. He should not have the staffing issues that he did last time. He’s not running for reelection. He has the House and the Senate and the judiciary, and not just the Supreme Court, but the entire judiciary is now very strongly leaning in his direction. He won the popular vote. So there’s no Russia collusion BS anymore. He won outright, and everybody knows it.
Nonetheless, that does not necessarily mean that he will succeed. And if he fails, I think that would be one of the biggest body blows to the validity of democracy as a system that’s worth using for government in the twenty-first century because to the majority of Americans who feel that the direction of travel has been completely wrong and unsustainable, if you elected Donald Trump with all of these things that we’ve just discussed, the House, the Senate, the majority, da, da, da, da, da, and you still can’t change anything, you still can’t strip DEI out of government, you still can’t have a normal border, you still can’t grow the economy, you still have racial preferences in hiring, you still have all of this, well, in that case, a lot of people on the right, I imagine some already are, will be asking, “Well, what good is democracy?”
Helen Dale:
And that is very dangerous.
Konstantin Kisin:
Of course, of course.
Helen Dale:
I mean, I’m quite, people at Liberty Fund get used to me because I’m coming out of that Australian tradition, I am quite majoritarian because I am used to democracy and majorities working very well because they do in Australia, but the Australian settlement is that democracy and majorities matter more than liberty and rights. When democracy falls over and you can’t make majoritarianism work, as in people cast their ballots, elect to government, empower the executive, which in Australia, to be fair, the executive can execute. It’s very, very powerful. The legislature is very powerful. Our weak branch is the judiciary. But if people can’t get what they want out of democracy, then yes, they will, left or right, they will start casting around for alternatives and that is really quite dangerous.
Just in an Australian context, the people absolutely flattened the voice referendum, but there have been a couple of state governments, notoriously Victoria, trying to do a smaller version of it at the state level through the back door. And I’m just looking at that and thinking, “You’re trying to do,” to use an American expression, “You’re trying to do an end run around the Australian electorate.” And in a country with compulsory voting and an educated, civically minded electorate, that’s very dangerous. It’ll just blow up all over a lot of people, that. So the next federal in Australia is going to be interesting.
So just coming back, we’ve been to the most recent thing you and Francis have done, but I want to step back into history for a moment because I think this is valuable. For a largely American legal audience that listens to this podcast, what was it that you saw, you and Francis saw, in 2018 that led the two of you to found TRIGGERnometry? And are any of the things that concerned you then still at the top of your mind now? It’s nearly seven years later.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes. So very briefly, the things that concerned us and that we saw were, for me, the re-racialization of society, which we’ve talked about already. I remember one incident in particular in which I found myself in an altercation with somebody on the street as I was making my way home from a gig, from a comedy performance. I used to do stand up, and I don’t anymore. And in the course of that altercation, the guy was, I don’t want to repeat the term, but used a kind of, you might say, a racial slur that referred to the fact that I have dark skin in the UK context. And then I got home and I got an email about the comedy show I was supposed to be performing the next day, which said, “I’m sorry, we’ve had to cancel your appearance because we have too many straight white men on the bill.”
Helen Dale:
Oh, God.
Konstantin Kisin:
And then I put these two events together in my head and I just went, “Something is very seriously wrong here. Something is very seriously wrong.” So that was one.
And the other thing was that I think in the two years post-Brexit and post-Trump, I saw a face of the left on which I thought I was, and it was a face I didn’t recognize. I didn’t recognize that the movement that I had naturally, by default, I assumed I was part of, would react to electoral failure by dismissing the concerns of the people who were the majority in that election. So the reaction to Brexit, which is half the country’s racist, was quite obviously moronic to me because as a first-generation immigrant who, as I just told you, had some experiences of discrimination or whatever you might call it, or suddenly someone being rude to me because of where I’m from, I knew that that didn’t represent the British people even remotely.
The idea that half of Britain or half of America, these incorrigible evil bigots, is just factually incorrect, and I thought it was childish to pretend otherwise, and therefore there must be another explanation, which is why I spent a year and a half, two years, it would’ve probably been more like a year and a half, we started in April 2018, looking at, well, actually what were the people who were in charge of these movements that I was against? I was against the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I was a remain voter, not with any great passion, but a remain voter by default. And then I just started listening to speeches and interviews with people who were in charge of those movements and I started to try and understand why they appealed to my fellow citizens.
And as I listened to people making the arguments about that, I understood what the Trump appeal was and the Trump appeal was, and I think the Brexit appeal was too, was a sense that our two countries were heading in the wrong direction and that the dominant ideology that had captured the people who were running our countries was what I call managed decline. And that there were many, many people still in our countries that felt that this was not an acceptable ideology for people who run our country to have, and what they would like our countries to be doing is not declining at all. They’d like them to be growing. They’d like them to be strong and powerful and wealthy and prosperous. They want their children to do better than they did.
And given that that promise is now increasingly under threat, as you said, quoting Donald Trump, “The American dream is dead,” well, there never was a British dream, but we know, if we look at the figures … I’m actually working on an article for my Substack now called, “We Need to Talk About Britain,” one of the points I make is even nominal GDP per capita, that’s without adjusting for inflation, has not grown in this country since 2007. We are poorer per head of population today than we were nearly 20 years ago. Now, why on earth would anybody want that for their society? And why would anybody accept that and why would anybody accept, by the way, that we have to do this to ourselves in order to make little Greta happy, which is what we are doing in the UK?
So on all of these things, it was very clear to me that there was a piece of information that was missing from the analysis that I was hearing, including from my fellow comedians on stage who would go on and do 10-minute routines about how anyone who voted for Brexit is racist and should die. You know? And while I never had a problem with them being able to express that opinion or make a joke, I just didn’t think this was a sufficiently good explanation, so I wanted to understand what was really going on.
And then the third issue was, of course, freedom of expression because all of a sudden, as someone like me who’d spent my young, my teens and 20s loving and respecting and enjoying comedians and other people who were at the forefront of saying, “Freedom of speech is extremely important and we must be able to do all kinds of jokes and all of that,” certainly in the UK, I saw the comedy industry celebrating the restriction of speech, and to the point when, at the end of 2018, I turned down a contract to do a comedy show for the reason that it had all these speech restrictions, I was attacked, not by woke members of the public with blue hair. The people that came after me the most when that happened were my fellow comedians and-
Helen Dale:
Yes, I remember that incident because I remember, I can actually remember you tweeted with a screenshot of the rules that you’d been given by this organization, and I’ve never forgotten the last line of it because I read it out to my partner at the time, that, “All jokes must be respectful and kind” was the last line of it. And I’m just sort of going, “That’s not the way humor works.”
Konstantin Kisin:
No, no.
Helen Dale:
It really isn’t, says the person who knows more lawyer jokes. Honestly, lawyers, we know, we tell the best lawyer jokes.
Konstantin Kisin:
I’m sure.
Helen Dale:
And I just remember reading that and thinking … And people who were comedians, and including some quite edgy comedians who, I mean, remember, I lived in Edinburgh and practiced as a solicitor up there for years, and I went to the Fringe every year because I lived in the Grassmarket. It was so easy just to pick 20 shows and they’re not very expensive and you just go to all of them. Some of them are funny, some of them aren’t, that kind of thing. And people who were really quite edgy and who I had heard them tell jokes along the lines of that you get the sharp intake of breath, it’s funny, but that kind of thing, and they were having a go at you and I’m thinking, “You really don’t know which side your bread is buttered on when you are doing this because that’s making your own noose, building your own guillotine.”
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes. So where are we on all those issues? Well, I think that in terms of misunderstanding the majority sentiment in this country, I think that has remained the case. In this piece that I’m writing now, one of the statistics I give is that seven out of 10 Brits feel the country’s in decline, and I think we all know that it is.
Where are we in terms of free speech? Well, we’ve got police knocking on the doors of journalists because they’ve done the wrong tweet. We have a whole host of issues that is simply not being discussed in the public domain to do with Islamism, terrorism integration, and the impact of mass immigration because no one’s allowed to say what the truth on that issue is without simultaneously being threatened by a visit from the police or simply putting your life at risk from people who will kill you for-
Helen Dale:
I always remember in this context, she’s gone to work for Quillette now, but you might remember the editor, Iona Italia. She used to run Areo Magazine and it folded and she went and took a deputy editorial role at Quillette, but she used to put a little note whenever she wrote or published an article that touched on this issue, “No, I am not going to publish the Muhammad cartoons because there are only two of us.” It was her, and they only had enough money for her and one other person. “There are only two of us, and we don’t have 24-hour police protection,” or words to that effect. That is genuinely the situation in some circumstances when it’s images. People are at actual risk.
Konstantin Kisin:
Well, of course, and by the way, most people who are, I mean, I was going to say sane, but I also, I respect people’s courage, but most people don’t want 24-hour police protection, even if it could be made available to them.
Helen Dale:
Yes.
Konstantin Kisin:
No one wants to upend their life in that way and be constantly feeling that they and their family are at serious risk of violence.
So I don’t feel that, in the UK, we have made improvements. However, if I had to make an optimistic case, I would say that the fact that all of the medium of communications is no longer in the hands of one political grouping is a good thing. The fact that Javier Milei and President Trump have been elected in their respective countries is a sign that people can get fed up enough of things going badly and turn things around. And now, I said it on my Q&A that I do with my Substack supporters yesterday or two days ago, Trump needs to deliver.
Helen Dale:
If he gets just immigration and economic growth right, those two big ones, I think will make-
Konstantin Kisin:
You can’t do them without dealing with woke though, Helen. Right? We know that, particularly even for-
Helen Dale:
In the universities. Yes, this is true, yes.
Konstantin Kisin:
No, not just universities. Everywhere. You can’t deal with things that you need to deal with without getting rid of the woke generals in the army. Right?
Helen Dale:
True. That’s a good point. Yes, I’ve got to remember that then.
Konstantin Kisin:
You can’t deal with … You know, this thing about, the phrase I heard, I think it may be a Chris Russo phrase, but it may be something else, which is, “Personnel is policy.” I think it’s incredibly true, particularly in the administrative state. So you have to get rid of the people whose brain is broken and put in people who believe in meritocracy and who believe in making America safe and prosperous. If he can do that, then he can do all the other things that he promised to American people. But this may be a kind of professional occupational disease or professional derangement of my brain, but I do see wokeness as being very central to all of this.
The one area where America really fundamentally differs from Europe, thank God, is even wokeness has not managed to make Americans believe that what they must do is commit ritual suicide that we in the Europe called net zero. The Americans are deeply unpersuaded even on the left that driving up the price of fuel and the price of electricity is the answer to all their problems.
Helen Dale:
This is also happening. … This debate is also happening in Australia as well, I think.
Konstantin Kisin:
Oh, I know.
Helen Dale:
Net zero is well on the way out, I suspect, and it’s going to lose, probably going to lose, Albanese the next election. But it’s … I think in this case for the same reason in both countries, this is one of the few times where the United States and Australia line up. The countries are both enormous and they’re both also have incredible natural endowments. Australia’s lot more because there’s fewer people with all those huge endowments, factor effects that economists talk about. They can both make themselves enormously wealthy and have done so historically with those factor endowments, those resources, that … Quarry Australis it used to get called. You dig a hole and you make yourself rich. If you try to make energy more expensive in two countries that are like that, people will reject it and reject you. They will tell you to go and fly a kite and worse. And I think that that’s to the credit of the electorates in those two countries.
Konstantin Kisin:
Absolutely. And by the way, look, I think your point about how, look, the countries differ is true, but I also think that even in a small country which is not as resource-rich as Australia and the United States, we still have resources that are untapped that we could be tapping. We are just choosing not to for purely ideological reasons. And the current Labour government has promised to do everything possible to get us to net zero as quickly as possible. And all of that means is we’re going to make people as poor as possible as quickly as possible. That’s what’s going to happen.
But if we’re still attempting to make the optimistic and positive case, there is the hope that seeing is believing and British people will watch the United States blossom and prosper over the next four years, if indeed the United States does blossom and prosper. And at that point, I think the choice will be very clear. And of course we’ve got our own Parliamentary and political battles going on and who knows what the parties will be, who lead the fire at the next election. It seems to me like Reform is on a very good trajectory at the moment from the right. I suspect that this Labour government will end up being one of the least popular governments in British history.
Helen Dale:
They’re on track in … I mean, I’ve spent many years covering British politics in the traditional little press gallery, Parliamentary sense going up and sitting in the gallery watching. If Starmer doesn’t get a grip on the civil service, which is doing to him now what it did to the Tories, just basically for our American listeners, just stopping the government from doing anything-
Konstantin Kisin:
It’s what Americans called the deep state.
Helen Dale:
The deep state. And a lot of people have this idea in their head that, “Oh, because a lot of the civil servants are lefties surely they will help a lefty government. They’ll help Keir Starmer.” But that’s not the case because the bureaucracy, the civil service in Britain has so metastasized that it doesn’t serve anybody’s interest except its own. And that is why it gets called The Blob. And I suspected this was the case when the conservatives were in power because they were blaming the civil service for being woke. And yes, there is wokery in the civil service, but above and beyond the wokery is just this extraordinary, “We exist for ourselves and not for anybody else.” So it means now Keir Starmer is experiencing, “I can’t do anything. I can’t even do lefty things. I can’t even get a wind farm built. Nothing is happening.”
So it’s just really … It’s an object lesson what’s happening in the UK at the moment. And just going even further back into history here, I got this question from a listener. We sometimes do ask our listeners for questions. And I do like this one. Going back before Triggernometry, how do you think your childhood and background in the Soviet Union shaped you? Do you think there are ways that you’re very English? And do you think there are ways that you are very not English still?
Konstantin Kisin:
That’s really interesting. Well, we just recorded an interview with Stephen Fry, which was a great honor for us. And one of the things he was saying is, “Well, I can imagine that you guys,” Francis’ mother being from Venezuela, “With your backgrounds, you get pretty irritated by the fact that you’re being lied to as you were and your ancestors were in your countries.” And I said, “It’s not even that we are being lied to. I expect people to be lying to me, especially the government. It’s that I’m not allowed to say that they are lying. That’s the thing that really bothers me.”
So I think my sensitivity around the ability to speak, discuss important things, challenge government, challenge authority is partly from that. I think that the one increasing deviation I noticed between myself and the British sentiment is that article that I keep bringing up that I’m writing now, which is that I think, especially after I spent time in America, I think it’s very clear that there is this beautiful thing about British culture, which is not bragging, not showing off, not talking about how you’re the best at everything. It has a very dark undertone and that undertone is one of … It’s the tall poppy syndrome. It’s that you shouldn’t-
Helen Dale:
Which is actually Australian.
Konstantin Kisin:
That’s an Australian phrase, the tall poppy syndrome. It’s almost like Britain has taken something that in some respects in Australia is quite attractive, the egalitarianism, and turned it into something that it’s not what Australians wanted with the idea of don’t stick your head up too far above the rest of the people, because in an Aussie context, it’s very much about stop thinking that because you’re very successful or because you’ve had a big achievement or because you’re very smart, you then get to tell other people what to do. That’s the way it works in Australia, but Britain hasn’t got that idea.
No. In Britain it’s mostly just like, “You’re not special. Why would you try to do something?” And so in America, when you tell people, “I’ve got this idea for a great thing that I want to do. I want to do a new show. I want to start this. I want to do that,” the reaction in America is always like, “Oh, that’s amazing. Let me help you. I can put you in touch with this guy,” whatever. In the UK, there’s a sort of like, “Who do you think you are to be starting things and doing things?”
Helen Dale:
See, that’s the thing. Australians will be optimistic, like the Americans will, as you’ve seen because you’ve been to Australia in the last year as well, but by the same token, Australia did invent the tall poppy syndrome and it does sometimes go too far. I mean, one of the reasons why a lot of clever particularly intellectuals in Australia have left the country in the past and gone to the UK or the US or sometimes to Europe if they have a foreign language has been because of the tall poppy syndrome. They just get cut too hard. And sometimes it is a case of they get out over their skis and try to tell Australians what to do because they’re clever, all that, they think they have a right to do that. But often it’s just Australians can be mean to high achievers. But it’s not mean in the same way that British people are mean. It’s a different kind of meanness, even though the phrase is the same.
Konstantin Kisin:
That’s really interesting. I saw an example of this very, very recently. So a businessman called Nick Candy, who I actually wasn’t aware of, he’s left the Conservative Party and gone to the Reform Party. These are all minor details for most of your listeners. But the point I’m making is he was privately educated, which means his parents were wealthy and paid for him to go to a good school. He was given a loan of 6,000 Pounds, which is about $8,000, by his grandmother. And this is now being used against him to say that when he built a multi-billion Pound business, from my understanding, he can’t say that he’s self-made, because he converted 6,000 Pounds of an investment from his grandmother into a billion Pound company, but he had a good education, therefore he’s not self-made. This constant attempt to tear people down and say, “Well, you’re only self-made if you grew up on a council estate with no money and one arm,” all of this other-
Helen Dale:
It becomes a Monty Python joke.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes.
Helen Dale:
I mean, you’re the comedian. The Monty Python routine that with all the fake Yorkshire accents saying, “I was born in a shoe box,” or, “I was born in a coal scuttle.” That’s what it becomes.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes. Whereas I think, frankly … I was chatting to Mary Harrington at our Christmas party, which you were also able to attend, and her and I were discussing the fact that I really think Britain in some ways must accept its role has evolved. At the beginning of the last century, Britain was the center of the Western world. It was the most powerful and dominant country, culturally and in many other ways. But we are no longer the center of the Western world. That center is shifted to the United States. And if we want to preserve and multiply the achievements of Western society, we may need to look at recognizing that fact, recognizing that we are essentially a periphery now of American civilization to some extent, America’s taken on that leading role, and looking at what they do well and trying to bring as much of that over to our society here. And I think shedding this combination of post-imperial boastfulness and shame at the same time. We’re so-
Helen Dale:
It’s very strange.
Konstantin Kisin:
We’re so successful historically that all we need to do now is talk ourselves down. … Because we’re so powerful that we shouldn’t talk about how great we are. What we should talk about is all our flaws. And this was interesting because at the very end of our interview with Stephen Fry, I said to him, “What does it mean to be British?” And he talked for a long time in a very beautiful way, as only Stephen Fry can, about all of that. And at the end he said, “The thing that makes Britain wonderful is our lack of bragging, our lack of. … We don’t talk about our values. You’re supposed to pick them up. But the truth is Western values aren’t as rare. And maybe we have to actually be less British and start saying, ‘This is who we are and this is why it’s good.'”
Helen Dale:
Yes. That’s some very sound advice. Final question. Back to the past again, but your old job, why do you think having a sense of humor is important? What do you find yourself thinking when people don’t have a sense of humor? And related to that question, what’s your response when you do experience, and I have seen this, online mobbing and controversy?
Konstantin Kisin:
Oh, okay. Oh. Well, if you’re talking about serious ideas, sense of humor is important because it’s like the sugar that makes a medicine go down. Triggernometry is slightly more enjoyable because we keep you occasionally laughing along, and that means that the seriousness of the ideas is made easier to bear. Some people don’t have a very good sense of humor for very good reasons actually. I remember actually a former Australian Deputy Prime Minister, now a good friend of mine, John Anderson, talking about how he lost a sense of humor in a tragic accident that happened with his family.
Helen Dale:
Yes. Yes. It’s well-known in Australian history. He lost a sibling.
Konstantin Kisin:
Yes. I think is understandable, but broadly speaking, I think it’s a case of people who are overly serious and unable to enjoy life. And enjoying life is very important because it mitigates you against all the other things that happen. As for online mobbing, whatever, I’ll be honest with you, I did a personality test a while ago, and I’m in the top-naught point something percentile for disagreeableness. So I honestly really genuinely couldn’t care any less about what other people are saying. I’ve always taken flack from both the left and the right because I’ve tried to just call it as I see it as opposed to being a team guy. That’s always going to be the place where you attract the most criticism. It’s much easier to find a tribe and just to be a partisan of that tribe.
But I’m very happy with that role. It’s very rewarding role. People are … I can’t in good conscience advocate for the importance of free speech and then get upset when other people exercise it. Doesn’t mean that I am not going to block people who are being rude or racist or insulting on Twitter, whatever. But broadly speaking, I believe in allowing people to express themselves even if that speech is unpleasant or rude or whatever. And truthfully, I have a very weird and perverse psyche in that I actually delight in the fact that some people are so annoyed with me saying something that’s obviously true, that I actually will often share with friends unflattering things that people say about me or about Triggernometry because it makes me laugh. So I’m all for it. I’ve got absolutely no problem. And look, and partly this is something that I always say to people who complain about this stuff, who have put themselves in the public eye is like, “You don’t have to be in the public eye.”
Helen Dale:
Yes. This is true.
Konstantin Kisin:
“No one made you. Not only that, but if you disappear from the public eye, if you stop saying what you’re saying or hosting a show that you’re hosting or taking positions that you take or talking to people that you talk to, no one’s going to say a word about you.” So it’s part of the package. You, in many cases, get to make a lot of money and have the ability to influence the culture and influence the direction of travel of your society and of your civilization and the price you pay for that is some idiot on the internet is going to say something unflattering. To me, that’s a price that’s well worth paying.
Helen Dale:
That’s always been my view as well. Yes. Well, thank you very much, Konstantin. That’s quite a good rundown of where you’re at with Triggernometry. We don’t have another book to look forward to, but you can sign up to Konstantin’s Substack. You can also sign up to Triggernometry on Substack. There are two separate Substacks. You will find them referring to each other when you go to Substack and type the names in. You could also subscribe to me as well. I’m on Substack. Also easy to find. And try to do the same sort of thing, but in a smaller and quieter way.
Konstantin Kisin:
All right, Helen. Thank you very much.
Helen Dale:
Thank you very much, Konstantin. See you.
Konstantin Kisin:
Thanks for having me. Bye. Bye-bye.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
The past five years have been tumultuous ones for elite higher education. Campuses have been rocked by plagiarism scandals, ugly and violent protests, and revelations about admissions discrimination that went on under the guise of affirmative action. Meanwhile, reformers are trying out new approaches, from civics institutes to more robust legislative oversight of public universities to brand-new private institutions. How pivotal will these years turn out to be? And what strategies are most likely to revive the mission of the university? Law & Liberty senior writer James Hankins has hope for a higher-ed renaissance.
Related Links:
James Hankins, “Learning Civics from History“
James Hankins, “Can Harvard Win Back America’s Respect?“
James Hankins, “Hope for Harvard?“
James Hankins, “A Centrist Strategy for Higher Education Reform“
James Hankins, “Training for the Contemplative Life“
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
TranscriptJames Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
John Grove:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty, filling in for our regular host, James Patterson. Today I am pleased to be joined by a senior writer at Law & Liberty, Professor James Hankins. Professor Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University, and his most recent books include Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. Professor Hankins has written many, many phenomenal pieces for Law & Liberty and elsewhere on higher education. And today we are going to talk about some of the themes that have cut across those various essays and book reviews that he’s written about his own institution of Harvard and about broader trends in higher education generally. So Jim, thanks so much for joining us.
James Hankins:
It’s a great pleasure to join you, John.
John Grove:
So I thought we would start with just the past year and a half, which has seemed really tumultuous for higher education, especially what we call elite higher education, the Ivy League, and similar sorts of institutions. So we’ve had the Students for Fair Admissions decision, which forbids race-based admissions policies. We’ve had plagiarism scandals including with presidents of major institutions. We’ve had the occupation of campuses by pro-Palestine protesters, and many of those have turned violent and have revealed some pretty intense anti-Semitism. We’ve had disastrous congressional testimony by a lot of the Ivy League presidents that were talking about these protests and the institutional response to the October 7th attacks. That then in turn led to a wave of resignations. And then perhaps a little bit more hopefully, we have seen a number of institutions, including Harvard, seem to take a turn toward what we call institutional neutrality, saying, “We’re not going to take positions on a number of political issues like we have in the past.”
So I thought I would just start by saying: how important do you think the past couple of years have been for higher ed? Will we be looking back at this time as essentially just a blip on the radar and everything goes back to normal, a bad normal, or is this going to be a meaningful turning point in American higher ed?
James Hankins:
Well, as you know, I’m a historian. Historians think everything is a blip, but I’m coming to believe that we may be really at a turning point. 2020 was a turning point for K-12 education—in many ways this will come as a surprise—and we’re now in the midst of a renaissance of classical education at the K-12 level. There’s a lot of reforming energies at the high school level and junior high school level outside the public schools. And in 2020, the pandemic and the George Floyd riots meant that parents could suddenly look over the shoulders of their Zooming students and see what they were being taught. And that led to some rather strong reactions, which I think are continuing. First of all, there has been much more parental involvement in district public schools. And secondly, there has been a very large exit from public schools into private education, classical education, and especially into homeschooling. There’s been a spike in homeschooling since 2020, which still continues.
We are starting to see this in higher education. I think that October 7th and its aftermath may be a kind of moment for higher education similar to 2020 in K-12 education. And of course, at Harvard it wasn’t just October 7th, it was the lawsuit of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, which in the discovery phase disclosed a lot of really explicit anti-Asian prejudice. And that was a shock to many people. Of course, the worst of it was a long time ago. Recently the admissions office has been more careful, but that was very disturbing to see that affirmative action for some means discrimination against others. And then we had the FIRE rankings, which gave Harvard a zero in academic freedom. Then there was the plagiarism scandal. Our president, Claudine Gay, was caught in plagiarism: real, undeniable plagiarism. So it was a kind of a quadruple whammy that we had last year.
And along with this, there was a massive and very well advertised drop in alumni support for the institution, support in the annual giving. Harvard depends a lot on annual giving. And so last spring, Harvard was very quietly selling bonds to cover its shortfall. There has also been a serious institutional response to October 7th and its aftermath. I have hope that we’ll have a reaction similar to what happened in K-12 education, that both inside and outside universities there’ll be successful attempts at reform. There are attempts already to reform the university from the inside. And also there’s going to be more competition from outside the elite universities, institutions that will be able to compete with existing, so-called elite universities.
John Grove:
And you made a good point, I think, is that one of the questions that I had in mind too, and I think you’ve already sort of answered it, is whether the things that have taken place in the last couple of years have changed higher education. There are certain people who have sort of seen some rot and corruption in higher ed for a long time. These especially tend to be conservatives, who have been saying this for a while; but I’m wondering if that October 7th reaction, and as you said, the plagiarism and so forth, if it sort of opened some eyes in the donor class in the public at large that had largely just sort of been ignoring this sort of thing. And it seems that you’re hopeful that that has happened.
James Hankins:
Yeah, I am. I’ve been around Harvard for a long time. This is my 40th year. I’m the oldest member of the history faculty, I mean, the longest serving member of the history faculty. And I’ve seen a lot of changes. When I came in 1985 to Harvard, it was much more balanced politically. There weren’t a lot of conservatives, but there were enough that people deferred to their views, enough to prevent colleagues from getting involved in political discussions in faculty meetings. But basically, since around the year 2000, most of the conservatives were driven out or retired. I think I’m now the last open—let’s say uncloseted—conservative in the history department. So things have changed. And the fact that it’s a political monoculture is responsible for a lot of the problems that the university has had.
There have been some very positive responses recently, however, in academe in general. To me, the most positive response is the existence of these new civics institutions that have been started in red state universities, at public universities in those states. And I think that that’s a very positive development. And I think, if they are founded in the right way, they have the potential to change the university culture in very good ways.
John Grove:
You’re anticipating my next question, which was this: As more eyes are potentially being opened to some of the problems that we have in higher ed, we’ve started to see some new solutions. Among them are these civics institutes that we have at Arizona State, at the University of Florida. You have an affiliation with the Hamilton Center at University of Florida. New ones coming in Ohio State and Toledo and some other institutions like that. So we have those. We’ve also seen the creation of new institutions. We’ve seen the University of Austin get underway recently. And then you also see some attempts in state legislatures to take a more direct approach, whether it comes to altering or abolishing tenure. You’ve had more direct curriculum oversight and oversight of personnel decisions. You have the New College of Florida, which is maybe one of the most controversial examples of these reform methods, where you have a really top-to-bottom transformation of the school.
So you seem to indicate already that your answer to this question was that you think the civics institutes are the most promising. Why do you think that’s the most promising approach that you’ve seen so far? And what do you think about some of the other approaches too?
James Hankins:
Okay, well, first of all, it’s not just the public universities that are starting civic centers. I’m not sure I want to reveal this because I wanted to take the opposition by surprise, but we’re going to try to start one at Harvard.
John Grove:
Oh, that’s great. That’s news to me.
James Hankins:
There’s very good prospects with the new president, new provost, and a number of changed conditions that we might be able to do it.
John Grove:
It’s not the usual state of affairs that we can say that the Law & Liberty podcast is going to have breaking news on it, but maybe we’ll have to advertise it that way.
James Hankins:
I’m not sure I want that news to get out yet.
John Grove:
Maybe you don’t want to say it. That’s fine. We won’t. We won’t. But if people listen, the careful listener will get it.
James Hankins:
Yeah, I think they’ll find out very soon. It will be announced very soon that we’ll be doing something along those lines. There’s an existing program at Harvard, the Program on Constitutional Government, which has been run by Harvey Mansfield for many years. And we’re going to build on that and try to create an undergraduate major in civic studies.
John Grove:
That’s exciting.
James Hankins:
I think that these civic centers are very positive just because there is a very legitimate public purpose in having a civic center, which is you want an educated citizenry and a state has the right to demand of its state universities, which it funds, knowledge of American history, knowledge of American government. And knowledge of Western history. All those subjects are perfectly legitimate for a state to demand of citizens educated at state expense. The reason I think that these institutions can be successful is partly that, if they’re well-funded and they’re set up the right way—which is to be independent of the departments—they can improve the prestige of the university, they can improve enrollments. Enrollments are the coin of the realm in many universities. If your civic program gets high enrollments, then it will be successful. So there are many subjects that have been driven out of the departments.
I wrote about this in one of my Law & Liberty pieces, about subjects that used to be very popular— American history surveys, things like that—which many departments are no longer offering. Many departments have stopped offering courses on the Enlightenment of Reformation, English Revolution, English Civil War, plus certain types of history like military history, political history. All these things have been neglected in the politicized university. But they are tremendously popular subjects with students. And so I think there’s a lot of potential for civics institutes to attract enrollments and bring in very prestigious scholars. That’s the other thing that’s happened that I think was not predicted about the civics institution is there happened to be a lot of people graduating with PhDs who haven’t been able to get jobs because of their politics or their low intersectional scores, or they’re just doing topics that the university doesn’t want to teach anymore. So they’re there and can be recruited.
At the Hamilton Center at Florida, they’ve hired, I think, 21 people in a very short time, and they’re all excellent people, PhDs from top programs, but they haven’t been able to get a job or they haven’t been comfortable in programs, in universities that are extremely skewed to the progressive left. So we’ve really put together a topnotch group of scholars. I speak as a member of the board. I’m actually going to the University of Florida in the spring as a Visiting Scholar, so I’ll be able to see what’s going on. But I think this is happening also at UNC, Chapel Hill, we didn’t mention that before, but that’s got a major, I think it’s called School of Public Administration.
John Grove:
Right. I left them off.
James Hankins:
And they have an excellent person, Jed Atkins, who’s been put in charge of it, and they’re recruiting like mad; they’re getting excellent people. I think they even stole a person away from the Harvard Gov Department. The Harvard Gov Department was trying to promote somebody from within, but that person preferred to go to UNC, Chapel Hill.
John Grove:
Wow.
James Hankins:
So there’s some serious competition going on out there. What I’m less enthusiastic about is the attempts of state legislatures to involve themselves in micromanaging curricula and hiring and firing and making it easier to fire professors. I understand the impulse to do that when you see somebody at a state university being paid by the state who’s spreading garbage and teaching anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, pretending their enemies are white supremacists, and all these crazy things. And the state legislature gets worked up and says, we have to have way to fire these people. Okay, I get that. But what I’m worried about, and I’ve seen this from within, is that you don’t want universities being turned into battlefields. And once you start creating martyrs and attacking the right of departments to set their own curricula, you’re going to have a huge political bust-up. And I think there are ways to do the same thing without having those problems.
So what I think that universities ought to be doing, what state legislatures ought to be doing is to change the administration. You’ve got to get university presidents with their own staff, with carrots and sticks who have the ability to move people around. Often they won’t be able to fire people, but they can neutralize them by putting them in positions of no power and cutting their budgets. I mean, if you have that kind of power, you can really change the administrative environment. And that is important. That’s antecedent to my mind, to changing faculty monoculture. And there are many things you can do in administration to make faculties better and more balanced. For one thing, it’s observable that small departments tend to be more politicized. If you’ve got a department of five or six people, and they all agree in politics, they’re going to start talking politics at department meetings, and then pretty soon they’re going to be doing political programs and curricula and so forth.
In bigger departments, that’s less likely to happen just because there’s always a chance that there are more conservative, I don’t want to say conservative, but let’s say fewer people on the extreme left, more people on the faculty who will disagree with small, politicized faction. That’s the case in our department. … So I think at university level, you could probably reorganize university a bit and take some small departments and make them large departments. I’m thinking in particular of you need somebody at the top who has practical wisdom, who really understands how to use the carrots and sticks.
So for example, in our university, we have a lot of different small language departments, and they’re all uniformly to the left, very far to the left. So what could you do? You could combine them into a larger department, you could give them some appointments, but with, let’s say, funding for half a position. The president has to approve the other half. So the president gets a veto essentially on who gets hired. Then you give the language department some big university curricular responsibility. I think it’s a disgrace that American universities do not require languages, mastery of languages. They used to do that, but now there are all sorts of ways of getting around these requirements. But if you told the language departments, okay, now you’re one big department, we’re going to give you some extra appointments. We’re going to beef up our language requirement and require students to really master a language, at least one language, something they don’t do now. Then I think the language departments would respond positively. And I think they would be less inclined to organize themselves into centers of political indoctrination.
John Grove:
In other words, keeping people busy doing what they actually do well, rather than …
James Hankins:
Yes. It’s just an example of how a wise administrator who knew what they wanted, who he wanted or she wanted, could make a serious change in the university’s political culture.
John Grove:
On this question of political reform too. So one of the prominent voices on this, especially with the New College of Florida, has been Chris Rufo, and he has a line that I’d be interested to get your opinion on. He’s pretty robustly in favor of some of these state governments and legislatures taking a more active direct role in university governance. And one of the phrases he often uses is where he says, “We need to make the university more political, less ideological.” What he means by that, I think, is that insofar as you get the legislatures more active, more involved in the governance of the university, that’s more political. But that will have the effect of reflecting public values, more than some sort of insane ideology that just a very small handful of faculty believe in. I’m just curious to have your opinion on that idea. More political, less ideological. Do you think that works or partly?
James Hankins:
Yeah, again, I largely agree with that, but I think it’s got to be done in a very wise way. And I think the lessons of classical liberalism is that the university or the institutions allow things to happen. They create conditions for things to change in freedom. They provide legal frameworks, institutional frameworks for freedom. That’s what we mean by ordered liberty in classical liberalism. So what I think that they should do is to change accreditation regimes and change testing regimes, do the things that are appropriate to a state legislature, but do them in a way that foster change. I’ll give you an example. The state of Florida last year allowed a testing agency called CLT, the Classical Learning Test, to be accepted for entry to state universities. So I’m on the board, so I should state that I guess, but I’m on the board because I believe it’s a great thing.
And what CLT does is content testing. What the College Board has done for a long time is basically try to determine raw intelligence by setting problem sets on college admissions tests. There are achievement tests, which are much better, but the basic SAT tests and ACT tests are tests of raw intelligence. So I think America should start using something more like the British A-levels—O- levels and A-levels— which are really content tests, tests that ask: what do you know? What have you learned? If instead of emphasizing skills and raw intelligence and problem solving, you had content tests, that could lead to a lot of positive changes.
And it’s a legitimate public purpose, again, to demand that high school students graduate with adequate knowledge of American history, government and Western history. So if you had a content tests, asking what do you know? What authors have you read? Do you understand the American constitution? Do you understand the history of the amendments to the American constitution? Do you know anything about what a republic is, the republican tradition in the West, how it’s different from a democracy? Do you know about the story of human rights? Those kind of questions. And also literature questions too. Do you know who Shakespeare is? Have you read Milton and Jane Austen? This is what the British do on their tests, and they’re very effective. It would have knock-on effects because, as they’ve discovered in Britain, if you have A-level test, a test on some particular area of content like English literature or Latin or something like that, students develop a lifelong interest in those subjects. And when they go to university, they want to study them.
If they had content tests, universities would be faced with large numbers of people who wanted to continue their studies and they wouldn’t be able to fill up the curriculum with all of these niche subjects and political indoctrination programs because they have students demanding something else. Student demand does count, especially in universities where enrollments count. There are some universities where enrollment doesn’t count like Harvard, and in most of the Ivy League enrollments don’t really count, they don’t pay attention to numbers very much. But I’d say the vast majority of universities pay attention to enrollments. So this is just to give you an example of how changing a testing regime and an accreditation regime could really have positive effects.
John Grove:
Yeah, and I’m going to want to circle back a little bit too to some of the stuff you were talking about, K-12 a little bit later. Right now though, why don’t we zoom out the conversation a little bit? We’ve been talking about specific reforms. I want to talk a little bit about what you see as, ultimately, what reformers should really be aiming for. So, what do you see as the essential mission of the university? And how far off are modern American universities from that? What should the university be about? What should it be doing?
James Hankins:
Well, first of all, it depends on the type of university. We have many different institutions. We have Christian institutions and secular institutions. We have state universities, public and private. We have research universities and liberal arts universities and colleges. We have institutions small and large. So, every university is going to have a slightly different set of objectives. But one thing I think all universities ought to be doing, that should be part of their raison d’etre, is fostering meritocracy. They should be training students for professions and for business, and for all sorts of future careers, but they also need to be encouraging, in a more general way, intellectual excellence of all kinds—and I’d include excellence in entrepreneurship, by the way. We have to consider the needs of the country as well as of the world. It’s one of the things that’s happened in universities, especially elite universities in the last 30 years: as they’ve gone global, and the students have become more global, and the faculty and the administration have become more international, they have are less likely to consist of people born in the country.
I’m not a nativist, but I think that globalization can have positive effects and can have negative effects. And right now, it’s having a negative effect because the national interest is being neglected. But my view is that, in general, the university ought to be encouraging intellectual excellence of all kinds. In the admissions offices around the US today, especially in elite universities, they think they’re job is to bring about social justice, right wrongs, practice restorative justice. Restorative justice means that you’re unjust to some people in the present in order to be to people who died 100 years ago. So the admissions offices are afraid of being bastions of privilege. And I think, instead, they should be thinking of themselves as bastions of excellence.
They should be creating communities of outstanding teachers, students, researchers with a higher purpose. They’re the kind of place that an outstanding young person, a gifted young person, wants to go to so they can develop their own excellence. I think they should have pride in this. This is something that I noted very early when I got to Harvard in 1985. One thing that immediately struck me was the tremendous pride people took in the institution. Of course, it’s often read by outsiders as arrogant.
John Grove:
Right.
James Hankins:
I understand that, but it’s a good thing if it means you have standards, right? People would say, “We do things differently here.” And we had administrators back then who, if the students acted up, they would be out the door the next day because “we are not a institution that trains protesters.” We are an institution that fosters excellence in science and in humanities and social sciences. This is what we do. And unfortunately, we’ve lost that sort of inspiration and that sort of pride, which I think is a real loss.
So that’s one thing I would think we should be doing, is encouraging meritocracy, encourage a love of excellence and proper pride in the institution. The other thing I think we should be doing is paying more attention to what students want to learn. In elite universities we should give more weight to enrollments. A lot of these departments that are the incubators of political radicalism are very small and they have very few enrollments. Now, in our department, the most … Well, I won’t talk about my department, but the Women’s Studies programs and some of the other programs, which I won’t mention by name, they’re the ones have all the radicals, but they’ve got relatively few students. The less radical departments have got hundreds of students. So I think if you paid more attention to what students want to learn and give those areas more resources, you can do a lot to right the ship.
John Grove:
That’s a remarkably hopeful observation.
James Hankins:
Yeah. One of the things I say about this, they should be giving resources to departments that can show that they’ve improved the knowledge and skills of their students. You’re probably aware of all these surveys that have shown that people go to college for four years and haven’t learned anything. That’s a total disgrace, especially for an elite university that has really wonderful students and faculty. Not everybody at Harvard is a genius, but we do have highly intelligent people who are capable of learning a tremendous amount, developing amazing skills. We’ve got, I would say at least 10 really world-class geniuses on the faculty, which is a lot, comparatively speaking. And students aren’t learning from them. A lot of this is the faculty’s fault. The departments have given up sequencing. They’re just a buffet of courses. The idea that you could actually improve in the study of history or literature or the social sciences is pretty much out the window now. Only in the sciences have they really kept the idea of sequencing: that you’re going to have greater mastery when you graduate than when you came in the door. So I think that’s something that universities, administrators, and state governments even could learn to pay attention to.
John Grove:
Yeah. So you’ve mentioned a few times the departments that become bastions of political ideology and get captured by political agendas. When do you think the university … when did things start to really go wrong with that? You opened one of your pieces for us, “A Training in the Contemplative Life,” —it was a book review—with a quote by Edward Said, and you said: “Guess who said this? And you’ll never guess.” Right? And it was a quote about … I’m not going to read the whole quote, but it was basically about how the classroom is not the place for advancing your political agenda. And coming from that source, it’s a sort of shocking thing to us today, because Said is seen today as this incredibly hard left radical, and you would never expect that type of person to sees education apolitically.
So, at what point did this change? Was it the 60s? There’s some people who go back further and say: once universities started to be interested in outside funding and taking government grants for this and that political project, that sort of made them lose faith in their mission. A lot of people would point to the 60s. When do you think the university really, really got off track, when they stopped having good sense about they were supposed to be doing in the classroom? Where did we lose that? Is that really recent or is that a longer term problem?
James Hankins:
Yeah, I’ve had this discussion with a number of people about this, and I think that the tipping point was around the year 2000, rather recently. There have always been activists in university, but the weight of the university was behind research and teaching, and it was assumed that’s the primary purpose of the institution. When I came into the profession 40 years ago, it was an unquestioned assumption that American universities were the jewel in the crown of American democracy. Other countries envied our 3,000 universities, and there was very high level of public support for them from both parties. The goal of K-12 education was to get people into higher ed, more and more people into universities. You got kudos if you were a guidance counselor at a high school and got people into elite universities. Maybe that’s still true. And there was great support for student loan programs. All of that stuff has been weakened, I think, in the last 25 years in particular, that the level of public support for universities has really gone down, especially in the last 10 years.
So why is that? One thing I think that’s happened is that, especially in elite universities, we all just got a little bit too fat and happy. We had too much money. And when you get that successful, and American elite universities are very successful … They’re very wealthy, and rightly so in many ways. I don’t want to give the impression that they’re all dens of political iniquity. They’re not. They’re doing marvelous things and they’re still doing marvelous things, and they can continue to do marvelous things if they just get their heads a little bit straight about their real mission. But anyway, what happens when they’re fat and happy is that they think they can do anything. They can do nothing wrong, nothing will go badly for them. And they develop all these parasites who want to use the institution’s prestige to further their own agenda. So you get a lot of featherbedding, get the multiplication of institutes and centers. Harvard is lousy with all of these centers.
And when you get too much attention to interdisciplinary experiments and cross-cultural investigations, you’re no longer training people in the disciplines. University administrators love the word “interdisciplinary,” but they don’t love the word “disciplinary” because they don’t understand what a discipline is, that it takes time and effort to produce a great historian, a great literary critic, or a great scientist. They don’t get that it doesn’t happen all at once and you need time and careful training to build up knowledge and skills.
So there was this period, and I guess it still continues, that anybody with an idea in their head and a couple of donors could set up a center. No one was thinking about the ultimate effects on the entire institution of having these centers everywhere. Professors love spending time at the centers where they can find people who were doing exactly the same thing as they were, where there were people they could talk to. So research becomes too specialized for any normal, well-educated person to understand, and they kind of hollowed out the departments, which is where disciplinary education takes place.
One of my very witty colleges who’s now dead, unfortunately, Mark Kishlansky, used to say that a center was like Noah’s Ark. It couldn’t hire just one professor. There always had to be two. And then once they had two, they had to have an assistant professor and a staff. So in our department, just for example, we have many area studies centers with multiple professors in them. It’s very easy to find donors to endow specialized centers, especially at a place like Harvard. For example, we have a center for Ukrainian studies, which was a very sleepy for a long time—until a couple of years ago. But some wealthy Ukrainian gave money to found Ukraine studies. So we have all these wealthy partners who want to establish the study of their country or special interest at Harvard, and we do research in all those areas. But we have lost a sense of what is most important for students to learn. No one ever thought that we needed an endowment for French history, for example, because no one imagined that we would ever stop teaching French history in preference to, say, Afghani history.
Another point: because we have faculty in these areas, we have courses in them, but they have microscopic enrollments. So now the “exotics” (as my friend Kishlansky used to call them) outnumber the professors in American and European history and can outvote them when it comes to setting departmental priorities. That’s how we end up teaching subjects few students want to study and neglect subjects of major importance that interest students, like the history of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the history of the presidency and the constitution, American military and diplomatic history, and so forth.
Maybe this is a little bit too much inside baseball for this podcast-
John Grove:
No, it’s interesting.
James Hankins:
… but I’m just trying to explain how expansion generates a lot of time-servers and a lot of distractions from the central mission of the university. I really believe that teaching and learning should go together, but with all these specialized centers teaching and research have taken separate paths. You have professors off doing their specialized research and not really focused on their departmental teaching and the life of the department.
John Grove:
Right. I’ll ask one more question on this question of politicized education and combating that, and then we’ll shift. You had a line in a piece you wrote for us called ‘A Centrist Strategy for Higher Education Reform.” This was an interesting exchange between you and Mike Gonzalez, and you two had a lot of overlap in your views of higher ed reform, but also some important differences. And one of the things you warned about there is you said, “It’s important that reformers, whatever approach they take, you said, “that they don’t turn the curriculum into a catechism of American values.” So this is a concern about the pendulum swinging too far in the other way when you’re trying to combat one thing. Say a little bit about that. Is that something that reformers need to avoid? How can you balance that? Because I sense that you are okay with a certain idea of a civic obligation for the university, but you want to make sure we don’t go too far. How do you find that balance between feeling like you do have a civic obligation that you’re fulfilling, but at the same time, not just, as you say, turning education into a catechism of American values?
James Hankins:
Well, universities are meant to be sites for free investigation and free study and freedom of thought, and we need to preserve that. They will cease to be universities if they don’t. We can’t have a required list of things that students must believe. I mean, I’m sure Gonzales doesn’t thought that either; I don’t want to make him into a straw man.
John Grove:
Right.
James Hankins:
Maybe some people in a state legislature somewhere want that. But the whole point of ordered liberty is to give people the liberty to think and write in ways that benefit the community. And I have enough confidence in the values of America to believe that if they’re presented fairly and compared fairly with other potential value systems, that they will win out. This is like Aquinas on the studying the pagan philosophers. The Christians can read Aristotle because Christians will ultimately be in agreement with what’s right in Aristotle and be able to correct Aristotle in things where they don’t agree.
I’m writing a history of Western tradition right now with Allen Guelzo, a huge 2 volume work, and I’m certainly not trying to be conceal the faults of the West. Knowing the faults of the West is required if you’re going to ever reform things, make things better. If you want to improve morally, you can’t conceal from yourself what your faults are. So, if you believe in the principles of the Revolution and the principles of the Constitution, you have to be willing to look at the criticism of them. You need to understand that not everything has always gone well in America. And that, despite our very noble founding principles, we haven’t done a good job of living up t our ideals. The true patriot wants to emend our country’s every flaw. And you can’t do that if you’re catechizing people on whether their values are correct or not.
John Grove:
Time for one more question. I mentioned I would circle back to this. You briefly started talking a little bit about K12 education and specifically, talking about these tests that people take for college admissions and the influence that those have. And clearly they have an influence: schools focus on how they can prepare their students to take these tests. Is there a hard cap on what university reform, higher education reform can accomplish, unless and until there’s some significant change in K12 education? Because one of the questions—and maybe there’s even a little bit of a distinction here between elite higher ed and maybe more mid-level and lower tier higher education—is that not only do you have some students who haven’t read essential texts, and they’re not familiar with things that we would consider to be basics of Western civilization, but even—as I say, going down into more middle tier and lower tier of higher education—but you even have a lot of students who lack basic skills to succeed in a college course. The ability to read a difficult text for example.
Do all of the efforts at higher education reform… well, I won’t say all, but do a lot of them hinge on us somehow getting K12 right? Or getting it at least a little bit better, so that the students coming into the university are ready for the sorts of things they will study there? You’re talking about the pursuit of excellence, but if you ask most students, freshmen coming into any university, whether they’re ready to pursue excellence or virtue, wouldn’t a lot of them look at you cross-eyed and say, “What are you even talking about? I want a job, whatever it may be.” So, what are the sorts of things at the K12 level, do you think, that need to change in order to get the universities a little bit back on track and do what they’re supposed to be doing? I know that’s a big question.
James Hankins:
It is a big question, but again, there’s a lot of change going on, and as I say, I think there’s a renaissance in American K12 education going on. Conservatives create renaissances, progressives create revolutions. So we’re having a renaissance rather than a revolution.
John Grove:
I like that.
James Hankins:
But there are a lot of reforming energies right now in the classical education movement, which is increasing by leaps and bounds. And there’s a million people doing classical education now, and it’s going to be 3 million in 10 years or less. Of course, the total population of K12 students is something like 55 million, and 45 million of those people are now in district public schools, as opposed to charter schools, which are public schools, but they’re not run by school districts and unions. The number of people in district public education has fallen from 95% to 88% since 2010. People are leaving district public education, mostly because they’re just not performing very well, providing basic literacy and reading skills and math skills. Scores in those basic areas are declining, and at the same time there’s politicization and there’s defiance of parental rights. But I think that things are moving in the right direction there, and that will eventually have an impact on the universities.
One of the problems that the classical school movement has had up until now is: where are our high school graduates going to go to college? There are not that many places that you want to send someone who has more traditional ideas in their head about religion and culture. Politicized universities are not welcoming places for people who have had a traditional education, people who are serious about their religious beliefs.
There are things that are being done at elite universities to help such students. I wrote about this in a piece for Law & Liberty a few year back. There are the FEHE Institutes for example—the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education—which has established about 20 institutions that are in the penumbra of elite universities—they’re private institutions that live near university campuses. The Canterbury Institute at Oxford is another one. And they help students at major universities find like-minded people, but also sometimes help them study things that are not being taught anymore. At Harvard we have finally hired a Dantista after many years without one, but for a long time no one was teaching Dante at Harvard. The could do so at the Abigail Adams Center, which is a FEHE institute near the Harvard campus, where Harvard students could read Dante or Thomas Aquinas or other writers and philosophers scanted in the Harvard course catalogue. They sometimes want to read authors that they can’t read anymore because the university English departments find them repulsive. I have serious doubts whether there’s any course in America on Kipling, for example, because he’s seen as an evil colonialist, though he’s a great writer.
John Grove:
He’d be radioactive for a lot of people in those departments.
James Hankins:
Yeah. So what I think is that we’re moving in the right direction and that universities are going to have to change if they want to open their doors to the brilliant students coming out of classical education now. They’re going to have to accept classically-trained students if they want the best students, because the public schools are not creating excellence. I’m writing an article right now for National Affairs about this. So I think things are bound to move in the right direction just because the undergraduates attending universities are going to be different. I think the new civics institutes will want to welcome a lot of these students as majors, provided they offer majors, and that will help the overall culture of the university. The elite universities are going to have to get smarter about what their mission is and about the population of students they need to serve. They will eventually understand that there’s a lot of excellence out there in K12 education that may not be coming from public schools.
John Grove:
Well, we are about out of time. I think that’s a great place to stop because one of the things I always like about reading your essays for us and for other outlets on higher education is that you’re very realistic about the problems, but you always come away with a little bit of a hopeful feel about it. And I feel like that has been true of this conversation too. I hope others will take hope from it. So anybody who has not read Professor Hankins’s materials on Law & Liberty on higher ed, we’re going to have links to pretty much everything he’s written on higher education for the past couple of years in our show notes, so please take a look at those. And Jim, thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed this conversation.
James Hankins:
I did too. It’s been a pleasure. Interviews are always fun for professors, we love to be asked questions. And I had some particularly interesting ones today!
John Grove:
All right. Well, thanks again.
James Hankins:
Thank you.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
When conservatives debate fundamentals, it does not take long for “fusionism” to come up. But it’s not always clear what it is. Is it a philosophical stance or a practical coalition? Was it a historically contingent response to the Cold War or an integral part of any conservative disposition? An all-star panel joins host James Patterson to discuss and debate what fusionism really is and what the prospects are for its future. Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade consider fusionism’s origins in mid-century America, its culmination in the 1980s, and its current status.
Related Links:
Charles C. W. Cooke, “A Roadmap—If We Want It” (Law & Liberty)
Stephanie Slade, “Is There a Future for Fusionism?” (Reason)
FUSION: In the Tradition of Liberty, (Samuel Goldman, Editor)
Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto
Samuel Goldman, After Nationalism
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Human beings are flawed, finite creatures. But they are not problems to be solved, argues AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience. In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a "new humanism" that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly "touch grass."
Related Links: The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen) The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj Irony and Outrage (Dannagal Goldthwaite Young) "A Long View on Artificial Intelligence" (A Law & Liberty forum on artificial intellegence led by Rachel Lomasky) "What the Smartphone Hath Wrought," (A Law & Liberty review by Joseph Holmes of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation)
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She lives in Washington, DC.
Human beings are flawed, finite creatures. But they are not problems to be solved, argues AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience. In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a “new humanism” that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly “touch grass.”
Related Links:
The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen)
The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj
Irony and Outrage (Dannagal Goldthwaite Young)
“A Long View on Artificial Intelligence” (A Law & Liberty forum on artificial intellegence led by Rachel Lomasky)
“What the Smartphone Hath Wrought,” (A Law & Liberty review by Joseph Holmes of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation)
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
TranscriptJames Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. The date is September 6th, 2024. Our guest today is Christine Rosen. She is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Concurrently, she’s a columnist for the Commentary Magazine and is one of its co-hosts for their podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture and a senior editor in an advisory position at the New Atlantis.
Her previous positions include editor of In Character, managing editor of the Weekly Standard, and distinguishing visiting scholar at the Library of Congress. She is also the author of several books, including My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Divine Girlhood, and Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, which is a dynamite book, although it sounds like it would be very unpleasant to read. It’s actually dynamite. A prolific writer, Dr. Rosen is often published in the popular press.
She has a PhD in history with a major in American intellectual history from Emory University and a BA in history from the University of South Florida. Today, we’ll be talking about her new book, The Extinction of Experience, which comes out next Tuesday, September 10th, 2024. By the time this podcast comes out, however, it will already be for sale, and you will be buying it because we’ll persuade you to be interested in this if you’re not already by this podcast. So, Dr. Rosen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Christine Rosen:
Thanks so much for having me, James. And please, no doctor, I cannot prescribe medication.
James Patterson:
That’s right, that’s right. Well, we’re going to prescribe something today.
Christine Rosen:
Sound advice.
James Patterson:
That’s right, that’s right. So obviously, the term “the extinction of experience” invites the question: What do you mean by experience, and how do things like digital media and social media threaten it with extinction?
Christine Rosen:
That’s a great, great question. The title of the book is actually a phrase that was originally used by a naturalist named Robert Michael Pyle. He was concerned that each new generation wasn’t actually having hands-on experiences in the natural world. And so if a species went extinct, they wouldn’t even register that because they had no real-world experience with it. And I had been reading something that talked through this idea and I thought, that’s actually a problem not just about the natural world, but about the way we talk to each other face-to-face. The fact that a lot of us can’t write by hand any longer and that we don’t teach children to write by hand, and the way we interact in public space. It just got me thinking about all of the human experiences that we now take for granted because we either outsource them to technology, assuming that’s a better and more convenient way to do it, or they’ve simply disappeared and been replaced by technology.
And so what I wanted to grapple with is, how many of those replacements were improvements? How many were not? And are some of the things that we’re unthinkingly embracing as good, in fact, undermining some deep and important truths about what it means to be human?
James Patterson:
Younger millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, these are the people that I’m teaching now. They’re growing up as what used to be called digital natives. These are kids who had digital devices thrust into their hands and grew up with them as kind of natural extensions of the world. How do they differ in their understanding of technology – their use of technology – from the very analog Gen X and baby boomers?
Christine Rosen:
Well, it’s interesting. So I’m Gen X—my kids are Gen Z. They’re 18 years old. They grew up with this stuff. I watched how much more saturated they were in a technological world, just simply by being the age and born at the time they were.
I think what has happened is that we’ve seen, particularly with millennials, that they were the first generation to really spend a good portion of their childhood/young adulthood with these tools. And we all wanted to believe it would be an improvement. Right? The digital natives would know how to search the internet. They would have access to so much information, they would be more knowledgeable. We all wanted to believe this. None of it was true. And we now are starting to see the fallout. In fact, information is not the same thing as knowledge. Those are two separate things. All of this mass of information, if it’s just thrown at you like a fire hose and you cannot curate the true from the false, the good from the bad, the reputable from the disreputable, you actually end up more confused and often more skeptical about everything than you do actually gaining knowledge and wisdom.
That said, the skills that I saw, the de-skilling, I should say, that I saw in younger generations that concerned me most were the human things. Can you look someone in the eye and carry on a conversation? Can you be bored without going slightly crazy? Can you daydream? Can you find ways to entertain yourselves and interact with others in your peer group that don’t have to mediate yourself or others through a screen, or doesn’t involve having to express emotion through emoticons or emojis or memes? And if we’re choosing more and more often to mediate our relationships, what happens when we’re stuck in a situation where you can’t mediate? Are we more impatient? Are we twitchy and can’t handle boredom?
These are all questions that I think, these are qualitative questions. And I think a lot of our discussion in the last 10 to 20 years about technology is about the quantitative benefits and some of the quantitative harms. How many hours do you spend staring at a screen? How many minutes do you save efficiently searching something up on Google versus an encyclopedia? Those are important questions, but we’ve missed the qualitative questions, and I think those are the ones that really are impacting us now, in terms of how people understand themselves, how they talk to other people. Why are our political culture, for example, is so wildly polarized. I mean, there are a lot of strands here and they’re not all causal, but I think those qualitative human interactions are what I was most curious about exploring in the book.
James Patterson:
So in response to the problems that we see with digital media, especially social media, you affirm sort of towards the beginning of the book, we need a new humanism, one that can challenge the engineering driven scientism that has come to dominate culture. Humanism puts human beings and human experiences at its center, not engineering or machines or algorithms. This is a pretty forthright statement. I was actually pretty taken aback when looking at it, that this is the nature of the problem. What does this humanism look? What would it be? What did it look like, and how might it apply constraints to the way we interact with digital media?
Christine Rosen:
That’s a great question. So I think we are in an era, we’re entering an era and the artificial intelligence stuff coming quickly down the pipeline will only accelerate this. We’re in an era where we have to defend the human, because if you look at the way a lot of our social, cultural and political lives are structured, they are the mediation through platforms developed by engineers, are guiding a lot of our behavior in a way, even if we’re cognizant of it, where I don’t think we’re thinking through the long-term fallout from it. And by that I mean, I have lots of friends who work in Silicon Valley, they are good people. They are genuinely, many of them genuinely trying to improve human life, but they have the engineering mindset, which means they see human beings as a problem to be solved.
I do not see human; I see us in our messy, contradictory, self-delusional glory as not an engineering problem. We’re humans, we… All our quirks and our misconceptions are what make us unique to each other, and we should celebrate that fact. That doesn’t mean irrationality should rule, but I feel like we have tackled a lot of human by trying to impose engineering solutions to solve them. And some of our problems are unsolvable, and this is where I become, the conservative part of my sensibility emerges. We are finite, flawed creatures, and I think our understanding of that is something that the Silicon Valley engineering mindset is constantly battling with. But I feel like so far we’ve embraced the idea that we should be more like machines rather than that we should try to use and develop machines that encourage our humanness.
James Patterson:
Yeah, there’s a funny analog to political science where early in the use of statistical methods, a lot of statisticians became very frustrated that people they were pulling did not fit into the categories the statisticians imposed. This seems to be a regular problem with the application-
Christine Rosen:
Yes.
James Patterson:
… with the application of these empirical approaches. Where would this humanism come from? I was worried when I was reading this because I agree, but I’m not sure if there are institutions that would necessarily want to do this.
Christine Rosen:
So I think this is the place where the question is going to be answered somewhat differently depending on who you ask. So for some people, that new human focus is going to come from the family or the local community. For others it will come from their religious institutions, still others, perhaps their educational institutions. There is no perfect top-down solution or a succinct answer to that question.
And I say that with hesitation because books these days about technology, particularly books that are critical of the way we use technology, people always want an easy solution. And 10 years ago if you’d asked me that question, I would’ve said, “Take a digital Sabbath. Don’t allow phones in schools. Make sure you delay screen time for your kids as long as possible.” There were all of these practical answers and we have embraced some of those and that’s a good thing. But we are now at a point I think, where so much of our experience as individuals, as family members, as citizens, we mediate so many of them just out of habit because it’s so easy. It’s how things are done.
I mean, you check out of a local CVS in my hometown here in my town of DC, and you rarely see a person. You can go in, buy your stuff, use the self-check kiosk, out you go, and it seems fine, right? That’s so quick, I don’t have to wait in line. But it’s a different experience than even five years ago when you waited in line, maybe saw a neighbor and chatted and then said, “Hello, good morning,” to the person who was ringing up your sale. That’s a human interaction.
Now, not all human interactions are positive, but I think when we try to think about how do we restore some of those, I do think that we need to start with the family and the local community first. I think that’s where real change can happen, and that begins with each and every one of us sitting down and thinking critically, how do I use these tools, and am I using them too much for things that I should just do face-to-face with the other people in my life?
James Patterson:
You mentioned waiting and waiting actually makes up a central chapter of the book. And I remember joking with my wife back when people went to Chipotle because of their ample serving sizes, before everything got-
Christine Rosen:
Shrinkflation struck.
James Patterson:
Shrinkflation, that’s right. It became easier to wait at Chipotle because people had phones that they could use to occupy their time, but this book is full of things that I had never thought about, and to sort of consolidate into a single set of arguments. And one of these is waiting and boredom. So how have firms tried to monetize these things? And if you could please especially talk about Disney, because that was definitely one of the best parts of the book.
Christine Rosen:
Yeah, so as a Florida native, we growing up in Florida in the ’70s and ’80s, if you were a Florida native with a Florida driver’s license, as my parents were, there were Disney days for Floridians. And so we would always go to those because it was discounted and it was the off-season, basically, not that Disney has an off season. And I remember, I’m one of three daughters and I remember fidgeting and standing in line and it was the broiling son of Florida in Orlando and the humidity and complaining and having one of my parents say, “You just have to wait,” and you had to accept that you had to wait. And so my mind would wander, I’d look around at the people, I’d sort of, I’d torment my little sister, whatever activity I chose, it was a self-motivated way to try to deal with boredom. And now, you don’t have to do that. First, because everyone assumes no one will wait. We’re much more impatient. We want things on-demand because we now have that expectation.
So Disney has even redesigned the way it does its lines. You can get the fast pass or whatever it’s called now, it’s got an even more high-tech name, and they entertain you along the way in line, which they never used to do. And then if you’re still bored, you’ve got your phone. And if you look at anyone waiting in line these days, whether it’s at Chipotle or Disney World or anywhere, they are all staring down at a screen. And so what that does is transform public space. It transforms as individuals our willingness to wait.
You see skyrocketing rates of road rage, now we have air rage, I’m sure train rage is coming. I mean, these are all expressions of cultural impatience that I think begin with the individual having an expectation, I shouldn’t have to wait. And that expectation has been met time and time again by these transformative devices and by the internet and on-demand culture. And again, I don’t say any of that saying we should take that all away and go back to the Stone Age and horse and buggy. I’m not a Luddite, but I do think we haven’t thought through the implications for habits of mind, worldview and virtues, really, is the word I would use. The virtue of patience, the virtue of delayed gratification. These are part of what make us functioning human beings, and I think we’ve lost sight of that.
James Patterson:
Earlier in the book, you mention being able to make and understand facial expressions is a kind of primal language, and you talk about the kind of curriculum based around smiling and frowning and having kids identify what each of these mean. Another one of these things I mentioned that it was something I’d noticed but never thought to put together in a book like this, really, really great. But what is it that digital media do to our ability to understand that language?
Christine Rosen:
So we are hardwired evolutionarily to read each other’s facial expressions, to decide if we can trust another person, to see if they’re angry, if they’re happy, if they’re sad, and then respond to that. The expression of our emotions on our faces is a very powerful form of communication. So what we’ve done by mediating that is dulled that, both the ability to express emotion and the ability to read it. And for a lot of people, I think that really struck home during the COVID pandemic when people were masked, and in particular when children looked into the faces of adults in their lives and couldn’t read their expressions. And there’s fallout from that. There’s fallout for language development, there’s fallout for emotional security. So the masking weirdly kind of cast into high relief a lot of the stuff I’d been reading for years about this.
What I’m concerned about is that we think that the screen is a reasonable substitute for the human face and it is not. And we now have a lot of fascinating research that shows, especially for children who are developing emotions and developing sense of themselves and in the world they’re in, having an adult, for example, read a story through a screen and the kid can see the adult reading them the story, is an entirely qualitatively different experience than someone sitting across from them reading a story or holding them and reading a story. And we know this intuitively, I think, I mean, if you’re a parent, you know this. But I don’t think that we took the time to think it through before we embraced screens in the classroom and in every home and giving every kid an iPad and thinking, this will make them smarter, because that’s what we were told it would do. We now know that that’s not the case, that there are other consequences, unintended consequences of some of these technologies.
So that’s where the human face is such a powerful tool, and I worry about younger generations who aren’t good about reading facial expressions. I have friends here in DC who work in diplomatic fields and they’ll tell you. When they get new recruits in, people they’re training to be diplomats and work in these very important high level jobs where they have to read other people, perhaps people who don’t speak the same language as they do. They find them struggling, harder to train, that they really, they won’t look people in the eye at the same way that older diplomats have just naturally done. So it has changed the way we interact. And I think some of those old, old evolutionary tools are, those are skills that are, again, it’s a kind of mass de-skilling of our ability to do something that brings us together as humans and allows us to build trust and to build communities with each other in a way that you just cannot do online.
James Patterson:
Yeah, another part to that de-skilling I found in the book that did not occur to me. I should mention that we’re kind of your typical Ave Maria, South Florida homeschooling family. So I get to kind of stand outside a little bit of this stuff. So when I see you describe it, it sort of horrifies me. It’s that there’s a decrease in the amount of writing and drawing and this very funny account of you learning the bassoon.
Christine Rosen:
Yes.
James Patterson:
If you could explain the arrangement of the bassoon for your tiny hands, that would be great. But what are they learning now if not these things? And how are they learning it?
Christine Rosen:
Well, so this fascinated me because like the human face, evolutionarily we’re designed to use our hands to understand the world around us by touching things, manipulating objects, building tools, all of these things that we use and communicate with our hands. And we all remember learning to write by hand, block letters, and then for those of us who are of a certain age, myself included, we learned to write cursive. And cursive was this crossing the rubicon moment where you’re like, it’s very frustrating and very challenging. And I always thought, why do I need to learn how to do this? I just have to know how to sign my name. But I was forced to do that, just like I was forced to diagram sentences. I am extremely grateful to all of my wonderful teachers who made me do that now, but at the time it seemed useless.
And I think as a culture, we now have this idea that because so much can be done on a keyboard or on a touchscreen, that handwriting is no longer important. But we know, and again, there’s this fascinating literature of people who study how we learn to read, how we learn to write. And what they’re finding is that children in particular who do not learn to write, later have struggled with certain aspects of complex literacy, understanding the written word, because there is some brain-body connection that goes on when you have to take an object in your hand and try to make words and learn how to discipline your body and your mind at the same time. And this is for anybody who’s learned a sport or who as I did when I was eight years old, for some unknown reason, took up the bassoon. There’s something really foreign and alien at first, and you can struggle with, where do I put my fingers and how do I hold this and do that? But as you practice and as you learn, those skills aren’t just physical, they’re also mental.
And in the case of if you’re a musician or an artist or an athlete, they can be emotional too. You feel connected to your own body and able to do things that you couldn’t do before. We are missing out on that when kids spend most of their time in free play, looking at a screen and swiping. Swiping a screen and tapping the screen, those are very rudimentary, limited technical skills. Handwriting is much harder, and cursive handwriting, the other thing I’ve noted recently. You remember the, you know the Coca-Cola label, logo, which is written in script?
James Patterson:
Yes.
Christine Rosen:
And other things like say for example, the Declaration of Independence, things like that, that are written in cursive. Kids today can’t read that. They cannot read the cursive, they cannot read our founding documents, and that scares me. And a lot of companies are changing their logos if they’re script, because they want to make sure younger people can actually read and they put it in block letters. That worries me, that is a skill we are running away from thinking we’re improving. But how is it improvement if people can no longer sign their names in cursive? I just feel like this is, again, this is a skillset that speaks not just to something we used to do, but can’t now, but also to literacy and to our ability to be sophisticated, thoughtful readers.
James Patterson:
Yeah, it’s impossible to do archival work without being able to read script.
Christine Rosen:
Exactly. Yes, exactly.
James Patterson:
And the idea that they would not know how to do that and they would have to take, at 25, they’re doing their dissertation to go do script courses.
Christine Rosen:
Do you know what was the funniest little anecdote I stumbled across in a news story when I was researching that chapter, was bakers at, like you go to Publix or you go to Winn-Dixie or something, you want to get a birthday cake for someone? They were having trouble finding workers who could write happy birthday in script.
James Patterson:
Oh, my goodness.
Christine Rosen:
They couldn’t do it, so everything was written in block letters. And if you’re a fan of the book, the Cake Wrecks book, which I personally am, they’re hilarious. I was like, oh my God, we’re all cake wrecks now. Nobody can write happy birthday in icing. This just for some reason really is chilling to me-
James Patterson:
That’s right.
Christine Rosen:
… because I like Publix cake, but okay.
James Patterson:
So it’s carving out a niche to be the last script cake decorator.
Christine Rosen:
Exactly.
James Patterson:
He’s going to charge astronomical rates.
So there’s kind of a zen cone of media theory that comes from Marshall McLuhan, and that’s the medium is the message. It means that the medium itself structures the messages we send, what we think of when we want to send messages and how receivers interpret them. So what is it about social media that makes us want to respond and post and have all of this anger and hatred? Is this what makes them successful? Is that part of the business model?
Christine Rosen:
It’s certainly, it’s designed to garner reaction and to keep you on the platform. It cares not a bit, the engineers who designed it don’t care at all if that reaction is fear, anger, anxiety and hostility, or if it’s smiles and laughter and happiness, it doesn’t matter. And as we know, if you study human nature and human behavior, as many of the people who work at these companies and design these platforms have, you know that fear, that the top emotions that are going to get the most aggressive response are fear and anger. Anxiety is pretty high up there too. So they know that, they design a platform that will just keep you coming back, giving you an intermittent reward system. You never know when you’re going to get that little dopamine hit, and that’s what it is, your brain’s getting a dopamine hit. And everything, they’re designed that way.
I would say the difference between when Marshall McLuhan and others were first critiquing our different media, particularly television and even early computer screens. The difference now with platforms like social media and TikTok and all of these other places that are very visually driven, is that they are much more sophisticated and seamless about hiding the structure of motivational behavior techniques they’re using. So you don’t feel like you’re being manipulated. You actually feel like you’re behaving in a very autonomous way but at each way, each point along your interaction with these platforms, you are being guided in a kind of hidden hand sort of way.
And I teach some undergraduates in technology and ethics and technology and democracy, and I’ll often call up an Instagram menu and I’ll say, “So, what do you see when you see this?” They’re like, “Look at all the choices. I can do this filter. I can set it to private. It gives me a world of choice.” And so the next question I ask them is, “What’s not on this menu? What can’t you do? From the moment you go to these platforms, what are you already barred from doing?” That’s a design choice. You can’t turn it right off. It makes it difficult to do certain things. It does everything to keep you on the platform. So, trying to think about all of the ways our choices are being nudged and how opaque it is to those of us who use these platforms, that’s the intention. But I think the effect, as we know, particularly with social media use, is a lot more polarization, a lot more anxiety, not necessarily the happy feelings.
James Patterson:
Yeah, and this ties into that discussion of waiting and boredom, and that people can have more money if they’re fortunate, they can prolong their lives to some degree, but it’s very difficult for them to have more time. And so there is a kind of fixed amount of time that a person can have claimed on an app or some kind of social media site. And so a lot of what they use to measure success is engagement, right?
Christine Rosen:
Yes.
James Patterson:
Like the time on app, that’s really the metric.
Christine Rosen:
Yes, exactly. Well, and that’s and for any… And again, to the notion of finite time, there’s a reason a lot of Silicon Valley types are very heavily invested and enthusiastic about life extension technologies. They want to extend time, many of them believe they can. But every time you are mediating an interaction with someone on a screen, there’s an opportunity cost. You could be doing something outside, touching grass, as the kids say, in the real world, or you could be talking to someone face-to-face. Now look, for all of us we do that with our work, but the design choices make it harder and harder for us to step away from those screens.
James Patterson:
So of the things that make people stay on sites like X or Facebook, are things like anger and hatred, but we’ve also seen a very strange resurgence of conspiracy theories. The most recent example of this was that Winston Churchill is really the one responsible for the second World War. What is it about social media that does this, that makes us think in conspiratorial terms or makes those more attractive?
Christine Rosen:
Well, I think two things. One, the attractiveness of it is that it gives people… And we do know by the way, that Americans are reporting higher levels of loneliness and isolation. I mean, I joke, but only sort of, that in America, a lot of people know more about reality stars and Instagram influencers than they do the names of their next door neighbors. This feeling of isolation and loneliness is a genuine thing.
So I think when people go online and they read something and they’re like, well, that seems startling, that can’t be true. Then they go into a chat room and there’s lots of other people who are interested in this too, and they can talk to each other in real time and they can exchange information and they can say, “Well, I researched this and did you know about that?” They become engaged in a world that’s completely online, but that gives them a sense of belonging to a group in the real world. And then we do, unfortunately for the more violent and extremist conspiracy theories, we see people taking those theories from the screen out into the real world and doing all kinds of things that they shouldn’t or that break the law or that are danger to others.
And it’s interesting because I think there’s a tendency in mainstream culture to just shake your head and dismiss it and go, [inaudible 00:28:40], those are crazy people. Actually have a lot of, I think we should try to understand what motivates people, and in follow-up interviews with people who’ve participated in QAnon-style rallies or violence or anything like that where they were motivated to do so after really living in these online communities that promoted these ideas. They sound lost in a way that it’s not mental illness. It’s, I really believe this stuff and I really thought I was doing something important, and they don’t have a sense of reality. And I do feel like our culture’s understanding of a shared reality has been seriously fragmented and undermined because we do mediate so many of our experiences.
James Patterson:
So there’s a really great book, and I’m trying to find it while talking to you. I found the second one that’s sort of a response to the first, it’s called Irony and Outrage, and it’s called the Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear and Laughter, not that we’re promoting Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s book. This is a book for Christine Rosen’s, The Extinction of Experience. But the thing about the book is that, all these books really, is that it’s very hard to keep them fresh. Right? So I’ve taught a course on media and politics, and so already this book, which didn’t come out that long ago, is referring to things that have kind of passed on.
But one of the recurring themes that’s in your book, that’s in this book, and the one that I’m trying to find and failing, is this sense of enclosure where there’s a desire to find on social media these kinds of almost like adopted families of common opinion. And this was mocking, these were mocked rather, for being what are called safe spaces. But that’s really a part of the structure of social media. Right? The algorithm delivers to you the safe space, it’s not exclusive to the left in any sense.
Christine Rosen:
No, that’s true. And I think what’s important to remember about that is that the thing that social media does that doesn’t happen in the real world is that there is no barrier to entry to these communities. So if you think about what a community is, there are obviously great benefits to being part of a community, but there are a huge number of responsibilities too. So if you join a community, say you volunteer with a local charitable organization, you have to show up, you have to do your part, you have to pitch in, and you have to support the work of the organization in lots of different ways. So that requires something of you.
So for a lot of these communities, especially for people who are already living either lonely or isolated lives, and who maybe aren’t super politically active, but they’re also maybe not active in a religious organization, they feel a little adrift. All they have to do is log on, and instantly they have thousands of friends, and these friends are enthusiastic and responding to them and talking to them, and they don’t feel lonely anymore. And the barrier to entry is basically turning on the internet, and the responsibility is just to keep reaffirming and sharing information with other people who already agree with you about the bigger picture of what the world, what’s happening in the world. So that’s extremely intoxicating because again, we’re wired to want to bond with our fellow human beings. But this way of bonding, which is for too many people, replacing the old way of bonding, which was in face-to-face interactions, that’s causing all kinds of unintended consequences and harms.
And the reason it’s such a conundrum is that there are plenty of these spaces that are doing all kinds of great work in bringing together people, organizing them, and then doing positive things in the real world with that organizational skill. So that’s why you can’t just dismiss it out of hand, but I worry about, because it’s linked to this rise in loneliness and isolation and people feeling much more polarized and divided and pessimistic about the future of the country in particular, I think that’s where these tools start to become things that exacerbate existing problems, rather than solving problems.
James Patterson:
That’s great. And I found the other book, it’s The Outrage Industry by Berry and Sobieraj.
Christine Rosen:
Yes, I have heard of, yes. That’s a good book.
James Patterson:
And what you just described is very familiar, but also in terms of what people experience in the loneliness, but what they’re focused on, and to some degree young are focused on are all these, on being on the receiving end of messages from televised figures. And that what you described as almost like a kind of democratization here means that it’s more decentralized and it’s also harder to turn off.
Christine Rosen:
Yes, exactly. Well, it’s there all the time and you will, the way that notifications on any, if you allow any notifications on any platform you regularly use, you’ll know. It’s constantly reminding you stuff is happening and you’re not involved. Don’t you want to jump back in? You might be missing something. I mean, the old phrase was fear of missing out, but actually, and it’s prompted, what I’ve heard people lately say is the joy of missing out. I don’t want to know, there’s so much coming at me, I just want to turn off my phone. But there are real, again, this is how we are wired, we are wired to be alert to new information all the time because that’s how we survived before technology. And now that part of our humanness is in a weird way working against us with some of these tools.
James Patterson:
I had someone message me the other day saying, “If you haven’t already, please don’t log on. Today we’re doing Hitler discourse.
Christine Rosen:
No.
James Patterson:
And it turns out that there was that Tucker interview, and but of course I hadn’t logged on because I was teaching all day. I was actually doing that thing you were saying we need to do, which was in person.
Christine Rosen:
That’s good.
James Patterson:
Educating.
Christine Rosen:
That’s very important. And there’s a reason that one of the early jokes about the internet age was the rule that by the third or fourth comment on any article, someone would call someone else a Nazi.
James Patterson:
That’s right.
Christine Rosen:
Again, there’s something about our anonymity and the fact that we do not have to look someone in the eye when we say and do the things we do online, that there’s actually a term for it, the online dis-inhibition effect. So that is rampant, and particularly in our political conversations these days.
James Patterson:
So I’m firmly middle-aged now, and so when I went to live musical events, I went to shows. If you held anything up at a show, it was a lighter, and it was usually ironically because no… And the other thing is everyone smoked, but now people hold up phones. And as you point out in the book, not only do people constantly take pictures and recordings, but they don’t actually look at them. No one looks at them.
Christine Rosen:
No, this was really fascinating to me because everyone I talked to who when I would ask them, “Why do you take pictures of this or that? Why do you record? When you go to the museum, why are you taking a picture of the painting? Why?” And they all said the same thing, and I think they were being honest. This is how they actually felt. They’re like, “Well, I want to remember it. I want this to be a memory.” Turns out though, the way our quirky little human brains work, the more time you spend taking pictures during an experience, the less likely you are to remember them because there’s something that tells your brain, “Oh, you know what? You’ve outsourced this. You’re going to have a picture of it.”
Now look, we all want pictures. I’ve got tons of pictures of my kids. Everybody shouldn’t stop taking pictures. But because of the ease and the sophistication and the ubiquity of the photos we take, we also don’t kind of go back and revisit them and sort of curate them. And the old physical photo album isn’t the way most people re-experience those previous experiences that they tried to record.
And I will say for live music and live entertainment in particular, I love to see, I was at a comedy show not long ago, and they had us all put phones in the bags and you had to check your phone in and you get it back later but they didn’t want any of us to record the comedian who was working on new stuff. But it also was, it was wonderful because people, strangers talked to each other, people turned and… It was a much more community convivial experience than I had had at concerts where everybody’s holding up their phone.
So, the look up experience is something I think we all need to have more of, not looking down. We look down all the time at our screens or at our laptops and whatnot. In the real world, when you’re experiencing something pleasurable or entertaining, look up. Don’t put that screen between your face and what you’re trying to experience, because at the end of the day, you’ll have a firmer… We know this from research. Your memory of that experience will be deeper and richer and more detailed than if you’re just filming it. It just will.
James Patterson:
Yeah, and at the shows I was going to, you might also get hit by a flying person.
Christine Rosen:
Yes, exactly. What show? Were you in mosh pits? Okay, that’s another conversation. It’s an off the record conversation, that’s great.
James Patterson:
That’s right, that’s later. So I’m going to hit you with something that’s a little out there, but I know you’re a veteran of the podcasting world, so.
Christine Rosen:
Go for it.
James Patterson:
You’re not going to have a problem with this. There’s this place in a Nevada called Goodsprings, and it’s a small town most Americans had never heard of until a game that came out in 2010 called Fallout New Vegas. And it’s about sort of post-apocalyptic epic over two factions fighting over the Hoover Dam. And what’s crazy is that this game was so popular that people started to go to Goodsprings in real life, IRL, for New Vegas Day.
Christine Rosen:
Oh, wow.
James Patterson:
And now the fans go there and they have a kind of regular pilgrimage site for all of the different businesses. And this really is what came to mind when I was looking at the blending of place, which is the physical embodiment where we have experience, in space, which are these mediated experiences you were describing before. Is this what you had in mind? Is this kind of like the way you kept back from mediated experiences?
Christine Rosen:
No, it’s actually, it makes me happy to hear this story because yes, if… They all met in cyberspace, right?
James Patterson:
Right.
Christine Rosen:
But they all ended up, or the ones who chose to go to this place, ended up in physical place, which means they did have to interact with each other. And I would be curious to know how awkward some of those initial interactions might’ve been, right? Because everyone has in their mind’s eyes some idea of someone they’re talking to before they meet them. And then when you see them, it’s often a little jarring. It can be very, it could be, oh my goodness, what an attractive person. Or it could be, oh no, if you talk to… I interviewed a lot of people who use dating apps. It can be, oh, but that, you’re not six feet tall, you’re really not. I’m looking at you in the eye and I’m five-two, so there are…
But that actually is a positive story because what that shows is the deeply, a deep human need to connect in person, in face-to-face to actually bond. That kind of bonding cannot be whatever you’re told by Silicon Valley who wants to give you an avatar or create a chatbot that uses your voice and is just like you. All of these things are no replacement for being in each other’s company, face-to-face in person. And so that’s a great story. It also, I mean, great business for the… Good for that town, for seizing on it and going with it. That’s fantastic. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. And I would say that’s the hybrid reality we want.
Now, the question would be to ask someone who goes to that event, how many hours they spend online versus how many hours they spend in person at the event. And I would bet it would still be a lot more online. And so that means that although they’re having these in-person connections with people they met online, there probably the opportunity cost is when they go back home, are they spending a lot of time on the screen and not around the people in their local community? So that’s another trade-off to consider.
James Patterson:
Yeah, they probably have like 1,000 hours in the game.
Christine Rosen:
Right, right, right.
James Patterson:
So, that’s just not a good trade-off. So there’s, just what is, is there a policy program that you have in mind, some kind of legislation or regulation of online content? A common one that you see as a simple solution would be getting rid of the infinite scroll, where you actually have to move on to the next page by pressing something.
Christine Rosen:
Right. Well, so I mean, this is where I become more free-market conservative. First of all, I don’t think there are top-down policy solutions to a lot of these challenges because these have to do with character and virtue and what kind of people we want to be.
That said, there are some things I do think where policy has a role, anything regarding platforms or technologies that harm children. I think we have to have, and we are having those conversations now. I’d say they’re 10 years too late, but holding these companies accountable for not enforcing the age limitations that we have. These are platforms designed for adults. They’re being used by eight and nine year olds sometimes, and I don’t worry as much about the predator stuff, although that exists online. I worry more about the habits of mind and behaviors that these platforms are encouraging in children for whom the platform was not designed. So I think enforcing age limits, which we already have on the books, we don’t have to pass a new law for that, but we do need to start enforcing that, and we need to make the companies responsible for their product, so that’s one thing with social media in particular.
When it comes to the design choices, in Europe, they are actually passing policies to try to encourage more thoughtful design choices. So that yes, like infinite scroll or the next episode, all the stuff, that’s where I don’t think regulation would help. These are private companies, they’re allowed to design their product, but they should have a higher ethical bar to leap over if their products are marketed to children. And they should disclose what is the information they’re gathering on you, in a way that isn’t a 500-page terms and conditions, just check this box and don’t bother to read it, approach. So I think they should adopt some industry standards about transparency, and codes of ethics.
This is probably pie in the sky on my part, even hoping for this. There is no competitive advantage for them to do this. Instead, we get these very gauzy Instagram ads about, we have new parental controls and we’re going to do this and that. And if you talk to their lobbyists though, and say, “Well, why don’t you put something on there that gives you a prompt, would you like to close the app? You’ve been on this app for two hours.” They’re like, well, we think people should be on the app all the time. So it’s that tension again, it comes down to us. We need to inculcate again, better habits of mind, better habits in general, and more skepticism about not just the tech companies, but about our own self-delusion when it comes to how much time we’re spending using these tools.
James Patterson:
Just as a final question, you mentioned dating apps, and while you were just talking, it reminded me, they’re not doing well.
Christine Rosen:
No, yeah.
James Patterson:
And I’m now teaching students who are younger than Facebook.
Christine Rosen:
That’s horrifying. Oh, we’re so old.
James Patterson:
Yeah, oh, I know. So there’s a not too distant future, we may not be doing this anymore. Do you think that’s true, or what do you think?
Christine Rosen:
Let me say, I wish it were true. Now, the dating apps not doing well, I have been reading about this and it’s quite true, in part because they’ve just become kind of like romance junkyards. There’s so many fake profiles and the male to female ratio is such a mess, and the matches aren’t good.
Here’s my concern, though. If you read what the Silicon Valley folks are trying to patent and what they’re really excited about in the relationship space, as they say, it’s making more efficient the act of even getting to know someone. So they want to create chatbots. And some of these are actually already in use experimentally on some platforms, where your chatbot interacts with the chatbot of the person whose profile was matched on the dating site. And the bots go through all these questions you might not have time to answer because you have 60 different people you’re chatting with on a dating app. And it makes it very efficient and it knocks people out who the bot has determined because of all of your browsing habits you wouldn’t like and all of your state of preferences.
So that by the time you actually meet another human being in the real world, not only have you had to promote yourself and turn yourself into this marketable product with listing all your likes and dislikes, but your bot and that bot have both had a conversation where they know a lot more about you than maybe you even wanted them to know, so-
James Patterson:
I know.
Christine Rosen:
That’s the direction Silicon Valley, the engineers want us to head, right? Let’s make all of this more efficient. I would argue, you know what? Everybody jokes about, oh, it’s so hard to meet people in a bar or at a restaurant. No, you know what? It should be hard to meet other people. That’s the barrier to entry. It’s difficult to find someone with whom you can trust and love enough to marry and raise a family with that. That, it should be hard, because that’s a built-in way of making sure you make better choices. So I do think it’s much more, the barrier to entry for meeting people in the real world causes a lot more anxiety now, particularly for younger generations. But that’s good. The anxiety is a good thing. It should be a little nerve-wracking because it’s a challenging thing to embark on finding another person with whom you want to share your life.
James Patterson:
This wonderful story you have in there about this man who’s met someone he’s been friends with on Facebook for years and does not recognize why he’s hot and shaking and all that. And it only just later occurred to him that he’s attracted to her.
Christine Rosen:
He’s like, wow, I really think I liked her. I was like, you think? Yeah, I think that might’ve been it. It was very sweet. What a, he was such a nice kid.
James Patterson:
Yeah, you could feel him re-embodying experience.
Christine Rosen:
Exactly, exactly. Well, he learned to understand the signals his own body was giving him because he hadn’t had to do that enough. So, yeah.
James Patterson:
The book is The Extinction of Experience, the author, the wonderful and charismatic, Christine Rosen. Thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Christine Rosen:
Thanks so much for having me, it was really fun.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
As students head back to classrooms, host James Patterson welcomes education experts Frederick Hess and Michael McShane to the podcast. We are still finding the "new normal" after Covid lockdown shook our education system—and public confidence in schools. Too often, our schools are guided by ideas developed by policymakers, intellectuals, and administrators who are separated from the needs of the classroom. Ranging from cell phones in class to school choice, from gender theory to administrative bloat, the conversation points in hopeful directions, drawn in part from their recent book, Getting Education Right.
Related Links: Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, Getting Education Right "Taking on the College Cartel," Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (Law & Liberty) "Opening Doors for School Choice," Frederick Hess (Law & Liberty) "A Unified Theory of Education," Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (National Affairs) Rick Hess Straight Up (Education Week) Old School with Rick Hess (Education Next)
Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.
Michael Q. McShane is an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and director of national research at EdChoice, where he studies and writes about K–12 education policy, including private and religious schools and the politics of education.
As students head back to classrooms, host James Patterson welcomes education experts Frederick Hess and Michael McShane to the podcast. We are still finding the “new normal” after Covid lockdown shook our education system—and public confidence in schools. Too often, our schools are guided by ideas developed by policymakers, intellectuals, and administrators who are separated from the needs of the classroom. Ranging from cell phones in class to school choice, from gender theory to administrative bloat, the conversation points in hopeful directions, drawn in part from their recent book, Getting Education Right.
Related Links:
Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, Getting Education Right
“Taking on the College Cartel,” Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (Law & Liberty)
“Opening Doors for School Choice,” Frederick Hess (Law & Liberty)
“A Unified Theory of Education,” Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (National Affairs)
Rick Hess Straight Up (Education Week)
Old School with Rick Hess (Education Next)
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Transcript
James Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. Today is August 28, 2024. I’m James Patterson, and with me are my guests, Mr. Frederick M. Hess and Dr. Michael Q. McShane. We’ll be talking about K-12 and higher education in the United States, especially their most recent book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K-12, and College, published earlier this year on Teachers College Press.
Mr. Hess is a senior fellow and the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on K-12 and higher-education issues. He’s the author of Education Week‘s iconic blog, Rick Hess Straight Up, and Education Next‘s popular Old School with Rick Hess. Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next, a Forbes senior contributor, and a contributing editor to National Review. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.
And Dr. McShane earned his PhD in education policy from the University of Arkansas and MEd from the University of Notre Dame and his BA in English from St. Louis University. He is an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Director of National Research at EdChoice, where he studies and writes about K-12 education policy, including private and religious schools and the politics of education. He was previously a high school teacher.
Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the Law & Liberty podcast.
Rick Hess:
Hey, thanks for having us.
Michael McShane:
Thanks for having us.
James Patterson:
Yes, this is very exciting. Lots of people are sending their kids back to school, probably fewer because some of them may be teaching at home. There’s been a lot of changes to the landscape of education. So before we get into the book, I wanted to ask you, what is the current state of American K-12 education now that we are firmly, and hopefully forever, past the COVID lockdowns?
Rick Hess:
Mike, do you want to take that?
Michael McShane:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we’re in this really interesting moment, as you intimated there. There have been some serious changes in enrollment patterns. We’re seeing more folks that are homeschooling. We’re seeing an increase in states passing private-school choice programs that are allowing more and more students to attend private schools with government subsidies in order to do that. And there are just some of these broader trends.
A lot of the work that we do at EdChoice, or a fair amount of work that we do, is in public opinion polling. And one of the things that I found most interesting recently was that there’s … When you talk about public opinion, the general polling question that you ask of, right track or wrong track, do you think that the American education system is going on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction?
Historically, two things have been true. We’ve been asking this question for years, and it is that the closer you get to people, the more they like their schools. So people tend to say, “Schools at the national level are a mess, but the ones in my state, they’re probably a little bit better, and the ones that are closest to me, my local district, is even better than that.” And the second thing that you would see is that parents were much more positive about their local schools than the general population was.
What we’re seeing for the first time in the last year or so is parent opinions of schooling just falling off the cliff. Parents are much less likely now, whether they’re talking about the national, state or local level, much less likely to say that they think that local schools are on track. And this is meeting up with similar polling that we have from teachers, that again, we’re seeing increasingly negative opinions from teachers if you ask them things like, “Would you recommend teaching to someone else?” or just talking about if they have confidence in their local schools.
So, I think we are in this really interesting moment where there is a lot of dissatisfaction in the American K-12 education system. There are certainly opportunities that are emerging for new players to come onto the field, but it remains to be seen how successful those are going to be. We’re in the very early days of some of these new education savings-accounts programs or others. They could go one way. They could go another. So it’s a really interesting time, and we’ll probably look back on this particular period as a turning point, this post-pandemic era, of where education goes from there.
James Patterson:
Yes. So there have been a lot of federal and state efforts to improve education. You go through them in the book. The most recent one that many people maybe our age, a little older, will remember is No Child Left Behind. Their format has been really to treat teaching as input and test scores as an output, and you discuss some of the limitations, some of the things that were learned in handling education this way. What were the successes and what were maybe the failures that caused us to reevaluate how maybe we can think about education?
Rick Hess:
Yeah. I mean, one of the realities of education is that we’ve been trying to reform it pretty much since day one. So if you go back to the founding of this country, Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and others talked a lot about the kinds of schools that could promote a free people. Jefferson famously had his architect of the Virginia educational system, both at K-12 and then at the University of Virginia.
So we’ve been doing this forever, and one of the realities is the higher up you go, the further you get away from education, from schools, from classrooms, the less ability you have to control what actually happens in them, because schools are incredibly complicated human places. The difference between a good classroom and a bad classroom usually comes down to a hundred tiny little interactions in the course of an hour. Whether a teacher knows who to ask a question to, how they ask that question, whether they know how to make a kid feel comfortable, put a hand on their shoulder, none of this can you touch from a state capital, much less from Washington DC.
So when you start trying to reform or improve schools from on high, whether it was the push that followed Nation at Risk in 1983 or No Child Left Behind in 2001, what you do is you try to control the levers that you can move from on high. Well, what is that? That is the number of courses that kids take. That is the amount of money that gets spent. That’s how you measure what’s going on in schools. That’s how do you manage the paper requirements for who’s allowed to teach or how schools spend money or buy textbooks.
And so what’s happened, time after time, most famously in No Child Left Behind, is that you’ve got well-intended policymakers trying to figure out how do you yank around these levers for schools, and then you’ve got parents and educators who are incredibly frustrated by the way that these blunt instruments play out in practice. And partly what’s going on today is that we’re living in the aftermath of … Between the 1990s push to raise standards and the 2001 No Child Left Behind, and the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top in 2009 with the Common Core, we’re living in the shadow of the frustration that was bred by all those ambitious efforts.
James Patterson:
Yeah. The thing about those curricula is that they did tend to be a little bit … How to put it? Oppositional, maybe, towards teachers. There was an attempt to tether performance of students to the outcomes of state testing. Was this a success? It doesn’t seem to have been, but you know more about this than me.
Michael McShane:
It’s funny. I think of what Rick just said, talking about all of those little interactions that take place within a classroom. I mean, I think that’s what we’ve learned. There was a big effort by the Gates Foundation. Others have tried to figure out, can we get the formula for what makes a great teacher, in theory so that then we could replicate that formula? And the thing is, it’s really hard to find because different teachers have different strengths and weaknesses. Different teachers run their classrooms in different ways.
And while we have identified some methods … There’s been this whole science of reading movement that’s taken place. It’s been really interesting, and I think quite helpful, in identifying better and worse ways to actually teach kids how to read and the mechanics of it. So that’s true, and I imagine with lots of careful experimentation, we might find the exact better ways to teach fractions or solve simultaneous equations or things like that, those discrete little tasks. This bigger picture of what makes a great teacher, how do we have more great teachers, how do we get more into the profession, how do we keep them once they’re there, it turns out that, as your question implies, there isn’t really a mechanistic way to do that. It would be great if there was. It would make life a lot easier, but I just don’t think that that’s the case.
James Patterson:
That can be a bit disappointing to people who want to figure this out as an equation, that it’s more complicated than that. So, the book Getting Education Right, I think it’d be a little simplistic to call it a school-choice book because there’s a lot more to the book than that, but there’s definitely an emphasis on exploring new opportunities, new ways of doing education policy, that allows for greater variety. In a way, it’s responding to the problems you just described, namely, that there’s not a one-size-fits-all curriculum or pedagogy. So what does school choice really mean? What does it look like in policy terms?
Michael McShane:
Well, it can take a lot of different forms, and I think that that’s actually a mistake that a lot of people in the school-choice world make, that they take whatever thing is in vogue at that moment and say, “Okay, that’s what school choice is now.” So as I mentioned at the beginning, people are really fired up about these education savings-accounts programs that basically place a student’s K-12 funding into a flexible-use spending account that they can spend amongst different providers, so they could pay private-school tuition, but they could also pay for tutoring or special-education services or others.
But that’s just one form of school choice. Historically, there’s been choice within the traditional public schooling system. Basically, anything that severs the connection between where students live and where they go to school. So it could be within their district where they attend a magnet school or some sort of special program, or they’re allowed to enroll in a school that’s across town but in the same district. Within the traditional public system but outside of the district, there’s inter-district choice that allows people to cross district boundaries. Some people call this open enrollment. States like Arizona, I think, have done this to great effect, and to a lesser extent, in places like Ohio and Wisconsin have given that a try at various times.
And then there are charter schools, which are public schools but exist outside of the traditional management system. They tend to be independently operated and schools of choice that students can attend. So we have within the traditional public system, straddling the public and private system, and then all of these new private school-choice programs. Some people might be familiar with school vouchers or tuition tax-credit scholarships that have been around for some time now. This new generation of education savings accounts, but also now places like Oklahoma that are giving tax credits for private-school spending or even homeschooling expenditures and others.
So, there are lots of different ways of mechanically providing school choice, but ultimately, school choice is about a couple of things, right? It is about empowering parents to pick the best school for their kids. It’s about empowering educators to try and create new educational models outside of the strictures that have existed in our existing system, whether that’s-
Michael McShane:
The strictures that have existed in our existing system, whether that’s collective bargaining agreements or other just rules and routines and norms, have developed over the course of, as Rick said, since before our nation’s founding, or even before I. And it’s about trying to create a more diverse pluralistic system, where different people can have different ideas of what makes the best type of school, and allow those folks to live out in that pluralistic way that our nation … Some of the highest norms and values of our nation has.
So it could be any number of those things—it could be within the traditional public schooling system, it could be outside the traditional public schooling system, but if you’re trying to empower parents to make choices on behalf of their kids, you’re trying to empower educators to have the space to create great schooling environments, that’s when you’re over the target.
Rick Hess:
James, and if I can just piggyback on that, one of the points you made, you said, “Well, it’s not a book about school choice, that’s part of it, but it’s really not about that.”
James Patterson:
Right.
Rick Hess:
And I think that’s what makes what Mike was just saying so interesting. A lot of what you’ve seen on the right when it comes to school choice is a tendency to talk about efforts to empower parents, to empower educators, as an end in themselves—that’s how it gets talked about. And that’s actually been a huge problem because it means we don’t have a very coherent vision of what are we trying to do, other than expand choice. It’s choice for choice’s sake. And to the extent that we say anything else, it tends to be bound up in diatribes about how awful schools are, because of test scores or because of X.
What Mike and I tried to set out to do in this book is address those two challenges very directly. One, we tried to say, look, empowering parents, breaking up the bureaucracy, and giving educators and families the ability to find the right solution for them is hugely important. But it’s only one piece of a much larger vision that speaks to the values that we want schools to impart, the opportunities that we need to think about in terms of the professional work of educators, how they’re paid, what it means for communities to take the needs of families and kids more seriously.
And then, the second thing we tried to do was offer an argument that’s less about schools are awful, or public schools are awful, and that’s much more grounded in, as conservatives, what are the things that we value when it comes to education? What are we for, not what are we against? And so, I think it’s not in any way to set aside the importance of empowering families, but I think if we start from first principles and make sure we’re explaining the choice is part of the solution, it’s not the whole ball game, it turns out both to be better for efforts to tackle education, and an easier way to explain to most parents, most voters, what we’re trying to do and why it’s important.
James Patterson:
Yeah, that’s great. And it really is, as a book, to be read very carefully by potential policymakers, or even concerned parents, because of the … It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Of course, that’s the problem with so much curricular and pedagogical recommendations, wised up to the fact that we’re not going to have it that way, and so school choice doesn’t want to make the same claim. In the early part of the book, there’s a discussion of childhood education for pre-K, and you talk about the two elephants in the room, and so a way of getting at that is, does it work, does it make a difference? And is this also efforts to subsidize it just a way of subsidizing childcare?
Michael McShane:
Oh, man. Yes, yeah, yeah.
James Patterson:
That was slow across the plate, right down the-
Michael McShane:
No, no, it’s great, because, look, there’s been so much … And especially if you have gone to grad school in education, or public policy, or whatever, in the last couple of decades, this research on pre-K has been just thrust into the forefront. And part of it is James Heckman, who won the Nobel Prize, has a lot of intellectual heft behind this work that was done. And frankly, some of these initial studies of pre-K were some of the first and best examples of randomized controlled trials where so much research at that time wasn’t able to really isolate causal effects.
And so, there were these couple of small programs, the Abecedarian Program, the Perry Preschool Program, that were actually … They did a randomized study, where half the kids got the intervention and half the kids didn’t, and they followed up after these kids, many years later, to actually trace them into adulthood, and the headline that you get is that these kids did much better. Later in life, they can track any number of things to make more money, I think they were less likely to go to jail—there’s all sorts of stuff that they found off of this.
But there are some interpretive problems with that, one of which is people are unclear as to what the actual intervention was because oftentimes these studies are used to talk about a new pre-K program that a state or a city is trying, where kids are going to go to school for, whatever, four hours or five hours or six hours a day. These programs had all sorts of other stuff going on. Some had parental home visits, and they had counseling, and they were incredibly expensive, even at the time, adjusted for inflation, they’re even way more expensive than that. So what exactly was doing this is not 100 percent clear, and so what you would do now, having learned from it, is also not exactly clear. And they were also just small. I think now there’s a joke that probably more studies have been done with the data from these things than there were kids in the original study, because you’ve had these things that are available at times.
So I don’t … Because the other thing is they take away these big things, where it’s like $6 or $7 or $8 in benefit for every $1 that was spent, and it’s like pre-K is a perpetual money machine, which, of course, raises the question, well then, wait, if we spend an infinite amount of money on pre-K, will we get eight times that in response? No, there has to be something that’s working here. So we throw some cold water on that in the book and say, look, the research on pre-K, some of it’s out there, some of other stuff that’s been out there is definitely a lot less rosy, and some of the stuff on daycare and others is a lot less rosy, and in some cases, actually trends negative, they’re negative experiences for kids to be in.
But we recognize that pre-K does a lot of stuff for people. So part of it is about, for some kids, it’s about academic readiness. We recognize that there are gaps that exist, from the earliest times that we test kids, we can see that there are gaps between different groups of kids, so trying to intervene earlier with academic preparation so they’re ready for kindergarten, or ready for first grade, makes a lot of sense, and so that’s helpful. There are other parts of it, where socialization, having kids have time outside of their house, even if it’s not full-time or whatever, but for a couple of days a week, seems to make sense, so kids can learn important things, like waiting their turn and sharing, which I think is quite important. And as you mentioned in your question, part of this too is childcare so that parents can work.
So we don’t want to come out in the book and say pre-K is bad, just because we don’t think these studies are as great as everybody else says, that we’re saying no place should try and ever subsidize preschool, people shouldn’t put their kids into preschool. We are just trying to temper the expectations and be honest about first asking the question, which is, well, what do we want to accomplish with pre-K? And if you are, as you mentioned, a policymaker that’s reading this book, what are you trying to accomplish here? And then, we can talk about the degree to which we think it will be able to accomplish it, and if that’s worth the expenditure that goes along with it.
But pre-K can be important for families, it can be necessary for people who are working, it can be helpful for some kids in some situations, but it is not the cure-all that we see in lots and lots of policy conversations out there today.
James Patterson:
Moving into K-12, there’s a lot of viral videos about behavior issues, there’s one in particular of a teacher getting assaulted by a student for taking away, I believe, a Nintendo Switch or something. The trouble with these videos is that they do a lot to influence people about how they think schools are going, perhaps maybe more than they should. Is there a real problem with discipline in schools, or is this a phenomenon of viral videos biasing us against those institutions?
Rick Hess:
Both.
James Patterson:
Oh, no.
Rick Hess:
Shockingly.
James Patterson:
It’s the worst option.
Rick Hess:
Yeah. What’s important to keep in mind is there’s three to four million public school classrooms in this country, and from … We can go far back as we want, you could always find a couple of lunatics doing awful things in schools and classrooms. We’ve had a problem with sexual assault by educators since time immemorial, we’ve had teachers pushing personal agendas or inappropriate activity. So sure, absolutely, that’s a real thing. But 30 or 40 years ago, if there was some awful teacher behaving inappropriately in West Texas, you were never going to hear about it in Indiana or Virginia. Today, you’re going to see it, and that, quite naturally and appropriately, makes you ask, well, how common is it? Is this happening in my kid’s school? But that’s the distortion, because what you’re seeing is the one or five or 10 out of three and a half million, that doesn’t necessarily … It’s good to be aware that there’s bad conduct, but it can also give us a really distorted sense of how common it is.
That said, the surveys tell us that there really is a problem right now, that kids feel unsafe, teachers don’t feel safe. Lax disciplinary policies are part of this, the failures to keep kids engaged in their lives together through the pandemic and after, that I think Mike and I would mostly put on the shoulders of school systems, but where a lot of parents also got overwhelmed, that’s a real challenge. The fact that so many local activities and healthy outlets got disrupted, or even vanished, during the pandemic, and that haven’t come back yet, that’s a problem.
So it’s all of the above. It’s easy to get an overly exaggerated sense of how bad things are if you spend much time scrolling Facebook or TikTok, but there are real challenges. And part of what Mike and I talk about in the book is the way in which the dominant cultural zeitgeist of education, in which we have become reluctant to set expectations, we’ve become hesitant to talk about rigor, we’ve seen educators feel like nobody’s going to have their back if they discipline students. These things have all, unfortunately, fueled an educational culture where too often, it seems like anything goes.
Michael McShane:
And I would say, just to put a data point onto what Rick said, as I mentioned, we at EdChoice do public opinion polling, we also poll teachers, and we did a poll of teachers in the spring, and we asked them about interruptions in their class and how often was their class interrupted. When we asked them about how often their class was interrupted by student discipline issues, 73 percent of teachers said that it was either extremely frequently, very frequently, or somewhat frequently that their class was interrupted by discipline issues. And so, it was about 13 percent said extremely frequently. So that’s more than obviously one in 10 teachers telling us that student discipline is an extremely frequent problem in their class.
Another 25 percent were in that very frequently. So if you put those two groups together, we’re talking about more than a third of American teachers telling us either extremely or very frequently that this is a problem in their class. When you throw in the somewhat, it takes it all the way up to three-quarters.
So I think there’s definitely, to just buttress what Rick said, there’s definitely evidence that in some places it is an incredibly acute problem and in other places, it’s a sort of low-lying problem that maybe isn’t happening all the time and in your face, but is happening there in the background and disrupting students’ learning.
James Patterson:
So just a brief aside, my mom was a public school special education teacher who worked on people with behavioral disabilities, and my wife used to be a public school teacher, and both of them confirmed that the phone is the worst thing to be brought into a classroom. It’s the worst device because of how disruptive it is since it creates both a kind of fixation of attention since it’s always trying to keep your attention, and also it makes it easier for people to start coordinating bad behavior on campus.
But the thing that … I actually didn’t have this down as a question. I realized that this is a mistake because you talk about it in the K-12 section of the book, which is what happened to things like tracking or honors schools. These used to be very important features of schools in order to make sure that kids are able to learn at the proper rates. But these became very unpopular for political reasons as much as pedagogical ones, right?
Rick Hess:
Mike, do you want to start with that? Then I’ll piggyback talking about phones a bit too.
Michael McShane:
I was going to say that when we get back to phones, I have a very fun phone data point that I’ll share with you. When you’re talking about tracking, when you’re talking about honors, this is something that we talk about in the book that I think that there is this broader, I don’t know if we want to go so far as calling it a war on rigor, but definitely like skepticism of rigor. What we basically had was a big obsession starting around the time of No Child Left Behind. But even at some points earlier than that, with this idea of achievement gaps, anybody who’s been around education in the last couple of decades has heard this phrase, achievement gaps, gaps, gaps, gaps.
The number one thing that our education system has to do is it has to close the gaps between the lowest performing students and the highest performing students, or if there are any gaps between racial and ethnic groups or economic groups or whatever. Gap closing, gap closing, gap closing. Well, if we just look at this mathematically, let’s strip out all of the other bits of this and we just think about the mathematical gap that exists between two different populations of people. There are a couple different ways in which you could choose to do that.
One way, conceivably the best way of possibly closing gaps is to say the students that are at the highest continue to go up, but the students that are at the lowest level, we’re able to increase their performance at a rate even faster than those that are at the top and they’re able to catch up. Everyone is better off and the gaps close, everybody’s happy. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really seem to be what’s played out in a lot of different places. In many cases, the idea has been to either sort of purposefully or just via neglect, not really care about those higher performing students.
And say, “You know what? They’re fine.” You hear this sort of rhetoric all the time. Students who perform well on exams or others, “Oh, they’re going to be fine. Oh, they’re going to be fine. We don’t need to worry about them.” And all of this emphasis was put on the students who need to be brought up to grade level or in others. And so I think if your goal is to close gaps, and that’s the thing that you’re sort of monomaniacally focused on, things like honors programs are a problem for you, things like selective admission magnet schools are a problem to you.
Because they’re taking some of your highest performing students and pouring as much gasoline on that fire as you can, which could, in turn, sort of exacerbate gaps between different groups of people. So I think part of it is this conceptual flaw that has been in the education policy community for some time and that it’s had these various pernicious effects over the years.
Rick Hess:
That’s right. And so you could say the kindling was there, and then when you got … Michael Brown was shot in 2014 in the launch of Black Lives Matter, and then George Floyd was killed in 2020, and you got the aggressive insistence that any difference by race in the US was a product of institutionalized racism. Anything like a gifted program, a magnet program immediately became suspect. And so what Mike’s talking about just got turbocharged. But let’s pause on that for a sec because I think this whole tech phone issue, that you touched on James, is huge.
And actually it gets to this, one of the reasons that we can’t discipline effectively is because both due to Obama administration, Dear Colleague Letters and Biden administration enforcement, but also because of the culture that’s taken hold in schools. Folks are scared of discipline because they don’t want to discipline a Black or Latino student, and therefore there’s just a real hesitance to discipline anybody. And that’s kind of a backdrop. So in that environment of extreme permissiveness, you’ve now got technology writ large.
And it’s funny because if you think about the tech stuff 20 years ago, those who are old enough remember the enthusiasm for the internet. It was going to democratize access to knowledge. It was going to foster civil engagement and an educated populace by allowing everybody to share and connect. It would make us all love our neighbor. And none of it played out that way of course. Well, 10 years ago in schools, the whole question was how could you get a device in front of every student? Educators and tech people were excited about giving a phone to every kid.
They were like, “Well, maybe we can’t get everybody a laptop, but if we can get a tablet or a phone, it’s just as good.” So there are states like Louisiana today or Utah where you’ve got the state has more than one device for every kid in high school. More than one device for every kid in high school. That was the game. And so you’re now in an environment where it turns out these devices manufacture distraction, where they’re designed to create addiction, where the average teen has over 230 messages a day coming in, so close to half of those during the school day.
Kids constantly either want to check their devices, they want to see what’s being said about them, they want to make sure they’re not out of the loop. And schools are reluctant to take them away unless there’s a law because you’ve got a lot of angry kids and you’ve got a lot of angry parents who say, “I can’t reach my kid when I need to tell them that I’m picking them up early or I forgot to pack lunch.” So what you’ve got is a hugely distracted environment where teachers are staring at a lot of kids who are already not very interested in paying attention begin with, and none of this is what tech’s supposed to do.
Now, the answer is not to try to strip technology out of schools altogether. A, because we’ll never manage. B, because technology has been with us since the pencil and the chalkboard. But because technology can be useful if it’s used carefully and properly. The real problem with this stuff is because so much of it’s driven not by a vision of what good education entails, but by a vision of what vendors are promising and of what teachers can practically manage to do in a given day, is that technology has generally wound up dehumanizing classrooms. It has generally wound up distracting kids and becoming another force that separates kids from their teachers.
What we really want is to use technology the way you use it in a promising environment, which is that technology lets us do less of the dumb stuff. Lets kids get real-time feedback on their math quiz. Lets the teacher simplify the process of planning a lesson so that there’s more time for the real human part of schooling. But that’s generally not what’s going on. And what Mike and I would argue in this book is it’s not going on, not because it’s impossible, but because a dominant culture of schools is shaped by people who aren’t really clear on what their purpose is or how the technology can help with it.
Michael McShane:
And I’ll give you the one fun data point that backs up exactly what Rick was saying there. From our polling, we’ve polled teachers, parents, and actually teenagers as well on the question of cell phones in school and cell phones in the classroom. So when we asked teachers, do you think students should have cell phones in school? 56 percent of them said that students should have cell phones in school. When you ask parents, it’s 71 percent. And when you ask teenagers, it’s 91 percent. And then when you look in the classroom, 17 percent of teachers say that students should have a cell phone in classroom.
Thrity-eight percent of parents say that students should have a cell phone in the classroom, but 65 percent of teens did. I mean, this is clearly a case where you can’t let the inmates run the asylum. Obviously, teenagers want to have their cell phones in school, they want to have their cell phones in the classroom, but vast majorities of adults, whether parents or teachers realize that that’s a terrible idea in the classroom and substantial numbers of teachers, they probably need to pull some more parents along with that as far as the cell phones in schools bit. But seeing that difference made me laugh.
James Patterson:
This morning I had my cell phone on the rostrum while teaching, and I had a … It’s on silent, so my phone has a notification that buzzes. And all the students in the front all slowly checked their phones and it was agonizing because I’ve just got to turn the phone off because any little sign of connection to the outside world will distract these kids. And they all start to focus. And of course there were notifications, so they were all very distracted anyway. I mean, we don’t have that much time left, and I have a lot of other questions. Maybe a lightning round as an order. I’ve never done one of those on a podcast, but I love it.
Michael McShane:
Let it rip.
James Patterson:
Let it rip. We’ll do a lightning round. One is gender theory. Has the tide gone out on this or is it here to stay, Rick?
Rick Hess:
This stuff has been brewing in schools of education for 30 years, but most of the public has just never paid any attention. It seemed like the kind of thing that only extremists were talking about. So everybody was caught unaware when this stuff burst on the stage. What you’re now seeing is pushback from both the right and from a lot of people in the sensible middle. I think what we’ll do over the next five or seven years is we’ll see it settle down. It won’t go away, but hopefully, we can settle down into something that’s more sensible, healthier for kids, and more workable for families.
James Patterson:
All right. Education has a bloat problem. I’ve got, albeit somewhat old, data here from an EdChoice colleague, Ben Scaffidi. Seven-hundred and nine percent increase in administrative staffing from 1950 to 2015. What on earth is going on?
Michael McShane:
Yes, school has a bloat problem. I think this is a K-12. It’s in higher education as well. These are people who are not spending time in the classroom, but they’re doing it. And I think when we think of the cost of that, we need to think of it in two ways because one of them is obviously this is money that could be spent. We could be, as we outline in the book, you could pay teachers more. You could do all sorts of different things with the money that you’re spending on these kind of mid-tier people in school districts and in schools that probably don’t need to be there. But the second part of it, and it’s actually tied into the last question that you asked, is all of these people then have to justify their own existence. And a lot of these initiatives that you see happening, if you know teachers and if you know other professors and others that are at universities, all of these crazy things that we hear about very rarely is it like some kindergarten teachers.
Like, you know what We need? Like a seven-part PD on whatever. These are these other folks who then have to justify their existence. They have to create these new initiatives. They’re not actually connected to the classroom, so they don’t know what kids actually need. And so there’s this other kind of longer tail of problems that this administrative bloat creates that is hard to put a dollar sign on. But when we talk about people being frustrated or ridiculous things in the classroom or in teacher PD or in administrative policies and higher education, I think a lot of those folks are responsible for it.
James Patterson:
The craziest part is that in the same study, teacher salaries had gone down. Right? This leads me to the final lightning strike of the lightning round, which is 8 percent of school teachers quit every year. Why?
Rick Hess:
One, because it’s hard work. Two, because that’s pretty typical, if you look in any profession. You get rates of turnover that aren’t outrageously different from that. But part of the question is, well, what can we do about it? Especially what can we do to keep the educators that we want to keep people who work hard, who do good by kids? And how do we keep them not just in education, but in classrooms instead of going to become trainers or assistant principals or bureaucrats and central? And part of the answer, I think is making the work more rewarding.
That means paying them better. It means making it professional year-round work by giving them more responsibility for things like curriculum and onboarding their colleagues. And of course, we should compensate them appropriately. It means setting clear expectations and letting them know that they’re not going to have to carry the weight for colleagues who are mailing it in. And it’s funny that at different times, we’ve gotten pieces of this, but because we tend to look for silver bullets, let’s throw some more money at the system at large and just hope. Or let’s try to fire our way to quality. We don’t spend nearly enough time talking about the work involved and how we actually make it more rewarding and more possible for mere mortals to do it well.
James Patterson:
So I deserve a medal for my restraint and for not asking only higher ed questions as a professor. I also have kids in K-12, so it’s not entirely a nobility that did this. So we’ve maybe got time for two more questions. The first that I wanted to get at was there was a lot of enthusiasm a decade ago for massively open online courses or MOOCs, which is a really unfortunate acronym, has COVID demolished that hope? I taught online, and I’ll tell you, the students are not loving it.
Michael McShane:
Look, it’s a classic thing about technology. Rick wrote about this with Bror Saxberg a decade ago. Technology is just a tool. And so you have to think about “what problem are we trying to solve?” What sort of learning community are you trying to create? If you’re trying to just broadcast lectures out to people, technology could be an opportunity to do something like that where the people are generally self-directed, they’re interested in what they want to know. I mean, Lord knows I did when I was in graduate school and was behind in mathematics. I used MITs, mathematics courses, and others because I was highly motivated. Fear is a powerful motivator. So, I was reaching out to those. But just because you have a hammer, not everything is a nail. There are lots of things that we want in education where want to have discussions where we want to build an actual community.
You want to have seminars. And I don’t think those things necessarily translate great to the online environment. So the problem, I think, with a lot of these is we thought, as happens in education, that suddenly, oh, now everything will be like this. As opposed to saying, well, what can we use technology for? What do we still need to use other methods for? And there’s no one answer for every situation. What is the problem that we’re trying to solve? Who are the people we’re trying to meet? What are we trying to create? And sometimes being able to broadcast, there are YouTube lectures that have tens of millions of views on them. So, obviously, that was striking a chord somewhere. But as you mentioned, Zoom School for so many people, and I’ve tried to teach classes and stuff over Zoom, if you’re trying to have discussions, if you’re trying to leave the seminar, way, way harder and probably not the best environment for it. So could be good for some stuff, but challenge for other things.
James Patterson:
Just as a final question, maybe try to merge these together because I think they’re related. The way that you address the issue of higher education is as a cartel. And the cartel that is one of certification because avenues for certifying people as qualified employees have been cut off for civil rights reasons. But in the process of doing that, what you’ve had is the creation of federal funding and state funding for a lot of that requires them to assess whether the schools are any good, something called accreditation. And the result has been that a lot of universities have essentially all turned into one of three varieties. You have a small number of rich, prestigious schools, and then you have small liberal arts colleges, and then you have giant state schools. There’s been a kind of standardization, a limitation on what we were talking about earlier as choice. So what’s happening here, and what might change to make higher education better?
Rick Hess:
Yeah. And then the other … I mean, that’s within kind of the four-year varietal obviously.
James Patterson:
Yes, that’s true.
Rick Hess:
Then the lion’s share of folks in higher ed, five out of six, are those other kinds like community colleges and regional publics. Look, I mean, yeah, you put your finger on it. What’s happened is that higher ed, largely as a result of how the courts allowed the Civil Rights Act to be interpreted in the late ’60s and early ’70s, higher ed wound up becoming entitled to give you a license to get a good job. So we created a culture where if you went to college and you got a diploma, you were going to earn a lot more. The standard figure is a million dollars over your working life, more than you would’ve. Not that your major necessarily taught you anything useful, not that we actually believe people who finished four-year colleges have demonstrated any great grit or insight or acquired any great skills.
There’s a great book called Academically Adrift by Richard Arum, which documented a lot of this a decade ago. But because it was an easy sorting way to separate the kinds of people who knew how to show up for work, who knew how to put together a PowerPoint or write a paper from all the other types who didn’t. And once they were given this enormous gangster authority to decide who’s allowed to go get a good job and who’s not, colleges have been able to monetize the living heck out of it. You need to get in and get a diploma, which means colleges get to decide. The elite ones get to come up with all kinds of bizarre ways to decide who should get to come based not on merit but all kinds of descriptive characteristics. Other institutions get to pay faculty $70,000 or $80,000 a year or more for teaching nine hours a week in the fall and nine hours a week in the spring. And then sprinkling a bunch of adjuncts around them, and all of this then created an incredibly noncompetitive environment.
So, there are a lot of things that we need to do to address behaviors, raise expectations, and open up accreditation. But the biggest thing we can do is we can remove the ability for employers to treat a college diploma as some kind of defensible hiring criteria, which means what we basically want to do is apply to diplomas the same exact equal employment opportunity tests we apply to every other criterion. Which is what we’re talking about actually related to the job, like in the case of nursing, say. And does it actually document relevant skills and knowledge? If it does, then degrees ought to be treated as appropriate hiring criteria. If not, then employers should not be able to favor people who borrowed a lot of money from taxpayers to go get a piece of paper. And that, more than anything else, would force colleges to start getting serious: A, about how much they cost, and B, about the value they actually convey.
James Patterson:
As a professor at a college, I do not endorse that answer. You borrow, and you come here. Mr. Hess, Dr. McShane, this has been absolutely fantastic. I wish I could spend another hour just talking about this. But unfortunately, we’ll have to settle that at another time. Thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Michael McShane:
Hey, thanks for having us.
Rick Hess:
Thanks for having us.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
Riots and speech crackdowns are only the latest symptoms of a growing factionalism in England along cultural lines. In a recent essay, Helen Dale argued that the kind of religious and ethnic divisions that emerged in the July elections reflect a new style of politics more familiar to Northern Ireland than to England. Dale, who will be a regular guest host of the Law & Liberty Podcast, joins James Patterson to discuss this “new sectarianism”—and also how her Australian countrymen performed in the Olympics.
Show Notes:
“The New Sectarianism” (Helen Dale for Law & Liberty)
Helen Dale’s Substack
“The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples” (Rachel Lu for Law & Liberty)
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Transcript
James Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name’s James Patterson. Today is August 15th, 2024, and today, we are speaking with the one and only Helen Dale. She is a senior writer at Law & Liberty and has won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand That Signed The Paper, and read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. She writes for a number of outlets, including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette. She lives in London and is on Substack at helendale.substack.com and on Twitter @_helendale. Today, we are going to be talking about a few things. One is her dynamite article, “The New Sectarianism,” which appeared on Law & Liberty on August 7th. But before that, we are going to talk about Australia’s Olympic performance. Helen Dale, welcome to the Law & Liberty podcast.
Helen Dale:
Hello, James. Thanks for having me.
James Patterson:
So before we got started, I had some questions about some of the athletes, one of whom became something of an internet sensation for not being terribly athletic. But my goodness, how on earth does Australia manage to put so many incredible Olympic athletes out into the world, given its relatively small population?
Helen Dale:
Australia is a sporting phenomenon for two reasons. One of which is the obvious one: it’s a very rich country. If you balance how you have to use several different measures to work out which is the wealthiest country in the world and where it’s genuinely wealthy, it’s not just oil wealth concentrated in a few hands and that kind of thing—it tends to be competing with say, Switzerland and Norway for the wealthiest country in the world and is ahead of the US. So it’s very rich. Very wealthy country. So it can afford to pay for lots of things, both at the state and the private sector levels with sport. So that’s part of it.
The other reason is biological or genetic. Australia has a deceptively large population in genetic terms, despite only having 26 million people, roughly. 27, it might be now in it. Someone was saying it was the population of Texas, roughly. I don’t know what that is in America, but about there.
But the thing is, Australia has the highest proportion of overseas born people in its population sourced from all over the world of any developed country. And I think to get to the equivalent even in developing countries, you have to include places like Israel with a very unusual history of immigration there for particular socio-cultural and political reasons or countries that are war zones full of refugees.
So you have a large influx of people sourced from all over the world and an immigration policy that for many years and to a large degree still does, although it’s a little bit more subtle about it now, was assimilationist, I would say, and is now integrationist. So you get very, very wide out-crossing. So you get all these people drawn from all these different countries all over the world, and then they all marry each other and have children. And this has been going on since 1945.
So there have been a number of generations for all these people to marry each other and have children and then their children to marry each other and that’s why you look at the Australian team and you go, what ethnicity are they? They’re vaguely white-ish, but not really. So that is why. It’s a genetic quirk and the country has the wealth to exploit it basically. There are many, many talented sprinters in West Africa, the ancestors of the Jamaicans and African-Americans, and you don’t get to see them. You see the Jamaicans, and you see the African Americans because they’re from wealthy countries.
James Patterson:
I’m wondering if this is also … Oh, by the way, you recommended before the podcast another Law & Liberty piece by Rachel Lu, “The Sporting Genius of English-Speaking Peoples.”
Helen Dale:
Yes. It is my favorite piece of hers and quite possibly my favorite piece that I have ever read in a magazine.
James Patterson:
I need to unseat Rachel, so I need to get writing.
Helen Dale:
Yes. I think it is. There have been a number of very good pieces on the Law & Liberty magazine or in the Law & Liberty magazine, and I’ve been very pleased with some of my own writing. Yes, writers are allowed to be smug. But that piece of Rachel’s, The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples or words titled to that effect, which I know wouldn’t be hers. Brian will have written that or something. Is pretty much my favorite piece because it just captures exactly a real thing that is very intense in Australia. What she describes in that article, and she applies it to basically the British Commonwealth plus the USA appears in an exceptionally intense form in Australia and underpins that Olympic success.
James Patterson:
I know we want to get on to the podcast, but I have just one other question. As you were talking about the Australian experience, it reminded me of one of my favorite new comedians, Jenny Tian, who is making a sensation on TikTok. And she is Chinese, I think by origin. Both of her parents are Chinese. But she speaks with the thickest Australian accent I’ve ever heard.
Helen Dale:
Australian-born Chinese. Yes. ABC.
James Patterson:
And so I think it appears not just in the athletics, but also in the comedy. One of the ways that you make these groups get together and understand each other is with humor.
Helen Dale:
So yes, Australia is a very, very distinctive and unusual country, remember. It produced all those medals and produces all these fabulous athletes, but also produced Raygun, who was the joke of the Olympics. And I will write about this, I think. I’m currently running a Twitter poll, and if the Twitter poll says, “No, don’t write about this, Helen. We expect you to write about your technical analysis of this piece of legislation currently going through the Commons or ping-pong between the Commons and the Lords. That’s what we want you to write about, not random second-rate Aussie breakdancers.”
James Patterson:
@ _HelenDale. Vote for her to write the piece. I am very excited about it. But unfortunately, we must go from this very exciting topic, this very fun topic, to something considerably more dire almost as though we were delaying the inevitable here. But your piece, The New Sectarianism, has really made a sensation. Go ahead and give us an explanation of what your position is and what it has to do with the state of English politics.
Helen Dale:
The reason I wrote that piece, having seen a few casual comments from people here and there, or hearing a few talking heads make this observation, was I thought in the general election we saw in England as opposed to where you normally see it, which is in Northern Ireland, genuine religious sectarianism. And what I tried to do using my knowledge of theology and comparative religion, something that I have for reasonably eccentric personal reasons, using my knowledge of both Islamic theology and the theology that underlies the historic troubles in Northern Ireland, I basically compared and contrasted them and tried to provide some history, some roots for the emergence amongst Muslims in England. And came to a very, very alarmed conclusion. And my alarmed conclusion is this. Because it is emerging in England and not in Scotland and not in Northern Ireland, it’s a new form of sectarianism. And England has not had this kind of intense religious conflict for a very, very long time. The English specifically have forgotten what it looks like.
So you’ve forgotten what sectarianism looks like. So you’re getting all of these very blithe and glib comments. And because the general election and the assassination attempt on Trump were so close together, you got the British pundits just doing their customary thing of, “Oh, I see the Americans are shooting each other again, or the Americans are trying to shoot their presidents or shoot their ex-presidents. Oh, that’s just what Americans do, isn’t it? Let’s take a pop at him. We don’t like him.” And yadda yadda yadda.
And there were all these boatloads of smugness getting on. And I picked out a really egregious one, put that in the article, and people can read it at their leisure. But there was a lot of it. And the thing is, a few people who are history nerds and the kind of history nerds who keep statistics … People like Ed West, but not just him—he’s the one who comes to mind, and he does write a lot of this—were going, “But hang on. Okay, the Americans have lost four presidents, and we’ve only lost one prime minister, but they haven’t lost a congressman since 1978, whereas we lost an MP, David Amess, only two years ago.” Blah, blah. And those conversations started to happen. And so I just sat there and thought, “No. You really, really do need to take seriously the possibility that this is something that is a real problem in Britain, in England, and you’ve done it to yourselves the same way that the Plantation of Ulster you did to yourselves.”
James Patterson:
There’s this irony to this, which is that the new sectarianism you’re describing has with it a weird partial healing of the old one between Irish separatists and unionists who marched together against increased immigration in Northern Ireland.
Helen Dale:
Yes. I don’t know enough about the province, although people from Northern Ireland whose opinions I rate like Ian Acheson did retweet my piece and praise it, and he is a retired prison governor from Northern Ireland and really, really knows his stuff. I don’t know the full significance of that cooperation that was going on in the province. Because my knowledge of sectarianism and what I’m writing from trying to get across to people to not treat it in this glib and casual and light, flippant way. My knowledge of sectarianism is from Scotland via my parents, obviously. Well, Scotland and the Republic. But it’s that very specific Scottish kind of sectarianism which has a relationship with Northern Ireland and the Plantation of Ulster. But outside of certain footballing history, the violence has abated to a large degree. It’s just nastiness now. Whereas I don’t quite know enough about Northern Ireland to know what’s going on there, but you can get that. You can get that uniting of people against what they perceive to be a common enemy.
James Patterson:
Yeah. I’m sorry. My parents lived in England. I was born there. I remember my mom’s … One of her favorite stories was that she was in line—this was before I was born, and she had my older sister with her, and she was being a bit raucous. And a woman behind her, a good English lady, said, “This country would be doing so much better if it weren’t for all the foreigners.” And my mother briefly was like, “Oh, I wonder what she’s … Oh, she’s talking about me.” So what has happened to England?
Helen Dale:
I am amazed at the normal comment that is made about Americans in those circumstances is, “Oh, dear Americans, they really don’t have an inside voice.”
James Patterson:
Yeah. That is-
Helen Dale:
That’s the British expression.
James Patterson:
I should mention that my-
Helen Dale:
Americans lack inside voices.
James Patterson:
The other thing that’s funny is my mom is of course, self-conscious on this point is that Americans don’t think they’re foreigners. It took her a second to realize that she was the subject of the passive-aggressive comment.
Helen Dale:
That of course being the sport at which Great Britain … Well, England certainly will always win the gold medal.
James Patterson:
That’s right.
Helen Dale:
Passive aggression.
James Patterson:
That is always coming home. They may never win the World Cup, but when it comes to snide remarks-
Helen Dale:
But they will always win passive aggression.
James Patterson:
So what has happened to England where they moved from … Maybe I think to the extent that they had immigration during the period when my parents were there is maybe Jamaicans or people from the Caribbean, but apparently there’s been a pretty serious migration to England and it’s been primarily under conservative watch.
Helen Dale:
Well, the big uptick in immigration started in 1997 with Blair.
James Patterson:
Oh, okay.
Helen Dale:
Okay. So the first probably third to a half of it, is Blair.
James Patterson:
My mistake, then.
Helen Dale:
The second half to two-thirds of it, I think, is probably a 60-40 split, and it has been the conservatives, particularly the conservatives, since 2019. That is when it has gone absolutely and completely bonkers. If you can get it … I don’t have the figures off the top of my head because they are so easy to get. You can get them from the ONS website and they’ll give you pretty graphs if you press the right buttons and you can get the figures from any one of a number of the British pollsters or whether it’s YouGov or whether it’s Survation or whoever. They’ve all done this enormous … It created during COVID and it did drop down and it was just basically the boat people, and that was basically it. But then just went enormously through the roof from 2021, completely mad, unbelievable. We were importing the city of Birmingham, which is the second city of the United Kingdom and just completely unconstrained immigration in addition to the small boats and the asylum seeker problem.
And this was after the conservatives had promised the British people that they would copy Australia’s points-based immigration system. And the reason so many British people know about the Australian system is simply because of historic, very high rates of immigration between England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. This is really important to remember. It really is the British Isles. It’s not just the UK to Australia. So everybody in both places is very familiar with a very different immigration system that is selective and that has also largely rejected the trendy global sympathy for refugees.
The current big debate in the Australian Parliament, literally as I got off the website of the Australian newspaper, for which I used to regularly write, is about the Australian current left-leaning center-left Labour government wants to give 1200 visas to refugees from Gaza. And the opposition is rejecting this, saying that they are much more likely to be terrorists because it’s very clear for people from Gaza support Hamas. And the attempt by human rights people in Australia to argue as they do in Britain or the United States that you are trying to choose between refugees and say, you’ll pick those, but not these to which Australians of both stripes politically going back to 1990, can just say, this is what we have always done. You don’t get to come here as of right. We get to pick and choose. We have abrogated, the relevant bits of the refugee convention.
Remember, Australia is Bentham. There are no freestanding rights. That is why there are none in our constitution. Your Antonin Scalia, Justice Scalia, when there was a somewhat trivial attempt to discover an implied right of freedom of political communication in the Australian constitution … It’s been some litigation over that a number of years ago, and the right is very small and very constrained and has been chipped away. Scalia’s response to a fairly eminent Australian jurist might’ve actually been the chief justice at the high court at the time. I can’t remember. But Scalia said, “I’m sorry. You don’t have that sort of constitution.” And he is absolutely correct. We do not.
James Patterson:
So the large number of migrants … And I should mention I’m not terribly … I’ve never been much of an immigration hawk. I grew up in Houston, Texas, where migrants were in large numbers, and I grew up with them. So, this conversation has always been difficult for me. So, pardon me if I don’t use the right terms. But there’s been an accelerant in Labour politics, especially where there are essentially Hindu groups and Muslim groups. And it’s the Muslim groups that have been posing the greatest challenge to Labour and to ongoing politics in England. How has that cashed out?
Helen Dale:
Well, what has happened historically, it’s become fairly clear is that initially, because of the parties of the left or the parties of anti-racism, this seems to be what’s happened in the UK. Didn’t happen in Australia. The Australian system is very different because of the selection effect with the migrants. But in the UK, at least initially, the parties of the left are the anti-racist ones. So they get the ethnic minority votes, they get all of them or nearly all of them. And then over a period of time,a reasonable number of years, two, three decades, enough for another cohort to grow up … So you have black British and you have Indian British and so on and so forth, is you get a divergence. And the more economically successful ethnic minorities, famously in Britain, “British Hindus,” but also Sikhs, the Sikhi, you get this as well. You see this and you see it among the Igbo Nigerians and some Yoruba, but particularly the Igbo who tend to be economically very successful as well. And they’re often your market-dominant minorities.
And so within a generation, they drift Tory. And in Britain they were led. That market-dominant minority group were led In a way they were dragged along accidentally. This was completely accidental as Jews shifted from left to right in Britain. And so now Jews mainly vote conservative in the UK. And they dragged with them British Indians, East African Asians who were the very specific market-dominant minority who were expelled in large numbers by various East African governments, most famously Idi Amin, for being economically successful in their particular countries and being foreign. So it was exactly the same prejudice that you saw in various European countries directed at Jews and for the same reason.
My father used to very cynically and nastily say, because Scottish people will make finance comments like this, “How do you know if your religion was founded by a person who was both poor and stupid? It will attempt to ban the lending of money at interest.” This is a very Scottish approach to the world.
James Patterson:
That’s very Scottish.
Helen Dale:
You are allowed to make jokes about Scots being tight.
James Patterson:
As a person of Scottish and just a little bit of Jewish descent, it’s all true.
Helen Dale:
So yes. That is what has happened. So that is the origin of this. And then the way it’s cashed out is that there was a bit of a blip during the Iraq war, but nowhere near as bad as this. And to be fair, that blip was first generated by a single individual, George Galloway, whose history, I give it a fair bit of detail with lots of links in the piece. I do that for a reason. Because this first hint that British Muslims who are mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi … There are a few Palestinians and there are a few Lebanese and so on and so forth, but they are in much smaller numbers. They’re overwhelmingly Pakistani and Bangladeshi extraction. The others are in tiny numbers.
The first hint that perhaps Labour had been taking its British Muslim voters for granted who’d stayed loyal to Labour when the other ethnic minorities were starting to drift. Were taking them for granted. This George Galloway character used to periodically when seats always off of Labour, he would tip and he would use his knowledge of what is called in Pakistan [foreign language 00:24:11] or [foreign language 00:24:12] politics. That comes from a Farsi word, which I’m going to pronounce wrongly because I don’t know any Farsi, and I was taught how to say it by Arabic speakers. [foreign language 00:24:22] just means brother [foreign language 00:24:24]. And it’s basically where you recruit entire communities based on their blood kinship to each other and effectively harvest their votes.
James Patterson:
Oh, no.
Helen Dale:
And Labour had been doing this for quite a long time, and yet the areas that British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis lived in tended to be poor, to have poor amenities, to have rubbishy schools and related. There was some success stories as well. Shabana Mahmood went to Oxford and went to Lincoln College, which is the rival college of Brasenose, that kind of thing. So there were some success stories as well, people who came from the upper rungs of Pakistani and Bangladeshi society and finished up in the UK and became stellar high achievers, but they were a minority. The bulk of British Muslims have not been winners in the race to economic advantage I think it’s probably fair to say, compared to lots of other ethnic groups. And they’d always loyally voted Labour and Labour had been in government for quite a lot of that.
And then you had on top of it, you had Labour being very pro-Israel and very in favor of the war in Iraq. And so first just this George Galloway, who’s a Scotsman who seemed to be able to exploit the style of vote harvesting politics. He seemed to be able to do it better than any British Pakistani could do it. And he would occasionally win seats off of Labour. They’d last one term partly because one of the reasons why British Muslims were voting for him was because Labour had done nothing for them. Then, they would vote for George Galloway, and they would get five years of nothing done for them either. Their constituency was still just as rubbish as it had always been. So he would be tipped out and they’d just go back to usually voting Labour, occasionally voting Tory, occasionally voting UKIP.
That happened in Rochdale. There was one election where it became a Labour UKIP marginal when the Lib Dem vote collapsed. So you would get that. But you didn’t get a true perfect storm of we are really annoyed about living in crappy poor parts of the country that nobody cares about and having our votes taken for granted. And there is a crisis in the Middle East. Those two happened together, plus the emerging sectarianism in the background because people have just been so glib about it and just thought, oh, well, yes, they’re just an interest group or a religious lobby group like any other religious lobby group, and I’m going, I’m sorry you did not treat, and you still do not treat the UDF or Sinn Féin like this. You just don’t. And they don’t. So it is just extraordinarily glib to just open the front door to sectarianism. And the thing is, it’s not just sectarianism with what you could vaguely call white people. That is a somewhat separate issue. The recent riots.
There’s a Muslim-Hindu conflict that has happened in Leicester. There’s historically been Black-Muslim conflict in Birmingham going back, and that was over the market-dominant minority thing. It was directed at East African Asians who once again perceived to be becoming too economically successful. And the glibness of the lightness of people just thinking, oh, this is all funny and cute. Actually, no, it’s not. And we’ve got real problems with…I think I’m quoting here from Arnold Kling, who’s an American economist I admire. Whereas a general rule across the Anglosphere and the European Union countries have agreed that they are pro-Israel by and large. They take Israel’s side more or less in conflicts and have done so for a pretty long time. Occasionally, the French will have a bit of a wobble, but not that much. What I think is happening everywhere except Australia and Germany for distinctive historical reasons is that the Middle East is generally just going to turn into partisan politics.
And I think you in the United States are maybe two election cycles from that. Where the pro-Palestinian side will come to dominate the Democrats, and the old guard, which was represented by someone like Joe Biden, will fall away. And that may well happen if Labour can figure out a way of getting those votes to come back to Labour. The effect could well be, once again, for the Middle East to become a culture of partisan politics for the Tories to become the party of Israel and Hindus, and for Labour to become the party of Palestine and Islam. That hasn’t happened yet because so many Muslims have just walked away from Labour and cut their majorities to tiny votes less than a thousand votes. And you have to understand, these are large constituencies with over a hundred thousand people in them. This is one of those things where a single ballot can occasionally decide who wins the seat.
James Patterson:
You describe the Labour majority as wide but shallow.
Helen Dale:
Shallow.
James Patterson:
Yeah. And this is because of the internal split?
Helen Dale:
Yes. It’s a fractured electoral coalition.
James Patterson:
The thing that I was wondering when I was reading through this is maybe the problem is that the numbers coming in can recreate a cultural hub, and that what I think had previously been the English wager was that the people would secularize more quickly than they could organize, so you wouldn’t have this feel the wrath of Allah, referring to people as infidels following the teachers of the prophets. These …
Helen Dale:
And remember, this is why it’s important to call it by its proper name. This is proper sectarianism because every single one of the people who had those comments directed at them was a sitting Labour MP who also happened to be Muslim. When they went after say someone like Jess Phillips it was more fairly traditional as she identified to be fair, straight up and down sexism. Just don’t like a woman being in authority over them. But when they went after the non-whites after women of color basically, who were also Muslims of color, they went after them very much on the basis of you are a bad Muslim, you are an infidel. If you watch the clip of Shabana Mahmood to the BBC, it’s very good, and it only goes for a few minutes, and I’ve extracted that piece from it. You can see people were bellowing at her across the street. You’re an infidel in English and in Urdu and in Arabic and this kind of thing.
James Patterson:
So there’s no way to expect the sectarianism to diminish over time then because it can reproduce itself within the borders, right?
Helen Dale:
This is the problem, and yes, and you are seeing one of the effects of this, and this is something I will write about in the context of the riots that I’m working on thinking through my thoughts through to the end on this. You are seeing what something that used to exist in place and to a degree still does and causes them social problems in countries like Belgium and Holland. They had pillar systems, pillarization, which was a post-confessional state compromise where you had countries with divided religious populations and you couldn’t do the thing of putting all the Catholics in Bavaria and all the protestants in Prussia and so on and so forth. It wasn’t that simple. So, you would have self-governing communities. Note that expression communities. You are hearing that all the time now. And what the state does is it provides a common framework for these different communities to interact with each other, but effectively allows them to police themselves through community leaders.
And the problem with that, of course, is when you have different moral frameworks and different organizing principles, you get things like the grooming gangs. A significant part of the reason for the problem of grooming gangs in Rotherham and in other cities in the north and the Midlands was precisely because of this treatment of various communities as self-governing and engaging with their community leadership rather than engaging directly with the people.
Mark Koyama wrote about this. The fellow who is probably pretty close to being the world’s preeminent economic historian, the fellow who wrote about the emergence of liberalism and the importance of having a single legal system that is applied without fear or favor to everybody in the population. But it’s very tempting to do pillar systems, particularly as some of the European countries that did do them historically, like the Netherlands, the Dutch pillar system were also pretty economically prosperous for a long time. A lot of people think, oh, those systems must be terrible, and when they were millet systems in the Ottoman Empire, they probably were terrible, and it’s one of the reasons why the Ottoman Empire became the sick old man and of Europe and all of this kind of thing. It was poorly run. But competent Europeans could do quite a good job with their pillarization, but it feeds political instability. The historic pillarization in Belgium is a large part of why that country persists in going hundreds of days, years, sometimes without a government after it has elections.
James Patterson:
So there’s something odd about this pillar system, which is that it operates primarily at the discretion of the English government, right? Because there’s a legal system that refers to some people, and then it’s more or less suspended in other communities. What do you expect but riots as a result of this inconsistent form of the rule of law?
Helen Dale:
Well, it’s not the rule of law. But part of the problem with anti-discrimination legislation is the people who developed the ideas behind modern anti-discrimination legislation going back to the 19th century, and probably John Stuart Mill and people like that. I think they thought that if you took away the legal disabilities … Well, no, I don’t think they thought, I know they thought because there’s lots and lots of evidence for this. Words are out of their own mouths. Everybody, from John Stuart Mill to Mary Wollstonecraft to Martin Luther King, and all of these people, they all clearly thought that if you took away the legal impediments to people succeeding, you would have winners and losers of all races and sexes. None of these people was trying to suggest that we would all be equal. That modern woke thing of true equality of outcomes, none of these people were running that line. But they did think that you would have roughly proportionate numbers of very clever, talented black people, very talented, clever women, and very talented, clever, this, that or the other. They thought that you would get roughly proportionate to their population numbers.
That hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen because not only are there average differences between individuals, there are average differences between groups. And so what we have got now is a lot of pent-up anger and irritation from people where they perceive that promises were made to them and then snatched away. I think that is at the root of a lot of this. It’s the liberal state, the modern liberal state bent over backward to do something like equality of opportunity, and that hasn’t happened, and now everything is just being scrapped over and torn apart.
James Patterson:
So the internal dynamics of these groups often disincentivize people from taking advantage of those opportunities too. You were mentioning that this one woman … What’s her name? I’m so unfamiliar with the politics here. Her name, is it, Shabana-
Helen Dale:
Shabana Mahmood?
James Patterson:
Yeah. Shabana Mahmood. She’s treated terribly, and you can only imagine that there are a large number of Muslim girls from Pakistan or Bangladesh originally who understand these cues and have been suppressed in their own ability to thrive.
Helen Dale:
This is what Baroness Gohir is talking about in that quotation from hers. She’s alarmed because it looks like it’s specifically directed at young Muslim girls as a way of just putting the hand on their head and making them sit down. Just because the girls here are mouthy doesn’t mean you get to join in. That kind of thing. Yes. That is a specific within the community issue that people are just not addressing. Because now of course, all of these things, whether it’s equality of outcomes or whether it’s differences between men and women and so on and so forth, there’s just been this extraordinary ideological flattening, so you can’t just make very sensible observations about the fact that, well, I’m afraid some religions are a bit more sexist than others. That’s just a thing that exists, and you have to take that into account and people within those religions who want to, for example, like Shabana Mahmood or Baroness Gohir who want to deal with the sexism in their own religion, the fact that there are problems with sexism in Islam, they have to be confronted, and the rest of us, all of us nice western liberals have to have those women’s backs, and that’s what’s not happening anymore.
That’s why it wasn’t hard for me to find all of that information with very detailed links and quotations from politicians and the great and the good and so on and so forth. It wasn’t hard for me to find, but people just do not want to talk about it. They do not want to look it in the face.
James Patterson:
Is it the fear of violence the reason for this? Is it the misapprehension of the threats? What is it that prevents people from wanting to defend these girls?
Helen Dale:
I suspect violence or fear of violence and association of Islamism with violence, which is just an upgraded version of the heckler’s veto, I suppose. It’s just, it’s a heckler’s veto with potentially something explosive on the end of it. I think that is a part of it. I always remember what Iona Italia said. And she’s both written and published articles when she was editor of Areo Magazine and she works for Quillette now. She would publish these articles, but she would never ever put in the magazine the images of the Muhammad cartoons from the Danish press. She would never include them. And she was always completely upfront about this. She would say, no, I’m sorry. I am a coward. This is not worth dying for. I have a very nice life as a magazine commissioning editor. I would like to continue to enjoy it. She was always completely upfront about this. And I actually have to say I have a lot of respect for that because it made me think, what would I do in those circumstances? I have a feeling I’d probably do the same thing as Iona. I quite like my life.
James Patterson:
So what is on earth? Is this Labour government going to do? What possible outcome could there be for them?
Helen Dale:
I don’t actually know if they are doing things like reviewing, for example. There is currently a review going on into the question of suspending UK arms sales to Israel. That’s something the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has just kicked off. If they continue to go along those lines, it would appear that they are attempting to get a significant number of Muslim voters back by changing the UK government’s approach to the Middle East, which is, as I said earlier, my initial suspicion long before the sectarianism gets truly terrible will just be that what will happen is the Middle East will just turn into a feature of normal partisan politics and it will change from administration to administration or government to government in the UK depending on who is in number 10 or who is in the White House or dominates the White House plus one other of the houses. And so that is the first thing that Labour is probably going to try to get those Muslim voters back because it’s not always going to have the huge buffer provided by the voters who did vote, turnout, even though it was a low turnout just under 60%, and actually only 52% of all of the eligible voters. A little under 60% of the registered voters.
Labour won’t always have the buffer provided by a large number of people who are large because they were drawn from the whole of the UK’s population voting for them. They won’t always have that buffer. There will come a point where, for example, Reform may make a better pitch because it’s got those social populist parties in Europe tend to have social democratic economic policies. Reform isn’t quite there. They are heading in that direction. If they start making a policy offer that has social democratic economic policies along with their immigration restrictionist cultural policies, they will start to undermine Labour votes in those historic red wall seats, which went Tory, Tories didn’t give them what they wanted. Now they’ve gone back to Labour, but on a very low turnout, on a very low percentage, but it was because everybody’s vote share was terrible.
James Patterson:
Well, on that note, we are going to have to close. Again the article at Law & Liberty is “The New Sectarianism” with a very thoroughly linked piece. By the way, I think I learned everything I could possibly know about the state of English politics by reading this and then followed the links encyclopedic and it’s scope. The one in-
Helen Dale:
I’m sorry. I assume that you do understand that it’s a parliamentary system and as a Prime Minister and the cabinet has to be appointed from within the Parliament. It can technically be appointed from outside, but that doesn’t happen very often.
James Patterson:
It just sounds like witchcraft to me, Helen. I don’t know what any of that means. The one and only Helen Dale, who, by the way, will be giving us her own Law & Liberty podcast probably sometime in October. She’ll be showing up every once in a while to add a little bit more spice, a little bit more excitement, but not very much Raygun. She’s very much more of the Australian swimming team and her talents.
Helen Dale:
I will try. I’ll try be good rather than rubbish.
James Patterson:
Thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast, Helen.
Helen Dale:
Thanks for having me.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, Helen Dale joins host James Patterson to discuss the rise of new sectarianism in the UK, political and civil unrest, and how the Australians performed in the Olympics.
Helen Dale is a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. She won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, and read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. She writes for a number of outlets, including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette. She lives in London, is on substack at helendale.substack.com, and on Twitter @_HelenDale
Show Notes:
"The New Sectarianism" (Helen Dale for Law & Liberty) Helen Dale's Substack "The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples" (Rachel Lu for Law & Liberty)
In a time of partisanship and dissention, can the Constitution provide the kind of unity we seek? Yes and no, argues AEI Senior Fellow and author Yuval Levin in his new book, American Covenant. The Constitution offers a kind of unity, but a limited one, that falls short of what many hope for. He joins host James Patterson to discuss constitutional history, our present social tensions, and what’s wrong with our institutions.
Show Notes:
- American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again
- Law & Liberty symposium on Levin’s book
- “Constituting Unity,“ a Law & Liberty forum led by Levin
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Full Transcript:James Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. It is Wednesday, July 10, 2024. My guest today is Dr. Yuval Levin. Dr. Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute where he holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. At AEI, Dr. Levin and scholars in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies research division study the foundations of self-government and the future of law regulation and constitutionalism.
Dr. Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under George H. W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at member committee and leadership levels. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy most recently American Covenant: How The Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again on Basic Books that recently came out. This book will be the subject of our podcast today, Dr. Levin, thank you so much for being on the Law & Liberty Podcast.
Yuval Levin:
Thank you very much for having me.
James Patterson:
So I have to admit that reading this book gave me an overwhelming amount of nostalgia. I have right here, I believe on page 157, Daniel DiSalvo and Robert Saldin on a page. Those were people I went to graduate school with.
Yuval Levin:
Oh wow. Okay.
James Patterson:
So I was reading … Jim Ceaser is in there. So it was like being back in Charlottesville back in the 2000s. So the thing about the book I want to start with though is that we see a lot of academics treat the Constitution mainly as a source of positive law or even like a raw material in order to devise their own policy outcomes. What have we really lost in that sense of treating the Constitution and what is it that you recommend we bring back?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, thank you. In a way, these two points are connected because the book really does try to bring to bear a different kind of academic engagement with the Constitution than we now normally find. Those two relatively younger political scientists that you mentioned are very rare now. They’re students of Jim Ceaser who was also very rare, a real political scientist who nonetheless rejects the basic approach that most political scientists and legal scholars now have to the Constitution, which is, as you say, that view of the Constitution as just a means to preferred policy outcomes. This book draws on a different range of scholars. Certainly, Saldin and DiSalvo are among them, but I would say the leading lights intellectually for it are scholars like Walter Berns and Martin Diamond, Herbert Storing, Harry Jaffa in some ways, who certainly disagreed among themselves on a variety of questions, but had a view of the Constitution that was rooted in a classical sense of what constitution means, a classical sense of what a regime is and how it relates to the life of a society.
And I think what we lose when we see the Constitution purely as positive law is the sense that ultimately we as citizens and as human beings are shaped by the kind of political society we live in, and that the Constitution shapes us in a particular way in the direction of being Republican citizens, people who take ownership and responsibility for the society they live in and for their common fate as a people. And the Constitution has much more to offer us than just a legal framework. It is important as a legal framework and I do think we should see it first and foremost in that way, but it’s also a framework for political life that I think can teach us a lot about what has gone wrong in contemporary American political life, why it is that our politics seem so dysfunctional, what it would mean to reach toward a more functional way of living politically. I think the Constitution is an incredible resource for thinking politically in the broadest and deepest sense, and the book really does try to recover that sense of what it would mean to think of it that way.
James Patterson:
Yeah, in the first chapter, there’s … It concludes with a discussion of three elements of American life. Competition, negotiation, and productive tension. These run contrary to a kind of contemporary instinct. I see this a lot among my students. If they’re writing something, and they don’t quite know what the significance is, like if they need to write about The Federalist Papers or they need to write about something by Lincoln, they reach for the term unity. This seems to be something that they want to say is a good thing, and this actually leads them sometimes to overlook or maybe even discount these three things that you’ve mentioned are actually central, competition, negotiation and tension, in a way that unity actually isn’t. So this being a controversial position, defend it. Why should they not accept unity?
Yuval Levin:
There is certainly an idea of unity at the core of what I’m working to draw out of the Constitution, but it’s a very distinct idea of unity. I think of it as a Madisonian idea of unity. And it says that unity means not thinking alike but acting together. Ultimately, no political community can consist of unanimity, of people actually just having the same opinions about crucial questions. Politics is always about what divides us. It is a way of dealing with division. A society that genuinely was not divided would not need politics. And what it means to see the political as a way of dealing with disagreement is to see that unity ultimately is a way of facilitating common action. Politics is about action. It is an answer to the question what shall we do? And in pursuing an answer to that question about collective action, we necessarily have to have ways of dealing with difference.
And in a sense to say that unity means not thinking alike but acting together, you invite the question, how can it be possible to act together when we don’t think alike? I think the American constitution is in many respects an answer to that question. How can we act together when we don’t think alike? Its various institutions are meant to facilitate that. Its modes of action are meant to facilitate that. And crucial among those modes of action are these three that you described, competition, negotiation, and a kind of constructive tension. The Constitution deals with competing factions by letting them compete over and over. First and foremost maybe just through the fact of elections. The Constitution is fundamentally democratic and we do have a lot of elections in the American system. An unusual number at various levels of government. And offices are set so that they expire at different times. And somebody is always running for something, and that means that our politics is always competitive.
There’s also competition between the states and the national government. There’s competition between the houses of Congress and between the branches of the government. That kind of competition is a way to force everybody to be as appealing and as coalition-minded as they possibly can. And then of course, negotiation is how you actually build coalitions and sustain them, and negotiation is at the center of how the Constitution wants us to solve problems. That’s why Congress is the first and foremost branch of the national government. It is the venue where the representatives of different factions of American life deal with each other, negotiate bargain, and reach agreements that they can all tolerate. I think the notion of constructive tension may be the least familiar of these, but it is a characteristic way in which the Constitution resolves some of the deepest differences that were evident at the time of its creation. It takes what seems like contrasting options and says yes to both at the same time.
So should representation in Congress ultimately empower states by population or empower them equally? This was maybe the most controversial question at the Convention, and the answer the convention arrived at was, yes, we’re just going to do both. One house of Congress will be by population and the other will represent the states equally, and the tension is always going to be alive in our system as a result. Or think about the presidency, as the president’s supposed to be an elevated head of state, like a regal king, or is the president supposed to be a clerk, someone who just carries out what Congress decides? The answer is yes, the president is supposed to be both of these things even though there’s an obvious contradiction between them. That means that the office of the president contains a kind of tension that allows it to shift its weight without losing its balance in times of change.
And a lot of the stability of our system is made possible by the fact that it doesn’t seek to resolve every question. It turns the political life of our society into a project of dealing with these permanent questions all the time, and in that way keeps us from falling apart when we’re divided. It gives us ways to be divided that can be constructive of collective action.
James Patterson:
So I growing up belonged to a lot of different organizations that had formal meetings that also use things like Robert’s Rules of Order, and these kinds of techniques for administrative meetings were something that I just took for granted as experiences, but I think that’s actually a weird thing that I was doing. And so I suspect that a problem that people have with competition, negotiation, and tension is that they have very little formation in what those things are like and in the process of meeting out compromises, but also sometimes just losing. And this comes up a lot in the book where one of the causes for unity is the desire to get everything you want when you finally win.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that what you describe is a kind of characteristic American experience, and it’s actually an example of how the Constitution shapes our national character. Tocqueville jokes in a letter to his father that if you get three Americans together, they’ll elect a treasurer. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that historically, that Americans have thought in terms of committee work. Whenever there’s something to be done, we create a committee and we follow rules of decision-making and bargaining, and we act as though we are following the rules of the Constitution even though we’re not bound by them. And I think that gives us a kind of experience in problem-solving in groups that is enormously valuable in a divided society, in a diverse society. Because working in groups is difficult. Other people are hard to deal with, other people are disagreeable, and oftentimes we need a structure, a way of dealing with differences.
I think that part of what has happened to our political culture in the last few decades is that we are engaged in much less civil society activity like that as Americans just in our own lives, and that means we have much less of the habits that are necessary for this kind of constitutional logic to make sense to us. We haven’t seen it at work quite as much. And so we tend to think that the point of political engagement is to get my way and I get my way by winning the election. If I won the election, then I’d be in charge. The American constitution actually doesn’t work that way. What you win when you win an election in our politics is you win a seat at the table and what happens at the table is committee work and negotiation and bargaining. And this isn’t how every democracy works.
A lot of the parliamentary systems in Europe, for example, in South America and Asia, work by empowering majorities. So however narrow your majority, if it’s a majority, it has all the power. It controls the government. The American system has always been more wary of majority power than that and has always forced majorities to broaden themselves before they can be empowered, to deal with minorities in order to get anything done. That does slow things down. It does put barriers in the way of efficient government. But it also requires us to build broader coalitions and to build a deeper legitimacy for public action. I think we’ve lost an appreciation for how important that is. We take that legitimacy for granted, even though our institutions are clearly losing their legitimacy in our time, and we don’t see that these mechanisms that slow us down are actually ways of making politics more tolerable in a vast and diverse democracy.
I think a lot of the critics of the Constitution today are pointing to the European systems, pointing to other kinds of democracies, and saying, “Look, they’re much more efficient. Norway and Belgium: They get things done much more easily and quickly. They’re much proportionally representative.” It seems to me that the fact that we can even compare ourselves to Norway and Belgium is an illustration of how well we are governed by the constitutional system. The United States is not like Norway and Belgium. The United States is more like India and Brazil. It is a vast, immense, diverse democracy, but it’s much better governed than India and Brazil. Our system is very well-suited to governing a vast and diverse democracy. We take it for granted. And so we think we could do better, we could be more like Belgium, and I don’t think so. I think we have to respect the ways by which we live with the fact of our immensity and our diversity, and that requires seeing why the Constitution works the way it does and helping it work better.
James Patterson:
Here in the chapter The Constituted Republic, there’s a section that I really enjoyed, especially the way that you put it, and so I just want to quote a little bit from here. If you have the book, it’s on page 74 at the bottom. The framers clearly assumed that a distinct set of virtues in the people was essential to the kind of government they were proposing. These prerequisite virtues were not of the highest kind of human excellence, but they were demanding a set of Republican commitments. So a two-part question here is I thought the founders were skeptical of morality as a backstop to things like tyranny or injustice. The second question is something that I guess is a little bit more complicated, which is what’s republicanism?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, it’s a very important question and a very challenging question. There’s certainly a lot of truth to the fact that the framers wanted a system that did not require perfect virtue all the time because they recognized that it would be populated by human beings, and they knew, as Madison famously says, that enlightened statesmen would not always be at the helm, and that there had to be a way for the mechanisms of the system to correct for some of the failings of human nature and human character. But those same framers, Madison and Hamilton who make that point, also say, often in the very same places, that we also can’t assume the lowest things about human nature because this kind of society does require some virtue in the citizen. In fact, a republic in particular requires certain kinds of civic responsibility without which it cannot function.
And the use of the term republic in that way is I think very important for us to try to make sense of in our time. The idea of republicanism is almost lost to us now. It’s not part of our everyday political vocabulary. It describes an idea, parts of which have been overtaken by terms like liberalism and democracy, parts of which have just been lost. And it seems to me that oftentimes now in contemporary political debates when people complain about liberalism and about our having too much liberalism, I think what they’re actually saying is that we have too little republicanism. We just don’t have the words to put it that way. Republicanism is, in a sense, the political vision of a self-governing society. It focuses on taking ownership of our society’s common future. And it is all about ownership and responsibility.
That term “responsibility,” which appears a lot, especially in The Federalist Papers written by Madison, was actually not in common usage. Madison brought it into English from French. His use of it is only the second time that the Oxford English Dictionary can find the word “responsibility” in English. The purpose of it is to describe the obligations of a citizen in the American Republic. There’s a way in which responsibility simultaneously describes accountability on the one hand, holding people accountable for what they do, but on the other hand also a sense, of ownership of claiming the future and saying, “This is mine, this is ours.”
I think that sense that this country is ours, that we’re not just standing around waiting for somebody to do something, and it doesn’t just act on us as if we’re passive recipients. It is us. It belongs to us, and ultimately the problems that it has are our problems. The strengths that it has are our strengths. That habit is absolutely vital for American citizenship. The ability to speak about our country in the first person plural in terms of we and us and our is very, very important. And I think it’s more important in the American political tradition than we now tend to see. “We” is actually the first word of the Constitution. It begins by speaking on behalf of We the People. Or think of that second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which also begins with we, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
Americans speak as when we talk about our republic. And it requires a kind of republicanism to do that. And ultimately the emphasis of republicanism is on obligations, it is on citizen duties. And we don’t talk about that very much. Now, we talk about rights, which is important too in the American tradition, and rights have more to do with liberalism than republicanism, but I think a recovery of the idea of republicanism could help us to balance some of what is now missing in our political culture without throwing away anything. The need we have is not to eliminate liberalism, but to recover republicanism.
James Patterson:
That’s right. I cannot stress how much I really loved that section. That last part you just said, the answer, reminds me that we have. … There’s a few years … Actually, I guess now almost like two decades ago, the book Rights Talk by Mary Ann Glendon talks about this.
Yuval Levin:
Wonderful book.
James Patterson:
Yeah. Just incredible. Rights as trumps rather than as rights as liberty to meet communal obligations. It really does present a problem for the way people understand what the Constitution and constituted bodies are for.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah. And it gives us the wrong impression about the nature of our society because when we think about rights as purely individual protections, we are prone to think that our society encourages a kind of radical individualism. But if you actually look at our rights, look at the rights that are enshrined in the First Amendment, we think of those rights as individual rights, and they do in a sense [inaudible 00:20:55] in individuals, but none of them is actually an individual. The right to free speech is not a right to talk to yourself. It’s a right to participate through speech in the life of a community. Nobody practices religion on their own. The right to assembly is obviously not an individual right. These are all ways of participating in the life of a formative community. And the First Amendment protects those communities in a way that I don’t think we give it enough credit for.
James Patterson:
I teach at a Catholic university and some of the students are a little wobbly on the idea of a church disestablishment at the federal level. So I posed to my students if the state can get baptized for you or go to a bar mitzvah for you. And the answer’s no, that’s what makes a riot inalienable, it’s one that you can’t delegate. And so those are the kinds of rights that are not subject to disagreement. That’s one of the problems that we run into in the Constitution. So there is a reference to Belgium and Norway now in here, so the United States is now dealing with this issue in the framing of the Constitution over the nature of small versus large republicanism. Normally the way kids are taught this is big states versus small states, but there’s more to it than that. There are rival conceptions of republicanism at the framing of the Constitution, and the one that Madison, Hamilton, and the like introduced is novel and maybe not as commonly understood, right?
Yuval Levin:
That’s right. We have this kind of cliched picture of the convention as divided between the big states and the small states, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, the big states, and then New Jersey and Maryland and Connecticut, and the debate is who should have the power? And so the small states want equal representation in Congress, and the big states want representation by population. There’s some truth to that when it comes to the design of the structure of the Congress, but the divisions at the convention were actually not big state versus small state. The most significant divisions actually happened within the delegations from the larger states and especially within the Virginia delegation where there were real ultimately people who became anti-federalists and who didn’t support the Constitution, like George Mason. And there was James Madison and voices that argued for a kind of centralization of power and for a large republic.
The dispute they had in a sense was about the nature of republicanism. The anti-Federalists argued that republics have to be small, that because they require civic engagement and a certain kind of citizen, and because they need to form their people in a particular way, they have to be an interpersonal community. And if they get too big, they won’t be capable of forming Republican citizens and they won’t be capable of gaining those citizens’ allegiance. This is an argument that has very deep roots in the Republican tradition all the way back to the republicanism of Rome you find these kinds of arguments, and certainly in the early Enlightenment republicanism and in Rousseau and elsewhere.
And James Madison rose to offer a different view about the problems created by the challenge of factions in a republic. Madison says there are factions in any republic of any scale, and to mitigate those factions, you can’t get rid of them, but to mitigate their effects some, it actually helps to enlarge the scale of Republican life, to make it larger so that there are more factions and therefore none are a clear majority or a permanent, durable majority. That means that all the factions have to think like minorities and have to try to be persuasive and attractive and ultimately work in a way that facilitates a kind of politics that’s rooted in negotiation and competition. A.
And that becomes an argument for a large-scale republic. A very novel argument. I wouldn’t say it’s entirely new, there are actually elements of it in Aristotle’s Politics, in Book IV of the Politics. But Madison certainly deepens and extends it and applies it to the American situation in a very novel way. That becomes quite persuasive even in the convention and allows some of the people who take republicanism most seriously at the Convention to wrap their heads around the possibility of a larger republic that will allow for some communal self-government through federalism, but will also allow for some real centralized national government on some issues. And to see that not as a betrayal of republicanism, but as a way to make it possible in a modern society.
James Patterson:
One of the major innovations Madison wants to contribute to our understanding of republicanism and The Federalist Papers is the idea of representation. Representation plays a big role in your discussion of the Constitution as well. This is a big subject, so I understand if you can’t cover everything here, but how does representation in the Constitution play such a role?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah. For Madison actually, representation is crucial to republicanism, to modern republicanism. There are places, in fact, in Federalist No. 10 for example, where he says that what distinguishes a republic from a pure democracy is that republics employ the principle of representation, which means the public does not directly make decisions. It’s not through a plebiscite that we make public policy, but rather the public elects representatives and those representatives then engage in deliberation, negotiation, and bargaining. There are things that become possible in a republic only thanks to representation. The representatives of competing factions are able to negotiate with each other in a way that the factions themselves would not be able to.
Madison is always worried about democracy becoming mobocracy, to use Lincoln’s phrase from half a century later. The idea that in a democracy you ultimately fall into mob rule. And he says famously that even if all the Athenians were like Socrates, the Athenian assembly would still have been a mob because the nature of the institution of plebiscite democracy is such that it’s just not possible to have serious conversations and deliberations and negotiations. And so you’ve got to have a smaller number of people who represent the different factions of society, but whose job it is to deal with each other. And representation makes that possible so that, ultimately for Madison, the Congress becomes the central institution of the American Republic. He says, “In any republic, the legislature is bound to have the most power.” And so the design, the structure of the legislature is enormously important for him so that it can facilitate negotiation and bargaining and allow the entire system to operate in that way.
And representation is really a way to try to turn the mass public into some kind of organized political body. That doesn’t happen on its own, it’s made possible by representative democracy.
James Patterson:
So the subject of federalism occupies a pretty central place in the book, both physically and in terms of your thinking. And honestly, it occurred to me while I was reading is that federalism has waned as an issue people talk about even among our own like milieu, but it should be probably given a bit more attention because there’s a lot more familiarity with its role in people’s everyday lives, especially after the states responded very differently to the COVID-19 regime. And as I like to point out to my students, we actually are engaging in a kind of modern nullification right now with states legalizing marijuana and the federal government essentially letting them. So what is it about federalism in the Constitution that’s so important and why has federalism always really struggled to maintain its place?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Federalism is one of the ways that the Constitution allows for some movement in the joints of American public life. You can have some diversity of decisions, some diversity of action, different places doing different things at the same time and have some tolerance for that. And I think it’s very important to think about the structure of federalism to see why that is. We have a tendency, I do this myself sometimes, and certainly, a lot of people who think in communitarian terms about politics have a tendency to think about federalism as layered government, something like subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching.
But federalism is actually very different from that. It does not operate by layering government by saying, “First things happen at the local level. Then above that there’s a kind of oversight from the national government as it’s necessary.” Federalism actually creates parallel governing tracks. The idea is… The question they face at the convention is should the states or the national government govern the people directly? If the states do it, then the national government is something like a federation and doesn’t really govern, it just resolves common needs. If the national government does it, then the states are something like administrative districts and it’s really the national government that governs.
And ultimately the convention came to a kind of constructive tension answer here, and they said, “Yes, we’re going to let the states and the national government both govern the people directly, but with regard to different subjects.” And so when it comes to national security, as we would now call it, and foreign affairs, and when it comes to economic policy, the national government would govern directly. And in every other way, all of the police powers of government, the states would govern directly. And they don’t interfere with each other.
Now, we’ve lost a lot of this character of federalism over time because as the work of governance has become more complex in our modern society and modern economy, we’ve actually integrated state and federal governance in a lot of ways, and especially in healthcare, in welfare, in education. The states and the federal government now work together. They spend each other’s money, they implement each other’s decisions. We’ve lost a lot of the strength of federalism as a result of that. I think the original federalist compromise was extraordinarily impressive. It allowed for a huge amount of flexibility, even as it allowed the United States to benefit from the advantages of centralized government.
The big problem with the federalist compromise though was the problem of slavery. And obviously, slavery is a subject you can’t ignore when you think about American history. When you look for how did the Constitution originally deal with slavery, there are all kinds of views about this and there are people who say the framers were advocates of slavery, and of course many of them were slaveholders. There are people who say the framers were secretly anti-slavery. Abraham Lincoln makes this case. I think that what they actually did is assign slavery to the states.
The decision they made essentially was not to deal with it in the Constitution, to avoid it as much as they possibly could, and the Constitution has very little to do with slavery. But where they had to deal with it, they assigned it to the states. And they went to great lengths to do this so that even when the Constitution permits the Congress to prohibit the international slave trade 20 years after ratification, it actually does that in terms that describe it as a state issue. And ultimately the idea that slavery would be a state issue turned out to be untenable. And rightly so.
Slavery is a very fundamental question of justice, and the nation just could not live with some states allowing it and some states not. Lincoln, of course, made this case more powerfully than anybody, and ultimately it turned out to be just untenable. And it led to the Civil War. And the Civil War transformed the character of the federalist compromise. The post-Civil War amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are all constraints on state power. They all restrain what the states can do by basically adding the equal protection of citizen rights to the list of things that are assigned to the national government. And so after those, federalism inevitably looked rather different than it did before.
But I think that we’ve allowed federalism to get away from the original logic of it to a much greater degree now than was required by the post-Civil War amendments. And federalism today is very confused and confounded. I think an agenda of federalism reform would have to largely be an agenda of pulling apart state and federal action and allowing them to work separately deciding what issues need to belong to the national government. Maybe there are additional ones now that have to be assigned to Washington. But if so, they should only be assigned to Washington. When the federal government and the states work together, we lose the advantages, the benefits of federalism. And those are great advantages, especially in a divided time.
James Patterson:
Once again, nostalgia for graduate school because now I feel like I’m reading Martha Derthick. So you anticipated my next question, which was, didn’t federalism reveal to be a problem given what we know from slavery and Jim Crow? So I’ll just move on to the questions about Congress now. I have been assigning your essay from Commentary on Congress since it came out, and I think there’s been a lot of other work out there that’s really proven you right, about what you’ve said. Another book that I really like is Morris Fiorina’s Unstable Majorities. And what we see with Congress for those who haven’t read your work on it, is that essentially Congress is weak because its members want it to be weak and that there’s a kind of defect in the Constitution in that the framers never suspected members of Congress wouldn’t want to do their job. So what is it that has demotivated, if that’s a word, or demobilized members of Congress that way?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, the problem of Congress is a strange problem because the assumption that underlies the Constitution is that everybody in the would be very ambitious. And so the balance of the system would be sustained by everybody’s ambition counteracting everybody else’s ambition. And so essentially the institutions would restrain each other each in pursuit of its own power. And what we now see in the modern Congress is that a lot of members don’t want to use their power as legislators. They want to use the institution in a different way than it was intended to be used. They want to use it as a platform for building their own brand as individuals, and they want to act as observers and commentators, especially on the president. And in essence, to say that their role as legislators is oversight, and you might even say commentary and punditry.
So what you find in the contemporary Congress is that members are still ambitious. James Madison wasn’t wrong about human psychology, but they understand their ambition in a way that is less connected to legislative activity and more connected to a kind of political performance. And so that means that the incentives they confront now don’t push them in a direction of being assertive legislators. To me, that suggests that we have to think about how to change those incentives. Some of the incentives are electoral. Members respond to primary voters, which is not how the system was originally conceived. Primary voters are the 10% or so of the American electorate who least want to see compromise and bargaining happen. And so when members understand those voters as their core constituency, they don’t want to be seen compromising and bargaining, and since that’s their job, they don’t want to be seen doing their job, they develop a different understanding of what their role is.
They also face some institutional incentives. The centralization of power in both houses of Congress has meant that it’s the leaders who make most deals when deals happen, and most members don’t really have a lot of legislative work to do, and so they do other work because they’re ambitious people and they see an opportunity to channel that ambition in directions that are not fundamentally legislative. To me, that argues for thinking about congressional reforms that make legislation more attractive to ambitious people and that make Congress more attractive to people whose ambition is more legislative. Congress should be much too boring to appeal to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Matt Gaetz. People with that kind of sense of what their purpose is in life should look at Congress and think that is dull. The fact that they find Congress interesting is a very bad sign, and it means that Congress has become a kind of circus, a place to perform and be seen performing.
I think that can be changed especially by empowering the committees in both houses to play more of a central role in driving the agenda. Committees are inherently dull, but they’re also inherently arenas for negotiation and bargaining. They’ve become much less that. And I think there are ways to change the rules of both houses to allow them to be more so. But we also have to think about the electoral incentives that members face and the disaster that has been the move toward primaries in both parties. That has really deformed our politics in a lot of ways. We’re living in a moment when that’s really evident. Our politics is populated by people who are just not well-equipped to play the parts assigned to them in the system. And I think the parties have to think about what they’re doing wrong too.
James Patterson:
The subject of political parties comes up toward the end of the book, and I really feel as though it’s important to talk about parties, especially in terms of how they’ve changed since they’ve gone through a campaign finance reform regimes. And a subject that I teach on at my university is that what’s happened over time is the parties have lost more and more leverage over candidates. And I think we’re now at a point where the parties have been completely replaced by donors who can essentially invest in a campaign and the only vestiges of the party that’s left are the letters after the names. This seems to be very closely tied to this sort of performance act you get in Congress. So is there maybe a way of thinking about reforming parties and a way to make Congress more responsible?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, absolutely. I talk about parties toward the end of the book because parties are not formally part of the constitutional system. In fact, I think of parties as a kind of missing piece in the constitutional puzzle. The framers thought it might be possible to avoid having formal durable parties. But as soon as the system got going, they immediately realized that they need political parties to organize political action. And the very people who thought we could avoid parties, especially James Madison, but ultimately also Hamilton and others, began to organize political parties. And that’s because democracy requires parties. Parties play an essential facilitation role in making it possible for democracy to function. They sort and select candidates for office and they facilitate coalition building. And I think that kind of coalition building is absolutely essential in the American system. It’s essential in some ways in every democracy, but in ours in particular, there’s a kind of need for two parties. The nature of the presidential selection process in particular means that if there are too many candidates, the process will not work.
And so our politics has almost always consisted of two broad, messy, sloppy parties, and those parties allow the system to draw into itself people who are well-equipped to engage in politics of negotiation and coalition building and bargaining. And coalition building is really the skill that has been lost in twenty-firstst-century American politics. And I think a lot of the reason for that is the wearing down of the parties. I would describe it very similarly to how you put it. I think maybe I would put money less centrally now. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I would’ve put it in just the same way you did, and you may be right, but I’ve come to think that money plays less of a role than I used to think and that is what’s replaced parties are actually a kind of independent contractor politicians who approach politics in a personalist way.
They have their own brand and they approach voters directly. They don’t really owe anybody anything. They’re selected by primary voters. And so their only constituency are those voters and they don’t feel like they owe their colleagues and the party anything. They don’t think that the party does all that much for them. It’s just a brand. And they’re not exactly wrong. The parties have actually contracted out to primary electorates their most important function, which is candidate selection. And so what remains really is a kind of brand, a platform. The parties are just a letter after your name and they tell voters something about you, but not all that much. And they barely exist as institutions.
We say now, “Shouldn’t the Democrats think about changing their presidential candidate?” You say, “Who are the Democrats? Who’s supposed to do this?” And that’s become a very hard question to answer. And there’s a primary electorate, but in my state, anybody can vote in the Democratic primary. You don’t even have to be a member of the party to do that. And so it’s very strange for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to contract out their core function of candidate selection to anybody who shows up to vote in the primary. And the work of serving as a repository of political professionalism, which is what the parties do, has been lost almost entirely.
The United States is a democracy and so our politics is mostly an amateur politics, a civic and citizen politics. But there are these repositories of professionalism of people whose full-time job is electoral politics. And those people are very important because they can make certain judgments about how the system should work that ultimately allow the rest of the amateur politics system to function. I think we’ve mostly lost those people. They don’t know what their job is anymore. Is their job just to represent the will of the primary electorate? Is their job somehow to form the options people confront? Is their job just to strategize about how to win elections? Their role has become very murky. They don’t know exactly what to do. And they’re inclined to function as observers rather than as actors in the system.
And I think we are living through a failure of the party system, and you can see that in part by the fact that we’ve gone through 30 years now without a majority party in American politics. It’s very unusual, and it’s meant that the two parties when they win, just barely win. When they lose, just barely lose. And when you don’t win or lose decisively, you don’t really learn anything from the election, and our parties have not really learned anything in a long time. They keep doing the same thing over and over. It isn’t really working. They’ll win a really tiny sliver of a majority and say, “This is a new era that we will dominate, and from now on, this is how politics is going to work.” And then two years later, the public just chooses the other party and it seems like everything got overturned. There’s not much of a logic to how the party system now organizes our politics, and I think that has a lot to do with the parties turning into brands and with the primary system.
James Patterson:
Yeah, political scientist Julia Azari calls this the politics a de-alignment. We, like you said, have these cyclical realignments in politics, and because no one knows how to form coalitions anymore, it’s very difficult to sort out how that consensus might be reformed. We have time for one more question, and given that it’s an election year and you talk about it in the book: defend the Electoral College.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, I think the Electoral College is easier to defend than people imagine. A lot of the times when it’s criticized, it’s criticized comparatively, and you say, “We just don’t have direct elections for the chief executive. We’re not a real democracy.” I think if you actually look at the other democracies, you find that the Electoral College is more democratic than how most democracies choose their chief executive. In most of the parliamentary systems, the chief executive is chosen by the parliamentary party. So the British, they just had an election. Before that election, between this one and the prior one, they had three different prime ministers. How were those people chosen between elections? They were chosen by a majority of the majority in Parliament, about 250 people who have the same political interest, who went to the same two universities, they chose the prime minister.
The Electoral College is much more democratic than that, but it’s intended to address the same problem as that kind of indirect selection, which is that when you choose an executive in a democracy, you always run the risk of demagogues, of people who move the public will in a way that advances an irresponsible person to a position of tremendous power. The Electoral College was one way to try to think about how to avoid that happening or at least reduce the likelihood of it happening. And it works as a system of basically 50 separate popular elections, the results of which are then weighted by population. It’s not that crazy. And I do think it is a way to avoid some of the dangers of a mass election while recognizing the necessity of electoral legitimacy.
It has some important advantages for us. For example, I think that if not for the Electoral College, our presidential elections in this divided time would actually be much more polarized. The Democrats would focus on the parts of the country where there are the most Democrats to bring out. Republicans would focus on those places where their people are concentrated. And they wouldn’t really talk to each other, they would just talk to their own core voters. Now, because of the Electoral College, it doesn’t matter how many Democrats you bring out in California or how many Republicans in Mississippi, if you didn’t win Michigan, you didn’t win the election. Michigan is distinct because it’s a place that could go either way.
And so the parties have to talk to the ideological middle of the country and to make themselves persuasive on the issues that make them most uncomfortable. I think that’s healthy for our democracy. It’s healthy in a divided moment. Obviously, the Electoral College is not perfect. There’s not a perfect solution to the challenge of how you choose a Republican executive, but I think that when you consider the options and when you think about the kinds of problems this system has to address, the Electoral College is a pretty good way to deal with that problem.
And I think ultimately the idea that there’s a legitimacy challenge when someone wins the Electoral College majority, but doesn’t win the popular majority is a misunderstanding of what we’re actually seeing with that popular majority. The elections we have are held on the premise that the president is selected by the Electoral College, and so people campaign that way. They focus their energies that way. They approach the public that way. If we had a popular election for president, everybody would campaign very differently and the result would be very different. I don’t think that the popular vote result in an Electoral College election actually tells us something in particular about public opinion. It’s a kind of side effect of the question the public was actually asked.
And so rather than be all that troubled by the fact that in close elections, the two can sometimes turn out differently, we should ask ourselves, what are we really doing here? The presidency is not a representative office, it’s an administrative office. The president is elected so that he can be accountable. And I do think that the Electoral College is a pretty good way to make sure that the president is accountable in the right way to the right voters. It certainly seems better to me than a direct election in a nation of 300 million people.
James Patterson:
Dr. Levin, thank you so much for being on the Law & Liberty Podcast. This was very enlightening. I hope you sell a lot of books.
Yuval Levin:
Thanks very much. I really appreciate it.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, host James Patterson sits down with contributing editor John O. McGinnis and AEI’s Adam White to discuss what the Supreme Court's latest rulings mean for the future of law in America.
Show notes:
https://lawliberty.org/forum/constitutional-government-after-chevron/ https://www.amazon.com/Originalism-Good-Constitution-John-McGinnis/dp/0674725077
Law & Liberty Supreme Court coverage:
https://lawliberty.org/emancipating-the-constitution-from-non-originalist-precedent/ https://lawliberty.org/netchoice-and-the-big-tech-scare/ https://lawliberty.org/jarkesy-rejuvenates-juries/ https://lawliberty.org/murthys-maddening-modesty/ https://lawliberty.org/a-loper-bright-future-for-statutory-interpretation/ https://lawliberty.org/a-specious-form-of-judicial-restraint/ https://lawliberty.org/moores-unrealized-potential/
On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, host James Patterson sits down with contributing editor John O. McGinnis and AEI’s Adam White to discuss what the Supreme Court’s latest rulings mean for the future of law in America.
Show Notes:
Adam White, Constitutionalism After Chevron (Monthly Forum)
John O. McGinnis and Mike Rappaport, Originalism and the Good Constitution
Law & Liberty Supreme Court coverage:
Emancipating the Constitution from Non-Originalist Precedent
Net Choice and the “Big Tech” Scare
Jarkesy Rejuvenates Juries
Murthy‘s Maddening Modesty
A Loper Bright Future for Statutory Interpretation
A Specious Form of Judicial Restraint
Moore‘s Unrealized Potential
Full Transcript:James Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast, I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.
Hello, and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. Today is July 11th, 2024, and we will be having a panel discussion on the 2023 to 2024 Supreme Court decisions. Our two panelists are Mr. Adam White and Professor John O. McGinnis. Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the University of Iowa, and he is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the Administrative State. Concurrently he co-directs the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. And Professor McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. He’s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford in philosophy and theology, and he also clerked at the US Court of Appeals DC among many other important posts.
So, before beginning our discussion, listeners, I want you to know that we are going to be a little longer today because there’s a lot to cover, and this was a very big year. So, let’s get this big question out of the way. What happened with Loper Bright v. Raimondo? The consensus before the decision was that the Court would overturn Chevron deference, and then afterward we got this line about how well now we’re going to have Skidmore deference as a lifeline for government agencies against courts. So, Adam and then John, tell us what’s going on.
Adam White:
Well, that’s a great question, and it’s great to be here with my friend, John. It would take a long time, I think, to know fully what’s going on with this decision. As I warned in an essay for Law & Liberty a couple of months before the decision came out, we surely won’t know for months or maybe years what’s really in this decision just as we didn’t know for decades what was in Chevron itself. This case is really about, picking your own metaphor, the hydraulic forces, the gravitational pulls, whatever we want to call these institutional dynamics that Chevron and now Loper Bright and Relentless are rearranging. One thing I can say though, and this is how I framed it in a piece this week for The Dispatch, I think we can really recognize the Loper Bright decision as an end to administrative exceptionalism.
This was a theme at the oral argument, certainly a theme in the majority opinion in Loper Bright, that what the Court has decided to do as statutory interpretation in the administrative state is just do what it does with statutory interpretation everywhere else. Everywhere in the law, there are ambiguities, always have been, James Madison reminded us of this in Federalist 37, there will always be ambiguity in the law, and the work of the judge is to try to resolve that ambiguity as best as possible, and as the Court put it in Loper Bright, find the best interpretation of even an ambiguous statute. So, now we’re going to see what that looks like in practice. As you mentioned, Skidmore is still on the books. We’ll see how that, whether you call it deference or weight or whatever, how that mindfulness of the agency’s own interpretations over the years plays into the Court’s own interpretation of the laws. We’ll see. But above all, what Loper Bright is doing here is trying to make administrative law less exceptional in the constitutional order.
John McGinnis:
Well, I agree completely with Adam. In fact, I would point out that at the Supreme Court, Chevron had not been cited to support a majority opinion for quite a long time, I think eight or nine years. And that’s because I think the Supreme Court has already become wary of administrative law exceptionalism and has allowed its view of, I think right answer formalism for statutory interpretation to envelop Chevron. Well, Chevron really only applied if there was some ambiguity, and you think that methods of interpretation mean there are really no irreducible ambiguities in statutes. It’s not at all clear what the function of Chevron is. I think the importance of it is less for the Supreme Court, which didn’t defer very much to agencies to begin with, but the lower courts. So, this will create an institutional structure in which lower courts, which actually did use the Chevron framework, I think partly because it got them out of some heavy lifting and hard work at times will have to confront statutory interpretation on their own.
What hopes might come from that is a greater reticulation on actually the rules of statutory interpretation and a greater consensus on that. That’s the hope. The fear is that it will just lead to polarized statutory interpretation in the lower courts, particularly as I think we have a more polarized judiciary with the Trump and Biden judges. So, that’s the fear. With respect to Skidmore deference, I also completely agree with Adam. We certainly will see it on, and I think though that’s going to be a long time before the courts really distill what Skidmore deference means. And I think the hard question for Skidmore deference, which at least in the context where it gives some weight to expertise is what do the agencies have to do to show their expertise rather than politics? Because expertise makes some sense for epistemic deference, but if it’s politics, it’s all the more reason for the Supreme Court not to give the agency decisions anyway. So, let’s see what happens in that way. I think we’re going to see a lot of pushes and pulls on Skidmore.
James Patterson:
So, in this same year we had Loper Bright, we got the case of the Court shooting out another EPA regulation, this time Ohio v. EPA. This was a Biden plan to limit air pollution coming from the West to the East Coast. Is this the kind of jurisprudence we expect to see with a post-Chevron deference kind of interpretation or are these unrelated?
John McGinnis:
Well, I think they are related perhaps at a high level of generality, there may be skepticism about the idea that you can take politics out of the administrative state, and therefore in this case, in the first case, it’s the judiciary who should make the decision. In the second case, it’s the judiciary that should carefully review the process by which the agency comes to its decisions, even within the bounds of what statutory discretion it can have. So, in that sense, there’s a connection, but you might say that there’s some even tension between them because this was quite a case where the Court gave a pretty probing view on what the agency had to do with respect to process, and there’s been a whole movement, which is called the Administrative Procedure Act Originalism, which might’ve been doubtful about the decision in Ohio v. EPA was what essentially Ohio v. EPA focused a lot on is the agency’s failure to respond to comments.
Some people, including Justice Kavanaugh on the Circuit Court, suggest that the agency really didn’t have that kind of strong obligation to respond to comments from those who commented in the notice and comment process. So, this case looks like what was called in the 1970s and 1980s, much more like a hard-look case. We’re going to make sure the agency is really deliberate it, and the way we’re going to police that is to make sure that its process of deliberation looks very sound. So, in that sense, I think it’s an important case, it suggests that the Court is not only going to be not deferential of course at all at the interpretation stage, but is going to be quite, I don’t know, persnickety would be the harsh term, but another way I guess putting it would be to be quite thoughtful, quite focused on whether the agency has shown that it is deliberated carefully enough.
Adam White:
I think that’s a really great point. It’s been interesting over recent years to see the ways in which the Court has ratcheted up procedural standards for agencies. We saw it during the Trump administration in an even harder-than-usual review of the citizenship question on the census, the Department of Commerce case, also in the DACA repeal case. But over and over again, we’ve seen the courts ratchet up, as I said, the procedural expectations that are placed on agencies. And part of that was built into the ever-evolving framework of Chevron, right? One of the reasons why Justice Scalia, who was a fan of Chevron, at least for most of his career, was so frustrated with decisions like Mead in these so-called Chevron/Step Zero cases was that it seemed to put a procedural overlay onto the framework for Chevron deference review. As John points out, Justice Kavanaugh might be the one who’s been the most explicitly critical of this.
I’m thinking back to, maybe this is the case John’s thinking of too. In the DC Circuit case called American Radio Relay League v. FCC, we’re in a concurrence. Then Judge Kavanaugh pointed to a doctrine that in the DC Circuit, it’s called the Portland Cement Rule and said, “This is DC Circuit precedent, but what we’re asking the agencies to do here in terms of how far they need to go to respond to public comments in the notice and comment process, it’s really not explicitly required by the APA at all, and we ought to be very wary of adding to those requirements.” How that plays out in the aftermath of Chevron deference, I’ll be curious because by getting rid of the Chevron framework, obviously the Chevron/Step Zero component of these procedural requirements goes away. But in so many ways, the Roberts Court has tried to tighten up what the agencies are doing procedurally, and also, as John alluded to earlier, questions about agency expertise to the extent they come into play in the new post-Chevron interpretive framework. That’s going to raise real questions about how the agency shows its expertise.
I tried to touch on this in that essay I did for Law & Liberty, but I think that’s one of the really underrated things that’s going to play out after Chevron is how the courts test for expertise in statutory interpretation and what kind of procedural requirements that either explicitly or implicitly imposes on the agencies.
James Patterson:
So, maybe we’re also seeing the courts come after agencies from another angle, namely they want the courts to remain the ones in charge here, namely the case is SEC v. Jarkesy, I’ve actually only read this name in which they seem to have done some pretty serious harm to the ability for these agencies to adjudicate questions internally.
Adam White:
Well, James, I suppose harm is in the eye of the defender. Some people would quibble with that characterization of it, folks who see this decision not as hurting the agency, but just putting it back in its proper institutional role. That’s kind of the connecting theme between the Jarkesy and the Loper Bright cases. It’s an analysis of the agency’s powers and the limits of those powers with an eye to the institutional role. It’s true that commissions like the SEC have a lot of power, and even after Loper Bright, they will have a lot of discretion in interpreting the law. They’ll have discretion over their procedures to some extent, and their factual findings may often be either binding or have some presumptive binding effect on judicial review. But one thing that the SEC can’t do is turn off our constitutional rights like a light switch, and that’s the basic holding of the Jarkesy case, that we have our constitutional jury rights in certain classes of cases regardless of the procedural vehicle that the agency or executive branch uses to enforce the laws against us.
And so, it’s not so much harming the agency, just making sure that the agency is kept in its proper constitutional place.
John McGinnis:
So, I agree completely with Adam’s view, and so let me try to put another connection in between Loper Bright and the Jarkesy case because the Court’s term I think is not only interesting for substance, but for methodology. And so one question, an originalist court faces both originalists with respect to the Constitution and Jarkesy and originalist, perhaps with respect to statutes and certainly the Administrative Procedure Act, which was the basis of its decision in Loper Bright, is what in the world to do when there is precedent against you when there’s precedent that’s inconsistent with the original meaning of either the Constitution or the APA. I think there really are two ways of dealing with that, because two ways of dealing with it and not doing what is problematic in the law, really destroying a lot of reliance that people have had on past constitutional decisions. So, in the Jarkesy case, what we saw was the Supreme Court distinguishing Atlas Roofing and essentially saying … implying perhaps, “We’re not ruling Atlas Roofing, but we’re isolating it. We’re reading it narrowly because it’s inconsistent with the original meaning.”
That’s one way of doing it, what I would call cutting back on non-originalist precedent. The Chevron case is interesting. We haven’t talked about the Chevron overruling case, Loper Bright is interesting because one of the things that Justice Roberts does just sort of Ipsy-Dix it says, “Well, all these previous decisions on regulation that have depended on Chevron were not disturbing.”
And that’s another way I think of protecting precedent. It’s almost a more radical way, which I would call perspective overruling. We’re going to overrule things, and it’s going to change the law now, but it doesn’t mean that you can go back and change the law before. Those are two methods, and I think that’s an increasingly important discussion to have on an originalist court because there are all sorts of non-originalist precedents, non-originalist APA precedents, and non-originalist constitutional precedents. How is the Court going to confront them?
In this term, I’d also point to Grants Pass as another example of that. That was the Eighth Amendment case where they said that the cities in California could apply their laws against camping against the homeless and also got rid or, carefully cabined a case which said you couldn’t penalize people for drunkenness and said, “Well, we can distinguish that case in any way. That case isn’t really very sound.” As an original matter, shows perhaps the way an originalist court is going to start moving the Constitution back to its original meaning without destroying the kind of reliance interests that have grown up around decisions that were quite non-originalist.
Adam White:
John, is it fair to loop in the case from about a decade ago, another separation of powers case, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board case, the case where you had one independent agency within another independent agency and the Court held that we’re not going to second-guess Humphrey’s executor today, but we’re not going to allow agents Congress to go past Humphrey’s executor in this institutional design. And you could pick your own metaphor. They drew a dotted line around Humphrey’s executor. Maybe they strung up that yellow police tape around Humphrey’s executor and said, “Crime scene, do not enter.” But in any event, they’re not disturbing anything in that precedent. They’re just leaving it alone but ensuring that it doesn’t go any further.
John McGinnis:
I think that’s right. Celia Law, of course, I think is another example of that. And what happens of course is the Court begins with originalist discussion and then goes to precedent. And that’s a different methodology of judging than beginning with the precedent. And of course, that goes to a potential debate about what constitutional interpretation is about. As you know, there are some people who think that the Court should understand the Constitution in a kind of common law way, which should prioritize its precedents. But I think the Court is clearly departing from that at meet with some exceptions, which we can get to. I’d be happy to discuss some of the notable exceptions to that methodology. Of course, I think the presidential immunity case is one of them.
James Patterson:
That’s actually the next question for me. It is only on the Law & Liberty Podcast where you’re going to start with the administrative stuff, and we will then get to whether the United States has made the President a dictatorship, which was kind of the rhetoric that a lot of people were using. Is the President now above the law? Is that what this court has said?
John McGinnis:
I’d like to begin from where I was with the methodology, and then I’ll talk about whether it was above the law, but I think it’s very distinctive in this case that we do begin with cases, and I think this case is in some tension with an originalist interpretation. I don’t see any presidential immunities in the Constitution, although certainly Congress, I think, could grant them, but the Supreme Court is a court, and it just can’t overrule or even I think cut back strongly on cases when that’s not what the parties are arguing for.
And the Justice Department, of course, is in a difficult position here because of the case of Fitzgerald, which the Court had already granted immunity from liability from the … I think it’s described, from the outer bounds of the President’s official duties. In some sense, this was I think an application of the Fitzgerald case, which the Justice Department could never disavow because that was a case that protected the presidents on a day-to-day basis.
That, I think, was the dilemma for the department in some sense. The reason that that decision looks so non-originalist, it looks like a common law decision reasoning from a variety of functional separation of powers opinions. And in that respect, I think it’s a well-written decision. I don’t think it puts the president above the law. The President has to be doing something according to his official duties, unofficial conduct that has no relation to his duties is still can be criminalized, but the concern is that otherwise, the President is going to be just as fearful of being sued, that’s Fitzgerald, fearful that a subsequent predecessor of another party is going to prosecute him.
Let me take the example of that. I don’t know if it came up at oral argument under, I think the Department of Justice’s theory. I think President Truman, for instance, could have been prosecuted for taking people’s property and holding it, which of course is illegal. You can’t go in without a lawful authorization after the decision in Youngstown. So that’s why at least when people have some, I think, there has to be some requirement of some good-faith idea that you are going forward with your official duties that that’s immune from prosecution. That’s the argument. As I say, it’s not obvious to me, it’s an originalist argument. It’s a kind of consequentialist argument that makes some sense as the Court previously recognized in Fitzgerald.
Adam White:
I’m worried now that to the extent that I think the Court’s analysis was right in the immunity case that I’m a bad textualist. I hope I’m not a bad textualist here, John. Let me just offer a few observations. I’ve been struck by the criticism of the majority opinion, particularly in the dissent and elsewhere. There is no presidential immunity clause in the Constitution. I mean, of course, that’s true. I point out there’s no congressional subpoena clause in the Constitution either, and that hasn’t seemed to raise the same kinds of concerns among the critics.
And oh, by the way, there’s no judicial review. There’s no Marbury vs. Madison power of judicial review clause in the Constitution. As we all know, all three of these things, to the extent they exist in our constitution or not, is they’re taken as inferences of the explicit grants of power in the Constitution, and in the context of presidential, why I really don’t have qualms with the Court building its analysis the way it did, is that this isn’t just sort of an abstract question of whether presidential immunity exists or not. It’s an institutional question that implicates both the presidency and also the courts.
The Court has to decide for itself … I won’t put it this way, a question of presidential immunity is a question of presidential power, and it’s also a question of judicial power. And so to the extent that presidential immunity that this decision empowers a president, it also is a question of restraint or self-restraint by the courts. The courts have to decide for themselves how far into the executive branch the judicial process is going to appear.
That is the kind of question that the Court can only answer by trying to draw inferences from the Constitution’s text and our history before and after that text was written and ratified. Or the court can just plow full steam ahead without asking questions, allowing the judicial process to totally subsume the administrative process.
And so I found the Court’s analysis pretty compelling. There are places where I would disagree with it, some of its analysis around the vice presidency, some of that interesting back and forth with Justice Barrett about the scenario involving quid pro quo. I think there are some gaps in that, but overall, I thought that this was a good originalist opinion, hopefully, a good textualist one too, but maybe not, I guess, after hearing how John parsed it.
James Patterson:
We had a couple of Second Amendment cases, or I guess related to the Second Amendment. We had a six/three decision in Garland v. Cargill, which overruled a ban on bump stocks, and then we had a unanimous decision that allowed the NRA to sue a New York state official who was interfering with businesses’ ability to work with the NRA. So the question that I really have about these is gun control in the courts. It seems to be kind of done.
Adam White:
I’m going to let John take that one first. I am not sure that I’ve got broad thoughts on this.
John McGinnis:
I don’t think it’s done. No, I think the Rahimi case suggests that there … maybe I’m not … suggests that there is room for some gun control legislation. Again, I think what’s interesting about Rahimi is the methodological ideas and the methodological disputes. Seven of the justices wrote an opinion in Rahimi because they disagreed on the methodology of how to decide the case.
In my view, it was decided correctly that the question is not, in my view, this is a question about originalism there. I disagree with Kavanaugh’s decision what’s the tradition after enactment long after the enactment of the Constitution, but what’s the tradition around the time of the Constitution that helps us define the scope of a right, like the right to bear arms? Does it include the right to bear arms even if there’s reason to believe that the individual is dangerous?
And I think there’s some evidence that it doesn’t include that from evidence right around the time either 1789 or when maybe more relevantly here when it was thought to be approved in immunity and applied to the states in 1868. I think that’s a pretty plausible argument, whether that goes to some of the other kinds of gun regulations, I’m sort of doubtful, and it certainly, I don’t think suggests that the Court was wrong when it struck down the New York law that required or that forced people to be at the discretion of some bureaucrat who could give them a license to carry a firearm for really any reason at all.
That’s, I just think, inconsistent with the nature of a right and the Court was absolutely correct to strike that down, but I think, and again, I think Justice Barrett probably had the best opinion. I certainly agree with Adam that the opinions, Justice Barrett’s made the best effort at giving an originalist basis for the immunity decision.
And I think again, in the Rahimi decision she correctly said that really what we’re trying to figure out here is the scope of the right and understand that as well as we can from the historical evidence, not just from just points of evidence, but trying to construct a principle which that evidence points to. I’m very hopeful that Justice Barrett being the academic originalist on the Court, may be pointing the Court to a more consistent way of deciding cases on the Second Amendment and others from an originalist perspective.
Adam White:
I’m probably at risk here being a one-hit wonder, a one-trick pony, and bring everything back to the administrative state. But I’m going to do that again anyway. What I find so interesting about these cases and cases before this is the ways in which these cases about constitutional rights really are increasingly in the Court’s docket and in government generally filtered through the administrative state.
And not just in the most recent cases, the NRA case with the New York regulators, job-owning insurance companies, I think did not do business with the NRA. And then we had this case, the bumpstock case about statutory interpretation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But even when you go back two years to the Bruin case in New York, I mean, that in most respects was a straight Second Amendment question about your right to keep and bear arms and how it applies in the context of that New York handgun licensing regime, but the licensing regime itself became a central focus of the case.
The sheer discretion that the regulators had in granting or withholding licenses really became central to the case and to the Court’s analysis. And if you pan back even further beyond the Second Amendment, we’ve seen so many examples over the last few years of cases that are primarily on their face about a constitutional right, maybe the right of free speech, the free exercise of religion, but whether it’s the religious liberty case, Masterpiece Cakeshop, that really boils down in the end to an analysis of what the Colorado Commissioners did there, what the record was in the agency, and questions about the agency’s motives or bias against religious people or the free speech case out of California.
I can’t remember. I think it might be Rucho v. Common Cause, I might be forgetting, but it was a free speech case, but it ultimately was a case about how much information is being amassed by the government about people and the effects that that could have on people’s lives as they try to exercise their First Amendment rights over and over again. I think we’re going to see the Court grapple more and more with constitutional issues either explicitly or implicitly through the lens of the modern administrative state. The NRA case, by the way, I find totally fascinating for the same reason that I found the Murthy case fascinating, the one involving the Biden Administration and social media.
That was a case where, I guess, the case won’t proceed. There wasn’t enough evidence there to justify standing or a cause of action. I haven’t really parsed that opinion yet, but I find both of those cases fascinating, the New York case and the Murthy case.
Fascinating examples of how modern administration, modern executive power being so broad, so all-encompassing in politics, so amorphous, it means that regulators, even the White House, might be able to have an extremely powerful effect on day-to-day lives of Americans and people and companies without an actual notice and comment rule or enforcement action or adjudication.
I’ve tried to coin the phrase the passive-aggressive administrative state to look at all the ways in which regulators can regulate without actually regulating. And even though the NRA case and the Murthy case, they came to divergent results so far, and it’s not clear what the future of either of those cases will be or those issues will be. I think they’re an interesting window into some of the next generation of cases we’re going to have around modern administration.
John McGinnis:
Right. I’d just like to add, I think there may be another connection here, insofar as the Supreme Court is constraining administrative agencies. And we also haven’t even spoken to another case that came out about a statute of limitations that allows companies that weren’t in business around the time rule-making was decided to sue years later, which also will constrain the administrative state.
Insofar there are these formal constraints on formal rule-making it incentivizes the administrative state to work informally and do things that aren’t through traditional mechanisms of regulation or law, but the kind of jawboning that was alleged in the cases that Adam mentioned. And therefore I think the Court is going to have to, I think, confront this.
Now, these cases, there wasn’t enough standing, there wasn’t sufficient standing, and some of the challenges struck the court as to facial and not sufficiently apply. Those are all very sensible views of the court to avoid immediately making a decision, particularly before the case is percolated enough in the different circuit courts of appeal.
It’s one of the … that’s kind of passive virtue that Alexander Bickel talked about with disability doctrines not to allow the court to get the benefit of a variety of views and understand how this works in a variety of circumstances. But I think that is the new frontier for the administrative state because all the incentives now are for the government to use this power, which it might call soft power.
But in a world where the government has so much funding authority, so much ability to actually go after you for technical violations, people are going to pay attention when the government asks you to do something, even if it isn’t backed by the force of law.
So I see this as just essentially a part of protecting liberty. It’s very hard to figure out how it will happen because it’s easy enough to figure out when a law is impinging on your liberty, but how is it possible to constrain the government from communicating?
Sometimes there’s good reasons to communicate to companies and the citizens and ask them to do something, and how do we distinguish just really quiet asks from asks that actually are offers that you can’t refuse. I see this as an essential question.
Adam White:
Not to keep belaboring the point, but I really couldn’t agree more with John on this. I think it’s incredibly important. I tried to allude to it myself at the end of that Dispatch piece this week.
There’s flavors of this a few years ago in debates around agency guidance and this question of trying to stop agencies from using guidance, make them go through notice and comment rulemaking more, maybe ratchet up the requirements and notice and comment rulemaking with legislation requiring more cost-benefit analysis and so on.
And the question always is: how do you avoid the unintended consequence of actually exacerbating the problem? Putting more and more of this sub-rosa. The day before we’re taping this, I spoke on a panel that Jennifer Mascott’s new 501(c)(3), the Constitutional Renewal Foundation. They hosted an event in Washington focused on bank supervision, bank examination. And that’s an area where this is becoming even more of a question, the regulation outside of the normal regulatory process.
With cases like Loper Bright and these other cases, it’s really, really important for us to think institutionally and to think about second and third order effects. And I know this is something John’s always tried to do, and I try to do myself, including in the pieces I did here at Law & Liberty before the decision. Think about the ripple effects.
And as John points out, a lot of what’s being decided this term is going to increase the incentives for agencies to regulate without regulating in ways that are going to raise real questions about justiciability, what can be sued over in court, what can’t.
So that means the third order effect here might be reconsiderations about justiciability doctrines. I think in this respect, to the extent the court gets curious about this, it’ll be a very realistic Supreme Court, maybe a new form of legal realism thinking about agency action, what’s actually binding on somebody or not. Not the formalities that administrative law has really relied on for the last 75 years or more, but a really realistic sense of how these agencies make policy, make law in ways that shape people’s lives.
Nick Parrillo at Yale a few years ago did a really fascinating study for the administrative conference in the United States on the use and abuse of agency guidance and how agencies use it, how it’s received by regulated communities.
I think we’re going to see more and more discussion of things like this, and I think … I keep coming back to the term realism. I think it might be the new era of legal realism in administrative law.
James Patterson:
Well, I was going to go back and talk about your original point, Adam, and say that a lot of the original First Amendment, the modern First Amendment cases came from CPI and Espionage Act stuff from the First World War.
And so this has been a problem for a century where you had administrative agencies engaging in suppression of constitutional rights, but that just came to mind.
I don’t want to belabor the point because I wanted to get onto the fact that abortion is back, it’s back in the courts. And we got some interesting decisions Maldi US and FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.
The reason why I sound a little surprised is that it seemed as though, and the Dobbs decision, we had these issues kicked back to the states and the states seemed to want to kick them back to the courts, at least Idaho did after in the Moyle v. US case. They seemed to want sort of an emergency situation restore abortion rights considering their law actually banned it once Dobbs was decided.
Adam White:
Well, not to keep talking about other publications and other podcasts, but I remember when Dobbs was decided, I was on the In House podcast at AEI, and I was asked, “So abortion goes back to the states?”
And I said, “Yeah, sure,” but that includes the biggest state of all the administrative state, and it would just be inevitable that so much of the abortion debates would gravitate toward the FDA, HHS, and other federal regulatory bodies that have a direct impact on abortion and on related issues.
So it’s no great surprise, I think, for any of us that these questions about federal statutes in the Idaho case or the FDA statute in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case that they would be front and center.
I mean, of course, we’re going to see cases coming out of the states; cases eventually involving a right to abortion when the mother’s life is at risk. And that’s going to raise really, really interesting questions or coalitions maybe of pro-choice folks and broader libertarian-minded folks who would want a right to medical treatment when life is in danger.
I think the post-Dobbs era of state-level abortion litigation will look different in the long run than what we saw between Roe and Dobbs. But I suppose it’s no great surprise that we’re starting with federal agencies and federal laws since federal agencies tend to be the things that can move the quickest.
John McGinnis:
Well, I certainly agree with that. I think the other interesting fact about these cases is that the Court, in both the Moyle case and the FDA case, didn’t seem eager to come down with really very definitive rulings. One, of course, went off one standing. They took the other case, but then they said it was prominently a granite.
And I think this again shows that this court, like other courts in the past, really rather uses what they call passive virtues when it can. The abortion decision was enormously controversial, and it would be really problematic, I think, for the court to seem like a court that’s issuing decisions on abortion every year.
And I’m not saying that there were no good arguments. I think there were good arguments that there was no standing in the FDA case and that there were some still unclear interpretations of law out of Idaho that had developed at the oral argument that called for dismissal. But I think the Court is relatively eager to find such issues.
And in that sense, the Court, as with its Dobbs decision, made the matter of abortion not national in the sense that the states are going to make decisions or at least on the substance of whether and how far women can have abortions and when, they’re also I think not eager for the Court to immediately make these decisions itself.
Even on federal laws, they’re going to allow courts of appeals some leeway to make decisions. Of course, at some point when there are conflicts, the Court will have to resolve them. But I think, again, it would like to see evidence of how the lower courts act in this area.
Adam White:
John, you’ve mentioned Bickel a few times. I’m here in my home office. I actually have a small replica of his Yale faculty portrait here in my office, so I’m waving at him now. I’ll send him your best.
But it’s funny, you’ve mentioned a few cases where the Court has not allowed litigation to proceed, right? We’ve talked about the FDA case, Murthy, you know. Over and over again, the court for years has been wary to open the doors too broad for standing to sue.
And so even though the Corner Post case, one of these last cases, extends out the statute of limitations for judicial review of agency action, I think it’s interesting how many of the Roberts Court’s critics, the ones that are predicting total disaster after Loper Bright and Corner Post, this idea that suddenly the court officer doors are open for total upheaval in modern administration. It’s just not true.
They’re looking past all these cases this year and in previous years where the Roberts Court has actually taken care to limit the extent to which the courts can get into the middle of administration. And of course the immunity decision is strongly in that same vein too.
James Patterson:
So we’re almost 20 years into the Roberts Court, and we’ve had a change in the majority from a type 5-4 to a 6-3. What do you guys think is so far the legacy of the Roberts Court, and did that shift when Barrett got onto the Court change that legacy?
John McGinnis:
Well, I do think it shifted, and I think it’s a mistake just to focus on that it has shifted in the sense of sheer numbers, although that’s true as well, that we have a 6-3 majority. Some people call it a conservative majority. I might call it an originalist-oriented majority.
But I think what’s also changed, and there’s been a lot written about Barrett, this term, because she seems at times to go out on her own. And I see some commentators who I think are already hoping that she might, quote, “grow on the Court” and move over to the left-liberal side. I don’t think that’s really likely.
What I see and is really, I think, very heartening is that she brings, of course, the one academic on the Court and I think brings a kind of academic perspective on getting the methodology, originalism, and statutory interpretation, right? And I think that’s extremely valuable.
And so I think it’s always a mistake just to think of it as the court of the court, as the chief justice. As justices readily admit, the Court changes whenever a new person comes on the Court. And I think Barrett, at least in my view at the moment, may turn out to be the most important of the originalist judges because she brings back that methodological rigor, which I think will force other Justices who are broadly in the originalist camp to figure that out. Her voice, I think, is really coming to the fore this term. And that’s not a surprise.
Famously, Rehnquist said, “When Justices get on the court for five years, they try to figure out, well, why are they there. And after five years, they wonder, well, why is anyone. … Why are these other people there?” Because they’re not doing things exactly right. And I think we see that kind of liberation of Barrett this term, not because, I think, we’re going to see a non-originalist Justice or someone who’s going to be interested in pursuing liberal policy results, but trying to get things right. And there’s just a tremendous problem for the Roberts Court, or particularly as I would call it, a court with a majority of originalists, which is how do we go about being an originalist court, both methodologically? What evidence counts for originalist meaning? And Barrett is engaged in that. And how do we deal with all sorts of non-originalist precedent?
And a lot of the Justices are trying to write about that. So in that sense, for an academic who’s been following originalism since the time he was a student where originalism was sort of really a quaint idea that was hardly taken seriously to now when it’s at the front and center of Constitutional law, this is extremely exciting. There’s going to be a lot more affirmant and thought about those essential methodological questions. So I see this as important about this term as any of the substantive decisions as the methodological battles that have been joined, particularly in the Romani decision and in the First Amendment decision on trademarks. Those are going to, I think, have a lot of influence on the law going forward.
Adam White:
Those are great points. And John, your point early on about some of the commentary at the end of the term focusing on Justice Barrett and maybe hoping … It seemed that the authors hoped that she was coming to the left or something. It reminded me of the old line from decades ago, strange new respect. Remember a strange new respect for Justice Souter when he was coming out of his shell on the Court and Justice Kennedy and others. It’s the strange new respect for Justice Barrett. I’d add a couple more points, maybe focusing on specific Justices. I think in the long run, the appointment of Justice Kagan is proving incredibly important on this court. She’s, in the modern era, the first progressive Justice who really speaks textualist as a first language.
And so as we’ve seen in a variety of cases, both at oral argument and in opinions, Justice Kagan is uniquely well-suited to really identify the previously unspoken areas of either disagreement or at least tension within different conservative approaches, different conservative instincts or Justices, and really kind of dig into them, get in there like a … Blanking on the word. But get in and split it apart and sort of widen out those cracks.
And that’s going to be very interesting. It’s going to be frustrating for someone like me at times. But I think ultimately, it’s going to be challenging and for the good in really making textualists think even harder than we’ve had to think before about our instincts, our methods, our jurisprudence. Looking at Chief Justice Roberts across his time on the Court so far, I think it’s clearer that his … The watchword for Chief Justice Roberts is steady administration. I keep thinking back to an article that Scalia wrote—maybe it was a speech he gave before he was a Justice—where he said, “Every generation faces its own distinct threat to the Constitutional order.” For Scalia, obviously, the threat was Warren Court-era judicial activism. I think as you look across cases and across subject matters, you see that for Chief Justice Roberts, one of the greatest problems in modern government, one of the greatest threats to Constitutional government is unsteady administration, wild flip-flops from one administration to the next.
Obviously, we see this most clearly in his administrative law decisions. Most recently, Loper Bright. But going back to the Trump era decisions. However, in the presidential immunity case, that line is the metaphor he uses at the end about the executive branch cannibalizing itself from one administration to the next. From oral argument to his opinions, he is clearly focused, maybe above all, on the fact that our government as a whole vacillates wildly from one administration to the next. We fostered a system in which every Presidential election is now the everything election. John and Mike Rapaport have written about this eloquently in their writings on Chevron deference and polarization. And I think as time passes, we’re seeing clearly now in the way that he selects which opinions he’s going to write and the way he writes them, Chief Justice Roberts is extraordinarily concerned about unstable administration from one administration to the next. And to the extent that sometimes energetic administration conflicts with the need for steady administration, Roberts seems to be focused mostly on steady administration, although not exclusively.
John McGinnis:
I like that about Adam’s comment. One way of saying it is in The Federalist Papers, one of James Madison’s greatest focuses was on stable laws. So long … You could have bad laws, but so long as they were stable, people could acclimatize themselves. So in that sense, you might think that Roberts is channeling the father of the Constitution in his focus.
Adam White:
Well, it’s even more than that, John. When we read Federalist 70, we all know the lines about energy and the executive, but it’s interesting that Hamilton, in that passage, says it’s needed for the steady administration of the laws. Federalist 71 and 72 on the four-year term and the need for opportunity for reelection. Above all, they’re about steady administration. The dangers of mutable administration, as he calls it. I’ve always thought that those essays by Hamilton are really an echo and a refinement in some ways of Madison’s argument for stability in Federalist 49. Even though Roberts himself doesn’t write his opinions with an eye to that language, in the most recent case, in the Loper Bright case, he does use the line steady administration from Federalist 78. I think like a gravitational pull just by the basic fact that we’re living in Hamilton’s nightmare now. We’re living in an era of mutable administration. The Court is being drawn like gravity towards these themes if only because Madison and Hamilton were right.
James Patterson:
So, you guys have touched on this a little bit throughout. And I’m wondering if you have anything further to say about the state of originalism on the Court. It seems like John wants to argue that … and Adam, maybe I’m wrong about this, but you might want to argue that we … Now it’s no longer a question if we are going to have an originalist court, but how we do originalism. And does this mean that it’s really moved from a rival to living Constitutionalism and is now just the predominant way of doing jurisprudence? Or is there some sort of looming threat of an alternative, for example, common good constitutionalism of Adrian Vermeule and Conor Casey?
John McGinnis:
Oh, I don’t think … common good constitutionalism is not a threat to the Supreme Court. There are no advocates of common good constitutionalism there. It’d be interesting if Trump were reelected whether Trump would continue with appointing, as he did, three originalist judges. So I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the issue for originalism is really the one of precedent. So in areas where there are isolated precedents or precedents that can be isolated, I think we’ll see originalism as the order of the day. But when we come to an area like … It’s not only the Fitzgerald case, but the concurrence in Youngstown, even some of the language in Morrison, we can’t impinge on executive authority, where we really have a real body of functional, might say, living Constitutionalist law that hasn’t been at least tested much by its connection to the text. It’s not obvious how we move back to originalism without disturbing a lot of reliance issues.
Another area I would call would be the First Amendment where it’s not obvious to me that New York v. Sullivan, the case that puts kind of restrictions on libel, was consistent with the original Constitution, but that’s built up a body of law. You might say our campaigns have been built up over that. I think that’s the hardest issue. So I think we might see a kind of a bifocal court in the sense that when there are issues of new impression or when there are issues that only have isolated precedent, we’re going to see a real rationing up of focusing on the original understanding. And that’s going to be facilitated. I think that one important point is facilitated by the culture of originalism that is growing up in law schools and among academics where there’s a lot written about the history of various clauses.
There needs to be a division of labor because Justices can’t spend their time doing serious archival and other kinds of research, but that will be brought to them. And insofar as they show an appetite for it, amicus briefs and advocates will bring it to them. And I see a real opportunity to move in an originalist direction. I think the harder question is when we’ve had law that has been built out in a completely non-originalist direction, what does the Court do there? And I don’t have an answer to that. At the moment, my sense is that it’s likely to continue to be a kind of common law court on matters like, for instance, the First Amendment.
Adam White:
John, your comment reminded me of Scalia’s quip in originalism, the lesser evil. Remember, he’s sort of deconstructing Taft’s opinion for the Court in Myers. And then he grants that it’s really hard to do originalism perfectly. He also said that doing justice to this question of executive power would probably take 30 years and 7,000 pages. But of course, courts don’t have that. And that’s why it’s incumbent on scholars to do the work ahead of time.
I agree with John that it’ll be incredibly interesting for the next few years or decades to watch this tension between originalism and precedent. I’ve spent some time going back to the writings and the non-judicial writings of the early Warren Court Justices, including Warren himself at the very end of his time on the Court, sort of reflecting on precedent. And the great irony now is that those Justices who created so many of the precedents that now are being given weight, they didn’t care at all about precedent. And they were often explicitly so. Chief Justice Warren, Justice Goldberg and others were really, really confident, often glib, about what little regard they gave precedent in the issues they cared about.
Ironically, now we have Justices who are originalists … So they, in theory, probably shouldn’t care about precedent maybe, but in practice, they often do. And for what it’s worth, I think that’s a very good thing. So I’m watching that. Also, and maybe this is sort of a mundane observation, but originalism arose as a tool of judicial restraint, as a tool for skepticism of broad judicial pronouncements on what the Constitution means or what it ought to mean. It was originally used as almost sort of a fact-checking device, a great tool in dissent.
But now of course, it’s the tool of the majority. And as we’ve seen for years, but now we’re really going to see with the recent changes in the Court’s personnel, we’ll see how originalism plays out both methodologically and politically as a tool of majorities. And since we keep bringing up Bickel, my own personal instincts for better and for worse tend to be on the judicial restraint side. And so I’m a little bit wary or a little nervous about how originalism will play out in the long run as a tool of confident majorities as opposed to a tool of those who were debunking confident majorities. And I’m very interested to see how it plays out. And I’m hopeful that it works out well.
James Patterson:
Well, that is a wonderful note to end on, especially because it does give a sense of anticipation for the future. The Court will, of course, always have business before it, so we’ll have to do this again next year. Thank you so much, Professor McGinnis and Mr. White, for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.
John McGinnis:
Thank you. Enjoyed it.
Adam White:
Yeah, me too. My pleasure.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.
On the first episode of The Law & Liberty Podcast, host James M. Patterson sits down with Richard M. Reinsch, who was the founder of Law & Liberty and the host of our original podcast series, and is currently a Senior Writer for the magazine. Listen to Patterson and Reinsch discuss contemporary trade policy blunders and prospects, the economic resilience of blue-collar towns, and Reinsch’s new projects at the American Institute for Economic Research.
Richard M. Reinsch II is Editor-in-Chief and Director of Publications at AIER. He is co-author with Peter A. Lawler of A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty. He writes regularly for National Review and Acton’s Journal of Religion & Liberty.
Further reading:
Richard’s writings at Law & Liberty
AIER’s The Daily Economy
Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch’s A Constitution in Full
Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.
Eliot A. Cohen joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss his new book on Shakespeare and power politics, The Hollow Crown.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law and Liberty and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. Thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. But today, in fact, we are not left to any arbitrary leniency of a willful goddess of inspiration to get us going for this latest episode of Liberty Law Talk because our theme today is Shakespeare and politics, the stagecraft of statecraft, and even the statecraft of stagecraft when it comes to understanding the halls of power and those who would be in it. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and I’m a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting Fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. But importantly, for today, I am a partisan, wholly and devotedly, of all things Shakespeare.
And joining me today is Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly counselor of the Department of State. His books include The Big Stick and Supreme Command. Thrice welcome, Eliot. What news on the Rialto, as we might say?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, Rebecca, first and foremost, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. I lead a very odd life in some ways, bouncing between military matters at the moment, which is my professional expertise in one way, and then Shakespeare. It’s odd, but it’s nice to be back with Shakespeare because the rest of the world’s pretty grim right now.
Rebecca Burgess:
All right. He provides us comfort and also much thought to chew on. So I thought, in this midwinter moment, when everyone is settling down in front of their fires, all sated with holiday cheer, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that all thoughtful people want, or are in need of, a good book and a good conversation. And voila, you have gifted us The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Just out recently by Basic Books.
And so I thought we could use the next hour or so to talk about what Shakespeare teaches us about politics today or helps us analyze those in the halls of power. The characters within Shakespeare are always of interest, whether it’s Henry V, whether it’s Richard II, or whether it’s Prospero. And I’m going to needle you about some you didn’t put in there, including the prince from Much Ado About Nothing and that band of unserious statesmen, not statesmen yet, the princes in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who have to learn how to become serious statesmen.
But I would love to start off by asking you: What has teaching Shakespeare and introducing Shakespeare into your syllabi at Johns Hopkins or others taught you anew about international relations, grand strategy, or politics?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, that’s really a whole range of questions. Let me just start as a teacher. So, I’m about to become emeritus at Hopkins and shift over full-time to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I’ve had a 34-year career at Hopkins, which has been wonderful.
The last course that I taught was for freshmen, and it was a freshman course on Shakespeare. And I have to say—it was just a wonderful way of rounding out a teaching career because what you see is how young people, who maybe have never really been exposed to this in a really serious way, they may have had an encounter with it in high school, but they’re now at a stage where they can begin to appreciate it. You can see how it opens a world for them, and that’s a delight. And it’s, in a way, at a time when we could all use a bit of optimism—it’s a source of optimism that you realize there’s always going to be a new generation coming on, and they can respond to the classics very, very powerfully. So that’s the Mr. Chips in me, if you will.
I began … I’ve always loved Shakespeare. I began thinking about teaching it after seeing Henry VIII, which is a play not often put on. There used to be some dispute about whether it was even by Shakespeare. I think most people think it is now a collaboration with another playwright named John Fletcher. And if your listeners will bear with me, I’d like to read the bit of the soliloquy that got it all started.
So what’s happened is Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII’s chancellor, has just been deposed, and it’s sudden, and it is a sudden fall from power. And here is what he says: “Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now has left me Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.”
So my wife and I saw the play, and I was really struck by that soliloquy because my immediate reaction was, I know that guy. I mean, I’ve been in Washington now for well over three decades, and I’ve seen all kinds of things, and I was so taken by that, I took it … I was meeting with a bunch of students who were all graduate students by the way, later on, and I said, “Let’s talk about this.” One thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of students at a professional school of international relations.
And I think the thing that strikes you, as you study Shakespeare from the vantage point that I have, which includes a fair amount of government service as well, is, first, how a lot of the fundamental predicaments of political characters just don’t change. He also mentioned how there are phenomena that he captures that are still very much with us. You just need to learn how to do the translation.
So, if I can give just one example of that. So, one of the plays that I have always enjoyed teaching is Coriolanus, which is about the great Roman general who becomes a traitor and comes to a sticky end. But, first, he’s an incredibly successful general. The problem is he has no political sense whatsoever. I’ve known a few generals like that, actually, in my time.
Rebecca Burgess:
Zero political prudence.
Eliot Cohen:
Right. Political prudence is not their strong suit. But there comes a point where he’s just been tremendously successful in battle, and they’re about to make him consul, which is the thing he really wants—it’s the honor he really wants. But he has to kind of go along with the people, with the plebs. Until they ask him to show his wounds, to take off his toga and see the scars of battle, and then he detonates, and everything goes downhill from there.
And I was teaching this to a group of graduate students, including about half a dozen people who’d been in very hard places and done hard things in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I said to them … So these are people in their late twenties, early thirties, some of them. I said, “Don’t feel obliged to answer this question, but has anybody ever asked to see your wounds?” And the conversation just exploded.
Rebecca Burgess:
I bet.
Eliot Cohen:
Because, yes. I mean, psychological wounds, not physical wounds. And so I think part of what Shakespeare gives us is the ability to see things that are around us, much more vividly in a way, because he’s abstracting us from our current context. I could go on, but let me pause there and see where you want to take this.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, in every direction, of course. But on this particular note of showing wounds, I think it is of interest, and we’ll probably touch on it later. I think it’s inevitable that in the rise to power, or in statesmanship, how much do you have to show the work of statesmanship to be a successful statesman? Are you supposed to make it look easy? Are you supposed to reveal your trials and tribulations?
And I think there’s a difference, perhaps, between Shakespeare’s day and ours, between that. It seems like, today, we emphasize the personal story of the politician. But is it any different than that showing of the wounds, or showing of the interior, if you will?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, we like people to show their vulnerabilities. But, the point that Shakespeare is making with the story of Coriolanus is we’ve always wanted our leaders to show their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Now, we’ve taken it to a pathological extent.
So I’m going to just give an example. So when they finally do the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, what do they do? They make a big point of having him in a wheelchair. In point of fact, FDR went to great lengths not to be photographed in a wheelchair because that was not the image he wanted to convey.
To go back to Shakespeare, what you see is a lot of leaders who actually have all kinds of burdens, pathologies, and so on, and who do make considerable efforts to conceal them. Actually, Henry IV, the father of Prince Hal, who became Henry V, talks about that about how he tried to conceal himself. But the truth is, those things are always there.
And I think one of the things Shakespeare shows us is, if you pay close attention, you can see what they are, which is a useful thing if you want to understand the people who are your leaders. The challenge that Shakespeare gives us, and the more I’ve read Shakespeare, and reflected on the more kind of diabolically cunning I think he is, he just gives you frequently little glimpses into a personality. And if you’re not paying a lot of attention, you won’t notice, which is kind of what the personality wanted.
But what Shakespeare is going to do is say, okay, I will tell you the things you need to know, but you’ve got to watch carefully. And that’s one of the things that Shakespeare can teach the student of politics, is the art of close observation.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, so you already quoted Cardinal Wolsey’s beautiful speech, it is so powerful. And it is from that point of vulnerability, a man who has realized that power is no longer in his grasp. Is this where we start to study power and those in power, from their vulnerabilities or the vulnerabilities inherent, or is it just one of many paths? Does it open up something, or are we missing something if we start from the standpoint of vulnerability?
Eliot Cohen:
I don’t think that’s where you start. This is Cardinal Wolsey at the end of his career, not at the beginning of his career.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Eliot Cohen:
No, I think you look at all kinds of other things if you want to see how people actually get into the business of acquiring powers. The way I organized the book is I didn’t go play-by-play. I began with one large section on how people get power, how they use power, and then, finally, how they lose it.
Again, one of the things that’s a bit sick about our current world, is that is where we want to start, with people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Not that you shouldn’t pay attention to them, you should, but first you want to see, I think, what is it that makes them effective? What is it that makes them succeed?
I mean, if you take Prince Hal, for example, who becomes Henry V … Of whom, by the way, I have a very dark view, that is of King Henry V.
Rebecca Burgess:
You do.
Eliot Cohen:
A very dark view of this is Henry V, the Shakespearean character. The real Henry V, I couldn’t care less.
But you see him kind of having a glorious old time, hanging around with a bunch of lowlifes in the east cheap, in what’s probably a brothel. And it’s comic, and it’s good fun. And here, again, you get to Shakespeare, the close observer. Actually, this is one of the ways in which Prince Hal is learning how to be a king, and that becomes clear, I think, later on in the play. But, again, you have to pay close attention if you want to see how this is going to feed into his ability to inspire people, to manipulate people, which he does a lot, and to rule.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. The setting is, in fact, quite important for Shakespeare. I know you spend a little bit of time talking about how important, when you’re talking to those who actually put on Shakespeare plays, they say that figuring out the staging, figuring out the costuming, sometimes is where they start from. It’s not the secondary consideration, it is where they start from.
For Shakespeare, the opening scene, the first scene, and the second scene of the first act, in fact, are always of prime importance. In Henry IV, it is so well done because you start in the halls of power before the king, and it’s the exact same speech, the exact same dynamics that are in scene two with Prince Hal in the tavern. And so Shakespeare is telling you, here is politics high and low, here is England, for Prince Hal to figure out how to govern and rule England. He’s going to have to figure out how to understand both of these on their own and how to tie them together. And I’ve always thought, gosh, darn it, that’s so brilliant, how can we not do that, too?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, you’re absolutely right. You always need to pay attention to how Shakespeare sets the stage initially. It’s also very important, I think, to pay attention to the very end, where he’ll occasionally drop this little thing on you, where, if you pay close attention, you go, aha.
So at the end of Henry V, for example … Throughout you’ve had the chorus, who is cheering Henry the V on and saying, “Oh, how can we possibly capture this guy’s greatness in just this little theater of ours here, and touch of Harry in the night,” all that stuff. And at the very end, the chorus says, “Thanks for being here. By the way, he died young, and his son was an infant, and all his conquests kind of fell apart. And we’ve talked about that before. See you later.”
It’s just a couple of lines, but if you look at the end of that, of Henry V’s story, you go, listen, why does Shakespeare put that in there? Why does he have to end on a two-line downer?
And I think the reason is he’s explaining a lot of the stuff that went before. One of the things that I talk about, I use, there’s a technical term for it, it’s what the Greeks called anagnorisis, where you suddenly realize the truth of your situation. That’s what happened to Wolsey there, where he goes, I’ve been swimming on a sea of glory, and, poof, it’s all gone.
It happens to individuals, but it can happen to us as readers of Shakespeare and people who observe Shakespeare. I think if we read it closely enough, where you go, “Oh, oh, that’s what’s going on.”
But just to connect it to the real world of politics, that’s very important too. I think one of the problems that we have when we talk about foreign policy, military affairs, and so on, is a lack of close attention to what’s going on right before our eyes frequently. Governments, in particular, fall prey to this, and I’ve seen it firsthand, but I’ve also seen it in other places as well. You get caught up in government talking to itself, you get caught up in highly classified this and that, and you forget to say, “Whoa, that’s right in front of me, that actually means something,” and to pause and reflect on what it means.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. And there’s a timing aspect to that as well, right? And I wonder sometimes whether the pace of government in our daily life is just so frenetic now that we … Unless someone is astute enough to carve out some time for themselves for reflection, the reflection doesn’t happen. And the consequences of that, of course, as you just mentioned, we see all the time. But I’ve wondered about that, especially recently, since my own time in coming to DC, which has not been as glorious as yours, I’m still laboring in the analytic vineyard …
Eliot Cohen:
It’s still early yet. I’m towards the tail end, you’re at the beginning.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. Right, right. And we’ll talk about that arc of power soon, so you can tell me the pitfalls to avoid. But I’ve wondered: Have we taken away the ability for our leaders, for ourselves, to have that moment of anagnorisis, of actually understanding the situation in front of us? Barring some huge kind of cataclysmic changing of the guard, which happened with Putin invading Russia, and then, of course, all the events on October 7th with Hamas and Israel. But should it really take something so profoundly catalytic for us to have these moments of, oh, the real world actually has changed from how we have been talking about it?
Eliot Cohen:
So, to get very serious for a moment, I just came back a week ago from eight days in Israel, where I’d led a small military and national security delegation to meet with a lot of people there high up. And they’ve just gone through this shattering experience. And, of course, one of the things … I’m actually writing a piece about this for The Atlantic.
One of the problems is that for the people at the very top they don’t actually have time to process any of that. And the surge of emotions is such that you can’t really expect them to process it. No, I think it’s a very large problem.
One thing I’ve always been struck by, and I made a bit of a study of some of the decision-making during the Second World War, it made a big difference that Churchill, when he would go to meet Roosevelt, would sail across the Atlantic, which meant that he would have three or four days where he wasn’t checking emails, and he could think things through. And I think wise executives do try to carve out that time.
I was, for my sins, I was a dean for a number of years at Hopkins. And one of the things that I learned, I said, I wanted to get an executive coach because the situation we were in was pretty difficult, and I wanted to get all the help I could get. She was a wonderful teacher and is now just a good friend. But that was one of the things she always emphasized, you’ve got to figure out a way to give yourself blocks of time where all you do is you think. And that’s when I began taking really long walks every day and without headphones on, without listening to music, just long, long walks and I think it’s a critical thing. And I do think that we’ve lost it in another way. I think a lot of senior political and military leaders don’t have the time to immerse themselves in Shakespeare…I don’t know, J. R. R. Tolkien, I mean something that is deep and fascinating other than what their day-to-day lives are like, and I think they suffer for it.
Rebecca Burgess:
So, to turn to the actual contents of your book, I love the taxonomy of power that you give, so essentially, your theme is power and the arc of power, and there’s almost a little bit of a Homeric cataloging of ships in how you go about in acquiring power and exercising power and losing power. So, how does one acquire power? For Shakespeare, of course, there are three different ways, and you give us those.
Eliot Cohen:
So, the easiest way is inheritance. Now, of course, a lot of the plays that I use are primarily the histories, one or two of the tragedies, some of the Roman plays, but preeminently the history plays. And you might say, “Well, okay, fine, if you’re living in a monarchy, of course, the crown prince inherits, but what relevance does that have to us?” Well, actually, it has a lot of relevance because if you stretch the concept of inheritance a bit, that’s where it’s not the case that you’ve… Let’s take a particularly pointed case right now. If you become the president of Harvard, it’s not because you’ve necessarily worked your way to the top in a difficult competitive environment. You’ve been picked and you enter into it. Now, in the past, it was the accidents of birth, I suppose, but it’s not the same thing as building a business from scratch or building any kind of organization from scratch where you have acquired power, you’ve been selected somehow, which means that at some level for anybody in that situation, it’s not something that you’ve acquired on your own.
Rebecca Burgess:
Figured out the mechanics of.
Eliot Cohen:
Right. And with all the learning and the scars that are associated with that, and inheritance is a fraught thing. The reason why Henry V is successful as a king, I think, is because even though he is inheriting the crown, first, the process is very difficult. He and his father have a terrible relationship. It isn’t even entirely cleaned up at the end before Henry IV dies. But what Henry V has figured out is he actually has to earn this. And I think a lot of people who get picked for very high-level positions, one way or another, don’t fully appreciate that. They don’t fully appreciate that, actually, even though they have been selected, they still have to earn it. That’s a very difficult lesson, I think, for lots of people.
I then talk about how people acquire power by means, which might be somewhat underhanded, sort of maneuvering. And that’s really the Henry IV case. I mean, there’s a bit of crime there. He does kill his predecessor, but it’s not simply a criminal seizure. It’s some of the dark arts. And Washington, DC is filled with people who practice the dark arts. And the challenge there I think, is for people who often have used somewhat underhanded means to get where they are again, to establish legitimacy, and they too have to earn it.
You have the third mode that I talk about is seizure, where it’s basically a crime. It’s what Macbeth does. He kills off his predecessor, and then… And, of course, the problem that he faces, which he recognizes, and he does it anyway, is that once you’ve seized power by murder, you have to keep on killing people. And there’s a big difference between him and Henry IV, Henry IV maneuvers Richard II out of power. He later on has him killed, but that’s a separate matter, whereas in Macbeth, it’s straightforward. I mean, it’s bloodshed. And there, too, people don’t usually do that nowadays in organizations and bureaucracies by actually literally sticking a knife into somebody.
But if you hang around any organization long enough, sooner or later, you will see somebody turning around and finding a knife that has been planted in their back frequently by somebody they didn’t expect. And then people are living with the consequence of a seizure powered by a coup. And I guess the larger point for all three methods is that… Actually, people sometimes think, “Okay, once I’m in charge, things are cool.” No, that’s when it all begins, actually. And you always have to work at ways, people find themselves always having to work at ways to make their power legitimate and to make it effective and to be able to hold onto it.
Rebecca Burgess:
That’s one of the really interesting contrasts, I think. Similarities in contrast, as you mentioned between Henry IV and Macbeth, is when you get to Henry IV, Part II, Henry, now King Henry, realizes that the exact same arguments he used to oust his cousin, Richard II, can be used in turn against him. And how do you prevent that? So, he made appeals to competence. He made appeals to his own ability, to justice, all of these things.
But in effect, it really came down to he had a greater ability and a greater kingly sway and that was what was legitimate, trumping the blood, trumping all of these things. And suddenly, he realizes, “Oh, there are these generals lords on my borders who are also very militarily competent who are winning some of these wars for me, and now they’re looking at me, and they are discontented with me. How do I stab off suddenly?” And you talk about that legitimacy question and how that also affects Prince Hal. He, as prince in waiting, as king and waiting, it turns out that is the most dangerous position and most difficult to be in because he is an automatic threat to his own father. So he can’t be serious around his father. So, from the perspective of the one coming up to power, how do you guard yourself against your own father so that you can get the foothold to establish rule?
Eliot Cohen:
It’s a very common thing. One of the points I make in the book is that Shakespeare is fascinated by the politics of courts. And again, you might think, “Well, okay, we don’t live in monarchies,” or, I mean, the Brits do, but we don’t. And even that is a different kind of monarchy for sure than it once was. But actually, if you think about any organization, it’s a court. The guy or gal at the top is the king or the queen. There may well be a crown prince who’s sort of designated. By the way, that’s not always the case in Macbeth, and under Scottish law, the king can pick their successors. So it’s not necessarily going to go down to his son. That’s one of the issues that Macbeth confronts. You have various courtiers who might think that, “I’d actually be a much better king than the current king.” There’s usually a court jester or two. So that phenomenon, I’ve seen it in universities, I’ve seen it in the State Department, I’ve seen it in the Defense Department. It’s universal. People live in courts.
The other thing is the shadow, just to go back to Henry IV, the shadow of illegitimacy. The good thing about inheritance is it involves a certain kind of legitimacy, whether because you’re the son or daughter of the king or because there’s been some sort of formal process that everybody perceives as legitimate for the selection of the next CEO. When people have acquired power in not entirely legitimate ways, I think one of the fascinating things that Shakespeare shows us is it never goes away.
So in Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, when Henry V is feeling sorry for himself, he’s about to manipulate his men into thinking that he’s one of them, which he isn’t. He tries to buy God off. He says, “So I’m going to give lots of money to the church, and I’ve got people singing psalms. We’re going to rebury Richard II.” It’s one of the reasons why I think he’s such a creep. He is a guy who feels he can manipulate everybody, including God. But the main point here, I think, is he knows that what his father did was illegitimate, and some of the shadow of that falls even on him.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right, yeah. Well, I must admit to being one of those who are swayed by the rhetoric of the chorus, and I buy in, I buy in.
Eliot Cohen:
So here’s the fascinating thing: you’re not alone. I mean, I once did a test when I was teaching this to a bunch of my very bright students, and I kind of go through the whole litany of why I think… Look, he launches an unjust war. He is quite cruel in these show trials he does of the conspirators against him. He orders the hanging of one of his best friends. He is kind of deceiving his men about what he really thinks about them. He orders the massacre of a whole bunch of French prisoners of war. Again, Shakespeare just kind of gives you a little note about that, and then it goes on to the other stuff. And then he seduces this French princess, except it’s also, there’s a bit of a threat of rape in it. So I say, “There are all those things. Okay, now having said that, and thinking about the Agincourt speech, ‘We few, we happy few.’ How many of you, if Henry the V were to walk in here right now and say, ‘Follow me,’ would follow him?” Everybody’s hands-
Rebecca Burgess:
All the hands go up.
Eliot Cohen:
All the hands go up. I should say, “Okay, teaching is dead. I failed.”
Rebecca Burgess:
No, you’re still doing the teaching. And then you say, “All right, and now, the next day, would you have regretted it?”
Eliot Cohen:
That also, again, this is part of Shakespeare’s genius. If we look at our own reactions to some of these characters, that could be very instructive. I mean, the same thing with Richard III. He’s evil. I mean, he murders his brother, he murders these two cute little nephews in the Tower of London. And you know what? We find him kind of funny and charming, and we like the fact that he breaks the fourth wall and he confides in us and he says, “Can you believe I’m getting away with this?” And against our will we go, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” And-
Rebecca Burgess:
See, he’s an absolute creep to me. And I’ve always been like, “How does Anne fall for his wiles? How can that be possible? How can she be so blind? She hates the guy. She marries the guy. What is this?”
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, but don’t you have any friends who did that?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes. Yes. I mean, I recognize the pattern, but it’s not one I want to recognize. But so true. But back to a little bit of Henry, and I think this gets us to your next block of considerations, which is exercising power. Once Prince Hal becomes Henry—and side note, I have to thank you so much for not titling this book “Shakespeare for Situation Rooms and Boardrooms” or something like that, it kind of takes a lot away from it.
So Prince Hal becomes Henry and he has to reestablish his kingliness, his fitness to rule in front of his people on this stage, the stage of monarchy, the stage of nations, of… Well, it’s the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, more or less, or the pre beginnings of it. And so he has to make certain all of his actions are seen by his courtiers and the world amplified. He is on a stage, he can’t get away from that. How can he not distance himself from Falstaff? Because Falstaff, well, “Banish me and all the world,” all of those things. All being said, he is still, not from a political standpoint, he’s a liability for sure. He’s also not a good citizen, really. And something needs to be done about that so that the youth don’t take them as an example. So, how do we square those responsibilities and personalize them? Does personal responsibility take second place to political responsibilities once you are in office?
Eliot Cohen:
Oh, I think you put your finger on it. I think part of what you’re seeing there is the dehumanizing effect of power. One of the things that Shakespeare does, this is something I think I always felt, but I feel more strongly now after immersing myself in this, is Shakespeare shows us how the exercise of power burns away a bit of your humanity. For me, the brutal thing is actually in… So first, let’s begin with the Falstaff, who is humanity on some level. We love him. He’s a rascal. He’s funny. He has no illusions. He’s probably the most beloved of Shakespeare’s characters. Well, there are two moments in which we see that Henry does have to break with him. I think you’re absolutely right, although Henry has also learned from him because what Henry has learned from Falstaff is this is what normal people are like. Henry is not a normal person, and in fact, people like Henry cannot be normal, and most very successful political people are not normal human beings in a variety of ways. The way Henry does it, though, is quite brutal. I mean, he-
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, ” I know thee not, old man: fall to…”
Eliot Cohen:
“I know thee not, old man.” So this is at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. Falstaff is hoping to cash in his chips, and he doesn’t just say no, these are the words that every teacher dreads to hear from a former student, “I know thee not, old man.” I mean, it’s completely contemptuous. And then Shakespeare reminds us in Henry V in the opening scene, we are indirectly told that Falstaff has died and that the king has broken his heart.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Eliot Cohen:
And you do wonder: Was the coldness in both cases necessary, or did it reflect something deeper about who Henry really is? Which is my view. But like I said, I just-
Rebecca Burgess:
But your view…Yes, yeah.
Eliot Cohen:
I just think it’s-
Rebecca Burgess:
It is absolutely fair. I mean, I think it is all there. I just want to indulge my being rallied by the noble speeches, if you will. All right, so exercising power, I mean, so you break it down into inspiration, manipulation, and murder, so force, keeping oneself in power through these ways. But maybe why is it that everyone wants power? What is it that power has that people are willing to pay such high prices to acquire it and to have it and to hold onto it?
Eliot Cohen:
I’ll fall back on a conversation I had in graduate school with a wonderful woman. She was a political philosopher, Judith Shklar, who was the first woman in the government department at Harvard. Who was, as a child, had been a refugee from the Second World War. And there was a group of us sitting around the table of a political philosophy class, graduate students, all of us, very ambitious. At one point, she turned to all of us and she said, “There are two reasons why you might become a political scientist: either you’re in love with power, or you’re afraid of it.” She said, “I’m afraid of it,” and looked at us.
And I think it’s… Ultimately, the craving for power means that there’s something lacking inside you that you want to transcend or expand beyond. I think that the people I’ve known who are genuinely content with their lots in life don’t want it and who have a sense of perspective. And that’s why, I mean, we’ll talk in a moment about why people leave power, but that’s why the figure of Prospero and Tempest is so powerful. I mean, he knows he has to let it go if he’s going to be a human being again. And it’s why as people grow older, I mean, I know this, just feeling it internally, particularly if you’ve had a pretty happy life, which in my case I’ve had all kinds of satisfactions out there. You don’t crave all the things that come with power and the responsibilities, the dehumanizing parts, you don’t want it. I think when you still have these cravings, which haven’t been internal cravings, which haven’t been fulfilled in some other way, you do crave it.
Rebecca Burgess:
Side note because I don’t want us to get too caught up in all the current relevance of Merchant of Venice, but that is one interpretation that a friend of mine and I kind of talked about with the ending of Merchant of Venice is: Why is Portia after brilliantly defeating all the legal minds of Venice, if you will, why is she content to go back to Belmont, this kind of made up fairytale place? And his response to me, and this is interesting, I’m the woman here, and he was a male professor, and he said, “Well, I think Portia realizes that the most important things are not going to happen in Venice. The most important thing is this little realm that she is able to control without having to disguise herself, all of these different types of things. But in the family life that she has created by choice, there is a refuge. Jessica, the daughter of Shylock, comes there.”
And I thought, “Well, that is interesting too, and it is true.” But what about for those of us who, and you talk a little bit about this, of the students or of Cymbeline, the old courtier trying to keep the young princes away from the court? All they want is to experience the life of the court because hearing stories about it is not enough. So is this the tragedy of the ambitious young person who thinks, “But I need this realm and this stage of politics to meet my meaning?”
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. Look, I think a noble ambition is a healthy thing. The desire to have the power to do some good with it and to have some notion of what that good is—that’s an admirable thing. But I think, at the same time, it’s important to know how it can be dangerous and how it’s not enough simply to desire power. If you want somebody who desires power, it’s Richard III. He has no idea what he wants to do with it, he just wants it. That’s different from, I don’t know, somebody like a Churchill who clearly wanted distinction, he wanted admiration. And if you want to get psychological, it does go back to his childhood, his relationship with his father and his mother, and all that. But in any case, with Churchill, it’s clear he wanted to do something with it. And I think that’s the critical thing, the critical distinction.
I used to have students who you’d say, “Okay, what do you plan on doing after school? What would you like to do?” They say, “Okay, I want to make policy.” To which my response was always, “Great. What policy do you want to make?” And I very rarely got a good answer to that. And at the end of that conversation, I would say, “You might want to go and have another think about why you want to… I’m not saying you shouldn’t aspire to be Secretary of State. That’s perfectly laudable. But why? To what end?”
And I think as a teacher or as a mentor, that’s the important question to ask. It’s not to try to deflect people from the pursuit of power. Also, ’cause if that’s in their nature, that’s what they’ll do no matter what you say, as Belarius finds out in Cymbeline.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. So Coriolanus seems a little relevant here, too, because he seems motivated by honor and glory.
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to say.
Rebecca Burgess:
And so I think, particularly today, we have a very cynical view of power and those who approach power. And, of course, that’s all imbued with truth. But on the other side of it, there’s a nobler, if you will, aspiration in there, which is for honor and glory. And how do we square this, or how do we allow it? Or is it possible that there are some just motivated by that thirst?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. I mean, look, the desire for some kind of glory is a very important motivator for human behavior. For something like Coriolanus, it’s success on the battlefield, for academics, it’s getting to be a tenured professor at a major university. For other people, it’s getting to be a CEO or maybe having a smashing podcast. But that, I think, will always be out there. The problem with Coriolanus is not only that he has zero political sense, but his desire for glory is coupled with contempt for everybody else.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
And I think that’s the perilous part. And it has a profound naivete to it as well because the people that he honors, and one of the people who he honors, who actually turns on him, and that’s Aufidius, sort of his rival soldier. He says, “A lion that I would be proud to hunt.” he calls him at one point. Well, actually, there are a lot of problems with Aufidius that Coriolanus is not perceptive enough to see. So, that ultimately ends up as Coriolanus’ real problem. Not his desire for glory, not his sense of honor, which is an entirely appropriate thing. It’s more the narrowness of his conception of honor and glory and his inability to bear with other people.
Rebecca Burgess:
So, is inspiration in wielding power always manipulation?
Eliot Cohen:
I think it usually has some element of manipulation. It usually has some element of artifice. Churchill didn’t just get up and give those speeches off the top of his head. He wrote them very carefully. He edited them, he chose his words very carefully. So, there always has to be an element of calculation. And if you want, you can call it an element of manipulation as well.
But again, that doesn’t mean it’s evil. I think it’s just in the same way that I’d like to think I was a pretty good lecturer. Lecturing is performance art. And-
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
… if you don’t think of it as performance art, you’re not going to be good at it. And if it is performance art, well, you better think about the performance. You got to think about-
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Eliot Cohen:
… when you’re downstage, when you’re not, and all that stuff.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. I’m laughing because that was my moment of anagnorisis, if you will. The first day of teaching, I thought, “Wait, no one told me. No one told me that this is a performance as well.”
Eliot Cohen:
It is.
Rebecca Burgess:
“And somehow, my brain has to be clicking at a high rate of speed here as well.” And I remember thinking, “Oh, that’s what makes a good teacher when they can combine those elements. Not just the knowledge, but the ability to deliver it with passion, so that bringing forward of your own personal connection with the text or the subject matter so that those in your audience are alerted that it matters.”
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. You asked me earlier what I had learned from Shakespeare about international politics. I think one of them is the importance of theatricality and of staging of performance. I thought more and more deeply about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, particularly in the early phases of the Ukraine War, where he put his skills as an actor and as a director to wonderful use in mobilizing his own people and mobilizing international support in ways that I wouldn’t have expected. So theater really does manage. And the politicians who are not particularly good are the ones who don’t understand that and don’t work at it really, really carefully.
Rebecca Burgess:
And that can be at all levels. I know you mentioned LBJ and the types of suits he wore, and Reagan did that, too, in the opposite. He had a very fine sense of fashion, but as president, in fact, he wore larger suits that were less tailored. They looked a little bit more everyman, and that was an important part of being the communicator, the great communicator.
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s true of all competent leaders, whether or not they’re good people, is they are thinking about those things.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right before we turn to the losing power part of this, on the question of honor, again, I think you mentioned this in your book, I don’t think I’m just imagining it is that difference between Hotspur and Prince Hal in terms of honor and glory. And King Henry IV thinks, or seems to think, that Hotspur would be a better heir to him. And it turns out, in fact, that would’ve been a disaster because Hotspur, he only has the hotness of his passion in the moment and no forethought, whereas Prince Hal kind of does, which brings in that honor’s apparently not enough to-
Eliot Cohen:
No, it’s not enough. And I would also say I’m not sure that… Henry V says that he’s hungry for glory, but I think his sense of honor is different from Hotspurs. Hotspur is a more genuine human being, he’s a more lovable human being. And you see that in his interaction with his wife, and that’s clearly a loving match. Whereas the only thing you know about Henry V and Catherine is, it’s a seduction with an element of coercion in it.
But for me, though, the thing that’s interesting about that story is that Henry doesn’t understand his own son. And he also doesn’t understand what his kingdom needs. But you can understand why he, who is a very calculating kind of guy who has gone through a lot in order to get where he is but has always been sort of calculating, wants a bit of his opposite as his successor. You say, “I wish it was Hotspur. Was kind of bold and audacious, and he’s fiery, and he’s spontaneous, and he’s unlike me.” And it’s one of those cases where it’s a father wishes his son was something completely different. And maybe the truth is Henry V is even more calculating than Henry IV and arguably much more successful. And maybe at some deep, deep level, Henry IV knows that and doesn’t want the rivalry there.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as all the Henry plays, the history plays are, is kind of charting that course from medieval England to post-medieval England and the modern age. But losing power, since we’re on that stage, what happens when people lose power? Who walks away from it, and who simply loses it?
Eliot Cohen:
So one of the ways in which I think people simply lose it is they deceive themselves about how they got there and about who they are. And the classic case is Richard II, who really no longer knows who he is, once he’s lost the kingship. When he’s confronting Henry IV at one point, he’s saying, “I’ve got this army of angels up there are going smite you down.” And then he goes, “I don’t have any friends at all.” And he falls apart. I mean, he’s a very interesting case because he is somebody who, once he’s no longer king, there’s no sense of who he is. He doesn’t know who he is. And he says as much, which is quite remarkable, is that speech where he says, “I’ve wasted time and now doth time wastes me.”
Rebecca Burgess:
Time wastes me.
Eliot Cohen:
And so, he’s really quite a pathetic case. Somebody else who falls prey to her own magic is Joan of Ark, who I think is a figure really worth talking about than Henry VI, who attributes her successes to magical powers and other people attribute it to magical powers. But actually, if you look closely at the accomplishments that Shakespeare shows you, they’re all very human kinds of statecraft and calculation and ruses of war and so on. And so, I’ve got a chapter there on people who convinced themselves of their own magic. And I reference Barack Obama, who I think was intoxicated and had people around him who were intoxicated by some sense of his magical powers, which, in retrospect, were very far from being evident.
But in terms of people who walk away, the two archetypes that I give are King Lear and Prospero. So King Lear wants the trappings of office but without the responsibilities.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
That’s the thing that’s so striking about him is he’s going to divide his kingdom. He still wants to be treated as the king in every possible way, including the deference he gets from his kids, the retinue, all that. And he doesn’t realize that if you give up responsibility and authority, that other stuff goes away.
Prospero is really a wonderful case because Prospero, who has all these incredible magical powers, decides to relinquish them. “I’ll break my staff and bury it several fathom deep and deeper than the plummet. Ever sound, I’ll drown my book.”, his book of magic spells. And in the book, I said, “Well, why does he do that?” I mean, he’s going to go back. He’s been able to do all kinds of incredible things on this island because of his magical powers. Why does he make a big deal of relinquishing them?
And the reason why is, I think, he realizes that the exercise of power on that island, that magical power, but most power is a kind of rough magic, is dehumanizing. And the hint, again, is just a little thing. But Shakespeare gives it to you, is at the very beginning of the play when he’s going to explain to his daughter Miranda, how they ended up on this desert island, stranded there and so forth. He says, “Okay, it’s time for me to tell you how this all happened, but first, help me take off my magic robe.”
So, there are two things about that. One is he realizes he cannot talk to his daughter as a father talks to a daughter while still being this all powerful wizard. But he also realizes he can’t take it off by himself. He has to ask her to help him take it off. And so there’s, I think, a wonderful insight there. And he is a different man at the end of the play. And it’s not that it’s necessarily a happy ending.
He’s going to go away, and every third thought will be of death, but he’s a human being. You see it in the way he treats the people who have been subservient to him, including even Caliban, who, at the beginning of the play, he’s quite brutal towards. He’s effectively saying, “Do what I tell you to do, or I’m going to torture you.” And at the end, he kind of admits to the king with whom he’s been reconciled and says, “Yeah, that guy’s mine. I’m responsible for him.” It’s a very, very different tone.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. There’s that whole, the shipwreck which he conjures up or the fake shipwreck. It doesn’t quite happen. There’s that interesting dynamic between him, who seems to be without empathy in that moment and sympathy, by the way, of watching the human drama, if you will, unfold. Which his daughter is just alive, too, and cannot distance herself from him. And she pleads with him. And so there’s that, as you were saying, there’s something about power that’s potentially dehumanizing. You have to take that cloak off in order to remember, in a sense, why you exercise power in the first place in order to improve. Or I would say one ought to exercise power in order to improve the lives of those around one in one’s state. But that’s interesting.
But back to Lear, I think Shakespeare gives us such a pointed commentary on that wish of Lear. “That’s literal madness.”, he says.
Eliot Cohen:
Right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. Literal madness, now rage, rage against the winds as you’re out of because there is nothing more foolish than to think that you can hold onto power but not have power. And that you’re going to have a happy ending in that type of thing.
Eliot Cohen:
So often in Shakespeare, people deceive themselves, as in real life all the time. And that’s why Prospero was such a wonderful counterpoint to him. At the end, he’s not going to deceive himself, which means that he’s not an entirely happy character. In the book, I draw the comparison with George Washington, who twice relinquished his power, both at the end of the revolution and then after his terms as president.
And George Washington was not a happy man in either case. I mean, he had all kinds of troubles that he was facing, but he was an infinitely more human character than he might otherwise have been. And it’s one of the reasons why he is such an extraordinary figure in American history and why we were so lucky to have him.
Rebecca Burgess:
Plutarch, which I’m, like, duty-bound to always mention Plutarch when I can, but he is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest teacher. And in Plutarch, we learn, and in history, we learn that, in fact, the statesmen, the generals who have given most to their countries, often have the most unhappy endings. They’re driven into exile, forgotten, banished, or killed. And there’s this question of gratitude you might say, which is something that let Lear become so alive about. And gratitude from the point of, “I gave my life in public service. What have you given me? And now you’re just going to take it all from me.” But I also wonder about—but is there a little note of legitimacy in the people sometimes doing that? Because how else would those people leave or give it up?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. Or I think it’s also sometimes you resent your benefactors, most of all.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Eliot Cohen:
But that’s been no doubt. No. Look, I think that’s, and Lord knows I’ve seen, and even to some extent, experienced cases like that where you’ve done an enormous amount of good. And your reward for that is going to be abuse. And I think that’s why… And I’m not sure whether Shakespeare really fully conveys this, although maybe in Tempest, he does to some extent. One of the things that’s really important for a powerful person to be able to do is really two things. One is first to take satisfaction in what you’ve accomplished, not in people’s gratitude for it. That is a hard thing for people to do, because if you’ve been the center of…
Eliot Cohen:
… for people to do, because if you’ve been the center of attention, you want that validation, but you’re not going to get it. But the other thing is knowing how to walk off the stage. Again, it’s a theatrical metaphor, isn’t it?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Eliot Cohen:
It is really important to know how to walk off the stage. And there are a lot of people in the political world, in the business world, in the academic world who’ve never figured that out.
Rebecca Burgess:
There are certain presidents or former presidents of think tanks who couldn’t stay in retirement and had to come back out, and then the issues that caused within, which is a separate question about founders versus rulers and governors, if you will.
Eliot Cohen:
Absolutely.
Rebecca Burgess:
But I think, also, part of it is just that desire to power is, in a way, an exercise of temporal immortality perhaps. And giving that up is the confrontation as Wolsey once again does and prosper of death.
Eliot Cohen:
I remember talking to one very senior official in the defense department, and we were talking about somebody else who was really clearly at the point where they should retire. And he looked at me, he said, “Eliot,” he said, “You have to remember for so-and-so the next big job is death.”
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Eliot Cohen:
True enough.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, I know we’re kind of nearing the end of our time, but I wanted to go back to King Lear just for a moment because that play is just so complex. But it also seems to me that Lear, in addition to his sin of wanting to have all the trappings of power, none of the responsibility, mistakes the rule of a kingdom for the affection of a family and doesn’t understand that he could force affection in a way from his daughters. But that making that the test of political succession is, in fact, one of the pitfalls, say at least of a monarchy. But it’s beyond a monarchy. It’s always the test of legitimacy from one’s designated heir or not.
Eliot Cohen:
It means, I don’t think he knew what the meaning of real affection is. He doesn’t know it with his youngest daughter. He doesn’t know it with the one nobleman who really is genuinely loyal to him, who he banishes but who sticks with him. I think, in many ways, he’s a great example of somebody who has been corrupted by the exercise of absolute power in such a way that his understanding of other human beings has shrunk. And maybe that’s one of the conclusions to draw: is you exercise power long enough, there’s an initial period where the exercise of power can cause you to grow. After a while, the exercise of power causes you to shrink, and Lear has shrunk. And although Lear is one heck of a depressing play, the redeeming part of it is he’s grown back a bit at the end. He’s grown back not only in his ability to recognize who the people around him really are, the bad, but also the good, but who he is. That line where he says, “I’m a fun, foolish old man,” well, that’s what he is.
Finally, at the end, he knows who he is, and that’s not given to everybody. And self-knowledge is something that one should strive for. It’s know thyself. In that sense alone, I would say Lear is an uplifting play.
Rebecca Burgess:
You begin your introduction in the book with a nice little anecdote about some people who see on the stage Goneril and all the rest of it. You know them, you’ve worked with them. I should have warned you at the beginning that I actually played Goneril once.
Eliot Cohen:
Oh, really? Oh, dear me.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, I did. High school, senior play. It was one of these things. I had no choice. You’re given the role. And I thought, “Oh crap.” And I will say, this is the fun of doing these things, of course, is we put on an excellent production, let us say. But for about two or three months afterward, there was a noticeable distancing of some people around me.
Eliot Cohen:
Now, was that because of them or because of you?
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, you know how effectively I’ve portrayed that role.
Eliot Cohen:
You’re such a nice person. I can’t believe it anyway. But I think there is a larger point there, which is particularly in the exercise of power, you’re frequently playing a role, and after a while, you play the role, you become the role, and I think that’s something that theater can teach you. And I’ve heard from professional actors that you play a character in a very serious way over a long season, it takes a while to deprogram yourself and to get that person out of your system. Well, for anybody who’s powerful, something has to be an act. It just is. And you may become somebody who you weren’t really, but I’m sure it was all about them, not about you.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. No one lost their eyes afterward. I don’t have that-
Eliot Cohen:
I doubt you would go in for the eye gouging.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. It’s a little too messy for my taste. But that lack of awareness, you’ve mentioned this a lot about Kloting, and I think it gets with Lear and maybe where we’ll end up maybe about America today, which is those who grow up with power, those who spend a lot of time in power often forget how to wield power responsibly. And there’s this lack of the effects of it almost, which you show with Kloting and how he is just cruel or just capricious in a way.
And that’s why, initially, I wanted to needle you a little bit about Much Ado About Nothing. You have this prince and his little coterie—they come back from a war, and they’re supposed to be the statesmen, and serious, they fight wars. And instead, what do they do? They create absolute havoc by just being like, “Let’s play with the lives of these lovers, these men and women.” How are we supposed to square that? Or what happens? How do we not have that? How do we find the medium between frivolity, which can end in death? Thankfully, it’s a comedy, it doesn’t. It could have been an Othello ending there with Much Ado and the horrors of Macbeth.
Eliot Cohen:
That’s a deeper question about how do you become a serious person? And I think the answer is you don’t become a serious person through the exercise of power or through, in that case, being successful in war. You become a serious person in some other way, which is much more introspective or reflective. And that’s, I think, what we’re missing. We talked earlier about how people don’t have time. Among other things, they don’t have time to read Shakespeare. They don’t have time to read the Bible, they don’t have time to read Tolstoy. They don’t have time to do, or they don’t make time for themselves to do the things that ultimately would make them much more serious, and those things have to lie outside politics. And I think the people who do keep an even keel, it is because of the things that are outside politics. It’s because of a husband or a wife or a relationship with parents or religious faith or a deep, airy addition. You can find it in many ways, but you’re not going to find it in the pursuit of power.
Rebecca Burgess:
To bring it up to America in the twenty-first century, that question of seriousness, I could say throughout the plays, throughout your book, you mentioned the importance of rhetoric. And it seems like today, not only do we have unserious politicians, we have very poor, rhetorically skilled politicians.
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, we do.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is this connected or do we put too much emphasis maybe today on rhetoric?
Eliot Cohen:
No, the problem is it’s not that the opposite of good rhetoric is not no rhetoric. It’s bad or misleading rhetoric. And I think in a lot of some of the tropes of our time on the right as well as on the left, you have slogans which are effective, which are rhetorically cheap. When you use the word rhetoric now, it means insincere speech. That’s usually how people talk about it. What Aristotle meant by it was persuasive speech. And he thought that rhetoric was absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy because it’s how you make arguments about things that are really important.
I think part of the reason for it, frankly, is just the decline of high quality education. If you look at a Lincoln or Churchill, very different masters of the English language, but both of them, they knew their Shakespeare, they knew their Bible.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
And that enriched the kinds of speeches that they gave and the way that they made arguments. I think with a lot of politicians today, they don’t really think it’s necessary. Maybe they’ve been intoxicated by emails and tweets and Instagram and all that, but they don’t understand the power of a well-delivered speech. Even today, even with all of our distractions. I have very ambivalent views of the Biden administration on Russia-Ukraine in particular. And one of the things that continues to baffle me is why we haven’t had a series of powerful speeches about why this matters. It does matter to us enormously, and it’s not hard to construct the case either. This is not esoteric. So why not? Where is it?
Rebecca Burgess:
It seems like we’ve forgotten in America, perhaps because the system works so well for so long that when you have institutions that carry forward the leadership in a way that you didn’t have in monarchies, you still in fact do need the leadership of particular individuals, presidents, secretaries of state defense, others who have the microphone, if you will, to make the case. And that seems what we are absolutely leading.
Eliot Cohen:
I think that’s absolutely right. The Cold War, you had the clarity of its beginning. You had John F. Kennedy, you had Ronald Reagan. You then had a period when the world seemed like a very benign and unthreatening place. It gets a bit darker after 9/11, and President Bush made some speeches. And then, after that, the world did not seem like a dangerous enough place, and the consensus didn’t seem in peril enough for somebody to realize that they needed to get up there and make the argument. And unfortunately, the world is now a much more perilous place. This past year, I’ve been in Ukraine, I’ve been in Israel, I’ve been in Taiwan, so two war zones and one potential war zone. It’s very serious. There are absolutely echoes of the 1930s, but we don’t really have a Churchill delivering the speeches that begin to wake people up in time.
Rebecca Burgess:
Nor do we seem to have a common language, if you will. And I know you’ve done work in civic education and the importance of deep something that goes back to the Edie Hirsch of the deep civic literacy or cultural literacy that allowed a Lincoln to do what a Prince Hall did, which is everyone in America had a copy of Shakespeare, high and low, those in power, just common. Lincoln himself taught himself through Shakespeare. We seem to lack some of those texts or core texts or core images that we can pull from today, which makes a book like yours necessary on Shakespeare and politics. Though in a perfect world, everyone already would know that Shakespeare was important and relevant to politics. Given that situation, where’s the hopeful road, the path that we can take forward?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, I think, let’s go back to where I started, those bright-eyed freshmen at Johns Hopkins University. They were wide open to what Shakespeare had to teach them, and many of them were in the sciences and that were engineering, things like that. And this was not central to their worldview. And that’s always, by the way, been my experience when I’ve had students who are not from liberal arts backgrounds or from STEM areas, I never underestimate the ability of young people to absorb fresh experiences. You just have to deliver it to them. And I think you see institutions and movements out there that are doing this, but you’ve got a teacher talking here. I think the solution to this is more education. Education takes place in many different ways, in many different places. People have the opportunity to shape this in their homes, in junior high, in high school. The universities are a different proposition, and I worry a lot about the universities.
But the truth is, I think the essential battles are actually fought a lot earlier than that. They’re fought in junior high and high school. And that’s where I think people should focus. And that’s why I wrote those pieces that I’ve written about patriotic education.
Rebecca Burgess:
Hearts and souls of men, right?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, like the chorus in Henry the V and like Puck in Midsummer’s Night Dream, I have to draw this to a close and ask our listeners for their blessings and their patience and all those wonderful things. Right before I do that, I’d like to give you the last word. Do you have a favorite quote or speech or character in Shakespeare we didn’t get to cover that you’d like to leave us with?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, I do. It’s from Julius Caesar, and one of the characters that I like, and this will sound odd, is Cassius, who always gets written off as an envious conspirator, which I actually think is not true. Actually, I think Brutus has the weaker personality. Brutus is the one who’s vain. Brutus is the one who doesn’t want Cicero around in the plot because he wants too much attention. Well, guess what Brutus wants? And Cassius is a much more realistic guy, and there is an element of envy with Cassius. But at the end of the day, they’re friends.
And this is on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. There’s this wonderful exchange. Brutus says, “And whether we shall meet again, I know not. Therefore, our everlasting farewell takes forever and forever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile. If not, why, then this parting was well-made.” And Cassius responds, “Forever and forever farewell, Brutus. If we do meet again, we’ll smile, indeed. If not is true, this parting was well-made.” And it’s a beautiful moment of reconciliation between two friends who had had a rupture. And the mirroring of the language, I think, captures that, and it captures an essential human dignity that, at the end of the day, they both have. And you know what? The guys who do [inaudible 01:17:10] don’t have.
Rebecca Burgess:
It’s a resonant ending, for sure. A resonant ending for this. And by the way, neither of us will exit pursued by bears.
Eliot Cohen:
Well, that’s true.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, thank you so much again, Eliot, for doing this and joining us and having this great conversation. It was a pleasure to have you with us today.
Eliot Cohen:
Rebecca, I enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for having me on.
Rebecca Burgess:
Wonderful. That was Eliot Cohen. I am Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us.
Eliot Cohen:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Eliot A. Cohen joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss his new book on Shakespeare and power politics, The Hollow Crown.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law and Liberty and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. Thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. But today, in fact, we are not left to any arbitrary leniency of a willful goddess of inspiration to get us going for this latest episode of Liberty Law Talk because our theme today is Shakespeare and politics, the stagecraft of statecraft, and even the statecraft of stagecraft when it comes to understanding the halls of power and those who would be in it. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting Fellow for the Independent Women's Forum. But importantly, for today, I am a partisan, wholly and devotedly, of all things Shakespeare.
And joining me today is Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly counselor of the Department of State. His books include The Big Stick and Supreme Command. Thrice welcome, Eliot. What news on the Rialto, as we might say?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, Rebecca, first and foremost, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I lead a very odd life in some ways, bouncing between military matters at the moment, which is my professional expertise in one way, and then Shakespeare. It's odd, but it's nice to be back with Shakespeare because the rest of the world's pretty grim right now.
Rebecca Burgess:
All right. He provides us comfort and also much thought to chew on. So I thought, in this midwinter moment, when everyone is settling down in front of their fires, all sated with holiday cheer, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that all thoughtful people want, or are in need of, a good book and a good conversation. And voila, you have gifted us The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Just out recently by Basic Books.
And so I thought we could use the next hour or so to talk about what Shakespeare teaches us about politics today or helps us analyze those in the halls of power. The characters within Shakespeare are always of interest, whether it's Henry V, whether it's Richard II, or whether it's Prospero. And I'm going to needle you about some you didn't put in there, including the prince from Much Ado About Nothing and that band of unserious statesmen, not statesmen yet, the princes in Love's Labour's Lost, who have to learn how to become serious statesmen.
But I would love to start off by asking you: What has teaching Shakespeare and introducing Shakespeare into your syllabi at Johns Hopkins or others taught you anew about international relations, grand strategy, or politics?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, that's really a whole range of questions. Let me just start as a teacher. So, I'm about to become emeritus at Hopkins and shift over full-time to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I've had a 34-year career at Hopkins, which has been wonderful.
The last course that I taught was for freshmen, and it was a freshman course on Shakespeare. And I have to say—it was just a wonderful way of rounding out a teaching career because what you see is how young people, who maybe have never really been exposed to this in a really serious way, they may have had an encounter with it in high school, but they're now at a stage where they can begin to appreciate it. You can see how it opens a world for them, and that's a delight. And it's, in a way, at a time when we could all use a bit of optimism—it's a source of optimism that you realize there's always going to be a new generation coming on, and they can respond to the classics very, very powerfully. So that's the Mr. Chips in me, if you will.
I began ... I've always loved Shakespeare. I began thinking about teaching it after seeing Henry VIII, which is a play not often put on. There used to be some dispute about whether it was even by Shakespeare. I think most people think it is now a collaboration with another playwright named John Fletcher. And if your listeners will bear with me, I'd like to read the bit of the soliloquy that got it all started.
So what's happened is Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII's chancellor, has just been deposed, and it's sudden, and it is a sudden fall from power. And here is what he says: "Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now has left me Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me."
So my wife and I saw the play, and I was really struck by that soliloquy because my immediate reaction was, I know that guy. I mean, I've been in Washington now for well over three decades, and I've seen all kinds of things, and I was so taken by that, I took it ... I was meeting with a bunch of students who were all graduate students by the way, later on, and I said, "Let's talk about this." One thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of students at a professional school of international relations.
And I think the thing that strikes you, as you study Shakespeare from the vantage point that I have, which includes a fair amount of government service as well, is, first, how a lot of the fundamental predicaments of political characters just don't change. He also mentioned how there are phenomena that he captures that are still very much with us. You just need to learn how to do the translation.
So, if I can give just one example of that. So, one of the plays that I have always enjoyed teaching is Coriolanus, which is about the great Roman general who becomes a traitor and comes to a sticky end. But, first, he's an incredibly successful general. The problem is he has no political sense whatsoever. I've known a few generals like that, actually, in my time.
Rebecca Burgess:
Zero political prudence.
Eliot Cohen:
Right. Political prudence is not their strong suit. But there comes a point where he's just been tremendously successful in battle, and they're about to make him consul, which is the thing he really wants—it's the honor he really wants. But he has to kind of go along with the people, with the plebs. Until they ask him to show his wounds, to take off his toga and see the scars of battle, and then he detonates, and everything goes downhill from there.
And I was teaching this to a group of graduate students, including about half a dozen people who'd been in very hard places and done hard things in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I said to them ... So these are people in their late twenties, early thirties, some of them. I said, "Don't feel obliged to answer this question, but has anybody ever asked to see your wounds?" And the conversation just exploded.
Rebecca Burgess:
I bet.
Eliot Cohen:
Because, yes. I mean, psychological wounds, not physical wounds. And so I think part of what Shakespeare gives us is the ability to see things that are around us, much more vividly in a way, because he's abstracting us from our current context. I could go on, but let me pause there and see where you want to take this.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, in every direction, of course. But on this particular note of showing wounds, I think it is of interest, and we'll probably touch on it later. I think it's inevitable that in the rise to power, or in statesmanship, how much do you have to show the work of statesmanship to be a successful statesman? Are you supposed to make it look easy? Are you supposed to reveal your trials and tribulations?
And I think there's a difference, perhaps, between Shakespeare's day and ours, between that. It seems like, today, we emphasize the personal story of the politician. But is it any different than that showing of the wounds, or showing of the interior, if you will?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, we like people to show their vulnerabilities. But, the point that Shakespeare is making with the story of Coriolanus is we've always wanted our leaders to show their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Now, we've taken it to a pathological extent.
So I'm going to just give an example. So when they finally do the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, what do they do? They make a big point of having him in a wheelchair. In point of fact, FDR went to great lengths not to be photographed in a wheelchair because that was not the image he wanted to convey.
To go back to Shakespeare, what you see is a lot of leaders who actually have all kinds of burdens, pathologies, and so on, and who do make considerable efforts to conceal them. Actually, Henry IV, the father of Prince Hal, who became Henry V, talks about that about how he tried to conceal himself. But the truth is, those things are always there.
And I think one of the things Shakespeare shows us is, if you pay close attention, you can see what they are, which is a useful thing if you want to understand the people who are your leaders. The challenge that Shakespeare gives us, and the more I've read Shakespeare, and reflected on the more kind of diabolically cunning I think he is, he just gives you frequently little glimpses into a personality. And if you're not paying a lot of attention, you won't notice, which is kind of what the personality wanted.
But what Shakespeare is going to do is say, okay, I will tell you the things you need to know, but you've got to watch carefully. And that's one of the things that Shakespeare can teach the student of politics, is the art of close observation.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, so you already quoted Cardinal Wolsey's beautiful speech, it is so powerful. And it is from that point of vulnerability, a man who has realized that power is no longer in his grasp. Is this where we start to study power and those in power, from their vulnerabilities or the vulnerabilities inherent, or is it just one of many paths? Does it open up something, or are we missing something if we start from the standpoint of vulnerability?
Eliot Cohen:
I don't think that's where you start. This is Cardinal Wolsey at the end of his career, not at the beginning of his career.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Eliot Cohen:
No, I think you look at all kinds of other things if you want to see how people actually get into the business of acquiring powers. The way I organized the book is I didn't go play-by-play. I began with one large section on how people get power, how they use power, and then, finally, how they lose it.
Again, one of the things that's a bit sick about our current world, is that is where we want to start, with people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Not that you shouldn't pay attention to them, you should, but first you want to see, I think, what is it that makes them effective? What is it that makes them succeed?
I mean, if you take Prince Hal, for example, who becomes Henry V ... Of whom, by the way, I have a very dark view, that is of King Henry V.
Rebecca Burgess:
You do.
Eliot Cohen:
A very dark view of this is Henry V, the Shakespearean character. The real Henry V, I couldn't care less.
But you see him kind of having a glorious old time, hanging around with a bunch of lowlifes in the east cheap, in what's probably a brothel. And it's comic, and it's good fun. And here, again, you get to Shakespeare, the close observer. Actually, this is one of the ways in which Prince Hal is learning how to be a king, and that becomes clear, I think, later on in the play. But, again, you have to pay close attention if you want to see how this is going to feed into his ability to inspire people, to manipulate people, which he does a lot, and to rule.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. The setting is, in fact, quite important for Shakespeare. I know you spend a little bit of time talking about how important, when you're talking to those who actually put on Shakespeare plays, they say that figuring out the staging, figuring out the costuming, sometimes is where they start from. It's not the secondary consideration, it is where they start from.
For Shakespeare, the opening scene, the first scene, and the second scene of the first act, in fact, are always of prime importance. In Henry IV, it is so well done because you start in the halls of power before the king, and it's the exact same speech, the exact same dynamics that are in scene two with Prince Hal in the tavern. And so Shakespeare is telling you, here is politics high and low, here is England, for Prince Hal to figure out how to govern and rule England. He's going to have to figure out how to understand both of these on their own and how to tie them together. And I've always thought, gosh, darn it, that's so brilliant, how can we not do that, too?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, you're absolutely right. You always need to pay attention to how Shakespeare sets the stage initially. It's also very important, I think, to pay attention to the very end, where he'll occasionally drop this little thing on you, where, if you pay close attention, you go, aha.
So at the end of Henry V, for example ... Throughout you've had the chorus, who is cheering Henry the V on and saying, "Oh, how can we possibly capture this guy's greatness in just this little theater of ours here, and touch of Harry in the night," all that stuff. And at the very end, the chorus says, "Thanks for being here. By the way, he died young, and his son was an infant, and all his conquests kind of fell apart. And we've talked about that before. See you later."
It's just a couple of lines, but if you look at the end of that, of Henry V's story, you go, listen, why does Shakespeare put that in there? Why does he have to end on a two-line downer?
And I think the reason is he's explaining a lot of the stuff that went before. One of the things that I talk about, I use, there's a technical term for it, it's what the Greeks called anagnorisis, where you suddenly realize the truth of your situation. That's what happened to Wolsey there, where he goes, I've been swimming on a sea of glory, and, poof, it's all gone.
It happens to individuals, but it can happen to us as readers of Shakespeare and people who observe Shakespeare. I think if we read it closely enough, where you go, "Oh, oh, that's what's going on."
But just to connect it to the real world of politics, that's very important too. I think one of the problems that we have when we talk about foreign policy, military affairs, and so on, is a lack of close attention to what's going on right before our eyes frequently. Governments, in particular, fall prey to this, and I've seen it firsthand, but I've also seen it in other places as well. You get caught up in government talking to itself, you get caught up in highly classified this and that, and you forget to say, "Whoa, that's right in front of me, that actually means something," and to pause and reflect on what it means.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. And there's a timing aspect to that as well, right? And I wonder sometimes whether the pace of government in our daily life is just so frenetic now that we ... Unless someone is astute enough to carve out some time for themselves for reflection, the reflection doesn't happen. And the consequences of that, of course, as you just mentioned, we see all the time. But I've wondered about that, especially recently, since my own time in coming to DC, which has not been as glorious as yours, I'm still laboring in the analytic vineyard ...
Eliot Cohen:
It's still early yet. I'm towards the tail end, you're at the beginning.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. Right, right. And we'll talk about that arc of power soon, so you can tell me the pitfalls to avoid. But I've wondered: Have we taken away the ability for our leaders, for ourselves, to have that moment of anagnorisis, of actually understanding the situation in front of us? Barring some huge kind of cataclysmic changing of the guard, which happened with Putin invading Russia, and then, of course, all the events on October 7th with Hamas and Israel. But should it really take something so profoundly catalytic for us to have these moments of, oh, the real world actually has changed from how we have been talking about it?
Eliot Cohen:
So, to get very serious for a moment, I just came back a week ago from eight days in Israel, where I'd led a small military and national security delegation to meet with a lot of people there high up. And they've just gone through this shattering experience. And, of course, one of the things ... I'm actually writing a piece about this for The Atlantic.
One of the problems is that for the people at the very top they don't actually have time to process any of that. And the surge of emotions is such that you can't really expect them to process it. No, I think it's a very large problem.
One thing I've always been struck by, and I made a bit of a study of some of the decision-making during the Second World War, it made a big difference that Churchill, when he would go to meet Roosevelt, would sail across the Atlantic, which meant that he would have three or four days where he wasn't checking emails, and he could think things through. And I think wise executives do try to carve out that time.
I was, for my sins, I was a dean for a number of years at Hopkins. And one of the things that I learned, I said, I wanted to get an executive coach because the situation we were in was pretty difficult, and I wanted to get all the help I could get. She was a wonderful teacher and is now just a good friend. But that was one of the things she always emphasized, you've got to figure out a way to give yourself blocks of time where all you do is you think. And that's when I began taking really long walks every day and without headphones on, without listening to music, just long, long walks and I think it's a critical thing. And I do think that we've lost it in another way. I think a lot of senior political and military leaders don't have the time to immerse themselves in Shakespeare…I don't know, J. R. R. Tolkien, I mean something that is deep and fascinating other than what their day-to-day lives are like, and I think they suffer for it.
Rebecca Burgess:
So, to turn to the actual contents of your book, I love the taxonomy of power that you give, so essentially, your theme is power and the arc of power, and there's almost a little bit of a Homeric cataloging of ships in how you go about in acquiring power and exercising power and losing power. So, how does one acquire power? For Shakespeare, of course, there are three different ways, and you give us those.
Eliot Cohen:
So, the easiest way is inheritance. Now, of course, a lot of the plays that I use are primarily the histories, one or two of the tragedies, some of the Roman plays, but preeminently the history plays. And you might say, "Well, okay, fine, if you're living in a monarchy, of course, the crown prince inherits, but what relevance does that have to us?" Well, actually, it has a lot of relevance because if you stretch the concept of inheritance a bit, that's where it's not the case that you've... Let's take a particularly pointed case right now. If you become the president of Harvard, it's not because you've necessarily worked your way to the top in a difficult competitive environment. You've been picked and you enter into it. Now, in the past, it was the accidents of birth, I suppose, but it's not the same thing as building a business from scratch or building any kind of organization from scratch where you have acquired power, you've been selected somehow, which means that at some level for anybody in that situation, it's not something that you've acquired on your own.
Rebecca Burgess:
Figured out the mechanics of.
Eliot Cohen:
Right. And with all the learning and the scars that are associated with that, and inheritance is a fraught thing. The reason why Henry V is successful as a king, I think, is because even though he is inheriting the crown, first, the process is very difficult. He and his father have a terrible relationship. It isn't even entirely cleaned up at the end before Henry IV dies. But what Henry V has figured out is he actually has to earn this. And I think a lot of people who get picked for very high-level positions, one way or another, don't fully appreciate that. They don't fully appreciate that, actually, even though they have been selected, they still have to earn it. That's a very difficult lesson, I think, for lots of people.
I then talk about how people acquire power by means, which might be somewhat underhanded, sort of maneuvering. And that's really the Henry IV case. I mean, there's a bit of crime there. He does kill his predecessor, but it's not simply a criminal seizure. It's some of the dark arts. And Washington, DC is filled with people who practice the dark arts. And the challenge there I think, is for people who often have used somewhat underhanded means to get where they are again, to establish legitimacy, and they too have to earn it.
You have the third mode that I talk about is seizure, where it's basically a crime. It's what Macbeth does. He kills off his predecessor, and then... And, of course, the problem that he faces, which he recognizes, and he does it anyway, is that once you've seized power by murder, you have to keep on killing people. And there's a big difference between him and Henry IV, Henry IV maneuvers Richard II out of power. He later on has him killed, but that's a separate matter, whereas in Macbeth, it's straightforward. I mean, it's bloodshed. And there, too, people don't usually do that nowadays in organizations and bureaucracies by actually literally sticking a knife into somebody.
But if you hang around any organization long enough, sooner or later, you will see somebody turning around and finding a knife that has been planted in their back frequently by somebody they didn't expect. And then people are living with the consequence of a seizure powered by a coup. And I guess the larger point for all three methods is that... Actually, people sometimes think, "Okay, once I'm in charge, things are cool." No, that's when it all begins, actually. And you always have to work at ways, people find themselves always having to work at ways to make their power legitimate and to make it effective and to be able to hold onto it.
Rebecca Burgess:
That's one of the really interesting contrasts, I think. Similarities in contrast, as you mentioned between Henry IV and Macbeth, is when you get to Henry IV, Part II, Henry, now King Henry, realizes that the exact same arguments he used to oust his cousin, Richard II, can be used in turn against him. And how do you prevent that? So, he made appeals to competence. He made appeals to his own ability, to justice, all of these things.
But in effect, it really came down to he had a greater ability and a greater kingly sway and that was what was legitimate, trumping the blood, trumping all of these things. And suddenly, he realizes, "Oh, there are these generals lords on my borders who are also very militarily competent who are winning some of these wars for me, and now they're looking at me, and they are discontented with me. How do I stab off suddenly?" And you talk about that legitimacy question and how that also affects Prince Hal. He, as prince in waiting, as king and waiting, it turns out that is the most dangerous position and most difficult to be in because he is an automatic threat to his own father. So he can't be serious around his father. So, from the perspective of the one coming up to power, how do you guard yourself against your own father so that you can get the foothold to establish rule?
Eliot Cohen:
It's a very common thing. One of the points I make in the book is that Shakespeare is fascinated by the politics of courts. And again, you might think, "Well, okay, we don't live in monarchies," or, I mean, the Brits do, but we don't. And even that is a different kind of monarchy for sure than it once was. But actually, if you think about any organization, it's a court. The guy or gal at the top is the king or the queen. There may well be a crown prince who's sort of designated. By the way, that's not always the case in Macbeth, and under Scottish law, the king can pick their successors. So it's not necessarily going to go down to his son. That's one of the issues that Macbeth confronts. You have various courtiers who might think that, "I'd actually be a much better king than the current king." There's usually a court jester or two. So that phenomenon, I've seen it in universities, I've seen it in the State Department, I've seen it in the Defense Department. It's universal. People live in courts.
The other thing is the shadow, just to go back to Henry IV, the shadow of illegitimacy. The good thing about inheritance is it involves a certain kind of legitimacy, whether because you're the son or daughter of the king or because there's been some sort of formal process that everybody perceives as legitimate for the selection of the next CEO. When people have acquired power in not entirely legitimate ways, I think one of the fascinating things that Shakespeare shows us is it never goes away.
So in Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, when Henry V is feeling sorry for himself, he's about to manipulate his men into thinking that he's one of them, which he isn't. He tries to buy God off. He says, "So I'm going to give lots of money to the church, and I've got people singing psalms. We're going to rebury Richard II." It's one of the reasons why I think he's such a creep. He is a guy who feels he can manipulate everybody, including God. But the main point here, I think, is he knows that what his father did was illegitimate, and some of the shadow of that falls even on him.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right, yeah. Well, I must admit to being one of those who are swayed by the rhetoric of the chorus, and I buy in, I buy in.
Eliot Cohen:
So here's the fascinating thing: you're not alone. I mean, I once did a test when I was teaching this to a bunch of my very bright students, and I kind of go through the whole litany of why I think... Look, he launches an unjust war. He is quite cruel in these show trials he does of the conspirators against him. He orders the hanging of one of his best friends. He is kind of deceiving his men about what he really thinks about them. He orders the massacre of a whole bunch of French prisoners of war. Again, Shakespeare just kind of gives you a little note about that, and then it goes on to the other stuff. And then he seduces this French princess, except it's also, there's a bit of a threat of rape in it. So I say, "There are all those things. Okay, now having said that, and thinking about the Agincourt speech, 'We few, we happy few.' How many of you, if Henry the V were to walk in here right now and say, 'Follow me,' would follow him?" Everybody's hands-
Rebecca Burgess:
All the hands go up.
Eliot Cohen:
All the hands go up. I should say, "Okay, teaching is dead. I failed."
Rebecca Burgess:
No, you're still doing the teaching. And then you say, "All right, and now, the next day, would you have regretted it?"
Eliot Cohen:
That also, again, this is part of Shakespeare's genius. If we look at our own reactions to some of these characters, that could be very instructive. I mean, the same thing with Richard III. He's evil. I mean, he murders his brother, he murders these two cute little nephews in the Tower of London. And you know what? We find him kind of funny and charming, and we like the fact that he breaks the fourth wall and he confides in us and he says, "Can you believe I'm getting away with this?" And against our will we go, "Yeah, that's pretty cool, isn't it?" And-
Rebecca Burgess:
See, he's an absolute creep to me. And I've always been like, "How does Anne fall for his wiles? How can that be possible? How can she be so blind? She hates the guy. She marries the guy. What is this?"
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, but don't you have any friends who did that?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes. Yes. I mean, I recognize the pattern, but it's not one I want to recognize. But so true. But back to a little bit of Henry, and I think this gets us to your next block of considerations, which is exercising power. Once Prince Hal becomes Henry—and side note, I have to thank you so much for not titling this book “Shakespeare for Situation Rooms and Boardrooms” or something like that, it kind of takes a lot away from it.
So Prince Hal becomes Henry and he has to reestablish his kingliness, his fitness to rule in front of his people on this stage, the stage of monarchy, the stage of nations, of... Well, it's the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, more or less, or the pre beginnings of it. And so he has to make certain all of his actions are seen by his courtiers and the world amplified. He is on a stage, he can't get away from that. How can he not distance himself from Falstaff? Because Falstaff, well, "Banish me and all the world," all of those things. All being said, he is still, not from a political standpoint, he's a liability for sure. He's also not a good citizen, really. And something needs to be done about that so that the youth don't take them as an example. So, how do we square those responsibilities and personalize them? Does personal responsibility take second place to political responsibilities once you are in office?
Eliot Cohen:
Oh, I think you put your finger on it. I think part of what you're seeing there is the dehumanizing effect of power. One of the things that Shakespeare does, this is something I think I always felt, but I feel more strongly now after immersing myself in this, is Shakespeare shows us how the exercise of power burns away a bit of your humanity. For me, the brutal thing is actually in... So first, let's begin with the Falstaff, who is humanity on some level. We love him. He's a rascal. He's funny. He has no illusions. He's probably the most beloved of Shakespeare's characters. Well, there are two moments in which we see that Henry does have to break with him. I think you're absolutely right, although Henry has also learned from him because what Henry has learned from Falstaff is this is what normal people are like. Henry is not a normal person, and in fact, people like Henry cannot be normal, and most very successful political people are not normal human beings in a variety of ways. The way Henry does it, though, is quite brutal. I mean, he-
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, " I know thee not, old man: fall to..."
Eliot Cohen:
"I know thee not, old man." So this is at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. Falstaff is hoping to cash in his chips, and he doesn't just say no, these are the words that every teacher dreads to hear from a former student, "I know thee not, old man." I mean, it's completely contemptuous. And then Shakespeare reminds us in Henry V in the opening scene, we are indirectly told that Falstaff has died and that the king has broken his heart.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Eliot Cohen:
And you do wonder: Was the coldness in both cases necessary, or did it reflect something deeper about who Henry really is? Which is my view. But like I said, I just-
Rebecca Burgess:
But your view...Yes, yeah.
Eliot Cohen:
I just think it's-
Rebecca Burgess:
It is absolutely fair. I mean, I think it is all there. I just want to indulge my being rallied by the noble speeches, if you will. All right, so exercising power, I mean, so you break it down into inspiration, manipulation, and murder, so force, keeping oneself in power through these ways. But maybe why is it that everyone wants power? What is it that power has that people are willing to pay such high prices to acquire it and to have it and to hold onto it?
Eliot Cohen:
I'll fall back on a conversation I had in graduate school with a wonderful woman. She was a political philosopher, Judith Shklar, who was the first woman in the government department at Harvard. Who was, as a child, had been a refugee from the Second World War. And there was a group of us sitting around the table of a political philosophy class, graduate students, all of us, very ambitious. At one point, she turned to all of us and she said, "There are two reasons why you might become a political scientist: either you're in love with power, or you're afraid of it." She said, "I'm afraid of it," and looked at us.
And I think it's... Ultimately, the craving for power means that there's something lacking inside you that you want to transcend or expand beyond. I think that the people I've known who are genuinely content with their lots in life don't want it and who have a sense of perspective. And that's why, I mean, we'll talk in a moment about why people leave power, but that's why the figure of Prospero and Tempest is so powerful. I mean, he knows he has to let it go if he's going to be a human being again. And it's why as people grow older, I mean, I know this, just feeling it internally, particularly if you've had a pretty happy life, which in my case I've had all kinds of satisfactions out there. You don't crave all the things that come with power and the responsibilities, the dehumanizing parts, you don't want it. I think when you still have these cravings, which haven't been internal cravings, which haven't been fulfilled in some other way, you do crave it.
Rebecca Burgess:
Side note because I don't want us to get too caught up in all the current relevance of Merchant of Venice, but that is one interpretation that a friend of mine and I kind of talked about with the ending of Merchant of Venice is: Why is Portia after brilliantly defeating all the legal minds of Venice, if you will, why is she content to go back to Belmont, this kind of made up fairytale place? And his response to me, and this is interesting, I'm the woman here, and he was a male professor, and he said, "Well, I think Portia realizes that the most important things are not going to happen in Venice. The most important thing is this little realm that she is able to control without having to disguise herself, all of these different types of things. But in the family life that she has created by choice, there is a refuge. Jessica, the daughter of Shylock, comes there."
And I thought, "Well, that is interesting too, and it is true." But what about for those of us who, and you talk a little bit about this, of the students or of Cymbeline, the old courtier trying to keep the young princes away from the court? All they want is to experience the life of the court because hearing stories about it is not enough. So is this the tragedy of the ambitious young person who thinks, "But I need this realm and this stage of politics to meet my meaning?"
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. Look, I think a noble ambition is a healthy thing. The desire to have the power to do some good with it and to have some notion of what that good is—that's an admirable thing. But I think, at the same time, it's important to know how it can be dangerous and how it's not enough simply to desire power. If you want somebody who desires power, it's Richard III. He has no idea what he wants to do with it, he just wants it. That's different from, I don't know, somebody like a Churchill who clearly wanted distinction, he wanted admiration. And if you want to get psychological, it does go back to his childhood, his relationship with his father and his mother, and all that. But in any case, with Churchill, it's clear he wanted to do something with it. And I think that's the critical thing, the critical distinction.
I used to have students who you'd say, "Okay, what do you plan on doing after school? What would you like to do?" They say, "Okay, I want to make policy." To which my response was always, "Great. What policy do you want to make?" And I very rarely got a good answer to that. And at the end of that conversation, I would say, "You might want to go and have another think about why you want to... I'm not saying you shouldn't aspire to be Secretary of State. That's perfectly laudable. But why? To what end?"
And I think as a teacher or as a mentor, that's the important question to ask. It's not to try to deflect people from the pursuit of power. Also, 'cause if that's in their nature, that's what they'll do no matter what you say, as Belarius finds out in Cymbeline.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. So Coriolanus seems a little relevant here, too, because he seems motivated by honor and glory.
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say.
Rebecca Burgess:
And so I think, particularly today, we have a very cynical view of power and those who approach power. And, of course, that's all imbued with truth. But on the other side of it, there's a nobler, if you will, aspiration in there, which is for honor and glory. And how do we square this, or how do we allow it? Or is it possible that there are some just motivated by that thirst?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. I mean, look, the desire for some kind of glory is a very important motivator for human behavior. For something like Coriolanus, it's success on the battlefield, for academics, it's getting to be a tenured professor at a major university. For other people, it's getting to be a CEO or maybe having a smashing podcast. But that, I think, will always be out there. The problem with Coriolanus is not only that he has zero political sense, but his desire for glory is coupled with contempt for everybody else.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
And I think that's the perilous part. And it has a profound naivete to it as well because the people that he honors, and one of the people who he honors, who actually turns on him, and that's Aufidius, sort of his rival soldier. He says, "A lion that I would be proud to hunt." he calls him at one point. Well, actually, there are a lot of problems with Aufidius that Coriolanus is not perceptive enough to see. So, that ultimately ends up as Coriolanus' real problem. Not his desire for glory, not his sense of honor, which is an entirely appropriate thing. It's more the narrowness of his conception of honor and glory and his inability to bear with other people.
Rebecca Burgess:
So, is inspiration in wielding power always manipulation?
Eliot Cohen:
I think it usually has some element of manipulation. It usually has some element of artifice. Churchill didn't just get up and give those speeches off the top of his head. He wrote them very carefully. He edited them, he chose his words very carefully. So, there always has to be an element of calculation. And if you want, you can call it an element of manipulation as well.
But again, that doesn't mean it's evil. I think it's just in the same way that I'd like to think I was a pretty good lecturer. Lecturing is performance art. And-
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
... if you don't think of it as performance art, you're not going to be good at it. And if it is performance art, well, you better think about the performance. You got to think about-
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Eliot Cohen:
... when you're downstage, when you're not, and all that stuff.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. I'm laughing because that was my moment of anagnorisis, if you will. The first day of teaching, I thought, "Wait, no one told me. No one told me that this is a performance as well."
Eliot Cohen:
It is.
Rebecca Burgess:
"And somehow, my brain has to be clicking at a high rate of speed here as well." And I remember thinking, "Oh, that's what makes a good teacher when they can combine those elements. Not just the knowledge, but the ability to deliver it with passion, so that bringing forward of your own personal connection with the text or the subject matter so that those in your audience are alerted that it matters."
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. You asked me earlier what I had learned from Shakespeare about international politics. I think one of them is the importance of theatricality and of staging of performance. I thought more and more deeply about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, particularly in the early phases of the Ukraine War, where he put his skills as an actor and as a director to wonderful use in mobilizing his own people and mobilizing international support in ways that I wouldn't have expected. So theater really does manage. And the politicians who are not particularly good are the ones who don't understand that and don't work at it really, really carefully.
Rebecca Burgess:
And that can be at all levels. I know you mentioned LBJ and the types of suits he wore, and Reagan did that, too, in the opposite. He had a very fine sense of fashion, but as president, in fact, he wore larger suits that were less tailored. They looked a little bit more everyman, and that was an important part of being the communicator, the great communicator.
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's true of all competent leaders, whether or not they're good people, is they are thinking about those things.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right before we turn to the losing power part of this, on the question of honor, again, I think you mentioned this in your book, I don't think I'm just imagining it is that difference between Hotspur and Prince Hal in terms of honor and glory. And King Henry IV thinks, or seems to think, that Hotspur would be a better heir to him. And it turns out, in fact, that would've been a disaster because Hotspur, he only has the hotness of his passion in the moment and no forethought, whereas Prince Hal kind of does, which brings in that honor's apparently not enough to-
Eliot Cohen:
No, it's not enough. And I would also say I'm not sure that... Henry V says that he's hungry for glory, but I think his sense of honor is different from Hotspurs. Hotspur is a more genuine human being, he's a more lovable human being. And you see that in his interaction with his wife, and that's clearly a loving match. Whereas the only thing you know about Henry V and Catherine is, it's a seduction with an element of coercion in it.
But for me, though, the thing that's interesting about that story is that Henry doesn't understand his own son. And he also doesn't understand what his kingdom needs. But you can understand why he, who is a very calculating kind of guy who has gone through a lot in order to get where he is but has always been sort of calculating, wants a bit of his opposite as his successor. You say, "I wish it was Hotspur. Was kind of bold and audacious, and he's fiery, and he's spontaneous, and he's unlike me." And it's one of those cases where it's a father wishes his son was something completely different. And maybe the truth is Henry V is even more calculating than Henry IV and arguably much more successful. And maybe at some deep, deep level, Henry IV knows that and doesn't want the rivalry there.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as all the Henry plays, the history plays are, is kind of charting that course from medieval England to post-medieval England and the modern age. But losing power, since we're on that stage, what happens when people lose power? Who walks away from it, and who simply loses it?
Eliot Cohen:
So one of the ways in which I think people simply lose it is they deceive themselves about how they got there and about who they are. And the classic case is Richard II, who really no longer knows who he is, once he's lost the kingship. When he's confronting Henry IV at one point, he's saying, "I've got this army of angels up there are going smite you down." And then he goes, "I don't have any friends at all." And he falls apart. I mean, he's a very interesting case because he is somebody who, once he's no longer king, there's no sense of who he is. He doesn't know who he is. And he says as much, which is quite remarkable, is that speech where he says, "I've wasted time and now doth time wastes me."
Rebecca Burgess:
Time wastes me.
Eliot Cohen:
And so, he's really quite a pathetic case. Somebody else who falls prey to her own magic is Joan of Ark, who I think is a figure really worth talking about than Henry VI, who attributes her successes to magical powers and other people attribute it to magical powers. But actually, if you look closely at the accomplishments that Shakespeare shows you, they're all very human kinds of statecraft and calculation and ruses of war and so on. And so, I've got a chapter there on people who convinced themselves of their own magic. And I reference Barack Obama, who I think was intoxicated and had people around him who were intoxicated by some sense of his magical powers, which, in retrospect, were very far from being evident.
But in terms of people who walk away, the two archetypes that I give are King Lear and Prospero. So King Lear wants the trappings of office but without the responsibilities.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
That's the thing that's so striking about him is he's going to divide his kingdom. He still wants to be treated as the king in every possible way, including the difference he gets from his kids, the retinue, all that. And he doesn't realize that if you give up responsibility and authority, that other stuff goes away.
Prospero is really a wonderful case because Prospero, who has all these incredible magical powers, decides to relinquish them. "I'll break my staff and bury it several fathom deep and deeper than the plummet. Ever sound, I'll drown my book.", his book of magic spells. And in the book, I said, "Well, why does he do that?" I mean, he's going to go back. He's been able to do all kinds of incredible things on this island because of his magical powers. Why does he make a big deal of relinquishing them?
And the reason why is, I think, he realizes that the exercise of power on that island, that magical power, but most power is a kind of rough magic, is dehumanizing. And the hint, again, is just a little thing. But Shakespeare gives it to you, is at the very beginning of the play when he's going to explain to his daughter Miranda, how they ended up on this desert island, stranded there and so forth. He says, "Okay, it's time for me to tell you how this all happened, but first, help me take off my magic robe."
So, there are two things about that. One is he realizes he cannot talk to his daughter as a father talks to a daughter while still being this all powerful wizard. But he also realizes he can't take it off by himself. He has to ask her to help him take it off. And so there's, I think, a wonderful insight there. And he is a different man at the end of the play. And it's not that it's necessarily a happy ending.
He's going to go away, and every third thought will be of death, but he's a human being. You see it in the way he treats the people who have been subservient to him, including even Caliban, who, at the beginning of the play, he's quite brutal towards. He's effectively saying, "Do what I tell you to do, or I'm going to torture you." And at the end, he kind of admits to the king with whom he's been reconciled and says, "Yeah, that guy's mine. I'm responsible for him." It's a very, very different tone.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. There's that whole, the shipwreck which he conjures up or the fake shipwreck. It doesn't quite happen. There's that interesting dynamic between him, who seems to be without empathy in that moment and sympathy, by the way, of watching the human drama, if you will, unfold. Which his daughter is just alive, too, and cannot distance herself from him. And she pleads with him. And so there's that, as you were saying, there's something about power that's potentially dehumanizing. You have to take that cloak off in order to remember, in a sense, why you exercise power in the first place in order to improve. Or I would say one ought to exercise power in order to improve the lives of those around one in one's state. But that's interesting.
But back to Lear, I think Shakespeare gives us such a pointed commentary on that wish of Lear. "That's literal madness.", he says.
Eliot Cohen:
Right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. Literal madness, now rage, rage against the winds as you're out of because there is nothing more foolish than to think that you can hold onto power but not have power. And that you're going to have a happy ending in that type of thing.
Eliot Cohen:
So often in Shakespeare, people deceive themselves, as in real life all the time. And that's why Prospero was such a wonderful counterpoint to him. At the end, he's not going to deceive himself, which means that he's not an entirely happy character. In the book, I draw the comparison with George Washington, who twice relinquished his power, both at the end of the revolution and then after his terms as president.
And George Washington was not a happy man in either case. I mean, he had all kinds of troubles that he was facing, but he was an infinitely more human character than he might otherwise have been. And it's one of the reasons why he is such an extraordinary figure in American history and why we were so lucky to have him.
Rebecca Burgess:
Plutarch, which I'm, like, duty-bound to always mention Plutarch when I can, but he is arguably Shakespeare's greatest teacher. And in Plutarch, we learn, and in history, we learn that, in fact, the statesmen, the generals who have given most to their countries, often have the most unhappy endings. They're driven into exile, forgotten, banished, or killed. And there's this question of gratitude you might say, which is something that let Lear become so alive about. And gratitude from the point of, "I gave my life in public service. What have you given me? And now you're just going to take it all from me." But I also wonder about—but is there a little note of legitimacy in the people sometimes doing that? Because how else would those people leave or give it up?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah. Or I think it's also sometimes you resent your benefactors, most of all.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Eliot Cohen:
But that's been no doubt. No. Look, I think that's, and Lord knows I've seen, and even to some extent, experienced cases like that where you've done an enormous amount of good. And your reward for that is going to be abuse. And I think that's why... And I'm not sure whether Shakespeare really fully conveys this, although maybe in Tempest, he does to some extent. One of the things that's really important for a powerful person to be able to do is really two things. One is first to take satisfaction in what you've accomplished, not in people's gratitude for it. That is a hard thing for people to do, because if you've been the center of...
Eliot Cohen:
... for people to do, because if you've been the center of attention, you want that validation, but you're not going to get it. But the other thing is knowing how to walk off the stage. Again, it's a theatrical metaphor, isn't it?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Eliot Cohen:
It is really important to know how to walk off the stage. And there are a lot of people in the political world, in the business world, in the academic world who've never figured that out.
Rebecca Burgess:
There are certain presidents or former presidents of think tanks who couldn't stay in retirement and had to come back out, and then the issues that caused within, which is a separate question about founders versus rulers and governors, if you will.
Eliot Cohen:
Absolutely.
Rebecca Burgess:
But I think, also, part of it is just that desire to power is, in a way, an exercise of temporal immortality perhaps. And giving that up is the confrontation as Wolsey once again does and prosper of death.
Eliot Cohen:
I remember talking to one very senior official in the defense department, and we were talking about somebody else who was really clearly at the point where they should retire. And he looked at me, he said, "Eliot," he said, "You have to remember for so-and-so the next big job is death."
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Eliot Cohen:
True enough.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, I know we're kind of nearing the end of our time, but I wanted to go back to King Lear just for a moment because that play is just so complex. But it also seems to me that Lear, in addition to his sin of wanting to have all the trappings of power, none of the responsibility, mistakes the rule of a kingdom for the affection of a family and doesn't understand that he could force affection in a way from his daughters. But that making that the test of political succession is, in fact, one of the pitfalls, say at least of a monarchy. But it's beyond a monarchy. It's always the test of legitimacy from one's designated heir or not.
Eliot Cohen:
It means, I don't think he knew what the meaning of real affection is. He doesn't know it with his youngest daughter. He doesn't know it with the one nobleman who really is genuinely loyal to him, who he banishes but who sticks with him. I think, in many ways, he's a great example of somebody who has been corrupted by the exercise of absolute power in such a way that his understanding of other human beings has shrunk. And maybe that's one of the conclusions to draw: is you exercise power long enough, there's an initial period where the exercise of power can cause you to grow. After a while, the exercise of power causes you to shrink, and Lear has shrunk. And although Lear is one heck of a depressing play, the redeeming part of it is he's grown back a bit at the end. He's grown back not only in his ability to recognize who the people around him really are, the bad, but also the good, but who he is. That line where he says, "I'm a fun, foolish old man," well, that's what he is.
Finally, at the end, he knows who he is, and that's not given to everybody. And self-knowledge is something that one should strive for. It's know thyself. In that sense alone, I would say Lear is an uplifting play.
Rebecca Burgess:
You begin your introduction in the book with a nice little anecdote about some people who see on the stage Goneril and all the rest of it. You know them, you've worked with them. I should have warned you at the beginning that I actually played Goneril once.
Eliot Cohen:
Oh, really? Oh, dear me.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, I did. High school, senior play. It was one of these things. I had no choice. You're given the role. And I thought, "Oh crap." And I will say, this is the fun of doing these things, of course, is we put on an excellent production, let us say. But for about two or three months afterward, there was a noticeable distancing of some people around me.
Eliot Cohen:
Now, was that because of them or because of you?
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, you know how effectively I've portrayed that role.
Eliot Cohen:
You're such a nice person. I can't believe it anyway. But I think there is a larger point there, which is particularly in the exercise of power, you're frequently playing a role, and after a while, you play the role, you become the role, and I think that's something that theater can teach you. And I've heard from professional actors that you play a character in a very serious way over a long season, it takes a while to deprogram yourself and to get that person out of your system. Well, for anybody who's powerful, something has to be an act. It just is. And you may become somebody who you weren't really, but I'm sure it was all about them, not about you.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. No one lost their eyes afterward. I don't have that-
Eliot Cohen:
I doubt you would go in for the eye gouging.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. It's a little too messy for my taste. But that lack of awareness, you've mentioned this a lot about Kloting, and I think it gets with Lear and maybe where we'll end up maybe about America today, which is those who grow up with power, those who spend a lot of time in power often forget how to wield power responsibly. And there's this lack of the effects of it almost, which you show with Kloting and how he is just cruel or just capricious in a way.
And that's why, initially, I wanted to needle you a little bit about Much Ado About Nothing. You have this prince and his little coterie—they come back from a war, and they're supposed to be the statesmen, and serious, they fight wars. And instead, what do they do? They create absolute havoc by just being like, "Let's play with the lives of these lovers, these men and women." How are we supposed to square that? Or what happens? How do we not have that? How do we find the medium between frivolity, which can end in death? Thankfully, it's a comedy, it doesn't. It could have been an Othello ending there with Much Ado and the horrors of Macbeth.
Eliot Cohen:
That's a deeper question about how do you become a serious person? And I think the answer is you don't become a serious person through the exercise of power or through, in that case, being successful in war. You become a serious person in some other way, which is much more introspective or reflective. And that's, I think, what we're missing. We talked earlier about how people don't have time. Among other things, they don't have time to read Shakespeare. They don't have time to read the Bible, they don't have time to read Tolstoy. They don't have time to do, or they don't make time for themselves to do the things that ultimately would make them much more serious, and those things have to lie outside politics. And I think the people who do keep an even keel, it is because of the things that are outside politics. It's because of a husband or a wife or a relationship with parents or religious faith or a deep, airy addition. You can find it in many ways, but you're not going to find it in the pursuit of power.
Rebecca Burgess:
To bring it up to America in the twenty-first century, that question of seriousness, I could say throughout the plays, throughout your book, you mentioned the importance of rhetoric. And it seems like today, not only do we have unserious politicians, we have very poor, rhetorically skilled politicians.
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, we do.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is this connected or do we put too much emphasis maybe today on rhetoric?
Eliot Cohen:
No, the problem is it's not that the opposite of good rhetoric is not no rhetoric. It's bad or misleading rhetoric. And I think in a lot of some of the tropes of our time on the right as well as on the left, you have slogans which are effective, which are rhetorically cheap. When you use the word rhetoric now, it means insincere speech. That's usually how people talk about it. What Aristotle meant by it was persuasive speech. And he thought that rhetoric was absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy because it's how you make arguments about things that are really important.
I think part of the reason for it, frankly, is just the decline of high quality education. If you look at a Lincoln or Churchill, very different masters of the English language, but both of them, they knew their Shakespeare, they knew their Bible.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Eliot Cohen:
And that enriched the kinds of speeches that they gave and the way that they made arguments. I think with a lot of politicians today, they don't really think it's necessary. Maybe they've been intoxicated by emails and tweets and Instagram and all that, but they don't understand the power of a well-delivered speech. Even today, even with all of our distractions. I have very ambivalent views of the Biden administration on Russia-Ukraine in particular. And one of the things that continues to baffle me is why we haven't had a series of powerful speeches about why this matters. It does matter to us enormously, and it's not hard to construct the case either. This is not esoteric. So why not? Where is it?
Rebecca Burgess:
It seems like we've forgotten in America, perhaps because the system works so well for so long that when you have institutions that carry forward the leadership in a way that you didn't have in monarchies, you still in fact do need the leadership of particular individuals, presidents, secretaries of state defense, others who have the microphone, if you will, to make the case. And that seems what we are absolutely leading.
Eliot Cohen:
I think that's absolutely right. The Cold War, you had the clarity of its beginning. You had John F. Kennedy, you had Ronald Reagan. You then had a period when the world seemed like a very benign and unthreatening place. It gets a bit darker after 9/11, and President Bush made some speeches. And then, after that, the world did not seem like a dangerous enough place, and the consensus didn't seem in peril enough for somebody to realize that they needed to get up there and make the argument. And unfortunately, the world is now a much more perilous place. This past year, I've been in Ukraine, I've been in Israel, I've been in Taiwan, so two war zones and one potential war zone. It's very serious. There are absolutely echoes of the 1930s, but we don't really have a Churchill delivering the speeches that begin to wake people up in time.
Rebecca Burgess:
Nor do we seem to have a common language, if you will. And I know you've done work in civic education and the importance of deep something that goes back to the Edie Hirsch of the deep civic literacy or cultural literacy that allowed a Lincoln to do what a Prince Hall did, which is everyone in America had a copy of Shakespeare, high and low, those in power, just common. Lincoln himself taught himself through Shakespeare. We seem to lack some of those texts or core texts or core images that we can pull from today, which makes a book like yours necessary on Shakespeare and politics. Though in a perfect world, everyone already would know that Shakespeare was important and relevant to politics. Given that situation, where's the hopeful road, the path that we can take forward?
Eliot Cohen:
Well, I think, let's go back to where I started, those bright-eyed freshmen at Johns Hopkins University. They were wide open to what Shakespeare had to teach them, and many of them were in the sciences and that were engineering, things like that. And this was not central to their worldview. And that's always, by the way, been my experience when I've had students who are not from liberal arts backgrounds or from STEM areas, I never underestimate the ability of young people to absorb fresh experiences. You just have to deliver it to them. And I think you see institutions and movements out there that are doing this, but you've got a teacher talking here. I think the solution to this is more education. Education takes place in many different ways, in many different places. People have the opportunity to shape this in their homes, in junior high, in high school. The universities are a different proposition, and I worry a lot about the universities.
But the truth is, I think the essential battles are actually fought a lot earlier than that. They're fought in junior high and high school. And that's where I think people should focus. And that's why I wrote those pieces that I've written about patriotic education.
Rebecca Burgess:
Hearts and souls of men, right?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, like the chorus in Henry the V and like Puck in Midsummer's Night Dream, I have to draw this to a close and ask our listeners for their blessings and their patience and all those wonderful things. Right before I do that, I'd like to give you the last word. Do you have a favorite quote or speech or character in Shakespeare we didn't get to cover that you'd like to leave us with?
Eliot Cohen:
Yeah, I do. It's from Julius Caesar, and one of the characters that I like, and this will sound odd, is Cassius, who always gets written off as an envious conspirator, which I actually think is not true. Actually, I think Brutus has the weaker personality. Brutus is the one who's vain. Brutus is the one who doesn't want Cicero around in the plot because he wants too much attention. Well, guess what Brutus wants? And Cassius is a much more realistic guy, and there is an element of envy with Cassius. But at the end of the day, they're friends.
And this is on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. There's this wonderful exchange. Brutus says, "And whether we shall meet again, I know not. Therefore, our everlasting farewell takes forever and forever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile. If not, why, then this parting was well-made." And Cassius responds, "Forever and forever farewell, Brutus. If we do meet again, we'll smile, indeed. If not is true, this parting was well-made." And it's a beautiful moment of reconciliation between two friends who had had a rupture. And the mirroring of the language, I think, captures that, and it captures an essential human dignity that, at the end of the day, they both have. And you know what? The guys who do [inaudible 01:17:10] don't have.
Rebecca Burgess:
It's a resonant ending, for sure. A resonant ending for this. And by the way, neither of us will exit pursued by bears.
Eliot Cohen:
Well, that's true.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, thank you so much again, Eliot, for doing this and joining us and having this great conversation. It was a pleasure to have you with us today.
Eliot Cohen:
Rebecca, I enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for having me on.
Rebecca Burgess:
Wonderful. That was Eliot Cohen. I am Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us.
Eliot Cohen:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Eckart Frahm joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient Middle East and his recent book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
“When time was young and world in infancy, man did not strive proudly for sovereignty. But each one thought his petty rule was high if of his house he held the monarchy. This was the golden age. But after came the boisterous son of Chus, grandchild to Ham, that mighty hunter, who in his strong toils, both beasts and men, subjected to his spoils. The strong foundation of proud Babel laid Erech, Accad, and Culneh also made. These were his first, all stood in Shinar land. From thence, he went Assyria to command. And mighty Nineveh, he there begun, not finished till he his race had run.”
Those are the opening lines from Anne Bradstreet's lengthy first of four poems on the earliest great empires called The Four Monarchies. She was no respecter for word economy. Her title runs The Assyrian being the first beginning under Nimrod, 131 years after the flood. A mouthful.
Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World poet. She emigrated to Salem from England in 1630, one of a group of Puritan pilgrims, just as she arguably introduced Assyria to the New World. So today, we'll be steeped both in novelties and in the ancientness of things, also via Assyria, the world's first empire, being our main topic of conversation.
And with that, welcome to a new episode of Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.
Joining me today is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Previously, Frahm was a research assistant and assistant professor of Assyriology at Heidelberg. He has also worked on cuneiform tablets in the British Museum in London and in the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, among many other museums and other collections. Professor Frahm, so many welcomes. It's truly splendid to have you join us today.
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor.
Rebecca Burgess:
This spring you released a new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire published by Basic Books. In an instance, I think of the Amazon algorithms getting things right. I chanced upon your book because, for my own research on empire, I'd been ordering probably a library's worth of books on Persia, Greece, and Rome. Also on Egypt by German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. And thankfully or coincidentally, you begin your account of the rise and fall of Assyria with a very dramatic story of a bloody encounter between Assyria and Egypt during the reign of Esarhaddon that results in the capture of the Egyptian crown prince, much of the royal harem, and with enormous amounts of booty being taken back to Nineveh, then Assyria's capital on the Tigris River in Northeastern Iraq.
Before me, cities, behind me, ruins is the inscription that encapsulates this classic imperialist behavior, rather reminds me of the Front Toward the Enemy warning on Claymore mines. But from that story, you weave a very richly textured account of Assyria as the world's first empire whose legacy in fact is the idea and form of empire, however protean you reveal that form historically to be. And it seems to me that in putting archeological artifacts, cuneiform text, and historical scholarship in conversation with Persian, Greek, Roman, and importantly biblical texts and attitudes, you set out to do at least three things with your book. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong later.
The first is to brush away the cobwebs of history from the picture of who and what Assyria was. The second to create an audience for the centuries-long silent voices of Assyrians themselves, who we can now hear in their own words. I thought that was a very lovely image that you opened with of these long silent voices suddenly being able to speak again. And third, to reveal precisely that Assyrian legacy to the world of empire and the surprising modernity, if you will, of what's been called the first half test of the history and the relevance of that age to our own pandemic, great power competition age.
As you weave in so much of this cultural history, I hope our conversation can touch on, not just the politics, but the deep cultural echoes that have concealed as much as revealed Assyria throughout history, from Herodotus to Shakespeare, Rossini, and Lord Byron, to perhaps the particular staging of Adolf Hitler's suicide with his wife and dog. And to Saddam's very kitschy, anonymously published 2000 romance novels inspired by Assyrian warriors and queens. And with that, the almost beginning. What is the surprising anti-imperial origin story of Assyria as you put it?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. When you hear of Assyria and you know a little bit about it, then you usually think of Assyria as this great imperial power, this militaristic, geopolitical entity, and that is what it will eventually become. But it is indeed quite remarkable that initially, Assyria is almost the opposite of an imperial state. In fact, there is no Assyria at the very beginning. Assyrian identity starts off at the little sort of town on the Tigris, some 60 miles or so south of the modern city of Mosul, the city of Ashur from which Assyria of course eventually gets its name. This is also the name of the Assyrian state god worshiped there. And it really is just a small place initially in the third millennium, largely dominated by southern powers. Remember we are here in Ancient Mesopotamia where writing, and cities, and all these things were for the first time invented in a way.
But this happened primarily in the south, in Southern Iraq, in places such as Uruk, or Ur, and so on. And during much of the third millennium, the city of Ashur was probably largely dominated by those southern powers. Actually, we don't have particularly good evidence for this time. But when for the first time sources allow us to reconstruct life at Ashur, and Ashur, so to speak, really enters the stage of history. It is a small city that doesn't receive its wealth from war, but instead from trade, from long-distance trade. So this is something quite striking. While in the south, a number of city-states and territorial states seem to be engaged in almost perpetual warfare with each other, Ashur stays away from the fray. And instead, merchants from the city of Ashur engaged in long-distance trade, mostly trading tin from the East, and textiles from the South, and also made in Ashur itself by women from the city trading this for silver in Anatolia.
We have a lot of evidence for that from a place named Kanesh in Central Anatolia, some 24,000 clay tablets. This is the type of document on which much of the reconstruction of Assyrian history actually rests. They are almost indestructible. Fortunately, these people didn't write on paper, papyrus, or parchment, which wouldn't have been preserved, but on clay. So we have these texts on there. And what these texts reveal about the city of Ashur is interesting that at this time, this is a city not ruled by powerful kings, but rather one which has something kind of akin to a mixed constitution in the way Polybius has described it for Ancient Rome that is, you do have a kind of dynasty of hereditary rulers. But rulers isn't even the right word. And these people weren't allowed to be called kings, and their power was very much restricted.
So they were allowed to put their names on texts, temples, and things like that. But there wasn't even a palace. They didn't even live in a palace. There wasn't a royal court or anything. And they shared the little power they had with two additional institutions. One was the city assembly, kind of a popular assembly of free male citizens. So of course, Ashur too included women and slaves. Probably not that many slaves, but still there were slaves, who were not part of this. But nonetheless, I mean, an almost democratic institution that would, for instance, deal with legal matters. And there was also the institution of the so-called Limmu, as it is called in Assyria and it's often translated as Eponym. On one hand, this was the individual after whom individual years were named.
And that indicates that this Limmu was in office only for one single year. He was selected by lot, probably from the leading families of Ashur, certain aristocratic dimension to it. This idea of choosing politicians througha lot has actually just saying that in the sidelines received some interest by modern political scientists who are not particularly enchanted with the quality of the political class these days, and believe that we too might profit from such a process. Anyway, they do this. So they have these eponyms in place who are in charge of the city hall, where taxes are determined, rates and measures, and things like that. So these two institutions compete with the institution of the ruler, was not called a king. So it's actually altogether a political situation that seems really remarkably modern in many regards.
Rebecca Burgess:
It seems more accurate then to say that Ashur was a city-state, and one that predated Greece. So perhaps Herodotus is not quite correct or needs a correction, an outside correction when he, in his account, rather binary account of Greece where everything is liberal, and free, and the barbarian other, which is very intriguing. But also on that note, I was struck by your invocation or your quote of an inscription from a stela that was erected near the Step Gate, a structure in Ashur where justice was administered, precisely about this question of justice and royal rule.
So the quote is, "May justice prevail in my city. Ashur is king. Erishum is Ashur's steward. Ashur is a swamp that cannot be traversed, ground that cannot be trodden upon, canals that cannot be crossed. He who tells a lie on the Step Gate, the demon of the ruins will smash his head like a pot that breaks." It's very direct and very dramatic. But there seems to be a direct linkage of the divine royal power and justice and even nature, the physical world of nature. So you touched on this a little bit. What can be pieced together of the dominant understanding of justice in relation to the ordering of society at Ashur, and everything from the religious cult of Ashur to the lack of palaces that you mentioned?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. I mean, this being a Law & Liberty podcast, it's of course absolutely right for you to ask the question about law and legal practices. And yes, you're right. There's this text that talks about law being administered at the so-called Step Gate, which is near a place where later the ziggurat, the temple tower would be located. At this time, probably it wasn't yet there, and where this popular assembly would actually come together and deal with these matters. It was not something that was solely handled by a very small group of elite members, but it was really all these free individuals, apparently. They were in charge of administering law. And it seems, based again on documents from Kanesh, as though in this location near the Step Gate, there were a number of stelæ inscribed with actual law.
We haven't found those. So altogether because all these early, well, layers are very deep down. The site of Ashur haven't really been reached by archeologists. Most of this is known from this other place on Kanesh. But what we learned there is that those stelæ included laws such as, for instance, that no one, no merchant in Ashur was supposed, on punishment of death actually, to sell gold to anyone from Babylonia or from the Hurrians, who lived around the city of Ashur. So this sort of economic protectionism in place, and gold was apparently considered primarily a medium for storing wealth rather than for exchange. Exchange was actually handled through silver. So silver was the money of the ancient that he is including. The money in this earlier Assyrian history. So this is just one example of those laws inscribed on those stelæ.
Now, the people of Ashur were not the first to have the written law. Written law is actually an invention from Ancient Mesopotamia, and it started not that much earlier. So these laws would be from the 13th century, perhaps BCE. The earliest written law that we actually have documented is from Southern Mesopotamia, from the reign of a king by the name of Ur-Nammu, whose law code, the Ur-Nammu Law Code is from roughly 2090 or so. And we see already with that law code, and then later with famous law codes, such as the Laws of Hammurabi, which are the most well-known laws from Ancient Mesopotamia, that these laws often have some monumental dimension. So the Hammurabi Laws, some of your listeners may know that they are primarily known from a large stele with an image of Hammurabi receiving insignias of power from the Sun God, a stele that is now in the Louvre in Paris. And there are some 300 laws inscribed on it.
So what the people of Ashur have in place with this law is nothing that they invented where they came up from it first, but they too participate in this legal discourse. And this law is guaranteed in a way. This is what this inscription that you mentioned shows. It's guaranteed and execution is supervised, well, by the God Ashur. And this inscription says something else, namely that Ashur is the actual king. I mentioned that the hereditary rulers of Ashur were not allowed to use the title king. That title of king is reserved for the God Ashur. So with that, in addition to these earthly dimensions of governance in Ashur, you also have a divine dimension. There's an almost theocratic element to it. And to a certain extent, we might be able to talk about it a little later. This conception of Ashur being the actual king of Assyria remains in place.
You also quoted these strange statements about him being a swamp that cannot be traversed. So in very nature, that's very unusual for Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, otherwise, the gods have anthropomorphic dimensions. They behave and look like human beings. They participate in all sorts of events, and wars, and have families. Ashur does not really. Eventually, he gets these things from other gods, but he's very malleable. He's in a way a god without qualities almost. I mean, that's actually quite convenient as Ashur undergoes some major transformations over time. The god too undergoes these transformations and becomes a more warrior-like deity. Initially, it isn't that at all. But when Ashur becomes a more belligerent state, then the God Ashur too assumes the qualities of a warrior god, and so on.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, speaking of those transformations and that gravitation towards more belligerence. So there's around the 14th century BCE, which you identify as the proper birth of Assyria. You note how Assyria kind of abandons its more peaceful mercantile ways and embraces policy of military expansion. What transformations are occurring internally in Assyrian political and social institutions that are prompting this? And who are those peoples and kingdoms that Assyria is now seeking to dominate?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah, the big difference really is that now in the 14th century, you suddenly actually do have a king, and I would say, of Assyria, because this is now actually becoming a territorial state. But first and foremost, there is now a king. There's an individual who bears that title, which in Assyrian, Babylonian as well is Shahu. And the first for whom this title is attested is a king by the name of Ashur-uballit, who was probably instrumental in the transformation Assyria undergoes during this time. Unfortunately, this happens in the wake of, well, a kind of dark age. Dark, primarily because we do not have too many sources. And so, it's actually somewhat difficult to establish exactly what prompts this very significant change that takes place. But we do see the outcome. And the outcome is that there is now this king. We actually have fragments of a coronation ritual from a little later, but probably already in place, at least in similar form in the 14th century.
And in this coronation ritual, you still have this notion of theocracy. There still is the priest shouting to everyone during the coronation of the king, "Ashur is king. Ashur is king." Twice, actually. So there's this notion that Ashur remains king. But then, there is also now a kind of earthly counterpart. And that is, well, the king of Ashur at this point. I mean, this Ashur is king is reminiscent of medieval coronation chants such as, "Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!" Christ is victorious, he rules, he governs. But there too, of course, it's in the context of a king being put into office. And that's the case here as well. And the god through the priest then asks the king of Assyria to expand his land. So Rapesh Matka is the Assyrian. So there is a divine command to the Assyrian king in this coronation ritual to expand the territory of Assyria.
So a kind of proto-imperial mission is expressed here for the first time. And that is what these kings from this period onwards actually do. Very much in contrast to the so-called Old Assyrian period about which I've talked before. They now go on campaign almost on an annual basis. And the King, sort of starting in the 14th century, expanded primarily first into the North and the East, so that cities, such as Nineveh and Arbela, which later on would become emblematic urban centers of Assyria, were included in this territory state. This is kind of the core area of Assyria. It's marked by this triangle of cities with Ashur in the south. Nineveh, opposite of the modern city of Mosul in the north. And in the east, the city of Arbela, which is modern Erbil in Eastern Iraq. But then, they also expanded to the West. So towards the Levant, especially towards a region known as the Khabur Triangle, a very fertile area and a tributary of the Euphrates River, where they sort of create a second center of power, thereby really becoming, I mean, one of the major players, political players of this time.
And they also became interested in the South. They engaged in numerous wars with the Babylonians. This is another sort of light motif of Assyrian history, this preoccupation with Southern Babylonia. The Assyrians acknowledged they received a lot of their culture and their religion from there. The relationships are very much like that between Rome and Greece in this, and also in other ways. But they also want to kind of politically dominate Babylonians. The Babylonians are not too keen on that. So there's the beginning during this period of a constant set of conflicts that are very charged because of the emotional nature of the relationship between these two places. So all these things essentially happen now and remain major features of Assyrian foreign politics for centuries to come.
Rebecca Burgess:
And it seems like as Assyria is barreling towards empire, one of these classic problems shows up, which is suddenly you have military leaders and heroes who can take away from the authority and rule of the king. So how does Assyria, one, how do they keep their military commanders and heroes in check? And how do they keep informed about the security threats on their perimeter? What kind of storylines should we be having in mind as we're seeing the king seemingly lose some power in regards to some powerful court officials as they're on the brink of empire?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. We see that, for the first time, this conflict between the king as the absolute ruler and someone competing with him for power. Well, you see it for the first time essentially sort of in the 13th century and the 12th centuries BCE. When a viceroy, that's his official title, was implemented as the Assyrian representative of Assyrian power in this Khabur area, began to try to gain his independence.
So this western part of the kingdom, I wouldn't call it an empire yet, and the eastern one. The eastern one is the core one. That's where the actual King has his residence still in the city of Ashur at this time. But during this time for the first time, you actually see how in the West, this viceroy is trying to gain more power. There are conflicts. So rush through the history now, because it's impossible to really talk about all the details here.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Eckart Frahm:
What happened around 1100 or so is, and especially around 1000, is that Assyria underwent a major crisis like all the states in the Levant and in the Middle East at that time. It's often linked to the famous Sea Peoples who, well, invaded Egypt around 1177 BCE. Their arrival was probably prompted by factors such as climate change that led to further migrations. At any rate, Egypt is under pressure. Large states such as the Hittite Kingdom disappear entirely, being destroyed in the wake of attacks by marauding migrants it seems, and the details aren't entirely clear. And it takes a little while until this chaos reaches Mesopotamia, which is located further east, including Assyria, but it does reach Assyria. And so, around 1000, Assyria is really limited to its core areas.
But unlike most other politics in the area, the Assyrian dynasty, most importantly so, stayed on. So there's never an interruption in the dynastic line. Actually, the dynastic line remained in place uninterrupted under the late 7th century. So for about 1000 years, which is really quite remarkable. And that means that when the dust settles... In Assyria, especially the Arameans who attacked, well, the various Assyrian cities and so on. When those Arameans begin to settle and when it seems precipitation increases again, and therefore, the agrarian output becomes again more abundant, the Assyrians are the first to profit. And it is then in the 9th century BCE under kings such as Ashurnasirpal II who moved the political capital to a new place, the city of Kalhu, its central Assyria, and his son, Shalmanesar III, that the Assyrians first regained their former territories.
And then, under Shalmanesar even moved beyond. So for the first time now they really also campaigned on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. They go find Anatolia and so on. But they do not yet annex any of these places. And what happens in the wake of Shalmanesar's reign is that a number of nobles, so-called magnates, the great ones in Assyrian provincial governors, and especially military officers who have control over armies in border areas again begin to seize power at the expense of the crown. Now, many of these people at this point seem to have been eunuchs. And that, of course, is for a reason because the kings want to avoid exactly a scenario where those guys start to create dynasties of their own. And that has essentially been successful it seems. So we have not really any evidence for any of these people really sort of forming family dynasties.
But we do see that for much of the first half of the 8th century, they call the shots. So there are now people, especially this general by the name of Shamshi-ilu, who is all over the place and who has inscriptions written in his own name rather than that of the king, who usually before had a kind of monopoly on this kind of memorialization. And so, we see these people really gain a lot of power. This discussion within the scholarly community and whether this really should be considered, well, a crisis or whether the agency that these people had might not also actually have contributed to Assyria in the long run actually profiting becoming, especially in economic terms, more powerful. And I think that latter point of view certainly has a certain legitimacy. But there will be a crisis eventually in the mid-8th century.
Rebecca Burgess:
So that crisis you note, it's curious what happens instead of Assyria collapsing in on itself. In fact, it embarks on a hundred-plus years of imperial dominance. So Assyria is now an empire. How does it remain so successful?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. If I may perhaps just say a few words on this crisis, because it is indeed very surprising that after the crisis, Assyria suddenly gained this enormous power. And because this is actually one of the new points in my book, and also perhaps resonates with our own time. I would like to just say this, between 765 and 745, Assyria undergoes a really difficult time. And I believe one reason for that is a plague. So what we see is that hardly any campaigns are undertaking anymore. The army stays at home. We have a number of sources that tell us that. And there are actually rebellions against the king. That's two mentioned in the Assyrian sources. And I believe that a major cause of all this was actually epidemics.
Because important chronological texts on Assyria tell us that there were at least two bouts of, well, plague, epidemics ravaging Assyria at this time, so during this period, things really didn't look very good. And then, suddenly with the year 745 and the rise of a new king by the name of Tiglath-Pileser III, Assyria suddenly expanded massively. By the end of the reign of this King, it ruled over all of the Levant almost, has conquered significant parts of Israel, for example. It has expanded to the East. It rules over Babylonia twice as large as it was before. Tiglath-Pileser also annexed many of these places, that is, he turned them into Assyrian territory, taxed them rather than just extracting tribute.
So this is, in my view, when Assyria becomes an empire. And then, of course, the question is, well, how is that possible considering that before there was this really pretty disastrous crisis? And I would say, well, what we see here is that... I mean, history is not determined by laws. I mean, you can adapt if the challenge is not too big, at least. And here I would say what Tiglath-Pileser does is he adapts, he compensates for the loss in wealth and also in labor. Lots of people probably died. By conquering new places, extracting their wealth, and then also deporting literally hundreds of thousands of people. So the Assyrians are always deporting people from other places, bringing them to new ones where they would serve as a labor force.
But under Tiglath-Pileser, the numbers increased dramatically. And I think he does it in order to make up for the losses that Assyria had suffered before. I also think that probably this epidemic had also affected other places in the area which would have made it easier for Tiglath-Pileser to conquer these places. Also, it's clear that, of course, the disaster cannot have been that bad, that no troops were there at all anymore. But I think there was a real crisis, and what Tiglath-Pileser does when he kind of invents the idea of empire, creates the first empire, in my view at least. The world's first empire is that he reacts to the crisis.
Rebecca Burgess:
So empires are synonymous often with conquests, militaries, and armies. So I'm wondering if we can spend a little time talking about the military. Here, the Assyrian military, how they organized it, and how violent it was, or any Assyrian tactics, or behaviors actually were in their relation to their enemies on the battlefield. We have, of course, through history. And as you point out, it might be a little bit of a blackballing of Assyria in this regard. Maybe they weren't as violent as they are portrayed.
At the same time though, there are some indications that they could be pretty violent. If I remember right, there may have been some indications of cannibalism, also frequent skinning of enemies, and public display of the flayed flesh. And then, of course, the boast of Sennacherib. And I know I just said that wrong about Babylon, that he had dissolved it in water and annihilated it, just reminds me of course of Rome and the sowing of salt in the fields. Yes, if you could just explain maybe a little bit about the military in this area.
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. I mean, this is a question I think is important and it needs to be addressed when you talk about Assyria. So just a few words about the army. Of course, the army was an extremely important institution in Assyria in the first millennium. Without the army, it wouldn't have been possible to conquer all these different areas. Well, it included a standing army stationed in the capital under the control of the King. But of course, it would have been impossible to just go out, and with this fairly small army to do what the Assyrians eventually managed to achieve. So there were also army contingents, army units elsewhere, in the provincial capitals. Assyria at this time was organized into provinces. In the end in the 7th century, I think roughly 70 provinces or so. Each of them had a capital with the provincial governor and all those governors also had to entertain army units.
So when a king would go on a campaign, he would gather up those army units as he went along. And the Assyrian vassals, that is kings or formerly independent kings, who were clients of the Assyrian kings, too, had to provide army units. The Assyrians were very open to, including in their troops, specialists from other places. For instance, the Assyrian chariotry was made up, to a significant extent after the conquest of Israel in the late 8th century, by contingents of chariots from Samaria in Israel, so the capital of Israel at that time. And there were other such foreign components of the Assyrian army. Of course, the Assyrian army went on campaign, would often act in violent ways. And the Assyrian kings described this violence with a great deal of detail. What I would say here is though that, first of course, the Assyrian kings are not the only ones.
Somehow though there's a lot of focus on those Assyrian inscriptions when it comes to descriptions of islands. But for instance, when you look at inscriptions and images from Ancient Egypt from the New Kingdom, you see too how soldiers heap up large amounts of hands and penises of slaughtered enemies before Pharaoh. So Egypt is not just of nice dancing girls depicted on the walls of some tomb. You have violence being very aggressively marketed in a way in Ancient Egypt as well. And of course, violence was also simply used by everyone in the ancient world. I mean, up to today, of course, violence is something that is being implemented by most states at some point. When you compare, let's say, the behavior of the Assyrians with that of, let's say, the Romans. My feeling is that the Romans probably were actually more violent. So what's also important I think is that we might be a little bit misled by those royal inscriptions.
The royal inscriptions focus very much on violence. And it is the question of why they do that. I mean, some have argued, well, deterrence. However, many of these inscriptions were not really accessible to enemies. So my feeling is more like they were set up often. I mean, in Assyrian cities, of course, they were consumed by the Assyrian elites. So one of their main purposes may have been sort of to immunize those who were expected to go to war with respect to using violence so that they wouldn't be afraid of doing so because this is of course one of the big problems. When you have an army, you must make sure that the army is somewhat willing to engage in killing. We also know, of course, that the Assyrians often preferred diplomatic solutions over violent ones. So if there was a chance to talk an enemy or a rival into submission, they would certainly go for it.
When you look at the situation in Jerusalem, as it is described in the Bible, the attack by Sennacherib, whom you mentioned. Sennacherib is his name. You mentioned in 701 he attacked Jerusalem. And in the Bible, you have a story of how the chief general talks to people there, and says, "Okay, just give up. And okay, we will deport you. But we will do so peacefully and we'll settle you in some nice place where you have your own fields, and gardens, and everything will be great." And of course, this is propaganda, but that's also important to keep in mind. I mentioned the deportations. Of course, deportations are acts of violence. No one wanted to be deported. These were acts of body snatching, but these were not genocidal acts. So what is important, and this is really a big difference, let's say, from modern states such as Nazi Germany or so. Sometimes the Assyrians are compared to those, and I think that's problematic.
The Assyrians had no interest in mass killing. The Assyrians wanted a labor force. They wanted people to be able to pay taxes. They also needed anyone, I mean, to be of a certain religion, or ethnicity. So they had no prejudices at all in this regard. They wanted a well-run efficient state. And for that, they needed people, on one hand of course, to be obedient. And so, deportations would make sure that, well, local loyalties would be dissolved. And they wanted these people to be able to do work, mostly in agricultural work, but also construction work, wherever they were needed most. And so, they sent them to these places. So many of the Israelites were deported after 720, the famous biblical story of the 10 lost tribes. I mean, these tribes are not lost.
They actually were settled in different places inside and on the margin of the Assyrian empire, including in Media, and also in construction sites. For instance, in Khorsabad, where Dur-Sharrukin, where this king Sargon build a new capital. And that's where we find them mentioned. And occasionally we have texts, for instance, about these people from Israel on the Khabur River and Gozana, where they are part of the local community and seem to live quite nicely. So again, I want to idealize it. This is not, I mean, how things should be obviously. But I think it's important to, not to exaggerate the degree of killing and make clear that, again, it was important for the Assyrians to have actually a large population for the Assyrian kings.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. That question of the propaganda of violence or of strength and the relation to the directness of publicizing a violence that they may not have actually done, at least to that extent, in practice. It made me wonder about that because, of course, as you note, you don't find any of these royal inscriptions where they admit their weaknesses. No king wants to admit their weaknesses. But then, that was an excellent point you made. And I do a lot of work around veterans and militaries in society. Well, that's one of the questions that always is, how do you enable your soldiers to be able to be effective on the field?
But then, how also can you enable them to come back within society? This question of the social sanctioning of violence in particular areas. And that's a very interesting point of this also being in play there. So thank you for mentioning that. But another kind of aspect of this question of violence I wanted to ask you about. It seemed as though it was tied maybe to some of the specific Assyrian beliefs about the dead, and some of the practices in relation to the burial of the dead, and their treatment of ancestors. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that.
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. I don't know if violence in particular would be linked to it, but I'm very happy to talk briefly about Assyrian beliefs about the netherworld, and perhaps about one particularly exciting case of where the burial did not occur and the consequences for Assyria, but also beyond. So in Assyria, just like in Babylonia and Mesopotamia in general, I would say, beliefs about the netherworld were quite similar to those of the Greeks and the Romans. So unlike in Egypt, the netherworld was considered a place that wasn't super attractive, where you would drink water rather than wine, and eat bread rather than cake. Of course, there was a very strong belief you needed to be there. What was very, very problematic was if you were not properly buried, and your ghost roamed around anywhere, that would be a threat to anyone left behind living.
And of course, it would also be a very unhappy fate for the dead. So what the Assyrians usually did, was they buried their dead in subterranean vaults. If they had enough money to have a decent house, under their houses. So in places like the city of Ashur, many houses were found with these vaults, basements were essentially skeletons in their closets, where once a month at least the children would go down and make a small sacrifice to their parents or grandparents and ancestors. So this is how this worked. And for Assyrian kings, it worked actually quite similarly. Only that their tombs were apparently much more lavish. None were found undisturbed, but we know where those tombs were located. They were the royal tombs. I mean, were located in Ashur in the so-called Old Palace, where the Assyrian kings continued to have a kind of temporary residence even after the capital, the court had moved to other places. First at Kalhu, and later on actually Dur-Sharrukin and Nineveh.
So the idea was to bury your king there once he dies. But on one occasion, in the year 705, King Sargon II – the one who actually deported those Israelites along with Tiglath-Pileser – Sargon went on a campaign to Anatolia to a land named Tabal from which he would not return because the army was defeated, the king was killed. And what's worse, the body of the king could not be retrieved. So it disappeared. Somehow it was taken away by the enemy. And that was clearly considered a really problematic issue. And you can sort of see that a whole discourse unfolds among the Assyrian elite about what this all means. If something like that happens, the idea is here then the gods must be displeased. And there's actually a text from later times in which Sennacherib seeks to establish the nature of the sin that Sargon must have committed, and so that he was killed in this rather terrifying way.
It's also interesting that Sennacherib then moves away from the newly built capital that Sargon had just created in Dur-Sharrukin, and creates a new capital at Nineveh and great expense of course. So clearly, he doesn't want to be in the shadow of this king who died under these very problematic circumstances. And we see, for instance, an Assyrian scholar. We have a lot of information on these scholars, intellectuals, and so on, copy the 12th tablet of the famous Gilgamesh Epic on this occasion. And in this 12th tablet, Gilgamesh and Enkidu talk about the fate of those who die. And the text ends with people who die on the battlefield and cannot be buried. So clearly, this is in reaction to all this unhappiness about the death of Sargon. At the same time, you can see in Israel that, of course, where Sargon is remembered, I mean, he has just conquered Israel and he has been aggressively trying to bring Judah, the Southern Kingdom, under certain control as well.
He is not very much beloved. And there in Isaiah, Isaiah 14, we find a kind of mocking that's related to his king. So their fun is poked at this king who was so haughty, and who climbed up the highest mountains, and was this great man, and was then though brought down, and not even buried. Buried away from his tomb as the text says. And here, I mean, what one can then sort of see is the strange ways, well, sometimes religious ideas develop. There is one line in this text, in this Isaiah text which reads something like, "How have you fallen from heaven? Oh, Day Star, son of the dawn." I mean, this statement is of course meant here as a metaphor, but later on was taken literally.
Jesus says somewhere in Luke, I think Luke 10 or so that he saw Satan fall from heaven. And the fathers of the church took this up, combined this New Testament passage with the passage in Isaiah 14, and said, "Okay. In Isaiah 14, this is actually a reference, well, to Satan, to the devil." And this Day Star, son of dawn, was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, as he has fallen as light-bringer, and in the Latin version of the Bible as Lucifer. So quite literally, I mean, at least one name of the devil. So here you see how some poor certain king who happens to fall in enemy country, and his body cannot be retrieved, becomes an archetypal model for the devil in the later history of the evolution of this theological idea of absolute evil.
Rebecca Burgess:
The etymological transliterations, if you will, are absolutely fascinating. And there's so much. We could do a whole podcast just on the Bible, the Torah, and Assyrian history. You've mentioned a little bit of the interactions between the Assyrians, Sennacherib and his father, and both kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And I know we need to kind of move forward because there's so much to talk about with Sennacherib. I want to talk about his wife and the role of women. But just have to note that how could we not talk about this and mention that famous episode that Lord Byron later dramatized with his spectacular poem with its opening line of, "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." It was just so memorable with the destruction of Sennacherib.
And it's an episode that Herodotus seems to mention in book two where he describes the defeat more in terms of field mice and once again pandemic. So it's kind of again two things that you have mentioned about these competing narratives of things that are happening. But I'm wondering if we can move towards this question of women and some of these powerful queens. Sennacherib's wife, Naqia, seems to have been extraordinarily powerful in her day. And she seems to have enjoyed ginormous influence over her husband and actually to have exerted power. And she's the only one to have left a building inscription in royal style, for instance. What does her story reveal about the role of women in the Assyrian Empire and her possible connections to the unraveling of that empire?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. So Assyria from the beginning is fundamentally a patriarchal society. So men are the ones who call the shots to a significant extent, but women have a lot of agency as well. And that was already the case in the Old Assyrian period when the city-state of Ashur engaged in this long-distance trade. All these husbands were away, of course, trading on Anatolia, and their wives were sitting at home in Ashur and were managing the household, and were managing the production of the textiles to be sold, dealing with the children, and essentially dealing with everything. So we have lots of letters written by those women, who were quite clearly literate, an important thing to keep in mind. They complain with their husbands about things not being quite right and the way they should be, and make very good suggestions of what should happen. So often enough, we were actually the ones who played an instrumental role in making all these things work.
But you asked about politics. And yes, even though the Assyrian King List is an important document about this Assyrian dynasty that was in office for such a long time, it's called the King List for a reason because it only includes the names of male rulers. It is very clear that women in various periods played very significant roles. One very famous is a queen named Shammuramat, an Assyrian who was sort of active around 800. She was the mother of King Adad-nirari III, who was probably minor when he became king and went on campaign with or for his son. This is mentioned in the inscription. And later becomes the model for the famous Greek femme fatale, Semiramis, who is a sort of archetypal, oriental female despot, fascinating. I mean, licentious, all of sorts of things. In many regards, a Greek projection of course.
So everything the Greeks thought was wrong in these, but also fascinating because it, of course, put into question weak narratives about male superiority. But the best evidence for this power of women actually does come, as you mentioned, from later times from the reign of Sennacherib and his son, Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon who ruled from 680 to 669 BCE. This is the time when Naqia, his mother, really seems to be an extremely important figure in many, many instances, really making the important decisions. So, she probably is instrumental in Esarhaddon actually becoming king. He is actually a younger son of Sennacherib. Naqia somehow manages to make sure that he succeeds Sennacherib. Naqia has actually received certain prophecies along with her son about Esarhaddon becoming king. And then once he is king, as you mentioned, she writes about herself building a palace for her son.
We also have a number of letters written to her by members of the Assyrian elite. Some are about sort of traditional female activities such as sacrificing to gods and being engaged in the cult. But there is also a very interesting letter by a general from Babylonia—at that time, Assyria ruled over Babylonia, talking about the need to repel the Elamites, so about to take a bridge. And that letter is addressed to Naqia. It is not addressed to Esarhaddon. Why is that? Probably because Esarhaddon seems to have been in very bad health for much of his reign, and he seems also to have been depressed. So he spent days and days in the dark. And his scholars would write him and say, "This is not how well you as a king should act. After all, you are an image of the Sun God. And the Sun God comes out every morning, and you need to do this as well."
But he doesn't, and he doesn't eat, he doesn't drink. So, this may be one of the reasons why Naqia is so powerful. I personally wonder, and I can't prove that, whether there might be something else. This is the time when the Assyrians have just, for the first time, really encountered, well, in somewhat major ways, the Arabs. So they have been engaged and traded with the Arabs, but also in battles against Arab tribes. And the Arabs are, well, a problem for Assyria because they are extremely flexible. Of course, they move from one place to another. Their cities, they have a number of cities, are protected by hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert. So it's very hard to get there.
What is particularly striking is that, during this time, we learned this all from the Assyrian inscriptions and not from any other sources. We learned it from the Assyrian inscriptions. They are ruled by women. So, those Arabs actually have queens rather than kings. They had a few kings, but most of these rulers were actually women. And they are not just playing cultic roles. They are really there when campaigns take place. They're the ones who call the shots politically. And I can't prove it, but sometimes, well, an empire doesn't only sort of influence its periphery—it can also be the other way around. So the periphery influences things in the center. And I wonder whether these encounters with this Arab gynecocracy, this rule of women, may not have encouraged at least attempts by women in Assyria to do this as well.
And Naqia is not the only one. Later on, we have others. Naqia, by the way, then imposes loyalty oaths on all the people in Assyria when she fears after Esarhaddon's death. She must make sure that Esarhaddon's own success, Ashurbanipal, is really accepted as the new king. And so, it is Naqia in whose name these oaths of loyalty are to be sworn. So there's another example of really having a lot of power. Later on, during the reign of Ashurbanipal, a sister of the king is negotiating between Ashurbanipal and the then king of Babylon, a brother of Ashurbanipal who has defected. So she's sent there to negotiate. There are literary texts about this, which are quite interesting I found in Egypt. So again, a woman charged with a very important diplomatic mission. So clearly, women, especially in the 7th century BCE, did play a big role in Assyrian politics.
Rebecca Burgess:
That is very fascinating. I'm very glad that you brought up Ashurbanipal. For anyone paying attention living in San Francisco, his statue is in fact right in front of what was the former Main Library in San Francisco. And this brings up a really fraught but interesting and fruitful conversation. And you do spend some time with this, is shows how, in this figure, we see the combination of how beauty and learning can coexist with cruelty and sadism. And how, from our perspective today, we can look at this figure and think, "Oh, look at this wonderful Renaissance man. This king who loved learning and wanted to gather all this knowledge, he's just like us." But at the same time, he was a very cruel man. Probably would not want to be our friends. So what is the lesson, if you will, from the figure of Ashurbanipal?
Eckart Frahm:
I mean, I would answer with the German philosopher Waler Benjamin having famously quipped, "There's no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." There's some truth to that, I think. This is what you can really observe when you look at Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal reached the age of the height of Assyrian art. When you look at reliefs from Ashurbanipal's palaces in many way, this is remarkably beautiful. Especially these reliefs where the king hunts lions. The depiction of these lions and other animals is very naturalistic. This is extremely artful. And, of course, you mentioned it—for us, the modern sort of Assyriologist is particularly important. But in general, of great significance is the fact that he created the first universal library. So he created a library at Nineveh—some 30,000 tablets and fragments were found there in the mid-19th century, still providing kind of the basic stock of what we know about Babylonian in literature because he collected everything, not just from Assyria, but also in particular from Babylonia.
So he does all these things. And yet, at the same time, when you read his inscriptions, you encounter a man who is spiteful, who is really brutal. And yes, they were all kind of brutal, of course. But you have the feeling, whereas other kings just did deserve, as a matter of course, that they occasionally would inflict violence. Ashurbanipal is an almost sadist pleasure in describing this violence in great detail. So enemies are forced to grind the bones of their fathers, and then harness to chariots. They have to draw, and things like that, so they're bound together with beards, and dogs in the city gate. You see Ashurbanipal banqueting with his queen and what seems like a very idyllic scene at first glance, drinking wine sort of in a little vineyard at Nineveh.
But when you look closely, you see that the head of one of his greatest enemies, the Elamite king, probably Teumman, hanging down from a tree. So it's this ambivalence. I mean, I think Ashurbanipal is, of course, usually really presented, well, in the counts of the Assyrian history as the apogee of Assyrian power. And in some regards, that's correct. But it also is a turning point, I think, because towards the end of his reign, with his reign, Assyria was now in charge of Egypt, in charge of Babylonia, and Elam in the East was conquered. At no other time was the Assyria as extensive as it is under Ashurbanipal. But towards the end of his reign, he lost a lot of territory. And it's, again, very hard to determine the causes. I mean, the question of what brings about the fall of the Assyrian empire is one of these big questions, of course, that will never be answered in such a way that everyone will agree, I think.
But I do believe that Ashurbanipal's failure of leadership on some level played a role. Ashurbanipal sort of, I think, made the mistake that he put these professions of greatness that all Assyrian kings were usually providing. So they were the greatest scholars, and warriors, et cetera. But Ashurbanipal, unlike the other kings, he put these professions to a series of public tests. So he really sort of had an arena built, and then slaughtered lions before an audience at Nineveh. And I can't imagine that this was not somewhat ridiculous. I mean, the lions were probably sedated or something. And then, he was well protected. He claimed he was this great warrior, but he also, it's clear from a number of inscriptions, that he actually did not go to war at all. He hated it. He stayed at home. There was a very convenient prophecy in which someone had seen the goddess Ishtar telling the king, "No, just stay home, eat, drink, and make merry, and the rest I will do for you."
This is a tradition that's later associated with the figure of the Greek Sardanapalus kind of caricature of Ashurbanipal as an oriental despot. And in many ways it is again a caricature, but there's also some truth to it. He claims to be this great scholar, but when you look at what he actually wrote, the letters that he exchanged with some of the scholars, they explained the most basic things. And people may have noticed. They may realize, well, this guy is actually claiming all these great things, but he doesn't really do anything. And it may have led slowly but steadily to a loss of grip on the part of this king. And well, as time went by with very weak kings following him, eunuchs taking over. This was then probably one of several reasons, of course, leading to the fall of Assyria around 612 by the hands of the Babylonians and the Medes.
Rebecca Burgess:
That self-inflation of his own scholarship reminds me just a little bit, and it's, of course, not to the same degree at all as these accounts of Napoleon writing to Josephine and telling her all about music and schooling her in music, and his own opinions are just quite terrible. It's kind of amusing. Of course, Napoleon was a military genius and all these other things, so he did have some things to brag about, I guess you could say. So now, we're at this moment of collapse. And you mentioned that there is this big historical mystery that Assyria falls, and it's an event rather than Rome, a protracted process of decline, sudden, abrupt, and brutal.
And of course, there are these notes throughout of a rhyme between Rome and Assyria. And what I thought was interesting or noticed was that Assyria kind of stood, if I'm getting it right, to Rome as, say, Rome stands to America often for us today, or even for the British Empire, is this kind of cautionary tale or morality tale of, look what happened here. Let's not do that kind of thing against the wall that we look at. But Assyria, in a sense, has a different cultural legacy. There is that legacy, but it has much more of a legacy.
And I wonder if we could turn to some of those questions of the legacy. And we have Xenophon's account. He's marching through where Assyria was, and maybe not noticing some of that. And then, there are other instances throughout the culture. And I mentioned Shakespeare and Rossini at the beginning. There's the opera. In Shakespeare, it's the very hilarious little scene between the weavers, the weavers play, where King Ninny's tomb shows up in A Midsummer's Night Dream. But coming up to today, you end with a discussion about the cultural legacy of Assyria and something that happened with the war in Iraq and ISIS in 2015. And I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit.
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. I would say there are probably three legacies left by Assyria. So one is the idea of empire. The Assyrian Empire came to an end between 612 and 609, but the idea of empire lives on. And there was a successor empire right away, the Babylonian Empire. And the kings of that Babylonian Empire, most famously Nebuchadnezzar II, who brought the Jews to exile. They used the imperial toolkit the Assyrians had created. So provincial organization, specific types of bureaucracy, taxation, and a mixture of direct indirect rule, the mixture of diversity in ethnic, linguistic, and religious terms, et cetera. All this is characteristic of Assyria. The way they manage the empire is not completely taken over by the Babylonians. A few things they do differently, but they take many of these things over.
And when the Babylonian Empire came to an end in 539 BCE, after some 70 years or so, a larger new empire, the Persian Empire, took over. The Assyrian legacies may be even more pronounced, because what we can see when we look at the Persian or the Achaemenid Empire is that, for instance, when it comes to art, the Persians follow much more the Assyrian model than the Babylonian model. And there's an entry from Cyrus in a cylinder inscription from Babylon, the first inscription and the most important inscription he left altogether after the conquest of Babylon in 539. He singles out the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. So, Assyria really is very much of the model empire for the Persians. And then, the idea of empire, that's the medieval idea of the translatio imperii sort of an empire moving on from one iteration to the next.
Of course, as this happens and as time goes by, the image of Assyria fades away a little bit but it is the very first element in this long chain, I think, and that is important. So this is one important aspect. Another one is the stories told about Assyria. I mean, particularly the stories told in the Bible. We briefly talked and we didn't really talk at length about Sennacherib at Jerusalem, which is absolutely fine. But this is a very long story told there in great detail. And for the biblical authors, Assyria really clearly also is the first empire. And it is a great problem, and they talk a great deal about it. They provide us with the names of many of the kings, and they're quite accurate in some cases—even princes and so on are mentioned. Assyria for the Bible also is, I think, important in that the idea of autocracy that empire represents is adopted and used to create a new revolutionary image of God.
So rather than the king who is in charge of everything, it's suddenly God. This is a complex process of this evolution of monotheism and is not just something that comes out of the encounter of the Israelites with the Assyrians. That would be too simplistic. But I do think one important element in that story is actually this transformation of the Assyrian royal ideology into a religious idea of divine omnipotence. So this is the second important legacy. And the third is what? And that brings me perhaps to the end of your question. I mean, what you find on the ground. I mean, you rightly said that the fall of Assyria was more an event rather than a process if you compare it to Rome or so. And indeed, it was a dramatic moment. I've called it the First World War. These many wars wage between 616 and 609.
It involved the Babylonians, the Medes, the Egyptians, the Chaldeans at some point, the Urartians, many others. That was really, really drastic. And it ended with the great Assyrian cities all massively destroyed, so Nineveh was gone and Ashur was. But then of course, it's also important to keep in mind that not everything was entirely gone. I mean, there were lots of shards, but they were still there. And for instance, in Ashur, where everything had started, Assyrians also continued at least for quite a long while. So for instance, we have Aramaic inscriptions from Ashur from the 2nd century AD, so some 800 years after the fall of the city, where people still talk about worshiping the god Ashur and his wife, Serua, just like these 800 years earlier. So somehow the temple of Ashur survived, the worship of Ashur continued in Ashur, and not everything was entirely gone.
And we also see how as eventually Christianity takes over Northern Iraq, how Christians in this area begin to identify with the Assyrians. So there are stories, for instance, about the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, converting to Christianity from a chronological point of view or rather sort of strange assumption considering that you would from 705 to 681 BCE, but there you have it. And you have other stories about some Assyrians being involved in Christian ideas. And you have, I mean, especially then since the 19th century, a very strong sort of Neo-Assyrian identity. Assyrian Christians in that area consider themselves the descendants of the Assyrians. And you mentioned the statue of Ashurbanipal in San Francisco. This was something that was created by a member of the Assyrian community, of course. So there is some continuity in fact in place.
And it is, therefore, all the more regrettable that in recent years, I mean, essentially since the 19th century, these Christian communities have really suffered a great deal from persecution and attacks by a variety of different people and are now dispersed all over the globe, essentially. There are still some people in this place near Mosul, or in the [inaudible 01:03:43], or in other areas originally part of the Assyrian kingdom. But most of these Assyrian Christians now actually live in Europe, and in the United States, or some centers like Chicago or so. And it is, of course, also extremely regrettable that, as you mentioned, ISIS, many of these Assyrian sites, such as Nineveh or the Palace of Ashurbanipal II in the city of Kalhu, were assaulted by ISIS and dynamited or destroyed in some other ways in the past year. So this, of course, was all extremely pressing to observe. Yeah, in this regard, things have not gone well certainly over the past years.
Rebecca Burgess:
But as you note there, in no way am I condoning such destruction, of course. But you also note that in fact it has revealed some new things. As you mentioned, there are all these layers and they go down so far. And in not wanting to disturb some, of course, with respect, you don't touch it. But by some of this destruction, there have been some new discoveries made. And I think throughout, your book is actually quite hopeful, which stands a little in contrast to many of these types of books about empire, which often are these languorous cautionary tales.
But before I get to the final, final question about the hopefulness that you have found, both perhaps for Iraq today, and for perhaps Israel and Arabs. I had this one more complicated question. One of the other stories that is in the background of your book is how other empires, later empires, the French-British Empire, in fact, we owe to their imperialism much of the uncovering of the Assyrian Empire and this archeological excavation and learning, which it's a difficult question, right? How should we feel about that? Is it not a question of feeling? What is the kind of intellectual stance to think about how we rely on other expressions of power and imperialism to uncover these legacies of knowledge?
Eckart Frahm:
Yeah. This is a difficult question. You're right. You're absolutely right.
Rebecca Burgess:
You can give a short answer, and we can-
Eckart Frahm:
The rediscovery of those sites. I mean, rediscovery should be in quotation marks because sites like Nineveh were never entirely sort of lost. People there knew this was the Ancient City of Nineveh. It was a place where the tomb of Jonah was, for instance, located and things like that. But the rediscovery, let's say, of traces of the actual Assyrians of the cuneiform tradition, the decipherment, this was very much largely a Western project in the 19th century. And it just so happened that this was the time when Western Imperialism was at its height. It is important I think also to remember, of course, that at the time, these sites were part of the Ottoman Empire, and neither the British nor the French nor anyone else was a colonial power there. So, the British and French individuals were usually actually quite small numbers of people who did those excavations and had to negotiate with the local pastures. It was very complicated.
And okay, they may have cheated them occasionally, but they were also of course on the part of the Ottoman authorities permissions given to them to excavate things. So this is the reason why so much of this stuff is now in the British Museum or in the Louvre when we talk about Assyria in particular. It is of course, however, in the long run, a problem that in many places in the Middle East, sort of thinking about Ancient Eastern history has been perceived as a Western preoccupation, and it shouldn't be. And it is, therefore, of course, extremely important that in places like Iraq or Syria, where local identities are also grounded in the ancient past. And that is, of course, in fact what some of the dictators of recent decades have started to do. I mean, Saddam in particular has done this identifying, to some extent, especially with Babylonian kings like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II, but also sort of playing with the Assyrian legacy.
And here, again, the problem was of course considering Saddam's extremely problematic legacy in terms of human rights, and so on, that others might have then taken that as a reason, in fact, just not to endorse any of this. And for ISIS, of course, it was... I mean, there were all sorts of reasons to destroy these sites. I mean, they wanted to, of course, annoy Westerners. And they knew that if they killed any local people, this would not actually get them the same types of headlines as when they actually started to blow up some Assyrian bull colossi or reliefs. And they were right. Unfortunately, this is how it went. It got a lot of traction when this all happened. So yes, you're also right, though, of course, that maybe, I mean, six years ago or so, I would have been much more pessimistic. I would've thought, okay, this is the end essentially of everything there.
But it's actually quite striking in what shorter period of time, for instance, in Mosul, which was completely destroyed. Things actually have been turned around, at least to a certain extent. The city is now in a better shape, much better shape again than it was after this complete destruction after liberation in 2017. And in fact, new excavations have taken place. ISIS itself, I mean, while claiming that it would destroy all this stuff because it was idolatrous, et cetera, of course, also sold things from those sites excavated and sold it on the antiquities market. But for that, they created tunnels underneath one of the mounds in Nineveh. And those tunnels have now been explored by archeologists from the University of Heidelberg. And they have uncovered, for instance, a new throne room with two thrones. One is probably that of Esarhaddon, and the other one, we don't know. Either it was that of Naqia, his mother, or it was of his successor, Ashurbanipal.
Very interesting question. So exciting new stuff is indeed coming out. And that's the thing. I mean, you think things are, it's all over, and then it goes on. So another colleague of mine, Karen Radner from the University of Munich, has now started excavations at Ashur, which is under threat from a dam that's being built of inundation with all sorts of problems, of course. I mean, she has been able to pull it off along with Iraqi colleagues and so on. I, myself, have been in Baghdad last year. I mean, it hasn't been super easy, but I was able to go to the museum, work in the museum, and look at texts from Ashur that were excavated there when I was the epigrapher on this occasion in 2001 and disappeared during the chaos of the post-invasion period, 2003, et cetera.
But they were retraced, and so I was able to study them again, where I tried to sort of work on those. Now, it's what I have to do the next month and get them out next year. So yes, things go on. And it could be that it goes the other way around, that there's another massive crisis. I think everything is unstable, of course, not just in Iraq, but all over the place. But there are also opportunities. And I think all of one can do, especially when you're a scholar, is use those opportunities out there. And I think what is really important is that, first, we need to make sure that local stakeholders are being involved in all these endeavors. So Iraqis themselves, of course, are extremely important, and they need to be in charge of these places and need to endorse them.
And it is interesting that the destruction at Nineveh, these attacks on these bulls when you listen to the audios, the people speaking in Arabic and saying why they are doing it. These were not people from the region. These were the people somewhere from the Gulf. And I've heard from colleagues and friends from Mosul that they're very much opposed. And many people in Mosul were not happy about what was going on. So people on the ground often actually do feel like this is their stuff and they want to preserve it. And so, again, there are, I think, opportunities to enhance collaboration, to explore this world even more. I mean, there are lots of very interesting questions that remain unsolved, and I would be very curious to know more about them.
Rebecca Burgess:
We touched on only a tiny portion of even what you cover in your book. I mean, you have given us a legacy to think about just as Assyria gave the legacy of empire to the world to think about and explore further. Final, final question. What is the most hopeful thing or one note of hope that you uncovered in writing this book?
Eckart Frahm:
I don't know if hope is the right word, but I would say-
Rebecca Burgess:
Optimism?
Eckart Frahm:
If you want to take something away from it. I would say one thing that I have tried to highlight is that, it's not a good idea to essentialize culture. I mean, it's a bit an unusual book for me to write. I had to also leave my comfort zone, and think about early history of Assyria. And by my primary interest is actually sort of more in the first millennium. But what I discovered of course was then how much it changes. I mean, we talked about it a great deal. And I think it was a good idea that it is, initially, Ashur has this mixed constitutions, these democratic elements, and eventually it becomes this autocratic state. So things can change. And there's this idea Hegel and particular pointing this out that the world's spirit in order to come into itself had to leave the East where everything was autocratic, and monolithic, and flow to the happy world of the Greeks where everything was free and great.
I mean, I don't want to downplay any of the despotism and so on that you can, of course, find in those regions over extended periods of time, but it doesn't have to be like that. So you can find historical precedence for very different types of societies. I mean, this is something that I think is important to keep in mind. Don't essentialize people. And then also, again, what I said when I gave you my previous answer. It looked some six years ago as though we would never be able to go back to Iraq. And now, there are quite a few very ambitious projects collaborating with Iraqi colleagues, who are actually quite open-minded about this and trying to uncover the ancient history of this place. It's always good I think if identities are not based on only one thing.
So if it is Islam, that's fine. But if it's something else too, I think that's great and that's important. And so, that's what I would hope for, that multiple identities can thrive, whether in the East, in the Middle East, or elsewhere in the world. And I would also say, I mean, the Assyrian Empire of course is perhaps interesting compare also to... I mean, today you mentioned it, empire has a bad name for good reasons, I would say. And most sort of "empires" wouldn't define themselves as empires, but you still have imperial structures in place in various ways. I mean, what I would say is when America, United States... I mean, some 10, 20 years ago, my book would have received greater attention because empire was the big thing. I mean, it was endorsed for many years.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah.
Eckart Frahm:
This has, of course, changed enormously. But the United States is still, I would say, in terms of communication, internet, et cetera, it's the number one sort of empire, so to speak. Everything works through the United States. And this is something the Assyrians were very good at. Royal roads, communication networks, et cetera. You have the aggressive nature of the Assyrian Empire as you see it play out right now. For instance, with Russia's attack on Ukraine, clearly also an imperial war. And you have a certain commercial aspect. The Assyrians always, even during imperial times, encouraged trade that you find perhaps in China, which has its own sort of specific imperial tradition. So all of these different aspects of imperial power. I mean, neither of them draws on the Assyrian model. But the Assyrian model, the first empire gives us all of these already gives us sort of stuff to think about when we think about our own world.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. The rhymes of history.
Eckart Frahm:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
If you will. Since you mentioned Hegel, of course, I have to make this analogy at the end. You have been an owl of Minerva for us, giving us so much to think about and great insight and wisdom. And thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Frahm.
Eckart Frahm:
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed your last comparison.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, good. Well, good. Once again, that was Professor Eckart Frahm from Yale University discussing his book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. And this is Liberty Law Talk. And I'm Rebecca Burgess. Thank you for joining us.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Comedy writer Graham Linehan joins host Helen Dale to talk about cancel culture, comedy, and his new book Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
Helen Dale:
My name is Helen Dale, and I’m Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. With me today is Graham Linehan. Graham is the writer and creator of multiple beloved British sitcoms, most famously Father Ted and The IT Crowd. With so many star-studded successes to his name and multiple BAFTAs—including a coveted lifetime achievement award—one would assume his place in the nation’s comedy firmament would be assured. Well, it was—until it wasn’t. Graham Linehan was one of the first prominent people in the UK to raise concerns about gender identity ideology (in 2018). He did so using the only tool available to him at the time, a Twitter account with 900,000 followers.
Over the next five years, Graham’s career was disassembled.
Not only was he abandoned in his hour of need by people he’d worked with for decades and known for longer, but current and future projects were also cancelled, including a completed West End musical based on Father Ted. Given his literary gifts, he’s fought back with a book, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, released last month in the UK and coming to US shores soon. Tough Crowd is both a wise and amusing guide to writing funny things for television and an account of the madness that has overrun the arts and universities throughout the developed world in the last two decades.
Thank you for joining us, Graham.
Graham Linehan:
Thank you for asking me.
Helen Dale:
You were—until a Comedy Unleashed show featuring you at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was also cancelled—probably the most cancelled major figure in the UK. All the 2023 Fringe did was make your cancellation into a national scandal. You talk about the wider cancellation in Tough Crowd, but for obvious reasons, you don’t discuss what happened at this year’s Fringe. What’s it like to be cancelled on this scale?
Graham Linehan:
Well, it’s a destabilising thing for a comedy writer because when you’re a comedy writer, you want to be an observer of human frailty and confusion and all the other comically negative things about humanity. And so when you’re in my position, I’m now no longer outside things looking in. I am at the centre of a story. I am a figure who is incredibly divisive and scandal-ridden, and it makes even thinking about comedy somewhat difficult. I mean, in terms of coming up with a new idea or a new show—for the last five years, six years, I’ve been basically firefighting trying to protect my reputation, trying to rebuild it—and you can’t really write comedy when you’re in that kind of state. You’re in a kind of constant fight or flight mode. So yeah, it’s a very destabilising and upsetting place to be, but I just have to live with it now.
Helen Dale:
Has there been any sense since the book came out…It’s only been out for a few weeks now, three weeks now. Has there been any sense of... Are more people starting to talk to you now, apart from the sort of obvious media and publicity around Tough Crowd being released?
Graham Linehan:
Well, it’s an interesting thing because when you bring out a book—and this was actually part of my plan—I did think of it as a two-stage plan. The first stage was the book, but also the interviews that followed it because there were lots of things I couldn’t put in the book because they didn’t fit thematically to each chapter or it was simply too much information. And I thought I would use the interviews to fill in the rest of it for people. But it’s an interesting thing. I get two types of interviews.
The first is what I’m getting here, which is being interviewed by people who know the issue, who understand the points, who understand what’s happened to me. And the second is what you might call the more mainstream interviews on TV and national TV over here—in the national press—which is usually with people who sort of understand the issue, but really are just kind of reporting on my Wikipedia page rather than anything that’s actually true about me.
So far, it’s been okay. Just before Edinburgh, I was ambushed on TalkTV by someone who simply did not understand the issue in the slightest and was responding to the portrait that’s been painted of me by others in our profession. But yesterday I had an interesting one. I appeared on Times Radio, and even though the interviewer was taking the usual tack—which is making me apologise for either things that I didn’t do or things that have been misreported—and for once, he actually gave me a chance to respond. So, I was able to put the points as clearly as I could, and I’m hoping that will just go on.
Helen Dale:
Well, that’s something at least. I should just note here that some of the questions in this show were provided by subscribers to Liberty Law Talk and to my Substack. I did this last time, in my previous podcast, and it was very successful—that podcast was with Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater. And so I’ve decided to do it again. Subscriber questions are of course mixed in with my questions, and you don’t necessarily know which ones are which. However, this question is from a subscriber. Do you think most other comedians in the industry who didn’t support you are scared to speak up, or do you think they’re true believers?
Graham Linehan:
It’s a very good question. It’s really hard to know. What I find extraordinary is that even people I was extremely close to don’t seem to understand the issue. I heard recently that Adam Buxton—who was a very close friend of mine when I lived in Norwich, and our families hung out with each other—and you would think someone so close would make a special effort to find out exactly what the issues were and to approach them in a serious way. But no, he’s platforming people who engaged in harassment against me, and he’s allowing people on this show to smear figures like Posie Parker.
So I think there’s... What you might call it is a kind of protective ignorance. It’s like, I saw an interesting thing today: two people interviewed who were at a Hamas march, and were kind of pretending they didn’t know about the October 7th attacks. And I think it’s a similar thing going on here. They don’t know about this stuff, but they deliberately don’t know about it because knowing about it to the extent that they would have to do what I do and protest about it means they might lose their careers. So it’s a kind of a faux ignorance, if that makes sense.
Helen Dale:
It’s a very interesting take on the idea of pluralistic ignorance or preference falsification. It’s like people are participating in those willingly.
Graham Linehan:
Yes, I’ve never heard those terms, but I will start using them because they sound like exactly what I’m talking about.
Helen Dale:
Preference falsification is when everybody says that they believe a thing, but the majority of people saying it don’t actually believe it, and then there are revealed preferences—where what they actually believe tends to be shown at the ballot box. So, they vote in a different way from what they say.
Graham Linehan:
Yes, that’s one thing I’ve been doing for the last five or six years is trying to find a way that people can safely make their complaints or their worries known. But it’s very difficult in this world where we’re always on a... I mean, that was one of the other reasons why the theme of audiences goes through my book. I think one of the things we did that we didn’t realise we were doing was, we decided to step on a stage.
The internet is a stage—and we all decided without really knowing what we were deciding to do—to play out our lives to a public-facing audience. Once these movements started to make themselves known—the gender identity movement is obviously the one I’m fighting—but there are many others out there. Everyone realised, I think simultaneously, that it’s a little bit difficult to be a political person if you’re on a stage.
You can suddenly have tomatoes or rotten fruit thrown at you. And I think it’s made, and this sort of goes back to the earlier question, I think it’s made many people very, very shy. Shy in a way that’s actually harmful, shy in a way that means that they can... One of the things I put in the book is that I always thought the Holocaust, another Holocaust, would be impossible in a connected world because you wouldn’t be able to build the concentration camps, you wouldn’t be able to commit atrocities because too many eyes were on you. And instead of that, what we have is a situation where the people committing the atrocities are filming it themselves.
It’s like I heard an interesting thing about CCTV cameras in crime-ridden areas. Apparently, they had a very good short-term effect. The cameras would go up, and the crime would just disappear.
But then, after a few weeks, when everyone got used to them, these places would simply resume their old kind of character. And it’s just so strange. I just think that the effect of everybody having a camera, everybody being able to spy on everyone else, has been not to suppress bad behaviour, but to amplify it. And my rosy view of what the internet would bring was completely decimated.
Helen Dale:
A lot of Tough Crowd is devoted to Twitter, or TwitterX as it appears to be now, and how it ensnared you. And I found it a fascinating part of the book I must say. I’ve since heard you talk about—and you’ve touched on it here—how social media produces a type of digital panopticon. I’d be grateful if you could outline some of your thinking on this here. What has this done to us and how is it playing out?
Graham Linehan:
Well, I think the main thing it’s done is it has turned us all into Stasi operatives. I’ve been reading a lot about the Stasi recently, and I believe it was something like one in four or one in five people in East Germany were Stasi members. So that kind of speaks to a... What’s the word? People seem to be predisposed to spying on neighbours. People seem to be predisposed to being an informer, being an operative, being a kind of member of the religious police, you might say. Unfortunately, Twitter has just allowed us all to take this role to report on our neighbours and friends for thinking the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and making the wrong joke. It’s one reason why I think comedy is in a really bad place at the moment. There’s a famous quote by a comedian over here who said, “the joke that will destroy my life is already out there.”
And what that means is that, let’s say this comedian enters into a contentious debate. It can be about anything, not even as contentious as Israel, Palestine, or feminism. It could be about football. Well, the enemies of that person will be able to simply do a search through that person’s timeline to find a tweet that uses a forbidden word or says a forbidden thing. And again, this forbidden thing might not have been forbidden at the time the person wrote it. It’s just forbidden now. And so what you have, again, sorry to use all these references, but there’s a quote I think by Cardinal Richelieu who said something along the lines of, "give me three letters by any man and I will find enough to condemn him." Which means that it’s the interpretation that’s the killer. What you say is one thing, but the interpretation applied to it can be used to destroy you at any time.
And unfortunately, comedians are particularly susceptible to this because their whole existence, their job depends on them being able to walk a very fine line between what’s acceptable to say and what’s not acceptable to say. So again, if there’s an enemy of this particular comedian out there, he has the power now to destroy that man’s or woman’s life. So that’s what I mean by panopticon.
Helen Dale:
What do you think will happen to British comedy in the future, near or far? Do you see any future where there is diversity of thought allowed in the wider industry?
Graham Linehan:
I think so because I think in the end, people will follow the money. I believe that Disney in the States, it’s now very easy to... There are no queues, there are no long queues at Disney. That might’ve changed recently, but this was the last time I checked at Disney World because people are so disgusted by the propaganda that Disney is pumping out. And you can see as well the popularity of shows like South Park in their recent attacks on Kathleen Kennedy that have just really struck a chord. I think Cartman has the line—which he plays Kathleen Kennedy in it—and he says the line, "Put a chicken in it and make it lame." And it’s a very funny way of looking at what’s going on. There’s this concentration on things that do not make for good stories, forced diversity, again—the lack of diversity of thought.
These things don’t resonate with audiences who are themselves diverse. When you get a diverse audience, they’re not looking to see diversity. They’re looking to see things that connect them to a shared humanity. And these stories have been told down through the years for centuries. And yeah, sure, some of them are out of date and some of them have creaky opinions and so on. But replacing those creaky opinions with modern-day creaky opinions, it’s no substitute. So I think that eventually people will... I think what you’ll find is that companies like Netflix, companies like Disney, they will suddenly get sick of losing money and their shareholders will take over. And I think at that time, you’ll find people actually actively seeking out comedy that is challenging and confrontational and exciting.
Helen Dale:
I’ve heard you comment to the effect that writing Tough Crowd made you feel like a comedian again. Do you have any comedy work or more creative work in the pipeline? And if so, how can we support those projects beyond buying the book of course?
Graham Linehan:
Ooh, that’s a good question. I think, no, you know what? I think buying the book is really the only thing I need at the moment, because what I need to do, what I really need is to feel a sense of safety in terms of my financial situation. It’s really hard to write comedy when you’re worried about where the money is coming from. So if the book kind of takes off, and if people realise that it’s not just me whining about being cancelled, there’s a lot of stuff in there about how to write comedy and comic observations in themselves. If that does well, then once I feel that the rubber hits the road on the sales, I’ll be able to just start thinking about the next project. But at the moment, my whole existence is spent trying to overcome the devices that are in place to stop the book from selling. For instance, WHSmith isn’t stocking it at the moment, which is the big retailer over here for the…
Helen Dale:
Are you in Waterstones?
Graham Linehan:
We are in Waterstones, and with Waterstones, it’s a shop-by-shop basis. From what I’ve been told, every shop is the subject of a power struggle with the kind of people who would be offended by the book and the kind of people who just love books and want to sell them. So it’s up to individual shops, whether they hide it in the stockroom or put it out on display. But yeah, it’s a tough one. But I have-
Helen Dale:
Have WHSmith even told you why they’re not stocking it?
Graham Linehan:
They’re even refusing to answer emails.
Helen Dale:
Oh, wonderful.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah. But we were expecting things like that. And I think also they would be very clever just to try and not have any controversy about it and keep it quietly hidden because these types of things, when they try and suppress a book, it’s a bit like, I don’t know if you remember the episode, but it was an episode of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal protested outside of a cinema, and all they did was drove people to go and see the film. And I think these activists within every organisation are beginning to get wise to that phenomenon. And quiet cancellation is the order of the day. So yeah, I’m just trying to fight that and trying to raise awareness of the book as best I can.
Helen Dale:
In Tough Crowd, you observe at one point that you love audiences, and this is a direct quotation for listeners. “They’re smart, they keep you on your toes. The reason so much content is so bad at the moment is because the audience is being edged out of the relationship.” I know what you mean, and I think Liberty Law Talk listeners will know as well, but what does this look like? Because I’m assuming your comedic antennae must start to twitch when it starts.
Graham Linehan:
Well, it kind of speaks back to what I was saying earlier. It just looks like a box ticking. When you see a cast that’s made up of one black person, one white person, one Asian person, my antennas start to go up that I’m being lied to. And I feel like for me, a show like The Wire is a much more honest and kind of meaningful attempt to get black faces and black folks’ voices on screen because it speaks to a world that’s hidden, that’s very uniform and it feels truthful in the same way Reservoir Dogs feels truthful. It’s like basically five or six white men on screen the whole time, but it feels authentic. It does not feel like these guys would be feminists or would be great kind of battlers for race relations. They’re just what they are. And I think those stories are just as valid as every other story.
And I think that what you will find—and this is what I mean when I say audiences are being edged out–—is that a black audience would love Reservoir Dogs just as much as they would anything else. It’s a very funny joke. I can’t remember who said it, but he said... Oh yeah, it might be Shane Gillis, who’s an American comedian, and he was talking about slavery movies, and he was talking to his black friends and he said, “Do you guys like these movies?” And his friends were going, “No, no, we thought these were for you.”
Helen Dale:
That’s so true.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, so it just feels like... When I cast The IT Crowd, the central comic figure in it is Moss who is played by Richard Ayoade, and I just responded to him as a human being, as a person, and it kind of gives you what you might call a natural diversity to the cast.
Helen Dale:
And also he’s the nerdiest nerd nerd who ever nerded.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Which gives another twist on it that’s also useful. And also, again, it’s truthful; because I was talking to the commissioner at the time who asked me to do it, and he said I find a lot of these IT guys are usually... Are often, sorry, not usually, but often Black or Asian or whatever it happens to be. So it kind of feels right. So when I see a show where they are forcing something and they are pretending that something is a, I don’t know what you would say, a kind of truth. They’re pretending that something is truthful and it’s not, that’s when I think the audience’s alarm bells go off and they don’t even know it. You can watch something and feel slightly unsatisfied by it and not really realise why. And it’s because at some level, you’re being lied to.
Helen Dale:
Do you have a favourite comedic period or era, and if so, why?
Graham Linehan:
Oh, that’s a good question. I really love the whole... I mean, feel very, if I could go back in time and be in one place, it would be on the Bilko writing team. That was Phil Silvers, Mel Brooks, and I think Sam Simon was on it. Woody Allen I think was in there. And I just think that it felt like... I mean, you look at Bilko and it was shot in the fifties and so on, and yet it’s really authentic. It’s rough. Again, it’s diverse, but truthfully so. Yeah, I just think that must’ve been a wonderful time to be around. Also, it was a time, I guess, when Jewish comedy was really being installed in the American consciousness, and I think that Jewish comedy and the voice of Jewish people became the dominant comic voice over the next 20 years. I’d love to have been at the start of that.
Helen Dale:
Yes. And I think a Jewish-Irish collaboration would’ve been very interesting.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Helen Dale:
Following on from the Twitter issues we were discussing earlier, you talk in your book about your old Twitter persona in the form of the conflict you had with Markus Meechan, who’s better known as Count Dankula. Yes. He’s a comedian, too, hence the name. How did that incident help open your eyes to left authoritarianism?
Graham Linehan:
Well, that’s a good question. It was around then that I started realising that the words fascist and Nazi were being thrown about way too liberally. And I kind of fell under the spell of it and became just another node in a network passing on received wisdom that I was getting from other left-wing people. And after that, I kind of thought, well, if that wasn’t quite true, then what else is not quite true? What else have I been unthinkingly copying and pasting, copy and pasted opinions? How many of them did I have? And I did look at many other things, and I won’t go into them because when you go into them, people say you’re denying X or denying Y. But I did think, well, I do have to now look at everything with a lot more scrutiny, serious scrutiny, and I need to start thinking about these issues carefully.
Because for me, in the last few years, the black-and-white version I had of politics–which was very much left as good, right as bad–has been incredibly stress-tested. And I’ve found it lacking in lots of different places. So my thing now is to try and find people who are genuine, honest, brave, and telling the truth as best they can tell it and try and lose all the previous delineations of left versus right. One thing I found absolutely inspiring was a brilliant Zoom kind of round table of black voices who were all talking about police shootings. And it was absolutely fascinating, and suddenly, it revealed to me that the one thing they pointed out was that the big problem with police shootings in America is not racism. The big problem is the fact that everyone has guns and police are terrified.
I’d never thought of it along these terms before. And of course, when you hear it like that, it’s not like a right-wing view that guns are a problem. It’s a left-wing view, and yet you never heard it really expressed because the overwhelming tide was coming to the conclusion that–if a tide can come to a conclusion–that the police were irretrievably racist, or I’m not sure what the word is there, but they were just kind of institutionally racist. And seeing this round table of these black conservative voices made me realise, oh, it is a lot more complicated than that, and it’s not helpful to drill down into one particular way of looking at the problem. A more holistic approach is what’s always needed. So yeah, what I did to Mark, and I’ve apologised a few times for it now, kind of joining in with his-
Helen Dale:
Note to readers: Graham also apologises to Markus in the book as well.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, yeah. I didn’t realise that he was a kind of a canary in a coal mine for that kind of Stasi desire to punish and to destroy that I subsequently became a victim of.
Helen Dale:
Because I will make a little observation here, and it’s one that I can’t prove. So I’m just putting it out there, and it’s perhaps worth doing some more research and thinking about for both of us later. But I do think that the Count Dankula incident may have contributed to the slowness of conservatives in coming to your aid when you were being monstered.
Graham Linehan:
Oh, very possibly true.
Helen Dale:
Because what it was is you had a—and I say this as being someone on the Tory side of the benches, for what it’s worth—among the relatively small group of Tories who are also reasonably successful artists, you had a reputation as a canceller.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah.
Helen Dale:
And I think that had roots with Count Dankula.
Graham Linehan:
That’s absolutely fair enough and can’t... All I can do is keep moving forward and trying to figure out what’s going on. If there’s one excuse I’ll give myself is that, although I don’t want to, but one of the things you realise the longer all this goes on, is that people do go into silos and their opinions and their beliefs are framed often by who they choose to follow on Twitter. And also they don’t want to fall out with the people who they follow on Twitter.
So I mean, I may look like I have strong opinions now, but I’m also influenceable. And when you’re in one of these silos, it’s very hard to break out of them. It was only, in fact—possibly one of the only positive things that have come out of all this—is that I have broken the head of the silo. I mean, I’m in a few silos now, but I like to think that they are pretty varied and questioning and sceptical, but I’m always kind of checking myself and making sure that I’m not just following along or I’m not just repeating information that I’ve heard somewhere else, that I’m looking into things and coming to my own conclusions. It’s all you can do really.
Helen Dale:
This question may seem like a bit from left field—it’s from a listener, but I actually think it ties into the politics point, about conservatives having a view of you as a canceller. That was nothing to do with the view that we might’ve had of you as the person who wrote Father Ted, The IT Crowd, or did all these other things, that kind of thing. And it’s another political question, another question from a listener. What is it with the Greens and gender woo? They never talk about conservation anymore.
Graham Linehan:
It’s so true. I don’t know. It’s very weird. The Greens have been particularly bad on all this. They have gone mad. Do you know, one of my early theories about gender is that I feel that the success of Brexit and the success of Trump slightly drove the left mad. They suddenly realised they had no power. They had no power in the real world. The real world saw what they believed in, saw what they wanted, and said, “Nope, we don’t want either of those things. We don’t want any of those things.”
And what happened was they retreated to an area where they felt they did have power. And this happened to be women’s rights. Because even among right-wing people, a lot of the discussion around women’s rights is dismissed as a culture war issue. And if you can dismiss something as a culture war issue, it means that committed people like the Greens can wreak absolute havoc while everyone else just ignores it and treats it as trivial.
So what we’ve had is this movement growing and growing and growing, causing untold damage to young people and their bodies and their minds and their sanity while what you might call mainstream voices simply ignored it. And so the powerlessness that these groups felt when Trump and Brexit prevailed was able to be kind of... They were able to redirect their energy into something where they felt they did have power.
And now, gosh, what is more powerful than giving hospitals the advice that they shouldn’t use the word mother in maternal advice? What is more powerful than getting to destroy a fundamental word in the English language? So yeah, they just retreated into their little worlds, and they started behaving like tin-pot dictators.
Helen Dale:
I have to say I did have the reaction expressed somewhat differently because obviously when this first started emerging, I was still in practice. And so it was very much not on my radar because the legal profession is quite conservative, but I could see it in the distance. And it was just the sense of, this is bonkers. Surely people are going to wake up to this. This is completely mad. And if people weren’t speaking about it seriously on the tellybox or whatever it is, we would all be laughing. This would be like, and I have to say, like the Pythons were doing, which was John Cleese’s observation in your book. I thought “This is so bonkers. People are just going to start falling about the place laughing.” And they didn’t.
Graham Linehan:
Yes. And one of the big problems we’ve had in fighting this is that people simply don’t believe it’s true. John Cleese had to be convinced that the story of Laurel Hubbard was true, who I think now holds the New Zealand record for women’s weightlifting, took it off two indigenous New Zealand women and he’s a man. And I think that for many people, it’s a combination of things.
First, not taking women’s sports seriously. I think a lot of men outsource their opinions on women’s rights to their wives. And because this is a kind of a middle-class movement, the movement, the gender movement, a lot of the women who are telling them–I’ve said this before, but I’ve heard it from a lot of people, the phrase, a lot of men, I’ve heard the phrase–“My wife says it’s not a problem.” And these are people who are in the media, in theatre, in publishing. These are well-off people. And of course, their wives don’t think it’s a problem because their wives won’t need a shelter or a rape crisis center, God willing. So they don’t see it as an issue.
So I think what happened is it has just flown under the radar for a disastrous amount of time. And every time men stuck their head in and they saw one of these extraordinary outrages committed against women, they either thought, “well, it’s not true,” or “it’s not a problem because my wife is fine.” So, unfortunately, it’s still a very male-dominated world. Men dominate the media and every other area. So they’ve just been merrily fiddling away while Rome burns, and it’s just gone as far as it has because it’s never received a kind of serious attention from the people who we expect to give it serious attention, politicians, news media, it’s just not seen as an issue.
Helen Dale:
There’s the thing, too–where they talk about men outsourcing–middle-class men outsourcing their opinions to their wives. There is this element, and it’s something that I’ve noticed over many years, that a lot of straight women struggle with solidarity. And so it’s quite easy to set them off very nastily against each other. And that’s how you finish up in a number of areas, you notice the sort of the loudest trans enforcers, pro-trans enforcers tend to be young women. And a number of Jewish people have pointed out, in the UK at least–I don’t know about other countries–but certainly in the UK, that the plurality of people tearing down posters of Israeli hostages are also young women.
That leads me to the next question I want to ask because you write about the importance of chivalry towards the end of Tough Crowd, which is something that many feminists dislike, but that most normal people see as necessary. I’m coming out of the political right, so we tend... We’re not feminists, we tend to think it’s a silly ideology, sort of in it’s fighting biology, basically. So a lot of feminists don’t like the idea of chivalry, but I think it’s actually necessary for the reasons you give in Tough Crowd. And much of that argument that you make, which I found very compelling, came from your late dad. So to what extent was your dad not only an influence on you, but also representative of the good side of Irish Catholicism?
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a good question. He was just plainly good. He was so genuinely good in every area. He was driving people to the hospital. He was volunteering at Special Olympic events. He was just plainly good. And I think that many of the things we associate with these things, like chivalry and so on, just came naturally to him.
We seem to have intellectualised ourselves into a position where–and I think this is another thing that kind of gave rise to the trans movement–where we fooled ourselves into thinking that women were exactly the same as men in every way. In fact, I remember saying to my son, “Well, women have a disadvantage in sport because their bodies aren’t as strong and they’re not as tall, their lung capacity is smaller, their reach is shorter.” And he was blown away. He was blown away by the concept because he had been fed this line that there was no discernible difference between men and women. And that was one of the ways I kind of sold him on the idea of chivalry. But Dad didn’t need explanations. Dad just knew it the way that human beings do know it. And unfortunately, the internet has come in and has kind of separated us from our instinctive human understanding of these issues.
So yeah, just basically we disagreed on a lot of things. And as I said in the book, he once used the words “the gay agenda,” which I was so mortified by because I’d heard it thrown around a lot by homophobes and so on. But again, good would always win out with him. And when the marriage equality vote came along in Ireland, he voted, after a discussion with me, he voted in favour of it because really, in the end, he couldn’t do anything mean-spirited. I know there are arguments against marriage equality and some of them from gay people and some of them are compelling, but he would see these images that were being heavily played of gay couples getting married, and he just thought, “Yeah, how can I stand in the way of people being happy?”
So yeah, he was such a good man. And also, the way he treated my mom was very... It had a big effect on the way I kind of feel about women. And he remains a model for me.
Helen Dale:
You’re very, very fortunate. I think, I’m not a psychologist, I’m a lawyer, but I think one of the things that has stood you in good stead through all of this–through five years and nearly six years now of nonsense and the extraordinary attacks you’ve had on you and finishing up nearly destitute and that kind of thing–I think the figure who has sustained you is actually your father. That’s how it comes to me anyway.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, yeah. He’s something to aim for, something to aim for. I wouldn’t quite like to be quite as self-sacrificing as he was. He would go to church every day and don’t think I could manage something like that. But yeah, he’s a good thing to reach for. Maybe sometimes, even if you can’t quite get there, it’s still a good thing to reach for something.
Helen Dale:
The question about your dad provides me with a lead into something more general, and this is where I want to, I hope, bring the two halves of both your book and this podcast together in one place.
When you were writing Father Ted, Ireland’s Catholic Church was still very powerful. Listeners, I strongly recommend the lengthy section in Tough Crowd where Graham discusses the care he and his co-writer took to ensure that Father Ted didn’t rely on Irish stereotypes or mean-spirited religious mockery. The show only featured a single joke about Ireland’s clerical abuse scandals, for example.
Because of that Irish Catholic history and its complexity, I’ve wanted to ask every Irish person I know this question but missed out on asking Helen Joyce in the last podcast because Maya was there as well, and we had so much else to discuss. I should say I’ve had a wide variety of answers to it from my Irish relatives and so I want to know yours.
Why is Ireland so woke?
Graham Linehan:
There’s a few things going on there. First of all, I believe there is some kind of tax break. That means a lot of Silicon Valley companies have moved to Ireland. So Silicon Valley is basically ground zero for a lot of these ideas. The same people who are writing the code for these platforms are the people who are calling themselves non-binary and embracing this movement.
Another thing that’s happened is it’s a reaction against the UK. The UK is seen as–there’s always been a bitterness–in Ireland. Sometimes, it takes quite harmless forms like the rivalry between our football teams or sports teams and so on. But other times, there’s a real resentment at what Ireland suffered at the hands of England.
So when, for instance, the UK became known as TERF Island, there might’ve been a kind of backlash against that and a feeling also that Ireland also had to make up for its sins in the past against women and gay people. Unfortunately, as happens so often in history, it’s a complete overcorrection. And Ireland has gone back to putting women under the thumb, but just in a different way.
So yeah, there’s a number of things going on there, but those are definitely a few aspects of it.
Helen Dale:
Yes, I’ve just had some very interesting responses to that question, and I do want to buttonhole Helen Joyce on a public recording at some point and ask her, why is Island so woke? One of my relatives–who still lives in County Cork–did make the point that part of the problem was that one of the voices objecting to the trans treatment of women was coming from the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church had previously–in the clerical abuse scandal–told so many lies people didn’t want to believe that they might now be telling the truth. That was one version that I’ve heard from an Irish relative.
Graham Linehan:
That makes sense. That makes sense, yeah.
Helen Dale:
But I think it’s a number of things. It’s not monocausal.
Graham Linehan:
Yes, yes. There’s a couple of things. There’s a kind of perfect storm of things going on. And Ireland, as well, it always has this kind of scrappy attitude to itself and to the world, and adopting something that’s so contentious and so counterintuitive, there’s a feeling, “Oh, we’re marching into the future and our little country is doing it better than anyone else,” and stuff like this. And it would be admirable most of the time, but on this, unfortunately, again, it’s just led to women being put under the thumb of a new sacred class.
Helen Dale:
Because that’s got real power in Ireland, the power of the... Because my memories of Ireland are all through my relatives and from when I was a child as well. And I can still remember visiting the Republic and going to Dublin and getting a very strong sense of: this is a very conservative country and priests and cops are the people who run it.
And then suddenly it wasn’t.
Graham Linehan:
Yes, yes. Well, one of the things that people used to say about Father Ted is that someone said—this is in the book—someone said it was Ireland’s punk. And one thing that the show did do was show people you are allowed to laugh at silly people. No matter what they do, whether they’re priests, policemen, or whoever it happens to be, you’re allowed to laugh. And I think it was a bit like lancing a boil.
I think a similar thing is needed with this movement, but at the moment, I have no idea how I would approach it. This is an incredibly silly movement. I think actually one of the big problems with this as a movement is that it’s so silly that it’s almost impossible to parody. It’s almost impossible to do-
Helen Dale:
Apart from that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Loretta.
Graham Linehan:
Yes.
Helen Dale:
That’s the only thing I can think of. That film came out in, what, 1979 or something?
Graham Linehan:
That’s right. Yes, absolutely. They figured that out very quickly. Then, of course, there was Rick in The Young Ones, but-
Helen Dale:
The Young Ones.
Graham Linehan:
... as I was saying to someone recently, if you did The Young Ones now, it would be four Ricks. You wouldn’t have the dynamics that you need for a comedy because everybody would be speaking in this monotone way. But that’s simply because I’m a 55-year-old man. I am not as attuned to the personalities that are around at the moment in terms of writing a sitcom about people that young.
In fact, one of the things I did want to do was graduate from writing comedy to teaching other people how to do it or to producing stuff because I do think that it’s a young man’s game. I think young people are funnier in general than older people, simply because they have a novel way of exploding certain things that have become calcified in everyone else.
Helen Dale:
One of the things you brought out very well in Tough Crowd—and it’s really well worth reading for anybody who’s got ideas about making it in this industry, never mind all the wokery—it’s just how much work is involved.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, yeah.
Helen Dale:
All the script development, all the read-throughs, and then you only get one shot with a live studio audience. If it turns to crap, you’re stuffed—that kind of thing.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s an interesting thing. The book went through a similar process in the sense that it may be easy to write something, but for it to be easy to read, there has to be a process. It has to go through a process. It was interesting writing a Tough Crowd and reading one bit, and the next paragraph doesn’t seem to flow naturally from the previous bit. You have to rethink either the previous paragraph or the next paragraph to make that flow happen. Sometimes things would—good scenes or good moments would naturally fall out of the book—because they didn’t have that flow. That’s the art of it. Everything has to flow.
When people come to the end of a show, a sitcom episode that they really love, it’s almost like time hasn’t gone by. They just started laughing and the next thing it’s over. That’s what you’re aiming for, but you can’t get there unless you are really disciplined in feeling the show on an audience level. Feeling it on an audience level means that you sometimes have to disappoint the writer in you or you have to ignore the writer in you. You have to meet the audience halfway. That takes work. That takes work. It’s a question of feel. I know it’s a cliche, but you do have to kill your babies a lot of the time. Funny moments, funny scenes, they can disappear because they just don’t fit.
When we had DVD extras, when there were DVDs, we only once put on a deleted scene. As soon as we put it on and it went out, I realised that was a huge mistake because part of the art of it is making people think that the show or the characters or whatever, they are just getting on with their day. That it’s not written, that it just kind of exists. It was…
Helen Dale:
They emerged fully formed into the world, basically.
Graham Linehan:
Yes, along with the story. That the story is just telling itself. When you show deleted scenes to someone, you’re reminding them this is all artificial. This is a series of decisions. They don’t care. They don’t care. One reason I think that movies about movie-making are never a success is because people don’t really want to think about that. They want to think that the stories they’re watching are real people experiencing things in the way that they naturally should be experienced.
I think that one part of the art of writing, creative writing, not just comedy writing, is what you don’t show people. Because if you don’t show them the failed experiments, and you don’t show them the jokes that don’t quite fit, they just think you’re a genius.
Helen Dale:
It’s funny. My father was very far from being a comedian of any sort—but one of the comments he made to me when I was young and showing some talent myself as a writer—and dad used to say when I gave him a draft or something that subsequently was published in a pretty decent outlet, he just said, “People don’t want to see the man behind the curtain, Helen.”
Graham Linehan:
Yes. Yes, that’s it. That’s it. Especially when it turns out to be someone like me. One thing I noticed—and it took me a while to get used to this—is people don’t give a damn about the writers. They don’t even know the writers exist. The sad lot of the writer is that when you do your job particularly well, then you are writing yourself out of the relationship. It’s the reason I think Tarantino didn’t become as great a writer as I always thought he would become. For me, he’s always too present, even to the extent of putting himself in entirely inappropriate roles in his own films.
Helen Dale:
Yes, it’s not like Hitchcock with one tiny little scene, what is it, going into the pet shop at the beginning of The Birds or that kind of thing.
Graham Linehan:
In Django Unchained, he played an Australian! It’s like, oh, my God. I think to become the writer that you want to be, you have to be able to disappear from your own work. I came to terms with that as soon as I became the centre of the story.
Helen Dale:
Yes. This is just leading into the final question now. This is one where I have had a few go-rounds publicly with different people I’ve interviewed or spoken to. I did ask Helen and Maya this question. It emerges out of something that is flummoxing a lot of people right now. It not only takes in things like queer theory, but also the decolonization narratives that have been used to justify Hamas atrocities in Israel, which we’ve all seen. That’s the background to this.
In Tough Crowd, you talk quite a bit and accurately about the extent to which these mad ideas escaped the lab of American academia and colonised vast swathes of the internet before getting their claws into the UK and European Union. I think it’s fair to say that the universities are cultures of our broken wings now. You live in one broken wing, which is the creative arts and comedy. The other broken wing is the universities. You’ve talked quite a lot in this interview and in Tough Crowd about one way we can resuscitate the arts. What do we do about the universities?
Graham Linehan:
Well, I think one of the most important things to be done is to simply…I think basically queer theory has to be treated like any other ideology that was found to be corrosive and dangerous to humanity. I think queer theory is an absolute busted flush. It may make sense when you’re sitting around having thought experiments in a college dormitory, but once you apply it to real life, it’s a disaster. It’s leading to incredible unhappiness and confusion. It has to be treated like a rot that just needs to be cleared out.
I think that it’s fraud. The Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay experiment where they handed in all these fake papers, including Mein Kampf. They actually got a chapter of Mein Kampf and sprinkled a bit of feminist language over it, or queer theory language, and it was published by a feminist magazine, a feminist journal. There has to be some way of addressing this problem of the fake body of knowledge that has been created by fraudulent academics quoting each other. That’s what it is.
Helen Dale:
Because that’s all it is. I mean, the hoax that you mentioned, the Pluckrose, Lindsay, Boghossian hoax— which actually happened back in 2018 before this story became all-consuming in 2020—but they showed the extent to which entire academic journals—for which taxpayers were paying an absolute fortune, by the way, because all of these systems are all state-funded—and they were just full of nonsense. You could get nonsense published in there if you used the right nonsense words.
Graham Linehan:
I was talking to someone else about this today. One of the worries that I have is that we are in such a state of chaos at the moment with the Palestine-Israel thing, queer theory, etc. I saw a thing today, I don’t know whether you saw it, but a man calmly got out of traffic and walked up to a Just Stop Oil type protest and just calmly shot two people.
Helen Dale:
Yes, I saw that, but admittedly, in a South American country where they tend to have more violence.
Graham Linehan:
Sure.
Helen Dale:
But even so, it’s still very worrying.
Graham Linehan:
Yeah, the look on his face—someone pointed out you didn’t see any rage on his face. You just saw a feeling of exhaustion. I think people are becoming exhausted by the chaos. Unfortunately, when people are exhausted by chaos, they tend to look for a strong man. I’m worried that, as I often say, the strong man better be a nice person because if he’s not, then it’s a very fertile time to grow a fascist leader who will just say, “Well, I’m sick of all this stuff. We’re going to take care of it.”
What we need is a popular but not undemocratic approach to cleaning up the universities, and cleaning up the various worlds that have been taken over by such concepts as queer theory and critical race theory. I’m just worried that if it goes on much longer and the chaos these disciplines are engendering in society go on, then something’s going to give. We’re going to see more of these guys, like the bloke who got out and shot those two people.
I’m scared of the strong man coming along to sort all this stuff out because we might find ourselves in an even worse position than we’re in now.
Helen Dale:
On that somewhat sombre note, our time has come to an end. Tough Crowd is available in all the usual places except WHSmith—which Americans don’t have to worry about—in all the places you normally buy books. I have put a link to the US Amazon page in the show notes to this so Americans can purchase it without having to spend more money than they wish to by having to change it all into pounds. It’s also—there’s an audible version as well. Graham, did you read the Audible version?
Graham Linehan:
I did, yes.
Helen Dale:
You get Graham’s dulcet tones reading his book if you buy it on Audible. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been listening to Liberty Law Talk. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Graham.
Graham Linehan:
Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Justin Shubow joins host Rachel Lu to talk about the importance of beautiful government buildings and the possibility of a classical revival.
Rebecca Burgess is joined by Frank Cogliano to discuss Jefferson, Monticello, and the Jeffersonian legacy.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
We know this outline from every nickel we've ever handled, it's part and parcel of America's iconography, the pillared domed home Thomas Jefferson built on his mountaintop outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and named Monticello. Jefferson called his self-designed creation his "essay in architecture," but it is not just a thought-provoking essay in building materials and lines and perspectives, it's an essay in American political and social thought, not to mention America's political history. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow with the Independent Women's Forum.
For the next 30 to 40 or so minutes, discussing Jefferson's Monticello on the 100th anniversary of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, is Frank Cogliano, Interim Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Cogliano is a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the University Dean International from North America. He's a specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States and is the author or editor of nine books, including Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy and Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson's Foreign Policy. Welcome, Professor Cogliano.
Frank Cogliano:
Thank you, Rebecca. I'm thrilled to be here.
Rebecca Burgess:
Wonderful. And I should have asked you if you're coming from Scotland today or from Monticello, Charlottesville.
Frank Cogliano:
I'm coming to you from Charlottesville today, I'm pleased to say. I'm spending the current year here in Charlottesville at Monticello, directing the International Center for Jefferson Studies.
Rebecca Burgess:
Could you tell us just a quick little background about what the International Center for Jefferson Studies is? So many people know the building, Monticello, the home, but don't know that there is this whole study center.
Frank Cogliano:
Yes, I'd be happy to. So Monticello is the home, as you say, that many people will be familiar with and hopefully they've visited. But Monticello is much more than the house; and it's owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and run as a museum by the foundation. But the foundation has several other arms to it, if you will, one of which is the International Center for Jefferson Studies, which is located in another historic home, about a half mile or so beyond the main entrance to Monticello at a place called Kenwood. And the International Center for Jefferson Studies will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year in 2024. And it was set up to be a center for scholarship and research and to encourage scholarship and research into Jefferson and the world that Jefferson inhabited, not just on Jefferson himself, although we do a lot of research in that area, but also on the American Revolution, the era of the American Revolution, the history of plantation slavery. As I say, the world that Jefferson inhabited and helped to shape.
For 30 years, the center, through promoting scholarship, both internally within Monticello but also externally through fellowships for scholars from all over the world, promoting conferences, promoting publication, and helping new scholars publish but also senior scholars, has really helped to shape our understanding of Jefferson and his time. And in so doing, has led... I mean in the past 30 years, and I hope we'll get to this, there's been a real kind of efflorescence of studies about Jefferson in his time, and I think ICJS and, in particular, Monticello generally has played a part in that.
Rebecca Burgess:
Don't worry, we will definitely get to the 30 years of efflorescence, as you call it. A wonderful word, wonderful image. So we'll probably go a little bit chronologically here, but I did kind of want to for our listeners start out by just saying the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has two twin pillars of its mission: preservation and education. And I'm hoping that our conversation touches on both, but really on the education element because it has become so vital towards America's understanding of Jefferson actually through the decades, through now a century as we are at the 100th anniversary this year. And it includes, as you mentioned, the other historic home, Kenwood. There's a fascinating presidential history that extends beyond Jefferson through Lincoln to the Civil War, obviously, to FDR in World War II, and that's a wonderful story as well.
But if we want to start maybe at the beginning of the kind of conceptual question here, the history of presidential homes and estates, including most especially those of American Founders, often are stories that are just as rich and complex and interesting as that of their original owners, and they often reflect the larger history of the American nation. This is especially true with Monticello. Many are not aware, of course, that unlike in Europe and America, the homes of the Founders or presidents are not owned by the federal government nor fully funded by taxpayer support. They don't necessarily have continuing grants even from the NEA, the National Endowment of the Arts, or the National Endowment of Humanities. So it's really been up to private individuals and foundations to protect and preserve them.
So Thomas Jefferson's Monticello has a very rocky few years or decades or beyond decades after his death... His heirs had to sell his estate after his death to settle his debts with the infamous story of the public auction of enslaved individuals on the front lawn. And Monticello passes out of the hands of the Jefferson family. Can you give us just a little bit of that story of what happened after the death of Jefferson, happens before this American Jewish family, the Levy family, comes into the picture?
Frank Cogliano:
Sure, absolutely. And you've done a very good job of summing up the kind of big picture, so thank you for that, Rebecca. As you say, Jefferson died on, many people will know, on the 4th of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as did John Adams. And Jefferson died in debt. He was in pretty extreme debt for a number of reasons, which we can discuss if you like. But that debt resulted in his heirs having to sell his estate, which was Monticello, but also, as you referenced, his human capital as well, the people he enslaved. And so more than a hundred people were auctioned on the west portico. So you mentioned the nickel. It's the nickel view of the house, the house that one sees on the nickel today and has for decades. That view on those steps, more than a hundred people were auctioned in January of 1827, and the home fell into a state of disrepair.
It passed through the hands of several local people in the decade immediately after Jefferson's death. And then, it was purchased in 1836 by a man named Uriah Levy, who was an officer in the United States Navy from New York. And Levy was unusual. He was one of the few Jewish officers in the Navy at that time, and he was a reformer. He was a sort of social reformer. He campaigned against flogging in the Navy, for example, as a punishment. And he bought Monticello because he admired Jefferson's commitment to freedom of religion.
This is where I think Levy's own religion, the fact that he was Jewish in a majority Christian country at that time, was really important. So he bought it as a home, and really he used it as a summer home, but he also bought it and sought to preserve it as a monument and as a tribute to Jefferson's commitment to religious liberty, which was one of the things enshrined on Jefferson's gravestone here on the mountain top. And the Levy family owned Monticello for longer than the Jeffersons did. They owned it for almost a century, for about 90 years, throughout most of the 19th century. It's a complicated history because Commodore Levy, Uriah Levy, as he's called, died in 1862, and he sought to leave the house for the United States at that point.
As many listeners will be aware, and undoubtedly you're aware, there was a small matter of the Civil War going on in 1862, and Monticello was in Virginia. So, there was some debate about whether it was in the United States or not at that point. So, leaving it to the United States was a complicated question. And eventually, there was a series of lawsuits, and again, we don't need to belabor this history, but the man who comes to own Monticello is one of Uriah Levy's nephews, a man with the wonderful name of Jefferson Monroe Levy and Jefferson Monroe Levy owns the house basically after the Civil War down to the early 20th century, he served as a congressman at one point, but when he eventually sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, then the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which is the foundation established in 1923.
Rebecca Burgess:
If we could just maybe have a little tangent there about that whole Civil War moment and Levy trying to gift it to the United States and the United States refusing Monticello and why he wanted to offer it to the United States, to be a home for orphans of naval officers. I think this is very interesting. And, of course, just the bloody reality that the fields around Monticello, that area of Virginia, is the side of the bloodiest battlefields.
Frank Cogliano:
There was a lot of fighting, as you know, in central and northern Virginia during the Civil War. So you are right. Commodore Levy's wish to create a kind of an orphanage basically at Monticello for the children of naval officers was again in fitting with his kind of reformist impulses, but it was completely impractical. And he knew that at the time, during the Civil War. That plan or that ambition or that aspiration, I should say, didn't bear fruit. What's interesting I think, and you made reference to this in your introductory comments a moment ago, is the fact that most presidential homes are not owned by the United States government. And although presidential libraries, which are often but not always at presidential homes, are homes run by the national archives, again, there's often a kind of quasi-public-private dimension to this. But with the homes themselves, especially in the 19th century, the preservation of these homes was not seen as something that the government should do.
And the best example in the mid-19th century, so shortly before Uriah Levy died in 1862, is Mount Vernon, and of course, Mount Vernon is bought and preserved for the nation by the organization that owns and runs it to this day as a museum, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association doesn't take any money from the federal government and runs Mount Vernon as a preserved and maintains Mount Vernon as a museum. And that was the model that emerged in the 19th century. And that's very much the model that the founders of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation have in mind when they buy the house from Jefferson Monroe Levy in 1923.
Rebecca Burgess:
And there was also an unfortunate note, if I'm remembering right, of antisemitism about the Levy family owning a Monticello, which in part prompted... Or maybe not prompted their sell of it, but it made it difficult. And there were public letters and op-eds basically saying, "How could a Jewish family own this thing that is American?" Various different attempts to get either the government or some other entity to own it. Could you give us a little bit of that story?
Frank Cogliano:
Yeah, that's an unfortunate part of this story. And you're right. And of course, between approximately 1890 and the early 1920s when this foundation is created, there is a period of mass immigration to the United States, mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. And so whereas most immigration to the United States, voluntary immigration that is, prior to that period had been from Northern and Western Europe and the British Isles, this so-called New Immigration was mainly from, as I say, Southern and Eastern Europe. And many, many millions of those immigrants were non-Protestants. Many were Catholic, but a large number of them were Jews, and they were Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. And there was, as we know, a kind of backlash against that so-called New Immigration that culminated in a rebirth of the so-called second KKK in the 1920s. So there's a great deal of antisemitism kind of in the air in the United States in the early 20th century, especially in the early 1920s.
As you say, there was a good deal of criticism of the Levy family, despite the fact that they saved Monticello and were the caretakers of Monticello, basically saying, "They're not really worthy of owning this iconic American site, this site that kind of represents what the United States is." Sometimes it was explicitly said because they were Jewish. Other times it was left unsaid because frankly it didn't need to be said. In our current vernacular, it was a dog whistle that everybody understood. And at one point, Jefferson Levy said that he would not sell the house under any circumstances because of this. He eventually acquiesced and sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923. Many of whose members, I should say, original members, were themselves Jewish. And so the debate about Judaism or the association of Monticello with Judaism, it's a deep history and it's an important history and it's an American history and it needs to be remembered.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely. Once again, these historic homes of presidents and especially Monticello, is so tapestried, I would say. Maybe that's not the right word, but it's the best metaphor I can come up with, which is how interwoven with so many different facets of the America story, the religious liberty, the education, the political, the social, the questions about slavery and race, and the dichotomies that we have had with professing certain ideals and aspirations, and then how we have failed or succeeded in achieving some of them. And this gets to, I think, maybe Jefferson himself, of how complex of a character he is intellectually, politically, and, of course, definitely privately. He had so many public personas. He is a young Virginia land owner, colonial elite, and Virginia State delegate. Importantly, of course, I have to say this: a member of the House of Burgesses. This is how I tell people in Virginia how actually to pronounce my last name. It's the one state where you see the light bulb click. "Oh, okay."
Rebecca Burgess:
... That you see the light bulb click a bit "Ah, okay." It's not a hard G. Anyway, but then of course, he's also Virginia Governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and Ambassador to France, US Secretary of State, Vice President, President of the United States, founder and architect of the University of Virginia, a founder of the United States. Which story is told at Monticello of this public persona, this man? And when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation was officially incorporated, how did they choose one of these personas or just the whole man and how did they go about stating what their purpose was with this foundation and what they hoped Monticello to be?
Frank Cogliano:
Yeah, that's a small question. Thanks.
Rebecca Burgess:
You're welcome.
Frank Cogliano:
And as you say, it's a pretty full CV he's got. He did a lot of things. I think when the foundation is originally established, Jefferson's reputation was actually at a low point. So Jefferson's reputation has risen and fallen over the past two centuries since his death. He is in a low point after the Civil War, down to about the '1930s, really the '1940s, I would argue. And the reasons for that are complicated. To some extent, it's just the ebbs and flows of history. He's slightly implicated because of his association. He's tainted with secession. There's a hint of secession in some of his writings in the '1790s when he was the main author of the Kentucky Resolutions and suggested that states could nullify federal legislation they didn't like. And so I think it's slightly unfair to hold him responsible for a civil war that happened a generation after he died. But there's an association there that doesn't help him.
And his reputation is at a low point. I don't want to overstate this because he's always had admirers, men like the levies, like those men and women who helped establish the foundation in the early '1920s. But he's at a relative low point. But the founders of this foundation, it's a terrible formulation, forgive me, are committed to what we might call the tombstone legacy. So for people who visited Monticello, you'll know despite that amazing CV, there are three things on his tombstone, author of the Declaration of American Independence, as he puts it, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Founder of the University of Virginia. And that tombstone legacy, if you will, I think neatly encapsulated for all the things he could have said.
He didn't say I was a two-term president. He doesn't put the Louisiana purchase on there. It's a very elegant summation though, because what you have there is a commitment to... So let's break these down. In terms of the Declaration of Independence, you have a commitment to political independence and really, small are Republican self-government. Basically, we should be able to govern ourselves. That's what the declaration stands for. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the first time in American history that we have a separation of church and state and one of the first times we get it in modern history and globally. And that's a commitment to freedom of thought. And separation of church and state is about protecting the state from the church and the church from the state. But it's also a commitment to freedom of thought. And Jefferson famously says, and this is one of my favorite lines of his, in the notes on the state of Virginia, "It doesn't bother me whether my neighbor believes there's 20 gods or no God, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." And so that's an important legacy there.
And then finally, in the founding of the University of Virginia, we have a commitment to education as the way you perpetuate those first two things, which are the point of having society, right? So political independence, Republican government, again, small arm, we're not talking partisanship here, freedom of thought and education is the silver bullet, that's how we get it done. So that tombstone legacy is really what the foundation is committed to in its early years. And it's about, as you said, preservation as well as education.
And so the first thing they've got to do is they aspire to restore the house to the way it was in the early 19th century, excuse me, when Jefferson was living there. So the house you visit today approximates the way it would've been in about, I don't know, '1819, '1820. And so they have to remove a lot of the modern furnishings and the modern decor because the levies and others have lived there in the succeeding century. But they're really committed to this vision of presenting the house as it was when Jefferson was living there in retirement. But they're crucially, with regard to your question about education, interested in conveying, I think in those early days, that tombstone legacy as being what Jefferson stood for.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. So in terms of education or presenting the house as a... So I earlier used the quote, it's a Jefferson's quote that it's an essay in architecture, but it's an essay of Jefferson's thought as well. And so uncovering that through the tour and the objects there. So as you mentioned, you have the physical objects that need rehabilitated, and that's its own interesting question, and maybe I'll start there before getting to how the foundation starts thinking about the house tour, which becomes the pivotal or central encounter with Monticello. So how do you in the early '1900s, start going about trying to find these household objects that may have been Jefferson's. And along with this, which we haven't really mentioned, where is Jefferson's family, his descendants or any of the descendants of the slaves circulating in this story? Do they have some of these objects? Are they coming forward? Are they happy with this direction? Are they staying away because it's a place of pain and suffering for them?
Frank Cogliano:
Well, okay, that's another big set of questions. Thank you, Rebecca.
So let me try and address them. So in terms of restoration, initially, what they do and the work is done by a husband and wife team, a lot of the early work named Fiske and Marie Kimball and the Kimball's are both... Well, Marie Kimball's a curator, and Fiske Kimball's an architectural historian. And they seek to restore the house. And they basically take the view that anything that wasn't Jeffersonian shouldn't be in the house. And so initially, what happens after the foundation buys, is the house is actually pretty sparsely furnished because there aren't that many things that are immediately Jefferson era or Jefferson related in it initially. And then the curators at Monticello just do amazing detective work over the next century tracking stuff down.
And they contact descendants. And in the first instance, mainly white descendants. And I'll get to black descendants in a moment. Mainly white descendants in the first instance who say, "Oh, I'm a descendant and I've got this china that I think came from Monticello." And they spent a lot of time really, really carefully tracking down the providence of goods that are brought to their attention. And because Jefferson was such a meticulous record keeper, because we do have accounts of how Monticello was furnished, they had material to work with and they spent a lot of time trying to track that stuff down. And they do an amazing job. And if you visit the house today, it's got a lot of Jefferson's stuff in it. Sometimes, they had to give people bad news saying, actually that desk you have is not Jefferson's. And it was bought at Sears and it came from Sears in '1905. And so they have to give people some bad news and they also have to negotiate with people about whether they'll loan stuff to Monticello or sell it and so on to the foundation.
But he folks who work here did, especially the curatorial staff, have done an amazing job of restoring the interior of the house. And the house you visit today, apart from its aesthetic appeal, it's beautiful. Also, it's pretty accurate. And so if you visit, just to give one example, they've got a substantial number of the books in Jefferson's library. So what they've done is where possible, they found Jefferson's actual books and acquired them. In other cases, because Jefferson was a meticulous record keeper, we know the books he owned, including the particular editions he had. And so where they haven't been able to get Jefferson's copies, they've got the equivalent first edition, the relevant edition of the books he owned. So the library you see when you visit the house today is a very accurate recreation of Jefferson's library. And the books that are behind glass are actually the ones that Jefferson owned. The others which are still rare in themselves, are the equivalent editions that Jefferson owns. So that's one way to illustrate the point.
As far as descendants are concerned. So white Jefferson descendants, many of whom had inherited Jefferson-related furniture and Jefferson's possessions, were happy to collaborate with the foundation. As far as the descendants of those enslaved at Monticello, including of course, some of whom were descended from Jefferson himself, there's less material artifacts have survived because those people, their fore-bearers, were not allowed in most cases or did not inherit material from the original house.
On the other hand, what they took with them, and there's a project at Monticello that falls within the International Center for Jefferson Studies now, called Getting Word. It's an oral history project. What they took with them was their own experiences and their own family traditions of life at Monticello. We have to remember, Jefferson didn't live at Monticello alone. There were approximately 200 enslaved people there at any time throughout his life. And so in fact, this is one thing that I often remind people of. It's a predominantly black space when he lives there. It's a site of black history in America. It's not just Jefferson's home. And so they take their memories and family traditions of their associations with Monticello with them.
And the Getting Word project, which has now been operating for three decades here, is tracking down the descendants of people who were enslaved at Monticello and collecting their family traditions. And it's amazing how consistent these are. These are people scattered across the United States and in some cases, across the world. But the family traditions and the oral traditions within those families about the life at Monticello and their fore-bearers are a remarkable resource, but also remarkably consistent. And I'll give you one example that's really, really exciting, if you'll indulge me for a second?
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely.
Frank Cogliano:
So one of my colleagues up at Getting Word, the current director, a young scholar named Andrew Davenport, his team got a call a few weeks ago from a Ph.D. student at the University of Northern Kentucky who basically said, "Hey, I think I've met somebody you need to talk to." And it turned out it was a gentleman in question who lived in Cincinnati. He's an older gentleman there who had in his possession he's descended from one of the enslaved people at Monticello. He's descended from the Fossett family, Joseph Fossett at Monticello. He had in possession his fore-bearers freedom certificate and a letter between two people, again among his fore-bearers, family letters within his family from the '1840s. It's the first letter we've ever encountered, ever discovered between two people enslaved at Monticello.
And this gentleman in Cincinnati had them in his possession. He's an older gentleman, as I said. And Andrew had to go out to Cincinnati to meet him and photograph these documents, interview him, and add another interview to the Getting Word archive. But we're still making new discoveries among those, the descendants, both white and black, who lived and worked here. And that's one of the most exciting things about the work at the foundation. Sorry, I'm getting slightly away from your original question, but it's such a great story. I'm happy to share it.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. And Joe Fossett himself is a very fascinating figure. If I remember right, he's one of the slaves who was sold during that public auction who returns before his death. Am I right?
Frank Cogliano:
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Rebecca Burgess:
And he has this interesting, and it's... Well, it's very interesting for me. And I guess here I should have said, I am a member of the young advisors of the Thomas Jefferson Monticello Foundation, which is a group that they pulled together in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the founding of America, the Declaration of Independence in '2026. So I am involved in Monticello other than just pure intellectual interest and love of America and American history and American Founders. But anyway, if I remember right, the Joe Fossett story is so interesting because it brings up this question of slaves who saw Monticello also as their home. And that question of home and returning to home and the ability to return home and how that adds a wrinkle into the complexity of this place called Monticello and race relations.
Frank Cogliano:
It does. It does. So the metaphor I like to use is that the mountain has two sides. And so we talked about Jefferson's gravestone a few minutes ago, and as I said, when the foundation was first established a century ago, that was the main focus. We remain committed to talking about that legacy. It's incredibly important. It's the reason we're here, frankly. It's the 250th of what we're celebrating in two years time, right? Or three years time. It's that legacy. However, so if you stand on the steps on the West Portico, if you're standing on those steps, and I had the privilege to speak from there a few weeks ago, and it's an incredibly powerful place. It's the place where Jefferson organized races on the west lawn for his grandchildren. It's the place where 50 to 60 new citizens take the citizenship oath every 4th of July now. It's the place where Franklin Roosevelt spoke on the 4th of July, 1936. It's the place where those people were auctioned in '1827.
So it's an incredibly powerful place. And you can look in one direction, you can't see it, but if you look several hundred yards away in one direction is Jefferson's grave. Several hundred yards away, approximately the same distance in the other direction is the East Road burial ground where people who were enslaved at Monticello are buried. Not all, but some of them and their descendants. And the point I would make is you can't have half a mountain and we now have to pay attention, and we do. And we want to pay attention to both sides of the mountain and both of those... So that spot and the-
Frank Cogliano:
Mountain and both of those. So that spot and the kind of two sides of the mountain that are represented by those two graveyards are incredibly important. And they are important because Monticello is America writ small because if they will... if you will, they're a metaphor for the country in my way of thinking. So that's how I like to think of it. And I think we now tell both of those stories because those stories are so important. They're also interlinked. We have four accounts, four life accounts from people who were enslaved at Monticello. Memoirs or autobiographies and so on.
Rebecca Burgess:
Okay.
Frank Cogliano:
Each one of them mentions the Declaration of Independence. They don't mention that they love Jefferson. I mean, it's too much to say, "Hey, I loved my enslaver, or I loved my father." It's a complicated history, right? But they do associate Monticello with, these people who were enslaved here, was the Declaration of Independence. So to some extent, I would argue in response to people who say, "We need to..." I don't like this phrase, cancel Jefferson, whatever it is. Well actually, at least the testimony we have from some of the people who were enslaved here, and they don't speak for all of them, of course, but the anecdotal evidence we have is the part of Jefferson's legacy they identified as important. And the reason they associated with Monticello, despite the fact it was where they were enslaved, is the Declaration of Independence and its premise... and its commitment to equality not fulfilled in Jefferson's lifetime, not entirely fulfilled in our lifetimes. But that's the takeaway.
Rebecca Burgess:
And I think you can argue that it is only respect, true respect for us to acknowledge that the Declaration of Independence, in their own words, played a large role in their association with Monticello and how they thought of Monticello. Maybe not lived reality, of course, as you were mentioning, but if it wasn't so important to them that they themselves mention it in their accounts-
Frank Cogliano:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
... we should respect that and not cancel their own affiliation with that document, I would say. I've been thinking about this. You've mentioned the tombstone legacy and how it doesn't mention such amazing things as the Louisiana Purchase or the Lewis and Clark expedition, and yet the house itself in a way almost has that legacy.
You enter in, and that first room is this almost museum of America. It has all of these artifacts, taxidermy, hides, horns, bones that were found throughout America. There are, if I'm remembering, it had a bison skin, which is decorated from North American Indians. And so in a way, the house is its own legacy or testament into America. And if you could tell us about the development of the house tour and how that has over the years really deepened into, instead of just pointing out this artifact, that artifact, this room, that room, tries to tell the story of the various storylines in residence of Monticello, and moments... and political moments, and political theory moments of the house.
Frank Cogliano:
Sure. I mean, Monticello isn't just a museum today. It was a museum during Jefferson's lifetime. He had a lot of visitors and tourists who came through, and came to see him. And he recognized that. And that entrance hall that you referenced was decorated, especially with indigenous artifacts. But there's a map of Africa. There are various maps, there are fossils. And when people were kind of cooling their heels in the entrance hall, they were meant to learn a bit. And to a very real extent, that legacy continues today.
And you are right. The primary way that the Foundation communicates information to visitors is through the tour. The tour of the house, but now also what we call the Plantation Tour. There's a tour of Mulberry Row, where the enslaved people lived and worked. There are architectural... sorry, archeological tours as well. But the tours are the main way that the Foundation communicates with the public.
And one of the things I liked is that I have a huge amount of respect for the tour guides at Monticello. They're very, very highly trained. They do a lot of reading, I can tell you that. And they're really put through their paces before they're allowed to give tours to the public. And one of the things I say, because I like to speak to the guides, is their work reaches far more people than the work of people like me. We write books that come and go and... You know?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Frank Cogliano:
Get read by our mothers, maybe, and that's about it. Right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Or just by one academic library.
Frank Cogliano:
Right. Exactly. Exactly.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Frank Cogliano:
One only needs to get one's royalty statements to realize how unimportant we are.
Rebecca Burgess:
About this much.
Frank Cogliano:
But they reach so many people, and it's incredibly important what they do. And the house tour is about 45 minutes, and they have a huge amount. It's a complicated place. It's a complicated legacy, as we've been talking about, to cover. And the tours evolved a lot over the years, and it's become, I think, more subtle and nuanced. They deal with matters of race and slavery. They deal with Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings. There's a real challenge on the house tour, which is you're trying to... or they are trying to convey ideas with objects. It's too easy to say, isn't that a pretty painting?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Frank Cogliano:
Because it is a pretty painting, or, look at that architectural feature. But what they're trying to do, and they do supremely well in my view, try to say, okay, what does all this add up to? What does it mean? What was Jefferson trying to tell us in decorating his house as he did? But as I said, a crucial element to this, I think as well, is, and I can't urge this enough for people listening to this, don't just take the house tour great as that is. Make sure, and it's included in the ticket, you take the plantation tour too because the people who give those are amazing. And you get a fuller idea of what was going on at this mountaintop and the sense of it not just as the home of a really, really important individual, but a community, and how it operated. And that's conveyed by the tour. And that's the way the Thomas Jefferson Foundation engages in the work mainly of education to hundreds of thousands of people every year. It's the most important thing we do.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. And I should just say to our listeners as well that the guides not only, as you put it, are put through their paces, but they're given research time every week, where they are not just encouraged but required to continue their learning and encouraged to explore their own interests in Jefferson. And so there's actually not a script, one common script that they're given for their tours. And so you can go five different... 10 different times to Monticello and get a different tour emphasizing different things. One can be very much about the Declaration of Independence. One can be very much kind about the tinkering, knick-knack aspect of Jefferson the explorer, if you will. And another can be very much about the life of the enslaved, or his family, and the complicated relationships there going on. So that, I think, is always valuable to emphasize and to highlight and clarify because as we're living in very polarized, polarized times and how one presents a story from history, it's impossible to say every single aspect and every single nuance in, as you mentioned, 45 minutes.
And there's also a suspicion that there's... brainwashing is not the right word, but a script that is meant to be shoved down people's throats. And that's really not the case going on. And it's a very difficult thing for presidential museums, homes to do this right now, or historic places to try and tell their story with truth and accuracy, but also nuance.
But to go a little bit further down the road of this educational aspect, as the Foundation in those first decades of the 20th century gets its feet underneath it financially, and is able to restore the house and get more visitors, they're also working on revitalizing that... a scholarly image of Jefferson. And the Great Depression is happening suddenly, and they're still able to pay off their debts, and raise this interest of Jefferson. And suddenly, biographies and books start showing up about Jefferson. And meanwhile, FDR, President FDR comes along just around the time that discussions are being held in D.C. about a memorial in D.C. And he is very pivotal in changing the nature of that memorial into a Jefferson Memorial. I was wondering because was that 1943, so we're not quite at a hundred years there with that, but if you could tell us a little bit about that story, and the FDR, World War II connection with Thomas Jefferson and Monticello?
Frank Cogliano:
Sure, sure. So FDR was a great admirer of Jefferson, and as I said a few minutes ago, he visited Monticello. He actually visited this area a lot. The house I'm sitting in, Kenwood, was the home of... They didn't have the role of chief of staff then, but he was the equivalent of Jefferson's... sorry, FDR's chief of staff, a man named Edwin Paul Watson. And Paul Watson was a close confidant of FDR's. And so FDR came here a lot, but he spoke at Monticello on the 4th of July, 1936. So FDR was a great admirer of Jefferson.
And in 1943... 1943 was the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth. Jefferson was born in 1743. And then as now, in the approach to that, people said, we ought do something about this in the same way we're saying about 2026. How are we going to celebrate this? And FDR was a very strong advocate for the building of what's now the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C., including picking the quotes that are carved in the memorial. And of course, that memorial was built during the Second World War, and FDR believed that Jefferson was the kind of apotheosis of the values for which the United States was fighting, and its allies were fighting in the Second World War.
Jefferson, the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth and the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial on one hand can be seen as of their time, but that also marked a kind of change beginning... I mentioned a few minutes ago that Jefferson's reputation was kind of low before that. The comeback starts during the Second World War and particularly after the Second World War. And what we see is... A couple of things help account for this.
First of all, because of the Second World War and then the subsequent Cold War, those values for which Jefferson... or with which Jefferson identified, that tombstone legacy, let's say, suddenly seem really important. Right? We're not blaming him for the Civil War anymore. Instead, we're saying, actually, this is what we're about in the fight against fascism and then the contest with the Soviet Union after the Second World War. So we get that.
Also, one of the things that starts... There's another kind of monument that started in 1943, which is the publication of the papers of Thomas Jefferson. You can actually see... You can see them. Our listeners can't, on the shelves behind me. So the Princeton edition of the... the modern edition of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Julian Boyd, begins in 1943. It's still ongoing. We're nearly there at the end, but we're going to get there hopefully soon. But that makes Jefferson's writings available to scholars, which is going to energize scholarship in the second half of the 20th, or in the middle decades of this 20th century, and continues to this day. So we get that.
So that's the kind of big-picture stuff. And we get publications like Dumas Malone's... the first volumes of Dumas Malone's six-volume biography of Jefferson. The first volume was published in 1948, the last one in the early 1980s. So we get this... as I say, this efflorescence of Jefferson scholarship. I do think the Foundation plays a role in this, especially in the latter part of the story, with the creation of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. I'll get to that in a minute.
However, we also have this key connection: the Foundation endows a chair, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation chair in history at the University of Virginia. So Dumas Malone holds it, and then Merrill Peterson, then Peter Onuf, and currently, it's held by Alan Taylor. And so what we have is Jefferson scholars at UVA, Jefferson's university, who really energized the study of Jefferson, both through their own publications and through their supervision of Ph.D. students or advising of Ph.D. students.
So what we have is an infrastructure around Jefferson that emerges supported by this Foundation, but... through funding that chair, but also when we get to the '90s, the creation of the place where I sit today, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, which through its close links to UVA and particularly UVA Press has served as a home for scholars and scholarship, but also helped those scholars find a venue to publish in.
And so there's been a kind of infrastructure, if you will, it's not an accident. There's a reason that Jefferson Studies has boomed over the past 30 years. In part, those foundations were laid in the middle of the 20th century. But the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has helped build on those mainly through ICJS, but not only its association with UVA and elsewhere. Sorry. That's a lot.
Rebecca Burgess:
No, it's all good. And we wanted to get to this, as you mentioned at the beginning, talking about these last 30 years and how fruitful they have been. And you mentioned the international aspect of it. We are so inwardly focused, famously or infamously, in America on ourselves and on our own, but what does it look like coming from the outside? What other country... What are they looking to Monticello and to your center for about Jefferson? Is it... and the relation to the Declaration? Is it all in relation to the Declaration? Or are there just multiple different... you know?
Frank Cogliano:
We're back... We're back to the two sides of the mountain, Rebecca.
Rebecca Burgess:
Okay.
Frank Cogliano:
As you know, academic historians and one of the real jewels of the crown of American historiography since the Second World War has been the development of the historiography around slavery, slavery and race. And we're the best-documented plantation probably in the world. And so we attract a lot of scholarship in that area. But we also attract a lot of scholarship on the tombstone legacy. So I will give you an example. At the moment, this is a random example, but I think it's indicative. We've got several fellows here at the International Center working on a variety of topics. And by coincidence, one of them is a woman from the Netherlands who's working on the relationship or the interaction between the French Army and the Americans, Jefferson and Washington, during the War of Independence. The other, we've got a Danish scholar here, who's coming to us from a house museum in Denmark where...
Frank Cogliano:
... here, who's coming to us from a house museum in Denmark where they are struggling, unsurprisingly, in the current moment to reckon with their history with race and slavery. And she's here studying this from a museum studies standpoint to say, "How have you dealt with this?" And obviously, we've got generations of experience dealing with questions of race and slavery. We've got another scholar here from Oxford who's writing about Jefferson's relation with Condorcet, the great philosopher in the French Enlightenment. These just happen to be this month's fellows. Next month's fellows will be different. We've got a long-term fellow here from the University of Richmond who's working on a really interesting project about religion in the Northwest Territory in Ohio and relations between Indigenous people and the Shakers. It's everything and anything, but those just happen to be our current fellows. But to illustrate, we happen to have a good crop of international fellows at the moment, so I think that as an answer to your question, or a way to answer your question, is just that random sampling.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Jon Meacham has said that experiencing Monticello is as close as you can get to having a conversation with Thomas Jefferson. So, in a way, bringing those international fellows to Monticello is... Well, I think that's a really neat thing.
Frank Cogliano:
I agree.
Rebecca Burgess:
But a little on that note and on the question, you brought up the Northwest Ordinance, which we could have a whole other podcast on. It's one of the forgotten documents, I think, of America's freedom and really needs a lot more attention paid to it. But something that struck me is that when Jefferson started to build Monticello and his father, that was the frontier, and that is the western divide, if you will, and they're looking out on this vast expanse, and they're looking ahead. Jefferson has always struck me as being full of optimism and then, of course, having to get his nose rubbed in the sand of reality as he becomes president and realizes you do need a manufacturing class, you can't just have these farmers if you want this type of free society, various different aspects like that.
But as we're all looking forward to the 250th anniversary, thinking of Monticello still as a frontier of scholarship on Jefferson and on the declaration and its role. Where is Monticello wanting to point us to, if you will? What types of conversations, what conversation with Jefferson is Monticello hoping it can open our eyes to?
Frank Cogliano:
I think... We have a lot of discussions about this internally, as you can imagine. I think we, and maybe I'm speaking for myself here more than the foundation, but I've been privy to these discussions. We really want to center Jefferson in the discussion of the 250th. But in so doing, we need to do so with care for both. It's a complicated legacy, as we've already discussed. But what we're really talking about is it's the 250th anniversary of what? The Declaration of Independence. And so, just like those enslaved people who make that connection between Monticello and the Declaration, I think we've got to do that ourselves because that's the core document, that's the foundational, that's the mission statement for the United States. And that's the reason we remember Jefferson, and that's the reason this place is so important.
All the other stuff follows from that, and all the other stuff requires our consideration. The other aspects of the Tombstone legacy, as I call it, the other side of the mountain, when we deal with, "Okay, hold on a second, Mr. All men are are created equal. What about the 607 people you enslaved?" That's not a small question. You talked about the frontier. "Hey, whose land was your house built on?" These are important questions we have to talk about, but they all follow from, it seems to me, that foundational moment and that foundational document for which we are all indebted to Jefferson. And this is why I don't like talk of cancellation. I don't like zero-sum arguments where it's got to be all one thing or the other. The past is complicated, the present is complicated, and people are complicated. Jefferson's definitely complicated. But I think the message and the centering of the declaration and Jefferson's authorship of the declaration is the real message and the takeaway for the 250th, which the word is, Rebecca, semi quincentennial.
Rebecca Burgess:
I know, I know. See, you knew I was avoiding using that word because it's such a tongue-twister. I always take the easy route and just say the 250th.
Frank Cogliano:
No, most of us are doing that.
Rebecca Burgess:
Semiquincentennial. I just said it, but your words make me want to ask this question of you because I think I already know the answer, but I think it's helpful to raise the question for our listeners. Is then Monticello actually a museum? Is it a shrine, is it a memorial? Is it all of these things, and or is it something else?
Frank Cogliano:
I think it's all of them. I think it's a museum, but I don't want people to think, "Oh, it's a dusty place you shouldn't go to." I think it's those three things, but it is a shrine. It's a shrine at Jefferson, but it's also a memorial to the people who were enslaved here. And we mustn't forget that. And we've dedicated a new commemorative site in the past few months that names those who were enslaved here, the names we know. We've left space for those we don't know, which is telling. So it's all of those things, but I think it's something else. Again, I think it's a place where Americans can come together and have difficult conversations. Frankly, the conversations we're presently unwilling to have or unable to have, because its one of the few places... Because of the great sort, and because we all bowl alone, we basically talk to people we agree with.
We've sorted each other in the red and blue, and we don't talk to each other, we talk past each other. Not here because hundreds of thousands of people come here. I love talking to people in the parking lot and saying, "Hey, where'd you come from today? And why are you here?" If they want to engage me, sometimes they just say hello and keep going. But what's fascinating to me is they come from all parts of the country. I don't want to make any presumptions about what their backgrounds are or what their beliefs are, but this is a place where we can also... It's always been a place of having hard conversations. Jefferson liked to have hard conversations. Crucially, you also believe they ought to be conducted with civility. And I think we need that.
Rebecca Burgess:
And with wine.
Frank Cogliano:
Yes. That helps.
Rebecca Burgess:
No, no. Good fair. Okay. Along those lines, to final, or as we approach the end of this conversation questions, and before I ask you about the book that you are currently writing on Jefferson and George Washington, do you have a favorite story or quote either specifically related to Monticello or to Jefferson that is not necessarily well-known, but that just encapsulates for you some of either the richness, the complexity, or the joy, the wonders of this “essay” of America?
Frank Cogliano:
Shared one of my favorite quotes, the one about, "I don't mind if my neighbor believes there are 20 Gods or no God." That's a favorite from the notes on the state of Virginia. You got to love, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness " is a quote, and "All men are created equal." And women, I would add. But I also like in the context of what I just said. One of my favorite quotes, and Jefferson himself struggled to live up to this, but I think it's an important one, is, "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy as cause for withdrawing from a friend." And I really like that quote. That's my current favorite. I mean, he's got some great ones, but that one has really stayed with me as I look around in the current moment. And I think if we all thought about that, that might be good. Sorry, I'm sounding preachy now.
Rebecca Burgess:
No, no. I was just going to say, immensely relevant for us today. And so, you are writing a book on Jefferson and George Washington, and you claim that it is the first of its kind. Can you tell us what this book is? It's coming out in the spring. I think that our listeners will be very interested in this book. I know I am.
Frank Cogliano:
It's coming out-
Rebecca Burgess:
More people than I will be.
Frank Cogliano:
I think the publication date is February 20th, and it's called A Revolutionary Friendship. It's about the relationship between Jefferson and Washington. Jefferson and Washington had a 30-year relationship that was mainly amicable. I mean, one of the things I'm looking at in this book is their friendship, and it's ebbs and flows, because, as many people will know, it ended badly. They were estranged at the end of Washington's life and they never reconnected because Washington died soon after in 1799 I think we've made a mistake and projected that back and looked for this throughout, and I just don't believe that. I mean, one of the things I did, I set out to read their correspondence in order, starting at the beginning and going to the end. And it's just simply not so that they hated each other throughout their lives. They actually collaborated quite closely on a number of things, and quite productively, and quite happily.
But they did differ politically and they differed over significant things, and I talk about that. But I talk about their relationship born of the revolution and eventually destroyed after the revolution and how and why that happened. And it's not a metaphor parable for our time, but I do think it might have something to tell us in this time. I'll be launching it here at Monticello on February 17th, right around President's Day, and you're all welcome to come.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh, I'll try and get myself there. Well, Jefferson famously died on July 4th, 1826, and he was full of foreboding about the violence he saw, of course, ahead. But he had optimism too about the American project and the project of freedom and equality that he had tried so hard to enshrine in the Declaration of Independence. So as America looks ahead to the 250th anniversary, and you've kind of answered this, but how can Monticello help us to reengage with our nation's aspirations and complicated legacy?
Frank Cogliano:
I think it's a place where we need to talk about this stuff. We have been doing that for the past century. We need to be at the center of a public conversation. We have a unique opportunity here because the eyes of the country and the world will be on this place because of its association with Jefferson, and we have a unique opportunity to help engage in, I think, a project of civic education to talk about the core values that we all still share as citizens of the United States.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, thank you so much, Frank, for that, for joining us for the Hopeful Words, and a happy 100th birthday to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello, and of course, gratitude for all of those whose study American political thought and history, for the work and the help that the foundation has given us the past 100 years and in revitalizing recapturing, relearning who Jefferson was. So thank you again, Frank, for joining us.
Frank Cogliano:
Thanks, Rebecca. Here's to the next 100 years.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, exactly. Cheers with some wine again. All right, so that was Frank Cogliano the Interim Saunders director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. I am Rebecca Bridges and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thank you for joining us today.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
James Patterson is joined by Rita Koganzon of the University of Houston to talk about the Amish, the Satmar, and democratic education.
Brian A. Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.
James M. Patterson:
Hello, you are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is September 29th, 2023, and my name is James M. Patterson. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy as well as the Institute for Human Ecology, and President of the Cicerone Society. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanted to make a brief statement of mourning for Dr. Ellis Sandos, who died on September 19th this past week at the age of 92, New Orleans native, father of four, 10 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, but people who are familiar with Dr. Sandos listening to Liberty Law Talk may know of his incredible contributions to the work of classical liberalism and political philosophy, including his edited volumes called the Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730 to 1805.
These are two volumes of the most important sermons that helped shape the politics of their day, as well as reflect on the beliefs and standards for constitutionalism held by outstanding religious leaders of the period. He was also the founder of the Eric Voegelin Institute. Many of the people you'll hear on Liberty Law Talk were participants in Voegelin Institute panels, including today's guest. Before we move on to her, I just wanted to read from the foreword that Dr. Sandos wrote in 1994 for the first volume of the political sermons. "Liberty is thus an essential principle of man's constitution, a natural trait which yet reflects the supernatural creator. Liberty is God-given; the growth of virtue and perfection of being depends upon free choice in response to divine invitation and help in cooperative relationships. The correlate of responsibility is that liberty is most truly exercised by living in accordance with truth. Man's dominion over the earth and the other creatures, his mastery of nature through reason, is subject to no restraint but the law of his nature, which is perfect liberty. The obligation to obey the laws of the creator only checks his licentiousness and abuse."
Dr. Sandos will be missed, and his contributions are many. And now, I'll move on to today's guest, Dr. Rita Koganzon, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston. While there, she teaches political theory and American politics. Her research focuses on the themes of education, childhood authority, and the family and historical and contemporary political thought. Her first book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, Childhood Education, and Early Modern Thought, examines the justifications for authority over children from Jean Bodin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wow, that's a pair. And explores how and why Locke and Rousseau departed from their absolutist predecessors by refusing to model the family on the state by nonetheless preserving authority, even extreme authority over children within the family, for the sake of liberty of adults.
She's working on a second project that focuses on education from the early republic in the United States through the 20th century. But today, we're talking about something a little different. We're talking about her recent presentation at the 2023 American Political Science Association, as well as two things that she's published recently on Judaism and religious liberty. The first is The Satmar Option, which she published for the summer 2023 edition of the Hedgehog Review, and her outstanding chapter from the book Religious Liberty and Education. It's titled Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life: Yeshiva Education Versus Liberal Education Theory. Dr. Koganzon, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Hi, thanks for having me.
James M. Patterson:
Sorry for the long preamble, but I'll give you now plenty of time to describe this central insight that really has stuck with me since your presentation on the difference between what you refer to slightly paraphrasing here as the kind of Amish paradigm for religious liberty and religious minorities versus what you call the Satmar option. So who are the Satmar, and how are they different from the Amish?
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Well, the Satmar are a Hasidic religious group. They are from Hungary originally, but they sort of crystallized, actually, in New York after World War II, the survivors of the Holocaust came and sort of reconsolidated the Hasidic group, and they were led by a rabbi. And they now live mainly in Williamsburg and in this independent community in Upstate New York called Kiryas Joel. It's kind of complicated to define what exactly Hasidic Judaism is or how it is analogous to certain kinds of Christianity because the ecclesiology of Judaism is not really the same as Christianity. So people will often say, well, this is a sect, which I guess is fine as a description. I don't know that they love it so much, but it's a sort of Hasidic group that follows this particular rabbi who actually has passed away. And now they have a problem with figuring out who they're following exactly.
And so they're different from the Amish in a lot of ways, namely that they're not Christian. But in terms of the political question, there's been a kind of treatment of religious minorities in American constitutional law, and also, I think, in American public opinion, that is very sort of Christian-centric in terms of the way we think about religious descent from the mainstream. And so the Amish are a kind of radical form of religious descent from the mainstream in that they don't want to live what we would consider a modern life, that they reject a lot of modern technology, that they reject living in cities. They live in their own rural communities that are based largely on agriculture. And so they look very different from sort of modern Americans in this respect. And they maintain a certain kind of separation from mainstream, secular, modern, whatever appellation you want to use, Americans.
And so then the question with them becomes, okay, well, when there are sort of generally applicable laws passed in state legislatures or by Congress or whatever, are they required to follow them if somehow following these laws would obstruct their ability to practice their religion? And this comes up in the 1972 case, most famously Wisconsin v. Yoder, where the question is if there are compulsory schooling laws in the state of Wisconsin, which are facially neutral, and they require everybody to go to school until they're 16, do the Amish have to comply with this if for them going to school until they're 16 would potentially disrupt their ability to remain in the Amish faith? And in 1972, the court decided that they don't have to comply with these compulsory schooling laws because they're a sincere religious minority and they have a First Amendment free exercise right to, in a sense, be exempted.
Although that's not the technical legal understanding of what's happening here, that is the practical effect of what's happening here. They're exempted from these compulsory schooling laws. They're allowed to pull their kids out of public schools early. And as the Amish put it, in this case, they're going to give them an Amish education at home, essentially an agricultural education and an education in their community. And so that is somewhat controversial, I guess. But as far as public opinion goes, that's acceptable to Americans becomes the basis for a lot of subsequent homeschooling legislation and other sorts of exemptions from public schooling. And the thing about the Amish is that they're very, I think, admirable to Americans in a certain way. They resemble kind of what America looked like at the founding or sort of what we imagine it looked like at the founding. And the important thing from the court's perspective is that they're self-sufficient in the sense that they don't rely on any government assistance.
And not only do they not rely on any government assistance, they actually do not contribute to or draw from Social Security. And so there really are very sort of distinct from the government. And so what I'm calling the Amish paradigm is a way of thinking about the terms of religious liberty as a kind of contract in the United States. And so what the Amish offer a model of is this kind of contract between the majority and a dissenting religious minority where the majority, in a sense, is willing to let the religious minority have some autonomy over its own internal government and be sort of less beholden to the federal government or the state governments, or maybe beholden is not the right word, but maybe something more involved with, regulated by. That's key. Secular government in exchange for their self-sufficiency. And they're not calling on these secular governments for assistance.
And I think that has been sort of the mental model that we hold for justifiable religious exemptions from generally neutral laws, regulations, and things like that. And the challenge that the Satmar posts to this is that they're urban. They are not self-sufficient in the sense that they're not an agricultural community that grows its own food or anything like that. They live in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, or in a suburb in Upstate New York, in New Jersey, in other very densely populated places. And they do receive government welfare and transfers. They receive a sort of direct aid like SNAP benefits and things like that. They also receive aid for schooling and things like that because they qualify for Title 1 funds. It's hard to say that they're poor. The issue is they have a lot of kids so even when they're working and they make an income, it's very hard to support eight kids or 10 kids on a single income or even both parents' incomes.
And so they often qualify for federal and state poverty funds because those are based on family size. So they pose a different kind of dilemma, I think, for us because then the question is, well, how far are we going to allow them to practice their religion, especially to the degree that their religion is in conflict with mainstream norms when at the same time they are sort of reliant on federal and state aid. So they're not self-sufficient, so shouldn't we have some sort of control over them? And this comes up very saliently in the last few years. There's been a conflict in New York City because they run their own private school system, and the allegations of the New York Department of Education and the New York City education bureaucracies that they are not doing a sufficient job of educating their children, that they don't teach enough secular subjects, that they don't teach English.
The Satmar speak Yiddish. And so should the state and the city governments be allowed to intervene in their school curricula and change them or bring them up to date or mainstream them, however, you want to think about it, on the grounds that this is a violation of their children's rights and we're paying for those schools? That's the other salient thing. So that's what I see as the contrast. There's a kind of vision of a very self-sufficient, almost sort of noble agrarian group who's practicing a divergent way of life in the United States. And we're sort of willing to forgive that so long as they don't depend on us or ask us for anything. But that's not really a common model of how religious descent works in America anymore. Most people don't look like the Amish. They look a lot more like the Satmar. They're doing something out of the mainstream, out of the ordinary, but they are pretty much integrated into American society and are sort of entangled in government institutions and also are often recipients of transfers.
James M. Patterson:
The subject of the Amish as a kind of exemplar reminded me of one of the worst movies I've ever seen called For Richer or Poorer with Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley, about a man and a woman from New York who retreat from a scandal to live on Amish country. And there's a kind of a rediscovery of what it means to be authentically human by living among the Yoders, which is, of course, one of the people in the Wisconsin v. Yoder case.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Well, I think that's just an extremely common Amish Mennonite surname. They're not all related.
James M. Patterson:
Oh, okay. They're not related to fictional people.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
No, it's an extremely common surname. So you've been to UVA, right? If you drive just north of UVA, there's a great children's farm market thing called Yoders, where they have a petting zoo and everything. Those people aren't related, either.
James M. Patterson:
That is actually a great recommendation. If you need to stop off with your kids, please go there. They were goats on a giant contraption that they'd built. It's incredible fun. And the food is amazing.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah.
James M. Patterson:
We are-
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Unrelated Yoders.
James M. Patterson:
We are not endorsed by Yoders, but we will gladly take any shoofly pie they will send our direction. We have just a real rich chapter here, and there's a lot that I want to talk about that Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life. The thing that you point out first in this chapter is that the preoccupation that many post-Second World War liberals had was with the possibility of a Christian theocracy. You say here, the 1980s, 1990s, "Fear of Christian theocracy can no longer reasonably motivate our considerations when so many of those asking for considerations are not Christians." So this older understanding that even by the nineties seemed to be pretty antiquated remains more or less enshrined in our laws. So, talk to me a little bit about what that liberalism was and why it was so preoccupied with this particular case of Christian theocracy.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, so I mean, the rise of the religious right and the election in 1980, I think sort of set off panic bells among many people on the left, that suddenly there is this insurgent movement of right-wing Christians who basically had not been heard from for a long time. I mean, not that they weren't there, they just weren't politically involved in the 1950s and 1960s. They started to become more politicized in the 1970s. And this takes a lot of sort of liberals, especially academic types, by surprise, and they become very worried.
And so if you think about Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, that's a response I think is written in the early eighties, is a kind of fever dream or fever nightmare of what she thinks might happen if these people were really to come to power. And I mean, they came to power through Reagan, but they were just part of a conservative coalition that included obviously many other parts. And so the Wisconsin v. Yoder decision starts to look kind of nefarious or ominous to the left, and then there's a second decision. I think this is just a circuit court decision. It doesn't go all the way to the Supreme Court called Moser v. Hawkins in the early eighties, which deals with or involves a group of what we call fundamentalists, whatever that's supposed to mean, who are challenging the secular humanist curriculum of their public school. Their argument is that actually secular humanism is its own religion, and it's being imposed on us evangelical Christians as though it were neutral, but there's actually nothing neutral about it. It's a replacement for our religion, and that's a violation of our religious liberty. They lose. The court ends up saying that this kind of secular humanist curriculum is not religious, but they make a really important point. Their political theorists, especially people working in the tradition of John Rawls, take this seriously as a real problem, that there are these people who think that even neutral secular education is a form of religion. There's a lot of writing done around Wisconsin v. Yoder and Mozert v. Hawkins in the 1980s and 1990s by this kind of Rawlsian tradition of liberal education or democratic education.
They're very concerned about, for them, the real question motivating a lot of this is: How can we neutralize religious rights? How can we prevent them from taking their kids out of schools entirely and homeschooling them into some kind of fundamentalist theocratic regime to promote such a regime or from developing their own schools that are going to promote this? Because their fear is that sort of the civic fabric is going to be rented by these people's children who are educated in this really insular fundamentalist type education and who are going to grow up and come out of it basically ready to overthrow the liberal, republican regime of the United States. They write lots of theories of education, political theories of education that are mainly about how to constrain these sorts of people. What sort of public education is required and necessary so that everybody gets the same civic foundation implicitly/explicitly so that they don't become fundamentalist theocrats when they grow up.
James M. Patterson:
The term that you use and that's used among the people that you cite is the word autonomy. The autonomy standard is, as you point out, not neutral. Even though you may not, I think, necessarily identify with the Hawkins case or its results, there is all the same kind of, I don't know how to put it, kind of acceptance that the religious right did have a point, you say. Although the autonomy aimed at by liberal education reports to give children a neutral or broad selection of lives, it is neither neutral nor broad in reality but highly normative and narrow. Although childhood exposure to diversity is intended to expand our liberty and capacity for independent thought as adults, it actually undermines the development of the very virtues necessary to exercise such independence. In fact, you point out later that this kind of education is really only beneficial to secular would-be elites, and the rest, more or less, have to suffer in silence.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, so I mean, the way that these political theorists who are concerned about the rise of right-wing theocracy or religious theocracy try to theorize this problem is to say, well, the kind of education that everybody needs is an education for an open future or an education for autonomy. That if we set this as a standard, we're sort of guaranteeing that nobody can get this kind of theocratic fundamentalist education and get away with it. The idea of autonomy is that you should have the kind of education that allows you to continually revise your understanding of the best way of life. That if you're sort of locked into one understanding that shows that you're not really autonomous, that you're hetero autonomous. In order to facilitate that, we need to expose you to diverse ways of life as a child as part of your education so that you can sort of rationally choose among them.
That's the sort of prevailing assumption of this kind of theory that if you were exposed to a diversity of ways of life, then in a sense, your insular fundamentalist parents don't have the kind of control over you that they can sort of determine how you turn out because you're going to have the resources to decide for yourself. I think that's sort of intuitively appealing to liberals. I mean, not just on the left, but just liberals broadly that that's the case because sort of how public education understands itself or what it understands itself as doing often. The argument that I make is that there's an assumption buried there that constantly revising your way of life, or at least frequently revising your way of life, demonstrates something about your virtue, but in reality, it's very costly to do that in adult life.
You have to think about, okay, well, you have a religion, but you reconsider it. You leave your church, and you leave all the social connections there and all the social capital that you've developed there behind. You have a career, but you decide you want to do something else, so you've got to retrain, that's also very costly. You have a marriage, and you decide, I actually would like to live a different kind of life, goodbye to my family. We can see the costs involved there. I mean, that's a kind of extreme example, but that's sort of part of the autonomy that they want to develop in people. When you think about, well, who can best afford that kind of life where you're constantly changing things around, and there's a lot of costs involved with those changes, the answer is basically people with elite educations, people who are white-collar professionals who make a lot of money and who just have more money to absorb these kinds of costs with.
Whereas, for the vast majority of people, the idea of moving around all the time, of changing up the way that you live, changing your career, changing your family can be really just devastating. It's not clear that you can always recover from this and that you have the resources built up to be able to absorb those costs. In that sense, it's not a neutral way of life. It's a way of life and a kind of ideal of the best kind of life that is really suitable only for people or maybe mostly for people with elite degrees in elite professions with a high degree of geographic and social mobility, who are able to absorb the costs of making frequent life changes. Then, for other people, the good of staying in one place is rooted in being tied to your family or being tied to a community. Those look to people from Yale and Harvard as being tied down and having no choices. The kinds of capital that you build up that way can be very important for supporting you throughout your life if you don't have the other kinds of capital that the people from Harvard and Yale have, literal financial capital, educational capital, and so on.
James M. Patterson:
A very strong passage, one of the ones that I marked with multiple stars, which means I have to talk about it, liberal theory has no answer where neither choice causes harm, the choice being between eating pork and not eating pork, but the child needs answers about the best way of life. A negative standard like the harm principle does not suffice. Absent authoritative guidance from parents and teachers, the child will either make his choices on mere whim or find other perhaps salutary authorities who are less skittish about comprehensive worldviews to guide his choices.[BS1] This is a summary of the kind of education you're describing is very bleak and you actually point to some ambivalence, maybe I'm misreading you on this, but with some ambivalence to the Satmars having an answer to this problem that liberalism creates. Maybe address if I'm right about the ambivalence, but also how stark the contrast is and the kind of education you get in a yeshiva.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Well, I mean, the kind of education you get in the yeshiva varies. The schools that are currently under investigation or were under investigation are kind of extreme versions of Hasidic schooling, and a lot of it has many more secular elements. What's in question here is you have a very Jewishly rooted education. It's an education rooted in Jewish law, often it's taught in Yiddish, and it emphasizes what we would call in the secular world, Jewish values rather than secular values. It gives you a very clear picture of the best way of life as this community sees it. Liberal theorists tend to view that as coercive because you're given this picture before you really have a chance to think through what for you would be the best way of life. I think the problem is that the assumption here is that the child is this rational thinker, is constantly working through the possibilities when another possibility is simply that you're creating children who don't really have a lot of, what you're not reinforcing in children is sort of the virtues of self-control and the sort of ability to stick to a decision because you're in fact, encouraging them to do the opposite, to constantly sort of change their mind or reconsider.
One possibility is that actually in childhood, it is better to have a concrete vision of the best way of life that is given to you authoritatively. I mean, children don't see it otherwise. They see it as being sort of imposed on them, but then they also can come to like it. It doesn't foreclose the possibility that in adulthood you will change your mind, that you will simply see this way of life as either impossible for you to follow or at least very undesirable and that you can leave. All of these communities within liberalism, we require all of these insular communities to have rights of exit as liberal theorists call them, right? That you can leave the Satmar, you live in New York City, just move to another part of New York City and try to start your life anew, secular, or maybe less observant than the Satmar. There's a lot of different options.
Whereas, the public school view or the way that the liberal theorists would like public schools to work is to not privilege any possible way of life to say that all ways of life are basically good unless they're criminal. Unless they violate the harm principle and that it's really up to a seven or eight year old child to make their own decision, but they don't have the resources to do that. They end up not necessarily in a better place than somebody who is given a more rigorous Hasidic or Satmar upbringing and gets to adulthood and either decides that they want to stay in this community or decides that they want to leave. In one way or the other has been given a much more, I think, complete sort of moral education than the kind that these liberal theorists are advocating for, which is largely a kind of abdication of making any claims about morality or about the best way of life out of this kind of defensive fear that if we say something is the best way of life, then we're, of course, prejudicing ourselves against other possibilities that could be equally good.
The irony, of course, is that religious ways of life are not equally good because they're heteronomous. Really it's hard to, I mean, there is a kind of smuggling in of value judgments here. The value judgments tend to be against religious orthodoxies because religious orthodoxies are not open to non orthodoxies.
James M. Patterson:
I've done some work on the Catholics side to this history of education and religious liberty. It's funny how parallel fundamentalist Protestants and now apparently the Satmar are to the same experiences that Catholics had, right down to Catholics complaining that public schools adopt what Dagger John Hughes, a bishop in the 1830s called “nothingarianism,” where there's sort of a dogmatic imposition of vaguely humanitarian beliefs that would only encourage people to become atheists.
That way of constructing a kind of implicit dogmatic teaching in a school is actually quite a flimsy one for most students. I think you have a very strong, probably very controversial take on this in the chapter, namely that Yeshiva education for Hasidic Jews is actually really great when it comes to living in a contemporary social life. The Hasidic adolescent is in a stronger position to seriously engage with diversity than the secular one who's exposed to a superficial parade of possibilities that hardly challenge his own weekly rooted preconceptions very deeply. He has not a naive personal preference, but 1,000-year-old tradition to weigh against the alternatives. He must also weigh the serious social and economic consequences of resisting the secular mainstream against the deep disapproval of his family and community if he joins it.
These are very high stakes, and that's why there's much more to the question whether to eat or not eat pork is this sort of development of the character of the student and their ability to maturely and almost independently make these decisions that purportedly secular education supposed to provide but doesn't afford. What is it about this 1,000-year-old education that is so bracing?
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Well, so I think there, I mean, I'm not actually singling Judaism out for this. It happens that Judaism is this 10,000-year old tradition. I mean, the Hasidic sects are not thousands of years old, but they're following Jewish law, which is thousands of years old. What I'm trying to say there is that there's a criticism from liberal theory that if you give your kids this kind of insular education where they don't have exposure to diversity, they're not going to be able to reasonably weigh the alternatives, because they're going to be so biased by the experience that they had in their upbringings that they won't be able to take seriously any alternatives. The point that I want to suggest here is that when you are a religious minority in a regime where the majority is very visibly lifestyle, everything economically different from you, it's really hard not to notice that.
The presumption of liberal theorists is that these kids are simply oblivious, or that these people are totally oblivious to the fact that they are extreme minorities in a society that functions very differently than their communities do. I mean, that may be more true to some degree for the Amish because they actually live physically isolated, often from larger communities of secular Americans. That's not really true of Hasidic Jews because they live in New York City. It's really hard not to notice in New York City that you look really different than all these other people on the street. It's true that the community can provide a lot of supports to make it feel normal to be Hasidic. That's not a problem, but it just seems not to be the case that for an extreme minority of this kind, that you would never consider the alternatives.
It is precisely because there's so much at stake with this question of the right of exit, of leaving a community for any individual who does it. You have to really take on a totally different way of life, and often you have to cut off connections with people that you knew in your childhood. I mean, that's a very serious life decision. For them, the question of how will I live is kind of constantly presented to them on the streets of New York City in a way that it's not to the secular student who is told, "Well, there's lots of different ways of life. They're all like ..."
A student who is told, "Well, there's lots of different ways of life. They're all pretty good, and there's some that are really just beyond the pale, so you shouldn't consider those." But then you end up with a situation like Buddhism, right? All of these kinds of secular people decide to be Buddhist for a while. And there's no cost in that because it's kind of fake, and it's part of this mainstream one of the new age options for life. And you can pick it up and discard it without any changes to your existing life.
And so the idea that you're autonomous because you're choosing these sorts of things, you're choosing to do yoga, you're choosing to attend a church, now you're choosing not to attend a church, these are all very low stakes decisions, and it's not clear that you seriously understand the valence of different ways of life. Whereas to be an extreme minority like the Satmar and also like the Amish, and to contemplate leaving that community is to contemplate the question of different ways of life and different understandings of the good life really seriously because there's a lot of cost.
James M. Patterson:
Yeah. You can see in that description you just gave how the approach to autonomy favors elites, especially people with a lot of money, because the decisions are low stakes if the money you spend on them is relatively disposable. So, for a particular kind of person, you can go to a sort of rich kid, Bali, hippie commune and get high on ayahuasca, and then you'll be able to leave after you get sick of that. And I don't know, go work as a vice president in your father's software company or what have you, whereas others who don't have those options instead simply consume media of people engaging in those options.
And all of that has that kind of shallow consumer model of religiosity that it seems very foreign to what the Satmar are dealing with. So there is a kind of history of litigation or of problems with the establishment clause that the Satmar have confronted. One of these includes the 1994 case Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumets. So, what's the story behind this? This is sort of where the Satmar first start to, or at least the Hasidic communities start to really come into conflict, right?
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Well, they come into conflict once they try to create a town. So this is actually described really nicely in the book that I reviewed for the Hedgehog Review called American Shtetl by Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers. And they give the kind of extensive legal history of creating Kiryas Joel. So, there are kind of two problems with the First Amendment that these sorts of groups face. One is the free exercise clause, which is the Amish issue with taking your kids out of school, being exempt from a generally applicable law on the grounds of free exercise. But once you try to set up a town that is populated entirely by Satmar and governed by Satmar, this raises a question about whether that violates the Establishment Clause because you're not supposed to have a religious government in the United States. And there are some interesting precedents for this. There's like this ashram in Oregon that tries to do this too, and there's shut down.
But what happens? So Satmar grows, they need space, they have a lot of kids, and the Rebbe approves the purchase of this land in, I think it's Monroe County, it's next to the town of Monroe, outside of New York City, and they start developing it and building on it. And they immediately come into conflict with their neighbors because they want to have really high-density housing. And this is a suburb of New York City, and people have single-family homes, and they're single-family zoning. And they're like, "Why are you building these apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere?" And there's a kind of sense of, do we really want to have this group of very strange people who live in a totally different way and don't really talk to us living in our town? And so there are all kinds of conflicts with the town of Monroe that actually lead to Kiryas Joel becoming independent, they break off and become an independent municipality.
So, the first set of conflicts is actually just creating Kiryas Joel as an independent municipality rather than a kind of subdivision of the town of Monroe. And then, as an independent municipality, they have no public school because they all send their kids to the private Satmar yeshivas, but they also have a problem, which is that they have some kids who have special needs and are not going to be well-educated in the conventional yeshiva. And so, the question is: Where do we send our kids with special needs? Should we send them to the public school in Monroe where they're not going to get a kind of Jewish special needs education, they're going to get the public school special needs education, or can we create our own special education program in Kiryas Joel that is intended to serve only students from Kiryas Joel.
And that's the basis of this conflict. So they start doing this, they create their own public school. It's a public school designed entirely for kids with special needs and only open to the residents of Kiryas Joel, who are probably 99.9% Satmar. I don't know. There might be somebody who's not Satmar living there. And does that violate the Establishment Clause because are they creating essentially a religious public school is the question? So this goes all the way to the Supreme Court and the Court decides against the school district that this is a violation of the establishment clause, that they are creating essentially a religious school, and that they can't go forward. If they do go forward, they just find other ways around it. And the interesting thing about this decision, as the authors in American Shtetl note, is that it sort of signals the beginning of a shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence about the First Amendment towards sort of allowing the state... I mean, in this case, they didn't allow the state to get involved in religion.
But after this, you start to see a lot more cases where the state is allowing more of what they call entanglement between government and religious groups. And at this point, we are at a point where there's a possibility of even starting religious charter schools. So Oklahoma has started religious charter schools, and I think that's going to be litigated, but it's not thought that that's totally beyond the pale. And there's a lot more government involvement in religious schooling and government funding for religious schooling. And so the argument that the authors of that book make is that this is sort of the beginning of that shift and that the Satmar plays an important role in kind of provoking that shift because, and part of the reason has to do with the fact that they're not the fundamentalist Christian bogeyman, they're Jews, they're a minority. They pose no threat to the majority.
And I mean, one of the things that's interesting about Satmar, in contrast to the fear of Christian fundamentalism that motivated liberal theory for a long time, is that Satmar does not want to take over America. They have zero interest in governing non-Jews. So you could always have... Christianity is an evangelical religion. Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Christianity is a majority religion. So even though there are sects within Christianity and there's a lot of sort of conflict within Christianity, there's always the possibility that Christians want to actually take over and they want to govern, and that's their real goal. And that when they're asking for these exemptions and things like that, it's part of the strategy for some larger long-term takeover. But you can't really assume that that's the case for the Satmar because their goal is not to govern any non-Jews and probably not really any non-Satmar, although that's a little questionable.
So in that sense, they're interesting because they don't pose this threat, this political threat. And the question of exempting them from generally applicable laws or whatever, or carving out exemptions for them from regulation is not one where you can plausibly ever say that their goal, they have some larger scheme, a long-term scheme to use these little exemptions and carve-outs to gain power and take over. And so it's really just a question of tolerating pluralism and how far we're willing to go in tolerating pluralism.
James M. Patterson:
There's a town in Michigan called Hamtramck, which has become majority Muslim, primarily from Bangladesh, and they have an all-Muslim city council that recently banned the use of pride flags in the city. The response from an LGBT activist and a former mayor was, "There's a sense of betrayal. We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you're the one doing the threatening." There's a sort of presumption among autonomy-based liberals that because they're defending religious minorities, the religious minorities support autonomy-driven liberalism, and this just doesn't seem to be the case.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, there's a sort of limit to this in the case of the Jews, which is that they're not trying to grow and take over, but there is a kind of analogous problem. So Ramapo County has this problem in which there are a lot of Hasidic Haredi Jews living there, and they won a majority of the school board seats, but they don't send their kids to the public schools. And so there are all these accusations that they're defunding, that they're basically using the public schools to divert money into their private school system, that they're defunding the public schools, that it doesn't make sense for them to be on the school board of school system, which they don't even support and which is competing with their school system.
And so I think there was a whole series of podcasts actually about this controversy. But yeah, I mean, there are ways in which it's clearly going to come into conflict with secular government. If you create local majorities, you could have enough people to win school board seats. You could have enough people of your religious group to win city council seats. At a small sort of local level, you could take over the secular government. And then what's going to happen to the people living there who are not members of your religious group? And what are the obligations of this dissenting religious group to sort of respect the now minority rights of the non-religious residents of this area?
James M. Patterson:
So the review has, and you told me this story as well, I think you may have even told it during your presentation for your paper, has this account for how the Satmar were actually able to essentially game the system for welfare benefits for low-income people. And they did so by more or less hacking an entitlement program, an entitlement program that was designed with the expectation, as it turns out, an expectation that I think you would agree liberals did not really imagine, that poor people would have low levels of social capital, but if you engineer a poor people with high levels of social capital, they're actually able to sort of work against the original intentions of this welfare program. So, explain exactly how this works and why it was such a source of outrage.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, that's a great story. So there's kind of two objections to the Satmar currently that sort of arise from their difference and their minority status. So one is their schooling and the curriculum of their private schools. And the other one is that they’re welfare sponges. And so they do receive a lot of government transfers. The main reason for this is that they fall below the state poverty line often, even though they're working and have an income because they also have a lot of kids. And the poverty lines are determined by family size, but they also have, on occasion, been convicted of fraud for gaming the system, as you say, for various government transfers. And that's the reputation that they have in New York City. So you talk to New Yorkers about them, and they're like, "Yeah, they do all this fraud." It's always hard to prove the fraud.
So I think there's probably less conviction, but when there is conviction, the New York Times is very happy about it, and they write about it. And so they wrote, I think this was last year, about this case in which one of the Hasidic Yeshivas in New York in Brooklyn had come up with a scheme where they would pay their teachers, they would sort of sign contracts with their teachers where they would pay them just enough that they would be below the threshold of qualifying for supplementary welfare payments. So basically, they would be paid a certain amount, and then they would still be able to apply for other forms of welfare. I'm not sure exactly what forms of welfare, but they would be able to apply on an individual level for supplementary transfers, and the school would make up the difference in supermarket coupons for kosher grocery stores.
And so you would be getting a salary, which was money, supermarket coupons, and then you would have to go out and apply for welfare to supplement your salary. And this was discovered, and this was described in the New York Times, and this is a kind of bargain that it's really hard to imagine anybody else in New York taking, right? I mean, imagine you're given a job offer, and they tell you, "Well, we would pay you 50,000, but instead, we're going to pay you 25,000, and we'll give you 10,000 more in supermarket coupons, and then you can go apply for welfare and the government will cover the rest." That requires a really high level of social trust to accept such an offer. Most of us would just be like, "Please give me the money, or I'm not going to work for you," because we don't have the social trust that we're working for an employer that really has our interest in mind.
We just think we're being scammed. In a way, the way we've structured welfare has kind of had this individualistic assumption that families will only use it when they really need it, that there's a kind of shame associated with using it, that they're not going to use it as a kind of tool of advancing their group because there's no group involved. But the Satmar have way fewer scruples about using government funding. Their idea is that the government is giving people money, and we qualify for it, so why shouldn't we be recipients of it just like everybody else? And part of that has to do with the experience that they had in Williamsburg in the 1970s and '80s, where there was a kind of ethnic patronage system of welfare where different groups were sort of trying to get their share of what the city was giving out, and they were part of that.
And so they don't have the same kind of objection that it's immoral or shameful to receive government benefits. They think this is something that's being given out and we qualify for it, and so why wouldn't we take it? Plus, they're much better organized in taking it. And so they have this ability to use welfare in these ways that are very difficult for other groups to do, to have a kind of organized employment system that simply incorporates welfare payments as part of the expected salary that you're going to make. And I think another element of this that's really interesting, and we're thinking about, especially for people who are thinking about how to design welfare, right, it's like, well, how would you prevent this fraud? Right? Well, you would have to, in some way, prevent people from qualifying on the basis that the Satmar qualify. So you have to change the rules in ways that would affect everybody. Are you going to impose, for example, child caps for the receipt of welfare transfers, right? So if you have more than four children, we're not going to pay you. But that seems outrageous. And so it's very hard to think about how to redesign the welfare system in a way that would prevent this kind of high solidarity community from taking advantage of it.
James M. Patterson:
Reading the Times' coverage of Hasidic welfare fraud, one gets the distinct sense that the reporters would be more relieved if all the public money that the Hasidim received was fraudulent then, except that so many of them are actually just poor. For them, it seems, poverty has not been as fatal to flourishing as it has for other Americans. It has not led to any of the social pathologies typically associated with it. This confounds the typical sociological explanations for these negative outcomes, which identify poverty as their root cause. In this respect, Hasidim confounds the right to since it more successfully models, in actual practice, the corrective or even alternative to liberalism that Christianity often inspires to be. Really just incredible stuff in this review. So, I have a couple more questions before you go. One is specific, and the other is going to be the most exciting one for me. But I'll start with the more specific one, which is what's the deal with this paragraph about those who are criticizing all of the Satmar being also Jewish?
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, well. So, the difficulty of having an open discussion of this is that with religious minorities, there is a social fear of criticizing. So you don't want to be accused of antisemitism. And a lot of Gentiles just don't have any idea what Hasidism is, who the Satmar are, and so they just view this as a weird foreign people dress funny, eat weird food, right? I mean, they're kind of on the level of other foreigners to a lot of American non-Jews. Whereas Jews feel a kind of personal stake in this question because these are our co-religionists and they represent us, and they represent us in ways that maybe we don't want to be represented to the majority. And so the question about the Hasidim and where they fit in has long been a kind of subject of intra-Jewish warfare where the Gentiles have kind of stayed out because they don't want to be accused of antisemitism because they really don't understand anything about what's going on. And they view this as just another weird minority group. America's full of weird minority groups, and there's no real interest in singling these people out.
And so the history of especially these legal battles over the Satmar, over Kiryas Joel, and now the Hasidic Yeshivas in New York City, if you look at who the main players are, many of them are Jews. And there are Jewish plaintiffs and Jewish defendants, and the lawyers taking these cases are Jewish. And because for the Jews, it's a much more sort of salient question of their own identity. What do Jews look like in America? Do they look like Satmar, or do they look like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And who is supposed to be the sort of representative of our people to the larger American population? So there's a kind of identity conflict that motivates some of this, right? And I think that that plays out.
Oftentimes, the Hasidim will accuse the secular Jews of this kind of version of antisemitism, which is just like, "You hate us because we represent something more orthodox than you, and you're afraid that people will see you in us." And I think there's some truth to that. But I do think also that there's just a larger clash of visions, which is that secular Judaism for the second half of the 20th century really had a pretty cohesive constitutional vision of liberalism that does not tolerate the Haredi and the Hasidim in the way that they want to subvert the First Amendment by their lights. Where their view is that there needs to be a strict separation of church and state precisely because the Jews are a permanent minority, and they will never stand to benefit from any kind of effort to scale the wall between church and state because they're always going to be persecuted.
If any other religious group gets hold of state power, which is much more likely given their numbers, the Jews will always be in a very weak and endangered position. And so the best position, this is what Judith Shklar calls the way of thinking of the permanent minority, the liberalism of the permanent minority, the best and safest position for a group like the Jews, which does not aspire to and likely never will be a majority, is to create a constitution, which creates a lot of defenses against state power, especially defenses against religious groups taking control of state power. And I think that that clash of visions is in some ways much more salient than this question of, well, are secular Jews just embarrassed about being connected to people who look like the Satmar, who wear the black hats and the big robes and things like that. I mean, I think there's some of that there, but that's not the main motivating thing. I think there's a real fundamental clash of constitutional visions.
James M. Patterson:
So, the Kiryas Joel lost their decision, but we've seen some major decisions that have expanded not just religious liberty on public grounds but also access to public money. This is like the Trinity Lutheran case and the Kennedy v. Bremerton case. So the thing really that sank into me when you were presenting was that The Satmar Option is now increasingly the model that not just the permanent minorities like the Jews are adopting, but also sort of stationed minorities all over the United States because this sort of autonomy-based liberalism has been able to preserve such a control over mainstream education, that the length of time has actually produced lots of different religious minorities pursuing their own ways of doing things. And the result has been that they've created a constituency that seeks out, especially after these decisions, all kinds of access, and the way that the Haredi had been able to, and the Satmar has been able to.
And have in mind here Catholic traditionalists because that's just the world that I'm more familiar with, but for example, graduate programs will actually request that graduate students in theology go on Medicaid. That way, it's easier for them to cover other expenses for the graduate students. And here in the State of Florida, they've started to disperse multiple thousand dollars in grants to families for them to attend whatever schools they want. And the result has been a massive increase in attendance of more traditional Christian schooling and homeschooling options.
So the thing that was so important to me about your presentation is that The Satmar Option that you're describing, framed by this permanent minority status and sort of putting away the Amish as the exemplars, really does introduce an entirely new paradigm for religious liberty cases in which the issue is not merely non-interference with religious practice, but also qualifications for access to entitlements. Is this really what you see as the future here?
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I don't know. I don't like to say I'm predicting the future. It seems to me that the Amish model is really anachronistic. I don't know that it was ever really exemplary demographically, even in 1972 when the Yoder case was decided because most people don't live like the Amish in the United States otherwise, they wouldn't be so strange. But certainly now, there's just the idea that people who are religious dissenters are going to separate themselves out and go live somewhere where nobody will see them, and they will see nobody is just not the way that religious minorities live in the United States, and it no longer seems to reflect the assumptions that they have. And you can see this definitely in the homeschooling movement, the shift, because in the 1970s and 1980s, when homeschooling started to become politically viable, and people were lobbying for changes to state laws that would allow them to take their kids out of public schools and not be subject to compulsory schooling laws, the whole argument is about removal, removing your kids from these influences, teaching them at home, the right to teach them at home to be able to sort of shield them from the larger influences of the mainstream culture.
Now, all the homeschooling battles are about inclusion. They're about whether homeschooling students have a right to play on public school sports teams, right? Do homeschooling students have a right to use public school resources in a kind of pick-and-choose way without attending those schools without being fully enrolled? And so you can see the sort of shift in momentum from do we have a right to take our children out and keep them away from this system? To now, what are our rights to participate in this system on a kind of piecemeal basis or on an à la carte basis? And so you see, the shift in that momentum is indicative of where, in general, religious descent is going. It's not so much about how far can we recede or remove ourselves from the mainstream to how far can we participate in the mainstream without being subjected to violations of our religious freedom because of government regulations that restrict certain services on secular grounds.
And so, in that sense, I do think that the momentum is shifting a lot more to sort of putting pressure on state, municipal, and federal government entities to be able to provide resources either in terms of school sports, welfare transfers, school funding, things like that to religious groups, and on what grounds can they provide those resources without violating the First Amendment. But the assumption is they will provide those resources, and it's just a matter of hammering out how they can do that without violating the First Amendment versus to what degree can we remove ourselves from all government entanglement.
James M. Patterson:
The Satmar Option, Hasidic Judaism, The Future of Religious Liberty, the Summer 2023 Essay, and the Hedgehog Review, and the chapter in Religious Liberty and Education, Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life, Yeshiva Education Versus Liberal Educational Theory. Thank you so much for coming on Liberty Law Talk, Dr. Rita Koganzon.
Dr. Rita Koganzon:
Thank you.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[BS1]I think this is a quote - maybe ask JP?
German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk joins associate editor Rachel Lu to discuss his book The Identity Trap.
Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater join host Helen Dale to discuss transgender activism, civil rights law, and Forstater's recent discrimination lawsuit.
Avik Roy joins host James Patterson to discuss Freedom Conservatism, its "Statement of Principles" and the broader political and intellectual environment.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
James Patterson:
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today is August 18th, 2023. My name is James Patterson. I am a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University. A fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy in the Institute for Human Ecology. And president of the Ciceronian Society. With me today is Dr. Avik Roy. He is the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank improving the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder, using freedom, innovation, and pluralism.
Roy's work has been praised on both the left and the right. National Review called him one of the nation's sharpest policy minds. Well, the New York Times, Paul Krugman, concedes, "Roy is about as good as you can get in this stuff. He actually knows something." That's high praise. Roy also serves as the policy editor at Forbes on the advisory boards of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And is a senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center. He's advised several presidential candidates, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. Roy was educated at MIT, where he studied molecular biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Roy, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
Dr. Avik Roy:
It's nice to be with you. Please call me Avik.
James Patterson:
Oh, okay. Yes, Avik. So the reason for our conversation today is because you are one of the principle movers behind the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles, as well as a broader effort to articulate a freedom conservatism. So for the readers and listeners at Law & Liberty who are not familiar with freedom conservatism, why don't you explain to them what this project is?
Dr. Avik Roy:
Sure. So a bunch of us have, over the last many years, I'm sure including many devotees of this podcast and of the Liberty Fund and of Law & Liberty, have watched with dismay as there has been a rise of authoritarianism, not just on the left, but on the right around the world and in the United States. And I think in the initial going, obviously many of us hope that this would be some temporary eruption that would eventually fall aside as people realize that authoritarianism is not something that Americans really want.
But as time has gone on, I think it's become clear that the people on the right in particular who like the rise of authoritarianism, who are inclined, who believe that it's a good thing, it's a salutary development, have succeeded at moving beyond merely trying to align with Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies at times, and instead try to build a permanent movement around authoritarianism. They call it national conservatism, by which they mean that the classical liberal movement is too nice; it's too willing to engage in toleration of multiple points of view. And that what we really need is an authoritarianism of the right to combat the authoritarianism of the left.
And last year, in 2022, the national conservatives got together and created a statement of principles with 10 planks that they published at their website. They have conferences twice a year, usually one in the US and one in Hungary or some other aligned location. And they have created an organized group of young people in particular, Capitol Hill staffers, people out of college, for whom this is the only kind of conservatism they've ever known. For those of us who are older, we take for granted that classical liberalism is a central part of the 20th-century conservative tradition and 21st-century conservative tradition. But for the nationalists, if you're just graduating from college now, you're 22 years old, 21 years old maybe, you were just entering middle school when Trump went down that golden escalator. So, you're not aware of any other form of American conservatism.
So, young people growing up today have had the impression that if you are to be a conservative, if you see yourself on the right or right of center, and especially if you see yourself as an opponent of the left, that nationalism and authoritarianism are the philosophies you need to adopt. And that trend, in particular, has become very concerning. It's also become very concerning that a lot of politicians on the right have concluded that the way to win a Republican primary in particular, whether it's running for president or running for Congress or state legislature, is to adopt these nationalist authoritarian positions because they see that as the base of the party. It wasn't that long ago that the Tea Party was the base of the party, a group of people who were seen as being constitutionalists, people who wanted the government out of their lives. That's been replaced by this new theory that the base is nationalistic and authoritarian.
And so you put all these things together, all these different trends, and a bunch of other people felt that this was a great concern, "We need to do something about it." And that the first step in doing something about it was to put together our own statement of principles. Now, obviously, we have the advantage that others in the past have also created statements or principles. The most relevant one for us was the Sharon Statement, which was signed by a group of people at Bill Buckley's house in Sharon, Connecticut, who ended up creating Young Americans for Freedom, a young organization of libertarians, individuals, and conservatives. And they put together a statement of principle that we took as our core inspiration.
But our goal was to say, let's create a statement of principles ourselves that, while it takes inspiration from the Sharon statement, is adapted to the political and policy challenges of our time. And also, it evolves and iterates upon that statement of principles in certain ways and allows us to articulate a different form of conservativism than nationalism. And also allows us, by gathering a bunch of signatories, to start building that movement. A group of people that are willing to put their names on a piece of paper and say, "Hey, I'm standing up for these principles." And thereby, if I look around and I see other names on that list, you know that these are people who are aligned with you, who are your friends, who you can reach out to and connect with, and we can start to build our own organization and network of people who advocate for the role of liberty and freedom in America once again.
James Patterson:
I agree with the concern about the interest in authoritarianism. For Law & Liberty, a couple of years ago, I noted the growth of the Francisco Franco appreciation threads that had emerged in social media. Strange. But the people who often write these threads or are participating in national conservatism conferences, paying attention to the publications and other media that come from national conservativist sources, one of their mantras, one of their rhetorical questions rather is what has conservatism conserved, here meaning fusionism? There's an answer to that question, I think. What is your answer to that question?
Dr. Avik Roy:
Well, boy, we could spend a whole hour on this topic. But I think I would answer it, I would flip your question to its inverse in a sense, which is that the national conservatives believe that America is lost. It's a profoundly pessimistic movement. They believe that the things that made America great are no longer present, that America is lost. Now, why do they believe that? Why do they believe that America is lost? Now, we could come up with lots of things that, in terms of trends in the United States, we think are negative if we wanted to look at the pessimistic side of things, right? The amount of money that the government spend has gone up. The size of the Federal Register, the compilation of all the regulations at the federal level, has gone up. The deficit and debt have gone up. So there are things like that that are not great.
There are things like entrenched and aggressive political correctness, as we used to call it, and now people call it “wokery” or “wokism.” That's not just in educational circles but in corporate settings as well. So those are the kinds of things that the nationals point to and say, "Hey, America is lost."
Now, there's something that some will say out loud, and others will not say out loud, which is arguably the core animating concern that they have, which is not so much those things, though those things I think all of us would agree we don't like about the state of America today. But the reason why they say America is lost is because of demographic issues. That is what you hear that some of the nationals say in their own settings and their own journals, and again, particularly the most frank and blunt and open ones who don't worry about any pushback they might get on this topic. They say the biggest problem with America is that America is increasingly a multi-ethnic, multiracial society. That's something that they believe will help drive America to lose its fundamental character. That America, in order to preserve its fundamental character, needs to be a white ethnostate.
And that's why immigration policy is front and center, not just in the United States but in nationalist movements all around the world. Skepticism of immigration, not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration. And this is really a core point, a critical distinction; I think most Americans don't like illegal immigration, but most Americans like legal immigration. They believe that since almost all of us are descendants of legal immigrants, we understand the role that immigration has played in making America this dynamic, great, prosperous country. So many of the greatest companies and successes we've had, economically and otherwise, scientific achievements, our athletic achievements, come from the people who have come to America from elsewhere.
This movie Oppenheimer is in the theaters as we're recording this podcast. I mean, much of our ability to win World War II and develop nuclear weapons came from immigrants, people who left Europe, who were being persecuted because they were ethnic minorities. And so those are the things that have made America great and continue to drive America to greatness in many ways. There are a lot of good things that are going on in America. We are still the most innovative country in the world. We're still the cultural leader of the world. We're still the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We're still a country where basic freedoms like being able to say what you want. Yes, there are people who are trying to push back, there's cancel culture, there are all these issues. But fundamentally, we have the ability to record this podcast and say what we want to say.
And yes, there are others who don't like it when you say what you want to say, but we are still basically a free society. And yes, there are things to improve about that free society, but we are not doing as badly as the nationalists think. And the reason why the nationalists say that we're lost, already lost, because this is a demographic issue, that, well, America is already not American, if you think America should be a white ethnostate, and that's why they lean towards authoritarian ideas because they know they can't persuade a majority of the electorate to go along with reformatting America as a white ethnostate, most Americans don't want that. And so that's why they veer towards these anti-democratic, anti-Republican ideas of what America should be in the future.
James Patterson:
Well, the freedom conservatism principles have a lot of continuity with what used to be called fusionism, which is the older version of conservatism that really was part of the original sort of conservative movement following the Second World War of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank Meyer. And that was regnant during the Reagan years and really had a lasting influence through the George W. Bush administration. Do you see freedom conservatism as a fusionism 2.0, or is it a new stage of conservatism that's meant to reckon with the things that you just mentioned?
Dr. Avik Roy:
I think it's both, right? For the listeners who are not familiar with the term fusionism, let's just make sure that we're describing it. So, you could say there are two forms of fusionism. There is the, you could say, coalitional fusion. So, the American conservative movement of the 20th century was a coalition of people that included libertarians, classical liberals, social conservatives, anti-communists, and a lot of people in between. And that coalition won the Cold War and did a lot to make America the preeminent nation in the world in the late 20th century when we defeated the Soviet Union.
There were people in that movement who would've said, I'm not a... And there's a second, is what I'm getting at, there's a second form of fusionism, which is what Frank Meyer, in particular, was known for, which was trying to actually come up with a philosophy, a political philosophy that incorporated both classical liberalism and social conservatism into a single philosophy. And his argument was that in order to be truly virtuous, if you're a social conservative and you care about virtue, one must live in a free society because it's only through freely choosing virtue that you can actually be virtuous. If someone's forcing you to be virtuous, you're not really being that virtuous. That was Meyer's argument.
And so the thing I'm trying to make clear by getting into all this, the etymology or taxonomy, is that the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles is open to both kinds of people. So there are signatories to the document who are libertarians, classical liberals. There are signatories to the document who are social conservatives and foreign policy hawks, who wouldn't think of themselves as fusionists in the Frank Meyer sense of the term. But there are also people who are signatories to the documents who are fusionists. So it encompasses both kinds of fusionism, is what I'm trying to say.
James Patterson:
Awesome. Yeah, I was originally... I'm sorry, an original signer of the document. And I don't really consider myself a libertarian, but I thought the language was capacious enough to address people who share your concerns about the emergence of national conservatism and its attraction to this or even endorsement of this oddly authoritarian approach to the American republic. So what do you think is the cause for so much interest in this alternative vision, this national conservative vision? You mentioned earlier that part of it is youthful ignorance. Is that everything, or is there more to it?
Dr. Avik Roy:
Well, I do think that if you're the kind of person who's gone to college in the last seven years, it was really 2015 when this Yale Halloween incident happened that things really started to change. Jonathan Haidt wrote an interesting article, I believe for The Atlantic, where he traced some of this to the rise of Instagram and some of these other relatively newfangled social media tools, where things really started to change, and the cancel culture really took off. And so I think there's a cohort of people who come out of that environment who've been radicalized in the other direction. Right? So if you're in an environment where you're told you are a fundamentally guilty and inferior person because you are a white male, a heterosexual white male in particular, then you're radicalized in the other direction and you feel frustrated because to the degree that your elders are telling you, "Hey, you should believe in freedom and let different sides coexist." That doesn't seem sufficient when you feel like you're being extubated. So I think that's part of it.
I think also there's a degree to which Trump's victory in 2016 was an opportunity for, what you might say, bandwagon jumpers to kind of say, "Hey, here's the new wave." The new hotness is to be a nationalist because Trump is at least instinctively a nationalist. I wrote in a piece for National Review recently that I made the argument that, look, almost all of Trump's domestic policy success came from freedom conservative principles, his tax reforms, his judicial appointments, his deregulation initiative. Those are all freedom conservatism policies that were executed by freedom conservatism acolytes. But to the degree that Trump has tried to break from that Bill Buckley/Frank Meyer consensus and say, "No, we should be against free trade. We should be skeptical of immigration."
Now, actually, I should parenthesize this because Trump is not actually against legal immigration. He produced a plan in 2019, an immigration reform plan that would be about securing the border, but actually reforming legal immigration so we were improving the quality of immigrants we were getting to the country, in terms of high-skilled immigrants who can really contribute to the country's economy. So, his immigration plan in 2019 was pretty aligned with what a lot of freedom conservatives believe. But there were plenty of people who saw in Trump an avatar for a nationalist agenda, some of whom believed it from the start, who were always nationalists, you could say. And then others who were perhaps persuaded or converted to become nationalists, because they believed that this was the way of the future, this is the way things were going to go. And I think that's a mistake because I don't think that nationalism is the wave of the future. And I think that most Americans, the vast majority, particularly young Americans, are not okay with a nostalgic movement that believes it can recreate the demographics of the 1930s.
James Patterson:
With the politics of the 1930s, too. At least in European politics. So, I've noticed that there's almost no real interest from Trump himself in national conservatism. It just seems to kind of pass him by. It's a funny thing where they're appealing directly to him, and he spends most of his time trying to get crowds to cheer for them. So what are some of the principles of freedom conservatism, and especially, how do you see them operating in political institutions or having policy implications for 2023 and beyond?
Dr. Avik Roy:
Well, there are a couple of things I'll say. The first thing to say is that the document makes it pretty clear that the most important thing that freedom conservatives stand for is individual and economic liberty. That's not only core to freedom conservatism; that's core to America. To go to your question from before, which is what is it that we're trying to conserve? What freedom conservatives are trying to conserve are the principles of the American founding, which is that the government exists to secure the liberties of the people, not the other way around. And that is the, in a sense, you could say the core contradiction, but also the core distinctiveness, the core creed of the United States. Which is that the tradition of America, the one that we seek to conserve, is the tradition of individual and economic freedom. That's what America was founded on, with the notable asterisk and exception of slavery. And that is the principle that those of us who believe in those founding traditions have sought to expand and apply to the circumstances that we're in today.
The nationalists don't believe in that tradition. They want to import the Hungarian or continental European nationalism, which is basically that your country is a collection of people who are genetically linked to each other with a common language and a common religion, and that's it. That's what a nation is. And there are nuanced versions of nationalism that are not completely incompatible with freedom conservatism. And I wouldn't even call them nationalist; it's more like that's just patriotism, right? For example, you can believe that the United States should seek to advance the interests of Americans, whether it's in foreign policy or in economic policy or anything else. And the way to do that is to expand liberty. Right? It's economic freedom that has made America the wealthiest and most dynamic and most prosperous country in the world, the one with the most social mobility and the most opportunity for people from humble beginnings to do well. Those are the things that bind us together. One can have a very robustly pro-American and patriotic philosophy, and yet not be a nationalist in the way that we've described nationalism.
And so there are people, I think, in that way, you can look at the statement of principles that we've put out and the statement of principles the nationalists have put out and say, well, I agree with the majority of both of these statements, so which side am I on? And there have been a number of columns and articles that have kind of been in the zone, saying, "Well, I don't want to really take a side here or I think there's merit to both, so I'm going to just kind of sit this out." And I think the mistake there is that if you are not trying to conserve the American founding tradition, that's a core moral issue. Right? The core fight that really matters is do you believe that Americans should be trusted to live their own lives? That families should be trusted to raise their children in the way they see fit? If you don't believe that, and the nationalists in certain places in their document don't believe that, then that's a problem. That is a clear area of distinction.
And so, where does this come down in policy? There are areas, I think, where there are pretty clear examples of where we have policy differences, in areas where there's more of an overlap or where people who are signing the freedom conservative document may have different views. One example of this is immigration. So, on immigration, there's a spectrum of views. I would suspect–I haven't pulled every single person who signed the document on this—but I think if you were, and it's safe to say, that if you asked signatories of the freedom conservative statement, where do you stand on immigration, you'd see a range of views. On one end might be a hardcore libertarian who says that the freedom to immigrate and emigrate is fundamental to freedom, "I believe in open borders." There are going to be people who ideologically believe that.
I think there are others, probably the majority, who would say, "I'm for immigration overall, I'm for legal immigration, but America has a right to decide who enters the country and who stays here and who works here. And so we need to have a robust system of legal immigration, but secure our border against illegal immigration." When you go over to the nationalists, it's kind of the other half of that debate, where they're saying they're very skeptical of immigration overall. They believe that circumstances may often require a full moratorium on immigration. And what's important to talk about there is that while that's what they say in their statement, if you actually read what they write in their own journals, the speeches they give at their own conferences, their view of immigration is much more hostile. You hear rhetoric like, "Immigration makes America dirtier." Immigration, again, despoils America's ethnic homogeneity and racial homogeneity. A lot of comments of that sort. So while the national conservative statement is carefully worded to maybe mask some of these darker elements of the nationalist movement, it's clear that that's a big thrust of theirs.
Another area I'll highlight where there's perhaps the most room for disagreement among the freedom conservatism is foreign policy. Obviously, if you're a purist libertarian, you take a Washingtonian view of skepticism about any and all foreign entanglements, the more Reaganite types in the freedom conservative movement would say, "Look, America's role as a leader of the world is really important. And while we don't have the resources or the willpower to be running the rest of the world militarily, we certainly, our leadership of the world, is very important to our freedom and security in the interests of America. And so we should have an internationalist position," not necessarily what we now call neo-conservatism, the very aggressive nation-building type approach. "But at the very least, we should recognize that there's value in having allies. There's value in America securing trade around the world through the power of our navy," et cetera, et cetera.
So that's an area where you might see some disagreement. So we've been criticized for having a statement that sounds like it could mean a lot of different things on foreign policy. But I think that that reflects the range of views appropriately so. But really, most importantly, creates space for this Reaganite foreign policy, where Reagan did not go around trying to basically rebuild nations around the world. He didn't invade the Soviet Union. But did he fight the Soviet Union in every way short of war? He certainly did. He tried everything he could to defeat the Soviet Union peacefully. He didn't just say, "We're going to ignore what's going on in Eastern Europe." He cared about liberating Eastern Europe. So there's a range of views there. So those are some of the areas where there's a diversity of views.
I think where there's real alignment and where there's real, one of the things that I think is really interesting about the Freedom Conservatism Statement is there are three areas in the document where we mix explicit commitments about what this movement is trying to achieve from a policy standpoint. So there's three places where we say we commit to X. The first is we say, we commit to deploying economic and individual freedom to reduce Americans' cost of living. This is something that is a problem. I mean, there are certain aspects of American life that are less expensive or inexpensive compared to what they were in the past, particularly food and clothing. But housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education have gotten far more expensive because the government has gotten involved in regulating and subsidizing those products and driving up the price. And that's a big problem for social mobility in America. And I think one of the things that drove Trump's election in 2016 was the fact that people who are on the bottom half of the ladder, people in the working class, feel like their prosperity is slipping away because of the rise in cost of living.
So I think it's really important for freedom conservatives, and the signatories agree, that it's important for the freedom conservatives to show that if you are a working-class American who feels economically insecure because of various things going on in our economy, that the freedom conservatives are looking out for you and we're fighting for you, and we are working on developing solutions to the problems you have. And that the national conservatives, to the degree that they claim to have any solutions at all, would go in the other direction, make things worse for you. So that's commitment number one.
Commitment number two is the commitment to a constructive approach to reducing the debt in the deficit. So this is something that's completely ignored by the national conservatives, and frankly, by President Trump when he was in office, he dramatically increased the deficit in the debt. And has argued passionately that the deficit in the debt don't matter, and I'm not going to do anything about it, basically. And so this is incredibly important, because young people, people coming out of college today, the deficit in the debt are going to be the dominant problem, economic problems that they face because we're entering a situation where in six years, five to six years, we're going to be paying more on interest on the national debt than we pay for national defense. And over time, that problem is going to get worse and worse. It's going to lead to decreased economic growth, higher inflation, and a bunch of other problems that are going to make America gradually weaker and weaker.
And that, to me, if you're a young adult just entering the workforce or getting through college, this is the crisis that the nationalists and others of these new waves of the right, the post-liberal right, they just don't care about it. And so it was very important to us to make a commitment, not only to prioritize the national debt, but to say, "We're going to commit to developing an agenda that can reduce the debt and the deficit and try to secure the prosperity of future generations." So that's commitment number two.
And then commitment number three relates to racial equality. And this is something that we've gotten some questions on. So we say in the statement of principles that we're adamantly opposed to racial discrimination, either for or against any person or group of people. But we also recognize that the legacy of slavery and segregation is still with us and that there's persistent inequality of opportunity for those who are descendants of the victims of slavery and segregation. And that we, the freedom conservatives, commit to trying to deploy the principles of individual and economic freedom to address that inequality of opportunity.
And so we've gotten some questions like, "Well, that obviously means you just want to discriminate against white people, right?" It's like, no. No. What it means is, for example, universal education savings accounts. Today, we have a system that's in part a legacy of slavery and segregation, where where you go to school is determined by where you live. And that was a very convenient system in the segregated South, because it meant that if you lived in a segregated part of town, you went to the segregated school with inferior resources, and that protected the all-white areas of town to have segregated schools in that part of town, right? And while segregation is illegal today, the geographic segregation is still extant in a lot of these places. And most importantly, it means that people who live in, whatever your race is, if you live in a poor part of town, the quality of the schools and the quality of your community, it can be more fragmented and fragile as a result.
And so education savings accounts is a race-neutral policy that says, "Hey, we're going to let you get the best education you can find. We're going to give you the resources that everybody else has, and then you go out and find the best education you can find with that money, whether it's Khan Academy, whether it's a charter school or a private school or private tutors, or whatever you want. And let's liberate you from that school that you were stuck in by the old system." And so that's an example of a policy that's pro-freedom, pro-choice, pro-innovation, but it also has the disproportionate effect of addressing this inequality of opportunity, not just for poor Black kids in formerly segregated communities, but also poor white kids and poor every kid. Right? So it's not a racial policy, it's a racially-neutral policy. And there are so many examples of that.
If you actually focus on policies that address the inequality of opportunity for low-income people in general because the descendants of sex slavery and segregation are disproportionately low income relative to non-Blacks, you're going to disproportionately help them, but you're also going to disproportionately help low-income white, low-income Hispanics, low-income everybody. So these are policies that are racially neutral, but that also address the inequality of opportunity that was a consequence of slavery and segregation. I think one of the real distinctions between the nationalists and the freedom conservatives is that this is something that we're committing to doing. We recognize that inequality of opportunity, for those who, again, descend from this system, is a real problem. And the nationalists say, well, tough luck, basically, "We don't care about that problem, it's not important."
James Patterson:
And not only is it good in and of itself to establish programs that benefit people with a history of segregation and slavery, but also, as they're benefited by those programs that provides common goods, right? Knock-on effects of their improving economic and social standing. So it's very strange. But I think it speaks to this issue, you've hinted at it and said it a few times, this sort of zero-sum, sort of sense of the American economy or this over American benefits or the country itself.
Dr. Avik Roy:
Let me just stop you there, because I think it's a great point you just made, which is that this idea of a zero-sum world in which there's a fixed set of spoils that we're divvying up, that is basically one way to think about the difference between the nationalists and the freedom conservatisms. And if you're a freedom conservatism, you understand that you can grow the pie. You can grow the pie through economic growth, through trade, through innovation, through ingenuity, through immigration. But all these things can lead to a greater pie and more prosperity for everyone. And the nationalists don't believe that. They don't believe the pie is growing. In fact, they believe the pie is shrinking, and that in a shrinking pie, you have to redistribute the spoils in ways that favor your tribe over everybody else's tribe. So I think that optimism versus pessimism is a really key element of all this.
James Patterson:
I agree entirely. It's often geographic too. I live in Southern Florida, and, I mean, the accelerating growth in most aspects of the economy here is usually best demonstrated by the number of hiring signs and windows, and wage signs and windows. And so when I read things like the introduction to Patrick Deneen's regime change, talking about how America's in a pit. I'm like, "Not here. It's great here."
Dr. Avik Roy:
And it's important to understand that there are places, like I live in Texas, the same thing. Texas is booming. People are moving to Texas every day. There are help-wanted signs everywhere. There's optimism, people are happy, people smile. There are places in America where that's not true. I think it's important when everyone has a strong disagreement with somebody else to really try to think about why they disagree. What are their strongest arguments, what are their best arguments? What are they seeing in the world that they're responding to? Let's take them at their best and take the most sincere and credible arguments that the other side has. And I think there are communities that are being ravaged by the decay of communities, the Bowling Alone phenomenon, the opioid crisis, right? And that's what a lot of people are responding to.
Where Deneen goes wrong, tragically wrong, is that he blames this on individualist intellectuals. It's because these professors and theorists and elites who support individual autonomy, it's because of that that these poor white people in Ohio and Pennsylvania are killing themselves with fentanyl and not getting married and things like that. That's the kind of thing that only an intellectual would say. Intellectuals, of course, are often in love with their ability to shape the world through the power of their pens and keyboards, but that's not actually what happened.
The thing that's, it's actually a less facile and harder thing to confront, but an important thing to confront is that one of the big reasons why... there's a couple of big reasons why marriage and family had broken down, not just in America, but around the world. The most important reason is technology. So, technology produced oral contraception, which started to separate the sexual act from procreation in a way that was not practical prior to oral contraception. And then secondly, there were the technological developments of things like laundry machines and dishwashers and other tools that meant that if you were a family of four a hundred years ago, you had to have a division of labor where there was one breadwinner and one homemaker because it wasn't practical to manage a household without having someone at home to do those daily tasks, unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to perhaps hire housekeepers and nannies to do all that stuff for you, which of course, very few people were.
Today, with all this technology we have, there isn't as much of a need. There's of course, still a need for parents to be present for their children. But in terms of those homemaking tasks, technology has made it easier for us to do those tasks in a way that isn't as time-consuming. And that fact enabled women to enter the workforce, something that the nationalists really don't account for. They say, "Well, it's all these intellectuals with their left-wing ideas that led women to start working." No, it was actually the fact that you had women who had, thanks to technology, a lot of free time, and they wanted to use that free time productively because they had brains and abilities. And that's something that has been good for America, broadly speaking. Yes, there are challenges alongside it. But the nationalists basically are saying, "Well, we don't like this, we don't like the society, so let's get rid of the liberationist intellectuals." I mean, you're not going to get rid of the liberationist intellectuals; number one, there are lots of them. But most importantly, they don't contend with the fact that a lot of these social trends are structural.
And that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about them, that we should be complacent about it. We absolutely should be thinking hard about how to rebuild communities that have been disrupted by a lot of these social trends. We should be thinking very hard about that. But it's just facile and simplistic and frankly wrong to say that the reason why these things are happening is because there are intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who think it's a good thing for people to have a tonic.
James Patterson:
Well, what's next for freedom conservatism? I think we have a good beat on what it's for, what policies it has in mind, why it's ideas, at least in my view, are true and better than those of national conservatism, more of the left. So, where is all of this headed?
Dr. Avik Roy:
Well, I think there's a bunch of elements to it. The first is, of course, we've been grateful for all the attention the document has received in the press and elsewhere, and we continue to be open to new signatories. So if you're somebody who's active in the liberty movement and connected to an institution, whether you're at a think tank or a journalist or some other organization that's involved in the movement in some way, and you're interested in being a signatory, we're still collecting signatories, you can go to the about page at freedomconservatism.org and sign on.
We are having a couple of in-person receptions for signatories at a couple of conferences, including the FREOPP conference in November (the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunities). Freedom and Progress Conference in November, in Washington. We are going to continue to stay in touch with both signatories and other people who subscribe to our Substack newsletter to keep them up on activities.
And a lot of the goal here is to build this network. To build the network, to have members of the network be able to get to know each other, to learn from each other, both in person and otherwise. To follow each other's work. We have a Twitter list that you can also find on our website, where you can follow all the free-con signatories. And the goal is to start building a network where we can, as the national conservatives have done to their credit, they've done a great job of organizing, they've done a great job of, again, building this network of hill staffers and campaign staffers and things like that, that go out and the activists who go out and try to spread the nationalist gospel. And we need to do that, too. We need to renew our efforts to raise the rising generation of freedom conservatives to evangelize their peers and their communities on these principles.
So, a lot of it is going to be trying to provide those resources for people. Try to flag and promote the work of freedom conservatives. To just give an example from recently, a couple of days ago or yesterday actually, as we record this, Samuel Greg wrote a great piece for Law & Liberty about free trade and an explicitly realistic approach to free trade, elaborating on what we talk about in the statement of principles as free trade with free people. So that's an example of something that, here's a guy who's elaborating. So if you want to know, okay, what does this mean, free trade with free peoples? And of course, his opinion is his opinion alone; he doesn't speak for the other 200 signatories. But to create that dialogue and that discourse where those of us who are signatories and other aligned people can discuss these issues and flesh out these ideas, so that it's not just a couple sentences that sound vague, but actually a very detailed set of policies that we can discuss and debate and get behind. I think that's important.
I think one thing that's really valuable about this effort is you start to see presidential candidates, other politicians look at this and say, "Hey, I'm a freedom conservative. How can I tap into this network to staff my campaign or staff my office, or just learn from various people who are aligned with this movement, so I can generate better ideas for reforming the country?" So all of those things are elements of what we're trying to do over the next 12 to 24 months.
James Patterson:
Dr. Roy or Avik, as you'd have it, thank you so much for joining us on Liberty Law Talk.
Dr. Avik Roy:
Well, thank you as well, and thanks to the Liberty Fund for all the important work that the Liberty Fund does to advance these principles.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Yonatan Green joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Israel's legal system and the reform proposals that have been generating controversy in 2023.
John O. McGinnis joins host John G. Grove to analyze the major cases from the Supreme Court's recently concluded term, which has taken place in the midst of a concerted effort to undermine the institution's legitimacy.
Douglas Murray joins Law & Liberty Senior Writer Helen Dale to talk about the state of racial discourse, national conservatism, and his recent book, War on the West.
Justin Dyer and Kody W. Cooper join host James Patterson to discuss their recent book, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics.
Hugh Liebert joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss statesmanship, from Plutarch to Kissinger.
Johnathan O'Neill joins host John Grove to discuss his recent book, Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal.
John Grove:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm John Grove, the managing editor of Law & Liberty. In his recent book, Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal, Johnathan O'Neill chronicles the conservative movement's response to and development following the New Deal's Constitutional Revolution.
Conservatives found themselves in a unique situation, one in which the old constitutional order had not been utterly destroyed, but one in which, to use the author's words, a new dispensation was laid over its predecessor without fully undoing the reality or the memory of what was defeated. The New Deal and subsequent constitutional developments gave birth to a more self-conscious conservatism, but it did so in circumstances of uncertainty. How should one respond to this new situation? What should we make peace with and what should we fight? What touchstones do we appeal to in resisting this encroaching Leviathan?
Tradition, philosophy, written law, the so-called principles of the regime, be they democracy, natural rights, natural law, or some other fundamental principle? Self-described conservatives did not have a unified answer and various approaches sometimes led to interesting and consequential differences. Joining me to discuss the dynamics of 20th-century conservative constitutional visions is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, Johnathan O'Neill. Jonathan, thanks for coming on.
Johnathan O'Neill:
Oh, wonderful to be here. I very much appreciate the invitation. I've been looking forward to this talk for a while now.
John Grove:
Great. This book is structured around four basic groupings of conservatives, traditionalists, neoconservatives, Straussians, and libertarians. You walk through very systematically how these groups addressed questions like the expansion of the administrative state, the decline of federalism, their vision of the presidency, judicial review. Let's start, why these four groupings? What are the distinctives of these four groups? And what did each see as the essential threat that this New Deal political order posed? All we're concerned with it, but maybe sometimes for slightly differing reasons?
Johnathan O'Neill:
I start the book out, as you know, by defining in a thumbnail way the major commitments of each of the schools that you named, and from there try to look at how the post-New Deal developments, how they assess them and responded to them. While it's hard to quickly summarize each of them, I attempted to do it in the beginning of the book. I think that traditionalists' primary focus is on the local custom, oftentimes with a religious basis, but not exclusively so, and tending towards a conception of American political order as inherited from the long tradition of Western civilization, more particularly the English and the common law Christian humanist tradition.
Libertarians focus on individual liberty and suspicion of the state as inherently coercive and dangerous, an orientation towards private ordering through the market and spontaneous order. Straussians, a little harder to pin down in part because they argue so much amongst themselves, but an orientation towards the great debates of Western civilization, in particular, biblical morality versus ancient philosophy and trying to understand America as in some sense and its constitutionalism as a place where this vitiating tension can still exist and be argued about and improve people at the individual level of virtue, but also improve our politics in America, while a modern regime still has an openness to this kind of input, and therefore they find American constitutionalism worth defending.
Neoconservatives, again, an always definitional problem, in part because they gather so much from preexisting forms of conservatism and oftentimes resolutely refuse to define themselves. But I think for my purposes, the characteristic element of neoconservatism that I'm interested in is its assessment of post-1960s progressive liberalism as just asking too much of the state. A great word that they always used in the period was overloading, that the state is overloaded, and the polity is asking you to do things that just can't be accomplished by a government.
Another element of, which we'll talk about more I'm sure, of the neoconservatives is the idea of a new class, of a managerial conception of politics in which elites in various kinds of institutions, media, government, cause lawyering are pursuing... They have an inherent interest in the growth of the state because it gives them something to do and something to direct. I think that that plays very much in their assessment of modern post-New Deal conservatism.
John Grove:
You distinguished pretty clearly between Straussian and neoconservatives. A lot of times those two are lumped together. Why has that conception developed, and why do you think that's wrong?
Johnathan O'Neill:
I talk about this a fair amount in the chapter on the presidency, and of course, I mean, the behemoth in the room here is the debate about the post 9/11 foreign policy and the George W. Bush administration invasion of Iraq. I think very quickly the media conflated Straussian and neoconservatives in part because there were some people with somewhat attenuated Straussian connections or influences in the Bush administration. But it quickly became this conspirational notion that Straussians were directing American foreign policy by hijacking neoconservatism, which no one was really good at defining anyway.
It just became this post-modern media firestorm without a lot of basis and fact. I spent a couple, well, at least a section of one chapter sorting this out and trying to show that there are many neoconservatives who are not Straussians. There are Straussians who condemned the Bush administration foreign policy. There are Straussians who explicitly rejected the invasion of Iraq. There are Straussians who use one of Strauss' masses or concepts of the regime or politeia as this fundamental ordering of society, its norms, its mores, not simply its laws, its institutions that is pervasive and hard to change.
If you understand that, you would understand why just writing a new Iraqi constitution isn't necessarily going to remake the place. There were Straussians making that argument against the gist of Bush administration policy. I think it took me a lot of pain and suffering to sort through all of that and make sense of it for myself, but I became increasingly convinced that this conflation of Straussians and neoconservatives is just mistaken and was a media bubble that a lot of people made a lot of for a short time. You don't really hear much about it anymore.
John Grove:
How did some of these groups differ in terms of the way they thought about constitutionalism and political order? I draw out one distinction, it's partly just it's a pet interest of mine, but the traditionalist, you talk a good amount about the traditionalists' nomocratic vision of constitutionalism, very much process oriented about the establishment of particular rules, very much went along with a heavy emphasis on federalism and the division of authority versus some conservatives that had more of an emphasis on fundamental principles, more ends oriented vision of constitutionalism. How did their overarching vision differ before we get into some of the specifics?
Johnathan O'Neill:
I learned a lot in writing about this about some of the deeper more principle basis for traditionalist or customary conservatism, which oftentimes is just dismissed as it's ours and therefore it's good or unquestioning, thoughtless loyalty to one's own. The distinction which comes initially from Michael Oakeshott between a nomocratic regime and a teleocratic regime. Telos, end, right? A teleocratic regime is a regime with a kind of uber value that it tries to instantiate and permeate because it's loyal to it, but as a pervasive political program, whereas a nomocratic regime, as you suggested, is more about process, about deliberation on a small scale.
It doesn't have an ambition to remake things in the name of a teleocratic concept. It's much more modest in its understanding of what politics is capable of and what institutions are for. On some level it's because it is rooted in people's customary shared moral understandings. Therefore, because we are rooted as a civilization in this way, we don't need to ask institutions to remake our civilization. We just need to use them to abide together and make common decisions together.
I think that a lot of traditionalists would say that, and this is one of the fundamental cleavages in American conservatism, would say that the release of the equality idea, the egalitarianism that comes a lot of these people would say from the Declaration of Independence and from Abraham Lincoln's ratcheting up of the idea of equality has derailed their understanding of the way the regime really should be. As I'm sure you have some familiarity with, this is a major conflict between people like some Straussians and some traditionalists. You see it come up in the book.
One of the things that certainly became clear to me over time thinking about traditionalists and studying people like George Carey or Russell Kirk is a sense of loss. The regime as they knew it, they just see as, in some basic sense, irretrievable. You see more conservatives of that dispensation, someone like Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option. There's a withdrawal, that we're aliens in a regime that is now operating on different principles. And to the extent that we can preserve what we believe in, we have to withdraw from it a little bit. I think that's certainly something that became clear to me as I studied this more.
John Grove:
Getting into some of the specifics, you spent a lot of time talking about federalism. Obviously that's one of the biggest conservative themes of this time. You put it this way. It says, "The reality that post-New Deal conservatives faced was that federalism had precipitously and irreversibly declined even though constitutionalists since the founders in Tocqueville had taught that the US regime needed it to survive." Federalism has been undermined. It's been eroded to the point almost like you were just saying, almost to where it's just irretrievable. It's not something that can ever be revived, at least in the sense that a lot of conservatives thought it ought to be.
And yet it was seen as something that you can't just say, "Oh, well, let's just make peace with this." It's absolutely essential. A difficult situation. In defending it then, conservatives have to make this positive case for it beyond just this is the constitution's inheritance that it's given us. What's the reason for federalism? You get into themes of community, which brings up one of my favorite conservative thinkers, Robert Nisbet, of Democratic self-government, arguments about that, the kind of polycentric political order, public choice.
In some of these cases, also maybe just some more lukewarm defenses, especially some of the Straussians and neo-conservatives, they weren't as animated about federalism. They defended it, but like I said, maybe a little bit in a more lukewarm way, maybe as a practicality, not to be taken as too axiomatic. Talk to us a little bit about the variety of the defenses of federalism that you see coming out of these different groups.
Johnathan O'Neill:
I'll start with the one that probably seems the least obvious, which is neoconservatives in the '60s and '70s who were questioning the Great Society and the principles of the Great Society and the way that it was run and administered. They're frequently urban Eastern intellectuals. They're not Southern States' rights guys. They don't really argue in the idiom of states' rights or traditionalist custom localism. And still, what you see them saying is this one size fits all policies administered from the center don't take account for differences in local moraes, inheritances. They don't take account for local level cultural differences.
This approach will inevitably founder on the particularities that exist at the local level, which, of course, is a very old argument in defense of federalism that you hear from all kinds of different conservatives for much of American history. One of the things I found fascinating is that even though the neoconservatives don't really understand themselves as arguing oftentimes in explicitly constitutional principles, they come round to this way of thinking because the reality of it is just right there in their face. I saw that Straussians, or at least different groups of them, changed tacks on several issues as time went on.
Federalism, certainly one of the core arguments for much of the Straussians was that America was always designed to centralize power more than oftentimes writers in The Federalist Paper wanted to overtly reveal. It was a somewhat veiled, careful project, but they thought all along that the orientation of the nation will be to become a continental and world power, and that you need to overcome the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation in order to do this. And then when people see that the federal government is fundamentally more competent than the states and administers affairs better, their loyalties will gravitate towards this.
It may take a little time, but this is what will happen. And on some level, endorsing this basic idea. And then by the time you get to the '80s, you start to see more Straussians saying, well, this kind of centralized leviathan behemoth amidst a commercial and materialistic society is just destroying the capacity of local communities to recreate Republican virtue, public mindedness, at the local level, which is the only place it can be created.
If the larger part of the constitutional government is going to endure, we have to have some provision for localities to tend to inducing virtue in the next generation, and concomitantly then we have to restrict the federal government putting its hands into everything, which is not really an argument that you saw them making against segregationist in the '50s and '60s. But as time goes on, they come to see that this kind of argument is necessary to preserve the regime in the way that they want to.
John Grove:
It seems a little bit more circumstantial in the sense that similar kind of arguments were made at the founding era by Anti-Federalists and Jeffersonians and so forth. Straussians were in this position, it was like, well, no, the Jeffersonians were wrong, and Hamilton and Marshall and Company were generally right at that time, but that things have just gone a little too far now.
Johnathan O'Neill:
Famously, Herbert Storing is the one who goes back to the Anti-Federalists and the first one to really retrieve the Anti-Federalists arguments and start publishing major Anti-Federalists writers who are making this argument. It's through his efforts that we start talking much more about the Anti-Federalists starting in the '80s. I think that that's true that the... I would say it's another thing that impressed me writing this book is the universe of constitutional concepts and the grammar of their use moves around and is used and deployed by people sometimes in one circumstance making one kind of argument that they run away from.
People in that camp run away from decades later. As I tried to point out a little bit in the conclusion, one of the ways you preserve a constitutional system is by having this argument about what its fundamentals are, what its limitations are, what it asks of us as citizens, what we need to adapt to technologically, but what we should never cleave off as a fundamental. I think that that discourse of constitutional debate contestation is itself a fundamental way that conservatives are contributing to the project of constitutional government.
John Grove:
Yeah, that's interesting. Federalism goes along with, of course, the rise of the administrative state at the federal level. If you're concerned about this expansive new administrative state, one answer is reviving federalism, just the federal government as a whole doing less. Other potential answers that become important themes here. You already mentioned a little bit the idea of thinking about the type of person that's in the administrative state and is there a way to reform our elites in some way.
Why don't we talk about that a little bit? You mentioned that was a big neoconservative theme and a little bit I wouldn't say making peace, but more so than say the traditionalists and the libertarians, a little bit of sense of making peace with certain elements of the modern system.
Johnathan O'Neill:
That's a fascinating question because this is one of the things that really surprised me when I was writing this book is leading Straussians, Herbert Storing and then I believe John Rohr, who was a student of Storing, they basically say, "Look, we're not going to be able to undo the New Deal," which a lot of other people say too, but they say modern regulatory bureaucracy is here to stay. In the complex society of even the middle of the 20th century, let alone today, the social interactions and the economic interactions are so complex that no legislature will be able to write a law that can contemplate every possible situation, and therefore you will need to seed some discretion to regulators.
And that no system of law understood as rules will ever be able to do without discretion as it is applied. So then the question becomes, what kind of people do we want to have exercising this discretion? How do we inform their discretion? How do we bound their discretion? The argument that Storing and Rohr and then others after them give is you want to educate bureaucrats in American regime principles. You want the exercise of their discretion to be informed in the most basic sense by the constitutional tradition, by understandings of the rule of law, by understandings of the importance of private property, the limitations cast on office holders by the remit of their office, by consent.
They can't be automatons. Fundamentally, applying the law is a political act, but you have to educate their discretion by having them read some of the great opinions of John Marshall, having them read some of The Federalist Papers, so that they understand what the basics of the regime are and what their place in the regime is, and therefore the limits cast upon them because of the kind of regime it is. I found this fascinating because I just didn't know that this argument from this group of people was out there.
It's a fundamental admission that this understanding of law in administrative state is inescapable, that you won't go back to the minimal 19th-century state. If you're a fundamentally realistic person about politics, you have to accept this and then you have to decide what to do about it.
John Grove:
Another thing that a lot of conservatives wanted to do about it was then rein it in by focusing on the person of the president more than the executive branch as a whole. That's another part of this reaction to the administrative state, the unitary executive. It seemed to me going through this that the unitary executive emerged first as thinking in terms of how do you reign in this administrative state and saying, well, not the "value-neutral expert bureaucrat" making decisions, but ultimately these people are making decisions on the behalf of a president. Getting the president more in charge, gripping the reins of the executive branch a little bit more.
But then it also evolved into just a broader, more general trust in the presidency over and against Congress and the courts at times, among some conservatives. This is one where there's really major differences. At one point, you quote Buckley, I think, saying that conservatives had become spastic, specifically pro-executive, and that seemed about right. All of a sudden, here's this really pro-executive branch conservative movement. How did this emerge, because presidency had always been this... It's the progressive branch. It can unify. It can plan. It's more plebiscitary. It's the voice of the whole nation and not part.
Big progressive themes. And then second half of the 20th century, you get conservatives coming to embrace the presidency. How did that come about?
Johnathan O'Neill:
I am as verklempt about this one in a lot of ways as many of the people I'm writing about. I mean, one answer, which one of my political science buddies forced upon me as he was reading this manuscript, is Democrats held Congress for most of the second half of the 20th century, and the Republicans held the presidency for most of the second half of the 20th century. On what level, if you think the administrative state is getting out of control, Congress is not going to rate it in, it's the one delegating all its authority to it and then running and hiding from any responsibility.
If you're going to have any hope of reigning it in by people who think it needs to be disciplined and brought within the discipline of the rule of law more, then that leaves the executive branch. I think that there's something elementally true about that, kind of unavoidably true maybe even in a mundane sense. I have a section of the book where I write about Scalia and Scalia's juts of the administrative state. This was fundamentally his answer that you described a little bit, which was that ultimately the president has to be responsible for what the administrative state does and for directing it.
Scalia, pulling no punches as usual, says that means we should overturn Humphrey's executor and he should be able to fire anybody in the executive branch too who is not administering the law that he's ultimately responsible for executing. There's a serious philosophical argument there, but it never really gets off the ground very far. I think in thinking about some of the things that you had said to me as I was preparing for this, I think seems like we're moving away from that conception of reigning in the administrative state more.
It seems now in recent times that the court is sticking itself into the situation more by trying to reign in deference, reign in the Chevron Doctrine, and trying to compel on the opposite side of the equation Congress to take more responsibility for what it delegates to the administrative state by saying, "We're not just going to simply defer to whatever an agency says."
It seems to me that, and I'm not a lawyer, but the protections of independent agencies and civil service protections just doesn't seem like a live option to wipe all of those away and say, "Yes, the president is responsible and he can fire anyone at any time," which it may be reductive, but I think that is what you would ultimately need if you wanted to put the president in charge. I just don't think that's going to happen. Maybe it shouldn't. But if it doesn't happen, then it seems that the only other way around is to try to discipline Congress more from delegating so much and the court from endorsing all of the delegation.
John Grove:
Both of these seem to be swirling around very much to today. I mean, you do have some recent cases where some of these independent agencies, the discretion that they had and the protections from presidential removal have been pulled back in the last couple years. It seems like some of the Trump right has been focused on putting the president back in charge. But at the same time, it seems Congress, I think, there's maybe, maybe I'm just hoping, maybe there is a growing recognition that ultimately reshuffling the executive branch isn't really going to solve the problem long-term. Congress has to be involved, which stay tuned for that.
We will talk about that a little bit, which is where you ultimately bring the book. Let's talk a little bit then about judicial review. Obviously when people think about conservatives in the Constitution, this is primarily what they think about. They think about the development of originalism, maybe slightly less division among the conservatives on this point than the executive questions that emerged. Of course, we didn't get into that fully, but you really show nicely... I mean, pretty much the traditionalists on the executive, the traditionalists pretty much always were very skeptical of this vision of the executive, whereas Straussians and neoconservatives a little bit more inclined to see some benefits.
Particular visions of statesmanship probably played into that a little bit and what is expected of individual leaders. There was a lot of division on that question, probably not as much on judicial review, but certainly there were and continue to be some interesting cleavages among conservatives. I mean, the conservative approach to the court in the 20th century seems to have had its roots and a vision of judicial restraint. That's such a slippery phrase because it could mean deference the legislature, deference the president. It could mean so many things.
But essentially there's this core argument it seemed like that the idea of sticking to the actual written constitution and looking for a fixed meaning is a kind of fundamental restraint on the judge, in the sense looking at the Warren Court's rights decisions or the New Deal Courts just abandoning of what conservatives would've seen as constitutional limits on the federal government, that these courts were looking to practical outcomes. They're doing outcomes-based assessment or a moral analysis or something like that, and that the Constitution is a restraining force compared to that.
But of course, it could never just be a matter of deference to legislatures given the New Deal Constitution was made possible by extreme deference to legislature. It could never just be a judicial restraint. But from this visceral reaction against the New Deal Court's demolition of the original constitutional limits of the federal government and then the Warren Court's erection of new more substantive policy limits on all governments, federal, state, local, how did conservatives try to reassert some form of stable constitutionalism? Basically, tell us the story of originalism here or 20th-century originalism.
Johnathan O'Neill:
The first book I wrote was on the history of originalism, the emergence of originalism, and very much more lawyer and court centered. The jurisprudential emergence of originalism within the discourse of lawyers, courts, briefs, Supreme Court decisions. That book came out just as originalism had come back onto the scene. And then for the next 20 years, it just has exploded as far as the debate within law schools. It has, of course, much more of a presence on the court. Chronologically, I ended that book in the 1990s, and then I was fortunate enough that originalism just continued to explode.
My story of its initial emergence had some traction. By the time I got to this book, I came to see the reality of the notion that all conservatives want to claim to be originalists. And not simply within the context of briefs and arguments, which maybe we could talk about some of them do get involved in those, but in the sense that our core beliefs have a place in, are reflected in the Constitution, and therefore we're the real originalist, we're the true originalists.
John Grove:
Almost everybody does that at the end of the day, even the progressive jurors. I mean, at the end of the day, it's always like, well, this basic principle is there.
Johnathan O'Neill:
We learned something about American political culture when we come to that realization though, right, which is to say it's a failing argument. As some extreme progressive liberals say, it's just a failing argument to say, "Yeah, the constitution, we're going to junk it and start over." That's never going to happen. The more interesting argument is how do you sustain your claim to purchase in the originalist idiom. Again, to take the traditionalists just as an example, in the 1950s and the reaction to the Brown decision and coming out of Southern Agrarianism, there were essentially racist segregation defenses of states' rights and reassertion of interposition as this is the real meaning of the Constitution.
Because it's such a decentralized state-based regime, the federal government can't tell us what to do on race, and we're going to stand in the schoolhouse door. That conception of the union and it's attachment to segregationism and racism had to be defeated again as a no longer acceptable form of originalism. That left the traditionalists, I think people like Nisbet, people like Russell Kirk, having to make the argument for decentralization, the decentralized constitution, the localist constitution as one based on community and, again, virtue at the local level. That's an argument that doesn't depend on the ultimate logic of state sovereignty or succession and is delinked from race.
I think is one that is still saleable and defensible. I'm not sure I'm answering the question in the way that you put it. I don't think you want me to retrace the lawyerly development of originalism. What I try to do in this book instead is show that. Another example would be the Straussians who say... In the '50s and '60s, they're saying the court should be our Republican school master. The court should teach the Damos virtue in the way that it interprets the Constitution, and that this was a project that was alive in the jurisprudence of John Marshall and others.
And that the way that you bring the polity into the constitutional project is the statesman-like judges who are teaching the principles of the regime as they decide cases. Now, all that's fairly abstract, and again, it's a kind of intellectual argument. A more on-the-ground argument is the libertarians who start out very dismissive and condemnatory of the New Deal state because of the massive changes in government, regulatory authority, et cetera, et cetera. For a while they're just purest rejectionists. This is unfixable. We're going to go live in a cave somewhere. And then by the time you get closer to the '80s and '90s, you have the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Institute for Justice.
You have the libertarians who by this point are starting to come into law school saying, "Okay, we can play the rights-based litigation game too in defense of property rights as opposed to overregulation," and having some success at it. In cases also about First Amendment religious expression, cases about regulation of property rights. That really starts in the 80s in a way that you just didn't see at all in the '50s and '60s. By the time you get to this point, you have religious groups litigating in defense of religious liberty.
You have property rights groups defending property rights and not simply submitting amicus briefs as they did, which not clear if anybody actually reads them, but actually sponsoring cases and taking them up to the court and winning some of them. It's a small section of the book, but there's a recognition. Again, this is a theme that runs throughout the book is it doesn't seem like we're immediately going to, even with the growth of originalism, constrain the court back into more traditional forms of interpretation.
Another way to say it would be that some form of modern judicial review in an assertive court is here to stay. The question for conservatives is, do you put your tail between your legs, or do you gin up your own litigation shops and try to join the battle? Increasingly, they've chosen the latter.
John Grove:
Well, actually, I'll turn then to this question. Two Supreme Court cases from the last term I'll just bring up, and perhaps maybe they point to the ways in which conservatives in some ways failed to make a dent, and in others they did turn the tide, but both of them are considered conservative victory. First is Bruen, the Second Amendment case. This is a conservative win. That was the language. But in many ways, it's representative of the fact that the much more judicially restrained, traditional conservative view of the '50s and '60s and '70s, which would've seen often argued pretty vehemently and I think they had a point that incorporation of the Bill of Rights was a dangerous road to go down.
It was a centralizing road. Bruen is just the outgrowth. Of course, it's nothing new, but just the outgrowth of the fact that conservatives really did at a certain point decided to, as you said, gin up your own stuff. You start playing the game too. We're going to get our own if we're going to do this if the rights revolution is done, it's accomplished, then we need to be standing up for the ones that we want. In some ways, Bruen is just indicative of that original vision of a restrained court trying to revive the Federal Republic. Now that corporation is a dead issue. People don't even give that lip service anymore.
In some ways, that was conservatives entirely giving up on reversing the rights revolution. But then on the other hand, you have Dobbs and, of course, Roe is the case that conservatives had focused on for the last 50 years. It was the paradigm case of the overreaching court that was just making things up out of thin air without any textual basis at all. But it was also seen as the monument of the expansive progressive accomplishments made possible by the court. To a lot of people, that being overturned just five years ago, that being overturned was seen as, "That's never going to happen.
That's impossible," and then down and go. In that sense, huge victory. I don't know, mainly I wanted to mention Bruen there especially because you mentioned the tendency of that question Conservatives always had to ask was, what do you make your peace with and what do you fight? But also just Dobbs. What changes in terms of the calculation of that question? What do you make your peace with? What do you fight? What are the possible future? Dobbs, here's an issue that was nationalized 50 years ago.
It was seen by so many as completely settled, done, it's over. And now we have abortion back at the state level. In some ways, some people might see that as, hey, well, look, there are things that we thought were impossible that actually maybe are. Does Dobbs change the calculation of that issue at all?
Johnathan O'Neill:
I've been pondering that myself. One quip that I have made to myself and sometimes to others is Dobbs proves that what the court gives it can take away. I think as you're alluding to, in some ways, the more basic question is, do you really like that, or does that really sit well with the kind of regime...
John Grove:
How many op-eds are there now every day from progressive people that could have been copy and pasted from a conservative in the 1980s and '90s about the robed masters making our rules for us? Sorry, go ahead.
Johnathan O'Neill:
Yeah, no. I mean, you're exactly right. As we were alluding to earlier, I mean, you can do the same thing with the presidency, where the two sides end up switching poles over the course of the 20th century. I don't think it's an easy question to answer what to do with that. I mean, I guess what I would say about Dobbs, which I know more about, and a lot of people... The problem with rights discourse, again, as you were alluding to, is rights discourse is to shut down and truncate the political.
Once you raise the banner of a right, you're saying, "Okay, the barriers are up. You can't come in here anymore," which certainly in some basic sense philosophically we would want to affirm that if one subscribes to the notion of natural rights, which I do on some level. But of course, this is all complicated when the court says we're going to start inventing rights, which is what happens in Griswold. I was thinking to myself as I was getting ready for this.
Actually, many moons ago, I wrote my master's thesis on Griswold in the emergence of the Griswold opinion, which as many listeners I'm sure know is what creates the right of privacy, which is originally a contraception to defeat a Connecticut contraception law, anti-contraception law. One of the things that always impressed me about this situation was for probably a decade, the sessions of the Connecticut legislature, which had a strong Catholic component, for several sessions in a row they would come up, should we undo the anti-contraception law? The Connecticut legislature reaffirmed it every time.
And then a cadre of Yale law professors get together and start creating this case that they want to get in front of the Warren Court to undo the Connecticut contraception law. The court invents the right of privacy, undoes the Connecticut anti-contraception law, and we move on nearly a decade later to Roe. The question then, is something like contraception a constitutional issue, or does it have really little to do with the Constitution and should remain in the realm of politics? I think the more that you have a court inducing rights out of whole cloth, that common everyday citizens and even lawyers say, "Where does this come from," the more vulnerable the supposed right is.
Therefore, even though it has been the law of the land for 50 years and some in basic sense illegitimate. And that this is certainly as a matter of life and death, this is a political issue. People who want to govern themselves should be allowed to take hold of this issue in politics and deal with it. I think that is the best defense of what the court has done and what it should have done all along and what actually was happening before Roe v. Wade. Surprise, surprise, some conservative states are defending abortion in their constitutions and their statutes right now as a result of Dobbs. Some are outlawing it.
Some are revisiting the placement of their bans as far as how many weeks should be allowed. In other words, we're having politics about this again. I think particularly an issue that is so divisive and has such moral components on both sides, that if we're going to be a federal self-governing people, then this is where it should be sorted out. One of the things federalism means is that regulatory regimes will differ on issues such as this one, and that's okay.
John Grove:
Where things should be sorted out. That leads me to my last question, and I'm going to give you a few minutes to talk about maybe the only point in the book where I could tell that where you really came down. You were scrupulously objective throughout this, aside from a hint here and there, usually couldn't really tell your proclivities on these various groups of among conservatives. But one area where you do advise, especially looking to the future, is to think about legislatures.
You were just talking about state legislatures, but in the book you talk about Congress. Basically you say conservatives on the whole haven't given as much focused attention to Congress, why it seems so broken, and ways that it ought to be fixed. Talk a little bit about that. Why have conservatives not focused on that and what are the possibilities by refocusing on Congress.
Johnathan O'Neill:
As to why they gave it so little attention is probably a harder question to answer, although James Burnham's famous book from I think 1959, Congress and the American Tradition, which William F. Buckley always said, this is the place to begin with in American conservatism. That book really should be reissued and deserves to be read, and, of course, Willmoore Kendall too, his defense of Congress against the presidential majority. I think that some of this is that once you get the New Deal administrative state hitch to the rhetorical plebiscitary vision thing presidency, as Burnham said, Congress starts to be just more of a sounding board and a rubber stamp.
To some extent, this is a hurdling of the separation of powers. Congress is simply to be led by the president and to endorse the president's party program. And then why would you then give much attention to affirming Congress if it seems increasingly irrelevant? When you get the rights revolution of the war in court, the court says, "Well, we now have the power. We're going to invent rights and strike down the actions of Congress and state legislatures too." It's not really where the action is. Why would you give it much attention? You should develop an argument about originalism, or you should whisper in the prince's ear who you think is going to become president.
I think some of it is due to the development of the institutions after the New Deal. Congress participated in it and allowed itself to be more irrelevant. I think what we're seeing now with undeclared wars, invented rights, bureaucrats running the nation, everyone's looking around saying, "How have we come to this past? Who can fix this?" I think the answer that I come back to is Congress can fix it. We have to figure out how to get Congress to fix it.
John Grove:
I can't help but think about that meme of the guy in the hotdog suit that I don't know where it came from, but you Google it, anybody listening. The hotdog car is crashed into the buildings. We're all trying to figure out what happened. Congress is also responsible for a lot of this in the sense that they were so happy to delegate authority to the administrative state.
I mean, all the issues that had led to some dysfunction in Congress say the '80s and '90s, add to that today's mass media and just so much, so many of the most famous, all of the most famous people in Congress, maybe with exception of leadership, are famous because they're using Congress as a platform, Twitter and so forth. Is there a path to a serious, deliberative relevant Congress?
Johnathan O'Neill:
If I had a magic wand and wave it, I would. Again, a note of realism because as I been thinking about this and working on some things, some writing related to this, I mean, in a very serious, realistic notion, you have to accept that the Congress as an institution is not constituted to make consensus where there is no consensus in the polity, right? If the nation is fundamentally polarized and divided, on some level Congress is constituted to reflect that reality.
John Grove:
That's where I always go back to. It seems like any discussion of rehabilitating Congress has to involve rehabilitating federalism to an extent in a renewed sense. Exactly what you said. If there's no consensus, well, then what we have with abortion right now, it's got to be determined at another level.
Johnathan O'Neill:
There's a growing literature on how to fix Congress and growing discontent in Congress itself. Some of the things I've read have said one of the keys to reforms in the past where Congress did reform itself is increasingly members of Congress have to become discontent with their own irrelevance, effectlessness, uselessness, and really not enjoy it anymore enough to try to change it. That's one answer. Of course, the other answer is a simple answer, but also the most complex answer is they will respond to what their constituents want. Some of it is just the down-home political answer of the constituents demanding more of the people that they send there.
But there are other fixes too. One of the ones that I like being a constitutional guy, and this is something that has come up in various places, is the presidency has its own constitutional advisors. The court issues its own constitutional opinions. Congress should create an institution for itself that advises Congress on Congress' constitutional position vis-à-vis the other branches. Unsurprisingly, the Department of Justice typically comes down on the executive branch's constitutional position.
Congress needs something like the Office of Legal Policy, a set of informed constitutional advisors that can... Because a lot of these people, I mean, a lot of them are lawyers, but they're not constitutional lawyers, or they're not versed in the minutiae of Supreme Court precedents or executive branch opinions that they have to actually contend with when the other side is putting them out as a defense of their own actions, since Congress needs more of a brain in this way.
John Grove:
What do they have? There is some service for the budgetary...
Johnathan O'Neill:
Congressional Research Service.
John Grove:
Congressional Research Service and there's a budget one too. That at the very least, it sometimes gives you a little talking point to say, "Hey, these guys actually say this is going to add a ton to the debt." You could have something like that at least, "Hey, these guys actually say this law is unconstitutional."
Johnathan O'Neill:
Yes, yes, yes. To me, that's an answer that I find attractive, and I think that would help the institution grow a few more fangs, which I think it needs.
John Grove:
All right. Well, we really only scratched the surface of Johnathan O'Neill's terrific book, Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal, which is available now. Sure to be an essential resource for anybody who writes and researches on the history of conservatism. Professor O'Neill, thanks so much for joining us.
Johnathan O'Neill:
Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it thoroughly.
John Grove:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jakub Grygiel joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient wisdom in his recent book, Classics and Strategy.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawandliberty.org and thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. At this point, I'm sure it's no surprise that I like to think about questions of statesmanship at home and abroad, or that I have a distinct fondness for discussing such with professors, practitioners, and other thinkers who've been willing to engage thoughtfully with writers of the past and present around these issues. Joining me today is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, Jakub Grygiel. Professor Grygiel is a senior advisor at the Marathon Initiative. In another life, he served a stint at the State Department. He's authored several books, including Great Powers and Geopolitical Change, The Return of the Barbarians, and with Wes Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier. It is lovely to have you on today, Jakub.
Jakub Grygiel:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely. One of the books that you've authored that I didn't just mention, you published late in 2022, titled Classics and Strategy. It's a collection of essays on different classic authors from antiquity, the Renaissance, and even the Enlightenment. I would say it's geared towards students, even practitioners of strategy and international relations. I've super enjoyed the opening inscription that you gave to that from Charles Péguy, that Homer is original this morning, and nothing is perhaps so old as today's newspaper. Within your introduction, you affirm that classic texts give us not just important insights, but often, unusual insights into strategy. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of the backstory of how this book came out of a month's long project, maybe even years-long frustration, with the limitations of the modern IR classroom. Would love to hear a little bit about this project and what you're hoping to accomplish with it.
Jakub Grygiel:
It's a great question. That little line from Charles Péguy, it's great because it really conveys with a great brevity the idea that this morning newspaper, it's old by now. What is it now? It's in the afternoon. I don't know whatever date it is. We don't pick up the morning newspaper anymore unless we forgot to read it in the morning, et cetera. There's something to that. Whereas we'll always, we'll pick up Homer, or Tacitus, or Plutarch, that we know well, or any other great authors, and we'll read that work with great interest and I think great profit to our intellect. Obviously, these are two different things. Reading Plutarch and newspaper, I think you should do both, to a certain degree, but the originality of it is interesting of these classic texts. Anyway, so one of the impetus for writing several of these essays and then the book was simply that I just like reading old stuff. It's very selfish. It's always fascinating to me, there are always interesting stories, interesting insights. Above all, I think, even though I'm not a classical historian or a classist, it's a refreshing way of thinking about current problems. When I teach classes in obviously foreign policy, national security, there's a tendency for students and often other professors to assign and read current policy articles, books, et cetera. I think there's a use for it, and I'm sure students enjoy it too, but sometimes you ask the questions to the students, do you really think that nobody has thought about deterrence before 1950? The answer will be, of course, somebody must have thought about it. It was like, yeah, even if you read the 1950s classical text by Thomas Shelling on deterrence, well, he starts with essentially Julius Caesar and other sort of anecdotes from ancient history, pointing to fact that this is actually not, the reality of deterrence is not new. Obviously, he phrases it a different way, in a more economic way, et cetera. There's these political realities are not always that new. Maybe instead of reading something that tomorrow will be old, read something that is old that tomorrow is still young. I think as soon as I think after a moment of sort of worry that they're not going to be up to speed with the latest foreign affairs article, or New York Times oped, they realize actually reading Thucydides or passages, it's interesting. You can have great debates about war in Ukraine, or what to do about Iran, or whether a land power can become a sea power, like the question of China and ocean going navy. I always thought that these are great, well, A, they're fun to read, and then from a teaching perspective, they're great tools of teaching current debates, current geopolitical dynamics, without actually going into the current debates, which often are ideological and personally unpleasant. That's the main impetus. The other one, which is probably a little bit more, I'm not sure, I have never written on that, and kind of perplexed whether I should say it, is that especially in graduate school, there's this emphasis on literature review. You write your dissertation or whatever, you read a book, an academic academic book, you have to review all the literature on the subject, which usually means the recent literature, the last 20 years, 30, maybe 40, maybe 50, right? Maybe done in political theory, it may be different. International relations, that's the sort of approach, comparative politics, American politics. Fine. I think it's useful, necessary perhaps, but it forces you then to place your work within a very limited context, within the context of essentially your peers. Fine, you should do that, but why not place it in the context of a much wider tradition? This idea of this pressure to have literature review, I think in very serious ways, it's very limiting intellectually, because then what you end up is you carve a niche within what is already a niche literature. Look, at the end of the day, that's why publishers will never publish a literature review chapter. They'll tell you the first thing that has to go out of your dissertation is the literature review, because nobody wants to read this. Okay, so why did you spend a year and a half doing this? Why didn't you read Thucydides and place it in context of that, right? Anyway, so in many ways, this is a freeing moment. It's like, look, I've been reading these guys for decades, and well, I don't have to do the literature review. I'm just going to write about them.
Rebecca Burgess:
It narrows so drastically the scope of what you're trying to do, but I think also the scope of imagination of the writer and then the scholars that you're trying to engage with. On that question of, well, one, you are so correct. The number one complaint I see on Twitter from all the Twitter scholars is that they hate doing a literature review. No one reads it. They don't want to do it themselves. Thankfully, I lucked out. I just got to incorporate all my literature throughout my dissertation draft in some sneaky way. It does raise this interesting question about I think imagination and reality. You argue in your introduction and throughout the book, you make a case not just for history. We're all more or less inclined to accept that we can study Thucydides, and we have our Graham Allison's, even though many of us have problems with his interpretation of Thucydides. Okay. This Thucydides is accepted, but the Tragedians, like Aeschylus, even other historians, Tacitus, Plutarch, you mentioned, you include these. I think this is a wonderful broadening of the discussion into international relations that you add, but you offer this very intriguing little soup song, if you will, into why, and you say that it's because they offer what modern thinking about strategy lacks, a deep grounding in reality. Could you tell us a little bit more how tragics and the classics give us maybe more reality than our current doctrines and schools have thought about realists, internationalists, what have you?
Jakub Grygiel:
It's a great question. I probably would have an hour long answer, another book perhaps, but in brief, I think they're, in general, it seems to me reading a lot of these classics, and the reasons why there are classics in my view is they are not abstract. By that, I mean they do not attempt to create rationalist theories of how the world, maybe they think it works, or it ought to work. Rather they trying to describe a particular tyrant, a particular moment in time, a particular speech, or maybe they make up the speech or they think they should be said, or they think that Pericles said at the moment or whoever, or they try to describe how somebody like a Persian thought about their loss of the battle at the Battle of Salamis, trying to get into their mind. Actually, that's imagination, that they're not sitting there with a camera recording what the Persians are saying about their loss. It's a flight of imagination. It's not an abstraction in the modern sense, which is usually the creation of a fairly mathematical reality, which may or may not correspond with actual facts on the ground on the reality. As a saying that or story that somebody once told Hegel that his theory didn't reflect the facts on the ground, the reality. Hegel allegedly responded, says, "Well, too bad for reality." This is the modern approach. The classical one seems to be "Okay, now hold on for a second. If my theory, whatever I'm saying, does not reflect reality, oh, not too bad for reality, too bad for me. I better be careful. I better actually figure out the actual events or the actual truth or what I think the reality really is." I think it's this pre-modern, perhaps allergy to overly abstract theoretical thinking, which is attractive in a lot of these writers. It doesn't have to be a historian per se. As you mentioned, it's Aeschylus and others that convey something of the way that people thought, that people were thinking, of how people assess each other, how people had a wrong assessment of each other, and they're not lost in great theoretical debates, which is very, very modern.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. You argue or write that a modern strategic thought is shaped by three broad ideas: a belief in equal rationality of all, a trust in impersonal forces of, well, often progressive in nature, and a pension for data gathering, and that all of these work towards discounting the role of individual statesmen, and replacing strategists with planners and managers, essentially. Then the argument, as I take it throughout the essays, is kind of showing how the planner and the manager are not helpful models for us today, and kind of restoring the individual and the statesmen. Could you just give us a little bit of why you chose the authors? You have Plutarch, Tacitus, Aeschylus, Montesquieu, missing someone else.
Jakub Grygiel:
Now, I'm thinking too, what are you missing? Guicciardini is the last one as the Renaissance one.
Rebecca Burgess:
Xenophon.
Jakub Grygiel:
Xenophon, exactly. The problem with lot of modern thought is that it conceives politics as a mechanism, like the mechanism of physics, or an engine of some sort. Therefore, the only thing you need to know is the science of discovering how that mechanism works. Once you have figured out how the mechanism works, you can replicate it. Once I know how the diesel engine works, I can rebuild it and with the right tools, et cetera. It's often the question is when you write a modern academic book or some argument is, how can you generalize this? Meaning, well, you figure out the science of this mechanism, can you now extend it to every other mechanism of similar nature? The classical authors are somewhat reluctant to put it in those terms. Politics is the realm often of the chance there'll be sort of Fortuna, the Machiavellian concept, but it's broader than that. It's of free will, which is a key component of human action, and therefore a certain level of not chaos, but surprises, is that certain things that you think if you look at a mechanism of incentives, cost and benefits, you should do or you should not do, well, suddenly, free will kicks in. You might do the opposite. You might actually not calculate it according to the cost benefit analysis. I think these are the authors that, and they're not exhaustive. You can talk at many other authors in sort of classical thought and both historians, theorists, or philosophers, or poets. Why these specific ones? Well, partly again, selfish, I like them and I always like reading them. Part of it I think is that they have certain set of themes that, I don't want to exaggerate their sort of unity among them, but certain themes there are recurrent. For instance, the recurrence of call them tyrants, dictators, but actually they use the term tyrants often, very peculiar type of political leader, which is for them, it's a recurrent reality in politics. It's not something that is passe. The progress has removed authoritarian or tyrannical leaders. No, it's always there because it's part of human nature. It's not a mistake of institutional building or a momentary lapse of the progressive march of history. No, no, no. It's a constant thing in human history. Let's look at that. What's the problem with tyrants? How do they think? Are they peculiar forms? Do they have a peculiar form of behavior? A lot of them will say yes, they have very peculiar forms of behavior. Another one is fragility of political order. I think it's more specific than that, because even a lot of modern thoughts will say political order is fragile. I think for a lot of these classical writers, it's the impermanence of political action. In other words, politics is necessary, but it does not have, and it should not be thought as, how to put it, a creative force. Modern thought seems to me often puts a lot of emphasis or gives a lot of power to politics. You can create new lasting realities. You build the mechanism of institutions, and you have great domestic or international stability or peace. You build the right set of an incentive structure of economics, for instance, free trade, and you'll have an outcome which is peace. It'll be lasting and sustainable. Here's tools of politics that you can arrange that create a new reality that will maintain itself in many ways, as long as that institutional or setting or that the structure of incentive remains. For classical authors is no. Politics is yes, absolutely essential. It has the capacity to mold things, but it's not classic, right? Yes, you managed equilibrium today. Well, tomorrow the equilibrium will change. Good luck, right? Work again, right? Never relax. It's fragility of political order. None of this says, "Okay, well, we have revolutions. Let's come up with a better state to create new order to bide our time." No. Fragility is no matter what you do, you'll have to do it tomorrow, and you'll have to under different circumstances with different actors, different states, different individuals, different set of incentives, et cetera, et cetera. It's this constant struggle of politics, in a good way, that I think is very refreshing.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, the fragility of politics, it's derivative, I guess I would say, of human beings. Therefore, it is as limited as we in our individual capacity, and even in our collective capacity, are. In that way, I think one of the most hopeful things I ever learned was actually in a Politics in the Bible course, Leo Paul De Alvarez, where essentially he said, "Politics has always been going to hell in a hand basket, so cheer up."
Jakub Grygiel:
Great. Sorry to interrupt. Just even if they're not Christian, there is a certain temporal pessimist, but at the same time, metaphysical optimist of a lot of these authors. That may be the point about the class.
Rebecca Burgess:
That's wonderful. I think we said we need to remember that in return back to it, because it dovetails with this other question I was going to raise is whether politics is ultimately tragic or not. Of course, you could say the ancients perhaps answered that differently than post-incarnation, but maybe not. Maybe that's where there is, I think, another argument for studying tragedy, that tragedy in a way can actually offer more hope for our politics than our actual politics do. That's a little different.
Jakub Grygiel:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
You mention tyrants, and that's kind of the question of regimes, individual statesmen, and particular individuals. It seems to me that one of the things that comes out is the theme not just of tyrants, but also of just enemies and knowing your enemies. Why is it so important to know one's enemy, and what does that actually entail for, well, there's the essay by Plutarch, but in fact, several of the others mention knowing your enemies collectively and individually.
Jakub Grygiel:
Well, first of all, the main one is that you'll never get rid of them, right? There always will be enemies. That's the nature of politics. That's the nature of human just daily life and political life in particular is that you'll never get rid of enemies. That goes back to the fragility of political action or the impermanence of political action. You will never solve the problem of the human condition. Somebody else said that you can't reduce human problems to the ills of the city. It's something deeper than that. I think classical, and obviously Christian authors will agree with that, right? Salvation cannot be reached by politics. That's the Christian view, but the same in a classical sense, the classical authors that politics has certain limits. Enemies are just a symptom of this constant struggle that you'll have to have with the reality of social life. Now, then the question becomes what do you do with them? Obviously, you might want to kill them if that's necessary, but first of all, you have actually have to know them. Knowing the enemy is sort of an ancient almost art. We often now think about net assessment or assessing the enemy or whatever other modern term you have. Essentially is, how do you know the enemy? You know that they're there, how do you know them? It involves, among other things, trying to think. They think not because you agree with them, not because they're sort of a relativist in them. No, no, they're barbarians, absolutely. You got to figure out how they think. That's why I think Aeschylus, his tragedy on the Persians is brilliant. As far as we know, it's the only, obviously any tragedy, but probably my only written document, especially of the Greeks, trying to put words in the mouth of the enemy, not in a derogatory way, not in a, "Oh, these guys are obviously enemies. They're far inferior, they're stupid," et cetera. No, no, no, no. These are human beings that have a certain set of assumptions, prejudices, a certain political structure, and we actually should have empathy to understand it. I think it's a brilliantly written tragedy, because it's all based in the court of the Persian king waiting for the news of what happens to the expedition to Greece. Messenger comes back and say, "Yeah, we lost the battle." "How can you lose a battle? We had all these numbers." It's like, "Yeah, yeah, but they're better than us essentially. They're organized, and yes, we essentially mis-assessed the enemy. We just looked at the numbers, and by numbers, you're right, queen, you should have won, but numbers are not the only thing that matter." There's this, again, attempt, very brilliant and unique attempt to get into the mind of the other enemy. That's what often we do now. If we start thinking about the enemies, like always somebody in a good war game or in a good debate, somebody will play the role of the enemy, not in a derogatory way, but let's take it seriously. Let's think how Chinese, Russians, Iranian, whoever else, how they think about this.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right, and how their own evaluation of their fear, honors, and interests could be quite different, the spectrum of that could be quite different from our own and what we might ascribe to it. Isn't this part of your argument about Tacitus is that he also exhibits this ability to understand why people in Britain, et cetera, would not be willing to be part of the Roman Empire, and to kind of show with a certain amount of sympathy what those reasons are?
Jakub Grygiel:
Yes, Tacitus is, especially in a short piece, that one I examined like a Greek on his father-in-law, who was essentially a governor, a Roman governor in Britain. In that little piece, he talks about one of the rebellions of the northern tribes led by this barbarian Calgacus, and he gives actually the most beautiful and longest speech of that book is in the mouth of Calgacus, who gives this speech, I think it was 83 AD before the battle. It's a speech that is given and is written the most beautiful Latin style, which is already telling, right? He's not thinking that he's speaking monosyllabic grunts. No, he's speaking in a perfectly, stylistically perfect Latin. What does he say? The famous lines there is essentially that he criticizes Calgacus, criticizes Rome and saying that they're plundering, they're killing, and they call it an empire. They make a desolation, different translation, they make a desolation and call it peace. It's one of those one-liners Tacitus is often remembered, or he says among other things that they essentially give us the civilization of some sort, language, baths, et cetera, but they're using it to enslave us. It's a powerful speech, because he indicts the Roman Empire in the mouth of Calgacus. Again, very unique speech by a Roman author that kind of understands in many ways how Rome may be seen from outside. He actually is a Roman, he's all for it, absolutely. Let's go and kill the Scottish barbarians, but he's trying to actually think how they think, and maybe there's something to that. How do we address that? Obviously, there are other reasons, and maybe also criticism of the Roman emperor and that particular case. Obviously, he can't put in the mouth of a Roman, certainly not a Greek like his father-in-law. Again, it's a powerful way of trying to at least understand how an enemy assumed that Calgacus existed in some form has thought about Rome and the empire. It's a symptom, in my view, of great confidence in your own civilization, that you're capable of writing or putting yourself in the mind of your enemy, who you think is bad, evil, probably civilizationally inferior, but nonetheless, you're capable of elevating that hostile, that the thought of the enemy, to such a way that makes sense, and that you are doing it. You're not just listening to their speeches. You're actually thinking how they, you're trying to think like they do. You have to be confident in your own civilization to do that.
Rebecca Burgess:
It raises two questions, both I'm not sure that we might want to answer on this podcast, but one which is our inability to accurately describe the minds of our enemies today or understand their motivations, a symptom of our lack of confidence in our own regimes, our own political orders and institutions. The other question is, is this something that's uniquely western? I would say Herodotus arguably makes the point in his histories that this is what the Greeks do that separates them from the Egyptians and the Scythians, that they have this ability to separate themselves out, and to see images, and to explore what those images, et cetera, are. The willing suspension of disbelief, we would call it. It does raise some interesting questions. Just one more question on this question of enemies before we pivot to one of the most interesting authors, to my mind, just because he's so little talked about today. You mentioned that it is in fact problematic, the statement, to know the enemy is to know how to win, and that in fact, what the menace is is to know the enemy's mind. Could you give us a little bit more insight into what this juxtaposition is?
Jakub Grygiel:
Well, just before I get into that, on the civilization thing, if you're not confident in your civilization like Tacitus is confident about Roman culture and civilization, then if you write or think, or try to think like the enemy, you're afraid that the criticism and the fears that the enemy may think of you actually are true. It becomes an indictment, and you feel like, oh my gosh, maybe Calgacus is right. Maybe we are so bad and we are just doing it for whatever reason. We're just blundering everything. If you're confident that actually Rome, okay, it's violent, yes, but we actually bring law, we bring baths, if you want. We bring better language. Okay, well, maybe that indictment is not as threatening to you. That's why there's a fear of thinking like the enemy when you're not confident in yourself. I think that's just going back to that. Why do you have to know the mind of the enemy? Capabilities and resources are not everything. We often analyze the enemy by saying, "He has these capabilities, and that's what we should just take into consideration." It's absolutely necessary. We should look at how much China's producing in terms of artillery, ships, or planes, missiles, et cetera, or nuclear weapons. That's not sufficient, I think, because capabilities alone don't tell you how, when, for what purposes they might use these things. It's very, the sort of resource capability oriented thinking is materialistic, many ways sort of Marxian, and everything is, that it's drawn from the things that you have or the things that you control, versus there's actually a power of the mind, not just to direct the capabilities, but actually use them in ways that you have not thought that could be useful. To give you an example, just a current example, I think the mistake of the Russians, for instance, was to look at the Ukrainians and look at only their economy, perhaps their political structure, corrupt, and their military capabilities de facto, whatever artillery they had. If you look at that analysis, the correlation of forces, the Ukrainians were weaker. What they did not take into consideration as become quite clear is the mind, both of Zelenskyy and the mind of the culture of the Ukrainian nation, which actually, I don't know if was a, often we call it a force multiplier, but it was more than that. It was actually something that is incalculable. It's not unknowable, it's incalculable, and I think was 90% of the reason whether Ukrainians are still here. Ukraine is still independent, with some obviously lost territories, but still an independent sovereign country. Knowing the mind of the tyrant, or the nation, or the people that you're facing, I think it's in that sense, is it's absolutely essential. It's not just a clash of forces. It's a clash of minds and wills.
Rebecca Burgess:
The incalculable versus unknowable is an excellent distinction. It's in baseball, there's no stat for will to win, but it's a thing we know. The moral wellsprings, you could say, of even national character, that to me is always, is connected with questions of regime. Once again, why looking at questions of regime are so much richer when we're thinking about not just domestic politics, but international relations and foreign policy to help us understand all this.
I think this is actually the Ukrainian/Russia example is a great segue into a writer from the Renaissance, which you spend two chapters at the end speaking about, Francesco, oh, I'm going to say it wrong.
Jakub Grygiel:
Guicciardini.
Rebecca Burgess:
That man.
Jakub Grygiel:
Francesco Guicciardini, yeah. That man, that guy.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, friend of Machiavelli. Born around 1483, Florence's ambassador to the Spanish court of Ferdinand the Second, a friend or within the court of the Medicis, and just this fascinating character, which you kind of hold up as a constructive counter-example to Machiavelli's style of teaching about Rome, and even about politics and models for politics. I think to start, maybe if you could just give us a little bit of the biography of him. As a segue, I'll say why I thought it was a segue is because of his emphasis on studying history as the particolare, not these abstractions and not as iron rules that can be just imbibed and ascribed without rhyme or reason, in the sense to particular ages and places.
Jakub Grygiel:
Francesco Guicciardini, more than Italian, he's a Florentine. Italy's not there yet. As you said, he was born in 1483 in a wealthy Florentine family that was close to the family of the Medicis. It was one of these tribes or clans that was powerful already, and had an impact for decades on the politics of Florence. From the very first years of his intellectual development, he became interested and involved in them in the Florentine politics. He was a lawyer. Then very quickly becomes, I think in the early 1500, he becomes an ambassador of Florence, obviously, to Spain. It was a great experience, even though I think it was two years or three years that he was there, but it was a great experience of which he writes his little notes about what he learned about the emperor, how he dealt with the court, his strategies, et cetera, et cetera. He used those two years obviously as an ambassador to write assessments of Spain, but also to learn about politics in general. Then from then on, he was constantly present in Florentine politics in different positions, including he reached as the highest office or the most prestigious office, the signoria, which is sort of the highest magistrate office or legal office. As most of these Florentine politicians, he had problems once the regime changes, and I think in this case, I think it's the twenties, 1520s, 1527, when he gets kicked out, the Medici lose power. He returns a few years into power, and he has people ended up criticizing because he accepted the role in 1530 or so, of punishing those in Florence who were enemies of Medicis, who opposed the return of the Medicis. The criticism obviously is like, "How can you do it? You're serving a tyrannical clan, the Medicis." His point has always been throughout actually his writing, there's a consistency that you might actually have an obligation to serve under a tyrant, because if you don't, and you're a prudent, virtuous man, well, somebody worse will be serving under tyrant. Don't think that there is no role in active politics under tyrant. Again, it's a controversial statement. It probably does not take into consideration more totalitarian tyrannies of modern times. This is not a totalitarian, it wasn't friendly, it wasn't nice, but was not a totalitarian tyranny. Maybe he did think, and he did probably, to a certain degree, have an impact, a positive impact on otherwise not a terribly novel, well, aristocratic, but not novel in terms of virtue, ruler. Key last point I'll mention: he was never a historian, although that's how he's known for. He's known to be a historian, although he never planned to be a historian. He ends up writing a history of Italy, history of Florence, very detailed, and based on a lot of personal experience and letters and some archival work. It was sort of his hobby, perhaps. Also, when he retires and his board and said et cetera, like Machiavelli, he ends up writing, but he's not a historian by profession. It's one of those, it's like Thucydides, right? Thucydides is not a historian professionally. He gets kicked out of Athens for coming up late to a battle, probably not his fault, anyway, ends up being a historian. Similar story here.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. He is another one of these instances of a statesman, a diplomat who is in an incredibly interesting and geopolitically changing moment, which is you have Charles V, you have the Spanish court in France. France is the first right? I think is the king at this time. Italy, which for so long has had so much political heft and power, is losing all of that to Spain and France. Then of course while Charles V comes in, sacks Rome. That's a nice little sock in the jaw. Is he trying to prep Italy, in a sense, to handle this moment? How do you stick up for yourself politically and not get trampled when you have this changing environment? Then also how can you know to handle these issues of the day? It seems like he turns to writing these histories in order to showcase these little moments that have happened beforehand to know why we are at this moment. It's not simply always looking to the ancient, ancient past, but even the more recent past, where there have been failures to even recognize the situation in which they are in.
Jakub Grygiel:
He's very critical of Machiavelli, who was a friend of his, that his criticism is that Machiavelli thinks that we can essentially mimic the Romans. Machiavelli writes discourses and essentially says, "Look, the Romans have all this virtue, copy the Romans, be like the Romans," which Francesco says "The heck, that's impossible. We are not Romans. We lost that virtue. We lost whatever the Romans have. We have something else. Maybe worse, maybe better, but we are not it." Don't go back to studying Roman history, which he obviously knew, but he doesn't write about that. He writes about more contemporary to his time history. His point is this, that Italians or Florentines in particular are different. The virtue that they have or the absence of virtue that they have is different from the virtue that Romans had or the absence of virtue that the Romans had. He's constant, there's always a line in different permutation of it, throughout these writings is that we should always return to the things within our power. Let's return to the things that are within our, yeah, let's talk about this. Fine, fine, interesting, interesting, but let's return to the things that are within our power, meaning that, look, not everything, we can't be Romans. We can't make ourselves into Romans, but doesn't mean that we can't do anything. What are the things within our power? What are the things that we can do right now? There's a practical streak that is associated with this criticism of the learning from distant past that may no longer be applicable or generalizable, to use modern academic terms, to the current times. He's the anti-Machiavellian, in the sense that it might have to do with his methodology rather than just ethics, is that every moment in time, every individual event, every individual is particular. The term that he always uses, en particolare, which means that everything has its own rules. Everything has its own characteristics and features, which may be similar analogous, but they're very peculiar. Let's be careful in not drawing some of these large, abstract laws of behavior from the Romans and say, "Oh, it applies to 1520 Italy." Well, let's study 1500 Italy and see what happened.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right, or 2021, 23 USA, right?
Jakub Grygiel:
Yeah. It doesn't mean that you don't study the Romans, but you don't draw a direct line from what they did to what we are.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. History becomes a form of training, especially for the statesmen. If there cannot be, or if it's a danger to think of history as providing these universal rules, what then can the statesmen, what is the training the statesmen can take from studying history, I would say?
Jakub Grygiel:
It's not, again, to draw abstract, generalizable rules, it's rather to train your mind to the existence of particular events. Traditionally, people say, "Well, a general should be well-versed in hunting." You cross the rivers, you cross the top, you learn the map, the hills, the mountains, the role of a trench, et cetera, et cetera. Well, Guicciardini will say, "Okay, fine. You're not a general, you're going to be a statesman. Well, study history." Not to say that what happened in 1490 or 50 AD will happen tomorrow. That's too big of a step, but train your mind to the complexity, the particularity of events. They're not going to be replicated exactly, but your mind will have the muscle to be capable of responding to the particular event that you're going to face, the particular circumstance that you're going to face.
Rebecca Burgess:
It seems almost as though there are three, I'm sure there are more than three, but three things that jump out to me, which is a certain humility that comes from studying history and being aware of those particolare, but then also once again, that question of imagination, of putting yourself and seeing larger things that are just right around you, of tasking your brain with seeing, once again, what your enemy's mind and motivations, et cetera, might be. Then also, to return to that sense of the tragic, the study of history shows you how difficult statesmanship actually is, and that is it tragic, ultimately? Does he think that the practice or the study of statesmanship is a tragic thing? Then how do you hedge against that? Is it courage? Courage in the face of that, and knowing how to use power well, wisdom, or once again, a combination of those things?
Jakub Grygiel:
Yeah, it's tragic in two ways, I think. It's tragic because the outcome of your actions are not going to be perfectly aligned with what you thought the outcomes would be. There's that tragedy, and that's contrary to understanding of politics as a science. If it's a science in its mechanism, and you know science well, what you do, the lever that you pull or push should have the outcome that science tells you to do. If it doesn't, you adjust the science and you move on, and there's progressive knowledge. Machiavelli and Guicciardini and many others will say, "No, that's not the way it works. Be ready that what you will do will have often unintended consequences." That's one. The second one is more personal one, is that not only your actions will have outcomes that you didn't foresee or want, but you'll fail as a political leader, that they're very rare in history you have political leaders that can sit back at the end of their lives saying, "I did awesome. That was awesome. This was just fabulous. I did everything I wanted." Most often great political leaders are tragic figures in the sense that either if they succeeded, they made themselves irrelevant. There's this personal, okay, now what? Why am I an exile? Well, you succeeded. People don't need you, right? It's the role that ...
Exactly. Right, a Roman dictator, right? The great, the good ones, they'll come in, solve the problem, and move on and deal with their chicken. There's that. Moses doesn't go to Israel, but he makes the nation of Israel capable of going there. He's no longer necessary for that, and he's not allowed to go in there too. There's this personal tragedy, which I think he, Machiavelli too, experienced firsthand, and it's just personally obviously painful. We always have this idea of a politician, of great statesmen, as somebody who's just the pinnacle of wealth, pinnacle of success, smiling. The good ones are not the ones that are present themselves. The good ones tend to be tragic figures.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Well, not to return always to Plutarch, but that is one of the points he makes, that there's chance in all of this, despite the greatest virtue, sometimes you don't have the opportunity to exercise. Sometimes, literally everything is against you, like with poor Lucullus. To kind of finally wrap this up, and it's been a wonderful conversation, and thank you again for spending time with us on it, is you end your final chapter on a note about how the study of particolares actually leads to the importance of patriotism. I think that's such an unlooked or overlooked aspect of the study of statesmanship, but especially in relation to international relations, and how might we present this or think about this so that people can, once again kind of, I don't know, relearn or reopen their mind? Imagine, allow for imagination to show them the importance for statesmanship of patriotism?
Jakub Grygiel:
That's a good question. Patriotism for Guicciardini, and to certain degree with Machiavelli too, although slightly different, I think, is the belief that the particular political, social, cultural conditions within which you've grown up, in which you are leading in politics, were particular, and they deserve to be protected as particular, that yes, they're certainly universal principles, but the universal principles are embedded in daily life through particular ways. The role of patria, or your community or your nation, and we can discuss the difference in terms, but essentially the local communities, are worthy of defending because they reflect in daily life something that is deeply valuable, and Guicciardini here is therefore a much greater protector of this particular way of life than Machiavelli is. Machiavelli is much more of the universal, there's something universal laws of politics, and everybody behaves in the same way, roughly, Guicciardini says, "No, hold on. There are some differences here. They may be worthwhile protecting." It's maybe a proto-Edmond Burke or Italian. It's maybe too much of exaggeration. I'm sure political theorists will sound crazy. Thankfully, I'm not a political theorist, so you can say I'm crazy because this doesn't affect me. The point is that there's something in Guicciardini that elevates the value of the particular way of life or the particular community, and says, "Defend that. Related to that, you will not defend an abstraction. You will defend the particular. You will not, it's very hard to love an abstraction." I think Burke, again, I mentioned Burke, Burke mentioned something like this. It's like, oh, revolutionary France thought that they created this sort of mathematical, geometrical new realities in France. Well, how the heck can you possibly love this stuff? What you end up is no country because nobody loves this thing, and Guicciardini has something to that. That's his love for the particular. It's both a call for humility, as in watch out, you can't have universal rules of behavior, but also, look, you want to protect this particular because that's worth defending, and that's why you'll be able to function as a statesman. People love this particular way of life, rather than obstruction, and they will be willing to sacrifice for it. Call it patria, call it nation, call it family, call it local communities, whatever you want to call it. That's, I think, where Guicciardini comes in.
Rebecca Burgess:
The hundreds of different types of cheese that the Frenchmen will defend, right?
Jakub Grygiel:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. I think that returns us and puts a nice, beautiful bow on the end of our conversation, bringing us back to that question of optimism, almost. I think that is where there can be optimism in the study of politics and the practice of statesmanship is recognizing that there are things to defend, that are worthy of defending, that you can know that, that you can know, in fact, you can know many things about politics, despite the uncertainties that are hedged all around. You, in fact, can know, and that there are worthwhile things to strive for and to do. Returning to the classics is an excellent way of stretching our imaginations. As we started out by, might be a little bit more relevant to us than our daily newspaper. On that note, we were discussing Jakub Grygiel's Classics and Strategy. That was Professor Jakub Grygiel joining us today. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thank you for joining us.
Jakub Grygiel:
Thank you.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Stephen F. Knott joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent book, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
James Patterson:
Hello. You are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is April 10th, 2023, and my name is James M. Patterson. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, and at the Institute for Human Ecology, and president of the Ciceronian Society. My guest today is Dr. Stephen F. Knott. Until his recent retirement, Dr. Knott was a professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Prior to that, Dr. Knott was co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, where I met him and worked for him for a little while. His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post, Time, Politico, The Hill, oh my goodness, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, I’m exhausted. He is author and editor of ten books dealing with the American presidency, the early republic, and American foreign policy. His most recent book, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy, was published by the University Press of Kansas in October 2022, and it will be the subject of today's interview. Dr. Knott, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
Stephen Knott:
Well, thank you, James. It's always great to reconnect with you, and I'm looking forward to our discussion.
James Patterson:
Listeners don't know this, but I promised to interview Dr. Knott maybe a little while ago. And so if he throws any barbs my way, understand that they're all very earned on my part. So for those who haven't read the book yet, one of the things that might surprise the reader is that Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy has a very strong personal component to it in a way that other scholarly works of yours have avoided. So what is it about Kennedy that makes the subject so personal?
Stephen Knott:
So, James, I grew up in a Kennedy-worshiping family in Massachusetts. And I use that term worshiping with some precision. As far as my mother was concerned, she was of Irish Catholic descent. When John F. Kennedy broke that glass ceiling that had kept Catholic or any non-Protestant out of the White House, from that point on, he could do no wrong. So my earliest memory, believe it or not, is of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So in addition to growing up in a kind of worshipful Kennedy environment, my earliest memories, two of my earliest memories, one is the missile crisis and seeing the fear on my parents' faces as they listened to President Kennedy in October 1962 talk about the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba. And then shortly after that, my father came home with plans for a bomb shelter in our backyard. That's my first memory. My second earliest memory is of the assassination, and my mother sitting in front of this grainy black and white television watching the news from Dallas that President Kennedy had been murdered. So both in terms of my memories and also just in terms of the environment that I grew up in was a rock-solid, New Deal, new frontier family. And my editor suggested, along with some friends that, that personal angle might set this Kennedy book apart from the other 40,000 titles that have been written about President Kennedy.
James Patterson:
Right. It's a very moving sort of introduction about the context in which you grew up. And I know a lot of ... I'm at a Catholic university, and I know a lot of people of a certain age that had that very similar experience. Another thing that I had wondered that made this book a little bit more personal was your previous book to this one, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, 2019, University of Kansas, or the University Press of Kansas, I always get that wrong. So you had a pretty strongly critical tone of the modern presidency. And so maybe developments in recent history had made you reconsider the legacy of Kennedy after growing up maybe a little bit more critical of him as you describe at the early part of the book.
Stephen Knott:
That's absolutely right, James. My previous book was critical, is critical of a number of the modern presidents, including President Kennedy, to some extent. And I actually wondered at times if perhaps I was a bit too critical. And I started thinking that way, particularly in light of the Trump presidency, which I viewed as quite destructive. And looking back at least at Kennedy's rhetoric, one can see a president I think who generally appealed to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, who viewed the United States as the last best hope, and belatedly, but nonetheless somewhat firmly tried to move his fellow white citizens in the direction of fulfilling the promises of the Declaration of Independence. So I still remain somewhat critical of Kennedy in terms of his embrace of this progressive notion of a kind of boundless presidency, where the president can be as big a man as he wants to be. I find that's still very problematic, but I also think that some of Kennedy's rhetoric did appeal to the best in us. And I thought it was time, after 60-plus years on this planet, for me to revisit my earlier beliefs about President Kennedy, and perhaps come away with a more nuanced understanding of this president and this man.
James Patterson:
As a subject, Kennedy really is a fascinating moment in American politics. It's at a critical turning point in the Democratic Party. Its coalition is shifting. And Kennedy himself is an Irish Catholic, we talked about that, at a moment when American Catholic culture was really beginning to experience its most popular moment of Notre Dame football, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day. So what is it about this moment that Kennedy is capturing that is part of what makes him so successful in winning the nomination and then just barely successful enough to defeat Richard Nixon?
Stephen Knott:
Yeah. I think Kennedy is very much sort of a personification of mid-20th century Catholicism for better or for worse. Again, Kennedy breaks that glass ceiling and makes a very firm commitment to the American people and to his fellow Catholics that he is going to take his guidance from the American Constitution and not from Rome. Now I know there are some folks who believe that Kennedy set far too high a wall of separation between church and state. And to this day, he remains a controversial figure in the minds of a lot of conservative Catholics. But I do see him as a kind of Catholic Irish immigrant success story that a lot of fellow Catholic immigrants really glommed onto, so to speak. And again, in the minds of so many of these folks, he could do no wrong after that point. One of the reasons, James, that I wrote this book is I do see a kind of cultish aspect to the support for John F. Kennedy, and that I find somewhat disturbing in a republic, whether it's a cultish support for Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, or John F. Kennedy, there's something troubling about that. But I did witness it up close and personal, and again, particularly for somebody like my mother who had to fight for the establishment of a Catholic Church in a very small New England town dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. She fought that fight in the late 1940s, and then 10 or 15 years later, there's a fellow Irish Catholic sitting in the White House. It's just important for your listeners to understand just how important that was to people of my parents' generation who were Catholic.
James Patterson:
My mother was at a Catholic school, and I want to say this was when she was in Washington, although it was when she may have been in Hawaii. She was the daughter of a man in the Army, he was a sergeant, and was the only Nixon supporter in her entire Catholic school and received very, very bad marks when writing an essay in favor of Richard Nixon. But the family, my mom’s side of the family is very old Republican, so this of course unpopular at her Catholic school. So let's get into the meat of the book, which is about the presidency. It's not a long presidency for very tragic reasons well-known to our audience. But one of the subjects you open with is on the civil rights movement. And I was very excited to read this section because I wanted to know what you had to say, especially because I have read a considerably long book on the same subject by Steven Levingston called Kennedy and King. And I think your reading of Kennedy is much friendlier and sympathetic, given that Kennedy was facing a number of trials at the same time.
Stephen Knott:
That's absolutely true, James. I do think there's been a tendency on the part of both the book that you just referred to and many other scholars to be highly critical of Kennedy for what, as one author refers to him as a bystander when it comes to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There's definitely an element of truth in that accusation. Kennedy was very cautious at first in terms of his actions as president dealing with civil rights. But I think sometimes folks forget, first of all, just what a narrow victory Kennedy had over Richard Nixon in 1960. And that victory was based in part on carrying some key Southern states, the state of Georgia, for instance, gave Kennedy his second-highest popular vote, just behind Rhode Island. And this is a man who just squeaks into the White House. There's kind of a cloud surrounding that election, to begin with. And then he's confronted with powerful barons in Congress from these Southern states, who are rock-solid Democrats, but also rock-solid segregationists. So he does tread very carefully, there's no question about it. He promised in the 1960 campaign that with the stroke of a pen, he could end discrimination and federally funded housing, and he waits until well over a year and a half to finally do that. But I do think, James, by his third year in office, or by 1963, excuse me, he puts the full weight of his White House behind what will become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And I would strongly recommend to your listeners that they go onto YouTube and just watch Kennedy's speech from June of '63, which was an address to the American public, where he puts civil rights as his top domestic priority, and he cites the Declaration of Independence. He cites the American Constitution. He cites our Judeo-Christian heritage in favor of a vigorous federal effort to finally break down the walls of segregation. And he'll spend the last four or five months of his presidency lobbying for that civil rights bill. And there's a reason why he's in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. He's in trouble in the South. He has alienated a significant portion of the Democratic Party's base by identifying himself with Dr. King, with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And I think he deserves credit for belatedly, absolutely true, but belatedly putting the full pressure, if you will, of the White House behind a significant piece of civil rights legislation.
James Patterson:
Yeah, that's right. He does embrace this language of Judeo-Christianity in precisely the way that Dr. King had, and that element to his speech is picked up and continued through the passage of the '64 act, in fact. So I was very taken by the treatment you gave of the speech he gives. It was a really good balance, really a correction to a lot of the anti-Kennedy stuff out there, which I have to admit I probably in my own work have been too readily accepting because of my own biases against Kennedy, obviously that I've inherited. Another subject that comes up in the book and really gets a finesse treatment given your foreign policy background is a little issue that came up during the Kennedy administration called the Cuban Missile Crisis. What exactly was going on with the Kennedy White House? And why was it that they decided to deal with Cuba, the missile crisis, as well as attempting to stage a coup the way that they did?
Stephen Knott:
Well, James, Kennedy had campaigned in 1960. He took a very hard line on Communism. He's one of the few mid to late-20th-century Democrats who actually outflanks his Republican opponent on national security. In other words, he comes off as more hawkish than Richard Nixon. And he accuses the Eisenhower Nixon administration of having lost Cuba just as Nixon and some of the Republicans had accused Harry Truman of losing China. So Kennedy beats up his Republican opponents on this issue of Castro coming to power in 1959 during the Eisenhower years. And he suggests that he's not going to tolerate that. And, of course, you end up with the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961. Now he had inherited a plan from the Eisenhower administration to try to topple the Castro government. We could talk for hours about the differences or the changes that Kennedy made to Eisenhower's plan. But the bottom line, that thing was just a total disaster. He took full responsibility for it, but he also continued to try to topple that government. And you end up with something called Operation Mongoose, which was a campaign of economic sabotage, but also a campaign involving trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. So this is the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That administration–the Kennedy Administration–had been trying to kill Castro for quite a few months prior to that. And, of course, the Soviets and the Cubans were well aware of this. When Khrushchev decides to gamble and put these offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba, I think he thought, Khrushchev thought, that Kennedy was somewhat weak, somewhat vacillating. He had canceled any air strikes for the Bay of Pigs operation. He had stood by while the Berlin Wall went up. And there may have been a calculation on Khrushchev's part that Kennedy would not respond in a firm manner regarding the missiles in Cuba. Now Kennedy does respond in a firm manner in terms of authorizing a blockade, or a quarantine, I should say, of Cuba. But what we didn't know at the time was that Kennedy also made some pretty significant concessions to Khrushchev in order to get the Russians to pull those missiles out. And so we secretly agreed to remove the missiles that we have on the Soviet border in Turkey, and also, we agreed to not invade Cuba again like we did in the Bay of Pigs. Those things were kept very quiet, very hush, hush. And one of the interesting things that comes out of the missile crisis, and the reason I can say this with certainty, is we have tape recordings of everything that was said in almost every meeting about the missile crisis. And John F. Kennedy was consistently the most dovish, for lack of a better word, the most determined to avoid a military conflict with the Soviet Union, while demanding the removal of these missiles at the same time. So I give Kennedy considerable credit for a very effective management of that crisis, which was the worst of the Cold War that could've easily degenerated into a nuclear conflict between the two superpowers. I do think it's due to Kennedy's willingness to put himself in Khrushchev's shoes, to make some concessions, to demand the removal of the Soviet missiles, but also to allow Khrushchev to save face. And I think we averted World War III by Kennedy so doing.
James Patterson:
Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the discussion on the issue of Cuba was that we focus a lot on the relationship that Kennedy had with Khrushchev. Normally, his presentation is one getting kind of yelled at by Khrushchev hammering his fists and/or footwear on various objects at the United Nations. But really, the part that I was most interested in was how slowly but surely, there's this sort of emergence of a three-way relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev and Castro. And Khrushchev's relationship with Castro eventually helps with the thawing of the relationship with Kennedy because of what Khrushchev's got with this guy and Cuba, and what he's demanding Khrushchev do with the missiles. So if you could tell any bit of that story just to tease it up for your future book buyers, I would be very grateful because it's one of my favorite parts of the book.
Stephen Knott:
Well, thanks, James. I have to say it, I'm glad you sort of highlighted this. I do think there's a tendency to put almost all of the blame on JFK for the missile crisis. The fact was this was an incredibly reckless gamble on Khrushchev's part. But more importantly, what emerges from a close examination of the missile crisis is just how zealous, how I would say, dangerous Fidel Castro was. He was furious at Khrushchev and at the Kremlin for the decision to pull those missiles out. Castro wanted this thing to go to the mat. He was itching for a conflict. And some of the statements that Castro made, both publicly and privately, to folks in the Russian hierarchy, really bone-chilling. I mean, look, saying things to the effect, if they want to take us down, we're going to take them down with us. He didn't particularly care if the whole world got embroiled in this conflict. So there's a recklessness about Castro that I think a lot of Western observers to this day still ignore. If you don't believe me, you can look at the accounts written by Khrushchev's son, Sergei Khrushchev, in which he talks about some of these really dangerous, irresponsible statements made by Castro at the height of the missile crisis, to the point where it really turned Khrushchev and the Politburo off. They became very concerned about Castro's stability. And I think that's a part of the Cuban Missile Crisis that just doesn't get enough attention.
James Patterson:
In my version of the text, it's this great part of the book, and pleading for a first strike in the event of an American invasion, Castro told Khrushchev that this was an opportunity to eliminate the chance for the Americans to strike first against the Soviet Union, quote, "An American invasion would be the moment to eliminate such danger," Castro told the Kremlin, this quote, "Harsh and terrible solution was the only solution, for there is no other." In Moscow, Khrushchev, the man who once promised to bury the capitalist West, and who had flaunted the possibility of nuclear war during the summit with Kennedy in Vienna of 1961, was astounded by Castro's proposed final solution, quote, "This is insane. Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him."
Stephen Knott:
Absolutely true. And again, not to beat a dead horse, but I've often felt that Fidel Castro to this day gets something of a pass from a lot of Western observers who sort of admire the fact that he stood up to the big bully to the north. But there's an element of Castro's zealotry to the cause and to his hatred of the United States that is particularly ... It's disturbing in an era of nuclear weapons. And I think he had a kind of cavalier attitude about those weapons that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev had, thank God.
James Patterson:
It's sort of like, "Well, if they start a nuclear war with each other, maybe they'll forget all about me down here." So this is something of a silly question, but it came to mind when I was reading that quotation. But is it true that Kennedy before imposing the embargo, picked up a bunch of Cuban cigars to keep for himself at the White House?
Stephen Knott:
I believe that is true, James, if my memory serves correctly. I don't know if I talk about this in the book or not. But I know I've come across references to, I believe, somebody in Pierre Salinger's staff. Salinger was Kennedy's press secretary, was somehow able to get ahold of these Cubans. Kennedy did like a good cigar, and I think that story is absolutely true.
James Patterson:
Well, I do like a good cigar as well, but I would never violate the embargo. That would be wrong. So Kennedy had an experience of war, and you mentioned earlier that he was dovish on nuclear war. To what extent did his experience serving in the Pacific theater influence his position on conflicts with the Soviet Union or other powers, especially given that this is a period when we're starting to see the emergence of the problems in Vietnam?
Stephen Knott:
Wow, terrific question, James. I mean, Kennedy's hatred of war, I think is, an aspect of his persona that is another one of these somewhat unexamined or underappreciated areas. His letters home while he served in the South Pacific during the second world war are filled with anti-war references. Now look, he wanted to defeat the Japanese. I mean, he was a patriot. He wanted the United States to succeed in that war. But he really developed a firm hatred of war. Two of his crew members were killed during that PT-109 incident of August 1943, where Kennedy was the skipper of a PT boat. Two of these young men were killed. One of those young men had talked to Kennedy about having had a dream in which he was killed in the war. And Kennedy notes that this young sailor was sort of obsessed with the idea that he was not going to make it home. Sure enough, he did not make it home. And Kennedy writes in one of his letters his regret that his efforts to get this guy transferred off his boat did not succeed. Now look, there may be a lot of aspects of John F. Kennedy's character that none of us can find particularly admirable, but in this case, it does strike me that Kennedy had a principled, a deep and abiding objection to war, he had seen it up close and personal. And when he's president a mere 20 years later, by the way, these are not particularly distant memories. PT-109 was in 1943. He's in the White House less than 20 years later. And his hatred of war leads him both in the Berlin crisis in the fall of '61, I would even say at the Bay of Pigs in April of '61, the missile crisis in '62. And I would also apply this to Vietnam. I just don't think John F. Kennedy would've gone to the lengths that Lyndon Johnson did in terms of committing over half a million American soldiers to Vietnam. This was a man who hated war, who had seen it up close and personal, who had lost his oldest brother in the war less than a year after the PT-109 incident. So again, this is an aspect of Kennedy's beliefs that I don't think is appreciated. And yes, you're absolutely right, James, it does guide his foreign policy and his national security decisions. And by the way, I would just add to this, there's a reason why some of the hawks in the defense department at that time, I'm thinking particularly of General Curtis Lemay, who was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, thought that Kennedy was soft, thought that Kennedy was an appeaser like his father, as a lot of folks liked to say. And you know what, they were onto something. Kennedy hated war, and that guided his decision-making process in the national security arena.
James Patterson:
Reading here in the chapter on Vietnam, Kennedy added that the United States was prepared to consist them, but I don't think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort. And in my opinion, the last two months, the government has gotten out of touch with the people. Here are the people, I think you mean the Vietnamese people. Kennedy hoped that it would become increasingly obvious to the government that they will take steps to try to bring back popular support for this very essential struggle. He was cautiously optimistic that the South Vietnamese would regain the support of the people with changes in policy and personnel. Absent those changes, the chances of winning would not be very good. Do you think that with the way Kennedy was approaching Vietnam, had he lived, we would've had a different experience there?
Stephen Knott:
I do think so, James. And let me start off by saying I've gone 180 degrees on this. I used to be firmly in the camp that John F. Kennedy would've followed the same course of action or a similar course of action as Lyndon Johnson. I mean, it was Kennedy's best and the brightest, McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Rusk, et cetera, who guided Lyndon Johnson into that war. But, after writing this book, after listening to White House tape recordings, and after combing through countless documents, it's very clear to me that Kennedy was a skeptic about America's role in Vietnam. Now he broadened it, no question. The number of advisors that went from Eisenhower to Kennedy was pretty striking, I think 700 or 800 perhaps when Eisenhower leaves office, to 17,000 by November of '63. So that piece of evidence will tend to suggest that Kennedy would've escalated. But I think it ignores the fact that throughout the major meetings on the course of the war in Vietnam, Kennedy is one of the most skeptical voices in the room who was constantly pushing back against those folks who were arguing for a greater American role. And let me add this: Kennedy spent a considerable amount of time in so-called French Indochina in the early '50s as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And it had quite an impact on him. One of the things I admire about John F. Kennedy, whether as a president or a member of Congress, is he had a tendency to go outside of official channels to gather information. And when he's in French Indochina, he's meeting with mid-level officials who aren't giving him the sort of State Department official diplomatic line. And they are expressing to him their concern that we are moving towards sort of picking up the slack of this French Colonial regime, and that would be a disaster. So he remembered those conversations from 10 years prior when he was a junior member of the House, and again, throughout his presidency, you see repeated skepticism about these optimistic assessments that are coming out of Vietnam. So I'm part of that school of thought that speculates, and I grant you it's speculation, that had he been reelected in '64, he somehow would've tried to pull off a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, similar to what he and Khrushchev had done in nearby Laos.
James Patterson:
Kennedy's presidency really is a dramatic test of America's replacing basically the British Empire as a kind of preserver of trade access on the open seas, and ensuring, at least in most cases, some level of peace among nations. And so you can see how Vietnam, especially with its connections to Communism, would be such a difficult knot to untie. This sort of aspect to governing with Kennedy is very tough to parse out. So I wanted to move to something that's actually at the beginning of the book. Maybe I should've started here, which is that Kennedy's got this very famous advertiser, at least among political scientists, it's famous, in which the song is (singing). Do you know what I'm talking about?
Stephen Knott:
I know what you're talking about.
James Patterson:
Listeners who don't know, I won't torture you with my atonal singing. It's on YouTube. You can listen to it. It's one of the most vacuous modern advertising ads there is.
Stephen Knott:
No question about it, James. Look, part of the reason why Kennedy manages to win the White House in 1960, even though at the beginning of 1960, he's still somewhat of an unknown entity, he was not the favorite of party leaders in January 1960. They were looking at Lyndon Johnson. They were looking at perennial candidate Adlai Stevenson. They were looking at Senator Hubert Humphrey or Senator Stuart Symington. Kennedy and his father, who of course had experience in Hollywood, understood the power of public relations, and they took advantage of this new medium of television, which was really catching on by 1960. And you end up with some vacuous things like that ad that you just cited. And of course, you also end up, and this has to be acknowledged, Kennedy and those famous four debates with Vice President Nixon, he just looked good. He came off well on television. Nixon looked kind of pale and sweaty and shifty-eyed. Kennedy had worked on his tan for the previous days leading up to the first debate. Kennedy wore the correct color suit. He knew the importance of imagery. And I understand that as a criticism of JFK. However, where I differ, I think some folks take that a little too far. He was not just good looks, good hair, I'm jealous of the hair, good teeth. There was substance to the man. He had an interest in history. He particularly enjoyed historical biography. He had a very inquisitive mind. He had an ability to think, as we say today, outside of the box. And so where I differ with some of his critics who say that he would be long forgotten were it not for Lee Harvey Oswald, I think that's patently false, and it's unfair. This was a man of some substance, in addition to being perfectly suited for this new technology of television.
James Patterson:
Yeah. To that point, there's a great discussion you have of the experience the Soviets and the Americans have in the testing of a nuclear warhead called Big Ivan, which was terrifying to read. And you conclude when discussing how Kennedy responded to its detonation, such a speech, the speech that he gives in response today would flummox many Americans. And you say this because of the level of detail and attention that Kennedy gives on the subject of nuclear weapons. I wanted to ask you about this because: Do you think that Kennedy was lifting people up and addressing them seriously as the Americans who would be affected by his policies? Or do you think that today people talk down to constituents so that they're no longer required to think hard about policy decisions?
Stephen Knott:
That's a really terrific and tough question, James. I mean, I'm inclined to say that Kennedy liked or preferred to talk up. And I'm glad you did cite that passage. And by the way, there are other speeches as well, which I think would probably not work today, simply because they are aimed too high. That is an element of Kennedy that I do admire, he and his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen. They were wordsmiths of a sort, and they were good writing team. And I do think Kennedy's rhetoric is some of the more impressive rhetoric in the history of the United States presidency. But yeah, I think today a lot of that speech you mentioned, where in response to the Soviets resuming atmospheric testing, even his missile crisis speech from October '62. I'm not sure that would work today. We have gone backward I think in terms of the kind of rhetoric that the American people seem to respond to, even reading the transcripts of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. They're actually fairly highly pitched and they're quite impressive in that sense. And it's one of the sad things to see that today in this era of soundbites and social media, the constant back and forth on social media, where people insult one another, part of the reason I wrote that book was to show the American people that there is an alternative, and it's not that far removed from the present day.
James Patterson:
One of the striking passages towards the end of the book on the subject of Kennedy's assassination is much of the blame for the proliferation of Kennedy conspiracy theories rests with Lyndon Johnson and his creation of the Warren Commission, which surprised me. Although, I later learned what you meant by that. But Johnson normally gets a lot of credit for using the tragedy of Kennedy's assassination for pushing through a lot of great domestic agenda reforms, like the Civil Rights Act, but also going to great excess with Vietnam. I had not heard this, although I'm not a great Kennedy scholar, not heard this discussion of Johnson being the person responsible for the conspiracy theory. So why don't you explain that while I put my tinfoil hat on?
Stephen Knott:
Sure. Let me say right off the bat, James, I'm not a conspiracy ... I'm not somebody who's into these conspiracy theories. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy and most likely acted alone. But what I meant by that statement was that Vice President Johnson, who in some ways as you mentioned, did handle the transition quite skillfully, did put pressure in a sense on what became known as the Warren Commission to point the finger at Lee Harvey Oswald and to remove any speculation that the Soviets, or the Cubans, or both were somehow behind the murder of President Kennedy. Johnson's concern was that if that was the conclusion, that could spiral out of control, God knows even end up with World War III. Keep in mind, November 22nd is barely a year after, just slightly a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so things were still quite tense between the United States and the Soviet Union. And Johnson wants to make sure that this commission comes out, quote, unquote, with the right conclusion. And the right conclusion, according to Johnson was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Now I happen to believe they got it right. But the fact that there was and we now know there was this pressure to come to that conclusion casts a shadow over the verdict in a sense of the Warren Commission.
James Patterson:
I took it off, so no one can hear the foil crinkling. It was just not good for broadcast. But was Kennedy a conservative?
Stephen Knott:
Yeah, that's a good question. I have made the case to a number of my liberal friends that I don't think you see a great society with a two-term presidency of John F. Kennedy. Again, it's speculation, I could be wrong, but I'd like to think it's informed speculation. I think Kennedy being the son of a businessman, and also not quite the new dealer that Lyndon Johnson was. Lyndon Johnson saw himself as completing the New Deal. That's not what John F. Kennedy was about. And again, I don't see the kind of massive great society proposals coming out of a second Kennedy term. Again, partly due to this little bit of a distance between the Kennedy family and the Roosevelt family due to bad blood going back to the second world war, Joseph P. Kennedy, the president's father, being Roosevelt's ambassador to England, and then being recalled in somewhat negative circumstances, to say the least. But also again, just the Kennedy coming out of a very different milieu if you will, and he's not the new dealer, he's not the worshiper of FDR that Lyndon Johnson was, and I just don't see the same sort of gut reaction or the gut sympathy for the kind of massive programs that will come to characterize the great society. Let me add to this, by the way of course, conservatives like to point this out, Kennedy's proposal for a tax cut in 1962, I believe, which does become law, and would later be cited by President Reagan as an example of kind of supply-side economics. Now Reagan may be a little bit off the mark there, but that's a gesture that I don't see ... It's not a gesture. That's a policy that I don't see Lyndon Johnson pursuing.
James Patterson:
I think I wanted to end this with these broader questions. I shouldn't have launched you into such a difficult question without any warning. What did Kennedy do to the presidency? I mean, you're a great scholar of the American presidency, a student of it for many years. What do you see as Kennedy's legacy? He was not in office that long, but he died very tragically and at a critical moment.
Stephen Knott:
Yeah. He was only president for two years, 10 months, and two days, so that's a mere blip in the history of this country. But by the way, this goes back to your previous question. I do see John F. Kennedy along with Ronald Reagan, and this again maybe plays into this notion of Kennedy being somewhat conservative. Both of those presidents I think believe in American exceptionalism, which I know is a controversial doctrine these days. But I think of the entire Cold War presidency, those two presidents, Kennedy and Reagan, made the most compelling case for the superiority of the Western world over the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. And I see Kennedy's rhetoric, his inaugural address, his American University speech in June of '63, his civil rights address in June of '63, and his speech at the Berlin Wall in June of '63 as some of the most powerful rhetoric in the history of this country, in the history of this presidency, and again, I see all of those speeches as appealing to the better angels of our nature. And in that sense, I see John F. Kennedy as a very positive force, somebody urging his fellow citizens to give something back to their country, to engage in service before self. That's very positive. The negative side of the equation, the negative impact on the presidency is he is very much a part of this 20th-century progressive view in the president being as big a man as he wants to be. Going back to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, and of course, Franklin Roosevelt, this kind of unbounded presidency that sort of promised the world to the American people. And I think what that did is set up both the presidency and the federal government writ large for pretty dramatic fall, if you will. It's simply impossible to deliver on the promises of the 20th-century activist presidency. And Kennedy is very much a part of that, and I acknowledge that forthrightly in the book, and I see that as the most egregious legacy of his when it comes to the American presidency. It's simply an unsustainable conception of executive power.
James Patterson:
The myth of Camelot that was the sort of way of dealing with the publicity of the Kennedy family as a kind of happy family, and behind the scenes, of course things were not so happy. And Kennedy also had some pretty serious medical problems. But the myth of Camelot after his assassination really did dominate the way that people interpreted Kennedy, as well as the ... You mentioned the wordsmiths like Sorensen, very captivating kind of writing style for an audience that wanted to hear lot of the conclusions they were reaching. Feel like that whole world has really come to an end. And it seems like this is a good opportunity to be writing such a book about Kennedy because you no longer have to tussle with the Kennedy industrial complex sort of raining down their official line on anyone who wants to make serious inquiries. Is this a change that you've noticed? Am I off-base with this?
Stephen Knott:
Well, you're very much on target, James. Part of the reason I had drifted away considerably as a younger man, my admiration for John F. Kennedy really began to wane, I even reached the point where I considered myself a Reagan Democrat, and maybe even adopted that belief that he was sort of just good looks, good hair, good teeth, et cetera, telegenic. That's gone. But you're right, Camelot is gone. That was a creation of Jacqueline Kenned. Less than a week after her husband was killed, she told the most prominent journalist in the United States that her time in the White House with the president was similar to sort of the hit play, hit musical of the era of Camelot. It lasted for maybe 20 years. It's long gone. And I say thank God it's long gone because one of the things I saw when I worked at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston was this kind of manipulation of history that was very much a part of the family's attempt to control the image of John F. Kennedy and the entire family. And as much as I was a Kennedy devotee at that time, I was also a devotee of history. And I really disliked the fact that decades after the fact, you have family members exerting veto power over particular authors gaining access to presidential papers at the John F. Kennedy Library. It was very disturbing to see. But that's gone. Camelot is gone. The family efforts to control history, to control of shape, manipulate President Kennedy's reputation is gone. And thank God for that. It took far too long, but I think we finally are at the point where we have a more nuanced understanding of this presidency. And hopefully my book will serve to contribute to that deeper understanding.
James Patterson:
It certainly did for me. And that was one of the things that I came away from the book really feeling, which is why I wanted to ask you that before we came to a close because it felt like a kind of post-Camelot book, both because it was a sympathetic reading by a more conservative scholar and not the kind of reading you would expect. So it was a pretty remarkable conclusion to reach by the end. Just as a final question, does Kennedy have anything to teach us today? Is there something about Kennedy's example? And here I mean in a positive as well as in a negative. Kennedy kind of gets a lot of criticism because of his personal problems. But of course, we had a president recently and is now running again who deals with the same kind of issues. Is there anything about Kennedy's experience that should teach us as people voting for presidents what to expect, or how to handle their decision?
Stephen Knott:
Well, I would like to think that the Kennedy example provides all Americans, and what I tried to convey in this book is this journey that I've been on. I would like to think that after reading this book, that perhaps American citizens will undertake a similar journey. We are kind of locked into our own ideological cocoons, unwilling to sort of look or read about individuals from the past or the present who may disagree with us. John F. Kennedy I think in many ways was one of the least ideological presidents we've ever had. Now that doesn't mean he didn't have principles. I think he actually did. But he was not an ideologue. He did not view politics as a blood sport. And I think all of us should stop viewing politics as a blood sport. One of Kennedy's, they weren't close friends, but they got along tremendously well, was Barry Goldwater. Kennedy and Goldwater talked about going around the country in 1964 and debating each other without any sort of media panel, just the two of them sort of going on a road trip, talking about the issues of the day. John F. Kennedy did not view the opposition as traitors. He did not view, as I keep saying, politics as a blood sport. And hopefully, if we could get back ... Not that this was a golden age, not that this was Camelot, it wasn't by any stretch. But there is I think some lessons to be learned from a more civil type of politics, where people across the aisle could talk to one another in an intelligent fashion and not personalize it, not turning it into some sort of mud-slinging event. We all have something to learn from that lesson, I believe.
James Patterson:
I'm reeling here at the idea of a Kennedy Goldwater traveling band.
Stephen Knott:
Yeah, they talked about it, James.
James Patterson:
Oh, man, what they took from us. Anyway, thank you so much, Dr. Knott, for coming on here, especially for your patience with me. This was a really enlightening book and I hope everyone listening decides to go pick up a copy and read it for themselves.
Stephen Knott:
Thank you very much, James. I really appreciate the discussion we've had today. And I look forward to us getting together again. Maybe we can have a cigar, maybe even a Cuban cigar.
James Patterson:
Well, we don't want to break any rules. I'll take you up on that. Bye now.
Stephen Knott:
Bye-bye.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or however you get your podcasts.
Will Inboden joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama, a collection of documents related to the 2008-2009 presidential transition.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. And thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
Welcome and hello to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm the contributing editor with Law & Liberty, a visiting fellow with Independent Women's Forum, and a few other things. And joining me today is Will Inboden, who is the executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, and an assistant professor at the LBJ Policy School, both of which are at the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome, Will, to Liberty Law Talk.
Will Inboden:
Thank you, Rebecca. It's great to be with you.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, I am very excited to talk about a book, which I'm not sure is on many people's radar. Because everyone is so excited about your recent Reagan book, they haven't realized that you have recently put out another edited volume, very large in fact, which is called Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. Just came out at the very end of February, and Brookings Institution Press published it. I have to say, I was recently at a conference, I had the tome with me on the table, and several people picked it up and passed it around, and they were so excited. Because this book is really novel. It represents about 30 or so different transition memos that the George W. Bush team wrote to the incoming Obama team in 2007/2008, as the new president was getting his team ready to take up the reins of government. And something like this, as far as I know, has never happened. Would you give us a little bit of the story, the summary of what this book is?
Will Inboden:
Yeah. Thanks, Rebecca. And I do think that, at the risk of immodesty, it is a very unique book. I don't know of any other book there's ever been like this particular one. If that sounds too grandiose for listeners, I'm not saying it's the most wonderful book ever, listeners can judge if it's good or bad. But just the type of book it is. I'll emphasize what I mean by that.
First, that has all of these declassified transition memos. And to give our listeners some context, these memos, when they were first written at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, most of them were classified top secret, others secret. So high classification levels. And according to standard American government practice, they would not have been declassified for at least 30 years or maybe longer. And so just the fact that we were able to get them declassified after just 15 years, which again, is a while, but not near as long as it normally would've been, that is very unusual.
Second thing that we did, which I don't know if another book that is done, is in addition to taking these declassified memos so that readers can see what did the world look like to outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration in 2008/09, is we had quite a few of the people who had originally written these memos, now write retrospective essays on them. So these are former Bush National Security Council staff, who now 15 years later, looking back saying, "All right, what do we think we got? What do we think we got wrong?" So it's a little bit of grading your own report card, right? It's a self-evaluation. But still, a good chance to take some of our own internal thoughts and reflections and put them down on paper.
Then the third thing is we also commissioned some outside scholars, Mel Leffler of University of Virginia, Martha Kumar, one of the most eminent scholars of presidential transitions, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins SAIS. And it had them write their own evaluation essays saying what do they scholars think the Bush administration got and got wrong on national security, on the transition, and so forth. And so to have all of those documents between the covers of just one volume, like I said, I don't know of any other volume there's been like this. And so there's any number of angles from which people can look at it and digest it.
Rebecca Burgess:
I love that it doesn't leave to future scholars. It's almost living history, it seems like. Maybe not quite, but that it's a certain transparency about it of showing the inner workings of government. And I should mention, because I didn't previously, who the other editors are that are involved in this volume, and the fact that you have a very nice forward from President George W. Bush himself and a note from Condoleezza Rice. But Stephen Hadley, who had served four years as assistant to the president for National Security Affairs is kind of the main editor. And then assistant editors are Peter Fever, who under Bush, served as the special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff. Yourself, who at the time you were senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff, and you also worked in the state department's policy planning staff, correct?
Will Inboden:
That's right, yes. Yeah, and the Bush-
Rebecca Burgess:
Wonderful.
Will Inboden:
Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
And then Meghan O'Sullivan, who was special assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. So very well-placed individuals there at the top who were in the middle of all of these things at the time. And I would love to ask in a question, maybe a step back, why does this book happen now? What was the thoughts that you all had that clearly at some point there was conversation, maybe it was over whiskey, maybe it wasn't. Where you said, "You know what we need to do, is declassify or see if we can declassify some of these transition memos and put it together in a book." And not just put them together in a book, but also write these postscripts, these kind of evaluations on them. Where does that process come from and what is it trying to do?
Will Inboden:
Yeah. So the process was started, and all credit here, by Steve Hadley himself, who had been the National Security Advisor at the time and had overseen the original drafting of these memos. And also overseen the transition process when Bush is leaving office and the Obama team is coming in, and Hadley advanced that. We'll want to talk a little bit more about just how important but little understood that process is.
Steve came to me about four or five years ago with the idea for doing this project. And wanting to know if I and Peter and Meghan would be interested in helping him out. One reason Steve originally approached me is I sit on the advisory committee for CIA and another advisory committee for State Department on expediting the declassification of old documents and getting them in the hands of scholars. And so I was already doing this kind of work for the Reagan administration, the Bush 41 administration, the previous administrations, so was able to help Steve with some of the mechanics of getting these documents declassified.
And it's an interesting thing about American law, even though President Bush, as president at the time had complete authority over the classification of these documents. Once he's out of office, these documents are the property of the United States government, not President Bush himself. And so he could not, now as ex-president just wave a wand and say they're all declassified. They had to go through a very rigorous process that current National Security Council officials oversaw, which took about a year and a half to two years.
So that was the original genesis of Steve Hadley wanted to do it. And there were two reasons why he wanted it done. The first is transparency and informing the American people of this is how national security is handled during a presidential transition, including a transition from a Republican to a Democrat, and an outgoing two term one, to an incoming one. Where there were real differences over policy, but at same time, I think I shared sense of duty to serve the country and protect the country.
And the second reason is Steve Hadley wanted to produce a pretty extensive record of what was Bush administration foreign policy. We're recording this as we're... this week is the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. Obviously, one of the most controversial aspects of Bush foreign policy. And there's a big section in here on Iraq. But as a way of reminding people, reminding scholars, reminding ordinary citizens that there were a lot of other things that went on during the Bush administration. A lot of other policies that we worked on, some things we got right, some things we got wrong. And putting these documents out there so that people can make up their own minds, but a part of the, I think trying to provide as full of accounting as possible of the Bush administration legacy.
Your listeners will know, I'm hardly objective on this. Right? I served this administration for five years, so I don't want to pretend to scholarly objectivity. I'm very proud of a lot of what we accomplished. And will also tell you, I think we got a number of things wrong as well. But whatever you think of the Bush administration foreign policy over those eight years, everyone will agree that it was consequential. Right? That some very important things happened, some of the good, some of them bad. And so I think to at least understand that, it helps to have these documents and these essays evaluating them.
Rebecca Burgess:
Absolutely agree. And I think just as a little side note, as you were saying that you're hardly an objective observer. Sometimes maybe I think we downplay the importance of having people who have been involved actually give their own thoughts and feelings about it. Because at the end of the day, we're not automatons. Even those who work in government are not automatons, they're individual human beings who are also using their emotions and their intellect to evaluate. And maybe we can get into this in a little bit, but in writing these memorandum, assessing situations, it's very much intelligence gathering type of an operation, even though we don't think about it in those specific terms. And of course, what parameters were you using to make those evaluations are very much based on our personal involvement and with them often.
So I was wondering actually if we can step also back a little bit and talk about transitions, because you were mentioning this, and what goes into a transition between two presidents. That's one level. The second is between two different parties, Republican and Democrat, as you mentioned. The third with this particular, is there's war going on. But then also just this basic fact that no president starts with a clean slate. No one gets to come in with an absolutely fresh new virgin landscape of domestic or foreign policy. And foreign policy, it seems to me this is where this really comes into play. The rest of the world is still doing its things. And a new president has to step in.
And how does the country, the United States of America preserve a certain continuity with all those countries when there are different presidents? Is this the role of the agencies? There are so many agencies. I don't think most Americans could name which agencies are involved in foreign policy, that there's not just state and the National Security Council, there's USAID, there's multiple other of these things. How do you coordinate those activities and how do we start to think about it? And is this where the practice of writing transition memos in a sense starts coming from? Is this what President Bush in 2007 is thinking about? Maybe just walk us through a little bit of some of these things.
Will Inboden:
Yeah, there's a lot there, and you tee up some really great questions and I have some really good thoughts there. I think the first thing to say is this, is that there is a two and a half month period roughly, for a presidential transition. Right? Between election day, the first Tuesday of November, and then inauguration day, which is almost always January 20th. So it's about that two and a half month window. And during that time, you still have one president. Okay, so the outgoing president stays president up until 11:59 AM on inauguration day. However, during that true two and a half month time, the outgoing president is the lame duck, and the incoming president is putting together his, maybe eventually her team has some ideas on the policies they're going to want to pursue. And so it's a very complicated and delicate time.
And the bad guys in the world, the threats, the potential terrorist attacks, the great power rivals, Russia and China, the rogue state actors, North Korea and Iran, they do not stop wishing harm on the United States during that transition. They're not going to pause their activities and their threats. Likewise, at any given time, the United States has hundreds, thousands of sensitive national security endeavors underway around the world. I mean, I'll just give a bunch of examples. Right? So we have troops deployed around the world. We have troops based in dozens, maybe even close to a hundred countries. During this 2008 time, we had two hot wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, those don't stop during presidential transition. A lot of other smaller scale operations going on. We have a vast array of sensitive intelligence collection endeavors underway of covert actions that are underway, that again, that the CIA usually is carrying out. You have lots of diplomatic negotiations underway that the state department is leading. Many of them out of the public limelight. You have the development endeavors underway, the different projects that USAID is funding and implementing. I could go on.
Those things don't stop during a presidential transition. And as the outgoing president is on the way out, he is handing over a responsibility for those to the incoming team. The incoming president will then, as commander-in-chief, as diplomat-in-chief, and so on, have authority to maybe change or revisit a number of those operations. But about 90% of them will continue, even with a new president of a new party. And so it's a very complicated question, how do you keep some continuity going? Those things all, just as the threats to our country don't stop, those operations and endeavors are not going to stop either. And the National Security Council, as the president's main advisory and coordinating body for everything related to national security is the nerve center for keeping those going, and thus ensuring a smooth transition. A peaceful transition of power and the continuity of all of these different operations and endeavors.
And so that is the backdrop for that very important, but sensitive and complex time, those two and a half months. And so what we had done with these memos originally is think all right, in addition to the different operations going on, we, I say we as both an American but also the Bush administration official, we had a responsibility to hand over as much of our institutional knowledge, our memory, our evaluations of policies to the incoming Obama team as we could. Again, it was going to be up to them to decide what they wanted to do with this or not, but we owed it to them to at least give them as much information as possible.
And there wasn't real partisanship involved in this. I mean, we knew that they had run their campaign in a lot of ways, very critical of Bush administration foreign policy. We thought some of those criticisms were unfair and some of them were fair. We knew ourselves about a number of things that we had had messed up, but also thought we had some good things going that we would encourage them to continue. And so we owed it to them to give them as much of this information as possible, and then they could decide what they will do with it. And part of this came from previous presidential transitions had been a little more messy on the foreign policy. The Carter to Reagan transition, which I treat a little bit in my other book, which you mentioned, was a pretty messy one, that was a pretty acrimonious one. The Clinton to Bush 43 transition, which Steve Hadley had been a part of as incoming one, had been fairly messy. Of course there'd been the disputed Florida recount efforts and things like that.
And so President Bush had decided early on in his second term that when it came time for him to do a transition, not even knowing yet that it was going to be Obama, not even knowing who the next one was going to be, that he owed it to his successor to make this as smooth as possible.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, I think now all the experts who studied presidential transitions look to the Bush 43 transition to Obama as a kind of textbook handoff. And I'm glad you mentioned the Clinton to Bush because, so I'm in maybe grade school or maybe high school at the point when that happens, and I ended up having to spend a lot of time in doctor's offices. And I looked at a lot of Newsweeks and Time magazines. And I remember the political cartoons of the things that the Bush administration stepped into, everything from missing Ws on keyboards and things like that.
And that what's in my head, and that's one of the first questions I remember when I saw this book being published was, does that effort, does president Bush is a slight impulsion to do it better because of how messy it was, at least on the outside, when he came into office. And how much of several steps back that can put an administration, if you're trying to just get up to speed on something, you're not quite ready to handle certain things. And I do believe, I think at some point, one of the authors of the book mentions this in regards to September 11th that there's a, I don't want to say a reason why, but part of the reason is that wasn't a lot of a good transition of information going on there. And so September 11th happens because things fall in the crack. Anyway, just maybe some of your thoughts on that.
Will Inboden:
I do think certainly a part of President Bush's commitment to doing a smooth and nonpartisan a transition as possible, did stem from his perception that his own earlier transition eight years earlier, the handover from Clinton to him had not gone so well. And again, it had been a disputed election. And there were some other factors too. I was finishing up graduate school at the time and was making some plans to eventually join the Bush administration, but I was not there firsthand for that 2000/2001 one. I think I read some of the same Newsweek articles you did.
I will say, on the 9/11 attacks, and again, this is before I officially joined the administration, there probably is something to the messiness of the transition nine months earlier. That said, as you'll see in here, Bush administration veterans would also admit that they... we, I guess I should say, had not fully appreciated or taken the terrorist threat as seriously as it needed to be. And then you did have someone like Richard Clark, Dick Clark a who had been on the Clinton NSC staff, then continued on the Bush NSC staff, who had been raising the alarms about this as a more serious threat. And he was frustrated that he wasn't listened to as much. So there may be something to it, but I wouldn't want to go too far and blame the Clinton administration for the messy transition on how 9/11 came about. There was also, as we know, poor information sharing between the FBI and CIA, and a whole host of other factors, which we learned very painfully.
Rebecca Burgess:
Once again, the multiple factors and agencies involved doing foreign policy national security complicate things all the time.
Will Inboden:
Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
In moderation of course, in assigning blame is always good. And generous and humility are good things. And so maybe a way to get into some of the content of the memos and the thoughts about them, I was thinking it would be helpful to just remind ourselves or situate ourselves in that kind of 2000 moment when Bush becomes president, and think through some of the big national security forum policy things that happened. And I remember, so September 11th happens, it's my first day as a senior in high school. And then decisions to go to war to Iraq, this happens freshman year of college. My career ends up now here in Washington, DC. But for 20 years I'm kind of becoming an adult growing into what this world is that America's dealing with and partly creating and responding to. And while you're living through it, you're aware of it, but you're also not aware.
And I remember a few years ago I was with my then colleague from AI, Gary Schmidt, and we were at the George W. Bush Presidential Library for going to work on some veterans military families issues. And we're just going through that exhibit. And it was a revelation to our own selves about all the different things and the decisions and the course, I don't want to say corrections, but pivots that happened, that Bush did not run his elections on. And so I did a quick little list here just to help remind ourselves. So the whole recount issue, Bush actually becomes inaugurated in January of 2000. Almost immediately there is the spy plane issue that happens over China.
Will Inboden:
April of 2001, yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Which causes great consternation and tensions and hackles to be raised. And very quickly after that, it's not April. Oh, it is April, I think. Somewhere around April. Bush actually backs Taiwan over China, saying publicly that if China does ever attack Taiwan, America will go to Taiwan's aid. So that's very interesting to remember now considering what our current discussions are. But that's just a few months into his presidency. And then we have September 11th, and then we have in October, of course, the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We have the anthrax scare in October, later in October. We have the withdrawal, I think this is also important to remember, in the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty that happens.
Will Inboden:
Yeah. Of the US and Russia. Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Which eventually allows us to start testing anti-ballistic defenses. Well, that we have the creation of another agency, Homeland Security. After this, we have the authorization. Then in October, 2002, of the use of force against Iraq. Though, of course, it takes until March for us to actually decide to go in. We have February, 2003, a CA director tells us that North Korea possesses a nuclear ballistic missile that's capable of hitting the US. Then, as I already mentioned, we go to Iraq. 2004, we're already in another presidential debate cycle with Kerry, and there's all of that. We have the bird flu scare in 2006. And then we are attacking Al-Qaeda in Somalia in 2007. And then now we're in 2008. And meanwhile there are all these color revolutions going on and Ukraine and Georgia and Kazakhstan. Is it Kazakhstan? Kyrgyzstan.
Will Inboden:
Kyrgyzstan. Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Kyrgyzstan. So there are multiple things going on throughout those years, and trying to remind ourselves almost. But because there are so many things, it's helpful I think to step back and to ask what is Bush and the world? And it seems like the volume is slightly organized around that principle. And starting with the soul of it and then the operationalizing of it, and then the stabilization. So what is the soul? What is the soul of the Bush, either foreign policy or Bush's approach to the world that comes to the fore?
Will Inboden:
Yeah. And I'll say, I got exhausted just listening to that litany, but let alone having lived them. And I come back very much to your question about the soul of Bush foreign policy. But let me just mention a few others too. Also, in February of 2003, you've got Bush announces PEPFAR. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ends up being this... We just celebrated our 20th anniversary of that too. But one of the most massive humanitarian assistance programs in history now saves some estimates, 25 million lives, like a $100 billion spent. August of 2008, Russia invades Georgia. We had another war breaking out under Bush's watch, which we can now look back and see was a foreshadowing of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Then September of 2008, you have the global financial crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. So a lot of things were going on.
Okay. So the soul of Bush foreign policy. There's a number of directions I could take that, but I will say it is best found in the first substantive chapter of this volume, the one on the Freedom Agenda. And this was Bush's desire or conviction, if you will, that freedom should be a universal right, available to all people. It comes from in part from his Christian faith, his belief in universal human dignity. And also more pragmatic or realist reasons of he just realized that America's best allies and partners are almost always democracies, and America's adversaries are almost always are dictatorships or authoritarian powers. These weren't strong convictions he held on inauguration day when he is first sworn in. It's something that he'd rather develops over the next couple of years.
Largely in response to 9/11. Right? The 9/11 attacks, when he starts asking what are some of the root causes of terrorism? Why is it that these Islamic radicals are bent on murdering thousands of innocents? Where do they get these beliefs? Where do they come from? And realizing that some of it at least stems from growing up in authoritarian sclerotic societies without opportunity. Some of this also comes from his just reading of history, seeing those color revolutions breaking out to 2003, 2004, 2005. Rose Revolution in Georgia, Orange Revolution in Ukraine. We could go through those. And it's most robust expression you can find in his second inaugural address from January of 2005. Much criticized in some circles, I think much misunderstood. But that is certainly, I think the disbelief in universal human dignity and liberty is certainly an animating spirit or a through line for Bush foreign policy.
A couple of other things I could mention are more specifically on Bush dooctrine on counterterrorism, is not distinguishing between the terrorists themselves and the state sponsors, by holding them accountable. Another one is not allowing problems to fester, but trying to take early action to address them before they become even more significant threats. He was always encouraging us, "Think big. Let's think big, let's think forward. We don't want to hand over a ton of lingering problems to my successor, we want to address as many as we can now."
And I think there's a certain nobility and sense of responsibility to those aspirations. But as we experienced, and as your listeners may be thinking, those can also lead you, as Steve Hadley has put it before, to our reach exceeding our grasp. Right? To take it on too many things. To maybe being a little more reckless when some of these things would've been better to let festering. Quite a few problems in international politics can't necessarily be solved. But they shouldn't be ignored either, sometimes they just need to be managed. But those would be a few of the features I would put to the animating spirit, as you had asked about Bush foreign policy.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, so could you maybe talk a little bit more about the Freedom Agenda. A little bit more in depth, but what that means for Bush.
Will Inboden:
And I do encourage our listeners to, if you can, take a look at the book and read this chapter. The retrospective chapter in the book as co-authored by the late Mike Gerson. Mike just died I think just a couple months ago. And then Pete Wehner, who had both been Bush speech writers and played a key in role in this.
But the Freedom Agenda, another one of its antecedents, which is less appreciated, is actually the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as Bush was taking a fresh look at that conflict and asking if there's any possibilities for negotiations, he realized that a core problem there was Yasser Arafat, who was a dictator ruling the Palestinian people, was not democratically elected, and was a terrorist. Right? And he just decided that there is no possibility or no prospect or no hope for a permanent stable settlement between the two sides if the Palestinians don't have some voice in their own government, some voice in their own future. And so he develops kind of a grand bargain. He becomes the first president to officially call for a Palestinian state, a two-state solution. But he ties that very much to, "You Palestinians, you got to get rid of Arafat. Because that guy is not a responsible leader and there's no possibility for peace while he's there."
So it starts with that strategic calculation, if you will, about the right and wrong conditions for a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. But out of that becomes that broader strategic logic of realizing many of the security threats the United States faces, North Korea, Syria, Iran, China, now Russia. Also happened to be authoritarian or dictatorships of some sort. Meanwhile, more positively, as Bush was looking at what we might call successful or well-functioning countries and societies, almost all them have some form of democracies, some form of self-government, of self-rule. And they usually are going to have healthier economies. They'll be less prone to going to war against each other or engaging in destabilizing behavior.
And so as a combination of these principled and practical reasons, why he decides he doesn't just want to be managing the downstream bad fruits of these dictatorships and terrorist groups and others, but rather how can we go after some of the root causes and how can we support the possibility of a better life for those people, many of the people living under these.
I should also say that Bush here was shaped quite a bit I think by recent history. Because again, as we're talking about this now in the year 2023, as you and I both know, democracy globally has not had a great run. The last 15, 16 years, it's been on a steady decline. You see this in the Freedom House Index and other indices. And I think many Americans have grown rather skeptical or less enthusiastic about the possibility of promoting it.
But from the vantage point of the year 2001 or 2002, when Bush is first developing these ideas, look at what the previous 15, 20 years of world history had looked like you know, the 1980s and 1990s. Those had been a golden era for democracy. Right? There had previously been a notion in, "Oh, those Catholic countries, they can never be democratic." Because they're, I'm being a little crude here, but they're loyal to the Pope and they don't think for themselves. And again, listeners, I don't believe this, but this is what some of the caricature was. But then you had seen a wave of democratization in prominently Catholic countries, Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, Philippines, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, others in the 1980s. And realization, "Okay, so we shouldn't have made that exception for Catholic countries."
Then there'd been a belief, well, those Asian countries, they can't have democracy because they're Confucian, they're hierarchical, they don't believe in empowerment to the individual. But again, in the 1980s and 1990s, you had Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, all democratized. I could go on. But then of course, you'd also had the, and I will go on, you had the peaceful end of the Cold War. Right? Where all of sudden these countries, Central and Eastern Europe, who had all lived under communist dictatorship for four or five decades, undergo peaceful transitions to democracy. And so if you were watching world events or reading the tides of history in the early 2000s, and then you're seeing these new color revolutions of more democracies, it does seem like that is the tide of history. And better for the United States to be supporting and encouraging that, rather than necessarily resisting it.
One final important point on this, is the first real strong statement you hear from Bush on democracy is in November of 2003, he gives a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on the net, on one of their big anniversaries. And this is when he comes out and says, "For several decades the United States has pursued a policy in the Middle East of supporting dictatorships and monarchies there, thinking that it would give us stability." But he said, "We've learned since 9/11 that trying to purchase stability at the price of liberty will give you neither stability or liberty." Now we look at the world today, we can see the Middle East still is a pretty troubled place without very many at all models of functioning democracies.
But he was correct, I think, in his diagnosis. And that in a lot of ways, seven years before the Arab Spring breaks out, predicted this current model of these dictatorships and autocracies is pretty brittle. Right? The people are not very happy there. It's not giving them a good life economically. It's not giving them opportunity and freedom of expression that they want. And it's something of a breeding ground for jihadist terrorism too. So that was an important part of his diagnosis as well. I'm sure no one wanted a winded answer.
Rebecca Burgess:
No. No, it was great. I mean, you could have gone on. I'm sure you have an entire semester in fact, that's probably about all of these things. Because you could. But I think it's both helpful and actually quite powerful to give that grounding. Because once again, presidential decisions, statesman's decisions, matters of foreign policy don't come out of the blue. Or very, very rarely are they these abstract things that just happen in a person's brain and then they say them. They're influenced and shaped by observing how things have happened.
And as you were speaking, I was even wondering to what extent the entire experience of 9/11 happening so early and thinking, we have these people who are warning us, and we didn't pay enough attention how much that experience alone just shaped then the responses that happened with other individuals in other countries and other situations. And saying, we need to just take care of this right now, because otherwise we're going to have, as we often heard, another 9/11 on our hands. And that was something that was simply couldn't happen and no one wanted to happen. I mean, in a way I'm almost, I feel like I need 10 minutes to just recoup my thoughts about all of that in a way.
So I'm just kind of following the breakdown in the book itself of how it's organized in these parts. And we have, as you said, the soul of the Freedom Agenda, but then also we have the things that everyone is going to be looking to this book for. Of course, Al-Qaeda, the fight against Al-Qaeda, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, even Pakistan. And then of course I was like, "Oh, there's one on Columbia. Oh, that's right, many things are going on in Columbia, are going on in Columbia." But you also have a chapter of the war of ideas. And I was wondering if you would mention what this is. How you differentiate this within the Freedom Agenda, within the more boots on the ground things that are also happening.
Will Inboden:
Yeah. So war of ideas, this goes back to this core question that Bush had of the root causes of terrorism. And some of this comes out in the first year or so after 9/11. The United States has some pretty robust initial successes in counter-terrorism, right? We kill or capture quite a few of the other architects of the 9/11 attacks. We've got the Jihadists on the back heels. We also realize new jihadists are being created. New generations of young Muslims in some sectors are becoming radicalized and wanted to take up violence against innocent civilians.
And that's where Bush wanted to be clear that we see this as not just the problem of one organization, Al-Qaeda, or a few isolated individuals, but rather there's this whole ideology behind it. Right? The nihilism, the neo fascism, if you will, of jihadist ideology. And also taking the enemy's ideas seriously that the Jihadists did have a certain vision of what they wanted, this rather militant intolerant, universal caliphate. And he decided right there, I think that we need to counter this idea rather than just trying to kill or capture our way out of this problem. And so how do we actually defeat this idea?
There's another important insight here, which is that he decided rightly very early on, this cannot be seen as a war on Islam. Right? We're not going to go to war against 1 billion people in the world, with the world's largest religion, spanning every continent. Especially because most Muslims do not support the Jihadists, and so they don't speak for our faith. And so as part of enlisting a broader coalition against the jihadist, he wanted to support and encourage and empower peaceful Muslims who believed more in pluralism, in tolerance, and didn't believe in that more militant and violent version of their faith.
So that was behind the framing of the battle of ideas. And asking, what can we do to de-legitimize and counter and neutralize jihadist ideology, and in turn, going back to our Freedom Agenda discussion, how can we support a positive alternative of free societies? So that was behind the framing of the battle of ideas.
Rebecca Burgess:
And then this becomes a kind of put into practice with some of the development and aid that becomes part of the agenda. So what were some of the... I mean you mentioned PEPFAR, but there was some other big initiatives which you cover in the book as well.
Will Inboden:
Yeah. And this was all done under the rubric of what we called smart development. Right? So Bush, again, comes into office, I think, rightly skeptical of some of the, if you will, more traditional or 20th century development models of large bureaucratic organizations doing state-to-state transfers or big handouts. Right? And you looked and see, all right, over the last few decades, United States had spent time, I don't know, maybe something like a trillion dollars on economic aid to poor, impoverished and developing countries around the world. And there didn't seem to be a whole lot to show for it. Okay? Many of these countries were still corrupt and impoverished. But he didn't want to walk away from the problem entirely, especially after 9/11, again, where he realizes that some of these same impoverished countries are also breeding grounds for terrorism.
And so that's why he develops a whole suite of new development initiatives under this rubric of smart development, that were designed around principles like accountability, transparency, positive incentives, citizen empowerment. Again, these may sound like just happy talker platitudes, but I'll give a few examples of what they look like. So he creates the Millennium Challenge Corporation. It's trying to incentivize other countries to get their governance in order so that they can then receive additional economic aid from the United States. So it's say, all right, you first have to meet certain benchmarks on anti-corruption, on transparency, on good governance, before you'll then be eligible for these economic aid grants. So tying it much more to accountability and good governance there.
Where PEPFAR, as we've mentioned, again, a whole suite of activities, but not designed to support economic growth or other state bureaucracies, but rather just to save lives. Realizing that these countries primarily in Africa are not going to have much hope of economic growth and development if their most young and vulnerable are dying or given a death sentence from being born with HIV/AIDS or if their young, most productive members of society are again being given this death sentence. And so designed to do these health interventions, all right, if we can save lives, then these people can be productive economic actors and help put their countries on a better path.
So those were a couple of features of this broader smart development agenda. A lot of which continues today. So I think that is certainly one of the positive features of the Bush legacy.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, once again, so much there to think about and to delve into. But I wanted to ask one very pointed question, and then one that hopefully ties into... You end the book on emerging challenges and great power competition and a lot of things that we now are hearing every day and multiple times a day. But before we get there, I just wanted to ask, as you and the team, your fellow editors were going through these memos and thinking about them, at any point did you step back and ask yourself one of the biggest elements of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and something we talk about in the civil military relations community a lot is this, the military went to war and America went to the mall. And that was a product of a very conscious decision on Bush's and the Bush administration's part, at least as far as I understand, of trying to encourage Americans to not stop their lives and to continue living and involving themselves in the economy, strengthening our economy and our democracy in those ways, those economic ways.
Was that the right decision to make kind of that dichotomy? And was there ever, even in 2008, as you all are writing these memos, is there already a thought of maybe we should have nuanced that in a better way or not made that distinction? So that's my pointed question.
Will Inboden:
Yeah. No, it's a very good one. And it's hard to think back to... And by the way, just to clarify, I left administration at the end of 2007, so I wasn't there for the actual production of these memos. But I'll answer your question more directly. So I'll say that decision early on after 9/11, to encourage people to go about their daily lives. I will say it was understandable at the time, and I'll explain why. And then I'll also say that in hindsight it is one that I regret. Absolutely. So I hope that can be an honest answer for your listeners.
But first, on why it was... I will say it was understandable at the time, really two reasons. One is you had mentioned being in high school when 9/11 happened. I had moved back to DC a week before. I was actually at AI the day it happened, with our mutual friend, Gary Schmidt, among others. It's a few blocks from the White House. I had passed right by the Pentagon an hour before the first plane hit. So this is very vivid. I bring that up because the months after 9/11, the sense of terror did not go away. All of us in DC believed that it was not a matter of if we get hit again, it is when will we get hit again. Right? And you're just in this constant state of siege. And what Bush wanted to do was find a way for the country to have a very robust and vigorous counter-terrorism response to go kill those bad guys who had hurt us and to stop others from doing it again.
But also for the country itself, the 300 million plus Americans, whatever our population was at the time, to not live the next several decades in a constant state of terror and siege. Right? And that is the worst part of terrorism. It's not just the material costs or the people it kills, is the way it plays with your mind. The way that it takes away the possibility of even living a free life, and instead you are in a constant state of quite literally terror. Okay? So that was one goal he had.
Then the other more practical one was, after the 9/11 attacks, the economy goes into recession, the stock market plunges, we are in really, really bad shape. And you realize, look, if everyone stops working and stops producing and stops shopping and stops consuming, our economy will never recover. And so there's a very practical... And a political leader's responsibility is to help maintain confidence in markets and confidence in economic activity. And so those were the two, I think understandable reasons why the encouragement to go back to your daily lives and go back to your shopping and your working, they were part of this broader principle of we can't let the terrorists defeat us, we've got to still be living as Americans.
But, as you rightly point out, what over time becomes the effect of that, it's that a tiny minority of the American population, almost exclusively those serving in active duty military, to this I would also add a number of intelligence officers who spent vast amounts of time overseas, a number of diplomats, other national security professionals, that less than 1% of the country carries the vast majority of the burden, the actual burden of the fighting. Whether it's the literal kinetic fighting or the overseas deployments or the stresses of all the different counter-terrorism problems. And over time, I think that relieved too many of the rest of us Americans of our own responsibilities for some sense of sacrifice, even if it's not necessarily putting on the uniform and deploying down range. But yeah, so over time I do think that became a pretty corrosive effect.
Rebecca Burgess:
Just to that point about the sense of terror that didn't go away. I mean, October of 2001, there's the DC shooter. There were, what, the two different planes that failed over New York, Manhattan or that area, and people thought it was another attack. I mean, this all-
Will Inboden:
The impact that you mentioned, yeah, it was literally a terrifying time for the next year.
Rebecca Burgess:
And that movie, The Pitch, I'm pretty sure it's called The Pitch, about Bush going out to Yankee Stadium and delivering the first pitch, which he gives a strike and he's wearing body armor. And so one, I think it's a beautiful little film, but it helps remind you about all of those different things. And how powerful and unifying that one moment was when President of the United States without fear walks onto baseballs, and everyone is back in the stadium and saying...
So the larger question I had is maybe a little more complicated or not. So about two years ago, the 20th anniversary of September 11th, Law & Liberty that hosts this podcast, they do these things called forums every month. And they have one big essay, and then they invite people to respond. And they had a historian, William, I'm going to get his name wrong, William Anthony Hay, wrote the lead essay. And it was essentially saying that our decision to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq afterwards is the one reason why America isn't prepared to deal with everything from China to Russia to all these things. So essentially it was a mistake. In my response I said, "I don't believe that's true. I think it showed for us once that we had to start taking foreign policy, national security things seriously again. That we had real enemies. That deterrence, by responding militarily, is a real thing, amongst these things."
But I do have to ask and I do have to wonder, reading through this book and realizing where it ends and where we are today with China and Russia and things that seem to have been constantly in the subterranean ground, I guess, of post-Cold War. Simply we're not taking care of or not paid attention to. Or maybe that's our perception. Maybe they were, and maybe that's what we can find in these transition memos. Is there a way while you're working within an administration on these of-the-moment questions, like war, to also pay attention to these longer-term festers so that we don't end up in 2023 with a near war, potentially on our hands with China and Russia, and Russia and Ukraine again? Or is it just simply that, as you mentioned, we can't solve all foreign policy problems, sometimes we can just manage them and sometimes we don't pay attention to them?
Will Inboden:
Yeah, it's a great question. And I will try to give a balanced answer and I'll try to keep it somewhat succinct so , we can go on for several more hours on this one. But I will say a few top line points. First, after 9/11, Bush was absolutely correct to make stopping another terrorist attack his overriding priority, and everything else becomes secondary to that. It had to be that way. And we can be lulled into something of a false sense of security, and frankly, a false sense of history. If we look back, now almost 22 years later, as we're here in 2023 and say, "Oh, well since there hasn't been another large scale terrorist attack in the United States, therefore it wasn't much of a threat." No, that gets it completely wrong. A fundamental reason why there hasn't been another large scale terrorist attack in the United States is because of these strategies and doctrines and policies that Bush developed to stop one. Right?
And I'll continue it out and give credit to the Obama administration or the Trump administration, now even the Biden administration. Every administration since then that has continued to do its part for counterterrorism. There are thousands of jihadist bad guys out there, who for the last 22 years up to now, would love nothing more than to pull off an even larger terrorist attack on the United States than 9/11. Right? So let us not be lulled into, again, like I said, a distorted sense of the threat or history, because we haven't been attacked again.
Second point is during Bush's first eight, nine months in office, so throughout most of 2001, before 9/11, it is not that Russia and China were significant threats to the United States at the time, and he started focusing on them, than 9/11 happens and he looked away from them. Rather, he inherited from the previous decade a very different set of challenges and strategic framework for both Russia and China. We'll start with Russia first.
The Russia problem that Bush inherited was not a strong, aggressive Russia, it was a weak Russia that we worried was essentially a Somalia with nukes. Right? I mean, was a weak and failing state that still had this large nuclear arsenal, but otherwise was on the potential verge of state collapse. And so the challenge for American policy then was how can we help stabilize Russia. And then, in turn, not treat Russia like an enemy. Because if you treat them like an enemy, they'll certainly become an enemy, but rather help integrate them into the international system and pursue a more constructive relationship with them.
Similarly with China. China wasn't worried about it being a failed state at the time, but China was still much weaker and was still rising as an economy. And the hope and strategy was, all right, again, let's treat them more as a friend and hope that they'll act like a friend, and let's support this integration of them into the international economic system and so on.
So that's the strategy that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration. And that's largely the framework he continued. He was a little more raucous towards China than Clinton had been. You mentioned his promised to defend Taiwan, the tensions over the Hainan Island's spy plane. He called China more of a competitor than a cooperative relationship, things like that. And then of course, 9/11 happens. So those are the two parts where I'll defend the Bush administration legacy.
Here's where I'll be more critical. And you can see this in some of the book as well. And hope our listeners haven't given up on me yet. Right? I do think that by the second term, when I'm on the National Security Council staff, there is becoming more of what you might say, an internal debate within the administration about, "Huh, is China on a good path? Is Russia on a good path?" We still see some ways that the engagement strategy may be working, but we're also seeing some worrisome signs. We're seeing that China has becoming richer, but not more free. And that it's putting a lot more money into its military. And that its military seems to be orienting towards the United States as its main threats, even though we didn't want to be a threat to them.
With Russia, we are seeing that Putin was poisoning dissidents and cracking down on free press. And in 2007 in Munich, he makes some very over the top and deranged threats against the west. In 2008, he invades Georgia. And so by the second term, we start to see some initial signs that these two countries are potentially going on in a bad path, a more menacing one towards the United States and our allies.
Bush did some things to hedge. This is a big part of why we launched the strategic partnership with India, which I think is still paying dividends today, is to help balance or hedge against a rise in China that becomes more assertive. But I do think that, this is where I'll be a little more self-critical of our legacy in the Bush administration, that we, two things, one did not become alert soon enough to just what bad paths Russia and China were going on. And second, even for those within the administration who did become more alert to those and were sounding some of the alarms, in 2007 and 2008, we were so focused on trying to salvage things in Iraq with a surge and seeing conditions deteriorate in Afghanistan, that that's where significant resources and attention were being paid. And so I think we bear some responsibility there for being overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and less equipped, even if we realized Russia and China were starting to become more menacing to do more about it.
Rebecca Burgess:
I would say that was probably the most tantalizing way of telling our listeners that they need to buy this book and to read the individual memos. That they can come to some of these insights themselves. So once again, that is Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. That's Brookings Institution Press. And I would just say on a final, final note that your last remarks reminded me of the passage in Hobbes' Leviathan, where he's talking about the state of nature. And he does make a note that international relations or foreign policy as an arena, is an arena of the state of nature all the time.
And that it's a little bit like, the best way to understand it is in terms of weather. It's not that it is a rainy day, it's a rainy climate. And there are showers and water droplets all the time in which you respond to or how big your umbrella is, is the question of statesmanship. That even in a democratic system, presidents who don't have all the lovers of power in their hands, yet they still set the tone in so many ways for exactly how administration does that.
So this was a wonderful reminder of the complexities of foreign policy, in and of itself, but in democracies. And we are so privileged to have you, Will Inboden, who is the executive director of the Clement Center for National Security, join us on Liberty Law Talk today. Thank you for listening.
Will Inboden:
All right. Thank you very much.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Georgetown Professor of Political Science Joshua Mitchell joins host Brian Smith to discuss his book, Tocqueville in Arabia, newly available in paperback, and offer Tocquevillian insights into the malaise of modernity.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith. With me today is Joshua Mitchell, professor of government at Georgetown University and the author of five books, including American Awakening, which we covered extensively on Law & Liberty, and the subject of today's discussion, the recently released in paperback, Tocqueville in Arabia. Thanks for speaking with us Josh.
Joshua Mitchell:
My pleasure, Brian. Good to see you.
Brian Smith:
Good to see you. So I wanted to open with a fairly general question. Which is, what led you to write this book? And now that it's being re-released, what lessons do you think it is most poignantly offering today?
Joshua Mitchell:
Well, what had happened in the early two tens, and really even before that, was I had become saturated with academic political theory. I thought that the discipline itself had lost its way. And by that I mean, it had lost sight of its original insight, which was there in Strauss and Arendt, notwithstanding their differences. And that insight was, look we have to return to the great texts of the Western tradition, in order to understand the contemporary moment. And so what Strauss and Arendt did, was they juxtaposed the crisis of modernity in the aftermath of the Second World War, and notably the Holocaust, with Plato, Aristotle and the rest, and effectively invented a field. These books were studied in philosophy departments and probably in literature departments to some extent too. But the unique development that they inaugurated was the conjunction, the bringing together of contemporary events and the great ideas of history, of Western political philosophy. And the problem was that insight, which inaugurated the discipline, was slowly being lost. 1989 came and went, 2001, 2007, 2008, economic crisis. And political theorists were busy exploring secondary and tertiary literature. And it struck me that we had lost our way. And so I left Georgetown. I had been the chair, I had left to go off to the Middle East to help found the Doha campus of Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and then also left Georgetown entirely for two years and went off to Iraq and helped develop the American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah. But all the time I was thinking about Tocqueville, who is always one of the ... he's the central guy really. I mean, I think of Augustine and Plato a lot too, but Tocqueville is always the central figure for me. And so it occurred to me very early on, really as early as 2001, even before I left for the startup team, that I would write a book about Tocqueville in the Middle East. Because Tocqueville has this grand claim that we're moving from the aristocratic age to the democratic age. It's not a claim about Europe alone, it's a claim about the very movement of history. And so what I concluded was that if his thesis is right, then one could talk about the Middle East as being an aristocratic society engaging in modernity, just as Europe in the 19th century began to become modern. And so I thought I should write a book using Tocqueville's framework about the crisis of the Middle East. And to come back to your original point, I did that because I thought the only way that these great books are properly studied, is if we juxtapose them with contemporary events.
Brian Smith:
I think that's an absolutely accurate depiction of where political theory is at. We have lost this sort of sense of how to juxtapose what's going on in our world right now, with great and profound insights of all of the authors you mentioned, and the rest of the canon besides. But so what I think hooked me as a reader of this book originally, and a lot of my students over the years who I shared this anecdote with, you open your prologue with this striking conversation you had with a Saudi man in a cafe, on your way to Doha. And you recount what he said about the effects of the 1960s in America, in Europe, and in the Arab world. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about the differences this gentleman was trying to get at. Why you use them as this interesting framing moment in the book, that opens up the field of conversation you want to raise? And what they mean today?
Joshua Mitchell:
So it's a great question. I did write a new preface for the paperback, but I did not include references to that conversation, and I wish I had. The reason I opened the book that way, is because as Tocqueville indicated, and is confirmed by our students' sentiments and prejudices, what's going on in the West is not universal. And while in the West we're largely moving toward, let's say the Anglo world, we seem to be fixated on notions of universalism that may have emerged out of the sixties in America, but there were other 1960s movements. And so I was trying to give the reader a sense really of the plurality of the world. That our account was not the only account. And I think as a device so to speak, that was an important way of getting readers to realize that the whole world is not like us. And what I had said in that introduction was that the 1960s in America, yeah it meant social revolution, but it also gave us Silicon Valley and huge advances in technology. And what I was trying to indicate there, was that Americans are fundamentally a practical people. And while I think that's true, and I'll come back to this in a minute, I think the American, what I described as a kind of forward edge of the 1960s, has become deeply pernicious. We can come back to that. But while the Americans are practical people, Europeans are still working out the catastrophe of 1945. And I don't simply mean the Holocaust and the wars, I mean the utter inability to deal with the problem of guilt. Which we have in America, with respect to the slavery question. But Europe has lost its Christianity, and yet still retained the Christian category of guilt, which was Nietzsche's prediction. But the catastrophe of that in my view, has been the development of the European Union. And while I did not put it in this way in the book, I put it this way now. The EU purports to be more than an economic union. I doubt it will be ultimately a political union, I think that's where it will falter. But I think ultimately it's more than either of those things. It is a public atonement for what nations did in the 20th century. Which is why elite Europeans are not disposed to go back to the national model. They believe that the only way that they can atone for their guilt is to repudiate their nations. And that's why nationalist movements in Europe are so interesting, because they're not ultimately going to succeed, unless they're able to somehow address the problem of guilt in a post-Christian age. In the Middle East, as my friend said at that cafe, they were wrestling with the question of how their fathers had betrayed them. And I mean by this, that many of the leaders, not just political leaders, but thought leaders, had halfway embraced the West. And halfway embraces are always dangerous, because they produce monstrous things, as Hobbes said a long time ago. And so you had a generation of young men who were trying to think beyond the perceived material of their fathers, and so turned to a hypothetical and imagined Islam that would be a comprehensive way of life. And this is Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And for the time it has died down, but I do not believe that we've seen the end of this. And the reason, which I believe I indicated very delicately in Tocqueville in Arabia, was that what's happening in the Middle East, at least in some regions, is you're moving to a kind of hyper-modernity, which is largely to be seen in the Gulf. And you cannot build a world on hyper-modernity, where everything is disconnected. You have all the accoutrements of life, but nothing is really linked together. And what I saw in the lives of my students was this vicious oscillation back and forth, between embracing autonomy, far more even than our students in America do, one moment. And literally the next moment, dreaming of an enchanted Islamic world from the 12th century. And so I think this movement back and forth between hyper-modernity and re-enchantment is going to be a feature in the Middle East for a long time. It's died down now, but it will re-emerge. And we need to understand it as a re-enchantment movement. I think the term Islamic fundamentalism is utterly unhelpful. Fundamentalism as we know, emerges in the United States as a category. It's a term, 1917 with the publication of the books in Los Angeles called The Fundamentals. So we're using Western religious understandings, to comprehend what's going on in Islam. And the crisis is the Tocquevillian crisis. Because what Tocqueville saw, even in the author's introduction to Democracy in America, was that while one could speculate about how the easy transition would occur from aristocracy to democracy, in fact aristocratic societies do not forget their past. "And so they look backward at the ruins," to use his exact words, and they dream of an enchanted past. And that's what I saw in the Middle East. I think again, while it's died down now, it's still very much a living option in the future. And then to pose your question, so where do we stand now? And I do say something about this in the new preface. So I think the American sixties generation has largely gone woke. While we're supposed to be a practical people, what I argued in American Awakening is we've moved away from what I, in the latest book called a politics of competence, which would be American practicality. We've moved away from that, and we've turned toward a politics of innocence and transgression. We've gone woke, to use that kind of language. So while in the book I indicated that America was probably the better off of the three groups, the three sixties movements, it's not clear to me that we are now. I would say that what I said about the Europeans continues to work itself out. They are still profoundly guilty about the 20th century. And so the EU project is their mode of atonement. It is their penance, EU is their penance. And then in the Middle East as I just indicated, I think for the moment it's died down. It's going to be very interesting to watch Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, and the other Gulfs, Saudi Arabia, negotiate their way into modernity. My sense is they know it can't be hyper-modernity. But it's not clear to me that they have a stable way of proceeding, without encouraging attempts to re-enchant the world. So I think the problem still remains there.
Brian Smith:
Well and that strikes me, that the enchanted dream that Sayyid Qutb, offers in The Shade of the Quran, to use his title. I mean, you can't say that that's not going to be an option on the table for people, especially because he's explicitly framing what he presents in this dream against the United States. Against his visit to the 1950s in Colorado, and all of this sort of Western decadence that he saw there. And that comparison I think is still going to be lively for the next decade, two decades, unless something ... I don't know what would change about us, that would make that comparison not seem lively to them?
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah. I think that's right. But I also want to defend the messiness of, I'll say America, but I mean something larger than that. I mean the Democratic age, as Tocqueville understood it. So Tocqueville knew that there would be a temptation to re-enchant the world. And why did he know it? He said because, the current moment, the Democratic age, has all sorts of discontinuities incoherencies. And it's not easy to figure out how one should be. So family tells us one thing, economics tells us another, politics tells us another. There are all these domains of life that are running across purposes. And he does ask the question at one point, you might remember it's in volume two, near the beginning. He asks the question, "So how does religion bear on this incoherence, this difficulty?" Remember, he writes the book and he says, "This entire book has been written under a kind of religious dread." By which he means, that nothing fits. We're in God's world, but God's world doesn't fit. And so he asked the question later on, "So what kind of religion do you need in this circumstance?" He says, "Look, there's two kinds of religion." We can talk about Islam, and Christianity, and Judaism, and Roman Catholics, and Protestants, but that's not how he ultimately divides it. He divides it into those religions which offer a comprehensive way of life. Which promise to bring utter coherence to human experience. And I will tell you, he doesn't believe that can work, and we have to understand why. Because he thinks we've been thrown into a moment of history which is incoherent. Where we don't really know what the future is going to bring. We can't fully rely on the past, we can't retrieve it, because we've been thrown to this new moment. So he literally thinks that religions which offer a comprehensive way of life are tempting, but literally don't comport with human experience. So then the question becomes, okay, so what kind of religion would comport with this human experience of disintegration? And he says, "Here Christianity is probably going to serve us better. Why? Not because it's a comprehensive way of life." Now, this is a huge question. Does it offer a comprehensive way of life, or not? But his reading is that it doesn't, it offers hope. And what that means, I think in his estimation, is the world is broken. There's a promise that it will be healed at the end of time, and the disunities will all be unified. And so what hope allows you to do, is to endure a world which can't be put together by us now. So that kind of religion can help us endure the fractionalizing that occurs in the democratic age. But a comprehensive way of life attempts to give an alternative, but can't deliver because life isn't that way. And he does, we should be clear, he does have criticisms of Islam on the basis of this distinction. That Islam does offer a comprehensive way of life. That's why he does think, this is again, long before Israel became the thorn in the side of the Arab world. The problem in the Middle East is not precisely Israel. The problem in the Middle East goes way back before that. Namely, modernity is coming everywhere, and Islam professes to offer a comprehensive doctrine. Now, having said that, we also know that there are many Muslim scholars, often in Europe, in England, in the United States, who are trying to provide an understanding of Islam that does precisely what Tocqueville thinks a good religion would do. Which is not to be utterly comprehensive. To somehow accommodate the strange twists and turns of the modern world, without Islam losing its soul. So there is a battle within Islam over this very question. Is it a comprehensive doctrine, or can it work within a world where one cannot find reconciliation?
Brian Smith:
So one other thing I wanted to draw back to before I go to the next question I actually had planned, which is with respect to what you said about Europe and the sort of repudiation of the nation-state, the European ambivalence toward it, I wonder how much that, how would I put it? Disordered, sort of uneasy sensibility, explains the European ambivalence to how on earth to deal with Ukraine right now? That they're unwilling to sort of wholeheartedly say, for us nationhood. Now they can be all for Ukraine, but I don't know how you embark upon this sort of military action, and support, and things like that, with half your heart?
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah. Well so Ukraine, it's very interesting you raised this. Ukraine has been a difficult question, not only for Europeans, but for conservatives on the right, as you well know. So in the case of Europe, so you're defending a nation-state, is that what you're doing? And you're defending it with a transnational organization called NATO. This is very peculiar. So Ukraine has emboldened both groups. It's emboldened the nationalists, and it's emboldened the EU, or of philic types who say "No, the age of nations has passed. And what we'll do then, is absorb Ukraine into this larger European project." I mean, this is one of the difficulties that the EU is faced with. It purports to be universal, so where is the boundary of this? Does it march straight through into Eastern Europe? Oh, what about Turkey? Well, it seems a bit disingenuous there, because it seems to me that the real reason Turkey wasn't included, was the obvious fact that it's an Islamic country and not a Christian country. So the charter of the EU indicates that Europe has a Christian past, a Christian pedigree, but does not say that it is Christian. But the point is, if you've got a Universalist society, it's very unclear where the boundaries end for that. So Europe is, people are scratching their heads. Those who believe in the nation and the universal project. And then, among members of the right, you know this as well as I do. Ukraine has been a difficult issue. Because on the one hand, many people, and I am affiliated with the NatCon movement. I mean, I'm one of their early members and Yoram and I are good friends. And I think he's fundamentally right that we have to return to the age of nations. And in that sense, we should be supporting Ukraine. Except the problem is, that the support that goes in that direction, does not look to be oriented by national sovereignty, but by a kind of globalist impulse that encourages, or that includes, all sorts of, let's say social teachings that are probably anathema to most of the people who want to save Ukraine as a nation, or most eastern Europeans for example. So the project to save Ukraine as a nation seems to be more about the globalist empire of pushing back against any particularism, Russia being the particularist nation. And so the difficulty is whether Russia is a nation trying to defend its own rights, or whether Russia is an imperial power destroying the nations. And I think that's the way a lot of conservatives who come out of the NatCon movement and are defending our involvement in the Ukraine war, they're saying, "No no, Russia is an imperial power, trying to push back against a nation called Ukraine. And that's why we have to defend." Anyway, it's going to be very interesting to see how the Republican candidates respond to this. Europe, as we indicated, both of us, there's a huge question on the forehead of all the Europeans about this. Because it seems to be moving in both directions at once, national and transnational.
Brian Smith:
Right. And I don't have a lot to say about it, other than that it certainly worries me, because I've read way too much about Russian, previously Soviet and now Russian, nuclear use doctrine. And know that they view them as tools, not as this sort of abstract threat. And whatever we say or do about this, however it's resolved, has to respect, I think ... And then this gets to your central insight, the age of nations is not passed. And if we don't recognize that, and we view, however illegitimate we see some of Russia's claims, whoever the people who are on Ukraine's side fully in this, I think need to recognize that Russia has claims as a nation. That if you ignore them, they're going to continue to feel like they cannot see peace. They cannot embrace peace.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah, I think one of the things that most irked Putin, was when Kerry and Obama, a long time ago, said something like, "Don't you know, this is the 21st century? And we're past wars, we're past the age of nations." And this is the horrible hubris of the Universalists. And it's ironic as well, because in order to get to that condition of cosmopolitan universalism, they are using the instrument of the state to achieve that. And I think that's really the question here. Are these elites going to be able to use the instrument of the state to destroy the state? And I think that's one of the great questions of the 2024 election. Are we going to continue to elect leaders who are not fixing on the United States? I don't like mantras like America First, et cetera. But it does seem to me that elites who are elected by their own people ought to be concerned first and foremost with the wellbeing of their own citizens.
Brian Smith:
Their particularity, their way of life, is what their elected to defend. So use a phrase, which I of course heard you say a great deal in the classroom, but that I think might be usefully teased out here. You talk about people who are possessed by the fable of liberalism quite a bit, in your writing. And one of the things that occurs to me as we've been talking, is we're often talked about right now, as being in a post-liberal Moment. That liberalism is being shown as the illusion. Or to use our former colleagues phrase, "It succeeded and therefore it failed." Which I don't think I agree with, at least not in Pat's terms. But I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, before we move on to the aristocratic versus the democratic age question that I have planned? Because I think this one might be useful for helping think through this question, particularly on the American right. On the side of these debates, to help us understand where the fault line really might be.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah. So I invoked the term, fable of liberalism, not to indicate that it's a lie. But it's strikes me that every political argument, every political position, has a story that underwrites it. Mythos precedes logos if you want to use that kind of language. And there is a story, there is a fable that is the preamble to the liberal frame of mind. And that story emerges out of the religious wars hundreds of years ago. And you can see this in Voltaire, for example. Not known necessarily as a liberal, but his famous saying, "I go to the English stock market. I see Jew, Christian and Muslim. They don't care about each other's religion, as long as their money is good." And the liberal fable is that once there was an age of war, and by setting our sights lower on commerce, then we can bring about peace. And what is interesting is that both left and right largely hold to this fable. So we're in a mess with China now. Why? Because we gave them WTO, Most Favored Nation status. Why did we do that? On the left, why did the Clinton administration do that? Because it believed in the fable of liberalism. So let us lower our sights. Let's not look at the metaphysical differences between China and the West, which are considerable. Let us lower our sights and engage in commerce, and that will bring peace. And then on the right, this happened as well. In the aftermath of 2001, George Bush without wincing, thought, "Well, the reason why there is terrorism, is because these people have not yet entered ..." I used that phrase in quotes, of course. "Have not yet entered into the age of commerce. Let's get actively involved. Let's help them develop commerce." This is the fable of liberalism, both on the left and the right. And the problem is, it is true that it unfolded that way in Europe for a time. I mean, it didn't put an end to religious conflict. But the general supposition of the liberal, and here I don't mean the Toquevillian liberal, but most liberals. Because I think Tocqueville actually, he saw the theory and the move past it, and we can talk about that. But the general supposition is, let's just bring commerce and everything's going to be fine. This shows up, by the way, even in our domestic policy. So Jack Kemp says, "The problem of the inner city." Which is a euphemism for the Black underclass. "Can be solved by enterprise zones." So it's both a domestic and a foreign policy disposition of mind, that goes very far back. It's 1720s with Voltaire, where gets worked out through Montesquieu, it's lurking in Hobbes. It's there in Tocqueville and any number of other figures. So it's a deep, deep idea. It's a deep, deep fable that we have, that continues to inform foreign policy. But it does not recognize that people are not simply driven by their preferences, there are deeper things at work. And this has been my great apprehension, with respect to say, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Because now what they're using to figure out US foreign policy, is gaming simulations based on this rational actor economic model of man theory. Which is idiotic, because the rest of the world doesn't behave the way the models behave. And I've got a piece coming out soon with the American Conservative, that talks about the Iraq War. I mean, we are not, let us submit and agree that America is a preeminent power, limited imperial power, whose task it is to make sure the sea lanes are open. I'm prepared to live with that. But the difficulty there, is that if we have destroyed, and we have done that. We have destroyed the vast reservoir of knowledge that was accumulated after World War II, by the area studies experts, which were then destroyed. You saw this at Georgetown, were then destroyed.
Brian Smith:
Absolutely.
Joshua Mitchell:
After 1989, when area studies became comparative politics and adopted rational choice theory, to try to understand the whole of the world. This was utterly idiotic. It was in a way purely American, because we wanted to simplify everything, and not understand the richness of these cultures, and the motives that the citizens have. So it let us submit that we have a responsibility. That empire has passed to us in a modest way, of keeping the sea lanes open. We don't have the capacity to understand peoples around the globe, because we have accepted the crude prejudice of the fable of liberalism. That somehow commerce, by destroying the rich understandings of human life, and reducing them all to commerce, we can somehow bring peace. So we're in a terrible position, in terms of our preparation, to understand the world. And yet we have this massive military, and a group of thinkers at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, who are utterly impoverished in their thinking.
Brian Smith:
And the irony here I think is, if you actually talk to people who lead soldiers, sailors, marines, they'll understand on an intuitive level that people are actually motivated. Their subordinates are motivated by that whole range of interests that people from Thucydides, and honor in the classical tradition of IR would talk about. Isn't just interest, it's fear, it's honor, it's principle. And without pulling all of those in, the way that Tocqueville ... I think here of some of Dan Mahoney's more recent stuff on statecraft.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yes.
Brian Smith:
Where he talks about the way that all of these great statesmen actually encompass that whole of the human experience, in the way they make their decisions, and attempt to persuade their people, and engage with other leaders. If we don't bring that whole mix of things, I think everything that you're saying about the disaster that's looming before us, and that's already upon us in many respects, will just keep on reaping horrible dividends. But let me add something here. So one of the things I'm thinking through these days, is the transformation that is underway at the moment. So let's just pause at three moments here. I'm thinking out loud, but I think this is right. So we had that moment after World War II when the GI Bill guys saw a horrendous world out there and said, "We don't want that to happen again." First they went and got PhDs, and then they became our ambassadors. So they were really, really smart people.
Joshua Mitchell:
John Rawls?
Brian Smith:
Yeah, right. Yeah. So my dad, as you probably might know, was a member of this group. I mean, he wrote the first book on the Muslim Brotherhood. But all of his friends went on to be ambassadors. Jim Aikens, Bill Crawford, all became ambassadors in the Middle East. And they would have ongoing conversations. So our ambassadors were studied men. And after 1989, we thought the Cold War was over. We've reached the post-war period. And so for lots of reasons, we gave up on all that, bad reasons. And turned to the second moment, which was kind of a rational choice model of human agency. And so we do gaming to figure out whether we should go to Iraq or not. And you hear today, "Gaming simulations have indicated that we can beat China in the South China Sea." Please. There's no gaming simulation that can tell us anything about what's really going to happen. So that would be the second Moment. We turned from deep knowledge, to a kind of superficial social science knowledge, which professes to understand the whole, but is so superficial that it can't really make any predictions. And this is what you always have to ask social scientists. Give me a non-trivial prediction, based on your so-called science. And they cannot do it. And we've been doing this for well over a hundred years now. But I think we've entered into a third moment, and this will dovetail with what I said in American Awakening. The third moment is that we are no longer using these extensive training grounds, called universities and colleges, to produce expert competence. Even if it's rational choice, social science expert competence. No no, that's not what we're doing now. What we're doing is, we're teaching our students fear and guilt. We are teaching them where they stand in the moral hierarchy of purity and stain. And you can be somebody who's deeply stained, but you're a useful idiot as long as you keep announcing that you are permanently guilty, and that you have privilege. And that seems to be what our university elites are now teaching, and we're going to have a generation of people who think that way. And we already have. And I do think the Biden administration represents a watershed. So as much as the rational choice theory does damage, because it does not accord with the multivalence of human persons in societies, this might be even worse, this next phase. Because the only criteria we use is moral purity and stain. So the military now is not concerned with winning wars, it's concerned with going green, and making sure that the innocent victim groups get the surgeries they need. I mean, this is really a new phase, and we have to recognize in itself. And the reason I say this at this moment, is because I think conservatives really need to upgrade their language. This is not progressivism. Progressivism was concerned with expert competence, and at least it believed in competence. The founder's vision believed in citizen competence, and that's why you could have small government. And conservatives keep talking about the importance of small government. None of this works, and here I draw directly from Tocqueville, unless you've got citizen competence that runs very deep, so that you can have a minimal government. So at least the second moment of American history, the progressive moment, believed in competence. This third moment that we're now stepping into, the age of the new regime change. And it is a regime change, which is concerned not with either kind of competence, citizen or expert. Now our universities are training people in fear and guilt. And as long as they, I don't call it virtue signaling, I call it innocent signaling, because it is a biblical category. As long as they signaled the right things, then they get a pass. So it's a new phase, and it already has drastically affected our foreign policy. We will see nothing but incompetence and disasters, so long as we step away from what I call the liberal politics of competence, and move toward the politics of innocence and transgression. Which is the project of identity politics.
Joshua Mitchell:
Right. And right now it's already upon us. You can find on Twitter entire accounts dedicated to photographing the Sovietization of the US Navy. And when you talk to sort of expert logistics people who have recently gotten out of the Navy, which I've done. I mean, one of the things I point to is, it's the slow creep of incompetence, in the face of this guilt catechesis. When you have, say a missile cruiser that goes out, and 10% of the crew is on leave for training academies or pregnancies. And another 10 or 20% are being sent to ever more required, check the box, mandatory education schools. Which are not, and some of them are for learning nuclear engineering. Or well, whatever the next thing they've got to learn is, to get promoted. But 10% of it now is DEI training. Which if you don't get certified, check the box to do that, you don't get promoted. And so lots of sailors get out. And the captains and NCOs on these ships are forced to say, "Well what critical maintenance can we defer or cut, just so we can keep the ship running?"
Brian Smith:
Yeah.
Joshua Mitchell:
And so American ships are coming to port covered in rust on a regular basis, which they never would've been in the Cold War. Or even up until fairly recently, simply because there's not enough hours of the day to stretch the human beings who are still competent, over the time remaining. Let me add something to this which nobody's talking about, but I think we really need to think about. So let's talk the Navy ships crashing into atolls and one another. So yes, we've moved away from what we're calling here a politics of competence. We have to ask the question, what has allowed us to do that? And I think one of the things that nobody's paying attention to, is that increasingly, as the world is operated by algorithms, then you seem not to need competence. And so you've got this interesting moment, where I think we're living in right now, where increasingly we're moving away from, or we're trying to render competence as computer algorithms. So we're going to have an algorithm to steer the ship. But if that goes wrong, then you've got a terrible problem. But if it goes right, you can carry on and push forward, away from competence, toward this politics of innocence and transgression, because you've got algorithms that are going to actually steer the ship. So this is going to only blow up when it becomes clear that either we need new algorithms, and there's nobody to write them, because there's nobody competent to write them. But I think ultimately what this is pointing to, is the need to recover competence. Another way I put this in the book is, there's real analog competent knowledge. And then digitization is a substitute for it. So algorithmic substitution, supplementary is possible, but ultimately it all hangs together through competence. But we've made a bet that we don't need to have this competence, we can turn toward algorithms. And then we can populate the workforce, not with competent people, but with woke people. So we've got to bring the algorithm part in here too, 'cause that's really important. It's not just on ships, it's everywhere. It's airplanes, everything.
Brian Smith:
Absolutely. And this actually does really relate back to Tocqueville in Arabia, I think in an important way. In that this is only thinkable under the pursuit of equality. Because you deny and you kick competence down the road when you don't believe that experts can, or should be trusted. Or to set aside the highly credentialed expert thing, you don't have that relationship with the mechanic, or with the teacher. That you defer to their competence anymore. You trust in the algorithm for the answer, but no longer have the judgment of when to use the darn thing.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah, great point. And let's go back to the mechanic. So if a mechanic has competence, you're going to trust him, and you're going to build a relationship with him. And I remember this. I mean, we knew our mechanic personally. But if increasingly, cars don't require the competence of a mechanic, but just computer automation. And everybody is taking their cars to the big city to get them tuned up once every couple of years, you don't have this personal relationship. These algorithms, the proliferation of these algorithms, the effect of them is to destroy the local face-to-face associations that we really need. So the more we have these computer-generated algorithms that take care of everything, customer service for example, the more we're going to be frustrated. The less and less we're going to have any need for our neighbor. So this problem of algorithm substitution for actual competence, it is the great experiment we're running right now. And my view is, because there is an actual by nature, proper relationship between supplements and substitutes, and algorithms can supplement but not substitutes for human competence, I believe the whole thing will blow up at some point. Because ultimately, we cannot turn supplements into substitutes. This is an ancient insight which is there in Plato, it's there in Rousseau. I think it's even there in Tocqueville, it's lurking. But his formulation would be, the state can be a supplement to the mediating institutions in which we develop competence, but it cannot be a substitute for it.
Brian Smith:
And without the linked men, as opposed to the de-linked men who are necessary to make civil society run in the Tocquevillian understanding, we're going to get that government stepping in.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
We're going to get that trust in the algorithm that promises we could do it. I mean, as you were speaking, in my head I went back to conversations we once had about Leviathan and Hobbes. That the Leviathan has become this not immortal God, but the sort of invisible one floating in ones and zeros on the web around us. Which we turn to, to humble the prideful. To select who should be selected for various things, as if there wasn't a person or a thing, sort of actively making choices that inform that algorithm. But I wonder if part of the backlash, and maybe this will drag us back to Tocqueville a bit more is, do you think maybe this backlash will be felt most keenly among the vestiges of aristocracy, and the horror of the de-linked people that they have, that you talk about quite a bit in Tocqueville in Arabia?
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah. And so this is my hope. And I should also point out, it's Tocqueville's. I think what Tocqueville understood, and you just said it, was that aristocratic peoples understand that Universalist aspirations are not ones that we can build a world around. I mean, I think for example of Burke's distinction between the excellence of simplicity, and the excellence of composition, in the writings on the French Revolution. It's a remarkable insight, because the democratic soul operates with a frame of mind called the excellence of simplicity. I'll give you an example. Covid is here. Everything must be shut down, the only problem we have is Covid, and the state has to step in. With the excellence of composition, which is an aristocratic way of thinking, everything is connected. Well, if we shut down the economy to save people from getting Covid, there's going to be all sorts of collateral damage. Maybe we need to think about seven or eight things at once, rather than one thing by itself? And of course, Marx is the perfect example of this excellence of simplicity. Class is the key to everything. One thing is the key to everything. Or identity politics, it's all about identity, that's the only thing that matters. This is another example of the excellence of simplicity. But the question is then, where does one learn, or how does one learn, this excellence of composition? And while Burke doesn't really lay this out, Tocqueville does. I mean, where do we learn that life is constant trade-offs? We only learn this in face-to-face associations. Rich connections, where we discover that the family is ... well, we have to do this in the family, but we also have to do this. And then if we're in a family, what do we do with our neighborhood? And all these rich questions, which don't admit of a kind of Universalist single key answer. And so I think, well I know what Tocqueville says is ... And you know this Brian, it's what saves democracy from itself, are these mediating institutions. Where do these media institutions come from? They come from the aristocratic age. They are the survivals, the church, the family, the municipal institution, the legal system based on precedent. These are survivals of the aristocratic age. And of course, now you stumbled upon the central paradox in Tocqueville, which is the very institutions that we need, these aristocratic institutions, are undone by this democratic frame of mind, that there's only one answer. So for the aristocrat we'll say, well men are men, and women are women. And we're going to partly understand each other, but it's a real distinction. No, the democratic soul is completely incensed by a real distinction that says, "No no, we're all the same." Which is of course, the project to destroy sex differences in the democratic age. So aristocratic souls are the ones who grasp this in their bones. And what Tocqueville had hoped, was that since there are no longer nobles around, there would be a substitute for them that would occupy the mediational space. Well, you know the rest of the argument. It's our families, it's our churches, et cetera. And so it's only by engaging in those rich associations and all the complexities associated with them, that we come to develop this excellence of composition, which allows us to make proper judgments about the complexity of the world. Unlike the democratic soul that says, national security state, Covid, bring democracy to the free world, or the whole world. These single key measures which purport to solve all of our problems. It's idiocy, but it's only possible when you destroy those rich associations, through which we can be confirmed in our understanding that no, there's no single answer here.
Brian Smith:
Well, and trying, as we both have for, I don't know how many years? And you combine the two of us when we've taught, together would be, it's a lot.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
One of the things I continually found, and I know you continually remarked onto me, as we were talking about, well what does it mean to be a professor, and moving on. Was just, you can't suddenly take kids who have, to take the phrase you use in Tocqueville in Arabia, that don't have any hermeneutic of deference, and suddenly give it to them. And suddenly develop that in them.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
It's the work of years. And it's remedial work for most American, and as you encountered, world college students. But I don't think it's impossible. And don't think you've seen that it's impossible. So maybe we could talk a bit about what is still possible, with bringing students along in an encounter with texts to develop this?
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
Totally new to them, kind of judgment.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah, it's a great question. Here again, Tocqueville is so helpful. So his scheme of course is, there's the aristocratic age and the democratic age. And there's a number of characteristics you can identify with each of them, and they map onto each other, so in opposite ways. So in the aristocratic age, you're looking to the past. You're looking to the fathers literally, but also figuratively. In the democratic age, you're looking to the future. Therefore, the aristocratic age is concerned with imitation, and the democratic age is concerned with innovation. So how does this play out in terms of the way we think about knowledge in these two distinct moments of history? Well, in the aristocratic age, there's a hermeneutics of deference. By which we mean, we pick up a book, we read it, we have reverence for it because it came before us. Because it's been handed down to us. Because by virtue of it being ancient and reverential, it exceeds our immediate understanding, and therefore we defer to it. And while I am, as you know, my relationship to Strauss is very mixed. But one thing I think we eternally owe a debt of gratitude to him about, is this hermeneutics of deference. I mean, he would tell his American students, "Listen, you don't understand this book. You think you do, but what you need to do is to approach this book and pose your questions, but immediately say to yourself, the author has an answer to my question, which I don't even understand. And so before I decide to offer my critique of him, you need to defer." So there's two hermeneutics, the hermeneutics of deference, and the hermeneutics of critique. And of course, this is critical thinking. And so our American students are taught to criticize. And of course we can see how this plays out in identity politics. "Well, this person has this kind of identity, therefore we have to dismiss them and purge them." No effort whatsoever to engage another mind. This is deeply, deeply pernicious. And I do not say that we have to substitute the hermeneutics of deference for the hermeneutics of critique. I say in point of fact, what we have to do is both. We have to engage the author. We have to recognize that his answers exceed our capacity to know them. But nevertheless, to pose questions. It is morally easy, as I probably said in the book, to be engaged fully in the hermeneutics of deference, of the hermeneutics of critique. Because in both case, your soul is unmoved. You either bow down to the text, or you do nothing because you're just ripping the book apart. That's the hermeneutics of critique. The really difficult challenge for education is to do both. And I think what we have to do is teach our young people that their hermeneutics of deference matters. In this respect, at least when I got to the Middle East early on, the hermeneutics of deference was well in place. I will report, and I intimate this in the book. The book was written in 2013, but I'm teaching now a course, for the same group that I was at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Doha. And the first papers I got back were very much hermeneutic of critique. It was, this is why Plato's wrong. He doesn't understand things political. And I would pose to my students the following question, "Well, so why is your understanding of the political, better than his understanding of the political? Maybe instead of you using your understanding of the political to critique him, maybe we ought to use his understanding of the political to critique what you believe?" So this hermeneutics of critique has penetrated into the minds of many of my students. I have very mixed views, after many, many years of involvement in American universities overseas, about what American higher education in the Middle East can do. I think at its best, it can help students who are wrestling in their own cultures, with the very problem Tocqueville thought was going to prevail in all cultures, namely the democratization of man. By which I mean the de-linking of persons. It can perhaps give those students a language to begin to understand the individuation and its perils, which they would not otherwise get in their homegrown institutions, they would simply get critiques of the West. Which they don't believe, because they themselves are half hyper-modern anyway. So at its best, American higher education can expose them to questions which we have been wrestling with for a hundred years. Namely, what does it mean to be a citizen of the democratic age? Does it mean we're just all Ayn Randians, running around being self-interested? Or does it mean as Tocqueville thought, that we can build a world together in face-to-face relations? Now that's something the Middle Easterners, my students, they can appreciate, because they have rich networks of family. But what's happening in these American higher education institutions often, not always, but I would say often. And here I'm just protecting myself in a way. What's happening is that you're getting faculty members who cannot get jobs in the United States. Or themselves are troubled enough, that they need to be utterly supported by huge sums of money that come their way, if they come to teach in the Middle East. You get people who hate the United States, who have one or another scheme of re-enchantment or purgation to peddle. And so our American universities in the Middle East are in a way becoming worse than the American universities in the United States. Deeply, deeply poisoned. So whereas they could have done some great good, but not to brainwash, but to indicate to the students that the feelings that they have of loneliness and isolation are not just their own. The whole crisis of modernity is this. And oh, by the way, here are some books that wrestle with this in constructive ways. Tocqueville being probably the most important. That's what should have happened. But what is happening in fact, is you're getting the most vehement anti-American faculty members you can possibly imagine going out there and hating on America. And thinking by the way, that that's what those students want. Now, some of them do, some of them are fiercely anti-Western. But if you ask them what their alternative is, they will sometimes say something like, "Well, Islam." And then you ask them to describe the Islam they have in mind. And you yourself, because you've studied Rousseau and all the anti-modernist marks, Heidegger and Nietzsche, you say, "Hmm, that's curious. That doesn't sound like Islam to me. It sounds like there's been a vast exportation of European anti-modern thought to your region of the globe, which is now intermixed with what you call Islam. And so you've been poisoned by this mixture that's neither Islam nor the West." And that is my view on what purports to be a lot of anti-Western thought, or Islamic thought. It's now, because of colonialism, so intermixed with European anti-modern thinking. Which is again, one thing we ought to be cognizant of, if we're setting up universities in the Middle East. But in point of fact, we're bringing over those who believe in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, to teach students who are desperately trying to find their way. And what they're given really is, I hate the West, and that's going to give you meaning. And that is no way to build a university.
Brian Smith:
And entirely destructive of souls. So I wonder, so this is a thought that occurs to me as you were talking, that something dovetails here in my thinking about this. That we have this polar, either hermeneutic of suspicion, or of deference, when living in between actually requires suffering. It requires that you open your mind and heart, up to questions that are deeply, deeply unsettling. That are triggering, quote/unquote, to use this contemporary parlance. And I wonder if you could talk about what you think the connection is between our societies, running screaming from suffering, in the West in particular. And a sort of the decline of religious faith, which would help us understand ourselves as living in a trial, living with suffering. And the challenges we're facing right now. 'Cause it seems like these are all deeply interlinked to me. And one of my experiences teaching, that was always so difficult, was to get students to recognize, that to be able to cope with the life that we are thrust into, you have to ask these questions about yourself, and come to grips with what you really believe about God, about our relationship to one another. And then if you don't, you are just going to be sort of at the mercy of these outside forces entirely, and see yourself as a passive recipient of everything. And never be able to live in that active voice, so to speak.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah. Well, so just a quick, seemingly long way of getting into this. I've taught at Georgetown since 1993, and when I first started teaching St. Augustine, it was fairly easy, because my students had a kind of theological fluency. Now I find it easier to teach St. Augustine on the Doha campus to Muslims, than I do to Georgetown students. Because theological fluency has largely disappeared in my students. And by that, I don't simply mean catechisms and things like that. I mean, what Christianity I think, should I say it's most important contribution. I'll say it with a full understanding, there's no such thing as the most important contribution. But what Christianity does, and it's right there in the Book of Genesis, is that it indicates to the reader, who might be wrestling with the darkness in the world, it indicates right there in those passages in Genesis 3, that the preeminent disposition of the human heart is to blame someone else. So Adam and Eve sinned, they sinned. There's a transgression against God, they rebelled against God. And what they do is, instead of looking within and taking some responsibility for that. Saying, "We should repent, please forgive me." It's not what they do. What they do is they say, "Well, the serpent made me do it." Or, my favorite line in Genesis, "The woman you gave me."
Brian Smith:
"The woman you gave me made me do it."
Joshua Mitchell:
Hilarious. God does have a sense of humor. So the way this plays out now, to bring us back to the issue of suffering. We're all Adam and Eve, by which I mean, not simply that we suffer from original sin, but that our response to that thing that is original, and always already in us, is to say, "No no, the problem's not here, it's out there." And identity politics is profoundly pernicious, because it does this. So the Christian understanding is that there's a vertical relationship. We are rebels, transgressors against God. That we are so errant from him, there's nothing we could do to come back to God. And so God had to send himself. So all human beings, I'll use identity politics language, are guilty of irredeemable stain. We're all irredeemables, we are all irredeemables. And in fact, the only way out for the Christian is a vertical one, where we recognize that Christ is the only innocent victim. There's none among us who are innocent victims. And he is the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world. Well, you've seen the three words here. The scapegoat, irredeemable stain, and innocent victim. And what I note in the chapter on religion in Tocqueville in Arabia, written in 2013, is that this understanding has dissipated. This is back in 2013. And then in American Awakening what I said was, I took it a step further and I said, "Well, it didn't completely disappear. It got moved." Because if the Genesis story is right, then the most primordial experience that is in all of us, because it's really the first thing that appears, is the experience of sin, and transgression, and rebellion. Now, none of us are going to admit it. We're going to say, "Not me, I'm not." We're going to do exactly what Adam and Eve did. And identity politics is this. It takes the Christian vertical understanding of staying an innocent victim, and it turns it 90 degrees and makes it a horizontal one. By which I mean, it establishes a moral economy intersectionality. According to which you rank yourself, on a scale from pure to irredeemable. And of course you can innocent signal and hide the stain under the wing of your ... remember the Christian reference, "Christ hides our sin under his wing." Well, you can hide it under the wing of a Black Lives Matter sign in your front yard, or we believe in Ukraine. However noble, rightly understood those things might be, it's a way to raise your sin score, so to speak. So identity politics is perfectly understandable, because the churches abandoned the idea of the God of judgment. All the churches, Catholic, Protestant, even within Judaism, there were calls by Rabbi Soloveitchik, the original in the 1950s. They're on YouTube. To return to an understanding of sin. So you had farsighted thinkers, Fulton Sheen, Soloveitchik, Reinhold Niebuhr, as you know.
Brian Smith:
Reinhold Niebuhr, yeah.
Joshua Mitchell:
All of them could see in the mid-20th century, that we had lost the fundamental insight. Which was, man is indicted, and somehow has to get right with God. But what's happened is, that all the religious institutions have jettisoned that, but it didn't go away. And it didn't go away because this experience of guilt is the deepest one in the human heart. And so identity politics comes along and finds a way for us to be Adam and Eve in the Garden. Which is say, to blame someone else, so it's white privilege. And I find this laughable, because what has to happen in identity politics is, once you purge one scapegoat, once you purge toxic masculinity, once all the men are hooked on pornography and drugs, and the young one are increasingly moving in that direction. They're disappearing, as they're supposed to. You need another scapegoat. And it'll be the Karens, and then it'll be Black men who believe that the traditional church, and the traditional family matter. And the transgenders are already going after them. So it's just one scapegoat after another. It's a deeply pernicious, it's a Christian heresy, is what I'm actually calling it now. And that's what we have to call it.
Brian Smith:
Right, that's a Christian heresy, where you never know. Yeah, you never know. I mean, to sort of pull the analogy in a slightly different direction, you never know, in a stable way, whether you are a Jacobin or a Girondin.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
You never know, because tomorrow's Jacobins are the next Girondins, and so on and so forth, and it keeps on spinning.
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah. I tell my students who are quite clear that they understand the moral economy, I say to them, "I notice you're drinking out of a plastic water bottle. When we discover in 20 years that microplastics are destroying the ecosystem far more than carbon dioxide, do you really want to be judged as a parasite, and as somebody worthy of purging and scapegoating, because you drank water out of a water bottle?" It never ends. You will always be discovered sooner or later. But to come back to what drove this, which was how do you teach this? I think the first thing we have to do, is to propose to our students the question, "How's that working for you?" I mean, you think that by picking out a group to be purged, then the world would be made pure. Or you think by getting rid of fossil fuels and having a quote, green economy, which there's no such thing as a green economy. We're going to poison the atmosphere, and the land and the water in different ways, with rare earth minerals. But I think the way this ends, is that people discover that no matter how much they've purged somebody, they wake up the next morning still feeling bad. And I think that's part of the reason why the left kept keeps moving. So they thought once they could get feminists on equal footing with men, everything would be fine. And yet they woke up and still they found there was guilt. Well then, let's go to gays and lesbians, and now transgendered. And we're going to one innocent victim after another, around which they can wrap their hearts, in the hope of attaining purity by supporting them. Eventually this, we discovered that this doesn't work. And at that point, I think people can listen. So you might remember in The Republic, the boys are quite confident in Book One, that they understand justice, and you have several definitions of justice. And the conversation of The Republic does not get started until Book Two, at which point Lachan says, "Well, I'm just confused. Can you help us, Socrates?" So as long as we've got this hermeneutic critique, where people are absolutely self-satisfied with their own answers, there can be no real education. So I think the way you get people to begin to say, to begin realize that there might be something they need to listen to, is you get them to see that what they're doing isn't working. Which is the way Plato does this.
Brian Smith:
Yeah. And I think that was exactly my experience in the classroom. And it's the only route available to us. But there are signs of hope though, in the sense that, you think of the places that actually are generative in our life right now. Churches that have held to an orthodoxy of sin and repentance, and synagogues that have done this are growing, and continue to. And have not had the birth dearth that so much of our society is plagued with at this point. And so there are readouts to where someone who has raised this question, or who has come to the end of themself, can come looking for respite, and an answer that is not just, "Well, who's next?"
Joshua Mitchell:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
So I wanted to conclude by bringing you to the Tocqueville in Arabia's new preface, and just get your reaction on a quote from you. "The fateful struggle today, is between those who wish for embodiment, and those who wish to flee from it." Can you say just a bit more about that, and how it relates to the things we've been talking about?
Joshua Mitchell:
Well, it's an ancient struggle within Christianity, which we should not be surprised, is appearing in what purports to be a post-Christian world. And the ancient struggle is between an incarnate view of human life, where the spirit descends into the flesh and suffers. And a Gnostic view, which is one according to which the purpose of the way one finds liberation, is to free oneself from the chains of embodiment. And that kind of Gnosticism today takes the form of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. And I think it's driven really by the inability to resolve the crisis of guilt. So every embodied form, every nation, every local community, every family, is impure. The world is broken. And what this means is, we have to find a way to live with it. And one of the difficulties for the modern mind, is that it's unable to live with stain and impurity. And I say this not only of the left, which wishes to indict America, I think of the 1619 project, by virtus systemic racism. But also of the right. Because the counterargument to the 1619 project was, "No, America is pure." But the supposition of both groups was that something is worthy, only if it's pure. And I think that's not Christian. I think the Christian view is the world is broken, and yet hope triumphs the brokenness. This is an astounding insight. And you can be an Augustinian or Nietzschian, and recognize that this is what gave a vibrancy to Western civilization. That human suffering is not the end of the story. Bob Woodson and I wrote an essay for Martin Luther King Day, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal two years ago. And we said, "Isn't it interesting that if you look at the history of African American political thought, up until very recently, while it was deeply divided, the underlying supposition was that Black Americans were capable of acting. Whether it meant going back to Africa, or pushing back, or getting involved, Booker T. Washington, there was a universal understanding that human action mattered. What characterizes the Black Lives Matter movement is fatalism. And I think, when you have an inability to understand how one deals with guilt, then, and Nietzsche saw this. Then the burden of guilt builds up more, and more, and more. And because you don't have the church, the holy house's mechanisms of repentance, atonement, above all forgiveness and confession of sin. That when you don't have those available, the only way that you can lift the burden of sin ... Well there's two related. One is to announce, and the other is to forget. And so our young people today who are unable to deal with the guilt they have internally, which then takes the form of a projected external guilt, namely the history, the constant attempt to find deeper and deeper perversions of America in history, this is really a projection outward I think. Ultimately of an internal wrestling match with guilt which can't be discharged, so they externalize it. And think that, "well, here's how I gain atonement. We'll destroy the monuments. We'll eliminate the family which is guilty of patriarchy. We'll eliminate the church which is homophobic. And when we do that, then the burden of our guilt is ultimately discharged." This is not, I mean minimally it's not a Christian way of understanding the problem. And I will say, and I've said this, and people get sort of horrified. Identity politics is not far off. I mean, I don't want to fully indict it, because what it gets, which conservatives don't understand, is that there's a problem of debt here that is deeper than economic debt, the free market types. And deeper than the debt we owe to our fathers, the traditionalists. It's a spiritual debt that goes right to the core of who we are. And while I think identity politics completely botches it, in terms of how it thinks it ought to think through this matter, it at least understands that there's a deeper debt than economics and tradition. And of course, those are the twin pillars of conservatism. So I think I would say of those who are now enthralled by identity politics, come home. You've heard my phrase before, Brian. "You're you're feasting on crumbs." Microaggressions, unconscious bias, this is a laughable, cheap imitation of original sin. Because the problem we have isn't microaggressions toward people of other races. No, no, no. That's hopelessly superficial. By virtue of human pride, every single morning we get up and we pray that we're not going to botch things up, in small ways and a big ways. And yet we do, which is why we go back and pray in the evening. So I say it to the identity politics people, you're not entirely wrong, it's a Christian heresy. Which means that if you want to be fed, you need to go back to the source. And this is where the churches must intervene. The conservative movement as a political movement, can do nothing to this. Because while, with all due respect to Yurom, who's a dear friend, I think it is true that the center of gravity of the conservative movement has now shifted from free market types, to traditionalists. From one kind of debt, to the debt we owe our fathers and our countries. I think that's important, but it still doesn't answer the identity politics challenge. Which is why every institution in America has been co-opted so quickly in the last few years, by identity politics. Because guilt is the fundamental question, and conservatives have no way to talk about this. So my view is that only the reawakened churches can do this. The churches have to bring back guilt, and transgression, and the god of judgment. And the problem is almost all of them, except for a remnant, a proper theological category here, almost all of them have bought into identity politics, because it is a cheapened Christianity. So we have to have a religious renewal. And then people say, "Well, so are you a Christian Nationalist?" And my answer to this is, we have an established church right now in America. It's called the Church of Identity Politics. It's an established church. I do not want an established church. My view is that the only way you can return to a politics of competence in America, is if we have a way of solving the problem of staying toxicity, and the crisis of the innocent victim. You have to have a way of solving the scapegoat problem. Because as the last few years have demonstrated, you're not going to turn to competence, until you can solve the scapegoat problem. The reason why America was a successful liberal enterprise, was because it had solved the scapegoat problem through the churches, and largely through the Protestant churches. And when the scapegoat problem, when we no longer can solve the problem of the scapegoat in the churches, then we will no longer have a republic committed to competence. And this is, I've said this, I've hinted at this, now I'm saying it boldly. That the reason why the politics of competence works, is that you have solved the problem of the scapegoat, prior to, and outside of the realm of politics. And Tocqueville in a way saw this. He said, "The moral imagination was bound, so that political freedom could work its way." Now, he didn't quite put it in terms of the scapegoat. I am putting it in terms of the scapegoat. And so the precondition for liberal tolerance, and for liberal competence, is having solved the problem of the scapegoat, through the churches. Because if not, we're not going to look at each other as compatriots in the project of building a competent world together. We're going to look at each other as possible, electric lightning rods, for the problem of scapegoat, and there'll be no confidence.
Brian Smith:
And with that, I think we should conclude. Thank you for that tremendous challenge for us. I mean, it highlights, I think the work that anyone who cares about liberty needs to undertake, in their communities, their lives, and anything they do with the public. If you want to know more about Josh Mitchell's writings, you can reference many of them, which I've linked above, on Law & Liberty. His books, American Awakening most recently, and Tocqueville in Arabia, are both available from Encounter Books, anywhere books are sold. And thanks for being on the show.
Joshua Mitchell:
My pleasure, Brian. Good to be with you.
Brian Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Matti Friedman joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Israeli culture and identity, immigration trends, religious and linguistic divisions, and his latest book, Who by Fire.
Rebecca Burgess:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor with Law & Liberty, and joining me today is Canadian Israeli journalist Matti Friedman. His work graces the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Mosaic, several other organizations. He's also a prolific author of a rich diversity of topics and books from everything about spies to the Dead Sea Scrolls to, most recently, Leonard Cohen's concert tour to the front lines during the Yom Kippur War. That's Who by Fire. And I'm sure, Matti, you had a lot of fun listening to a lot of music while you were writing that book.
Matti Friedman:
I sure did, although Leonard Cohen's music, if you know it, can be a bit of a downer. So if you listen to five hours straight of Cohen, it doesn't mean that your mood is going to be great necessarily. But I did have a good time.
Rebecca Burgess:
Wonderful. Well thank you so much for joining us today, coming from Israel.
Matti Friedman:
It's a real pleasure to be here.
Rebecca Burgess:
Great. So Israel is frequently in the news for about three things: Gaza, violence, and rocket barrages. Most recently, of course, it's been in the news for questions about its judiciary and its politics, in particular its election travails: five elections in four years, and at the end of it we have Netanyahu back in power. But I'm hoping that today we can talk about something that you focus on in your longer-form essays, which is the social, cultural and demographic change of Israel that helps us understand what is actually going on in the country as a country beyond or above those headlines. And most recently you had a wonderful essay in which you noticed that there are many French in Jerusalem now and that there is a almost war of baguette shops. So what are the French restaurant wars in Jerusalem? Tell us about what's happening in terms of the population shifts.
Matti Friedman:
It's rare when you can see a social shift manifest itself physically just in store signs when you walk down the street. But over the past couple of years in my neighborhood and elsewhere in Jerusalem, you just can't avoid realizing that there are more and more French people in Jerusalem. You can go to a bakery downtown called Gagou de Paris, and if you don't like their croissants you can go across the street to another one called L'Artisan. And there are other options these days in Jerusalem. French is just one of the languages you hear. And there are other cities in Israel where it's even more prevalent, particularly one called Netanya, which is a city on the coast with a particularly large French population. So clearly something is going on in France.
One of the interesting things about Israel is that it ends up being a barometer for the situation of Jews in other countries. So we've had an influx of people from Ukraine and Russia recently. So even if you knew nothing about the war in Ukraine or what was going on in Russia, just by looking at the new arrivals around my neighborhood you would understand that something is clearly going on there because we're hearing more and more Russian and Ukrainian in the street. And in the case of the French, it's not a wave of immigration exactly. It's not millions of people moving, but tens of thousands have moved in the past decade and more than 100,000 Jews have come from France to Israel since the early seventies, and about half of them have come in the past decade. So clearly there's something going on. People are being drawn to Israel, people are feeling a bit uncomfortable at home in France, and that's manifesting itself in the superior quality of our pastries here in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is it, do you think, related at all to some of the violence that has been perpetuated against Jews in France? So there were of course several famous [incidents], the Bataclan Theater, Charlie Hebdo and others, and it would seem natural if in the wake of those types of violent occurrences in France that there would be a sudden influx in Israel. Is it that that's driving it, or is there this other, and it's almost a third rail I know to talk about when you're talking about France, but the influx of Arab immigration within France, which seems to be driving others out of France.
Matti Friedman:
So there are pull factors and push factors as in any immigration wave. So the pull factor is the draw of the Jewish state, which for a certain number of Jews in every country is enough of a pull without any push factor: the desire to live in a place where your culture is the culture of the majority. And for some people it's a religious impulse to return to the land of Israel, which some interpret as a biblical commandment. So that's going on. But of course there are also push factors, and the violence that you mentioned is certainly one of the push factors. And you can see that after spectacular instances of violence against Jews, and unfortunately there have been several, there's a spike of immigration. So there was a big one after the murder of a young Jewish guy, he was 23, named Ilan Halimi in 2006, and he was murdered by a group of Muslim French citizens.
They called themselves the Gang of Barbarians, and they kidnapped him and then tortured him to death. Immigration went up after that and then kind of subsided. And then there was an attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. Another French Muslim murdered a few kids. And that was also a shock to the community, and there was another wave of immigration. So yes, there's something going on in France. There's something kind of bubbling under the surface and the Jews are feeling it, and that is triggering immigration. Although, again, it's not like all the Jews in France are leaving in panic, but that is driving the numbers up. And every time there's an instance like that, you see the graph go up and then, if things get quiet again in France, the graph kind of subsides. But the trend is toward increased immigration from France. And part of it is definitely that many Jews in France feel less and less comfortable at home.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is there also that aspect of the secularism in France in which it is a hot point of wearing religious clothing and religious symbolisms in France? And in the public school system this is a huge fight. My sister is in fact a Dominican nun, and it's a French congregation, and they have, every day almost, to struggle with some of these questions, especially themselves. They're wearing a habit which doesn't look that unlike how some Middle Eastern women cover themselves. Is it some of the more orthodox or observant Jews who are tending to go to Israel from France, or does that seem to be not really part of the equation?
Matti Friedman:
I think it is part of the equation. I'd actually love to hear more about your sister. That sounds fascinating. Often Americans have a bit of trouble understanding the French system, which is different than the system in the United States. In America, there's separation of church and state and you're allowed to do whatever you want. In France, the culture is kind of aggressively secular or at least the official culture. And they have an idea called laïcité which basically is a kind of antagonism toward expressions of religious observance in the public sphere or open expressions of religious observance. And that could cause problems for a Muslim woman who wants to cover her hair with a hijab, or a Jewish man who wants to wear a kippah, or even openly displayed crosses in some cases. Many French people interpret that as a violation of laïcité, the idea that the public's sphere must be secular.
For observant Jews that can be a problem. And I spoke to one young French woman who's actually now in Israel, who's interviewed in this story that we're talking about, which came out in Tablet, who remembers that in her childhood they served kosher food at public school. And then that was considered to be a violation of laïcité, so you can no longer get kosher food at the public schools. They used to give Jewish students exemptions or postponements of exams if the exams fell on Jewish holidays, and now that's also a bit tense because that's also considered to be special pleading if you ask to have your exam administered on a different day.
So that makes life a bit fraught for people of religious observance, not just Jews but for everyone. And certainly Jews do feel it. And if you look at the profile of the average immigrant to Israel in the past decade, you'll see that it tends to be people who are traditional in their observance. It tends to be people who are of North African descent. So there's a huge Jewish population in North Africa up to the forties and fifties, mainly in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And after the independence movements in these countries succeed and the French colonists are kicked out, the Jewish population either moves to Israel or goes to France.
So most of the Jews in France are actually not the original French Jewish population, which was European in origin, but North African in origin. And it's those Jews who tend to be moving to Israel. So they often find Israel quite familiar, I think in many ways because they're coming two or three generations back from Mediterranean Jewish societies in places like Morocco and Tunisia and then ending up in Israel, which is also a Mediterranean Jewish society. So the social leap for many of these people is not as dramatic and difficult as it would be for an American Jew moving to Israel, for example.
Rebecca Burgess:
I think I was reading that about a third are single young people coming, and a third are about young families, and then a third are retirees. So it almost makes me think about, and I know this is really probably not the best analogy, but in the States right now, we're seeing a lot of people leave from blue states and go towards red states where they feel that they are more free or less hampered in types of schooling choices and other ways of living. I don't know if that's in any way similar, but that tradition of going where you feel more welcome and feel like you have some roots and some familiarity with a system.
Matti Friedman:
No, it's an interesting analogy and definitely people want to feel at home. And part of being a minority and part of being Jewish is always a sense that you're not quite at home, that you're dependent on the acceptance of others, that you need to play an identity game where you're open to the mainstream and capable of playing ball with the mainstream, but also maintaining your own personal traditions and keeping your own identity, which makes you different from the mainstream and which the mainstream, in some cases, does not like and is hostile to. So for many people, going to Israel is a way of solving that problem. It creates numerous other problems, as I found having moved to Israel myself, of course, from Canada when I was 17. So it doesn't make your life problem-free, but it does replace that problem of being a minority. It replaces that problem with other problems. And yes, I think people want to feel at home and they would like to be surrounded by people who, they might not be exactly like them, but who are at least open and welcoming to who they are.
Rebecca Burgess:
Have their croissants.
Matti Friedman:
And also they can move to Israel without any compromise on the quality of the baguettes. Although I guess I shouldn't say that in their name. They might think that the Israeli baguettes are not quite up to par. But definitely these days you can get excellent food in Israel. It certainly wasn't the case when I moved here in 1995. I don't think it was really even the case 10 years ago, but definitely the French have brought many good things and cuisine is one of them.
Rebecca Burgess:
The summer when I was there on a national security trip, sponsored by Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where I met you, I had that privilege, I was rather blown away by the wonderful extent of Israeli cuisine. And thinking about adding French on top of that, I thought that's just not fair.
Matti Friedman:
We have the best food in the world, in my opinion. And I've been around the Israeli cuisine. Because it's made up of so many different groups that have come over many, many years, it is spectacular.
Rebecca Burgess:
So it seemed like you started noticing the French immigration wave to Israel through the proliferation almost of the restaurants, the French restaurants. But also I thought that your observation about the bookstores was interesting, that some of these French bookstores, they're not what you might think they are, they're not all super orthodox or religious in content. Many of them are just simply French bookstores, which kind of show that shift towards those who are moving to Israel. It's not necessarily a religious only question, but maybe more broadly cultural.
The North Africa element reminded me that several years ago you had this very fascinating article in which you asked whether Israel is eastern or whether it's European, meaning is it Middle Eastern or is it western? And in the West, in America, we tend to tell the Israel story as though it is a byproduct of the West only. But that in fact, if you look at the population, the current population of Israel, it's very much a Middle Eastern story. And that to me was the first time, in reading your articles, that I had ever thought about that and what that might mean and the differences. And that article, I think you'd called it Mizrahi Nation, where you invited us to think about all the different ramifications of Israel being a Middle Eastern state and country, population.
Matti Friedman:
So I think that is the key to understanding Israel. And I, like many other people who grew up in North American Jewish communities, always learned about a very European country with Herzl, and the kibbutz, and the Holocaust, and the Jews from the Middle East were very much on the margins of what I knew about Israel. But if you look at the Israeli Jewish population, we have a one fifth Arab Muslim minority. So if we just set them aside for a second and look at that 80% Jewish majority, at least half of the Jews in Israel do not come from Europe. They come from the Islamic world, they come from places like Morocco, they come from Syria, they come from Yemen, Kurdistan, Iran. And you can't understand the country without understanding that.
And even the Jews who came here from Eastern Europe, over three or four generations in Israel they've been Middle Easternized. And that expresses itself in the cuisine and expresses itself in the kind of music people listen to. And it expresses itself in our politics, which are incomprehensible without understanding the ethnic origins of Israeli voters, because often issues that we describe or arguments that we describe as being about policies are actually about identity. And that often has to do with whether your family came from the Christian world or from the Muslim world. So this is all very important to an understanding of the country, and yet it remains kind of marginal. People don't really think about it, they don't think it's central, but it is the central fact of Israel.
I wrote a book trying to explain it, which is a book called Spies of No Country, which ostensibly is a book about Israel's first spies, the guys who created the Mossad in many ways. But Israel's first spies were the only people in the country who could walk across the street into the Arab world and disappear, and those people were Jews who'd come from the Arab world. A year or two before they were natives of the Arab world, they were native Arabic speakers. And if we understand that at least half of the Jews in Israel are the children or grandchildren of those people, then we understand something really important about the country that is otherwise missed.
Rebecca Burgess:
Is that reflected in any of the public education, in terms of the languages that students are being encouraged to learn?
Matti Friedman:
I wish I could say yes, because it would be amazing if Israeli kids could actually speak Arabic, not only to interact with our Arab surroundings. There are 6 million Jews here and 300 million people in the Arab world. So it would be nice to have more people speaking fluent Arabic, but also Arabic is a Jewish language. Jews always spoke Arabic, and there are great works of Jewish thought that were written in Arabic. A good example is the philosophical writings of Moses Maimonides, who's an incredibly important philosopher from Cairo about a thousand years ago. His philosophical words are written in Arabic. So Arabic is really Jewish language and many of the people who came to Israel after the state was founded spoke Arabic. That was their language.
But what happened was that there was a real attempt to create an Israeli identity in which people spoke Hebrew. And for that to happen, the diaspora languages had to be killed basically. And that meant no Yiddish and no Polish and no Russian, and it definitely meant no Arabic. So within one generation the Arabic speakers were gone and their kids were Israelis, which was a success for the Zionist movement but a loss, maybe, for the culture of this country. Definitely a loss for the intelligence services who could really use native Arabic speakers, but that's what happened. The linguistic treasures that came here in the first years of the state, where you had all these people speaking Persian and speaking Kurdish and speaking 80 different languages or whatever it was, that was really eliminated by this drive to create an Israeli population. And that has its upsides, of course. We all speak the same language and that's good, but a lot was lost. I wish we could recover some of it, but it's hard two or three generations later to get any of it back.
Rebecca Burgess:
It's kind of a longer unformed question, though, about language and how language creates a national identity. At the beginning, when you are so small and you're starting out, it makes sense to tamper down on one common language, if you will. But, seven decades later, is it possible to loosen up a little bit, or is it the case that because the pressures from outside have only multiplied in that time? I don't think anyone would say that the pressures surrounding Israel have lessened. Has it entrenched the idea of having this one language to help the cultural identity have a type of centrality to it, and that's what will continue through the next decades?
Matti Friedman:
Yes. This society is so fractured and kind of at odds with itself that it certainly helps to have one language. And if you look at the country 50 or 60 years ago, many of the ultra-orthodox Israelis wouldn't speak Hebrew. And many of the people were immigrants, even the leaders of the country were immigrants, and they spoke kind of immigrant Hebrew, very heavily accented. And the fact that most people in the country today, including our Arab citizens, speak Hebrew very well is definitely good for communication. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to make us more unified or well-disposed to each other. So it does raise a question of whether a common language is actually helpful or not. But retrieving those old languages that were lost with our grandparents or great-grandparents is very difficult.
So there are attempts to bring back Arabic, and people are much more interested in the culture of the Jews of the Middle East and in the music, and there are attempts to revive it. And people are more interested in Yiddish. And people are more open to the experience of the diaspora, which was really radioactive in the early years of the state. One, Israelis were supposed to hate the diaspora and forget about it and be ashamed of it and never mention it. That has really passed. So people are interested in their roots. You can't just wake up one morning speaking Arabic. And we're not our grandparents. We might like our grandparents' culture, but this generation is Israeli. And the search for different cultures or for different cultural roots, that search is Israeli. It's not quite the same thing as being from Morocco or being from Poland.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well that's interesting, because I would say in America today... And not to make everything a comparison with America, but America is what I know. When we talk about the current generation, one of the questions that comes up a lot is a sense of rootlessness amongst the current population and whether that drives some of this whole culture of depths of despair, the depression, some of these more medical-driven problems, you could say, of our society, and whether that's rooted in questions about us losing our sense of identity or our central identity. I'm just wondering in Israel how younger generations feel or if, as you mentioned, they're being Middle Easternized, that's giving them a different type of rootedness instead of rootlessness and they're kind of making it their own thing. And I know that you also recently wrote about a pop star. And I was a little intrigued by this. Is it a pop star? Is he Palestinian? He was the most popular in Israel.
Matti Friedman:
Do you mean Nasrin, the article I wrote for The New York Times?
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes.
Matti Friedman:
So I like to look at our cultural questions by looking at music, rather than looking at heavy things like academic research or anthropological study. So the dominant pop form in Israel is a kind of music called Mizrahi, which literally means eastern. And what it is is Middle Eastern pop music sung in Hebrew, often with Greek influences and western influences. But that is really the most popular pop genre in Israel, which is kind of proof that the country is basically a Middle Eastern country. So I thought an interesting window into all of this would be one pop star whose name is Nasrin Kadri. This was two or three years ago when I wrote the story. She was really the hottest name in the Mizrahi pop scene, and she's really a diva. She's got a phenomenal voice, and she happens to be a Muslim woman from Haifa who converted to Judaism which is very, very, very rare.
But it was a great way of looking at this mix of western and eastern and the Middle Eastern style in Judaism. So Nasrin is originally Muslim, but her fans are Jews, many of them of Middle Eastern background themselves. So she's kind of an Arab diva for Jews affiliated with the Arab world. But she sings in Hebrew most of the time, although she also sings in Arabic. And all of that is just so interesting and confusing to anyone who wants to see this as a European country. So I thought a profile of Nasrin as kind of a pop goddess of the moment would be a fun way into one of the most important cultural questions here, which is: what kind of country is this? And if we're a Middle Eastern country, what does that mean? So that's what I was trying to do with that story. And there I really did enjoy listening to the music, and I got to hang out with Nasrin and then go to a concert. And I had a great time doing that one.
Rebecca Burgess:
Hopefully you had great seats, too.
Matti Friedman:
I did. I had excellent press seats close to the bottom. I could almost reach out and touch her knee-high glittery boots.
Rebecca Burgess:
That's so not the image that we have of Israel today. So the contrast, it's good for the senses to wake us up, like spicy food makes us reevaluate our assumptions.
Matti Friedman:
There was a bit of Beyonce in the concert and there was, of course, some Arabic and there was one point in the concert where she was posing against these screens which had satanic flames on them. And there were two guitarists on either side of her, and they were wailing like Slash from Guns and Roses. So there was just a lot going on at that concert, culturally.
Rebecca Burgess:
A lot of imagery.
Matti Friedman:
A lot of imagery. There was nothing about it that was purist. It wasn't meant to be like pure Middle Eastern music or anything like that. It was totally commercial, and very crass, and totally fun.
Rebecca Burgess:
So also looking at pop culture, you've noticed that there's been an influx from China within the cultural moment. And I'm talking here about Chinese, and I'll say his name wrong, Itzik. Is it the Chinese Itzik? This incredibly popular YouTuber who sells China, almost, to Israel. And I found this quite fascinating. One, how did you come across this? Is it just because it's so prevalent? And the story that you found of China's influence operations, if you will, within Israel through this one lens of this YouTube star?
Matti Friedman:
So I'm always looking for an interesting way of telling an important story. So Itzik, or Chinese Itzik as he's known here, seems to be a good way of doing it. He's a YouTube personality who works for a Chinese government media operation and he speaks phenomenal Hebrew, just almost native Hebrew. And he's an incredibly smart and charming guy. So he does videos from Israel about being a Chinese person in Israel, and he also does videos from China explaining China to Israelis. But that's his job, presenting a good face of China to Israel and serving as a cultural communicator between Israel and China, or the Chinese government. And I got to speak to him, and he's a fascinating character. And he really gets Israel in a very interesting way. And he's spent time here, and he's picked up the language in a very remarkable way.
The article looks at him as a way of trying to understand what China's up to in Israel, because of course the Chinese are on the move across the Middle East. They're building installations. They're taking infrastructure projects. They're very much in evidence here in infrastructure. They're building a big part of our new light rail system in Tel Aviv. A Chinese company now owns our biggest dairy products company, which is called Tnuva. A very important tunnel project a couple of years ago under Mount Carmel was handled by the Chinese. And they're building us a hydro plant, at least one. But the biggest Chinese installation, or the most important one that has opened in recent years, is a port.
Israel has always had two ports, one in the city of Haifa and one in the city of Ashdod. And because the country's grown and because the economy has boomed, those ports are insufficient and we needed another port. And a Chinese company won the tender for the port. And it's the company that operates the port in Shanghai, which is called SIPG. So they won the contract and built an absolutely beautiful port that I got to visit. It's a kind of shining, brand new port open last year. These red cranes with huge Chinese letters on them, and you go into the command room and the workers are Israelis actually, but the executives are Chinese, and they're running Chinese software, and the whole operation is Chinese. And it's really, really striking because you can read all you want about the expansion of Chinese influence, but when you're standing in a Chinese port facility in Israel and the corner offices are populated by Chinese executives, you realize that something's going on.
Things are really changing. And the calculus of economic interest, and maybe even security interest, in the Middle East is shifting as the Chinese make themselves felt more and more and as the American presence seems to fade. So that article, which was also for Tablet, looks at those two elements: the port, and Chinese Itzik. That's really what he calls himself, Chinese Itzik, Itzik HaSini in Hebrew. His real name is Xi Xiaoqi, and he's from Beijing. That's what I tried to do with that story, to try to take something really complicated and make it as simple as possible and a bit entertaining.
Rebecca Burgess:
So this summer I remember standing at the old Haifa port and looking across and being told about this new Chinese one and thinking, from the national security standpoint, the American Sixth Fleet gets refueled right there, right across from the Chinese. And of course, in America we have a heightened security sense around China. But it did have that sense. And it did make me wonder a lot about how regular Israelis feel about the increasing presence of Chinese industry, Chinese companies within their country operating what I would call sensitive infrastructure. We also went to Tel Aviv. That has been my first time in Israel, and it suddenly struck me that, oh, Israel is also a Mediterranean country. It's right there on the Mediterranean, and I hadn't really thought about Israel being a Mediterranean country.
And later on I was in Trieste, which the Chinese are also heavily influential in. That was the historic port of the Austria-Hungarian empire. It's still very, very important to Italy, and the Chinese are there and in presence everywhere around the city in very tangible ways because that's something that they're supposedly using for their Belt and Road Initiative into Europe. And it drew together kind of that sense, I don't want to say of foreboding necessarily. I didn't necessarily have foreboding in Haifa this summer, but it felt unnerving the extent of seeing that in person. And I thought if I was a citizen living here, would I not notice it just because it's something that happens over time or would I notice it and worry about it? And whether you had insight into how kind of everyday Israelis feel about that?
Matti Friedman:
So Israelis have always had many enemies, of course. And we've fought wars, unfortunately, against many states in the Arab world. And our most potent enemy at the moment is Iran, of course. And a country that has never been a problem for us is China. They've never been an enemy. So Israelis are not worried about them. And you can look at polling information which shows that Israelis are, for the most part, just not concerned about China. They don't see China as a competitor, they don't see China as a threat. They understand that the Chinese antagonize the Americans. And there've been two big defense deals that have been torpedoed by American protest because America was unhappy about Israel selling certain things to the Chinese, quite rightly. And so there's an understanding that that's sensitive, but there's no kind of gut suspicion of the Chinese or feeling that we need to be worried about this.
And I'm not saying that that's necessarily true. I'm just saying that Israelis have always had a sense of who their enemies are, and the Chinese seem to be making really good offers on infrastructure contracts. And they come in on time, and they come in below budget and great as far as Israelis are concerned. And we also tend to play a very short-term game. There's very little long-term planning here. So if you have a port that needs to be built and the port company from Shanghai comes in and gives you a good deal, you'll take it. And you might not necessarily think about what that's going to look like 30 years down the road, 50 years down the road. We put out fires. That's the Israeli way of doing things. And there's very little long-term thinking, not like the Chinese, of course, who have very careful long-term imperial considerations.
So that's also a difference between the Chinese and the Americans. When I was at the port, the obvious question is what... The Sixth Fleet is across the bay, I think. I don't know, it's less than a mile. And they said, "Well, what do you want from us?" When the tender was open for the port, because it was a public contract. It was open to any bidders. The number of American companies who bid was zero. No American companies bid on the contract. And so the Chinese got the contract. And that's also something that's going on. The Americans just aren't there. The Chinese are hustling. They're making good deals, both because they're out to make some money and because they're considerations are imperial as well as the profit motive. So an American company looking at a project like the Haifa port would've to say, "Okay, am I going to make my investment back within 20, 30 years?" And there would be all kinds of graphs showing yes, no.
The Chinese have other considerations. So they want to make their investment back, of course, but they're playing a much bigger game. And that game is visible in Trieste, and it's visible in Greece, and it's visible across Africa, and it's visible in Iran, and now it's visible in Haifa. And the considerations are imperial considerations, ones that would've been familiar to the British a hundred years ago, which unfortunately are not that familiar to Americans, I think, who are also playing a shorter game than the Chinese are in Israel. Israel's a very small player. We're kind of caught between the two big powers. Of course, we have our affinity with the United States. There's no cultural affinity to China. There's no attempt by China to export Chinese culture to Israel. So Israelis are consumers of American culture, and everyone watches Netflix and loves the NBA. And there's no danger of Chinese competition in that regard, but things are definitely changing.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, Americans do have not just shorter attention spans, but I would say our reaction isn't necessarily 'put out a fire' as in 'put a bandaid over it for now and move on and leave it for someone else to deal with down the road,' which is a very unfortunate and very disastrous tendency, I think. But slightly along those lines, in our remaining minutes, I was wondering if... It reminded me of the larger framework of the whole Israeli and media discussion and how you in particular have drawn our attention in the West to how, and in America, how we get it wrong so often because we impose a framework that simply isn't there for Israel.
So we tend to see everything happening within Israel, not only, as we mentioned earlier, from this very western, it's a byproduct of the West and Europe, but also in America from a very kind of race and equality type of a discussion when in fact that's not what it is, and how that kind of blinds us or hinders us from understanding what actually is in play within the state. And maybe that's a little pivot for you to remind us again of why that just simply isn't true, and especially in terms of this increasing Middle Easternization as you were mentioning, how that maybe is the key to tell us or remind Americans why it is not about this race and equality narrative.
Matti Friedman:
I think Americans often see things through an American lens, which I guess makes sense. And there's a tendency to take American problems and then view other countries through the lens of those problems. And I understand why race is the demon that stalks the United States, and that's clear to anyone who's lived in the United States as I have very briefly, and anyone who knows anything about American history. But the problems here are different. I'm not even saying they're necessarily better, but they're completely different. The Jewish problem was never a problem of color. So my grandmother's family, she had a bunch of brothers and sisters and her parents, they were all shot in the forest outside this village where they lived in Poland by people who looked exactly like them. There was no color difference between them. It wasn't about color, it was about some other kind of difference.
And Jews had these incredible problems living in societies where they were a minority, and ended up in Israel. And now there's an attempt to portray Jews in Israel as a kind of stand-in for white Americans or stand-in for maybe European colonialists. There's a lot of guilt bouncing around the West and a lot of desire for stories that can help channel that guilt. And Israel is used, in many different ways, as a blank screen onto which to project characteristics that people don't like. So you'll see it described as a colonialist power, or racist, or militarist, or nationalist, and mostly it's projection. It's not that we don't suffer from those problems necessarily, but mainly it's projection. The Jewish population here is about 6 million people, and we live in the midst of the Arab world which is 300 million people, and in the midst of the Islamic world, which is one and a half billion people, maybe 2 billion. There's some argument about the numbers.
So Israelis don't feel like an empowered majority. They're not analogous to white Americans. Palestinians are minority among Israelis of course, but they're part of the regional majority that outnumbers Jews by a very wide margin. So one of the tragic aspects of this conflict is that both the Palestinians and the Israelis feel like an embattled minority, and both are right. There's a lot of truth to those claims on both sides. It's impossible to understand that dynamic if you're just projecting the American sentiments or American problems. And there are American politicians who've begun doing this. And we heard people say in Congress things like, "What they're doing to us in Palestine is what they're doing to us in Ferguson," in an attempt to really draw that line between Black Americans and Palestinians, who have nothing to do with each other.
The predicament is completely different, and it's better to understand another country completely on its own terms rather than to bring in a lot of American baggage and then reach the wrong conclusions about what the solution might be. Because if you're imagining that the solution here is civil rights struggle along the lines of Martin Luther King, you just will not be able to solve any of the actual problems that exist. So I think Americans sometimes get into trouble with things like that. And they've walked into some trouble in Iraq by making some incorrect assumptions about who Iraqis were, and what they wanted, and how similar Iraq was or could be to the United States. There's a sense that Iraq was kind of an America in waiting if only it could be free to be America. And the cost of that error was extremely high, and you know more about that than I do. An earlier mistake was in Vietnam, kind of a similar assumption. So it is a problem that America seem to run into a lot, and it's one that's best avoided.
Rebecca Burgess:
Well, you're mentioning some wars and conflicts, so I almost have to end on this note, but before I end on the note about conflict and war and veterans, since you had mentioned Maimonides earlier, as a student of political theory myself, with Maimonides and Al-Farabi, their western counterparts, Aristotle, Aquinas, the hardest thing it seems is to actually know what is, versus what you think you are seeing and describing and getting from opinion to knowledge is... Well, I know what you're doing every day in journalism, but also what we are hoping to do on this podcast is uncover the things that we think we know and show all the rich complexity underneath it.
And part of that complexity, going back to war and conflict and knowing your enemy, but knowing who you are, is Israel is this fascinating culture, or nation now, of veterans. And since I study veterans, I'm often looking for the clues between how a society understands citizenship in itself and leadership and statesmanship in terms of what risk they have done for their country. And I often wonder if that does color their politics, and their political discourse, and their political understanding of themselves and their role in the world, or if that just doesn't color it because it's more common, if that makes sense.
Matti Friedman:
I think that the mandatory military service here does have an effect on the way people think. I think you're less likely to embark on a military adventure if you are likely to be affected by it very personally. And of course, I served in the military. I've got two boys who are almost 16, and they'll be serving in the military within a few years. It does change the way you think about what the army is. You know the military a lot better than most Americans do, so you're much less likely to buy the kind of bullshit that the military likes to sell civilians. And you can really see that in our parliament, where I think it's much easier to bullshit American politicians than Israeli politicians just because people have been in the army and they kind of have a realistic sense of what is and what isn't possible and what the needs are or are not.
And that's all very important, but the numbers serving here have gone down percentage wise. So the numbers are still over 50%, but a lot of Israelis don't serve. The ultra-orthodox, for example, don't serve. Arab Israelis don't serve. Many mainstream Israelis get out of it in different ways. And so the society's changing. It's becoming a more individualistic society, less that highly-mobilized, socialist society that we might remember 30 or 40 years ago. The place is changing. The military is still very powerful and it's still, I think, our most trusted institution. I haven't checked the polls recently, but I do believe that is the case. And it is a kind of unifying institution, but in this day and age, as you know it's true in Israel and it's true in the States, the idea of unifying institutions is very much under fire and everything is becoming divisive and binary.
And it raises real questions about how we're supposed to live in a democracy if you can't agree on the institutions, if you don't agree who won the election, if you don't agree about the judiciary, if you don't agree about the military, about the people making decisions about the life and death of your children. So it's a fraught moment here in that regard. That's really what people are arguing about in Israel. There are protestors out on the street mainly because of this idea that the institutions are threatened, that the institutions are threatened by our fellow citizens who seem to be a threat to us, and we seem to be a threat to them. And it's this strange, dark social media moment that's raising real questions, I think, about how we're supposed to maintain democracy and democratic institutions. And I know we're all dealing with that, not just us here in Israel.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Well, to not end on a depressed, dark note has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. I know we could have gone so much further into each one of the topics, but on a lighter note, to end, I was wondering if you could share with us maybe one of your favorite stories or anecdotes from the research you did for your latest book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen. And this is a beautiful wrap up moment, right? We were just talking about war, we talked about music earlier and culture and how these things kind of show us what's actually going on, illuminates more difficult political kind of questions. So you wrote this book about Leonard Cohen going to the front lines in the Yom Kippur War and his music there, and you got special access, I'm pretty sure, if I remember right, to some of his notes, or a diary, or a manuscript that he had written. Was there one moment or little anecdote that stuck in your head as just either lovely, precious, or just hilarious?
Matti Friedman:
There were so many. I had such a great time researching the book, not only diving into the Cohen material. Cohen is, of course, this great kind of poetic, bohemian figure from the sixties who shows up here and gives one of the weirdest and maybe greatest concert tours of all time. And I got to meet these, I think of them as soldiers even though now they're in their seventies and they're all grandparents, some are men and some are women, people who encountered Leonard Cohen in Sinai in the middle of this war.
And I remember meeting one woman whose name was Orley, who remembered that Cohen showed up at their base. This was a base at the very tip of Sinai, and these very young women had just been through a horrific experience where their radar station was rocketed by the Egyptians and five of their friends had been killed. And they'd just gone through this, and then suddenly Leonard Cohen was at the base and someone told her that he needed a place to sleep. He needed a bed. And Orley, who loved Leonard Cohen, very quickly volunteered her bed and showed Leonard Cohen into the barracks and kind of put him in her bed and still remembered it. And she was so touched by it. And she said, "I wasn't in the bed with him, but he slept in my bed." And this still meant something to her, all these years later. It was something that they shared, and it was a very human moment amidst kind of inhuman events in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Rebecca Burgess:
The little human moments that actually keep things going. Thank you so much for sharing that, and thanks for your time. Again, that was Matti Friedman, journalist and author. And I'm Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks so much for listening.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith. I am the editor of Law and Liberty. With me today, I am very pleased to have Gordon Wood, who is the Alva O. Way University professor, and professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. The author of 10 books, including most recently, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, as well as the National Humanities Medal. Gordon, thank you for joining me.
Gordon Wood:
My pleasure.
Brian Smith:
So, I wanted to have you on the podcast today, specifically to talk about Power and Liberty, which as I understand it began as a lecture you gave at Northwestern’s Law School. So, I wanted to ask, how did the themes of that lecture inspire the book? And what was your aim in writing it?
Gordon Wood:
Actually, it was a series of lectures, a half dozen lectures that I gave at a school, I think, in the fall of 2019. And as we got into the COVID period, I had these lectures, and I thought maybe I should try to publish them. And so, that’s what led to the publication. I hadn’t really thought about that when I was giving the lectures, but it worked out nicely.
Brian Smith:
So, what was your goal in presenting a condensed version of your entire sweep of scholarship about constitutionalism? What were the key things that you thought needed recapitulation right now, that you were aiming to give your audience?
Gordon Wood:
Well, although the lectures pretty much summed up my thinking over the past half century on the constitutional issues, I hadn’t actually put them into this form, in print, at least. So, I thought that this was a good way of conveying my thinking, starting with the imperial crisis, going on to the constitution making at the state level, which is what they aim for. The United States, literally was 13 states at the outset in 1776, and each of those states wrote its own constitution.
And then, having to explain the origins of the federal constitution, which [inaudible 00:02:39] granted, but they certainly hadn’t anticipated. I ended with the issue of private versus public, which helps explain the beginnings of the corporation. And then, I had a final epilogue on Rhode Island, my own home state, which suggested the middle class world that emerged following the revolution. So, all of that fit together, and it was what I wanted to say coming up my career.
Brian Smith:
So, I really specifically wanted to ask you about Rhode Island. It was a very striking epilogue, and I think a very surprising one. So, what was really special about Rhode Island at the founding? What made them stand out and can you say more about that analog between their middle class world and ours?
Gordon Wood:
That’s exactly right. They were a middle class society that probably of all the states, certainly the most middle class, that is to say they had the weakest aristocracy. And right from the beginning, they never were able to establish even a semblance of an aristocracy in their state. And as a consequence, they were very entrepreneurial minded, go looking for the fast money. And they were involved, of course, in slave trade, drum making, and all of that. But I think it’s the middle class nature of the society that… And of course, they were involved in paper money, which is, they had 11 issues, I think, of paper money as a colony. And this was far in excessive what any other colony did. And that paper money was capital, if you will. And they continued that after the revolution. They were the only state that refused to attend the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
So for a host of reasons, Rhode Island was interesting. James Madison, in his small little essay that he wrote, a working paper for his ideas about the new Federal Constitution, isolated only one state that he complained about. And that, of course, was Rhode Island, mainly for its issuing of paper money which created inflation and hurt creditors. And Madison’s whole structure was designed to protect minorities from majority overreach, or majority tyranny. And Rhode Island was the example that he used of this democracy run wild.
So, for a host of reasons, Rhode Island was interesting. And, of course, Rhode Island went on in the nineteenth century to become an economic powerhouse. By the end of the century, they had five leading manufacturing firms in the world, were located in this tiny little state. So, there’s a host of reasons why they picked Rhode Island as an example of the middle class society that really came to dominate the north.
Brian Smith:
Yeah, it was a fascinating example of how banking and credit have these long-tailed effects that you-
Gordon Wood:
And, of course, it was not at all anticipated by the founders.
Brian Smith:
Exactly. And as you say, none of them really understood how complex and rich that network of commercial exchanges really were, or how they depended upon the relatively easy money that paper notes allowed.
Gordon Wood:
None of the founders really, except for Hamilton, understood what a bank was anyhow. Adams never did. Jefferson never did. But Hamilton knew what a bank was, but he was unusual. But what Madison wanted in constitution was a veto given to the Congress over all state legislation. That’s so impractical. Can you imagine if they had stayed in all bills that the states wanted to pass would have to be sent to Washington, and having hearings, and the Congress would have to approve them? Well, that was Madison’s proposal. He was so frightened at what the states were doing.
Well, that was so impractical that they mentioned, threw it out, and had substituted Article one Section 10 of the Constitution, which lists a number of prohibitions on what the states can do. Namely, they cannot print paper money. Well, if that had been enforced rigidly, it would’ve stifled the antebellum economy. States get around that by chartering banks, which in turn issued the paper money.
And, of course, there were probably hundreds of banks. And by the eve of the Civil War there were 10,000, probably 10,000 different paper currencies. It was just chaos. And of course the Civil War ended all that. The federal government shoot its own greenbacks, as we do today, and taxed the state banks out of business. But up to that time there was just these state banks issuing currency, and it must have been intolerable as a businessman to deal with this. You’re in Providence, in Rhode Island, and you get a bank note from the first Bank of Nashville, Tennessee. What do you do? Well, probably if you wanted to take it, you’d probably discount it because it’s so far away. The bank note would say, “We, the Bank of Nashville promise to pay the bearer $100 in gold or silver,” but you’re not going to go to Nashville. So you take the note, discount it, give the person $90 worth of goods, and then hope you can pass it on to somebody else. That’s the way it worked. It must have been very chaotic.
Brian Smith:
So, I wonder if we can rewind a bit though. I jumped the gun a bit, just out of excitement because I wanted to hear more about Rhode Island. But I wonder if we could go back to the beginning, and talk a bit about sovereignty. So, you say that defining who was sovereign was the issue that finally broke up the empire in the… Can you explain that a bit?
Gordon Wood:
Yes. Well, the imperial debate started over an issue of representation, where the parliament issued a stamp tax. Parliament said, “You can’t tax us. We didn’t give consent to that.” And the British responded by saying, “Oh yes, you were. You were virtually represented in the House of Commons.” And the Americans said, “We don’t like this virtual representation, we’ll have none of it.” But the issue then moved to the issue of sovereignty, which was something that the English and Blackstone, the great legal jurist had worked out. Although he didn’t invent it, he put it into his book published in 1765, that there must be in every state, one final supreme lawmaking authority. And in the British constitution, that authority rests in parliament, and there can be no deviation from that. There has to be that final authority.
And the Americans kept saying, “Well, no, we want to divide authority. You have some authority over us, yes, for trade purposes and so on, but we don’t want you to have the right to access.” And the British responded in the following fashion. They said, “If you deny parliament’s authority in one aspect, you have to deny it entirely. You have to accept parliament’s authority, it’s final authority.” And when confronted with that choice, by the end of the 1760s, 1770, the columnist responded to say, “Well, if that’s the case, we’re independent of parliament, and we’re tied only to the king.” And they worked out in a series of pamphlets written by all of the major founders, Jeff Adams, all wrote pamphlets saying, creating what I would currently called the Commonwealth theory of the Empire, similar to the modern Commonwealth, that is to say Canada, Australia, New Zealand, are tied to the British nation by the Crown only. And each of their parliaments are independent. Something worked out in the twentieth century, 1931.
So, that’s the position the colonists are forced into by the early 70s, that they are tied only to the Crown. And of course by English standards, this was just, because we, Americans, can’t fully appreciate it. But Parliament represented such a liberty loving, it was the source of English liberty. It was the bastion of freedom against the Crown. The Crown was the source of tyranny. And through history, especially from the seventeenth century on, parliament had come to the side, or to rescue the people from the tyranny of the Crown. So, for the colonists to take on parliament, was to create a confusing situation for the British. They thought the Americans must be Tories. That is to say not good wigs. Wigs being the people who support parliament and support liberty, support all of the things that parliament did, especially the glorious revolution of 1608.
So, the Americans are forced into a very peculiar position, in terms of fish culture, where they’re opposing the bastion freedom that is parliament, and are tying themselves to the Crown, which is the source of purity. And from the British point of view, it was totally confusing. North said, “They’re just a bunch of Tories, these Americans, what are they doing?”
Brian Smith:
But at some point though, in this narrative, a concept of sovereignty resting in the people emerges to replace the sovereignty of the king. When did that happen?
Gordon Wood:
Well, you see, when we get to the Federal Constitution, there’s opposition from the anti-federalists, and large opposition. The country was really divided. In fact, if they’d been a poll taken, the Constitution needed. It was an unusual situation. This was an unanticipated creation, this federal government. And the anti-federalists raised the issue of sovereignty. They said, “Look, sovereignty says, the doctrine says, there must be in every state, one final supreme lawmaking authority. And we can look at this constitution and its supremacy clause, that’s going to be the Federal Congress, and our states, which will be reduced to nothing, to measuring the height of fence posts and laying out roads. And that’s all states will have to do. This is intolerable for us.”
And it was a very embarrassing argument for the Federalists, which is the name that the supporters of the Constitution took. They were awkward. They said, “Well no, we’re going to divide power. Some power’s going to be given to the federal government, some powers will remain with the states.” But the anti-federalists, just the way the British had, just came back over and over again, so there must be in every state. And they invoked this doctrine of sovereignty.
And it’s James Wilson, who is, I think, relatively unrecognized founder, very smart Scotsman, who had immigrated to the colonies as a young man. He was a graduate of St. Andrews in Scotland. He comes up with a solution. He says, “We’re going to relocate sovereignty in the people.” Now, this isn’t just meaning that powers all derive from the people. And all good wigs in England believe that, saying that this actual law making authority, final supreme power, rests in the people. And they’re doling out bits and pieces of it to the different agents, some to the federal government agents, and some to the states. And once that idea, he did it in a lecture he gave out of doors, and then also repeated it in the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention. And once Madison and others heard this, they said, “Ah, that’s all we need. That solves all of our problems, all of our intellectual problems, this doctrine of sovereignty resting in the people.” And so, that’s the origins of it.
Brian Smith:
So, that’s really interesting. But prior to this, you say that one of the other great innovations in the Americas, is the move to written constitutionalism. And while these don’t exactly evolve in parallel, it is this very unprecedented move, which you’re right to point out. What do you think drove this desire to move away from the unwritten English Constitution and into a written series of documents that we could use to understand our political process and its parameters?
Gordon Wood:
Well, it’s true. The English did not have a written constitution, and still don’t have. It’s very unusual. I guess Israel’s the only other state with England that doesn’t have a… But England did have a lot of written documents, and starting with Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, and all the way up through the Bill for Habeas Corpus, and then of course the Bill of Rights of 1688, ’89, those were all written documents. You write things down when you’re not sure that when you want to make them clear, and assert their strength by writing them down. That’s why we have written contracts. And so, that’s what they thought they were doing.
And of course, England briefly had a written constitution in the middle with the Cromwell, and the little experiment in Republicanism that England had. But there was nothing like what took place in 1776. Each of those states wrote its constitution. And it’s hard for us to understand, but the states were independent. They had a significance for each [inaudible 00:18:29], the people who lived in the states, that’s difficult for us to appreciate. We think of the states more as ministry of units. But think back, Massachusetts had a hundred and some years, 50 years of history. Virginia had the same thing. So, when Jefferson said, “My country,” he didn’t think of the United States as his country. It was Virginia. And when John Adams said, “My country,” he meant Massachusetts.
So, you have to think of the articles of consideration, which is the first treaty that holds these states together, like the EU today. We know there’s an EU, but how much do people think of themselves as Europeans? Frenchmen think of themselves as French, and the Germans say, “Well, we’re Germans.” But there is this thing called the EU, and to some extent they are aware of a Europeanness, and that’s a best way of understanding how Americans thought of themselves. They did talk about themselves as Americans, but they also knew that they were the citizens of Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, or Virginia. And so that first tree, like the EU, the articles were based on a treaty of these 13 states coming together. And each of them had its own constitution. So, moving to the Federal Constitution 10 years later, was something nobody anticipated, 1776, not a single person even raised the idea of such a strong federal or national government in 1776.
Brian Smith:
No, you do a really interesting presentation in the book of how surprised everyone was that it didn’t come out of imminent crisis, that we built this new constitution. It wasn’t quite accidental the way you presented, but it acquired a force of its own. Can you say more about some of the peculiarities in that moment of-
Gordon Wood:
There were some federal problems, that is national problems that they worried about. This new federal government that they created, the articles of Confederation. The Congress that was created had no power to tax or to regulate international trade. Essentially, you have to think of the first Congress that was created with the articles, as giving the power of the Crown. It was a substitute for the Crown. And since the Crown couldn’t tax, and the Crown by itself could not regulate trade, neither could this new Congress. And everyone by I think by the mid 1780s, was ready to give the Congress the powers to tax at least a 5% impost, or tax on imports and the power to regulate international trade because it was getting confusing. Massachusetts was passing its own navigation acts that were hurting Connecticut or Rhode Island, and it just didn’t make sense to have each state having its own navigation system, national trade.
So, people are ready to give those powers to this Congress. But there is a larger problem, a much more potent problem that Madison put his fingers on. And of course, he’s not alone in this. That the state legislatures were running amuck. They had been given such power in the state constitutions, especially the lower houses, the Houses of Representatives, and they were passing all kinds bills, multiple… As Madison said in his working paper, “The Vices of the Political System of the United States.” It’s a very important document. Madison worked it out in April, or in the early spring of 1787, in preparation for the convention.
And he lists the problems that the states are. He said, “The multiplicity, the mutability, that is the changeability, and the injustice of all these state laws.” The mutability laws were being passed by annually elected legislatures with turnover of 50%.And so, every legislature had new laws to pass. And it was just getting confusing. Judges didn’t know what the law was. The multiplicity, there were more laws passed with Madison, in the 10 years since the Declaration of Independence, than in the entire colonial period. So he said, “We’ve got to do something about that.” But more important, these laws were unjust, and he focused on the paper money laws that were being passed, that hurt creditors. And I tried to explain why that was so harmful to the elite.
And any ways, those are the forces that are building up. And when the convention is called, most people assume they’re just going to add a couple of powers to the… That is the power to tax, and the power to regulate international trade, to give those powers to the Congress. But instead, Madison comes to the convention, and he’s backed of course by the Virginia delegation, and lots of other elite members of the society with a whole new proposal, the Virginia plan. He’s not going to amend the articles, he’s going to scrap them and substitute something entirely different. And this is a shock to many people when they find out it’s not the articles revised. It’s an entirely new constitution, giving an immense amount of power to the Congress and the President. So, that’s the background to what happened in 1787.
Brian Smith:
So, it seems like part of the realization that the members of the Constitutional convention had, was this sense that we need a higher law to reign in all of these challenges. But you also say, elsewhere in the book, that democracy itself is a problem under the articles. To what degree was this? Were these ideas like the Virginia plan, an attempt to reassert a republicanism against democracy?
Gordon Wood:
Well, that’s one way of putting it. The things that Madison complained about, which he calls the excesses of democracy, are in some sense things that we’ve come to take for granted. The idea that the politicians should be concerned about what their constituents think, and the horse trading, the things that… He served for a short time in the Virginia legislature. He was appalled at what was happening. And yet, the things that he complained about were, we considered the stuff of democracy. He had an idealized notion, and some of them… And the others did as well, an idealized notion of democracy. Now, we must be clear about this, the revolution was conducted not to create democracy, but to preserve liberty. That’s what they talked about. They never said in the serial crisis, we’re trying to create a democratic society. They thought that a democratic House of Representatives, which is where the democracy resided, that is the lower house, is important to preserve liberty, because the people would look after their liberty, but they didn’t think that was the goal of the revolution. That’s just a means towards the goal, which is the preservation of liberty.
Liberty is being threatened by democracy. The democratic behavior of these lower houses in the decade following 1776, they suggest all kinds of solutions. First they say, “Well, maybe we could make the Senate more stronger, or the judges could use their authority to curb the lower houses.” But in the end they feel that that would not be satisfactory. And so, they go to this new federal government that’s going to be a way of curbing state legislatures.
Democracy starts as a technical term of political science, referring only to, it means ruled by the people, and the people are confined to the lower house. That’s why it’s called the House of Representatives. The Senates were not democratic bodies. They’re supposed to be Republican counterpart to the House of Lords. They represent the wisdom of the society, and if you will, the aristocracy of the society. And then the governors, and of course this is John Adams who has a tremendous influence on the state constitution make. The governors represent the sort of monarchical element. They go back to Greek philosophy. Aristotle talked about the monarchical, the aristocratical, and the democratical parts of government. And you try to get a balance among these three powers. That’s what’s the thinking that goes into the original state constitution.
The House of Representatives is the only body which is democratic, because the thinking of democracy is a technical term of political science. 10 years later, by the time you get to the Federal Constitution, democracy is already emerging in the way we think of it as the whole system, as a set of values that goes way beyond the organization of government. And we’re left with this awkward terminology when we talk about the House of Representatives. What do we mean by that? Is that the only body that’s representative? Are the Senate’s not representative?
So, we have to think about how these parties emerged. And by the time you get to the federal government, the Federalists are arguing that all parts of the government are representative of the people. And so, that the House of Representatives has no monopoly of representation. These are fantastic changes in a relatively short time, that get us into more or less the way we think about it today. And they’re already talking in terms that we would about democracy being the values of the whole system. And the people are everywhere in the system. So, in 10 years time, there’s a radical transformation of language and of meaning, that gets us into a world that we are very familiar with, it’s our world, in a 10 years time.
Brian Smith:
So, one of the most provocative things you say at the very beginning of the book, is that one of the very special things that happens in this time period is the forging of an identity through these documents. Because we’re not a blood and soil people. We’re not a people of one ethnic origin. We don’t have a singular tradition that’s handed down to us, but we do have these documents. So, can you say a touch about how out of this messy set of compromises, and this coalescing of understanding, which you just summarized for me, how do you think this notion of documents like the Constitution and the Declaration as a basis of identity, started to be formed in the early republic?
Gordon Wood:
Well, because they were quite aware that they will not single people. Even by 1790 when the first census, the English were of course the largest ethnic party, but they were Scots, they were Irish, they were French, and there were lots of Germans, some Swedes. They recognized immediately that they were diverse people. And John Adams wrote about it. He says, “We’re a hodgepodge. How can we ever hold together?” He was kind of pessimistic about it.
There were 19 different religions, and there were just as many different ethnicities. And he says, “This is not a nation.” So, there’s some awareness of the diversity, nothing like what we have today, of course, where the whole world is in the United States. But even then it was diverse. And so, they actually clinged to the documents as the adhesive force. And the person of course who cements that in our history is Lincoln. He comes to really, [inaudible 00:32:01] the Declaration of Independence. That that is the thing that pulls us together. But there was an awareness even back at in 1780s and 90s, that constitution, especially after the Federal Constitution, the constitution becomes the king, so to speak, and the thing holding us, this very diverse people, together. And I think that’s still true today.
Brian Smith:
Since you brought up the challenge of ever-increasing diversity, I wanted to talk a bit about slavery. And in particular, the way in which it’s become this central focusing project for the understanding of American history in recent years, both through the new history, histories of capital and the 1619 Project. Can you talk a little bit about how you think we ought to think in terms of slavery? And then, maybe we can talk more about where these movements are taking history in general.
Gordon Wood:
Well, slavery has existed in many states. Probably every culture at some time or another had slaves for thousands of years. And it was existing, especially in the new world, in Latin America, and in the United States at the time of the American Revolution. And it still exists in some parts of Africa and the Middle East, [inaudible 00:33:35] slavery. But there wasn’t anything quite like the plantation slavery that existed in Latin America and in the South.
But the recent argument about the 1619 Project, that the protection of slavery was the source of the American Revolution. The data they used, the evidence they used is Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of November, 1775. Lord Dunmore was the Royal Governor of Virginia. He’s sitting in his ship, his British ship in Chesapeake Bay, in a desperate situation militarily. So, he issues a proclamation offering all of the slaves in Virginia, come to the Crown side and they’ll be free. About 300 slaves respond at that time. And this is the argument that underlies the claim by the 1619 Project, that slavery was the source of the American Revolution. That the fear of losing slaves was the source of revolution. It’s just not true. Virginia was already in a revolutionary situation. The rebels were in complete control of the government, which is why the governor is sitting out on his ship in Chesapeake Bay. He’s been ousted, and the rebels are in control. There was no fear of their slaves being taken away by the British that led to their revolution. Their revolution was based on they wanted to control their own destiny in Virginia.
But the other side of it is, of course, in 1776, the Northern states launched the first, and perhaps in modern times, the only effort at legalizing or abolition, that is the abolition of slavery. This is the first instance history of the world, of the modern world at least, in which a system of government which legalized slavery did away with it. Now, there’s not great numbers, about 50,000 slaves held in the northern states, but it is a momentous time. It’s a monumental event to have the first abolition movement in the world. And it had a great impact on the new world. You can imagine what the Southerners who weren’t prepared to free their slaves, and the Latin American observers of this felt. This was an ominous sign. If the northern states, still country, the United States could abolish slavery, then it could be abolished anywhere.
And so, from that moment on, the defenders of slavery thrown onto the defensive. Slavery essentially had never been tackled in this way before. There had been isolated instances of people opposing slavery, [inaudible 00:36:41] Samuel Sewall in 1700 wrote something against slavery, and Quakers had spoken out against it. But where slavery had been previously legitimate, no state had ever abolished it. So in that sense, the American Revolution was a momentous attack on slavery, and it divided the country. The Virginians were caught in the middle. There were lots of people in Virginia who were eager to abolish slavery, Jefferson being the most important. But it was too overwhelming for them. They had a population of about, it was about 40% of the population of Virginia, which was by far the largest state, 200,000 slaves in the state. It was just too much for them. But if they could have gotten over that, it would’ve been incredible.
But Virginians were eager to move against slavery, at least in 1776. It all changed later, especially with the Saint-Domingue, the Haitian rebellion in 90s, that frightened Virginians and frightened Southerners in general. But what’s interesting and never mentioned by the 1619 Project, is that in 1791, the College of William and Mary, the trustees, were all slave holders. Wealthy men, give an honorary degree to Grandville Sharp who was the leading British abolitionist at the time. Now, why would they do that if they were frightened of abolition? Why would they board an honorary degree to a British abolitionist?
Many Virginians were eager to try to move against slavery, and Washington was confident that slavery would die. They had been growing tobacco. Tobacco is a very soil exhausting crop. And so as a consequence, many of them, including Washington, were moving to the growing of wheat grain, and grain and wheat do not need the labor that tobacco did. And so, they had excess amount of slaves. Washington was renting his slaves out to people in Norfolk and in Richmond. And that’s the first step in their minds towards waged labor. If you’re renting your slaves out, then somehow or other they got the thinking that slavery is on its last legs, and is going to die a natural death. Now, they couldn’t have been more wrong. They live with the illusion that slavery was slowly going to end itself. It compete with free labor, and they live with that illusion. And there are dozens of people saying the same thing around the time of the federal constitution, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. They live with the illusions. Of course, we live with illusions too. We just don’t know what they are.
So, that’s the context. And so, it’s a very mixed thing. And certainly the 1619 Projects has got it backwards. What’s important is that the American Revolution makes abolition legitimate for the first time in history. The abolition of slavery by those northern states, eight northern states, is extraordinary. Even if the numbers are small, there are only 50,000 involved. It nonetheless is a momentous time to have that movement. And so, I think the American Revolution has to be seen as the beginning of anti-slavery. We are the first state to move against the slave trade when the United States moves against it. And we have this abolition movement in all of the northern states. Now of course, the southern states don’t, and that’s the problem. And of course, the division of the sections led to the Civil War.
Brian Smith:
So I wonder, do you think that one of the great problems that the 1619 Project brings to light, is the degree to which the American history discipline has just been derailed into thinking in terms of contemporary politics? Is that the central problem that we’re facing right now?
Gordon Wood:
I think it’s bigger than that. I think we’re in the midst of a monumental period in our history. And this is elite driven, but we’re trying to atone for the 400 years of both slavery and segregation, that blacks in our society have suffered. And there’s just no doubt of it. The story is bad enough, the true story is bad enough, and there’s no reason to have to invent things the way Hannah Jones and the New York Times have invented, because the true story is bad enough. There’s just no doubt that slavery existed for several centuries. And then even with the north freeing of the slaves, the northern whites were unable to give equality to the blacks. And blacks had their rights taken away. Not immediately, but slowly. And by 1840, no new state that was brought into the union after 1840 gave blacks any rights of citizenship. And it’s really not until the 1960s that blacks have achieved any civic equality.
So, that bitterness and that guilt felt by white elites is driving these… So, the 1619 Projects is just an aspect. In some sense, one small aspect of this larger thing that’s running through our society, and will have to run its course. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but we are going through an immensely important and monumental period in our history.
Brian Smith:
So, how do you think the history profession or other branches of the humanities or social sciences, can helpfully address this in a way that doesn’t rend the society apart?
Gordon Wood:
It’s gotten politicized and that’s not healthy. Well, all I can say is, I think the humanities are hurting. They’ve lost their confidence. I just give you a statistic. Over the last 10 years, Harvard, 10 years ago, 30% of the graduating class majored in the humanities. Now that’s down to 10%. And if that continues, if that tendency continues, first of all, a lot of colleges will begin abolishing the humanities. They won’t have the students. The students are looking for subjects that have monetary returns, finance or something in computer science. There are more computer science majors at Harvard than majored in all of the humanities put together. So, these are the tendencies of our time. And small colleges are either going out of business, or they’re being forced to abolish the humanities courses, because there’s no student in.
So, there’s a really larger problem going on, that’s bigger than just the 1619 Project. And there’s no doubt that American history and history in general is hurting, and it’s become politicized. Of course, it’s always been to some extent the problems. When Charles Beard wrote his book in 1913, it created sensation, and there was a lot of… Going through a very important period in our history. Can be depressing, but a 100 years ago, if you remember, there was an equal crisis in some sense with the new immigrants coming in. People really frightened of all these Eastern Europeans polls, and then the Italians and Jews all coming in. And it looked like the society could not absorb these people. They were too different from the previous immigrants. And there was a crisis. And remember what John Dos Passos, the novelists said, in light of the Sacco & Vanzetti trial, “All right then, we are two nations.” And it looked bad. We were a nation of native one and… Of 13%, about the same percentage of foreign born as we have today in 1920.
But we weren’t two nations then. But we were able to assimilate. And by 50 years later, intermarriage became the secret, and that crisis was averted. We didn’t remain two nations. And you remember AV’s Irish Rose, and the whole series of intermarriage. And that I think is the secret to our problem right now. I read somewhere that black-white intermarriage is up to 17%. Jews and non-Jews are marrying almost close to 50%. Asians and non-Asians are marrying 50%. That will ease the problems we worry about. But anyway, we are in a midst of a tremendous crisis. And I think it’s said by the guilt and the realization that blacks have suffered, and they’re not fully assimilated in some sense. It’s almost like new immigrants. They came in the 1960s, so to speak, even though they’ve been here from the very beginning. So, it’s a very difficult time for us, and we have to have hope or the patience to see it through.
Brian Smith:
Well, thank you for your time. I think this is an excellent place to end. Gordon Wood’s book, Power and Liberty, is available anywhere books are sold. And thank you for your time.
Gordon Wood:
Thank you.
Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Paul Edgar joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss the picture of statesmanship we can glean from an extended ancient inscription on a statue of Idrimi of Alalakh, discovered in 1939. Edgar has written on the Idrimi inscription for Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy.
Brian A. Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
Rebecca Burgess:
Hello and welcome on this Groundhog Day to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law and liberty. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty, Acting Director of the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy Project, visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, and a few other professional odds and ends.
I mentioned Groundhog Day for its iconic Bill Murray movie reference, because when it comes to questions of statesmanship and international relations, the more we today want to describe everything as unprecedented, the more we find things are in fact very much precedented. On that theme, joining me today and highlighting the point, by talking about the Idrimi statue inscription, one of our most ancient accounts of statesmanship in near
Eastern history, perhaps the earliest complete biography of a political figure that has been discovered to date, is Paul Edgar of the Clement Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. Welcome, Paul.
Paul Edgar:
Hi, Rebecca. Thanks very much for having me here, and thanks for your work on a number of things. We've had the opportunity, fortunate opportunity to work together on essays, and I've read your public writing frequently over the past several years, so thank you.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh. Well, thank you. Well, I need to tell our listeners a bit about your honors and glories, Paul, on theme with our subject, and I promise I won't be chiseling this in stone while we're speaking. Paul is an Associate Director of the Clement Center, and he holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern languages and Cultures from the University of Texas. He's also a philologist of several ancient languages and has studied, notably at Tel Aviv University.
But even more intriguing, before entering academia. Paul served more than 22 years as an Infantry Officer in the US Army, beginning as a platoon leader in Korea, and eventually finding his way to slightly sunnier pastures perhaps in Italy, hotter pastures in North Africa, and more recently serving in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, also in Afghanistan with his final assignment being in Jerusalem. Is that correct? I have that all right?
Paul Edgar:
Correct. Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Perfect. So when I say that on today's podcast we have a traveler from an antique land in the east, it is the truth. And Paul, I was wondering if you would mind if I did some personal indulgence and quoted Shelly's poem that is on theme?
Paul Edgar:
Sure. No, no. That's a great idea.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh, great... So, "I met a traveler from an antique land, who said-, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read. Which yet survived, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing besides remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sand stretch far away."
So of course, as you know Paul, that's Shelly talking about Ozymandias, the Pharaoh. But speaking of words on pedestals, I wonder if you can start us off by telling us about how important these old statues and inscriptions are, how they keep on ending up in British museums and us finding them in British museums and studying them there, how Shelly was responding that too in his day, but today, why relatively recently we've only come to the history and the knowledge of this statue?
Paul Edgar:
Well, I find these things interesting. And I think they're academically important. I think they can certainly enrich what we already understand classically and practically about politics, politics broadly. Most of what I'll talk about today is international politics, but international diplomacy. So I don't think they offer anything new, but I think they do offer confirmations of these things that we know more traditionally from the era of Herodotus and Thucydides and forward. I think historically our understanding of history and political history especially begins there, right around the 5th century or 6th century B.C. You could turn, I say, perhaps we could turn to some biblical text, but for the past couple 100 years at least, people have been hesitant to do that, certainly the last 100, 150 years. But our understanding of these things begins with those texts that remained with us from the time they were written all the way through today.
And Napoleon, I'm sure many other things involved, but Napoleon's tour, I think the whole tour was unexpected. He went to Egypt and then got stranded there in Egypt and thus worked his way up the coast of Palestine, Syria. But when he did that, one of the things that occurred, or one of the things that corresponded with it was this sensation in Western Europe with things that are older, things that we would call pre-class, that predate Herodotus and Thucydides. And so, there was a rush of archeological exploration, much of that private, privately funded, or perhaps a kind of a combination, private and state-funded. But there was a whole lot of private involvement, private money involved. And as a consequence, we discovered so much. We discovered Sumerian texts and Acadian texts, thousands of years of these things. Much of that is what we would call accidental. In other words, we may have stumbled upon archives, formal archives, but our discovery of it isn't complete. We happen to find particular archives for different reasons, perhaps the ones that were easiest to find at the time. And there's probably still a lot more that we still don't know about 'cause it's all been covered up.
But anyway, so we discover this material. A lot of it is quinoa form tablets. Most of those tablets would be receipts, but a whole lot of them, our diplomatic texts, they're diplomatic letters, they're treaties. And over the last 200, 150, 200 years, academics have had an opportunity to, one, sort of crack the code. 'Cause most of these languages we didn't know. We didn't even know they existed. So we had to decipher the script, decipher the language, and then organize the language and better understand it. And all of that, of course, takes a long time, for a number of reasons.
But I think we're in a position now where we can take a lot of those texts and tell a bigger story, tell a more complete story of the eras that we would consider early iron. So this is much of what is captured in the early part of the Hebrew Bible and Samuel, Kings. But then much earlier than that, and the example today comes from what we call the late Bronze Age, an era from about 1,600 to 1,200 or 1,100 B.C. And the statue that we're talking about is kind of towards the latter end of that in the 15th century, about 1,450 B.C.
Rebecca Burgess:
So who would, for context for some of our listeners, who would've been the big figures? Egypt comes to mind, of course, lots of people know some of the pharaohs, around which Pharaohs or reign would this might have been?
Paul Edgar:
So, I'm a little hesitant to... Sometimes I'm hesitant to talk super precisely, but in this case, I think we're at least fairly safe to say, or we're certainly safe to say that the prominent Egyptian pharaoh during Idrimi's rule, again, we'll introduce Idrimi a little bit more or in more detail here shortly, but during Idrimi's rule, the two pharaohs that would've been in power were probably Thutmose III and Amenhotep II. Both of whom, mainly Thutmose III, but both of them conducted military expeditions up into this area. Now those tended to be short-lived, they didn't establish, they didn't colonize, or try to annex anything up there, but there were certainly prominent military expeditions up there. So, they did reach the area of Idrimi and certainly would've been known to Idrimi and those that he socialized with.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it. So speaking in a mix of both biblical peoples and terms and modern day, we're talking about, with Idrimi, the area of modern Turkey, Syria-
Paul Edgar:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
... the Canaanites, right? Am I getting that right? That's about where it?
Paul Edgar:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's more than fair. So, where Idrimi's statue was found and where Alalakh, his city or city-state was located is in modern Turkey, but it's barely in modern Turkey. It's just on the other side of the Orontes River there near Syria. I would still refer to it as Syria. I know that some, depending on how people conceive of these places, some people may disagree with me or even disagree with me sharply. But I consider this northern Syria, not in the sense of the modern state, but geographically.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it. Got it. And then, this particular statue was found somewhere around the 1930s, correct?
Paul Edgar:
Right. So it was a British expedition. Leonard Woolley, who was now, wouldn't be considered a modern or a high-tech archeologist in our day. Archeology has come a long, long way in the past couple of 100 years. They're still coming along, they have a long way to, but they've come a long way. But for his time, Woolley was very precise about what he was doing. He had certain methodologies of controlling a dig and being very methodological about it, and accounting for where, how things were found, and the state it was found in. He did that as well, or better than anybody who had preceded him.
Rebecca Burgess:
So I think, when you first brought this topic to my attention, what I was most, maybe arrested by is, speaking as a political theorist, we often get a little caught up in the words in texts and thinking about learning actual political theory in a sense, but politics and diplomacy from a statue and an inscription on a statue, I found absolutely breathtaking, but also fascinating. And the physical statue itself is very intriguing and unique. Could you describe a little bit about it? From my understanding, the writing is actually on parts of the body of the king. And even with a little thought or speech bubble coming out of one side of his mouth.
Paul Edgar:
Correct. So the statue, and anybody can look this up, you can look this up on Wikipedia, there's a really nice picture of Idrimi and the inscription on Wikipedia. The British Museum, of course, has a couple of good photos as well. But actually, those photos are a little bit without context, 'cause they have a black background, and so you think it might be huge. And it's not, it's three and a half feet tall, and it's made of, I may be mispronouncing it, but I think I'm using the right term, magnesite. So this is a light, perhaps a light gray or a white stone, at least two pieces, the throne and then Idrimi, the figure of Idrimi himself are two separate pieces. There may be more than that, but certainly two primary pieces. And then the inscription, which is in cuneiform form, in a language that we normally refer to as peripheral Acadian, is written across the statue and begins in one spot, and they use about all of the, not all, but most of the surface area of the statue to write this inscription, which again, is, in summary, a political biography of Idrimi's life.
Rebecca Burgess:
Great. And of course, the king himself could have inscribed this, but we actually know that it was not himself, it was a scribe, correct-
Paul Edgar:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
... who actually wrote it?
Paul Edgar:
Yeah. The scribe mentions himself twice in the inscription and mentions one of Idrimi's sons in the inscription as well. So I think it's fair to say, unless we learned something else later, I think it's fair to say that this inscription was written by his family and political colleagues or servants shortly after his death. The end of the inscription is essentially an epitaph that is very, very formulaic, often found on the tombs of royalty at the time. So, while Woolley found this, it was not set, it doesn't appear to have been set near Idrimi's tomb, but it may have been set near where he was buried originally, or certainly, it was at the very least sculpted and then inscribed on in order to commemorate his life after he had died.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it. Well, maybe we should turn to that life now, and you can tell us a little bit about who this enigmatic and clearly charismatic individual was, I think. And we'll get to, of course, feel free to actually invoke the inscription, which you have translated in an original translation. But he mentions that, oh, his older brothers didn't quite get the political situation, but he, the younger brother did. So anyway, he seems like a little bit of a character, so feel free to tell us a little bit about him.
Paul Edgar:
According to this inscription, his biography, and we imagine that certainly there was a lot more involved, and the biography is also uniformly positive. So there were probably some rough points, and Idrimi probably had some rough points, even if he was a fantastic leader. There were probably some failures, which the inscription does not capture. So with those as maybe some disclaimers, it's fair to say that a summary of his life, he begins his life, his family lives in Aleppo, so this is Syria proper. There's no argument. It's not whether it's Syria or Southeastern Turkey, but his family is in Aleppo. And for a number of different reasons, we believe that it's a prominent family. It may have been the most prominent family. His father may have ruled in Aleppo. The inscription hints that he probably did, but something bad happens, and we're not sure what. I translate it as a calamity. But in short, the word words mean a bad thing happened.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
So something bad happened to his family in Aleppo, and they fled to Emar, which was just about 50 miles to the east of Aleppo. And Emar is a famous archeological dig today with lots of Akkadian texts. So they lived in Emar, where his mother was from, and it appears that everybody was content. Perhaps they were still disappointed with whatever happened in Aleppo, but they were sufficiently content to stay in Emar, except for Idrimi, who, as he grew older, became more and more incensed at what had happened and thought that it was his job to sort of reestablish the family name and family rule in some sense. And in order to do that, he leaves Emar. He goes south into Canaan, which we would consider probably somewhere near the northeastern border of modern Lebanon with Syria today, somewhere in that area.
He runs into a number of refugees from Aleppo that recognized him and knew of his father. He stays there, and just sort of consolidates power or waits for the right moment, sails up the coast with some soldiers, and then sails north, probably about a hundred miles up the coast, probably crosses what would be the mouth of the Orontes River there in the northern Mediterranean. He disembarks and finds more people, apparently, that recognize him, and he sets up in a town that in English we'll just call Alalah. And as I mentioned, that is right there about a mile away from the current Syrian border on or near the Orontes River, so where Syria, the Orontes, and Turkey sort of meet, right about there. And that's about 50 miles to the west of Aleppo. So Idrimi did not travel more than about 100 or perhaps at the most, 150 miles from his birthplace of Aleppo.
So he successfully sets up in Alalah with what I'm going to call a domestic constituency, but that's not enough. He needs to also gain support from one of the great powers, and in this case, the correct sort of candidate, the best ally to make amongst the great powers was Mitanni, the kingdom of Mitanni, which Mitanni is roughly analogous to what we might consider today is Kurdistan, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it.
Paul Edgar:
If we drew borders for Kurdistan, it would be right about where Mitanni is located. The other great power, so we mentioned Egypt, Mitanni is the second, and the third would be Hatti. The Hittites, I think many people are more familiar with that name, the Hittites, the people of Hatti, which was largely in modern-day Turkey. So those were the three powers that he could have relied on and he chose to try to make peace with Mitanni, is successful, and then he also has to defend against some other local rulers. He is successful and, again, sort of consolidates power after that and seems to have a successful period of rule.
Rebecca Burgess:
This doesn't sound at all familiar to more recent events in the Middle East. Regional powers, fights for powers, families, and tribal societies.
Paul Edgar:
Right. Now, I said that was a summary, but that was probably more than a summary. I apologize.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. No, no, that's really helpful. I mean, it's fascinating, and I know you'll probably read some from your translation, but just the opening, "I am Idrimi, the son of Ilim Ilimma," if I sang that right, "the servant of the storm god, Hepat and Ishtar, this lady of Aleppo, my lady." I think it's fascinating, this kind of chronology that he brings in. But then also this question of the gods and from our Thucydides Herodotus and everyone where we're so familiar with this question of how do we ground political power and how does a king ground it with his people?
Paul Edgar:
Right. This is a great question. This is a really great question, and I think sometimes our answers are too narrow. For example, when we look at the Hebrew Bible, if you look at the Hebrew Bible, there's a lot involved, but on the surface, we tend to summarize it as if Yahweh approves of a leader, then the leader is approved and successful, and well, that would certainly be true. It wouldn't be the only thing that's true. There's a lot of work that goes into political leadership, both good and bad examples of political leadership. There's more than simply a supernatural stamp of approval. And we see this in Herodotus. One of the things, the first time that I read Herodotus, what really occurred to me is how infrequently he refers to a kind of divine providence or divine approval, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
It comes up here and there, but lots of other things come up as well. And I think that's what we're seeing here. We see in one part an appeal to divine authority, but then you see somebody who's really rolled up his sleeves and done the hard work of leadership as well. And I want to say, I guess I should caveat that a little bit and say, I don't know whether Idrimi was tyrannical or was magnanimous or what, I don't know. But either way, the fact is that political leadership is hard work, and he apparently put in that hard work in order to be somewhat successful.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. He mentioned seven years where he released birds, and inspected lambs. He is waiting for apparently auspicious signs, but that he also mentions, and then he built ships, and he gathered soldiers and he kind of networked it sounded like, to get more soldiers and to impress his older brothers, so his family or his tribe. And then as often happens in movements, success breeds success, almost. And it seems like the more people come the more successful he is. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost seemed like to actually reestablish his city, he relied mostly on the recognition of the king of Mitanni.
Paul Edgar:
Right. So let's do this. I'll read an excerpt that sort of captures-
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, perfect.
Paul Edgar:
... this, what I'll call the domestic constituency or part of it. And then we'll read a part that, this seven years that you referred to, I'll read that part and we can comment on both of those. So we'll start with line 27. So this will cover his period in Canaan amongst the Habiru, which, if we have time we can talk about whether or not that is related to the word Hebrew. But it's an interesting and divisive question. Anyways, this captures his period in Canaan and then his sailing up the coast and establishing his initial rule, at least in Alalah. So lines 27 through 42. And I'm not sure if you decide you want to link the article where I translated this, and I'm not trying to pump up my article, but if it's helpful for listeners, then they can refer to it.
Okay. So "I settled in the company of the Habiru for a long time, for seven years. I released birds, I inspected lambs. Then in seven years' time, the storm god returned to me, so I built ships." And let me pause here. So to me, this is really interesting, and I won't comment on this at length, but those of us that are involved in either studying or actually as a practitioner in some sort of political or military leadership, we are always looking for certainty, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
We want to know that what it is we're doing is right, whether in a moral sense or practical sense, that this is actually going to work. And while Idrimi's search or search for certainty, we might consider more rudimentary than ours, he's inspecting the entrails of lambs or the kidneys of lambs and releasing birds, it's still the same sort of activity, this quest for certainty in political leadership and decision making.
Okay, so picking up again, "I loaded formations of nullu soldiers," and just as a comment, we don't know what nullu is. It's a special type of soldier, but we're not sure what, but he loaded soldiers onto ships. "I approached the land of the Mukishim by way of the sea," so he is sailing up the Mediterranean coast, "and I arrived on dry land in front of the Hazi mountains. I went up and my land heard me. They brought goats and sheep before me. And within one day, as one person, the people of the land of Nihi and Amaae and the land of Mukish and the city of Alalakh, my city," at least subsequently it becomes a city, "they had turned to me." So I'll pause there.
So there's an earlier passage that captures an earlier part of his, again, what I'm calling a domestic constituency. And here is part of where it grows and is more formally established, and its legitimacy, at least internally, internal to this particular political body, seems to be firm, seems to be established. Of course, his legitimacy in the eyes of others who are relevant is an open question. So we'll move on to that next. So the next section I'll read comes from lines 43 through 60. And this is where Idrimi essentially seeks the approval, the acceptance of the king of Mitanni who here is, whose name is Parattarna. We actually have evidence of Parattarna from other sources.
We also have, so your listeners know, we have evidence of Idrimi from other sources as well. So we have a lot of confidence that we're not talking about Hercules or Aries or anything like that. This was a real person and a real political figure, and so was Parattarna, the king of Mitanni. Now, in the text, it actually refers to him as the king of the armies of the Hurrians. But for our purposes, the king of the armies of the Hurrians and the king of Mitanni are one and the same. Okay. So, "Moreover, for seven years, Parattarna, the strong king, the king of the armies of the Hurrians, made an enemy of me. In the seventh year, I wrote to Parattarna the king, the king of Ummanmanda, and I spoke about the services of my fathers when my fathers found relief before them, the Hurrians, and about our other affairs concerning the kings of the armies of the Hurrians, and it was good. Thus, they established between them a strong oath. Right now, he's referring to, whether it's fictive or whether it's real I don't know, but a previous relationship between his people, presumably his father, and the people of Mitanni.
Rebecca Burgess:
Just a slight pause here, if I'm getting it right. He starts out kind of as an enemy, right, of Parrattarna?
Paul Edgar:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
And something happens where they're able to establish it's either a draw, maybe a military draw?
Paul Edgar:
Well, I doubt it's a military draw.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, probably.
Paul Edgar:
What I anticipate is that, and I'm a hundred percent, this is supposition. I think it's an educated supposition, of course. But I anticipate that Parrattarna conducted annual military expeditions and that some of them would've gone near or through Alalakh.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it.
Paul Edgar:
And perhaps as this new upstart city state or king over a city-state that had existed prior, Parrattarna did not immediately accept his kingship. And perhaps for many reasons, either lack of interest, lack of time, or other priorities, didn't just smash him. I anticipate that the kingdom of Mitanni would've had no problem smashing Alalakh had it wanted to. But in any case, they were at enmity with one another, or at least Parrattarna was towards Idrimi. And after a period of time, it says seven years, and I think that it could be exactly seven years or this could be sort of a trope in that over this arduous complete period of time where I was working to establish relations, finally, my appeal got through to Parrattarna, and he realized the great wisdom of it and accepted me, and then he made me king. I mean, that's what he says, is that in fact he doesn't really refer to himself as a king until Parrattarna, the king of Mitanni, accepts him or acknowledges him as king.
He refers to this prior relationship, and let's just sort of take that at face value, is it's an appeal to history, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right?
Paul Edgar:
Perhaps it's true history too, but it's an appeal to history that, hey, we had great relations before. Now I was in Aleppo, or my family was in Aleppo, not Alalakh, but we had great relations before, so why don't we pick up where we left off there, and apparently it was convincing. The strong king listens to what I said about the services of my predecessors and the oath that was between them, and he respected the oath, he received my greeting gift for the sake of the matter of the oath, and for the sake of our services, a lost house, in other words, Idrimi's house, returned to him. Now the domestic constituency is supportive. The great power of the region, or perhaps the most relevant great power of the region, is supportive. You'd think that that would be sufficient, but it's not. But wait, there's more.
Rebecca Burgess:
Never enough, exactly. Yes. Oh, I love that next line. It just says, they piled up my ancestors upon the ground so I piled up theirs upon the ground. In battle, I piled them high.
Paul Edgar:
Right. So I ended with a lost house returned to him. Right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Mm-hmm.
Paul Edgar:
Just two or three sentences later, this actually, he then has to fight in order to defend his kingship from those around him. I spoke to him regarding my case, so he is still talking again about Mitanni, and regarding my loyalty, and then I was king. This is the first time that he pronounces himself as, or mentions himself as, a king. The very next sentence, "The kings to my right and my left rose up against me against Alalakh, for he had made me equal like them." They attack him because they don't want another peer. Right? They preferred it when Idrimi was not a king recognized by Mitanni. Somehow this is a threat. Perhaps it's a threat because they're allied with somebody else or it's just a threat because they're allied with Mitanni and less of Parrattarna's attention if there's another vassal king to demand attention and resources or whatever else.
This part of my translation I have taken from a former professor of mine, a mentor of mine, Ed Greenstein, the scholar who co-wrote the article with him, and is from the early seventies, this translation, David Marcus. We don't know what these next lines say. It's very difficult to translate for a number of reasons. But I thought that Greenstein and Marcus did a really great job of understanding the material of the era, what kind of material literature of the ancient near East would've been consistent with this, and essentially cut and paste material actually from the Hebrew Bible that they think captures what these words or what these lines probably say, something along those lines. But I think it does at least capture the intensity of the fight between Alalakh and the kings around them. "Just as they piled up my ancestors upon the ground, so I piled theirs upon the ground, and in battle, I piled them high."
Idrimi Has to defend himself against the small powers around him. Only once he's done that, so he's now established a domestic constituency that is stable, he's established a relationship with a great power that is stable, and then he battles his neighbors until they leave him alone and are convinced that, okay, either we accept him because he is proven himself, or we can't overcome him, or the cost of overcoming him is too great, and so we're going to stop here and call it good. And then he can relax a little bit.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Right, where he mentions that he had an estate built. Finally, after all of his enemies are at least neutralized, he had an estate, so he made his throne like the throne of kings and built up his city essentially. I thoroughly enjoy the kind of listing of duties than of what he needs to do as a good king. Or we might imagine him or his scribe saying here's how and why he was a good king. He settled the inhabitants, he says. In that next part, those lines, 81 and 91, he established the lands. He made my cities equal to those that came before me. Then there's once again, the establishment of cults of religion, of the gods of Alalakh, and then prayers and offerings. There's kind of this, as there was at the beginning, a throwback or a recall of tradition and religion and the gods. And then he says he passes it to the hand of his son, so he kind of gives through the narrative of succession. I don't know, is there anything about that that particularly caught your attention?
Paul Edgar:
Well, there's two things, the two big things that stand out to me in these next couple of paragraphs. You've mentioned one of them, what we might call the stability of the international system, enables him, provides him the bandwidth to do these domestic, these kinds of necessary domestic tasks of improving the lot of his people. That's maybe the best way to capture it, improving the lot of his people. He refers to essentially settling those that came with him, settling or improving the prosperity of those who already lived there. And then there's a kind of an oblique reference to settling those who had not been settled. In other words, if you imagine this may be a little bit of a stretch, okay, so bear with me on this, but if you imagine that the prosperity is so great that of course due to Idrimi's greatness and great leadership, that even those who were previously homeless suddenly had a home, that they were settled.
Think of it in those terms. And then again, that may be a little bit of a stretch, that these people who were not settled could have been either migrants or nomads, people who were intentionally moving from place to place because that just was their way of life. But in some way, people who had not yet settled, settled because of the prosperity and stability that he brought to that region. That stands out.
But then another, and this is worth looking at briefly is line 64. "I took an army and I went up against the land of Hatti, and I seized seven cities." And he named those cities. He seized those cities, and he destroyed other ones, "And the land of Hatti did not assemble or come before me, so I did what I wanted." I'll read one more sentence. "I took them captive. I took their property, their goods, their pilferable things. I divided it for the army, my auxiliaries, my brothers, and my friends."
If you are a friend of Mitanni, you're automatically an enemy of Hatti, and this passage makes him sound very bold. And perhaps he was, perhaps he was. My guess is that these were really, really minor incursions to an area that might be kind of minorly considered Hittite. Because again, if just like Mitanni could have wiped out Alalakh at any minute, any time they wanted, well, Hatti's relative power right now is sort of a little bit reduced from what it was previously and what it will be in another 50 years or so. Hatti still could have wiped out Alalakh without much of a problem.
But essentially, he's demonstrating his loyalty to Mitanni. This is some bravado here and some bragging about himself, but it also does help place him, again, in what we would call the international system of the era. He's aligned with one and against another and actually takes military action against the enemy of the king that supports him.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right, and kind of showing us in, so to speak, real time the balancing and the tensions and the dynamics at play in keeping, you've mentioned the three constituencies, but really that larger, kind of we go up another level to look down on the situation of how anytime statesmen, kings, are thinking about keeping their people and their kingdom safe, they have to think about all of the different pressures from outside and how they balance those things. You had mentioned certainty and the great desire for certainty and the real lack of it in the international system and how this is what we see. You know? Yeah.
Paul Edgar:
Stable does not mean fixed, right? Stable means stable enough, but it's always changing, and in a sense, it's always hanging by a thread. Right? Even a stable, strong international system is arguably hanging by a thread, and if that thread breaks, and of course, I'm speaking to you here as a conservative, one who would argue generally for stability rather than rapid change, if that thread of stability breaks, the amount of suffering by everybody, by all classes and all people and all races, the amount of suffering is absolutely immense.
Rebecca Burgess:
There's a real role it seems to me in this inscription for agency and understanding how Idrimi himself thought about that and what we can learn from it. I mean, in the essay that we keep on referring to, and I'll mention it again at the end, which you wrote about this inscription, you mentioned that Idrimi shows that circumstances are not determinative, and neither is geography because Idrimi started out in one situation, he fell from whatever that was to a really bad situation, and somehow managed to be in a better place with supposedly a line of succession after him strong enough that he could curse on his stone anyone who dared to move it, but then also blesses anyone who read it and prayed on his behalf. I think that agency is really interesting, especially when we think of, today, how we look at international relations, foreign policy, and even diplomacy and statesmanship.
Paul Edgar:
Right. And there are a few things this makes me think of, and I'll try to riff off that thought.
Thinking about Idrimi himself, my dissertation is about this whole era, the political history of this whole era, and so I've read tons of treaties and diplomatic letters. Primarily those are between a great power, either Hatti, Mitanni, or Egypt, and a small power, a town or a city-state like Alalakh, or Aleppo or Ugarit which is on the coast of Syria today, within Alawite Syria. And lots of other examples. Jerusalem, right? Jerusalem, pre-Israelite Jerusalem, there are letters from the ruler of Jerusalem to the Pharaoh of the era.
So having read all of these things, the agreements and the treaties, those formal treaties and what we might consider informal treaties, just arrangements that are not written, for each of the small powers, there are similarities, of course, there are similarities, but there are also really prominent differences. In other words, there was negotiating room, and there was room to maneuver, politically speaking. And when a great power was breathing down your neck, even breathing down your neck demanding that you become a vassal, when you agreed to that, there was still some negotiating room so that your particular treaty with that great power might be more or less onerous or provide for more or less liberty, for your own rule for your people, et cetera.
So there is agency within circumstances, within the systematic forces that compel small powers or great power... Whoever. But usually, we're referring to small powers. The political forces in action force small powers to do whatever. Usually, it's something negative or bad. And there's some truth to that. I don't want to say that political forces don't exist. But those political forces, as well as the decisions made by rulers of small powers, are decisions made by human beings. Because of that, this is not a physical tsunami that has no capacity to change course, it is headed for its target, and it's just going to crush it. Because these are decisions made by human beings, there naturally is room for differences, for negotiation, for agency, for room to do things a little bit differently.
I think that does come out, not just in this text, but in the political history of this whole era.
Rebecca Burgess:
It's a little irreverent of me to say, but Francis Fukuyama's end of history would not have quite worked at this point, would it have? So much history before them, right?
But on that note, for me, what I found so valuable amongst many things of your scholarship about this is just seeing how this one inscription, this one statue, gives us a snapshot in time of one moment in a protracted regional struggle, or a struggle for regional hegemony in this particular area, in a situation in which you did have three larger powers, Egypt, Hatti, and Mitanni. And how, clearly they're not robber barons, but littler kings managed and maneuvered within that, and how close that feels to us today, but also how the themes...
In reading this inscription, I get a little bit of Machiavelli, what is it that always motivates the sons when their patrimony is taken away? But not everyone is. Idrimi is, but his brothers aren't. But then you have this question of the gods, which we mentioned, and tradition. The question of what is it that makes a good king and political legitimacy, your own people looking at you or not? But then... And I think you mentioned this at the beginning, and maybe as we end or wrap up, which sadly I guess we have to do, there's so much to say, is what is the other value of this text?
Just as a classic source, you could say, I think there's something that you've mentioned before about it because it's not Thucydides because it's before Thucydides and doesn't have the weight of all the commentary around that, perhaps it helps us clarify some things. But then when we think, say, to today's practitioners and students, what might be one or two things you would love for them to think about in looking at this text?
Paul Edgar:
I think there are a number of things, but let me go with this because based on a question someone asked me yesterday, I started thinking about this. Now I don't want to draw too much of a parallel between Syria then and Syria now, but I think there are some things that we can at least discuss.
Somebody asked me yesterday, why President Assad is failing where Idrimi, in the same region, not all of Syria, but in the same region, appears to have been successful. And you don't pick up a lot of humility from Idrimi from his inscription, but I think reading between the lines, this is somebody who was willing to compromise, willing to recognize that he couldn't have everything that he wanted. And since he couldn't have everything... This is Machiavelli, right? Don't go for the ideal. It's in that sense, it's Machiavellian. Don't pursue the ideal if it doesn't work. Pursue what will work. And because it works, then in this sense, the state has its own morality.
Now, I know some Machiavelli scholars may not like my use of that. I think it's true, I think it's part of what he's saying. He says more than that. But I would say that Idrimi, in his willingness to compromise with Barattarna, knowing that he couldn't be a king without the recognition of a great power, was willing to give up what might have been his ideal situation to establish something that actually worked. Not just for him, but for those around him. And we could say that Assad is doing exactly not that. Now, Assad certainly has the support of a mediocre power, but he's not recognizing all of the legitimate political equities within, heck, I'll say it now, what was really formerly the state of Syria.
And if he had at some point... preferably much earlier than today, but if he had at some point recognized that there's some legitimacy here that others have or legitimate concerns and that if he could imagine that whatever his ideal is is not going to come to fruition, and be willing to explore the space in between and what might be a reasonable settlement... Now I know that's a lot to claim or demand from him in an area like that, but that's the leader's responsibility, right? That's the leader's responsibility. That's the J-O-B.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
But he's not willing to do it, and so as a result, he's impoverished from it, and everybody around him is impoverished from it. And impoverished doesn't really capture it. Calamity doesn't capture it, right? It's many calamities put together.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
But I think that's one of those things that we could say that we get a little bit from Machiavelli or we see from Machiavelli in his political theory, but then we could say we see it in practice as well. So this is an example of what I would consider, okay, well this is something that we could point at and say, "This is a classical characteristic of good political leadership or successful political leadership." Because we don't just see it because Machiavelli projects it upon our society from the 15th century CE forward, but we see it in a text that predates him, that predates all of the Greek political philosophers and political historians. So it's a reinforcement, right? It's not teaching us something new, it's simply reinforcing things that we ought to know already.
Rebecca Burgess:
Do you think that it's in that vein... Really, really wrapping up. Do you think it's in that vein of teaching and transmitting to future generations these themes of what it takes, what's at stake, of statesmanship and caring for our people, that Idrimi included that?
And I know there are tropes of this, but what's so fascinating, at the end of his statue he invokes blessings and curses. "Whoever tears down this statue of mine, may his descendants be subdued, may heaven curse his name, may the underworld take his descendants." It goes on. But then also, "May the gods of heaven and earth cause the scribe who wrote this to live, guard him, be good to him." And then, "May those who read this and look on this," the words, "may they pray on my behalf." And I wonder if this is really early recognition of the importance of transmitting the lessons of kingship and statesmanship.
Paul Edgar:
I think so. I think there's certainly some hubris there, right? "Remember me." But also it's more than that. It's more than that. And even there have actually been some scholars that have done a little bit of work on that. Actually, one of the mistakes that scholars sometimes make with this particular text is that they look at it and they pick out one single thing that to them is the most important and say, "This is why Idrimi wrote this," or, "This is why his political colleagues and family wrote this." It's probably for a whole bunch of reasons. But this certainly is one of them, that there would be some kind of continuity. That there would be a going forward and not simply a reversal of political stability.
Now again, I don't want to say whether he was a tyrant or not, because sometimes political stability is worth shattering. But if you shatter it, make sure you know exactly what you're doing. More often than not, I think it's this idea of communicating the value of what has been done, what has been established, and not reversing it or not undoing it, because your perspective from things at this moment may be very different than the other side of chaos.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Well, hopefully, this podcast has not been chaos or chaotic for our listeners. But thank you again, Paul, for your insights and scholarship on both statesmanship ancient and relevant to today, but also the Idrimi statue inscription. It's not something I think many of our listeners or many within political theory know about, and it's definitely worthwhile as an example of the real physical object speaking both through space and time, more than the Ozymandias statue perhaps.
So once again, thank you. That was Paul Edgar, who is the Associate Director of the William P. Clements Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin, and I am Rebecca Burgess, a Contributing Editor at Law and Liberty, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Many thanks to all our listeners.
Paul Edgar:
Thanks very much.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Paul Edgar joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss the picture of statesmanship we can glean from an extended ancient inscription on a statue of Idrimi of Alalakh, discovered in 1939. Edgar has written on the Idrimi inscription for Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy.
Brian A. Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
Statue of Idrimi (British Museum)Rebecca Burgess:
Hello and welcome on this Groundhog Day to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law and liberty. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m a Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty, Acting Director of the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy Project, visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, and a few other professional odds and ends.
I mentioned Groundhog Day for its iconic Bill Murray movie reference, because when it comes to questions of statesmanship and international relations, the more we today want to describe everything as unprecedented, the more we find things are in fact very much precedented. On that theme, joining me today and highlighting the point, by talking about the Idrimi statue inscription, one of our most ancient accounts of statesmanship in near
Eastern history, perhaps the earliest complete biography of a political figure that has been discovered to date, is Paul Edgar of the Clement Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. Welcome, Paul.
Paul Edgar:
Hi, Rebecca. Thanks very much for having me here, and thanks for your work on a number of things. We’ve had the opportunity, fortunate opportunity to work together on essays, and I’ve read your public writing frequently over the past several years, so thank you.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh. Well, thank you. Well, I need to tell our listeners a bit about your honors and glories, Paul, on theme with our subject, and I promise I won’t be chiseling this in stone while we’re speaking. Paul is an Associate Director of the Clement Center, and he holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern languages and Cultures from the University of Texas. He’s also a philologist of several ancient languages and has studied, notably at Tel Aviv University.
But even more intriguing, before entering academia. Paul served more than 22 years as an Infantry Officer in the US Army, beginning as a platoon leader in Korea, and eventually finding his way to slightly sunnier pastures perhaps in Italy, hotter pastures in North Africa, and more recently serving in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, also in Afghanistan with his final assignment being in Jerusalem. Is that correct? I have that all right?
Paul Edgar:
Correct. Yeah.
Rebecca Burgess:
Perfect. So when I say that on today’s podcast we have a traveler from an antique land in the east, it is the truth. And Paul, I was wondering if you would mind if I did some personal indulgence and quoted Shelly’s poem that is on theme?
Paul Edgar:
Sure. No, no. That’s a great idea.
Rebecca Burgess:
Oh, great… So, “I met a traveler from an antique land, who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read. Which yet survived, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing besides remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sand stretch far away.”
So of course, as you know Paul, that’s Shelly talking about Ozymandias, the Pharaoh. But speaking of words on pedestals, I wonder if you can start us off by telling us about how important these old statues and inscriptions are, how they keep on ending up in British museums and us finding them in British museums and studying them there, how Shelly was responding that too in his day, but today, why relatively recently we’ve only come to the history and the knowledge of this statue?
Paul Edgar:
Well, I find these things interesting. And I think they’re academically important. I think they can certainly enrich what we already understand classically and practically about politics, politics broadly. Most of what I’ll talk about today is international politics, but international diplomacy. So I don’t think they offer anything new, but I think they do offer confirmations of these things that we know more traditionally from the era of Herodotus and Thucydides and forward. I think historically our understanding of history and political history especially begins there, right around the 5th century or 6th century B.C. You could turn, I say, perhaps we could turn to some biblical text, but for the past couple 100 years at least, people have been hesitant to do that, certainly the last 100, 150 years. But our understanding of these things begins with those texts that remained with us from the time they were written all the way through today.
And Napoleon, I’m sure many other things involved, but Napoleon’s tour, I think the whole tour was unexpected. He went to Egypt and then got stranded there in Egypt and thus worked his way up the coast of Palestine, Syria. But when he did that, one of the things that occurred, or one of the things that corresponded with it was this sensation in Western Europe with things that are older, things that we would call pre-class, that predate Herodotus and Thucydides. And so, there was a rush of archeological exploration, much of that private, privately funded, or perhaps a kind of a combination, private and state-funded. But there was a whole lot of private involvement, private money involved. And as a consequence, we discovered so much. We discovered Sumerian texts and Acadian texts, thousands of years of these things. Much of that is what we would call accidental. In other words, we may have stumbled upon archives, formal archives, but our discovery of it isn’t complete. We happen to find particular archives for different reasons, perhaps the ones that were easiest to find at the time. And there’s probably still a lot more that we still don’t know about ’cause it’s all been covered up.
But anyway, so we discover this material. A lot of it is quinoa form tablets. Most of those tablets would be receipts, but a whole lot of them, our diplomatic texts, they’re diplomatic letters, they’re treaties. And over the last 200, 150, 200 years, academics have had an opportunity to, one, sort of crack the code. ‘Cause most of these languages we didn’t know. We didn’t even know they existed. So we had to decipher the script, decipher the language, and then organize the language and better understand it. And all of that, of course, takes a long time, for a number of reasons.
But I think we’re in a position now where we can take a lot of those texts and tell a bigger story, tell a more complete story of the eras that we would consider early iron. So this is much of what is captured in the early part of the Hebrew Bible and Samuel, Kings. But then much earlier than that, and the example today comes from what we call the late Bronze Age, an era from about 1,600 to 1,200 or 1,100 B.C. And the statue that we’re talking about is kind of towards the latter end of that in the 15th century, about 1,450 B.C.
Rebecca Burgess:
So who would, for context for some of our listeners, who would’ve been the big figures? Egypt comes to mind, of course, lots of people know some of the pharaohs, around which Pharaohs or reign would this might have been?
Paul Edgar:
So, I’m a little hesitant to… Sometimes I’m hesitant to talk super precisely, but in this case, I think we’re at least fairly safe to say, or we’re certainly safe to say that the prominent Egyptian pharaoh during Idrimi’s rule, again, we’ll introduce Idrimi a little bit more or in more detail here shortly, but during Idrimi’s rule, the two pharaohs that would’ve been in power were probably Thutmose III and Amenhotep II. Both of whom, mainly Thutmose III, but both of them conducted military expeditions up into this area. Now those tended to be short-lived, they didn’t establish, they didn’t colonize, or try to annex anything up there, but there were certainly prominent military expeditions up there. So, they did reach the area of Idrimi and certainly would’ve been known to Idrimi and those that he socialized with.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it. So speaking in a mix of both biblical peoples and terms and modern day, we’re talking about, with Idrimi, the area of modern Turkey, Syria-
Paul Edgar:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
… the Canaanites, right? Am I getting that right? That’s about where it?
Paul Edgar:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s more than fair. So, where Idrimi’s statue was found and where Alalakh, his city or city-state was located is in modern Turkey, but it’s barely in modern Turkey. It’s just on the other side of the Orontes River there near Syria. I would still refer to it as Syria. I know that some, depending on how people conceive of these places, some people may disagree with me or even disagree with me sharply. But I consider this northern Syria, not in the sense of the modern state, but geographically.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it. Got it. And then, this particular statue was found somewhere around the 1930s, correct?
Paul Edgar:
Right. So it was a British expedition. Leonard Woolley, who was now, wouldn’t be considered a modern or a high-tech archeologist in our day. Archeology has come a long, long way in the past couple of 100 years. They’re still coming along, they have a long way to, but they’ve come a long way. But for his time, Woolley was very precise about what he was doing. He had certain methodologies of controlling a dig and being very methodological about it, and accounting for where, how things were found, and the state it was found in. He did that as well, or better than anybody who had preceded him.
Rebecca Burgess:
So I think, when you first brought this topic to my attention, what I was most, maybe arrested by is, speaking as a political theorist, we often get a little caught up in the words in texts and thinking about learning actual political theory in a sense, but politics and diplomacy from a statue and an inscription on a statue, I found absolutely breathtaking, but also fascinating. And the physical statue itself is very intriguing and unique. Could you describe a little bit about it? From my understanding, the writing is actually on parts of the body of the king. And even with a little thought or speech bubble coming out of one side of his mouth.
Inscription on the Idrimi statue (British Museum)Paul Edgar:
Correct. So the statue, and anybody can look this up, you can look this up on Wikipedia, there’s a really nice picture of Idrimi and the inscription on Wikipedia. The British Museum, of course, has a couple of good photos as well. But actually, those photos are a little bit without context, ’cause they have a black background, and so you think it might be huge. And it’s not, it’s three and a half feet tall, and it’s made of, I may be mispronouncing it, but I think I’m using the right term, magnesite. So this is a light, perhaps a light gray or a white stone, at least two pieces, the throne and then Idrimi, the figure of Idrimi himself are two separate pieces. There may be more than that, but certainly two primary pieces. And then the inscription, which is in cuneiform form, in a language that we normally refer to as peripheral Acadian, is written across the statue and begins in one spot, and they use about all of the, not all, but most of the surface area of the statue to write this inscription, which again, is, in summary, a political biography of Idrimi’s life.
Rebecca Burgess:
Great. And of course, the king himself could have inscribed this, but we actually know that it was not himself, it was a scribe, correct-
Paul Edgar:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
… who actually wrote it?
Paul Edgar:
Yeah. The scribe mentions himself twice in the inscription and mentions one of Idrimi’s sons in the inscription as well. So I think it’s fair to say, unless we learned something else later, I think it’s fair to say that this inscription was written by his family and political colleagues or servants shortly after his death. The end of the inscription is essentially an epitaph that is very, very formulaic, often found on the tombs of royalty at the time. So, while Woolley found this, it was not set, it doesn’t appear to have been set near Idrimi’s tomb, but it may have been set near where he was buried originally, or certainly, it was at the very least sculpted and then inscribed on in order to commemorate his life after he had died.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it. Well, maybe we should turn to that life now, and you can tell us a little bit about who this enigmatic and clearly charismatic individual was, I think. And we’ll get to, of course, feel free to actually invoke the inscription, which you have translated in an original translation. But he mentions that, oh, his older brothers didn’t quite get the political situation, but he, the younger brother did. So anyway, he seems like a little bit of a character, so feel free to tell us a little bit about him.
Paul Edgar:
According to this inscription, his biography, and we imagine that certainly there was a lot more involved, and the biography is also uniformly positive. So there were probably some rough points, and Idrimi probably had some rough points, even if he was a fantastic leader. There were probably some failures, which the inscription does not capture. So with those as maybe some disclaimers, it’s fair to say that a summary of his life, he begins his life, his family lives in Aleppo, so this is Syria proper. There’s no argument. It’s not whether it’s Syria or Southeastern Turkey, but his family is in Aleppo. And for a number of different reasons, we believe that it’s a prominent family. It may have been the most prominent family. His father may have ruled in Aleppo. The inscription hints that he probably did, but something bad happens, and we’re not sure what. I translate it as a calamity. But in short, the word words mean a bad thing happened.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
So something bad happened to his family in Aleppo, and they fled to Emar, which was just about 50 miles to the east of Aleppo. And Emar is a famous archeological dig today with lots of Akkadian texts. So they lived in Emar, where his mother was from, and it appears that everybody was content. Perhaps they were still disappointed with whatever happened in Aleppo, but they were sufficiently content to stay in Emar, except for Idrimi, who, as he grew older, became more and more incensed at what had happened and thought that it was his job to sort of reestablish the family name and family rule in some sense. And in order to do that, he leaves Emar. He goes south into Canaan, which we would consider probably somewhere near the northeastern border of modern Lebanon with Syria today, somewhere in that area.
He runs into a number of refugees from Aleppo that recognized him and knew of his father. He stays there, and just sort of consolidates power or waits for the right moment, sails up the coast with some soldiers, and then sails north, probably about a hundred miles up the coast, probably crosses what would be the mouth of the Orontes River there in the northern Mediterranean. He disembarks and finds more people, apparently, that recognize him, and he sets up in a town that in English we’ll just call Alalah. And as I mentioned, that is right there about a mile away from the current Syrian border on or near the Orontes River, so where Syria, the Orontes, and Turkey sort of meet, right about there. And that’s about 50 miles to the west of Aleppo. So Idrimi did not travel more than about 100 or perhaps at the most, 150 miles from his birthplace of Aleppo.
So he successfully sets up in Alalah with what I’m going to call a domestic constituency, but that’s not enough. He needs to also gain support from one of the great powers, and in this case, the correct sort of candidate, the best ally to make amongst the great powers was Mitanni, the kingdom of Mitanni, which Mitanni is roughly analogous to what we might consider today is Kurdistan, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it.
Paul Edgar:
If we drew borders for Kurdistan, it would be right about where Mitanni is located. The other great power, so we mentioned Egypt, Mitanni is the second, and the third would be Hatti. The Hittites, I think many people are more familiar with that name, the Hittites, the people of Hatti, which was largely in modern-day Turkey. So those were the three powers that he could have relied on and he chose to try to make peace with Mitanni, is successful, and then he also has to defend against some other local rulers. He is successful and, again, sort of consolidates power after that and seems to have a successful period of rule.
Rebecca Burgess:
This doesn’t sound at all familiar to more recent events in the Middle East. Regional powers, fights for powers, families, and tribal societies.
Paul Edgar:
Right. Now, I said that was a summary, but that was probably more than a summary. I apologize.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah. No, no, that’s really helpful. I mean, it’s fascinating, and I know you’ll probably read some from your translation, but just the opening, “I am Idrimi, the son of Ilim Ilimma,” if I sang that right, “the servant of the storm god, Hepat and Ishtar, this lady of Aleppo, my lady.” I think it’s fascinating, this kind of chronology that he brings in. But then also this question of the gods and from our Thucydides Herodotus and everyone where we’re so familiar with this question of how do we ground political power and how does a king ground it with his people?
Paul Edgar:
Right. This is a great question. This is a really great question, and I think sometimes our answers are too narrow. For example, when we look at the Hebrew Bible, if you look at the Hebrew Bible, there’s a lot involved, but on the surface, we tend to summarize it as if Yahweh approves of a leader, then the leader is approved and successful, and well, that would certainly be true. It wouldn’t be the only thing that’s true. There’s a lot of work that goes into political leadership, both good and bad examples of political leadership. There’s more than simply a supernatural stamp of approval. And we see this in Herodotus. One of the things, the first time that I read Herodotus, what really occurred to me is how infrequently he refers to a kind of divine providence or divine approval, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
It comes up here and there, but lots of other things come up as well. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here. We see in one part an appeal to divine authority, but then you see somebody who’s really rolled up his sleeves and done the hard work of leadership as well. And I want to say, I guess I should caveat that a little bit and say, I don’t know whether Idrimi was tyrannical or was magnanimous or what, I don’t know. But either way, the fact is that political leadership is hard work, and he apparently put in that hard work in order to be somewhat successful.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. He mentioned seven years where he released birds, and inspected lambs. He is waiting for apparently auspicious signs, but that he also mentions, and then he built ships, and he gathered soldiers and he kind of networked it sounded like, to get more soldiers and to impress his older brothers, so his family or his tribe. And then as often happens in movements, success breeds success, almost. And it seems like the more people come the more successful he is. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but it almost seemed like to actually reestablish his city, he relied mostly on the recognition of the king of Mitanni.
Paul Edgar:
Right. So let’s do this. I’ll read an excerpt that sort of captures-
Rebecca Burgess:
Yes, perfect.
Paul Edgar:
… this, what I’ll call the domestic constituency or part of it. And then we’ll read a part that, this seven years that you referred to, I’ll read that part and we can comment on both of those. So we’ll start with line 27. So this will cover his period in Canaan amongst the Habiru, which, if we have time we can talk about whether or not that is related to the word Hebrew. But it’s an interesting and divisive question. Anyways, this captures his period in Canaan and then his sailing up the coast and establishing his initial rule, at least in Alalah. So lines 27 through 42. And I’m not sure if you decide you want to link the article where I translated this, and I’m not trying to pump up my article, but if it’s helpful for listeners, then they can refer to it.
Okay. So “I settled in the company of the Habiru for a long time, for seven years. I released birds, I inspected lambs. Then in seven years’ time, the storm god returned to me, so I built ships.” And let me pause here. So to me, this is really interesting, and I won’t comment on this at length, but those of us that are involved in either studying or actually as a practitioner in some sort of political or military leadership, we are always looking for certainty, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
We want to know that what it is we’re doing is right, whether in a moral sense or practical sense, that this is actually going to work. And while Idrimi’s search or search for certainty, we might consider more rudimentary than ours, he’s inspecting the entrails of lambs or the kidneys of lambs and releasing birds, it’s still the same sort of activity, this quest for certainty in political leadership and decision making.
Okay, so picking up again, “I loaded formations of nullu soldiers,” and just as a comment, we don’t know what nullu is. It’s a special type of soldier, but we’re not sure what, but he loaded soldiers onto ships. “I approached the land of the Mukishim by way of the sea,” so he is sailing up the Mediterranean coast, “and I arrived on dry land in front of the Hazi mountains. I went up and my land heard me. They brought goats and sheep before me. And within one day, as one person, the people of the land of Nihi and Amaae and the land of Mukish and the city of Alalakh, my city,” at least subsequently it becomes a city, “they had turned to me.” So I’ll pause there.
So there’s an earlier passage that captures an earlier part of his, again, what I’m calling a domestic constituency. And here is part of where it grows and is more formally established, and its legitimacy, at least internally, internal to this particular political body, seems to be firm, seems to be established. Of course, his legitimacy in the eyes of others who are relevant is an open question. So we’ll move on to that next. So the next section I’ll read comes from lines 43 through 60. And this is where Idrimi essentially seeks the approval, the acceptance of the king of Mitanni who here is, whose name is Parattarna. We actually have evidence of Parattarna from other sources.
We also have, so your listeners know, we have evidence of Idrimi from other sources as well. So we have a lot of confidence that we’re not talking about Hercules or Aries or anything like that. This was a real person and a real political figure, and so was Parattarna, the king of Mitanni. Now, in the text, it actually refers to him as the king of the armies of the Hurrians. But for our purposes, the king of the armies of the Hurrians and the king of Mitanni are one and the same. Okay. So, “Moreover, for seven years, Parattarna, the strong king, the king of the armies of the Hurrians, made an enemy of me. In the seventh year, I wrote to Parattarna the king, the king of Ummanmanda, and I spoke about the services of my fathers when my fathers found relief before them, the Hurrians, and about our other affairs concerning the kings of the armies of the Hurrians, and it was good. Thus, they established between them a strong oath. Right now, he’s referring to, whether it’s fictive or whether it’s real I don’t know, but a previous relationship between his people, presumably his father, and the people of Mitanni.
Rebecca Burgess:
Just a slight pause here, if I’m getting it right. He starts out kind of as an enemy, right, of Parrattarna?
Paul Edgar:
Right.
Rebecca Burgess:
And something happens where they’re able to establish it’s either a draw, maybe a military draw?
Paul Edgar:
Well, I doubt it’s a military draw.
Rebecca Burgess:
Yeah, probably.
Paul Edgar:
What I anticipate is that, and I’m a hundred percent, this is supposition. I think it’s an educated supposition, of course. But I anticipate that Parrattarna conducted annual military expeditions and that some of them would’ve gone near or through Alalakh.
Rebecca Burgess:
Got it.
Paul Edgar:
And perhaps as this new upstart city state or king over a city-state that had existed prior, Parrattarna did not immediately accept his kingship. And perhaps for many reasons, either lack of interest, lack of time, or other priorities, didn’t just smash him. I anticipate that the kingdom of Mitanni would’ve had no problem smashing Alalakh had it wanted to. But in any case, they were at enmity with one another, or at least Parrattarna was towards Idrimi. And after a period of time, it says seven years, and I think that it could be exactly seven years or this could be sort of a trope in that over this arduous complete period of time where I was working to establish relations, finally, my appeal got through to Parrattarna, and he realized the great wisdom of it and accepted me, and then he made me king. I mean, that’s what he says, is that in fact he doesn’t really refer to himself as a king until Parrattarna, the king of Mitanni, accepts him or acknowledges him as king.
He refers to this prior relationship, and let’s just sort of take that at face value, is it’s an appeal to history, right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Right?
Paul Edgar:
Perhaps it’s true history too, but it’s an appeal to history that, hey, we had great relations before. Now I was in Aleppo, or my family was in Aleppo, not Alalakh, but we had great relations before, so why don’t we pick up where we left off there, and apparently it was convincing. The strong king listens to what I said about the services of my predecessors and the oath that was between them, and he respected the oath, he received my greeting gift for the sake of the matter of the oath, and for the sake of our services, a lost house, in other words, Idrimi’s house, returned to him. Now the domestic constituency is supportive. The great power of the region, or perhaps the most relevant great power of the region, is supportive. You’d think that that would be sufficient, but it’s not. But wait, there’s more.
Rebecca Burgess:
Never enough, exactly. Yes. Oh, I love that next line. It just says, they piled up my ancestors upon the ground so I piled up theirs upon the ground. In battle, I piled them high.
Paul Edgar:
Right. So I ended with a lost house returned to him. Right?
Rebecca Burgess:
Mm-hmm.
Paul Edgar:
Just two or three sentences later, this actually, he then has to fight in order to defend his kingship from those around him. I spoke to him regarding my case, so he is still talking again about Mitanni, and regarding my loyalty, and then I was king. This is the first time that he pronounces himself as, or mentions himself as, a king. The very next sentence, “The kings to my right and my left rose up against me against Alalakh, for he had made me equal like them.” They attack him because they don’t want another peer. Right? They preferred it when Idrimi was not a king recognized by Mitanni. Somehow this is a threat. Perhaps it’s a threat because they’re allied with somebody else or it’s just a threat because they’re allied with Mitanni and less of Parrattarna’s attention if there’s another vassal king to demand attention and resources or whatever else.
This part of my translation I have taken from a former professor of mine, a mentor of mine, Ed Greenstein, the scholar who co-wrote the article with him, and is from the early seventies, this translation, David Marcus. We don’t know what these next lines say. It’s very difficult to translate for a number of reasons. But I thought that Greenstein and Marcus did a really great job of understanding the material of the era, what kind of material literature of the ancient near East would’ve been consistent with this, and essentially cut and paste material actually from the Hebrew Bible that they think captures what these words or what these lines probably say, something along those lines. But I think it does at least capture the intensity of the fight between Alalakh and the kings around them. “Just as they piled up my ancestors upon the ground, so I piled theirs upon the ground, and in battle, I piled them high.”
Idrimi Has to defend himself against the small powers around him. Only once he’s done that, so he’s now established a domestic constituency that is stable, he’s established a relationship with a great power that is stable, and then he battles his neighbors until they leave him alone and are convinced that, okay, either we accept him because he is proven himself, or we can’t overcome him, or the cost of overcoming him is too great, and so we’re going to stop here and call it good. And then he can relax a little bit.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Right, where he mentions that he had an estate built. Finally, after all of his enemies are at least neutralized, he had an estate, so he made his throne like the throne of kings and built up his city essentially. I thoroughly enjoy the kind of listing of duties than of what he needs to do as a good king. Or we might imagine him or his scribe saying here’s how and why he was a good king. He settled the inhabitants, he says. In that next part, those lines, 81 and 91, he established the lands. He made my cities equal to those that came before me. Then there’s once again, the establishment of cults of religion, of the gods of Alalakh, and then prayers and offerings. There’s kind of this, as there was at the beginning, a throwback or a recall of tradition and religion and the gods. And then he says he passes it to the hand of his son, so he kind of gives through the narrative of succession. I don’t know, is there anything about that that particularly caught your attention?
Paul Edgar:
Well, there’s two things, the two big things that stand out to me in these next couple of paragraphs. You’ve mentioned one of them, what we might call the stability of the international system, enables him, provides him the bandwidth to do these domestic, these kinds of necessary domestic tasks of improving the lot of his people. That’s maybe the best way to capture it, improving the lot of his people. He refers to essentially settling those that came with him, settling or improving the prosperity of those who already lived there. And then there’s a kind of an oblique reference to settling those who had not been settled. In other words, if you imagine this may be a little bit of a stretch, okay, so bear with me on this, but if you imagine that the prosperity is so great that of course due to Idrimi’s greatness and great leadership, that even those who were previously homeless suddenly had a home, that they were settled.
Think of it in those terms. And then again, that may be a little bit of a stretch, that these people who were not settled could have been either migrants or nomads, people who were intentionally moving from place to place because that just was their way of life. But in some way, people who had not yet settled, settled because of the prosperity and stability that he brought to that region. That stands out.
But then another, and this is worth looking at briefly is line 64. “I took an army and I went up against the land of Hatti, and I seized seven cities.” And he named those cities. He seized those cities, and he destroyed other ones, “And the land of Hatti did not assemble or come before me, so I did what I wanted.” I’ll read one more sentence. “I took them captive. I took their property, their goods, their pilferable things. I divided it for the army, my auxiliaries, my brothers, and my friends.”
If you are a friend of Mitanni, you’re automatically an enemy of Hatti, and this passage makes him sound very bold. And perhaps he was, perhaps he was. My guess is that these were really, really minor incursions to an area that might be kind of minorly considered Hittite. Because again, if just like Mitanni could have wiped out Alalakh at any minute, any time they wanted, well, Hatti’s relative power right now is sort of a little bit reduced from what it was previously and what it will be in another 50 years or so. Hatti still could have wiped out Alalakh without much of a problem.
But essentially, he’s demonstrating his loyalty to Mitanni. This is some bravado here and some bragging about himself, but it also does help place him, again, in what we would call the international system of the era. He’s aligned with one and against another and actually takes military action against the enemy of the king that supports him.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right, and kind of showing us in, so to speak, real time the balancing and the tensions and the dynamics at play in keeping, you’ve mentioned the three constituencies, but really that larger, kind of we go up another level to look down on the situation of how anytime statesmen, kings, are thinking about keeping their people and their kingdom safe, they have to think about all of the different pressures from outside and how they balance those things. You had mentioned certainty and the great desire for certainty and the real lack of it in the international system and how this is what we see. You know? Yeah.
Paul Edgar:
Stable does not mean fixed, right? Stable means stable enough, but it’s always changing, and in a sense, it’s always hanging by a thread. Right? Even a stable, strong international system is arguably hanging by a thread, and if that thread breaks, and of course, I’m speaking to you here as a conservative, one who would argue generally for stability rather than rapid change, if that thread of stability breaks, the amount of suffering by everybody, by all classes and all people and all races, the amount of suffering is absolutely immense.
Rebecca Burgess:
There’s a real role it seems to me in this inscription for agency and understanding how Idrimi himself thought about that and what we can learn from it. I mean, in the essay that we keep on referring to, and I’ll mention it again at the end, which you wrote about this inscription, you mentioned that Idrimi shows that circumstances are not determinative, and neither is geography because Idrimi started out in one situation, he fell from whatever that was to a really bad situation, and somehow managed to be in a better place with supposedly a line of succession after him strong enough that he could curse on his stone anyone who dared to move it, but then also blesses anyone who read it and prayed on his behalf. I think that agency is really interesting, especially when we think of, today, how we look at international relations, foreign policy, and even diplomacy and statesmanship.
Paul Edgar:
Right. And there are a few things this makes me think of, and I’ll try to riff off that thought.
Thinking about Idrimi himself, my dissertation is about this whole era, the political history of this whole era, and so I’ve read tons of treaties and diplomatic letters. Primarily those are between a great power, either Hatti, Mitanni, or Egypt, and a small power, a town or a city-state like Alalakh, or Aleppo or Ugarit which is on the coast of Syria today, within Alawite Syria. And lots of other examples. Jerusalem, right? Jerusalem, pre-Israelite Jerusalem, there are letters from the ruler of Jerusalem to the Pharaoh of the era.
So having read all of these things, the agreements and the treaties, those formal treaties and what we might consider informal treaties, just arrangements that are not written, for each of the small powers, there are similarities, of course, there are similarities, but there are also really prominent differences. In other words, there was negotiating room, and there was room to maneuver, politically speaking. And when a great power was breathing down your neck, even breathing down your neck demanding that you become a vassal, when you agreed to that, there was still some negotiating room so that your particular treaty with that great power might be more or less onerous or provide for more or less liberty, for your own rule for your people, et cetera.
So there is agency within circumstances, within the systematic forces that compel small powers or great power… Whoever. But usually, we’re referring to small powers. The political forces in action force small powers to do whatever. Usually, it’s something negative or bad. And there’s some truth to that. I don’t want to say that political forces don’t exist. But those political forces, as well as the decisions made by rulers of small powers, are decisions made by human beings. Because of that, this is not a physical tsunami that has no capacity to change course, it is headed for its target, and it’s just going to crush it. Because these are decisions made by human beings, there naturally is room for differences, for negotiation, for agency, for room to do things a little bit differently.
I think that does come out, not just in this text, but in the political history of this whole era.
Rebecca Burgess:
It’s a little irreverent of me to say, but Francis Fukuyama’s end of history would not have quite worked at this point, would it have? So much history before them, right?
But on that note, for me, what I found so valuable amongst many things of your scholarship about this is just seeing how this one inscription, this one statue, gives us a snapshot in time of one moment in a protracted regional struggle, or a struggle for regional hegemony in this particular area, in a situation in which you did have three larger powers, Egypt, Hatti, and Mitanni. And how, clearly they’re not robber barons, but littler kings managed and maneuvered within that, and how close that feels to us today, but also how the themes…
In reading this inscription, I get a little bit of Machiavelli, what is it that always motivates the sons when their patrimony is taken away? But not everyone is. Idrimi is, but his brothers aren’t. But then you have this question of the gods, which we mentioned, and tradition. The question of what is it that makes a good king and political legitimacy, your own people looking at you or not? But then… And I think you mentioned this at the beginning, and maybe as we end or wrap up, which sadly I guess we have to do, there’s so much to say, is what is the other value of this text?
Just as a classic source, you could say, I think there’s something that you’ve mentioned before about it because it’s not Thucydides because it’s before Thucydides and doesn’t have the weight of all the commentary around that, perhaps it helps us clarify some things. But then when we think, say, to today’s practitioners and students, what might be one or two things you would love for them to think about in looking at this text?
Paul Edgar:
I think there are a number of things, but let me go with this because based on a question someone asked me yesterday, I started thinking about this. Now I don’t want to draw too much of a parallel between Syria then and Syria now, but I think there are some things that we can at least discuss.
Somebody asked me yesterday, why President Assad is failing where Idrimi, in the same region, not all of Syria, but in the same region, appears to have been successful. And you don’t pick up a lot of humility from Idrimi from his inscription, but I think reading between the lines, this is somebody who was willing to compromise, willing to recognize that he couldn’t have everything that he wanted. And since he couldn’t have everything… This is Machiavelli, right? Don’t go for the ideal. It’s in that sense, it’s Machiavellian. Don’t pursue the ideal if it doesn’t work. Pursue what will work. And because it works, then in this sense, the state has its own morality.
Now, I know some Machiavelli scholars may not like my use of that. I think it’s true, I think it’s part of what he’s saying. He says more than that. But I would say that Idrimi, in his willingness to compromise with Barattarna, knowing that he couldn’t be a king without the recognition of a great power, was willing to give up what might have been his ideal situation to establish something that actually worked. Not just for him, but for those around him. And we could say that Assad is doing exactly not that. Now, Assad certainly has the support of a mediocre power, but he’s not recognizing all of the legitimate political equities within, heck, I’ll say it now, what was really formerly the state of Syria.
And if he had at some point… preferably much earlier than today, but if he had at some point recognized that there’s some legitimacy here that others have or legitimate concerns and that if he could imagine that whatever his ideal is is not going to come to fruition, and be willing to explore the space in between and what might be a reasonable settlement… Now I know that’s a lot to claim or demand from him in an area like that, but that’s the leader’s responsibility, right? That’s the leader’s responsibility. That’s the J-O-B.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
But he’s not willing to do it, and so as a result, he’s impoverished from it, and everybody around him is impoverished from it. And impoverished doesn’t really capture it. Calamity doesn’t capture it, right? It’s many calamities put together.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right.
Paul Edgar:
But I think that’s one of those things that we could say that we get a little bit from Machiavelli or we see from Machiavelli in his political theory, but then we could say we see it in practice as well. So this is an example of what I would consider, okay, well this is something that we could point at and say, “This is a classical characteristic of good political leadership or successful political leadership.” Because we don’t just see it because Machiavelli projects it upon our society from the 15th century CE forward, but we see it in a text that predates him, that predates all of the Greek political philosophers and political historians. So it’s a reinforcement, right? It’s not teaching us something new, it’s simply reinforcing things that we ought to know already.
Rebecca Burgess:
Do you think that it’s in that vein… Really, really wrapping up. Do you think it’s in that vein of teaching and transmitting to future generations these themes of what it takes, what’s at stake, of statesmanship and caring for our people, that Idrimi included that?
And I know there are tropes of this, but what’s so fascinating, at the end of his statue he invokes blessings and curses. “Whoever tears down this statue of mine, may his descendants be subdued, may heaven curse his name, may the underworld take his descendants.” It goes on. But then also, “May the gods of heaven and earth cause the scribe who wrote this to live, guard him, be good to him.” And then, “May those who read this and look on this,” the words, “may they pray on my behalf.” And I wonder if this is really early recognition of the importance of transmitting the lessons of kingship and statesmanship.
Paul Edgar:
I think so. I think there’s certainly some hubris there, right? “Remember me.” But also it’s more than that. It’s more than that. And even there have actually been some scholars that have done a little bit of work on that. Actually, one of the mistakes that scholars sometimes make with this particular text is that they look at it and they pick out one single thing that to them is the most important and say, “This is why Idrimi wrote this,” or, “This is why his political colleagues and family wrote this.” It’s probably for a whole bunch of reasons. But this certainly is one of them, that there would be some kind of continuity. That there would be a going forward and not simply a reversal of political stability.
Now again, I don’t want to say whether he was a tyrant or not, because sometimes political stability is worth shattering. But if you shatter it, make sure you know exactly what you’re doing. More often than not, I think it’s this idea of communicating the value of what has been done, what has been established, and not reversing it or not undoing it, because your perspective from things at this moment may be very different than the other side of chaos.
Rebecca Burgess:
Right. Well, hopefully, this podcast has not been chaos or chaotic for our listeners. But thank you again, Paul, for your insights and scholarship on both statesmanship ancient and relevant to today, but also the Idrimi statue inscription. It’s not something I think many of our listeners or many within political theory know about, and it’s definitely worthwhile as an example of the real physical object speaking both through space and time, more than the Ozymandias statue perhaps.
So once again, thank you. That was Paul Edgar, who is the Associate Director of the William P. Clements Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin, and I am Rebecca Burgess, a Contributing Editor at Law and Liberty, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Many thanks to all our listeners.
Paul Edgar:
Thanks very much.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Spencer Klavan joins Brian Smith to discuss his new book, How to Save the West.
Brian Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith and I am the editor of Law & Liberty. With me today is Spencer Klavan, a prominent podcaster who has a new show with DailyWire+ forthcoming, classicist, magazine editor for the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of the new book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. And I’m very glad to have Spencer on the show.
Spencer Klavan:
It’s a delight to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
Brian Smith:
So I have a confession to make, which is that when I first saw the title of the book, I thought to myself, “Not another defense of the canon, this just cannot work.” But read the book, refreshingly, and as I got to know you at a conference recently, I realized that can’t be the book, it won’t be the book. And you say so right away in it. Just so we take anyone who has this apprehension and sort of diffuse this so that they go and buy your book, I wanted you to talk about what led you to write it and what makes you and this book different from the rest of the defending the Western canon genre that we’ve seen so many entries in recently.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah, I really appreciate your asking that question actually, because it’s sort of like that poem, I too, dislike it. I too, dislike poetry. I too, dislike defenses of the cannon or rather I’m sort of bored with them. And I do say upfront in the book that this is not a defense of the canon, full stop. The other thing I say it’s not is it’s not a survey. It’s not the five books you need to read to get a grasp on the whole of Western literature, it’s not a reading list. There are other good books that deal more comprehensively and at greater length with that sort of issue. I mentioned a couple, Jack Rosen, Harold Bloom. Go read those guys if that’s what you want. But what I would say, this book isn’t a survey, it’s not a defense, it’s an offering. And that comes out of the podcast, Young Heretics, which was sort of my first foray into podcasting.
And I kind of began that podcast because it occurred to me that on the right, in the conservative movement, even among well-intentioned liberals who believe in the value of the Western canon, we do a lot of fighting and speaking in defense of the Western canon. “We ought to be teaching Homer. We shouldn’t be scrubbing them from the curriculum. They’re not all just dead white men. Here’s the relevance,” and so forth. And something that I noticed is we spend so much time defending our right to read Homer that we don’t spend all that much time actually reading Homer. It occurred to me the number of people who pound their fists on the table and say, “Oh, the greats of the West, we’ve got to keep them in schools,” I sometimes wonder whether those people are cracking the spines themselves. I mean the point of preserving this stuff is for it to change you, to shape you.
Even if it isn’t erased from the internet, even if it isn’t taken out of the school curriculums, none of that will matter if you personally, wherever you’re with your family, in your home, and your community and you aren’t exposing your soul to the forming influence of these great works. I think that’s what they’re for, I think that’s why they endure. They don’t endure because they’re complicated or fancy or elevated. They don’t endure because they furnish material for PhD thesis. They endure because somewhere in them is wisdom about how to be good at being human. And the reason the subtitle of the book is Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises is I think that the moment we’re in, especially the moment that has been kind of accelerated by digital technology as I discuss a lot in the book, is dredging up and presenting us with a lot of fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being and just what is this universe in which we live?
And there’s an irony, as I say in the introduction, that the great works of the canon, the intellectual inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem is being most maligned precisely when it’s most needed. This is what these resources exist for.
Brian Smith:
And by people who should know better. By people who should know the best.
Spencer Klavan:
In fact, I think in some cases by people who know exactly what they’re doing because of course depriving people of the resources to take a certain degree of ownership over their own spiritual, psychological, political formation is a really good way to present yourself as the savior of the world, right?
Brian Smith:
Absolutely.
Spencer Klavan:
And so the reason it’s a how-to, despite the kind of ostensible grandeur of that title, the ambitions of the book are actually much smaller than you might expect upon cracking the spine. People who open this book expecting some political program to “Fix all Problems,” capital F, capital P, right, those people are going to be disappointed because what you’re going to be finding instead is a selection and offering, as I said, of ways of thinking about these fundamental questions, “Who are we? What are we made out of? Where are we going?” That are time tested, rich and for you. And that’s what I’m offering here.
Brian Smith:
So one thing that really strikes me in what you just said is, maybe giving it to you as an anecdote, so in graduate school, I feel like anytime you’re in graduate school for great books like both of us were, I did political theory, you did classics-
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
There’s a sense in which you’re surrounded by technicians often. Now I was very fortunate in that I had professors that were not technicians, Patrick Deneen, Josh Mitchell, others, but there’s very much a sense of as you professionalize, you’re going to read these books to understand the discourse around these books and what falls out of that kind of training and education I think quite often is the very thing you’re pointing us toward, which is: How do these books form our souls? How do these books offer that guide to life? How might they simply show us, “Don’t go down that door, that’s the Nietzschean door, [that’s a] bad door,” or things like that. So is there a sense in which any of your graduate school experience or your exposure to the academy before you ran screaming informs this book? I mean you don’t explicitly say this, but I had the suspicion that some of this has to do with the reaction to how academia does things.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. That’s well put. I’m like you in that I had a lucky grad school experience. And I always feel really responsible to say this when I launched my critique of the academy, which is severe and structural because I do believe that in America especially, but in Europe as well, the academy is suffering a real kind of identity crisis and in some ways a kind of an implosion self-destruction. And so I always feel like I need to put the caveat on there that I too had wonderful instructors who didn’t view these texts as kind of objects of power to wield or certain brand mystique that they could attach to their own person, all these ways that you see people misusing, I think, the great works, but that matter of technicity that you identified is so important. And one reason why I did not end up pursuing a career in academia is I feared that the technicity would become the point.
For people like you and me who devote lives to the life of the mind, the pleasure of that technical expertise is very great. And indeed the temptation to pride in it is also very great. It becomes very easy to forget, especially if you seal yourself off hermetically in a world of technicians, that all techne, all kind of practices of doing something well and with craft are in service of something. They are handmaidens. They’re not goals.
And one thing that immediately became clear to me as I started the podcast and also as I wrote this book, is I got a lot of people who come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re really smart. I’m not that smart.” And by that they didn’t actually mean what they were saying. What they meant is, “You’ve got all these tools in your tool belt.” And that’s actually true. I don’t want to deny that it takes some doing to kind of unpack a paragraph of Aristotle. But if you’re doing that and if you’re devoting your life and investing the kind of human capital that you’ve been given by God as a person, then you ought to be doing it for someone and for something.
Brian Smith:
Exactly.
Spencer Klavan:
And that’s what I think is lost in our approach to these books a lot of the time. And in some ways, it’s a way of neutralizing them and diffusing them because what they have to say is so explosive and in some ways so contradictory to the going conventional wisdom of just our modern gurus that if we look at Aristotle as simply a kind of animal in a jar or a bacteria in a Petri dish that we can isolate and study, then we never have to risk exposure to his claim, for instance, that man is a political animal. Imagine if you actually had to consider that as a truth claim that could or could not be true of you, what would that do?
Brian Smith:
Yes. Well, it becomes news in that regard of sense.
Spencer Klavan:
Totally.
Brian Smith:
These are not just sort of scientific claims. The news has arrived and you’ve got to decide how to live with it.
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
So sometime in graduate school, I remember stumbling on the statistic, it was reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that something north of 60 or 70%, depending on the field, of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences would suffer severe depression during the course of their studies.
Spencer Klavan:
Geez. Yeah.
Brian Smith:
And at a certain point, just in a PhD program in politics, I started to notice that my colleagues were sort of divided selves fairly often. They wanted to apply these theories in a very tactical way to other people and yet it couldn’t help but infiltrate their life.
Spencer Klavan:
Yes.
Brian Smith:
So I’m reminded of this passage in one of J. Budziszewski’s books where he says, “I set out to prove all morality was essentially arbitrary and that our choices were equally arbitrary and that all of our emotional states were equally meaningless. And yet I loved my wife and I loved my children, but this theory couldn’t help but bleed back in to the way in which I treated my wife and my children.” He said that the despair from that was actually the moment that he turned and went in search of something that was better, that he could actually wager his life on.
Spencer Klavan:
Two passages come to mind, one that you and I just recently shared when we were at that conference on Brothers K. Dostoevsky in that novel has a wonderful moment between Alyosha, the kind of hero, and not his beloved mentor, Father Zosima, but actually a more severe kind of almost administrator in the monastery, Father Paisi, who he thinks doesn’t really like him very much, but he pulls him aside and he says, “Men think that by isolating the technicity of the world, the science of the world, they’ve reduced an objective truth about morality, they’ve reduced virtue to mere fantasy. But the people bear witness to the impossibility of that view and their own hearts bear witness also.” I mean I think this is something very much in evidence and really important, especially in an era where one’s convictions, one’s gut reactions to things, one’s subjective “experiences” of things are written off as totally without worth or merit.
You take the true claim, which is that your first impressions of something might need revision, they might need you to step back and consider them and understand them and we’ve advanced that to the claim that actually your loves, your aspirations, your virtue, your attachments, these are illusions. They’re after effects, they’re byproducts of what’s “really going on,” which is matter bouncing off of matter essentially. And since it’s impossible to live that way, you do end up in a situation where your own life kind of bears witness against your philosophy, which is a profoundly neurotic place to be.
Brian Smith:
Exactly. And you said two passages.
Spencer Klavan:
Oh you are right. I’m sorry, I got so wrapped up in the Dostoevsky. The other one in C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, which is the conclusion of his Space Trilogy, by far my favorite fiction that Lewis ever wrote. I know people know Narnia and love Narnia, but that third installment of the Space Trilogy for me is his master work. It’s basically an artistic enactment of the abolition of man. It’s deals with a lot of these questions of scientism and materialism. But there’s a moment at the end, very small spoiler alert, that one of the guys whose whole project has been to reduce human life to determinism, it’s all kind of neurons firing in the brain and fate just kind of carries us where it will because we’re a machine, he finds himself overtaken at the last moment like one of the denizens of a fairytale city who’s turned to stone by a curse that actually was all real all along. The things he was playing with in his kind of neat syllogisms were deadly serious. I think that’s a situation we find ourselves in a lot as well.
Brian Smith:
Yes. No, I think those are very apt quotes for this problem and your book is filled with many others, but I want to drag us back to that because we could talk about other stuff like this all day long.
Spencer Klavan:
Yes. Let’s talk about the book.
Brian Smith:
So you list five crises and given that you sort of start and end the book by circling around this, I wanted to focus on what I take to be the most foundational one, which is over our sense of reality. What is this crisis? Why do you think it matters?
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah, one thing I do in the book throughout is you sort of start with a news cycle moment that everybody’s familiar with or remembers from the last couple years. And then I unravel that into, “Well, here’s 10 other news cycle moments you probably forgot about from the last 20 years that all kind of point in this direction. And here in fact is this long history of dealing with this very problem.” And the one that the book starts off with is the Metaverse, virtual reality essentially, immersion into virtual reality, and this way that a lot of our elites have of talking as if the distinction between my actual daily experience of life, which I would think of as reality, and a computer generated simulation that stimulates the brain in such and such a way, that distinction is really quaint and kind of outmoded and superstitious.
And so it’s really not to get down on Mark Zuckerberg or on Meta or whatever, Facebook and so forth. It’s rather to use these statements and these product launches as ways of uncovering a real philosophical conviction. Once you see it, it’s like putting on the green glasses, you see the Emerald City, you can see this everywhere. And I think that this speaks to a conviction that some things are very, very true. We have still in our society, because it’s impossible to live any other way, a desire to claim to reality and to truth and also a total lack of grounding of where do we root that. Is reality the images that my neurons cough up on the screen of my eyes? In which case the metaverse is just fine as a substitute for reality. It’s not even a substitute, it’s just an equivalent alternative that I happen to find more pleasurable. Or is reality some other thing?
And if it’s some other thing, is it the idea of the good? Is it my physical experience of the world, right? Before even asking the questions, I mean the first section of the book, I don’t even begin to ask the question, “Well, is reality abstract truth or is it emotional truth?” Or whatever, get into that much later. As you say, this question is threaded throughout the whole book, but really the first question and the fundamental question with which western philosophy proper begins is, “Do you believe that somewhere in some realm of experience there are things that are true no matter who says so or who says otherwise, things that you can’t by feeling differently about them, things that you can’t wish or imagine into existence and that you will never be free of even if you blind themselves to them?” You take Plato’s Cave. I say in the book, “It’s the original metaverse,” the idea that you are already in some sense being blinded by the sophists that run your culture and by your own presuppositions.
The point of that story is our third person view. The reason it’s a revealing story is because it draws back the camera so we are looking from the outside right into the cave and we’re able to see that even though for the people shackled to the walls of Plato’s Cave there is no reality other than this, there is in fact an external, truer reality outside of that kind of fantasy. And that matters even for the people who believe in the fantasy. Just as we were talking about earlier, if you invent a world where your emotions are part fictive and where your moral convictions are arbitrary, you can construct that world in speech all you want, but the reality of actual moral truths is going to come crashing down on you one way or another.
And that’s where we start to see the very tight and intimate connection between these kind of dismissals of absolute truth, of final reality and violence. Because if there is no absolute truth, you think you’re kind of being let free into some glorious future where everything is whatever you want it to be and nothing is either good or bad, thinking makes it so. But of course the only way then to determine what’s going to happen is through an exertion of power, through the Thrasymachus’s claim, that the power is basically the determiner of justice.
Brian Smith:
But to be even more dark within that, I think there’s an element of, “I can prove I’m really real by killing.”
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
Which becomes a theme in Russian literature like we’ve just read. It becomes a reality in ideology in the 20th century. But there’s also this other element which you draw on throughout the book, which I think is very interesting, this idea that there’s an explanation for why the dramas that we watch even have gotten so vacuous. In our denial that there is a reality and consequence, this multiverse theory where we can reinvent characters’ histories in a completely arbitrary way and we can take what’s seemingly were meaningful moments, Thanos snapping his fingers, half of everybody dying, and just undo it in a heartbeat and then nothing has any weight. How does this relate to Plato’s Cave? Say more about that because I want to hear that connection drawn a little bit more tightly.
Spencer Klavan:
So this is where you do have to start to ask the question, “Well, okay, if you intuitively feel that in fact there is such a thing as the real and it’s not purely arbitrary or purely capable of being constructed at will, then where does it live?” And I think the most readily available answer for most people to what is real is stuff, physical objects. They are real. And there’s an appeal to that answer of course, because as Aristotle observes our sensory experience of physical things is the most vivid and immediate experience that we have. And it takes some doing… What is purest and realest in actual fact is in some sense the last thing that we make our way toward if we ever get to contemplating, “Okay, I see a brown table and a brown cow. What is brown?” And as you reach those levels of abstraction, Aristotle thinks, you also begin to hone in on things that have more integrity as entities than just the physical objects you see in front of you.
And yet crucially, reality only ever comes to us mediated through our senses. So it’s very easy to make this mistake that, “Well, there’s only matter, right? Matter is what is real.” And basically my argument about the multiverse is that as an artistic failure, it is kind of the final breakdown of materialism as a philosophy. And I think everybody’s looking for the grand victory that’s going to stop people from thinking that the world is just atoms, you’re going to be able to prove such and such a thing. And one thing I argue a lot in the book is that these aren’t the kinds of questions that subject themselves to scientific proof. If you believe that matter and scientific questions are the only things that exist, you’re going to trap yourself in a little tightly sealed box with no opening because there then will be no mode of accepting any kind of truth that is other than the one that you’ve already determined for yourself.
And I think the emptiness of our art as it becomes more and more inspired by a kind of neo-epicurean philosophy of pure matter, of atoms bouncing off one another, is itself not a proof, but evidence, an indication that science is basically trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. Plato’s claim is that the effort to extract truth from your day-to-day experiences is already a difficult enough task, is already something that requires long years of study and effort and perhaps even divine intervention. And the multiverse claim is essentially that, “No, in fact the things that you can see and touch are basically the realest possible thing, the only thing really that we can count as real at all. And other than that, it’s basically just shadows on the wall. It’s just fantasies that’s just throwing these up.” Those fantasies are empty. If, in fact, you believe that that’s what you’re doing when you’re telling stories, you’re just pressing certain buttons in the brain, you’re just confecting certain shadows on the wall, then you are going to end up with stories that don’t mean anything because they don’t refer to anything outside of themselves.
Brian Smith:
Right. And I do also wonder whether there isn’t an implicit link here between the people who find these stories compelling and the people who, having embraced the idea that matter is everything, begin to doubt their own loves, their own affections toward people, places, things, institutions. And so this is a society for whom all the solid things melt into air. And yet I also think that there’s some hope in the sense that the shows and the forms of art that rebel against this, that say, “Reality is not just the evidence of your senses,” the ones that don’t try to beat you over the head with this fact seem to be the most successful ones. I think of a show like Yellowstone for instance. This is a show about very intense affections and deep historical sort of ties that people are not willing to break and to assert something real beyond the senses.
Spencer Klavan:
Another show that comes to my mind is White Lotus and-
Brian Smith:
Oh yeah.
Spencer Klavan:
There’s this dark comedy. It’s really about sexual relations and power relations in an era of woke morays. And what I love about this show, although it’s kind of viewer discretion advised in a big way, what I love about it is that rather than perform a little morality play where all the people with the wrong ideas get theirs, the show creators have simply depicted the problems and consequences of woke sexual ethics as in fact they are. And there’s no grand scene of repentance where somebody makes a big speech about, “This is my philosophy,” but there is a sense that ideas have consequences, philosophies have consequences. And if we’re going to show these things on screen, to be fully honest about them, we can’t just depict the fact of their existence. I mean this is something that I think both conservatives and liberals get wrong about the culture wars, which I talk about also in the book.
We think of this as some sort of debate about, “Is art going to just show anything goes? Are we just going to be totally free to put anything on screen or are we going to side with those nasty conservatives who don’t want you to be able to show certain things, want the Hays Code back and so forth?” And what we don’t realize I think is there’s no such thing as art that is anything goes. Art inherently contains a moral outlook on the world because the reality of moral truth is actually inescapable. It’s impossible for us to think without it, the very forms, the shape of our mind.
Brian Smith:
We need rules.
Spencer Klavan:
We need rules. Yes.
Brian Smith:
It reminds me of an essay you once wrote for us on video games.
Spencer Klavan:
That’s right. Yeah, rules and the good. We need ideals, we need objectives, we need the telos. And so really what we’re in is a fight over whose rules, whose vision of reality is going to be publicly honored and awarded and more regularly produced in these big movie houses. And the ones that are most on offer are kind of epicurean nihilism. There’s million universes, nothing you do matters except that we be kind of peaceful and pleasurable amongst ourselves. And then there is this new strain, you’re right, of art that is not preachy, it’s not a conservative tractate and in fact many of the people that are making it are not traditionally speaking conservatives, but that simply recognizes the total inadequacy. I mean look, I just went to see Avatar, Way of Water, Part Two, This Time It’s Wet. And here’s James Cameron, a guy who’s made movies that I really like.
I think Terminator 1 is one of the great movies, a great pop art of the last few decades. But this guy spent 10 years on basically a roller coaster ride. And what has he got to say? I mean this is just this kind of wonder of science, earth mother Gaia, “It’s all energy bouncing off of atoms, man,” is so played out that even when it makes money at the box office, people kind of know they’re being served thin gruel. And that’s kind of the hope I think you’re talking about. We are still in a situation economically where people feel incentivized to slap another cut of raw meat on the table for the Lumpenproletariat to consume. And yet everybody knows this stuff is inadequate, that in fact shows White Lotus, shows like Yellowstone, shows that kind of put the moral universe out in front of your eyes as if it had urgent reality are becoming more popular for exactly this reason. They feed the soul better.
Brian Smith:
So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about one of your best phrases. I mean the book has a lot of great phrases and sort of pithy encapsulations of really complex thoughts. My favorite, the aptest, I think is something you call Soul Dysphoria and in that section you explain a bunch of things, but you link body positivity, this whole movement and the phenomena of Insta photoshopping perfection. And you say that they have a common outlook and I guess my question is, so what’s common to them? Why are they popular? What do they tell us about who we are right now?
Spencer Klavan:
So near the beginning of that chapter… First of all, I’m really glad you noticed soul dysphoria because I thought, “Oh, that’s just a subhead.”
Brian Smith:
I circled it.
Spencer Klavan:
Nice. Well, okay, so let me try to work into this. Near the beginning of that chapter, I say the kind of pop wisdom, pop psychology is that the soul is kind of extraneous, that it’s kind of an appendage, that it’s a holdover from certain kind of unclear evolutionary accidents that cause us to feel things like love and emotion, but really all we’re really doing is just surviving physically. So given the fact that we have these bodies, why do we need to have thoughts and souls and consciousness at all?
But in fact, since as we’ve been discussing now at some length, in fact since love and desire and the soul truths are realer in some sense and more urgently real than the kind of physical facts that follow upon them, the real question that everybody has always struggled with and that secretly we’re still struggling with now is not, “Why do I need a soul?” It’s, “Why do I need a body? If I am this being that is capable of making contact with abstracts truths and with love and with all the high, noble things that you and I have just been talking about and have talked a lot about off mic as well, then what’s the point of this meat sack that’s hanging off of my divine spark?”
One of the things that pulling back the camera on that does is it helps to have a little bit of charity and empathy for this problem. This is an old problem. It goes back not necessarily, I don’t think actually to Plato himself, but to some of Plato’s interpreters inside and outside the early Christian Church. Plotinus is somebody that I mention a lot in the book in this context. And if that’s true, if the body is kind of an imposition or a fall or a descent, then it follows that the best thing we can do with it is just mold it to our desires and to conform with our souls, our divine spark, our essence, our identity, whatever word you want to call that, to mold it as directly to conform with our desires as possible.
And that is the connection which is a very central and old human impulse between the internet avatar, the airbrushed, photoshopped picture, and the body positivity movement. They’re all efforts to reconfigure the world of the body so that it matches people’s aspirations, the way they think they ought to be, the thing that they think they somehow are secretly. And the great Christian and pagan truth, the height of Athenian and Jerusalemite wisdom on this topic is that you are not actually going to float away from your body into the true, the good, and the beautiful. You have a body because it is the medium in which the true, the good, and the beautiful is best expressed. And that’s the mind flip I think that the great texts can give us on this one.
Brian Smith:
Well, and without this insight, I think it is relatively easy to yearn for a technological solution to the frailties or the dysmorphias that we have with our own form. I mean this yearning, which I think is expressed in science fiction, for uploading into a place where we can just define our own avatar, on the one hand, anyone who’s played a role playing game or played a computer game where you create an avatar of some kind I think can sympathize with this. “Wouldn’t I wish to be a thing I am not?”
Spencer Klavan:
I want to look like my LensAI profile picture. It looks better than I do in real life. It doesn’t have the aches and pains that I have. Yeah, totally.
Brian Smith:
Right. And people who hit the gym, who lift weights, we’re struggling against the limitations of our bodies with the weight we can’t get rid of. But in a way there’s something I think which you get at, that it’s more human to embrace the intersection of body and spirit and live with those struggles and find things that give us traction for understanding that, as in great books, as in deep conversation with friends who share similar struggles. Without those touchpoints, it makes sense that some of the weirdness we’re inhabiting right now… I do kind of wonder, in the world of no Covid ever happened, shutdowns never happened, would the extreme anti-body sort of movements that we have right now have quite as much traction, if people had not been cut off from one another, had been left in the face-to-face encounters that you cannot avoid as a teenage person? And you think of the biggest number of these people are, it’s teenagers who have been most isolated and found these online communities.
Spencer Klavan:
Well, there is a moment in the history of this problem, this question in modernity that I found really striking and that was a piece by Andrea Long Chu in the New York Times. This is a male to female transgender person, making the argument that the point of bottom surgery wasn’t happiness and that it wouldn’t actually necessarily cure the depression or the discomfort, “Because desire and happiness are unrelated agents.” This is the line from the piece. And to me, that is really the heart of where this is actually going. That’s at least a level of honesty about what actually happens if you disembody yourself or if you make your body into a plaything to kind of respond to your whims. The terrible bind that we’re in… I mean it’s a fallen world, no question about it. But the problem is if the material world including your own self is just kind of raw material to be dominated, then you’re not actually in a relationship with anything, including yourself and you’ve in fact destroyed the possibility of aa relationship.
So you will just be a bunch of diodes just kind of beeping at will haphazardly in the end, right? That’s basically what we are without bodies and our pushing up against something physical as you describe in the gym, which is a great example. There’s a reason that people go to the gym now as a kind of reaction against this trend. It’s precisely because making contact or having driven home to you that there is kind of a hard surface against which you’re pushing up against. Lets you know you’re not alone. Otherwise, it’s lonely being a divine spark. There’s really no to go with it.
Brian Smith:
What you just said makes me think this entire movement that we’re talking about, it’s the rejection of that Augustinian understanding that we are intentional desiring creatures and by severing that understanding, we’re casting ourselves off, we’re adrift. Because if you understand yourself as, “I am a sinful creature,” or maybe you don’t even understand yourself as that to get this point? If you understand yourself as defined by the things you are attracted to and love, that at least opens the door to certain kinds of understanding through the body that the denial of that, that chosen severing of desiring from happiness. Once you make that leap, it becomes very hard to reach this sort of person even through art, I fear. Historically, I feel like novels and poems and film and music can hit us where we don’t expect it, not because they’re attempting to crush our intellect, our intellectual defenses, but because they open us to a kind of experience in our hearts and in our longings that maybe we didn’t see that way before.
Spencer Klavan:
Wow. Yeah, that’s very beautifully put.
Brian Smith:
Thank you.
Spencer Klavan:
Something I read after finishing the book that has been a little mantra with me lately is this Simone Weil observation, and I’ll probably butcher it because it’s one of those things I’ve repeated in my head so many times that I feel like I probably have my own personal version of it that I don’t want to lay that on Weil, but she says something to the effect of, “Love is a form of attention and attention is a form of prayer.” And somebody that really affected me deeply this year is Thomas Traherne, this English mystic, undiscovered for hundreds of years, and then resurrected in the early 20th century, I think, whose whole thing is about the beatific vision and the question for Weil and Traherne both I think is your actions imply a highest good.
They imply a love even if you don’t… And we have this kind of ridiculous, cheapened idea about the word love that it means butterflies in your stomach. Those are beautiful things. It’s beautiful to have a crush on somebody, but if what you think is that you are not loving if you’re not experiencing those things, then you don’t understand yourself. Beatrice says to Dante, “Never creator, nor creation was ever without love.” And everything that we do, every action that we perform by its inherent logic implies some goal, some good. And pursuing that goal, paying attention to that goal, devoting yourself, giving of yourself to it is love.
And when you are mindlessly scrolling, I’ll pick my drug of choice, Twitter, it could be Instagram, whatever, when you are lying in bed for the third straight hour, that you hit snooze on your alarm, whatever, you’re not not loving, you’re not in a neutral space of, “I don’t worship…” And people think they don’t worship anything, they think whatever. No, you’re just giving yourself over to another kind of worship, another kind of love that you have less control over and self-awareness about and really the reason that this body problem is so pernicious is because it holds out this fantasy that you can choose the structure of your loves or have no loves at all. You can just be kind of a free floating entity that’s not tied to or pulled toward anything and that ain’t going to happen. We exist in states of love at all times.
Brian Smith:
We may not like those loves.
Spencer Klavan:
No.
Brian Smith:
We may not be quite aware of them as you say, but they’re really there. So I want to shift gears again. We’ve talked a bit about scientism already. I mean I don’t even remember you using the word scientism anywhere in the book, but there is this pervasive notion you talk about, of science outstripping its proper boundaries in our imaginations. Quick quote from you, “We call upon science now to explain not just how the physical world works, but how everything, everything works and why.” So I’d just like you to riff a bit on how you think this vision of science as a sort of ideology has added to the distortions we’re experiencing and this phenomena we’ve been talking about.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m recording the audiobook now and I’m trying to remember if I’ve said the word scientism at all because it’s a word that I use all the time. I’m a podcaster and so forth, and in so far as it goes, I think it’s a very good descriptor of what we’re dealing with when we talk about this sort of thing. But no, I didn’t use it in this book because I wanted people step by step to really see what we’re dealing with. It’s like one of those things where the two young fish are swimming by and the old fish says, “How’s the water, boys?” And the young fish turns to his friend and says, “What’s water?” I mean this is what we’re up against when we talk about something like scientism. It’s so pervasive and really what it is is the swelling up of what the ancients would’ve called natural philosophy to swallow every other discipline, branch of knowledge, way of doing things.
And of course natural philosophy is an ancient good and noble way of studying the world. It has to do with the things that behave according to phusis, which is the Greek word for the things that happen spontaneously or according to fixed rules that are inherent in the things themselves. So it is in the nature of a stone. It is in the phusis of a stone to fall to the ground when dropped because objects with mass attract one another, right? These are things that even in describing them, you can freely and happily blend language from Aristotelian metaphysics with kind of Newtonian mechanics and even on into quantum physics. This is a seamless tradition in that respect.
Of course, there are many profound revolutions in science, but as a practice, as a human practice, it retains, I think, its noble character. What happens really to cause the neurosis that we’re struggling with is the development of the idea that that form of knowledge, knowledge about spontaneous, rule-based behaviors in the natural world is the only form of knowledge and this is where the reality thing becomes important again. This is the only kind of truth. This is the only way that we can know things is through experiment and verification and therefore the things that exist are physical things and that’s that. There’s nothing else to them. And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that even if this is not what people believe in their conscious minds, we all breathe this in like oxygen.
Brian Smith:
Oh absolutely.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. We all know that. We all feel in our bones that that must be true. And one of the things I try to show in the book is that was never proven. That was not a thing that happened because somebody advanced some brilliant argument, that science is the only kind of truth. It’s actually something that happened as a matter of circumstances. The church lost its claim on authority and as truths began to come to light that science could reveal that theological speculation, suddenly we became very addicted to this kind of knowledge because it’s powerful and it’s reliable. You can always get it if you do it right and you can do things with it that make you very strong. And this has now become our idolatry, our way of thinking about everything, the whole world, and it is not strong enough to sustain that weight.
This thing where we now say, “Trust the science,” where Dr. Fauci becomes the defacto governor of every state in America for two plus years, this is obviously a disordered way of living and of governing ourselves and it arises directly out of this unsustainable effort to reduce all forms of truth to scientific truth because some things don’t have a scientific answer, some very important things like moral questions, right? “Okay, the virus is this contagious. Should we therefore shut the country down?” And what we’re doing now is we’re trying to find some way of rooting our answers to that question in science, as if we could empirically prove what the right answer is because that’s the only way that we think we can know anything. And really in this respect, demoting science will be the best thing that ever happened to it out of Covid.
Brian Smith:
Right. Well, because the only logic that science can lend itself to in terms of an ethical theory strikes me as something like a kind of crass utilitarianism, that you’re struck with okay, so if our postulates are health and bodily integrity are the goods we’re aiming, at least a sort of way understanding of that, then you can kind of understand how you get to these judgments like we’re seeing again now of, “Oh yes, we need masks again because of the triple threat of viruses and the flu and Covid version X,” I don’t even know what we’re at right now there. And so there is this oddity going on. You knew it was going to happen, there’s a line from Walker Percy about this.
Spencer Klavan:
Oh, here we go. Good.
Brian Smith:
Yes, here we here, right? You had to expect it.
Spencer Klavan:
Somebody should play a drinking game at home with this podcast, how many times-
Brian Smith:
Exactly. But he had this notion that what is happening with scientism is this seeding of our sovereignty to they, the experts and that something is lost in that. When we allow this notion that scientific expertise can claim sovereignty over the moral choices that define who we are and that our insanity around this shows up in various ways, that people in their yearning to have that certainty, which we might find in the gospel, we might find it in the way we let our faith shape our lives, if you don’t have that, it’s really easy to sort of say, “Well, trust the science. The experts are telling us this is the right way to live. And so we just have to do is we’re told.”
Spencer Klavan:
Yes, it’s very easy to find this argument made explicitly in the works of Wilsonian progressives.
Brian Smith:
Yes.
Spencer Klavan:
Since the era of the progressive, this has not stopped being an express argument, that democracy basically is inefficient, that it doesn’t work, and that the best thing to do is to do that outsourcing that Percy’s talking about. Let me give an example that may seem a little bit out of left field, but that I think is really telling and that is this respect for Marriage Act that just passed. Irrespective of the side that one may be on about gay marriage itself, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole thing now where everybody wants to codify certain Supreme Court decisions, and it all happened after Dobbs because it turned out that you could actually overturn a Supreme Court decision, right?
Brian Smith:
Shocking, right?
Spencer Klavan:
I mean it’s funny, but my colleague and boss, Charles Kesler, who edits the Claremont Review of Books, made this point that the problem with Dobbs was not just how sacrosanct abortion was in the leftist project, it was also that court constructed, substantive due process rights are the whole architecture of the progressive universe. And if one of those planks can be just taken out, then any one of them is vulnerable. That’s why Clarence Thomas’s concurrence was so scary, even though he was the only person to say, “Now we need to revisit all these other decisions.”
Brian Smith:
He said the quiet part out loud.
Spencer Klavan:
Exactly. But it’s true. If substantive due process is a fiction, which I think it is, then all of these things are vulnerable and they’re vulnerable even more fundamentally because the courts aren’t supposed to be making these sorts of decisions, which is maybe another way to say the same thing. Anyway, this funny thing then happened where Democrats were like, “Well, what we really need to do now is write laws in Congress that codify these decisions and these principles and then they’ll be safe,” to which I thought, “I have news for you about Congress. We vote in new people and they also can write new laws and can overturn these.” And it’s like everybody wants a final answer to these culture war issues. That is one side definitely won, and that’s that. But a lot of these issues, that’s not our form of government. We debate these things together, face-to-face, and we come up with compromises that we enact locally and people, they would rather have, in many cases, I think the definitive pronunciation of the experts.
Brian Smith:
And I think there’s something tempting but ultimately flawed about this. And not just about politics, but even more broadly speaking. I stop myself all the time… This is another way that scientism creeps into your head. I try not to talk about human things as problems that can be availed by solutions.
Spencer Klavan:
Right.
Brian Smith:
Because almost nothing in human life that isn’t a medical condition is actually a problem in that way of, “I can find a technical answer that will fix this.” I mean, yes, you can set an alarm to get yourself out of bed, to use your example earlier. You can set five alarms, you could do the Jocko thing and just stagger them on top of one another, but you still have to make the conscious choice of will to get up and go lift heavy things if that’s how you’re ordering your day and how you have aspired to order your day.
Spencer Klavan:
You can wake up and turn off the five alarms just as easily you turn them on.
Brian Smith:
Right. And yet all the time we use this problem-solution pairing, and to get back to the political thing, as if we are not tomorrow going to find another challenge that our hypothetical final solution to this great problem has caused. So the things we do to ameliorate the challenges that are in front of us tend to create a new set of challenges. And this is human life. It is an unending series of this sort of thesis-antithesis cycle. Then you talk about the Polybius regime cycle in the book for a little bit, and there’s a very similar version of this sort of dynamic.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. And I’m so glad you mentioned medical problems because the danger, the thing that I am trying to train myself out of now is medicalizing regular phenomena, and that’s in terms of language of psychiatry or the language of actual physical ailment. You do this all the time, right? “Oh, I had trauma.” “I struggle with or suffer from depression, suicidality.” I mean these are not diseases. They are spiritual struggles and we should talk about them that way.
Brian Smith:
Yes, absolutely.
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah.
Brian Smith:
So maybe this is a good way to draw us toward the ending I had in mind, which is I wanted to end by talking about love, which is to the degree there’s a “solution,” I put it in air quotes, present in your book, you talk about love, you talk about the ordering principle, and I just want you to talk a little bit now about how love points us back to the real. How does it help us out of the fixes that we perpetually find ourselves?
Spencer Klavan:
Yeah. It’s interesting that just kind of naturally, we’ve been edging up upon this very thing as we start to talk about it’s going to be a daily grind. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to have to make the decision to get up in time to make breakfast for your kids, to go to church, to read for 30 minutes a day, whatever. You’re going to have to make these decisions afresh each time. And that’s because love is love of the particular, and by the end of the book, I even say even something as noble as Save the West is a kind of unhelpful aspiration if it’s not embodied in the here and now, in the fullness of the here and now, not just this kind of reductive what’s the physical reality around you, but the whole experience that you wake up every day and are immersed in. Yeah, this is my answer, this is my solution.
How do you save the west? Love. But you have to write a whole book about it because you have to earn your way to it. You have to earn your way to an understanding of love that isn’t just going to boil down into nice, fuzzy feelings. And what begins somewhat slightly perhaps at the very beginning of the book, I drop in this Iris Murdoch quote, she’s one of the great disciples of Plato in the 20th century, and she says, “Love, and so art and morality, is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
Brian Smith:
It’s a great quote.
Spencer Klavan:
It’s a beautiful line. When you come down to politics, people feel immobilized by the fact that there are all these sort of structural crises going on at the level of our national government and indeed the world. And those narratives, those crises are in some sense designed to immobilize you. You are not going to muscle the cycle of regimes back into place, right?
Brian Smith:
Absolutely not.
Spencer Klavan:
No. And it may be that you have some role to play in ameliorating those big problems, but you’ll find them in the particulars of your human sized life because that is where you are capable of doing love as a verb. This is where if a man says he loves God but love’s not his brother, he is a liar. Why is that? Well, because we’re very easily swayed into making God into the kind of amorphous jelly of our particular preferred abstractions. God is love, God is goodness. All these things that God actually is, but there’s a reason he took on flesh, right? There’s a reason that Christmas happened. There’s a reason the cross happens, and that’s because we are actually more complete, more noble, more elevated at the size that we are at. Man is made in the image of God and this is where goodness and joy take place, on our earth, in our creation. They take place in the daily political and personal struggles that people wake up and choose to do out of love of the good and embodiment of the good, and the realization that someone other than oneself is real.
Brian Smith:
And that I think particularly, as we are recording right before Christmas-
Spencer Klavan:
Yes.
Brian Smith:
But our audience won’t hear this till after, but I think it’s a good place to stop. Thank you so much for joining me for this hour and talking about all these great things. Spencer’s book will be out at the time we put this podcast up and it can be bought anywhere you buy books, so please go out, get yourself a copy of How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan. I’m Brian Smith, and this has been another episode of Liberty Law Talk.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
My name is Brian Smith, and joining me today is Samuel Gregg, a distinguished fellow in political economy at the American Institute for Economic Research. A contributing editor at Law and Liberty, author of numerous books, including most recently, The Next American Economy, which we discussed here on the podcast in October. Sam, thanks for joining me.
Samuel Gregg:
Brian, thanks for having me on. Always good to be with you.
Brian Smith:
So, recently you wrote an essay for us that's been receiving a great deal of attention. Some of it very surprising from people like Joe Scarborough. The title of this piece is “When a Classical Liberal Confronted Nazi Terror,” and the piece focuses on Wilhem Röpke, a German economist that's not exactly a household name. And focuses on a speech he gave in February, 1933, warning the German people against embracing the Nazis. Can you give us some background on Röpke and the speech?
Samuel Gregg:
Well, Wilhem Röpke was one of the most important free market economists, certainly in the German-speaking world, and arguably in the 20th century. So he died in 1966, which is quite a while ago. But his life was very much occupied with the... Let's call it the traumas of the first half of the 20th century. So he was born in Germany. He came from what you'd call an upper middle class background. Very much steeped in medicine, academia, and in his case, the Lutheran Church of Germany. He was born in 1899. He fought in the First World War as a soldier on the western front, very young man, obviously, was a decorated combat veteran. Comes back to Germany, does a doctorate in economics. He becomes the youngest professor in Germany at a very early age in the early 1920s.
And as you know, Germany is obsessed with professorial recognition and the academic world. So when you become a full professor at the age of, I think it was 26, in Germany, that's kind of a big deal. Now, he was, as I said, a free market economist. He wrote a lot on things like monetary policy, business cycle theory. He was advising the German government in the 1920s on issues ranging from how to deal with the Great Depression, to how to deal with questions of reparations, which, of course, Germany had been subjected to after the First World War. But he was also very difficult to pin politically speaking, because in one sense, he's clearly a classical liberal as we would understand that today. So he believed in limited government, he believed in constitutionalism, rule of law, a dynamic market economy. And all those things, certainly in Germany at the time in the 1910s and 1920s, were not necessarily the working assumptions of most political thinkers and people involved in politics at this particular period of time.
But at the same time, he, like a lot of other pre-market economists at the time, is very interested in what you might call the cultural, moral, and institutional foundations of free market economies and free societies, in a way that's, I think, somewhat lacking in our own time. Most economists don't talk about those sorts of things. So he's not just a very distinguished economist. He was read everywhere in Europe. He's also a political economist in the sort of tradition of someone like an Adam Smith.
Now, when it came to German politics, he was extremely concerned by the rise of the hard left, and particularly, of the hard right in the 1920s. And he wasn't just concerned about them because of their bad economics. He was also concerned about them because he saw these groups as rejecting not just what we would call liberal order or whatever you want to call it, he saw them as rejecting the essence of Western civilization. And so he was, I mean, extremely rarely for a very distinguished academic. He would write in newspapers. He would write for more popular audiences at a time when academics generally didn't do that.
And so he got very worried in the late 1920s by the rise of the National Socialist Movement. And he saw their rise coming before, I think, a lot of other Germans did. So as early as the 1930s, which is really 1929, 1930s, when the Nazis make their breakthrough into the Reich stock, they've become the second biggest party after the social Democrats in the late 1920s in the Reich stock. And Röpke had been warning about these trends for years. And he even in 1930 elections, he actually wrote election pamphlets telling Germans, "Do not vote for these people. They are seriously dangerous. They are not going to moderate their positions when they get into power." And he also warned Germany's conservative political and military elites, "Do not get involved with these people, because if you help them get into power, you are going to find yourself more or less co-opted. Which is basically, of course-
Brian Smith:
Exactly. It's what happened.
Samuel Gregg:
So in 1933, January the 30th, 1933, which was a very recent date, was the 90th anniversary. We just experienced the 90th anniversary of the President Hindenberg, the Great World War I military hero who was president of Germany, inviting Hitler and two other Nazis to become part of the Reich government. Hitler becomes chancellor and two other Nazis enter the cabinet. And the Nazis always viewed this as the day when they effectively seized power. And at the time, there was some concern about this, both domestically and internationally. But even for example, German-Jewish organizations. I mean, they obviously didn't like the Nazis, but they were not convinced that the Nazis were going to do what Hitler said that they were going to do.
So in eight days after the Nazis took power, Wilhelm Röpke gives a speech, a public lecture in Frankfurt am Main, in which he basically goes through and says, this is how we've got to this point. This is how we've got to this point where this party that is not just economically not in favor of free markets or any of these things, but actually is representative of a trend in the German-speaking world, and more generally in Europe, to reject what he calls liberalism. And by liberalism, he doesn't mean sort of 19th century liberalism, as a lot of people understood that at the time. He's not even talking about the German liberal parties that had, to a certain extent, participated in government in Weimar, Germany in the 1920s. For him, liberalism is another way of saying western civilization.
He's very clear about this if you read the speech. He is very clear in detailing what he means by this. He means Greece and Rome. He means Jerusalem. He means Judaism and Christianity. He means what you would call broadly speaking natural law ideas. And he also means the particular contributions of the enlightenment. All of which adds up to what he calls Western civilization. And he says the Nazis are in the business of taking this down. And not just the Nazis, but the Bolsheviks as well. Because remember, it's not just the right that's been radicalized in this period, it's also the left. The Communist Party in Germany is very strong at this time, the same time as well. So that is the essence of the speech.
And you think about it, it's a pretty brave thing to do, because Hitler had made no secret of how he proposed to deal with opponents once he got into power. He's very clear about this. He says, "I'm going to achieve power by legitimate means," which is what he did. "But when I get into power, I'm going to dismantle the Weimar Republic." So to get up eight days after these people have been admitted to power, and very quickly start taking over a lot of state institutions to get up and give a speech like that and say, "I'm telling you now, these people are not just economically problematic. They are a threat to civilization," in what you might call high German intellectual culture, was a very, very brave thing to do. And he paid a price for that pretty soon afterwards.
Brian Smith:
Which you detail in your piece. And I think one of the interesting things about this is the Nazis were very clear. Hitler was very clear about what they were about. And yet, all over Europe, everyone denied the plain meaning of the words they're saying, the embrace of the friend-enemy distinction, the virulent desire to murder the Jews, which they were pretty clear about. And yet, all these people, which I do think there's something about human nature that's sort of when we think we're getting what we want politically, we're willing to for forgive or forget a lot of the sorts of things people, politicians say, as if it's just politics. But these guys were aiming at something more. And so were the Bolsheviks. What were some of the... Or I guess what was special about Röpke's understanding that helped him see these threats for what they really were?
Samuel Gregg:
Well, I think there are a number of things. One was that he was very aware of different trends in, let's call it German nationalist circles. Because the national socialist obviously had their own political program. They had a particularly charismatic leader. But he was pointing to trends in German society that the Nazis had picked up on and amplified in a way that had not really occurred before. So he was very aware that there was a lot of talk in Germany on the right about blood... What you might call blood and soil politics….
Brian Smith:
Or the front experience politics too.
Samuel Gregg:
Right. Right. And he also noticed the rise of this friend-enemy language that was very prevalent on the national circles on the right in Germany, and also on the left as well, one should always add. He also had read the literature that was being put out by these people. Another thing which I think sort of drew Röpke's attention to the Nazis was that he noticed that students at German universities were embracing many of these ideas. He was very popular as a professor. He was a very good lecturer. He was very accessible to students. But he noticed that more and more young minds in German high intellectual culture, were shifting towards political radicalization. Now, it's natural for younger people to be a little bit more politically radical than say you or I would be. But he was noticing that these people were moving in this direction very quickly and in a way that was ahead of the rest of German society.
So when he gave his speech at Frankfurt am Main, he was a full professor of economics at the University of Marburg, which the student body was overwhelmingly national socialist in its political sympathies. The city itself had voted by 16 more points for the national socialists considering the national average. So he was immersed and surrounded by these ideas and people like this in the German academic world. Which is where you might think there would be more resistance to some of these ideas. But he was looking at this and saying, "No, this is where these ideas are really flourishing. And part of my responsibility is to speak out against this and warn what is coming."
Because he said, it's not just that these people are talking about blood and soil, enemy versus friend logic, et cetera. He said, these people are opposed to reason. They're opposed to reason itself. They see reason and this sort of the quest for truth. They saw these things as restrictions, as barriers, as things that were impeding the German people from a realizing its glorious destiny, et cetera. So in this speech he says, it's not just that they're for all these things. They're against reason itself. And when a party or a movement speaks in these super Nietzschean terms, very explicitly Nietzschean terms about what their agenda is and how they see the world, then we have something to be severely worried about. And remember, when the Nazis came to power, there were a lot of people who thought, well, they'll just sort of junk the sort of more radical dimension of their agenda, they'll accustom themselves to office. They'll forget all the things they said during the political campaigns. That was not the case. And Röpke saw this coming.
Brian Smith:
Right. And I do think there's this element of Nazis acquired this particular force because it was an educated... It had the support of this educated young population who really embraced that sort of Nietzschean, vitalist set of currents that were floating around in the 20s. And it's the sort of commitment that people don't leave behind. If you really all the way down believe in the politics of the will as these people did over that of reason, there's no escaping there being deeper consequences over time. So I also wanted to ask you, when you were discussing the defense Röpke laid out of liberalism, the speech. You note he was, "Neither an economic determinist nor a philosophical materialist." So why did he think rejecting those views were so vitally important to defending an ordered society then and now?
Samuel Gregg:
Well, the first thing to point to make about Röpke in this regard was he was a believing Christian. So he came from a family, as I think I mentioned, of doctors, academics, but also Lutheran pastors. He was a believing Christian. And not every self-described classical liberal at the time was. But he was, as were some of the other German liberals at the time. So he was instantly suspicious of any argument that's based upon, let's call it economic determinism or philosophical materialism. So he was basically inoculated against that type of thinking. So that's the first point.
The second thing is that he's trying to combat the Marxist interpretation of what was going on in Germany at the time. Because the way that the German communists... And communists in general interpreted the rise of the Nazis, was that this was a type of part of the dialectics of history that were working themselves out. And that the rise of the Nazis was the latest of a series of futile attempts by the capitalist class to resist the inevitable dynamics of history as we move closer to socialism and then communism, et cetera, et cetera. So he's making it very clear that Germany, what it's going through, is not some type of Marxist dialectic. He's saying people are making choices here. They're not being moved by economic circumstances.
Although, of course, he's very aware as a distinguished free market economist, that Germany's problems in the 1920s or particularly the great inflation of 1922-1923, as well as the Great Depression, had steadily radicalized significant sections of the German middle class, and particularly including a lot of academics as it turns out, and younger people as well. So he's very aware of the economic dimension of this, but he's saying this can't be interpreted purely as a type of reaction to or expression of economic circumstances. He says very clearly, look, Germany is in serious economic trouble right now. This great depression is very, very damaging. But the era that we're entering into is not to be understood purely in economic terms.
This reflects a series of ideas that have acquired popular form, and have acquired a charismatic leader, and a structure that is taking us away from this relatively limited experiment in liberal democracy that the Weimar Republic represented. Now, Röpke was not uncritical of Weimar. Everyone was critical of Weimar to some degree. Everyone across the German political spectrum had some problem with Weimar Germany and its particular way of doing liberal constitutionalism. But that's not Röpke's point. Röpke's point is that we are entering an era in which many of the assumptions upon which things like rule of law, constitutionalism, and Western civilization are built upon are going to be systematically dismantled by a movement and an individual that is very explicit about wanting to achieve these types of ends.
So that's why he says it's an end of an era. That's the title of the lecture, end of an era. The era that's coming to an end is an era in which this experiment with liberal constitutionalism is going to be junked. And there's going to be some serious consequences of that among which are the identification of particular groups and individuals, as not being part of what's called the Volksgemeinschaft, which was a phrase the Nazis used all the time, which meant racial community, the racial community. And that obviously excludes the Jewish people, right?
Brian Smith:
Yeah.
Samuel Gregg:
That's part of the whole Nazi logic of the idea of race. But it also means the obliteration of the individual. There is no individual in the Volksgemeinschaft. There is the people's community, the racial community as the Nazis talked about. And when you move into a situation where you start talking that way and thinking that way, it's not that just that particular groups, who by definition according to the Nazis definition, can't fit that category, who will be expelled, so to speak, from the body politic. It's of any concern for individual freedom, the dignity of the person, and anything that suggests that there is a world outside the Volksgemeinschaft that needs to be taken seriously.
Brian Smith:
So there's the first step in all of this. To go back to the question that I asked, which is when you reduce the human person to these supposedly objective categories or classifications as both the communists and the Nazis were doing, you make it impossible to actually do politics that defends human life in an individual way. Which, of course, was the goal of both of these groups.
Samuel Gregg:
Yes. And-
Brian Smith:
And they want to erase the individual.
Samuel Gregg:
Right. So the Nazis are talking about the group as in the race. The Bolsheviks are talking about the class, and everyone belongs to a class and no one exists outside of class, and everything needs to be defined in terms of the class group that you belong to. So when you think about it that way, the individual, as an individual being, gets pushed out of the picture very, very quickly. And it also means that you are prepared to establish and promote political arrangements in which the individual can be treated primarily as an object rather than as a being that possesses an inestimable dignity of its own.
So neither the Nazis nor the Bolsheviks had any time for notions of individual dignity. They had no time for arguments like you may not use people as a means to an end. You may never instrumentalize people. And Röpke talks about this in the speech. He says, the Nazis will do this. They will use people as means to an end. And when you enter into that type of logic, then killing people, imprisoning people, lying to people, manipulating people, all becomes part of the way that politics is operating in that given set of circumstances. So when you think about it that way, you can see that Röpke is saying the individual is going to be obliterated legally, politically, and even socially up to a certain extent in the new era in which the national socialists are going to take this country.
Brian Smith:
So I think that sums up what makes this so important, why he was so brave for doing this. Because this is a tremendous challenge to what the Nazis were doing. I wanted to conclude by talking about what lessons you think this speech and Röpke's ideas more generally offer us today. How ought we, if we're using him to reinforce our own thoughts or help ourselves understand our present moment?
Samuel Gregg:
Well, there's lots of different implications that can be drawn from Röpke's speech. And the fact I think that my article got picked up, and tweeted, and circulated by people on the right. But also interestingly enough, as you say on the left, which is not usually what happens to articles that I write, I think people picked up some of the implications that, I think, flow from Röpke's speech and the way I tried to present it and explain its context to Lauren Liberty readers.
So what are some of the lessons? One is that populism is something that we need to be wary of. Now, by populism, I don't mean democracy. I don't mean people expressing their views, or majority rule, or anything like that. What I'm talking about by populism in this context, is when reason is pushed out of the picture for political debate and discussion. And by reason, I just don't mean empirical reason, I mean reason in the sort of broader, deeper sense that people like Aristotle, or Aquinas, or the American founders for that matter, the way that they talked about reason. Reason is the central means by which we do politics. And there are forms of populism that denigrate that, and even see that as weak. And that's one thing.
The second thing I would say that comes out from Röpke's speech is if you don't ground... Let's call them liberal institutions, constitutionalism. Rule of law, certain conception of rights, et cetera. If you don't ground these things on a particularly rich understanding of the human individual person, then you run into problems when people want to demolish these types of institutions. Because if it's all just based on utility or just based on efficiency, those things turn out not to be particularly strong when confronted with people and movements that are determined to sweep those things aside.
Brian Smith:
Right.
Samuel Gregg:
Third implication, I think, is that Röpke was very conscious of this friends-enemy language that was floating around the German Eastern intellectual sphere, so to speak, at this particular period of time. And this language was very much eventually associated with people like Carl Schmitt, who was a German conservative philosopher, who initially, before the Nazis came to power, had reservations about the Nazis, but became an apologist for the regime, and used this friend-enemy language. And even wrote pieces justifying things like Hitler's clearly unconstitutional actions in 1934 following The Night of the Long Knives, which is when he basically engaged in terroristic action against the left wing, the hard left wing of the Nazi Party in order to consolidate his own rule. So Schmitt wrote a defense of all this, right?
Brian Smith:
Yeah.
Samuel Gregg:
And that friends-enemy language, once it starts to enter into the political mainstream, it becomes very, very difficult not to start viewing people as threats to the republic, or to see people as groups that you have to push aside and marginalize rather than engage in the very difficult, and complicated, and sometimes frustrating everyday business of politics that exists in a constitutional republic like the United States.
Now, I'm not saying that different groups in individuals who act this way or seem to be acting this way are Nazis. That's not what I'm saying. I don't think they're Nazis or anything like that. I don't think they're fascists or anything like that. But what I was pointing to in the article was that there's a certain logic. Once you start embracing a certain logic of politics... And this is what Röpke's point was. Once you start embracing a certain logic or politics, then your concern for the freedom of others, the dignity of others, and even things like the workings of the judicial system in terms of upholding constitutionalism and rule of law, once this type of logic gets into the political mainstream, respect for those basic institutions, and procedures, and moral habits associated with the workings of constitutional republic like the United States tend to be put on a secondary level, which I think is highly problematic.
Last thing I'll say is that Röpke is very aware that liberalism, as he understood it, is not just a 19th century thing, that its roots are much deeper. They go back to the classical world, the Roman world, the Jewish world, the medieval world, the enlightenment world, and that this is where, he believes what he calls liberalism, must root itself. It's not enough to root liberalism in this sense in economic efficiency, or utility, or just mere procedural. He says it's got to have these deeper roots if it's going to survive. And when people start attacking those roots, whether they're coming from the right or the left, institutions of limited government, rule of law, a market economy, private property rights, and ideas like the dignity of the individual, start to lack the nourishing roots that they need, if they're going to function and prosper over the long term.
Brian Smith:
Well, I think that's a great place to end. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Sam.
Samuel Gregg:
Thank you, Brian. Always good to be with you.
Brian Smith:
So you can, if you're intrigued by this, read far more about Röpke in some of Sam's other essays on Röpke on Law and Liberty. You can also read more about him in his book The Next American Economy, which I encourage you all to pick up and read. Thank you. Have a good day.
John Foster Dulles represented the apex of liberal mainline Protestantism's influence on American power and policy.
Brian A. Smith (00:03):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
James Patterson (00:17):
Hello, you are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is January 6th, 2023. My name is James M. Patterson, and I'm a Contributing Editor to Law & Liberty as well as Associate Professor and Chair in the Politics Department at Ave Maria University, a Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, and at the Institute for Human Ecology, and the President of the Ciceronian Society. My guest today is Dr. John D. Wilsey. He is Associate Professor of Church History and Philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and book review editor at the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He is also an ordained pastor and has pastored at several churches in Virginia and North Carolina as well as teaching both at K-12 and university-level positions. In 2017 through '18, he was the William E. Simon visiting fellow in Religion and Public Life with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton Seminary. He has written three books: One Nation Under God: An Evangelical Critique of Christian America, and American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of An Idea. Today, our topic is his third book, God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. I should also mention that Dr. Wilsey is a fellow at CRCD with me, so Dr. Wilsey, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
John Wilsey (01:47):
James, thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.
James Patterson (01:50):
Well, if things get a little informal during this podcast, it's because John and I go way back and so we're having a good time today. But a person who did not have the reputation of having a good time was the subject of this book, John Foster Dulles. Was he as stern and cold-blooded and marble-like as his reputation would seem?
John Wilsey (02:23):
Yes and no. I'll start with that to frustrate your listeners right off the bat. But before we get into that, I just do want to thank you, James, for having me on this podcast. I love Law & Liberty, avid reader from way back. Had the honor and privilege to contribute some writing pieces to Law & Liberty recently, and just a big fan. A big fan of yours as well and I'm very grateful for our friendship. It's approaching 10 years now, I believe.
James Patterson (02:58):
That's right.
John Wilsey (02:58):
So it's a great honor and a privilege to be with you. Yes, John Foster Dulles definitely has that rep for being sort of a bucket of cold ice water. I can't remember what year it was, I think it might have been 1956, Time Magazine voted him as the most boring man in America. And maybe most famously of all, a lot of your listeners will be aware of this, that Carol Burnett recorded a very famous parody song about him for the Ed Sullivan Show and for the Jack Parr show, which was the Tonight Show back in those days, and you can go on YouTube and look it up. Just do a search on Carol Burnett, John Foster Dulles, and you can see the recording. I think it's on the Jack Parr show of her recording of that song. It's hilarious. If you really want to get deep into that, you can look at some other YouTube videos where she gives some of the backstory to that recording, which is also very funny and very interesting. So he did have that reputation. In public, he was very serious and very staid. He was that way, I think, by conviction. He had aspired to the Office of Secretary of State for all of his life. It was a lifelong dream come true because his grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison and his uncle on his mother's side, Robert Lansing, was Secretary of State under Wilson and he had portraits of those two men in his office at the State Department during his entire tenure. So he had sort of a sense of destiny about him in that role. And he also had a very, very serious perspective or posture towards American foreign policy and America's role in the world. It was the beginning of the Cold War. We often think of the Cold War... Many people think of the Cold War in those early years as culminating 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But those years that he was Secretary of State were very serious years. Many, many crises that they didn't bring the world quite to the brink as 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but they were every bit as dangerous as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm thinking about a couple of Berlin crises occurring in the 1950s. I'm thinking about Quemoy and Matsu, which that was a crisis that occurred in 1953, '54, again in 1958. Then of course, you had the Dien Bien Phu crisis in 1954 in which the French asked the United States to use nuclear weapons to support them in their conflict with the Viet Minh. So very serious times, very serious times. The world could have gone to nuclear war during those years just as easily as at any other point in American history. And he had definitely an awareness of the seriousness of the times, and he was a serious man. He was a serious man when it came to serious things, which I've always respected about him. Richard Nixon told a story about him that I think is very... It helps us to really sort of get a picture of him and his seriousness. In cabinet meetings, when Eisenhower ran his cabinet meetings, he ran them, he modeled those cabinet meetings off of his meetings when he was a five-star general when he was Commander of the Allied forces in Europe. When he would have meetings with the senior staff, he always allowed everybody to speak their mind on their opinion on any issue they were talking about, no matter what their expertise was. And he carried that forth in his meetings as president with the cabinet. So even the postmaster general, if he had an opinion on the economy or if he had an opinion on, say, civil rights or opinion on American diplomacy, his views were just as welcome as anybody else. So Nixon tells this story in the oral history that when Dulles would be asked a question by the president, he would take some time to think carefully about how he was going to respond and answer the question. And he would receive the question and he would look at the ceiling and you could tell that he was formulating his answer, and that he would spend 60 seconds, 90 seconds, just staring at the ceiling. And it was awkward, especially at the beginning, at the beginning of the administration when people didn't really know him very well. Even Eisenhower didn't really know him as well. Him staring at the ceiling for several seconds was strange to people. And then he opened his mouth and he would offer a very logical, a very organized, a very comprehensive answer to the question and very impressive answer because he demonstrated himself to be master of the issues that were confronting the United States and the State Department. But on the other hand, he was also a frivolous personality. I always described his sense of humor as kind of zany. With his close family and his close friends, he had a hilarious sense of humor. He was known for having a very loud laugh. He would throw his head back guffawing and laugh really hard. His brother, who was head of CIA, Allen Dulles, once said that he thought Hitler had a guffaw. He said, "I thought Hitler had a laugh like a donkey." But he said that his brother's laugh even put Hitler to shame, which is a strange comparison. But Dulles, Allen Dulles, had met Hitler on a few occasions and had been privy to his loud laugh. He compared his brother to Hitler, which was kind of funny. I write about one instance. His daughter talks about this in her oral history interview that he once embarrassed her and her friends. She was about 18 years old, and he posed as a waiter at a dinner party that she was having with her friends, and he stuffed a pillow up his shirt, took a carving knife and split his tummy with his pillow. Feathers went everywhere like in an act of hara-kiri to get a big laugh out of everybody, and she was embarrassed by that. He thought it was hilarious. So in private with his friends and with his close friends and his family, he could be quite zany. But he was deeply introverted, he was a serious man, and he kind of knew when to sort of separate times for seriousness and times for frivolity.
James Patterson (10:30):
So this is when I ask you to pass the knife check, maybe briefly explain the knife check.
John Wilsey (10:41):
Yes, yes, and yes. And there were a lot of people that would comment on his laugh and how ready he was to laugh and how he loved a good joke and how he told a lot of jokes. His support staff, his secretaries, loved his laugh. They could hear him laughing in his office with the door closed, so forth, but he didn't show that personality as much to the public. I'll say one other thing about his sense of humor that, I mentioned Carol Burnett, she gave that parody song, and she presented it on live television a couple of times during the same week in 1958. The first time that she performed, I think, was on the Ed Sullivan Show, I believe. Somebody from Dulles' staff called her at home and said, "The Secretary did not have a chance to see the recording of the song. Can you go back on and do it again?" And she, of course, was thrilled because she was just starting out and she was kind of making herself famous off of this. So I think she went on the Jack Parr show, I could have the order backwards, but she went on the Jack Parr show, Tonight Show, did it again, and the secretary saw it. He did not comment anything to her-
John Wilsey (12:03):
He did not comment anything to her, he didn't get in touch with her, but she was watching Meet the Press on Sunday morning. She was watching the television. I think she was washing dishes or something at the same time, TV was on. She was watching Meet the Press. Dulles was being interviewed, and when the interview was concluding, the interviewer said, "Well, now Mr. Dulles, we appreciate you being on the program with us. There's just one last question I have. Can you tell us about this young lady, Carol Burnett, and that song she has about you?" And then his very dry cut away. He didn't miss a beat. He just grinned a little bit and said, "Well, I don't like to discuss matters of the heart in public." So she tells that story. I've heard her tell that story on The Diane Rehm Show when she was being interviewed about, oh, 10 years ago or something like that. And she has also a couple of places on YouTube where she has told that story.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:12:04]
James Patterson (13:15):
So I'm not sure if I should tease the readers on what the knife check is when I asked my question. But of course, this is a detail from the private lives of the children in which Dulles would require all of his kids to have a knife on them. So this is at his titular airport, I don't think you're still allowed to do that.
John Wilsey (13:39):
No, I don't. I think that's discouraged.
James Patterson (13:43):
It's frowned on.
John Wilsey (13:44):
I think that is discouraged, frowned on. But yes, he had three children. He had two sons, John and Avery, and he had a daughter whose name is Lillias. And Lillias was the youngest daughter, and Avery was the youngest son. John, of course, was the first son. And he required them each to be carrying a pocket knife on them at all times. And he would make sure that they were carrying their knife when he would demand it. He would say, "Pocket knife." And if they didn't have it, they had to pay him a quarter.
James Patterson (14:18):
So good. So one of the unique features of this book is that it is a biography of faith. And one of the things about biographies of faith is that normally there's some sort of obvious hook. And the thing about Dulles is that he doesn't necessarily seem to have an obvious hook. And when you read the book, one of the things you learn is that he's not necessarily the most devout person, and at least the way that maybe I as a Catholic and you as a Baptist would normally regard it. And one other thing just to shape the question is that it's odd that you have to tell his story in a way the collapse of the main line has left them unable to tell their own.
John Wilsey (15:17):
Wow.
James Patterson (15:17):
So tell us a little bit about the peculiar nature of this latter-day mainline protestant and how this faith functioned. I know this is the heart of the book, so you don't want to give too much away.
John Wilsey (15:30):
Yeah. Well, Dulles inherited a faith from the liberal social gospel tradition. His father, Allen Macy Dulles, was a pastor and a theologian. He was the pastor of a church in Detroit before he was born, and then for 17 years from right around the time that John Foster was born, he was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, New York, in upstate New York, near Syracuse and near the Ontario Shore. And he was the pastor there for 17 years. He pastored there till 1904. And he left that pastor to take a professorship at Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York. And he served in that role as professor of apologetics and theism at Auburn Seminary until his death in 1931. In fact, literally to his death. He died on a Thursday and I think he was preparing to go to class, to teach class the morning that he died. His father was a liberal. He had studied at the University of Leipzig, so he had studied under the German higher critical method and was a liberal. And so Foster grew up going to church three days a week, listening to sermons, drinking deeply from his father's faith. Dulles was at the heart of the Presbyterian fundamentalist modernist controversy in the 1920s. He was there at the General Assembly in 1924, '25, and '26, and he was very famously the council for Harry Emerson Fosdick, perhaps the most famous liberal protestant of the day. And while he was working on the issues of the controversy, he was being coached by his father. The correspondence between the two of them during those heady days of the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the presbyterian denomination is rich with the two of them just talking about the importance of getting this right for the modernists and for putting the fundamentalists away. And Dulles' contribution to the controversy was really decisive. It was behind the scenes, but it was a decisive kind of a victory that he represented. In 1937, he was at the center of the ecumenical movement that was taking place there in Oxford, England at the Oxford Conference in 1937, in which he had a turning point, a spiritual turning point. Prior to that time, I mean, he was an elder at his church, he was an elder at Park Avenue Presbyterian Church, which later merged with the Presbyterian Church in New York. But during those years, the 20s and early 30s, he was not really involved in the church, didn't go to church very often, didn't take his family to church very often. He enjoyed sailing on Sundays, he enjoyed playing tennis on Sundays, and so he didn't go to church very much. But then he went to the Oxford Conference and he saw something that he didn't think was possible. He saw representatives from all over the world, all over the Christian world who were getting together in Oxford to put aside their theological differences, to think about ways for the churches to actually have a hand in solving international problems of the day. So of course, in 1937, Hitler is rising to power, the Japanese have already established themselves in Manchuria. Looks like there's going to be another war coming up. And Dulles became something of a new convert in a way after 1937. He became convinced that the churches definitely had a role to play in international politics, and that it was possible for them to put away their theological differences. That tells you something about Dulles, that he was not interested as much in theology. He was interested in pragmatics. He saw the faith as a pragmatic faith. He didn't see it as a doctrinal faith. And that's certainly also very consistent with his liberal upbringing. As a liberal, he didn't place an emphasis on theology. In fact, he didn't believe himself in the virgin birth. He didn't believe in the literal physical resurrection of Christ. He believed in the ethic of the church, the ethic of Jesus, and he thought that's what the essence of Christianity was. It was an operative pragmatic faith, not a doctrinal or an abstract faith, which means that his expression of his faith was not going to be devotional, it was not going to be like a John Bunyan or a Charles Finney or some kind of a devotional thing. He was not Oswald Chambers. He wasn't somebody like that. I see a connection between his desire to live the life of an ethical Christian with this very public expression of piety that he offers as a public figure. Some people would look at that and say, "Oh, this is just him being a hypocrite, or he's not a real Christian because he just uses their faith to advance a public agenda." That's liberalism. So I see him as being not a hypocrite at all, but a thoroughgoing consistent liberal in that regard. It's interesting too that you say that it's weird that I'm the one that has to be the one to shed light on this. And I think that's right. I think that as a person who takes the faith seriously, I'm interested in people who thought of themselves as serious Christians, even if I'm not myself a co-signer with that particular vision of the faith.
James Patterson (21:58):
Yeah. In fact, I have in front of me the dissent of the modernist cartoon, where they're walking-
John Wilsey (22:04):
Yes, exactly.
James Patterson (22:04):
... down the stairs. Judging from the criteria that you offered me just now, I'd say that he's halfway down the staircase. For those of you who don't know, there's this very famous cartoon, a fundamentalist cartoon that was eventually used by Bryant in the Seven Questions in Dispute, and that was Bibles, fallible or infallible, manmade or not made in God's image, et cetera. So that means, and it's funny that the person in the middle of the staircase actually looks like Dulles.
John Wilsey (22:34):
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. I don't have the cartoon in front of me, but I've seen it so many times.
James Patterson (22:39):
Yeah.
John Wilsey (22:40):
I know exactly what you're talking about.
James Patterson (22:43):
So this sort of liberal Protestantism that's a little reluctant to take what they might regard as superstitious or outmoded views of Christianity, all the same, still seems to be fundamental to the moral vision that Dulles brings to American political affairs. You show that there's this tension in Dulles. On the one hand, he sustains this view about natural right or natural law, this idea of a moral law of the universe. Maybe I shouldn't call it quite natural law, that might be too... It's smoke of papism for him. But at the same time, there's a change in policy for him where he's less of a belligerent in his young life, doesn't go full pacifist, but he's still skeptical of it. And then later in life, obviously he's quite different on this view. And so there's this continuity in the moral basis, but a discontinuity in its application. And this is probably, at least for me, this was my favorite part of the book, exploring how he has to work all throughout his career trying to sort this issue out.
John Wilsey (24:03):
Yes.
James Patterson (24:03):
Let's sort this issue out.
John Wilsey (24:03):
Yes. I love the way you put that. There's another book, another religious biography that was written in 1985 by Mark Toulouse, who was a professor for years at the University of Toronto. I actually got to know him at an academic conference a couple years ago and we had a wonderful dinner together. His critique of Dulles was exactly what you're saying. I think he's right about this. I don't agree with him fully about his assessment, but I do think he's right about this, that Dulles had a transformation, a transformation from, the way he put it, was from prophet of realism to priest of nationalism, which is, I think, a really interesting way to put it. When Toulouse talks about a transformation, he talks about a radical transformation, and I don't agree that it's as radical as he says that it is. I do think that he does go through a change, and I think you just put your finger on it there, but I don't think it's as radical. Let me just flesh this out a little bit, if you don't mind. He talked about the moral law all the time after 1937, when he was at the Federal Council of Churches, when he was help setting up the UN, when he was a member of the Council on Foreign Ministers, and when he was heading up the talks that resulted in the Treaty of San Francisco that ended the war in the Pacific in 1952. And then, as a senator, very brief stint as a senator from New York and as Secretary of State, talked about the moral law all the time. And one question I get a lot from people is, what does he mean? What does he mean by that? You talked about natural law and I had to struggle a little bit when I was writing the book. Do I call this natural law or do I say it's the moral law? Because it sounds a lot like natural law when he talks about it, but it's not quite that.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
James Patterson (26:11):
That's right. Yeah. I had to catch myself, too.
John Wilsey (26:13):
Yeah. One of my drafts of the manuscript I had to go through and change, I went back and changed, because I was saying natural law for a long time, and I went back and changed all the references I could find to moral law, but I think there is one that I missed. I don't know if you caught it or not, but I think-
James Patterson (26:30):
I will tell you, you never go back and read your own work. You never do it.
John Wilsey (26:35):
Never go back. I'm sure that I found it when I had the finished product in my hands.
James Patterson (26:40):
That's right.
John Wilsey (26:43):
But the moral law, I think that's a better way because it's a liberal Protestant's way to see it, not a Catholic's way to see it. So that's the one thing I would say. The first thing I would say is how he defines it. There's a couple of facets to this, one, that human nature is sinful. Now, he always believed that. He was very persuaded by the Federalist Papers, that Publius' lack of confidence in human nature. I think he's definitely echoing that. I think he's echoing also scripture. He believed human nature is sinful. It was always seek power at the expense of others and evil men will always threaten order. He also believed that change was inevitable. This is something that he latched onto even as far back as his undergraduate days when he was at Princeton. He was Princeton class of 1908. He wrote a senior thesis on change and he believed that change was inevitable and it threatened order, it threatened peace and security. He believed that God created the world in a moral way. He believed that the world was a moral system governed by just law and right and wrong are built into the entire created order. So he was an admirer of Lincoln. Of course, this is something that Lincoln talked about. He saw the Christian ethic as the clearest statement of the moral law, so specifically, Christ's admonition to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, forgiveness of wrongs will disarm your opponent, the sacrifice of prerogatives that you have for the sake of others, defending the defenseless, the dignity of the human individual, the liberal notion of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, something that he took very seriously. He was someone who held to a very high view of freedom, freedom under just law, freedom over property, and economic and religious freedom were very, very strong commitments that he had all his life that he never changed. He believed that power should be shared, distributed in order to check the ambitions of human beings and that moral law was universal and it was irresistible. And because of that, he believed that, as long as the United States was committed to the moral law and animated by the moral law, that the United States would ultimately win the Cold War because the Soviet Union was atheistic, it was godless, and it was opposed to the moral law. It had set itself up in opposition to the moral law. And if you're going to do that, you're already on the losing side. So throughout Dulles' public life, you read his speeches, read his articles, his books, he has two books that he wrote, one in 1938, one in 1950, the moral law is central to his philosophy of politics and of diplomacy.
James Patterson (30:05):
So while he was entering into diplomacy, he ran into someone we've mentioned before. He had this funny little mustache. And you mentioned at the opening of his book that there is this picture of Dulles with Hitler. And tell me how we get to this, where we get Dulles, who steers his way more into what we might call white-shoe law firm, eventually makes his way into diplomatic life. You mentioned this is part of the family trade, but he does have to take a particular path that ultimately gets him to being the architect of a Cold War response. I'm especially interested in this question because one of the things your book helped me appreciate was how Dulles had to essentially invent an American approach to global affairs because the United States before that hadn't needed one, except in a very pragmatic trade relation sort of way, because we had counted for so long on the British supremacy of the seas. With that in decline, Dulles has to emerge. There's this idea of the moral law, but how do we get from a guy who's hanging out with the chancellor to someone who is as opposed to totalitarianism as anyone in the country?
John Wilsey (31:39):
That's great question and it's a big question, too.
James Patterson (31:43):
Yeah, sorry.
John Wilsey (31:44):
No, it's a great question. He is a member of the Reparations Commission at the Versailles Conference. He was a fairly young man. He was in his early 30s when he was on his way to Versailles in 1919. When World War I broke out in 1914, he had just gotten his job at Sullivan & Cromwell, which was an international law firm in Manhattan, as you say, white-shoe law firm. That's an interesting story about how he got that job. He got that job through his grandfather, former Secretary of State, Foster. In 1911, he joined that law firm. By 1914, in the onset of war, he was already representing Sullivan & Cromwell with the Government of Panama, as well as Costa Rica. I believe he may have even gone down to Nicaragua, as well, and he made a couple of trips down there to Central America to visit various diplomats from those countries to ensure that, when the war came, that those countries would, in fact, declare war on Germany with the United States, which of course did happen in 1917. The South American country, Central American countries did do that. They were faithful to a promise they kept to John Foster Dulles. He was sent there by his uncle, Robert Lansing, on those missions. So early, early on in his career as a lawyer, he is already representing the State Department, as well as his law firm. When war broke out in 1917, he wanted to be an artillerist. He tried to volunteer for the artillery. He couldn't get in because his eyesight was so bad. On one of his trips down there to Central America, he contracted malaria and it messed up his eyesight. So he couldn't be in combat arms in the Army, but he did manage to secure himself a role with the Signal Corps and that turned into a job with the War Trade Board. He was a captain in the Army and worked for the War Trade Board. When the war ended, through his connection with Bernard Baruch, who was an old family friend going back to his childhood, Bernard Baruch had him come to Versailles as his personal assistant. Later on, he got a seat on the Reparations Commission. And he learned a lot of lessons from Versailles. He learned that static treaty commitments would always lead to war. He learned that, if you grind your former opponent's face in the mud, as it were, humiliate them, the time would come when they would seek revenge and start another war, several other lessons that he learned. Now, those lessons he did not learn until later in the '30s and the '40s, but he did come away from Versailles a much wiser man. He came back in late 1919. He started his work back up with his law firm. At the height of his career in the '20s, he managed over a billion dollars in loans to countries in Europe and in Central America. And in 1933, he took two trips to Germany, one in July, or rather June, I should say, and one in December in 1933, where he was helping to renegotiate the terms of German payments of reparations, which of course, during the 1920s and early '30s, that was a constant bugaboo that […] was trying to work with. He had the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan and those things. And so in one of those visits, I think it was the one in June, he is photographed with Hitler. It's a weird photograph. It's a photograph that I found in the archives there at Princeton. He's in his ...
John Wilsey (36:03):
Photograph that I found in the archives there at Princeton, is in its own folder all by itself. And there's no other pictures in there. And all it says on the back is JFD 1933.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:36:04]
James Patterson (36:10):
I'm so sorry.
John Wilsey (36:14):
And it's so weird.
James Patterson (36:14):
Nothing else interesting about this photograph, except the year.
John Wilsey (36:19):
It's so weird. Yeah, it was so strange because there's nothing at all for commentary, and I've never seen any biographer forever mention the picture. I was able to put two and two together and I've figured out that's what he was doing. He was there in Germany. Hitler had come to power as chancellor in January of 1933. And he was negotiating with Hitler on reparations payments and that's why he was there. It's a weird picture too, because Hitler is in a tuxedo.
James Patterson (36:48):
Oh yeah, not what you usually see.
John Wilsey (36:51):
Not what you usually see Hitler wearing, usually he is in a frumpy suit or a military uniform. Hitler is grinning broadly. It's a candid sort of a picture taken in a ballroom full of people. And there he is talking to John Foster Dulles. In 1933, nobody knew what Hitler would become. We know now.
James Patterson (37:14):
Yeah, right.
John Wilsey (37:16):
But then nobody knew. Was a defender of Hitler all the way up until I think 1937, saying that he was kind of getting a bad rap. And after 1937, I believe he changed his mind about Hitler. But regardless of those things, your broader question about how does he go from being sort of focused on his career as a lawyer and really spending the 1920s just really amassing a massive fortune. Not being all that interested in politics as it were. He is interested in internationalism, he's interested in war during this time, of course, in the twenties, war is being outlawed by governments all over the world. 1928, the United States Senate passed the Kellogg-Briand [P]act, which was an act that outlawed war, and it passed unanimously in the Senate.
James Patterson (38:10):
We did it!
John Wilsey (38:12):
I think it was signed by Coolidge, Herbert Hoover who'd won the election in 1920, was a pacifist. He was a supporter of that act. So that sort of pacifism was in the air. He was going around the country, speaking on internationalism and war. He wrote several articles on the need for the United States to be engaged in the world economy. We think of the United States as being isolationist in the 1920s. Of course, it was to a certain extent, but on economic matters, the United States was not at all isolationist in the 1920s. And I think that's represented well by Dulles. Dulles was constantly advocating for a very vigorous involvement in the world economy. And the United States was involved in the world economy, the twenties. Initially I think that his concern with politics began in 1935. Hitler's on the rise, the Japanese are on the rise, and the Soviet Union is certainly a threat. And he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called "The Road to Peace." And that article that he wrote was really his first foray into serious engagement with diplomacy, international politics, and American involvement. How do you avoid war? He says in the very beginning of that piece, it looks as if the world is moving inexorably again towards war. And he thought that was a crazy process. He'd been at Versailles. He had been there to oversee the war to end all wars. Pacifism had been in the air for so long, and here we are getting ready to have another war. No one could have foreseen this. And yet because of Versailles, because the Treaty of Versailles was failing and because Wilson's vision of the Fourteen Points was not being taken seriously, war was coming again. So you really do see in 1935 is a sort of keynote year in his career. He really begins to become interested and that sets him on a path. In 1936, he gave a major address at Princeton University that echoed many of the same themes from that 1935 article. And on he went, he was off to the races in international diplomacy after 1935.
James Patterson (40:42):
Oh, so that's very good. Okay. I did have a bit of a spicy question to end this, if you don't mind spicy questions?
John Wilsey (40:50):
I love spicy questions. You kidding me?
James Patterson (40:53):
Yeah. So would you characterize this transition after '35, by the time he is in the Eisenhower White House, emphatically a proponent of the civil religion, this sort of national faith. Would this be an appropriately understood to be a kind of Christian nationalism? And I asked this question because you've written for Law & Liberty on the subject, and it's very much part of a lot of the discourse among conservatives in the United States, especially among American Protestants. And what makes the question so spicy to me is this is a liberal Protestant.
John Wilsey (41:37):
Yes. Yes. I'm so glad you asked this. And maybe we could do another episode sometime on Christian nationalism-
James Patterson (41:44):
This is a bit unfair.
John Wilsey (41:47):
... right there. But you make it-
James Patterson (41:47):
Give you five minutes to answer this.
John Wilsey (41:48):
That's okay. But to make it quick, yes. For most of American history, it's been, I should say this... Let me characterize it this way. Christian nationalism relies on history. Christian nationalism is always animated by a particular philosophy of history, particular method of history. And for most of American history, Christian nationalism has been articulated through the lens of a progressive view of history. So for most of the time, the nation has been situated in orientation towards the future. America is the land of the future. It's the nation of the future. Thomas Paine said, "We have it in our power to begin the world anew." John O'Sullivan, the guy that coined the term "manifest destiny," said, that we are "the great nation of futurity." We're going to turn our back on old Europe. We're going to turn our back on tradition. We're going to start over again. Our own motto. You look at your dollar bill, the reverse side of the Great seal of the United States. There's two mottos. One is, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation to Latin, but Annuit cœptis, I think is the name is the way you say it, which means roughly, God has blessed our undertaking. It's a quote from Virgil. And then the other one is Novus ordo seclorum, which is translated roughly a new order for the ages. So historically, most of the dominant way that Christian nationalism has been articulated has been to orient the nation to the future. It's been a progressive historiographical kind of a philosophy. And John Foster Dulles is definitely in that school of thought. He is a Christian nationalist of the early 20th century. He sees America as the nation of the future. He's optimistic about America's future. He's optimistic about the future of the world because he sees America as the indispensable nation in bringing about an optimistic sort of a view. He's a Wilsonian in that he sees America's role is messianic. God has chosen America to lead an international order, first through the League of Nations, but then later through the United Nations. It's going to lead the free world in this Manichean struggle against Soviet communism. And because America is on the side of the moral law and because America is a Christian nation, he says that kind of stuff all the time. That America is destined to win the Cold War. And the Soviet Union will eventually go down with all the other totalitarian regimes that have set themselves opposed to the moral law like the Nazis, like the Fascists in Italy, like the Japanese expansionists. These were all groups and governments and entities that set themselves against God. And hey, the universe is created as a moral order. You cannot beat the system. So the United States being a Christian nation, being a nation committed to the moral law and to a moral order, to peace, to security, to justice, America will triumph. That's very different from the Christian nationalism we see today, which is the conservative view that orients the nation towards the past. To the founding, the religious nature of the founding to the faith of the founding fathers and so forth and so on. That's not the kind of Christian nationalist Dulles was. So in our conversations about Christian nationalism, and we do have to be specific and be precise about what historical orientation, historical perspective we're talking about.
James Patterson (46:04):
The book is, God's Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles, the author, my good friend and wonderful scholar, Professor John D. Wilsey of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Thank you so much for coming onto Liberty Law Talk.
John Wilsey (46:21):
Thanks so much for having me, James. It's a great, great privilege.
Brian A. Smith (46:25):
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
John D. Wilsey discusses his book, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles.
Brian A. Smith (00:03):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
James Patterson (00:17):
Hello, you are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is January 6th, 2023. My name is James M. Patterson, and I’m a Contributing Editor to Law & Liberty as well as Associate Professor and Chair in the Politics Department at Ave Maria University, a Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, and at the Institute for Human Ecology, and the President of the Ciceronian Society. My guest today is Dr. John D. Wilsey. He is Associate Professor of Church History and Philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and book review editor at the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He is also an ordained pastor and has pastored at several churches in Virginia and North Carolina as well as teaching both at K-12 and university-level positions. In 2017 through ’18, he was the William E. Simon visiting fellow in Religion and Public Life with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton Seminary. He has written three books: One Nation Under God: An Evangelical Critique of Christian America, and American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of An Idea. Today, our topic is his third book, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. I should also mention that Dr. Wilsey is a fellow at CRCD with me, so Dr. Wilsey, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
John Wilsey (01:47):
James, thanks so much for having me. I’m glad to be here.
James Patterson (01:50):
Well, if things get a little informal during this podcast, it’s because John and I go way back and so we’re having a good time today. But a person who did not have the reputation of having a good time was the subject of this book, John Foster Dulles. Was he as stern and cold-blooded and marble-like as his reputation would seem?
John Wilsey (02:23):
Yes and no. I’ll start with that to frustrate your listeners right off the bat. But before we get into that, I just do want to thank you, James, for having me on this podcast. I love Law & Liberty, avid reader from way back. Had the honor and privilege to contribute some writing pieces to Law & Liberty recently, and just a big fan. A big fan of yours as well and I’m very grateful for our friendship. It’s approaching 10 years now, I believe.
James Patterson (02:58):
That’s right.
John Wilsey (02:58):
So it’s a great honor and a privilege to be with you. Yes, John Foster Dulles definitely has that rep for being sort of a bucket of cold ice water. I can’t remember what year it was, I think it might have been 1956, Time Magazine voted him as the most boring man in America. And maybe most famously of all, a lot of your listeners will be aware of this, that Carol Burnett recorded a very famous parody song about him for the Ed Sullivan Show and for the Jack Parr show, which was the Tonight Show back in those days, and you can go on YouTube and look it up. Just do a search on Carol Burnett, John Foster Dulles, and you can see the recording. I think it’s on the Jack Parr show of her recording of that song. It’s hilarious. If you really want to get deep into that, you can look at some other YouTube videos where she gives some of the backstory to that recording, which is also very funny and very interesting. So he did have that reputation. In public, he was very serious and very staid. He was that way, I think, by conviction. He had aspired to the Office of Secretary of State for all of his life. It was a lifelong dream come true because his grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison and his uncle on his mother’s side, Robert Lansing, was Secretary of State under Wilson and he had portraits of those two men in his office at the State Department during his entire tenure. So he had sort of a sense of destiny about him in that role. And he also had a very, very serious perspective or posture towards American foreign policy and America’s role in the world. It was the beginning of the Cold War. We often think of the Cold War… Many people think of the Cold War in those early years as culminating 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But those years that he was Secretary of State were very serious years. Many, many crises that they didn’t bring the world quite to the brink as 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but they were every bit as dangerous as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m thinking about a couple of Berlin crises occurring in the 1950s. I’m thinking about Quemoy and Matsu, which that was a crisis that occurred in 1953, ’54, again in 1958. Then of course, you had the Dien Bien Phu crisis in 1954 in which the French asked the United States to use nuclear weapons to support them in their conflict with the Viet Minh. So very serious times, very serious times. The world could have gone to nuclear war during those years just as easily as at any other point in American history. And he had definitely an awareness of the seriousness of the times, and he was a serious man. He was a serious man when it came to serious things, which I’ve always respected about him. Richard Nixon told a story about him that I think is very… It helps us to really sort of get a picture of him and his seriousness. In cabinet meetings, when Eisenhower ran his cabinet meetings, he ran them, he modeled those cabinet meetings off of his meetings when he was a five-star general when he was Commander of the Allied forces in Europe. When he would have meetings with the senior staff, he always allowed everybody to speak their mind on their opinion on any issue they were talking about, no matter what their expertise was. And he carried that forth in his meetings as president with the cabinet. So even the postmaster general, if he had an opinion on the economy or if he had an opinion on, say, civil rights or opinion on American diplomacy, his views were just as welcome as anybody else. So Nixon tells this story in the oral history that when Dulles would be asked a question by the president, he would take some time to think carefully about how he was going to respond and answer the question. And he would receive the question and he would look at the ceiling and you could tell that he was formulating his answer, and that he would spend 60 seconds, 90 seconds, just staring at the ceiling. And it was awkward, especially at the beginning, at the beginning of the administration when people didn’t really know him very well. Even Eisenhower didn’t really know him as well. Him staring at the ceiling for several seconds was strange to people. And then he opened his mouth and he would offer a very logical, a very organized, a very comprehensive answer to the question and very impressive answer because he demonstrated himself to be master of the issues that were confronting the United States and the State Department. But on the other hand, he was also a frivolous personality. I always described his sense of humor as kind of zany. With his close family and his close friends, he had a hilarious sense of humor. He was known for having a very loud laugh. He would throw his head back guffawing and laugh really hard. His brother, who was head of CIA, Allen Dulles, once said that he thought Hitler had a guffaw. He said, “I thought Hitler had a laugh like a donkey.” But he said that his brother’s laugh even put Hitler to shame, which is a strange comparison. But Dulles, Allen Dulles, had met Hitler on a few occasions and had been privy to his loud laugh. He compared his brother to Hitler, which was kind of funny. I write about one instance. His daughter talks about this in her oral history interview that he once embarrassed her and her friends. She was about 18 years old, and he posed as a waiter at a dinner party that she was having with her friends, and he stuffed a pillow up his shirt, took a carving knife and split his tummy with his pillow. Feathers went everywhere like in an act of hara-kiri to get a big laugh out of everybody, and she was embarrassed by that. He thought it was hilarious. So in private with his friends and with his close friends and his family, he could be quite zany. But he was deeply introverted, he was a serious man, and he kind of knew when to sort of separate times for seriousness and times for frivolity.
James Patterson (10:30):
So this is when I ask you to pass the knife check, maybe briefly explain the knife check.
John Wilsey (10:41):
Yes, yes, and yes. And there were a lot of people that would comment on his laugh and how ready he was to laugh and how he loved a good joke and how he told a lot of jokes. His support staff, his secretaries, loved his laugh. They could hear him laughing in his office with the door closed, so forth, but he didn’t show that personality as much to the public. I’ll say one other thing about his sense of humor that, I mentioned Carol Burnett, she gave that parody song, and she presented it on live television a couple of times during the same week in 1958. The first time that she performed, I think, was on the Ed Sullivan Show, I believe. Somebody from Dulles’ staff called her at home and said, “The Secretary did not have a chance to see the recording of the song. Can you go back on and do it again?” And she, of course, was thrilled because she was just starting out and she was kind of making herself famous off of this. So I think she went on the Jack Parr show, I could have the order backwards, but she went on the Jack Parr show, Tonight Show, did it again, and the secretary saw it. He did not comment anything to her-
John Wilsey (12:03):
He did not comment anything to her, he didn’t get in touch with her, but she was watching Meet the Press on Sunday morning. She was watching the television. I think she was washing dishes or something at the same time, TV was on. She was watching Meet the Press. Dulles was being interviewed, and when the interview was concluding, the interviewer said, “Well, now Mr. Dulles, we appreciate you being on the program with us. There’s just one last question I have. Can you tell us about this young lady, Carol Burnett, and that song she has about you?” And then his very dry cut away. He didn’t miss a beat. He just grinned a little bit and said, “Well, I don’t like to discuss matters of the heart in public.” So she tells that story. I’ve heard her tell that story on The Diane Rehm Show when she was being interviewed about, oh, 10 years ago or something like that. And she has also a couple of places on YouTube where she has told that story.
James Patterson (13:15):
So I’m not sure if I should tease the readers on what the knife check is when I asked my question. But of course, this is a detail from the private lives of the children in which Dulles would require all of his kids to have a knife on them. So this is at his titular airport, I don’t think you’re still allowed to do that.
John Wilsey (13:39):
No, I don’t. I think that’s discouraged.
James Patterson (13:43):
It’s frowned on.
John Wilsey (13:44):
I think that is discouraged, frowned on. But yes, he had three children. He had two sons, John and Avery, and he had a daughter whose name is Lillias. And Lillias was the youngest daughter, and Avery was the youngest son. John, of course, was the first son. And he required them each to be carrying a pocket knife on them at all times. And he would make sure that they were carrying their knife when he would demand it. He would say, “Pocket knife.” And if they didn’t have it, they had to pay him a quarter.
James Patterson (14:18):
So good. So one of the unique features of this book is that it is a biography of faith. And one of the things about biographies of faith is that normally there’s some sort of obvious hook. And the thing about Dulles is that he doesn’t necessarily seem to have an obvious hook. And when you read the book, one of the things you learn is that he’s not necessarily the most devout person, and at least the way that maybe I as a Catholic and you as a Baptist would normally regard it. And one other thing just to shape the question is that it’s odd that you have to tell his story in a way the collapse of the main line has left them unable to tell their own.
John Wilsey (15:17):
Wow.
James Patterson (15:17):
So tell us a little bit about the peculiar nature of this latter-day mainline protestant and how this faith functioned. I know this is the heart of the book, so you don’t want to give too much away.
John Wilsey (15:30):
Yeah. Well, Dulles inherited a faith from the liberal social gospel tradition. His father, Allen Macy Dulles, was a pastor and a theologian. He was the pastor of a church in Detroit before he was born, and then for 17 years from right around the time that John Foster was born, he was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, New York, in upstate New York, near Syracuse and near the Ontario Shore. And he was the pastor there for 17 years. He pastored there till 1904. And he left that pastor to take a professorship at Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York. And he served in that role as professor of apologetics and theism at Auburn Seminary until his death in 1931. In fact, literally to his death. He died on a Thursday and I think he was preparing to go to class, to teach class the morning that he died. His father was a liberal. He had studied at the University of Leipzig, so he had studied under the German higher critical method and was a liberal. And so Foster grew up going to church three days a week, listening to sermons, drinking deeply from his father’s faith. Dulles was at the heart of the Presbyterian fundamentalist modernist controversy in the 1920s. He was there at the General Assembly in 1924, ’25, and ’26, and he was very famously the council for Harry Emerson Fosdick, perhaps the most famous liberal protestant of the day. And while he was working on the issues of the controversy, he was being coached by his father. The correspondence between the two of them during those heady days of the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the presbyterian denomination is rich with the two of them just talking about the importance of getting this right for the modernists and for putting the fundamentalists away. And Dulles’ contribution to the controversy was really decisive. It was behind the scenes, but it was a decisive kind of a victory that he represented. In 1937, he was at the center of the ecumenical movement that was taking place there in Oxford, England at the Oxford Conference in 1937, in which he had a turning point, a spiritual turning point. Prior to that time, I mean, he was an elder at his church, he was an elder at Park Avenue Presbyterian Church, which later merged with the Presbyterian Church in New York. But during those years, the 20s and early 30s, he was not really involved in the church, didn’t go to church very often, didn’t take his family to church very often. He enjoyed sailing on Sundays, he enjoyed playing tennis on Sundays, and so he didn’t go to church very much. But then he went to the Oxford Conference and he saw something that he didn’t think was possible. He saw representatives from all over the world, all over the Christian world who were getting together in Oxford to put aside their theological differences, to think about ways for the churches to actually have a hand in solving international problems of the day. So of course, in 1937, Hitler is rising to power, the Japanese have already established themselves in Manchuria. Looks like there’s going to be another war coming up. And Dulles became something of a new convert in a way after 1937. He became convinced that the churches definitely had a role to play in international politics, and that it was possible for them to put away their theological differences. That tells you something about Dulles, that he was not interested as much in theology. He was interested in pragmatics. He saw the faith as a pragmatic faith. He didn’t see it as a doctrinal faith. And that’s certainly also very consistent with his liberal upbringing. As a liberal, he didn’t place an emphasis on theology. In fact, he didn’t believe himself in the virgin birth. He didn’t believe in the literal physical resurrection of Christ. He believed in the ethic of the church, the ethic of Jesus, and he thought that’s what the essence of Christianity was. It was an operative pragmatic faith, not a doctrinal or an abstract faith, which means that his expression of his faith was not going to be devotional, it was not going to be like a John Bunyan or a Charles Finney or some kind of a devotional thing. He was not Oswald Chambers. He wasn’t somebody like that. I see a connection between his desire to live the life of an ethical Christian with this very public expression of piety that he offers as a public figure. Some people would look at that and say, “Oh, this is just him being a hypocrite, or he’s not a real Christian because he just uses their faith to advance a public agenda.” That’s liberalism. So I see him as being not a hypocrite at all, but a thoroughgoing consistent liberal in that regard. It’s interesting too that you say that it’s weird that I’m the one that has to be the one to shed light on this. And I think that’s right. I think that as a person who takes the faith seriously, I’m interested in people who thought of themselves as serious Christians, even if I’m not myself a co-signer with that particular vision of the faith.
James Patterson (21:58):
Yeah. In fact, I have in front of me the dissent of the modernist cartoon, where they’re walking-
John Wilsey (22:04):
Yes, exactly.
James Patterson (22:04):
… down the stairs. Judging from the criteria that you offered me just now, I’d say that he’s halfway down the staircase. For those of you who don’t know, there’s this very famous cartoon, a fundamentalist cartoon that was eventually used by Bryant in the Seven Questions in Dispute, and that was Bibles, fallible or infallible, manmade or not made in God’s image, et cetera. So that means, and it’s funny that the person in the middle of the staircase actually looks like Dulles.
John Wilsey (22:34):
Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I don’t have the cartoon in front of me, but I’ve seen it so many times.
James Patterson (22:39):
Yeah.
John Wilsey (22:40):
I know exactly what you’re talking about.
James Patterson (22:43):
So this sort of liberal Protestantism that’s a little reluctant to take what they might regard as superstitious or outmoded views of Christianity, all the same, still seems to be fundamental to the moral vision that Dulles brings to American political affairs. You show that there’s this tension in Dulles. On the one hand, he sustains this view about natural right or natural law, this idea of a moral law of the universe. Maybe I shouldn’t call it quite natural law, that might be too… It’s smoke of papism for him. But at the same time, there’s a change in policy for him where he’s less of a belligerent in his young life, doesn’t go full pacifist, but he’s still skeptical of it. And then later in life, obviously he’s quite different on this view. And so there’s this continuity in the moral basis, but a discontinuity in its application. And this is probably, at least for me, this was my favorite part of the book, exploring how he has to work all throughout his career trying to sort this issue out.
John Wilsey (24:03):
Yes.
James Patterson (24:03):
Let’s sort this issue out.
John Wilsey (24:03):
Yes. I love the way you put that. There’s another book, another religious biography that was written in 1985 by Mark Toulouse, who was a professor for years at the University of Toronto. I actually got to know him at an academic conference a couple years ago and we had a wonderful dinner together. His critique of Dulles was exactly what you’re saying. I think he’s right about this. I don’t agree with him fully about his assessment, but I do think he’s right about this, that Dulles had a transformation, a transformation from, the way he put it, was from prophet of realism to priest of nationalism, which is, I think, a really interesting way to put it. When Toulouse talks about a transformation, he talks about a radical transformation, and I don’t agree that it’s as radical as he says that it is. I do think that he does go through a change, and I think you just put your finger on it there, but I don’t think it’s as radical. Let me just flesh this out a little bit, if you don’t mind. He talked about the moral law all the time after 1937, when he was at the Federal Council of Churches, when he was help setting up the UN, when he was a member of the Council on Foreign Ministers, and when he was heading up the talks that resulted in the Treaty of San Francisco that ended the war in the Pacific in 1952. And then, as a senator, very brief stint as a senator from New York and as Secretary of State, talked about the moral law all the time. And one question I get a lot from people is, what does he mean? What does he mean by that? You talked about natural law and I had to struggle a little bit when I was writing the book. Do I call this natural law or do I say it’s the moral law? Because it sounds a lot like natural law when he talks about it, but it’s not quite that.
James Patterson (26:11):
That’s right. Yeah. I had to catch myself, too.
John Wilsey (26:13):
Yeah. One of my drafts of the manuscript I had to go through and change, I went back and changed, because I was saying natural law for a long time, and I went back and changed all the references I could find to moral law, but I think there is one that I missed. I don’t know if you caught it or not, but I think-
James Patterson (26:30):
I will tell you, you never go back and read your own work. You never do it.
John Wilsey (26:35):
Never go back. I’m sure that I found it when I had the finished product in my hands.
James Patterson (26:40):
That’s right.
John Wilsey (26:43):
But the moral law, I think that’s a better way because it’s a liberal Protestant’s way to see it, not a Catholic’s way to see it. So that’s the one thing I would say. The first thing I would say is how he defines it. There’s a couple of facets to this, one, that human nature is sinful. Now, he always believed that. He was very persuaded by the Federalist Papers, that Publius’ lack of confidence in human nature. I think he’s definitely echoing that. I think he’s echoing also scripture. He believed human nature is sinful. It was always seek power at the expense of others and evil men will always threaten order. He also believed that change was inevitable. This is something that he latched onto even as far back as his undergraduate days when he was at Princeton. He was Princeton class of 1908. He wrote a senior thesis on change and he believed that change was inevitable and it threatened order, it threatened peace and security. He believed that God created the world in a moral way. He believed that the world was a moral system governed by just law and right and wrong are built into the entire created order. So he was an admirer of Lincoln. Of course, this is something that Lincoln talked about. He saw the Christian ethic as the clearest statement of the moral law, so specifically, Christ’s admonition to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, forgiveness of wrongs will disarm your opponent, the sacrifice of prerogatives that you have for the sake of others, defending the defenseless, the dignity of the human individual, the liberal notion of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, something that he took very seriously. He was someone who held to a very high view of freedom, freedom under just law, freedom over property, and economic and religious freedom were very, very strong commitments that he had all his life that he never changed. He believed that power should be shared, distributed in order to check the ambitions of human beings and that moral law was universal and it was irresistible. And because of that, he believed that, as long as the United States was committed to the moral law and animated by the moral law, that the United States would ultimately win the Cold War because the Soviet Union was atheistic, it was godless, and it was opposed to the moral law. It had set itself up in opposition to the moral law. And if you’re going to do that, you’re already on the losing side. So throughout Dulles’ public life, you read his speeches, read his articles, his books, he has two books that he wrote, one in 1938, one in 1950, the moral law is central to his philosophy of politics and of diplomacy.
James Patterson (30:05):
So while he was entering into diplomacy, he ran into someone we’ve mentioned before. He had this funny little mustache. And you mentioned at the opening of his book that there is this picture of Dulles with Hitler. And tell me how we get to this, where we get Dulles, who steers his way more into what we might call white-shoe law firm, eventually makes his way into diplomatic life. You mentioned this is part of the family trade, but he does have to take a particular path that ultimately gets him to being the architect of a Cold War response. I’m especially interested in this question because one of the things your book helped me appreciate was how Dulles had to essentially invent an American approach to global affairs because the United States before that hadn’t needed one, except in a very pragmatic trade relation sort of way, because we had counted for so long on the British supremacy of the seas. With that in decline, Dulles has to emerge. There’s this idea of the moral law, but how do we get from a guy who’s hanging out with the chancellor to someone who is as opposed to totalitarianism as anyone in the country?
John Wilsey (31:39):
That’s great question and it’s a big question, too.
James Patterson (31:43):
Yeah, sorry.
John Wilsey (31:44):
No, it’s a great question. He is a member of the Reparations Commission at the Versailles Conference. He was a fairly young man. He was in his early 30s when he was on his way to Versailles in 1919. When World War I broke out in 1914, he had just gotten his job at Sullivan & Cromwell, which was an international law firm in Manhattan, as you say, white-shoe law firm. That’s an interesting story about how he got that job. He got that job through his grandfather, former Secretary of State, Foster. In 1911, he joined that law firm. By 1914, in the onset of war, he was already representing Sullivan & Cromwell with the Government of Panama, as well as Costa Rica. I believe he may have even gone down to Nicaragua, as well, and he made a couple of trips down there to Central America to visit various diplomats from those countries to ensure that, when the war came, that those countries would, in fact, declare war on Germany with the United States, which of course did happen in 1917. The South American country, Central American countries did do that. They were faithful to a promise they kept to John Foster Dulles. He was sent there by his uncle, Robert Lansing, on those missions. So early, early on in his career as a lawyer, he is already representing the State Department, as well as his law firm. When war broke out in 1917, he wanted to be an artillerist. He tried to volunteer for the artillery. He couldn’t get in because his eyesight was so bad. On one of his trips down there to Central America, he contracted malaria and it messed up his eyesight. So he couldn’t be in combat arms in the Army, but he did manage to secure himself a role with the Signal Corps and that turned into a job with the War Trade Board. He was a captain in the Army and worked for the War Trade Board. When the war ended, through his connection with Bernard Baruch, who was an old family friend going back to his childhood, Bernard Baruch had him come to Versailles as his personal assistant. Later on, he got a seat on the Reparations Commission. And he learned a lot of lessons from Versailles. He learned that static treaty commitments would always lead to war. He learned that, if you grind your former opponent’s face in the mud, as it were, humiliate them, the time would come when they would seek revenge and start another war, several other lessons that he learned. Now, those lessons he did not learn until later in the ’30s and the ’40s, but he did come away from Versailles a much wiser man. He came back in late 1919. He started his work back up with his law firm. At the height of his career in the ’20s, he managed over a billion dollars in loans to countries in Europe and in Central America. And in 1933, he took two trips to Germany, one in July, or rather June, I should say, and one in December in 1933, where he was helping to renegotiate the terms of German payments of reparations, which of course, during the 1920s and early ’30s, that was a constant bugaboo that […] was trying to work with. He had the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan and those things. And so in one of those visits, I think it was the one in June, he is photographed with Hitler. It’s a weird photograph. It’s a photograph that I found in the archives there at Princeton. He’s in his …
John Wilsey (36:03):
Photograph that I found in the archives there at Princeton, is in its own folder all by itself. And there’s no other pictures in there. And all it says on the back is JFD 1933.
James Patterson (36:10):
I’m so sorry.
John Wilsey (36:14):
And it’s so weird.
James Patterson (36:14):
Nothing else interesting about this photograph, except the year.
John Wilsey (36:19):
It’s so weird. Yeah, it was so strange because there’s nothing at all for commentary, and I’ve never seen any biographer forever mention the picture. I was able to put two and two together and I’ve figured out that’s what he was doing. He was there in Germany. Hitler had come to power as chancellor in January of 1933. And he was negotiating with Hitler on reparations payments and that’s why he was there. It’s a weird picture too, because Hitler is in a tuxedo.
James Patterson (36:48):
Oh yeah, not what you usually see.
John Wilsey (36:51):
Not what you usually see Hitler wearing, usually he is in a frumpy suit or a military uniform. Hitler is grinning broadly. It’s a candid sort of a picture taken in a ballroom full of people. And there he is talking to John Foster Dulles. In 1933, nobody knew what Hitler would become. We know now.
James Patterson (37:14):
Yeah, right.
John Wilsey (37:16):
But then nobody knew. Was a defender of Hitler all the way up until I think 1937, saying that he was kind of getting a bad rap. And after 1937, I believe he changed his mind about Hitler. But regardless of those things, your broader question about how does he go from being sort of focused on his career as a lawyer and really spending the 1920s just really amassing a massive fortune. Not being all that interested in politics as it were. He is interested in internationalism, he’s interested in war during this time, of course, in the twenties, war is being outlawed by governments all over the world. 1928, the United States Senate passed the Kellogg-Briand [P]act, which was an act that outlawed war, and it passed unanimously in the Senate.
James Patterson (38:10):
We did it!
John Wilsey (38:12):
I think it was signed by Coolidge, Herbert Hoover who’d won the election in 1920, was a pacifist. He was a supporter of that act. So that sort of pacifism was in the air. He was going around the country, speaking on internationalism and war. He wrote several articles on the need for the United States to be engaged in the world economy. We think of the United States as being isolationist in the 1920s. Of course, it was to a certain extent, but on economic matters, the United States was not at all isolationist in the 1920s. And I think that’s represented well by Dulles. Dulles was constantly advocating for a very vigorous involvement in the world economy. And the United States was involved in the world economy, the twenties. Initially I think that his concern with politics began in 1935. Hitler’s on the rise, the Japanese are on the rise, and the Soviet Union is certainly a threat. And he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called “The Road to Peace.” And that article that he wrote was really his first foray into serious engagement with diplomacy, international politics, and American involvement. How do you avoid war? He says in the very beginning of that piece, it looks as if the world is moving inexorably again towards war. And he thought that was a crazy process. He’d been at Versailles. He had been there to oversee the war to end all wars. Pacifism had been in the air for so long, and here we are getting ready to have another war. No one could have foreseen this. And yet because of Versailles, because the Treaty of Versailles was failing and because Wilson’s vision of the Fourteen Points was not being taken seriously, war was coming again. So you really do see in 1935 is a sort of keynote year in his career. He really begins to become interested and that sets him on a path. In 1936, he gave a major address at Princeton University that echoed many of the same themes from that 1935 article. And on he went, he was off to the races in international diplomacy after 1935.
James Patterson (40:42):
Oh, so that’s very good. Okay. I did have a bit of a spicy question to end this, if you don’t mind spicy questions?
John Wilsey (40:50):
I love spicy questions. You kidding me?
James Patterson (40:53):
Yeah. So would you characterize this transition after ’35, by the time he is in the Eisenhower White House, emphatically a proponent of the civil religion, this sort of national faith. Would this be an appropriately understood to be a kind of Christian nationalism? And I asked this question because you’ve written for Law & Liberty on the subject, and it’s very much part of a lot of the discourse among conservatives in the United States, especially among American Protestants. And what makes the question so spicy to me is this is a liberal Protestant.
John Wilsey (41:37):
Yes. Yes. I’m so glad you asked this. And maybe we could do another episode sometime on Christian nationalism-
James Patterson (41:44):
This is a bit unfair.
John Wilsey (41:47):
… right there. But you make it-
James Patterson (41:47):
Give you five minutes to answer this.
John Wilsey (41:48):
That’s okay. But to make it quick, yes. For most of American history, it’s been, I should say this… Let me characterize it this way. Christian nationalism relies on history. Christian nationalism is always animated by a particular philosophy of history, particular method of history. And for most of American history, Christian nationalism has been articulated through the lens of a progressive view of history. So for most of the time, the nation has been situated in orientation towards the future. America is the land of the future. It’s the nation of the future. Thomas Paine said, “We have it in our power to begin the world anew.” John O’Sullivan, the guy that coined the term “manifest destiny,” said, that we are “the great nation of futurity.” We’re going to turn our back on old Europe. We’re going to turn our back on tradition. We’re going to start over again. Our own motto. You look at your dollar bill, the reverse side of the Great seal of the United States. There’s two mottos. One is, I’m going to butcher the pronunciation to Latin, but Annuit cœptis, I think is the name is the way you say it, which means roughly, God has blessed our undertaking. It’s a quote from Virgil. And then the other one is Novus ordo seclorum, which is translated roughly a new order for the ages. So historically, most of the dominant way that Christian nationalism has been articulated has been to orient the nation to the future. It’s been a progressive historiographical kind of a philosophy. And John Foster Dulles is definitely in that school of thought. He is a Christian nationalist of the early 20th century. He sees America as the nation of the future. He’s optimistic about America’s future. He’s optimistic about the future of the world because he sees America as the indispensable nation in bringing about an optimistic sort of a view. He’s a Wilsonian in that he sees America’s role is messianic. God has chosen America to lead an international order, first through the League of Nations, but then later through the United Nations. It’s going to lead the free world in this Manichean struggle against Soviet communism. And because America is on the side of the moral law and because America is a Christian nation, he says that kind of stuff all the time. That America is destined to win the Cold War. And the Soviet Union will eventually go down with all the other totalitarian regimes that have set themselves opposed to the moral law like the Nazis, like the Fascists in Italy, like the Japanese expansionists. These were all groups and governments and entities that set themselves against God. And hey, the universe is created as a moral order. You cannot beat the system. So the United States being a Christian nation, being a nation committed to the moral law and to a moral order, to peace, to security, to justice, America will triumph. That’s very different from the Christian nationalism we see today, which is the conservative view that orients the nation towards the past. To the founding, the religious nature of the founding to the faith of the founding fathers and so forth and so on. That’s not the kind of Christian nationalist Dulles was. So in our conversations about Christian nationalism, and we do have to be specific and be precise about what historical orientation, historical perspective we’re talking about.
James Patterson (46:04):
The book is, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles, the author, my good friend and wonderful scholar, Professor John D. Wilsey of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Thank you so much for coming onto Liberty Law Talk.
John Wilsey (46:21):
Thanks so much for having me, James. It’s a great, great privilege.
Brian A. Smith (46:25):
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Kevin R. C. Gutzman joins host John G. Grove on this episode of Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
Often underappreciated and understudied by the general reading public, the Jeffersonian era is indispensable for understanding American development. Kevin R.C. Gutzman has now written a definitive account of the period. He joins Liberty Law Talk to discuss.
In his new book, Burning Down the House, Andrew Koppelman argues that libertarianism has gone down a dangerous path inspired by Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard. He joined host Rachel Lu for a spirited debate and discussion about limited government and the role of the state.
Rachel Lu:
Hello. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I am Rachel Lu, associate editor at Law and Liberty, and with me today, I have Andrew Koppelman. He is the John Paul Stevens professor of law at Northwestern University and the author of several books. But today, we are going to be talking about his newest Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. Thanks so much for being with us today, Andrew.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Thanks for having me.
Rachel Lu:
So, I think we should really just dive right in and talk about this title here. I don’t think there’s a need for some fancy preamble on my part. I actually thought the title was very clever because there is a metaphor in here, but there’s also an actual burning house that you refer to in the book, which you take as an example that will help us to understand what’s gone wrong with libertarianism. So, talk about that a little bit. What is the burning house and why did that become your title?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
So, Obion County, Tennessee did not have its own fire department. It contracted with a nearby town for fire protection, but it didn’t do the contracting. Each individual citizen made a private contract with the fire company for protection, and there was an old man named Gene Cranick who had been paying his fee for years and he’s getting old. One year, he forgot and his house caught fire. His wife called the fire department, and the fire department told him, “Sorry, you didn’t pay your fee. We can’t help you.” Eventually, they came down in order to make sure that the fire didn’t spread to his neighbor’s houses because his neighbors had paid the fee and his house burned down.
This generated a furious debate in the press afterward about whether this was appropriate behavior and there were folks on the right and the left who agreed that this was the true face of libertarianism. This was the vision of the future that libertarianism was offering. It wasn’t really so much about the house in particular where this was 2010. What they really were debating was Obamacare. What they really were debating was whether society has any obligation to take care of people who suffer misfortunes that are not the consequence of rights violations by other people.
Rachel Lu:
Right. Very good. An interesting example, also good, because I remember this and probably a lot of people do, right? I remember this debate about the burning house, and this is going to go on thought to have a metaphorical edge to it, right? Because you want to think about the way that libertarianism as a philosophy has burned down in a sense. I want to talk about that in just a moment, but first, I wanted to get in a question to make sure that I don’t forget it. You indicated in the book that you became interested in libertarianism at this time, at the time of the burning house.
Then as you say, this was a debate really about Obamacare in many ways. I know you were really interested in Obamacare. Before that point, you’re an established scholar who’s been mixing it up with intellectuals for a long time. Presumably, you already had some familiarity with libertarianism. So, what did you think before that? Did the research pick up on notes from a youthful libertarian phase or was it a total about phase for you? How did this fit into your intellectual life?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, I always believed that we should have a society that accommodated weirdness and difference and idiosyncrasy. My earliest scholarship was about gay rights and anti-discrimination law, but I wanted to respond to the idea that was being offered by libertarians like Richard Epstein, that the culture was none of the state’s business. It seemed to me that one of the things that anti-discrimination law did, first, it interfered with freedom of contract for larger purposes. I thought that that was entirely appropriate. It also was an intervention in the culture to try to change the culture. I thought that that was appropriate.
So, I was interested in libertarianism from quite early, but the Obamacare case took me out of the areas that I’d worked in, which were law and political philosophy with respect to individual rights to larger questions of government power. I thought what was strange about the challenge to Obamacare was that its proponents were trying to cripple the power of the federal government because they thought that that would promote liberty. I thought that that was strange. I thought that people weren’t understanding the extent to which the Obamacare challenge rested on this strange philosophy. In the course of writing a book about the Obamacare fight, which I did, I got deeper into libertarian philosophy.
I was surprised to discover that I liked Friedrich Hayek and his original formulation of libertarianism in 1944 better than I expected to. I was more sympathetic than I had been when I had read him in college and in graduate school. I also, for the first time, read Ayn Rand. Lots of people read them in high school. I did not. I was absolutely horrified and I found this stuff repellent. One of the remarkable things about the fire story is that I found a lot of libertarians treating them as if they were the same, Rand and Hayek, but they’re in fact radically different.
Hayek would never have a fire department stand back and watch a house burn down. He was just less doctrinaire than that. He was a big fan of free markets. He thought that people on the left should not sufficiently understand the value of free markets, but he also thought that there was a role for government to take care of a huge range of human needs that markets weren’t going to supply.
Rachel Lu:
Yeah, and it’s interesting, I’m your fellow traveler there. I think I also read Rand exactly that same period as the right is going through this very hard libertarian phase. I don’t think you should read Rand for the first time when you’re a full-fledged adult, because if you’re not 16, you read her and you think, “Wow, I guess I thought there must be something more or better or something in here. I know a lot of people are impressed by this, but this is just awful. This is it. This is really rad.” So, I don’t know. I hear you there, but let’s move on to talk about Hayek, because Hayek is in some ways the hero of this book, though heavily qualified, but still has a heroic role.
Of course, you go on to make an argument that I’m sure many of our conservative listeners will find extremely counterintuitive. You want to say that the Democrats have become the Hayekian party in truth, though not necessarily acknowledged, right? As the right has moved off in a Randian, Rothbardian direction, right? It’s actually tacking towards anarcho-capitalism, even though as you acknowledge, most people on the right don’t want to think of them themselves that way, certainly now, right? The Tea Party era has waned, at least in its public face. Most of them wouldn’t want to say that. But talk about what it is that Hayek gets right, that you think Rand and Rothbard have wrong.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
So, to understand Hayek, we’ve got to go back to when he wrote the Road to Serfdom, which was his big intervention. He didn’t mean it to be an intervention in American politics, but it was. He was really responding to the program of the British Labor Party, which wanted to nationalize the means of production and put all heavy industry under the control of central economic planning. In the late 1930s, the world’s most admired economic managers were Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, because they were the ones who had turned their economies around and they were both booming. Russia had been a backwater. Now, it was building steel mills.
There’s high employment, and they’d ended the inflation in Germany while France and Britain and the United States were all experiencing high unemployment. So, there was a broad consensus among intellectuals that economic planning was the only way out. They didn’t like the dictator’s methods, but they thought something like this was necessary. Hayek, who at the time was a professor at the London School of Economics, he had grown up in Austria, but he was now in London, wanted to argue that central economic planning was necessarily going to be wasteful and tyrannical. That’s the argument of the Road to Serfdom. T
he book was an unexpected hit in the United States where conservatives who were opposed to the New Deal were looking for some good intellectual rationale for the position that they already had. Hayek just turned out to be exactly what they wanted, but it was always a poor fit, because Franklin Roosevelt never proposed central economic planning. There was something approaching it that was tried in the first years of the New Deal, but he had pretty much given up on that by 1934. After that, what Roosevelt was offering was welfare state capitalism where you have capitalist economy but with a safety net. So, that you wouldn’t have destitute old people. You wouldn’t have destitute poor people.
The program of the Democratic Party since then has been about expanding the safety net to provide for the people who lose out in a capitalist economy. The Road to Serfdom wasn’t opposed to that. The argument in the Road to Serfdom at least, was that capitalist economies are not going to give people what they deserve. They’re just going to efficiently promote production and they avoid the tyranny that you would get if there was central economic planning. So, there really isn’t anything in the basic ideas being put forth in that book that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would reject.
We are arguing about the size of the welfare state, about what protection there ought to be, but Hayek, in 1960, again arguing against the British case, argued that you don’t need to have a national health service with doctors on the payroll of the government. It’d be much more efficient to give people vouchers and let them buy subsidized insurance on the private sector, have private insurance companies compete with one another to provide insurance. Of course, you’d have to require the insurance companies to write insurance for everybody so that they couldn’t exclude people who were sick and you would have to require everybody to have insurance.
By the time you finish reading this passage of the Constitution of Liberty, another book that Hayek writes in 1960, by the end of that passage, you can see today he has outlined Obamacare, all of the elements of Obamacare proposed by Hayek in 1960. He does, as he becomes older, become crankier about a welfare state. He is terribly afraid of democracy, because he thinks that the democratic governments are going to redistribute and destroy a capitalist economy. He ends up becoming friendly with murderous tyrants like Pinochet in Chile. But his original formulation I think had something quite valuable to offer, and the Road to Serfdom is still worth reading.
Rachel Lu:
So, it seems to me like you’re probably right that most people on the left would agree with Hayek about some fundamental principles. They certainly would agree that it is okay to engage in some level of redistribution in order to help people in desperate circumstances, but most people on the right would agree with that too, right? That’s not going to be a terribly controversial suggestion on either side of the political spectrum. So, I think maybe we need to distill a little bit more clearly what mistake it is that you think comes through Rand and Rothbard that you think is so important or invigorating on the political right.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, the shift that has happened over time in libertarian thought is the view that the smaller the state is, the better the state is, the more free we are. The larger the state, the less free we are. That’s an argument that has been put forth by the writers who I take on later in the book, not just Anne Rand, but Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick and Ludwig von Mises and Charles Koch who’s enormously influential in American politics.
While there are lots of elements of the Republican party that don’t embrace that view, if you look at the track record of the Republican Party, the last time they held the presidency and both houses of Congress, what they actually managed to accomplish was enormous tax cuts for the rich and gutting the regulatory apparatus, the administrative state. The Trump administration basically tried to cripple regulation at every opportunity that it had. There was a massive effort to abolish Obamacare and to take health insurance away from about 20 million people in order to have even more tax cuts for the rich.
This is not Hayek. This is a vision in which the smaller the state is, the lower taxes are, the better off we are. So, it actually has in practice quite a lot of power within the Republican party. You saw it just before the last election when the Republican leaders were talking about what they would do if they captured both House of Congress, which they hoped to do. They wanted to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and they wanted cuts in Medicare and social security. This is not Hayek and this is Rothbardian.
Rachel Lu:
Well, but what’s the argument for why it is necessarily Rothbardian to want a smaller state? Presumably, part of the background for this is that you’re right, most people on the right want the state to be smaller than it is. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we want it to be as small as is absolutely possible without descending into total anarchy. But if most people want it to be smaller that it is right now, if they have an idea that the state is doing too much, then for practical purposes, they’re always going to be attracted to any platform that promises to reduce the size of the state somewhat.
But I guess my question would be, do you have good reasons to think that the motivation for wanting that is really fundamentally Rothbardian or might there be some other reasons for that that are more sympathetic maybe, dare we say more Hayekian that are worth fleshing out and responding to?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
So, the useful work that Libertarians continue to do today I say in the book is they are inclined to think that anything the state is doing is likely to be incompetent or corrupt or both. This is always a hypothesis worth investigating. There are plenty of state programs that are counterproductive. If you read Milton Friedman’s books, if you read Capitalism and Freedom or Free to Choose, there’s a whole catalog of things that the state is doing wrong, interfering with the economy in ways that make us all poorer. A lot of the time, he’s right. The hypothesis is always worth investigating. Let’s imagine that you have a doctor who thinks that the body can heal itself and that surgery and drugs are never necessary.
You don’t want this person as a doctor, but he can be a fabulous medical researcher, because it sometimes turns out that there are medical interventions that are wasteful and unnecessary. It turns out, for instance, that there are lots of joint problems that have been the object of surgery. Turns out that physical therapy does the job just as well as surgery does. So, libertarians, I think, do a useful job in entertaining that hypothesis. It’s when you push the hypothesis across the board without attention to evidence that I think that it becomes destructive.
That’s another aspect of the Trump presidency. Trump wanted to get rid of any regulations that burdened industry and had high costs for industry regardless of the benefits. If given regulation is going to cost industry half a billion dollars, even if the amount of lives saved and destruction prevented is going to be 10 times that, well, the regulation is still too expensive and we don’t want to do it because we don’t want regulation burdening the industry.
Rachel Lu:
Right. So, you used that example in the book about the doctor and I thought that was pretty clever and especially good for thinking about thinkers like Friedman, because I think you’re right. He is ingenious sometimes about coming up with explanations for how certain things can happen without state action. They’re not always right. When you think through the details of them, sometimes you think, “No, I don’t actually think that would work.” But because his mind just works like that, it’s always worth engaging. Sometimes you think about aspects of a problem that you hadn’t thought about before and he can be a useful foil that way, even if you decide that he’s not right.
But here’s my concern or at least voicing a concern that I think many conservatives would have that I would share. As you move through the chapters of this book, I think many of us are going to notice there just seem to be a real lack of constraints, either theoretical or practical, on what claims people can make against the state in situations of need. So, conservatives are going to have two pretty significant objections to the growth of the state that aren’t really rooted in this tough luck libertarianism of Rand or Rothbard. They’re rooted more in concerns about subsidiary and the way that civic and community organizations can be stunted or suffocated by the state and then also in concerns about moral responsibility.
When are we stunted in our moral growth as individuals if we just live with the perpetual assumption that the state is going to backstop all of our real needs? Maybe you can’t have anything that you want, but at least anything that you plausibly need is society’s obligation to supply you. How does that affect us as individuals if we just live that way? So those two concerns I think are going to loom pretty large in the minds of a lot of conservatives who are going to agree with you that it’s okay for the state to do some redistribution for the sake of supplying a social safety net, but they’re not going to want the state to do quite so much.
So, the question that I would ask to you maybe on behalf of people who share those concerns is just under what circumstances is it okay for the state to say to an individual, “Yes, you plausibly need this, it would be possible to supply it to you at the public expense, but we’re not going to do that”? What could justify saying that if anything?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, the question of what needs are urgent enough that the state needs to provide them is a question you’ve got to answer at retail need by need. But the specific context in which we were having this argument was the fact that there were large numbers of Americans who either could not afford healthcare or who were going to be bankrupted if they got sick. That seemed to me to be a fairly easy case for remedying the deficits of the market if the market is in fact undersupplying those and one of the things that had been happening as the negotiating position of working class people had become more precarious as it steadily has, is that the number of people without health insurance was steadily growing.
So, in the decades before Obamacare, the proportion of the bottom quintile of workers who had no health insurance had risen from 20% to 40% and was continuing to rise. So, whatever needs you think people ought to be on their own for, medical care if they get sick seems like an obvious candidate for government supplying it.
But I’ll also say if there’s a point that Richard Epstein makes that I embrace in the book that the bigger and more prosperous a capitalist economy you have and the more opportunities people have to provide for themselves, the smaller a welfare state you need. It was because there had been developments in the economy that had caused the enormous growth of wealth in the United States over the last few decades to pool at the top that you had people in this precarious position. An economy that is doing better without welfare provision for the people at the bottom just needs a smaller welfare state.
Rachel Lu:
So, it’s interesting because I agree that we need to do something to help chronically ill people who can’t afford their health insurance, but where to you, it seems like this is, as you just said, an obvious case where the state needs to come up with some reliable way to help people who are in need. To me, it seems like a very, very difficult case. In the book, this is several times, you draw the comparison. You quote Locke for instance, talking about how we have a clear obligation to ensure that people don’t starve. Then you suggest that, “Well, it obviously cross applies to things like medical care.” To me, that jump seems like a really big one. You say, “Well, death is death.”
Actually, you say that in the book, death is death. It doesn’t matter if it happens because we can’t get food or because we can’t get medical care. Either way, you’re just as dead. So, these things are fundamentally the same. We have to provide people with medical care the same way that we can’t let them starve. But to me, I’m going to say no, those aren’t the same at all. Those are dramatically different. Obamacare was an interesting illustration of how different they are. Why are they different? Well, one reason is because there’s not really any limit to how much healthcare people might plausibly need to consume.
Whereas the human body requires a certain number of calories, right? Two to 3,000 per adult is going to be fine. Once you get those, you’re pretty much good. We can get everybody that number of calories in the United States today and then you’ve met that need, but that’s not the case for healthcare. The reaper always wins in the end. We’re staving him off indefinitely. So, the number of medical interventions or treatments that might plausibly allow people to live a little longer, you can’t quite say unlimited, but it almost seems to be getting there, right? People can consume a lot of healthcare, but also, it’s just a lot more invasive. If my physical person is the responsibility of the state, that opens a huge range of questions.
How my responsibility to take care of myself dovetails with society’s obligations to me. At what point in time is it okay for the state to exercise some paternalistic relationship and say, “Well, Rachel, I know you want to be a rock climber, but because we’ve agreed to backstop your medical needs, then we don’t think we can let you take that risk. So, no, we’re not going to allow any more climbing in Yosemite. It’s too dangerous now that we have agreed”? So, there’s a lot of questions like that that are opened by the healthcare concern that just don’t seem to be opened by the demand for food. Do you worry about any of those?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, to begin with, in fact, as a matter of American political culture, the enactment of Obamacare turned out to be no danger to Yosemite rock climbers. They’re still climbing. So, that particular slippery slope did not in fact happen. I mean, there is this problem about the unlimited character of medical care. It’s a problem that everybody faces. In fact, the insurance that is paid for or subsidized by Obamacare has treatments that it won’t pay for. That is a separate problem, but what Obamacare does in all of its forms address is the much easier cases that it requires, for example, that health insurance companies make free visits to preventive care visit to the doctor available on an annual basis with no copayment.
Now it doesn’t control. People are still free not to go to the doctor in the same way that we’ve got a food stamp program, but people are permitted to starve themselves if that’s what they want to do. We don’t force feed them. But it turns out that if you make these options available, lots of people are going to take them and those people are going to lead healthier and longer lives than they otherwise would. Healthy long lives are an element of human liberty.
Rachel Lu:
If you think though that the growth of the state has these negative impacts on us as individuals and potentially on civil society at large, then you can see how something like Obamacare is going to raise a lot of serious concerns. When you just say, “Well, these concerns are not going to come to fruition, it’s all going to be fine,” people aren’t necessarily going to be reassured by that when what you want to do upfront is dramatically change the system that’s already in place.
You want to do that basically on the argument that we absolutely have to because there are people in need. That’s when you get people who are going to come back and say, “Oh, so every time people are in need, we just have to make any necessary changes in order to ensure that they don’t have needs anymore. Can we at least spell out some conditions under which that might not be obligatory?”
It seems to me that you don’t really do that all that much in the book. So, I think that’s still going to be a lingering concern. People are going to feel like you haven’t really explained why the growth of the state can’t just be relentless, can’t just be endless. Once that becomes true, then we’re going to be really concerned about these issues of subsidiary and moral responsibility.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
So slippery slope arguments are always empirical arguments about what is in fact a danger and what dangers are likely to emerge in the world, but these same slippery slope arguments were made against social security. They were made against Medicare. There is a famous speech by Ronald Reagan in which he argued in the early 1960s that if Medicare was passed, that would be the end of freedom in the United States. It’s just not the case. Obamacare is now an element of American life, and it has now evidently become politically untouchable. It doesn’t feel like it’s not a free country anymore.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything medically. It is just the case that if you can’t afford to pay for your medical care, which is true of a very large number of Americans, that you will still get the medical care. There are easy cases, but you’re right, I don’t have a set of an elegant philosophical theory of the necessary and sufficient conditions of human need that warrant government subsidy. I think that that’s got to be negotiated politically.
Rachel Lu:
So, you mentioned social security in Medicare. You might anticipate, I don’t know, that for somebody like me… You mentioned that several times in the book. Actually, in the book, you seem to mention social security a lot more than Medicare. I was curious whether there was a reason for that. Are you more confident in the case of social security than in Medicare or it just happened like that?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, social security has been around longer, and so it has been more of a libertarian target. If you read libertarian writings from the 1930s to the present at any given time, if you read Libertarians in the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, one thing that is a constant is that they are always confident that social security is going to go bankrupt in the next 10 years. That has just been a theme that has persisted.
Rachel Lu:
So, do you really think that programs like Social Security and Medicare are sustainable over the long haul?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Yeah, I think that the broad purposes of these programs is to make sure that old people have a decent standard of living and have adequate medical care. The country is phenomenally richer than it was in the 1930s when these programs were enacted. We can afford to pay for these because we are so much richer. The principle impediment is that all of the money is pooled at the top and it’s politically difficult to get at it, but that’s a political choice.
Rachel Lu:
I don’t know. I think the numbers on that really, really are pretty bleak, right? Because yes, of course, these programs were designed to stave off penury in old age, but right now, they’re paying out massively more than they’re bringing in from younger workers. We’re paying for these programs by adding to the deficit, but we have shrinking numbers of workforce age adults and growing numbers of elderly adults. I think it’s pretty widely agreed at this point that especially in the case of Medicare, this is becoming a real problem. We’re going to have to change the thing in some way in order to make the program sustainable. That’s pretty difficult, because once you establish an entitlement program, people expect to get that.
They build their lives around that expectation. That seems to me like exactly the problem in fact that Hayek was worried about when he said, “Well, this is going to end up redistributing wealth from the young to the old. It’s going to cause intergenerational resentments and it’s going to distort people’s incentives in such a way that it may eventually become socially sustainable.” I look at elderly entitlements and I say, “Yes, and yes, and yes, I was right about all of that. These programs are a very serious problem.” I mean do you anticipate that there’s going to be some change that’s going to make even Medicare sustainable over the long run?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, I agree with you that politically, it is not possible to tell old people, “Sorry, we can’t afford to pay for your medical care anymore.” But I also think, I’m going to repeat myself now precisely because in our general running of the economy, we have been Hayekian and the country is so enormously more wealthy than it was even 30 years ago for us to say now, “Well, if you are old, we could have afforded to pay for your medical care 30 years ago, but now we’re too poor to do it and we can’t do it anymore.” It’s just wrong. There’s more wealth, much, much more wealth than there was 30 years ago. So, I wouldn’t focus on specifically the number of younger workers. I would focus on the amount of wealth that is available to the society.
Rachel Lu:
Well, what about the fact that we are right now using elderly entitlement programs to transfer wealth from younger workers to older adults who in many cases are far wealthier than these younger workers and were wealthier than them in their own youth? So, we’re actually transferring wealth away from a plausibly needier group of people to one of the best financially established groups in America. That’s just happening right now. It’s the situation that Hayek foresaw and that I think inevitably is going to happen when you establish things like these entitlement programs. Does that seem to you like an injustice?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Most old people in fact depend on social security for most of their income. Most old people are not all that rich. So, the biggest problem with social security, I would say, is that it’s regressive, the amount of taxation is capped. You pay a percentage of your income up to a certain limit. After that, the very richest workers with the highest incomes are off the hook. There’s been some talk of changing that, because again, there’s quite a lot of revenue there. A big shift in the American economy over the last several decades is that wealth is concentrated at the top. I could pay more in social security. I could afford it.
Even if the payments were not going to increase, the richer people can afford to subsidize the poorer people. But now, we get into the weeds of policy. The broad idea of libertarianism that I’m trying to address in the book is the idea that social security is morally wrong, because it redistributes and redistribution is a violation of human rights because it takes money away from people who did nothing wrong. That’s the fundamental libertarian idea that I’m trying to challenge. I mean, we can talk about policy. It’s just got nothing to do with my book.
Rachel Lu:
Well, I understand that, but I think it does. Maybe I’m not explaining this well. What I’m trying to get at here is that I think most conservatives are going to agree with you on the point that you’re trying to carry, but they still don’t like social security and Medicare and they don’t like a lot of things that the state is doing right now for other reasons. They think that these programs are problematic for the two reasons that I’ve already said. One is that they teach us to see the state as the primary entity that backstops all of our fundamental needs.
That creates a lot of injustices like the ones I think we’re seeing right now where a lot of wealth ends up getting transferred away from people who plausibly have needs to other people who in many cases at least aren’t as needy, but it also leads to a lot of negative kinds of incentives that both train people to live less productive and less morally responsible lives and also disincentivize the formation of different kinds of civil society. It seems like you just want to say, “No, I’m not really very worried about that. I think it’ll be fine. That’s not the question that I’m interested in.”
But if that’s the question that conservatives are interested in, most people on the right, and if many of us think, “No, we really don’t think it’s fine,” then my point is it may not be correct to suggest that the right is overwhelmingly Randian or Rothbardian. It may be that people on the right just don’t agree with you that social security and Medicare are well-functioning programs. They don’t agree with you that the threat to individual moral development and community is trivial and that’s why they’re opposed to the growth of the state. They’re not Randian. They’re Hayekians but Hayekians who disagree with you about a number of maybe more practical questions. That’s my point.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
There are two different issues here, and I want to separate them out. One is the specifics of the programs. I’m not addressing those in the book. The question about whether these programs could be designed differently is separate from the question of whether it’s legitimate for the state to do anything at all about people who in old age can’t afford food, housing, and medical care. I mean, any government program generates dependency. I’m sitting here in my house and I don’t own a gun and I have no ability to defend myself if I’m attacked because I rely on the police and my reliance on the police is a dependency. You could say, “Look, Koppelman, this is destroying your character. You really ought to be more self-reliant and defend yourself.”
But I think that it’s better for my liberty to not have to think about the danger of being physically attacked because I got a reliable police force. Even people who are barely making it on their wages, who don’t have the resources to set aside a fund for their old age, provide for medical care for their old age, I don’t think that that destroys their character. I think that makes them freer. Now, there is a concern that you’ve raised that we do know that some programs have been counterproductive and have generated kinds of dependency that are counterproductive for the people who are the objects of the program, that some welfare programs meet that description and some don’t.
I go back to my claim that libertarians provide a useful function to the extent that they call attention to particular pathologies of particular programs. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes welfare programs do create dependencies that are bad for human flourishing, but it’s just way too broad to say that this is true of government programs generally. The logic of that position does extend to the police force, and I like having a police force.
Rachel Lu:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you actually do have some examples in the book that are pretty good for thinking through some of the forms of, you might say, nanny statism, that we plausibly want. One of the things that you point out in the book is that modern life is just extremely complicated. In many cases when you think about all of those complications, you do want to say, “Yeah, I think it’s actually fine for the state to have somebody figure out which toxins can’t be in my lake that I live by, which ones are going to poison my children and then send people out to test the water and make sure that those toxins aren’t there.” I’m not going to do that on my own. I don’t have the relevant expertise. So, sure, I’ll pay taxes for somebody to do that.
But what I’m saying I think is that a lot of us on the right think there are a lot more cases than Democrats want to consider in which it’s not good for us to have the state playing that role. I think a lot of us think that, yeah, programs like social security and Medicare have infantilized us in ways that have undercut our flourishing as human beings. They’ve really fundamentally changed our relationships to our own families and to our own communities. Even if there are some positives to that, there are also a lot of profound negatives to that that we’re really concerned about. So, to loop this back to your argument, what I’m saying here is I think your point that you want to make against Rand and Rothbard, I think you make it very effectively.
I would grant you victory on that point, but insofar as you think that you’ve won a victory against the entire political right and you’ve shown that the Democrats are the real Hayekian party and that the Republicans are off on some Randian protest against the world or something, it just doesn’t seem as convincing to me, because I don’t think that the motivations most conservatives have for protesting the growth of the state are fundamentally Randian. I think that they’re more rooted in these other concerns about moral responsibility, moral development, civil society, community and so on and so forth.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, I think that the United States needs a responsible conservative party that is suspicious of the left’s proclivity, and the proclivity is certainly there to reach to the state for a solution to all problems. I think that people on the left have a tendency to be too optimistic about the state’s capacity to solve problems. This is an argument that we should be having at retail program by program. So, I think there is a valuable role for a responsible conservative party in American politics. I remember when there was such a party and I miss it.
Rachel Lu:
Well, do you think it’s possible? This is a question that I had for you. You have a brief flyby discussion of Aristotle in the book, and there are a few things that you say. I mean, there’s a couple places in the book where you basically just tossed to the side any distinction between killing and letting die for instance. Oh, not giving somebody medical care when you could is pretty much like murdering them or something. I mean, to a Catholic intellectual, that’s putting up a big sign that says, “Fight me, but I restrained myself a little bit.”
Andrew M. Koppelman:
That’s Locke. John Locke says that. I just quote him.
Rachel Lu:
Well, but even if that’s true, you’re quoting him with approval and you want us to apply that to present situations, right? I don’t think we actually want to spend the whole time talking about trolley car scenarios or things of that general nature. So, I haven’t gone that direction. But I do want to ask you, doesn’t it seem possible that many of the questions that we’ve been discussing here about the proper size of the state will only be answerable if we do have more detailed discussions of human nature and how it affects us as human beings when the state is playing a certain role in our lives? It seems to me that you don’t really want to do that very much. You mostly just want to say, “Oh, well, people should be able to pursue whatever life they want to have.”
But if you’re not prepared to enter more deeply into questions about human nature and what rural development requires and what healthy community and family life require, then it may be that a lot of the negative impacts of state programs on human life are just going to be invisible to you. You’ve already decided from the beginning that you’re not going to look at those kinds of problems or you don’t care about them or something, but then for somebody like me, that’s going to seem like a pretty see no evil approach.
All of the harms of state programs that I think are most significant and are actually seriously undercutting our thriving of human beings, you’ve just decided from the beginning of the book that you’re not going to talk about and that’s going to make a lot of it amiss with me.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
I don’t think that I’ve done that at all. I say repeatedly in the book that state programs can be counterproductive and destructive and they can have that effect, but once again, I think that you’ve got to think about that at retail. So, just the talk about the size of the state, you need to disaggregate the functions of the state. So, pollution regulation, for example, which you talked about, it’s just basic physical harm. I am making money by running a factory that dumps toxic chemicals into the river that children are going to drink. This is just basic harm prevention. But if you want to prevent that harm, you need an enormous scientific bureaucracy to figure out which chemicals are harmful in which ways.
You need a big state in order to provide this level of basic protection. Most of what the federal government does is Medicare and social security. We can talk about how to design those programs, but if old people are going to get a basic standard of living and decent medical care, you are going to need a transfer of funds on that scale. You think you can redesign the programs to make them more efficient. Hooray, I’m in favor of it, but the fundamental question is, are you going to do anything about that?
I talk about the earned income tax credit, which responds to the destructive dependency that the welfare state has produced by telling poor people, “Look, you get a job and you make any salary at all and we will supplement your income. So, that you have a decent standard of living, but you got to have a job. You got to work. You cannot be purely dependent on the state.” That’s the shape that the welfare state takes today primarily, and it does not in fact produce the kinds of dysfunctions that the older welfare programs did.
Rachel Lu:
So, suppose I say, “Well, one of my concerns about elderly entitlements is that it seems like they fundamentally undercut people’s incentives or inclinations to marry and have families.” The reason people used to do that is so that they would have people to care for them in their old age. But also, when generations are more connected by need, they’re just more aware of the relevance of family connection, of intergenerational ties, and so on and so forth. So, you say, “We have to do these calculations at retail.”
Suppose I’m looking at a young person who’s trying to decide what to do with their life, and I say, well, that person today thinks, “All right. Well, my parents are cared for by the state, and I will one day be cared for by the state. So, when I think about my personal goals, I don’t really see why new humans need to enter into that.” That person doesn’t go on to have a family. They end up pursuing some single life or possibly married childless lifestyle. Something like that is most appealing to them. Is that a retail level calculation when I start thinking about how that impacts people’s decision making or where do we fit that into the conversations we have about the appropriate role of the state?
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, there are today lots of people who have children because they want to have children, not because they are terrified of being destitute in their old age. I think that actually wanting to have children is a better reason to have children than financial considerations. Everything that we know about relations between old people and young people before social security, the relations of dependence weren’t sources of happiness on either side. We know that now. I mean, there are some people who live with their adult children, but in fact, the overwhelming preference of old people is to live separately and to not be in the same house as their children.
It’s not like they don’t have relationships with their children. They just want to live independently from one another. We have stories of the old people trying to manipulate and wheedle support from their younger children because they are financially terrified. I just don’t think that financial terror is a good basis for family relationships. I see members of my family who I don’t depend upon at all just because I love them and I want to spend time with them. That seems to me to be a better basis for family connection.
Rachel Lu:
So, clearly, I’m much more concerned about this than you are and I could bring forward a lot of further issues. So, things like these really sad articles you read sometimes from therapists who say, pretty much, my office is full all day long of people who either a parent or a child has just decided they don’t want to have a relationship with them anymore. It’s a one way decision. More often it’s the child who makes this decision, but it can go either way. Usually, the explanation is just, “Oh, I don’t like your political or religious or social views. I feel hurt that you’re not as supportive of my life choices as I’d like.” Whatever, something like that. It’s not some serious case of abuse, but relationships are messy sometimes.
Maybe the other person just said, “I don’t think I want to deal with this one anymore.” So, I’m a lot more concerned about those things than you. But instead of trying to solve that question, I just want to say my real question to you is, is there room in the parameters of your debate even for talking about questions like this? Because I think that is the type of concern that people like me have with the growth of the state. But when you keep coming back to the response, “Well, we just have to look at this at a retail level,” I’m going to be inclined to say, “Yeah, but what you consider to be retail level considerations don’t really seem to include a lot of the broader considerations that I have about human beings, how they develop, and how they’re most likely to thrive.”
It seems like both at the top theoretical level and then down at what you call the retail level, you have already decided that you’re only interested in looking at certain kinds of considerations that seem to screen out a lot of the concerns that I really have. I think many other traditionally inclined people would have. Where do we talk about this? Do we talk about individual dependence when we’re talking about Hayek and high level government considerations, or is this somehow supposed to be something that the policymakers deal with? Because I feel like that whole level of analysis just got squeezed out in your jump from political theory to “retail level” considerations.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Well, one of the basic presumptions of liberalism is that if you give people adequate resources that the institutions of community and family that you care about are going to flourish, because people are going to make good choices with their freedom. That’s I think true of most people. I mean your therapist’s offices tend to be inhabited by people who are in some way dysfunctional and need therapy. They’re not a good sample of the population as a whole. I mean, this has been a problem for liberalism from the beginning.
If you allow people to make their own religious choices, some of them are going to choose false religions and should the state tolerate that. One of the basic presumptions of giving people freedom is that people are competent to decide what to do with it. I mean the fact that the state got out of the religion business in the United States has made the United States one of the most religious countries in the world. It turns out that people are attentive to these things if you just let them decide how to live.
Rachel Lu:
You know what I’m going to say here. We got to wrap this up, but it feels to me like we’ve come circled around to a place where you are being the tough luck libertarian now. You’re telling these people in the therapist’s room, “Look, this isn’t my problem. If you didn’t raise your kids right, then I can’t help you now.” Where I’m the one who wants to say, “No, we need to be making decisions at a higher level to help people have more fulfilling lives and flourish and feel real and important human needs.”
Maybe an interesting place to have gotten to. I feel like I should give you an opportunity if there’s anything in conclusion that we didn’t hit that you want to mention about the book or that you want readers to be attentive to. We have a generally classically liberal audience. So, if you want to make any pitch for why they should be interested in your book, now is the time to do that before we wrap up.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
Big takeaway of the book is that libertarianism comes in flavors. The reason why I wrote this book was because when I was writing about the healthcare case, I saw that it was being animated by a libertarianism. So, I tried to learn about what’s libertarianism, where’d it come from. That’s why I was reading Hayek and Rand. There was no good general introduction to libertarianism that was not written by an enthusiast.
So, I thought a good critical overview of what this set of ideas is, where it comes from, I thought was badly needed. So, if you are classic liberal inclined, I think the book puts some pressure on your views and tries to sort out what is alive and what is dead in that view. I think it’s better to be awake than to asleep. It’s better to reflect on your political views than not.
Rachel Lu:
Thank you so much for that. The book we’re discussing is Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. It is… I didn’t say this before so I should say it now. … a very readable volume and you don’t need to have a lot of background in either law or political theory to read it. It really just reads very nicely. So, anyone with an interest in that, I would encourage you to go out and check out Andrew’s book. Thank you so much for being on with us today.
Andrew M. Koppelman:
This was fun. Thank you, Rachel.
Rachel Lu:
This was fun. Yes, thank you so much.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
In his new book, Burning Down the House, Andrew Koppelman argues that libertarianism has gone down a dangerous path inspired by Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard. He joined host Rachel Lu for a spirited debate and discussion about limited government and the role of the state.
Brian A. Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law and Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. And thank you for listening.
Samuel Gregg:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Sam Gregg, and I'm distinguished fellow in political economy at the American Institute for Economic Research, and I'm also contributing editor at Law and Liberty, part of the Liberty Fund Network. Thanks for joining us today. Classical liberalism and classical liberal ideas have long played an outsized role in modern American politics, especially on the right. Today, however, we seem to be living through a period of retrenchment, whereby, classical liberal ideas are under siege from the left, but also increasingly from the right. Economic nationalism seems to be in the ascendancy on the left and the right, and much of the American business world has lurched in the direction of what's often called stakeholder capitalism. We even find parts of the American right seemingly willing to even embrace and use something that most conservatives have at least theoretically opposed, that being the administrative state. Some national conservatives insist that classical liberals have been in the driver's seat of the American conservative movement for too long, and that it's time for them to step back. So what's happened to classical liberalism in America? Did classical liberals make mistakes in pursuing their limited government agenda? Is there a chance that the band, otherwise known as fusionism, might get back together? Are classical liberals now condemned to being friendless for a generation? What does it mean to be a classical liberal in America as the second quarter of the 21st century looms. Joining me to discuss these and related questions today is one of America's leading classical liberal economists, Dr. Veronique De Rugy. Dr. De Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in political economy and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her primary research interests include the US economy, the federal budget, taxation, tax competition, and cronyism. Her popular weekly columns address economic issues ranging from lessons on creating a sustainable economic growth, to the implications of government tax and fiscal policies. She's testified numerous times in front of congress on the effects of fiscal stimulus, debt, and deficits, and regulation on the economy. She's the author of a weekly opinion column for the Creators Syndicate, writes regular columns for Reason magazine, and blogs about economics at National Review Online's The Corner. Her charts, articles, and commentaries have been featured in a wide range of media outlets, including Bloomberg Television, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN International, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and Fox News. And I think it's fair to say that she is the scourge of that most crony-est of outfits, the Export-Import Bank. Vero, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
Veronique De Rugy:
Thank you for having me, Sam.
Samuel Gregg:
Vero, you've been involved in the world of classical liberal ideas in America, but also in Europe, particularly France, for a long time. And in the 1980s and 1990s, classical liberal ideas, especially about economics, I think, seemed to be in the ascendancy, right? At least at a rhetorical level. But now they are plainly on the back foot. So what, in your view, is the single biggest event, or the single biggest development that's responsible for this change?
Veronique De Rugy: That's a very good question. If I wanted to be utterly self centered, I would say that it seems that everywhere I go, classical liberalism loses, because obviously when I lived in France, it was not a classical liberal country, there's still a communist party, there's still a socialist party. I mean, command and control seems to be really the way people think about the economy, and the role of government, that most solution comes from the government. And I moved to the US hoping to leave all of this behind, not that I have any illusion that the US was perfect, but certainly, it looked so much better. And ever since, it's been in decline. But that, I assume, is more correlation than causation. So to answer your question more seriously, I think, obviously, the most obvious answer is we have either not done our job properly, or we've been ineffective at making our case, or, and there is something easy and appealing to the case that the government can solve all of your problems. And we have failed, utterly failed, to present our ideas in a way that actually contradict this claim in spite of the evidence. I mean, we live in a world that is abundant compared to where... It should be obvious that a market economy is the way to go. But also, I think we have probably failed to emphasize and talk to people about their real concern. So maybe we haven't talked to people at their level of concern, and we've stayed in this fear of, look, this is great, all is great, the economy is growing, we're wealthier than we are. And we've not addressed people every day concern.
Samuel Gregg:
Well, let's step back then and take a type of self reflective position, which I think is what you're doing now. Do you think that classical liberals simply assumed that they had won the economic argument, and they weren't paying attention to some major cultural shifts that have lent energy to those on the right and on the left, who perhaps were always skeptical about markets, and who never really gave up their faith in things like Keynesian economics, or the different interventionist options associated with things like industrial policy. So do you think that's part of the issue that the assumption was, we've won the economic argument, therefore our major job of persuasion is over?
Veronique De Rugy:
Yes and no. I think this is true for areas like free trade and immigration for a while. But I think in the world that I've evolved in, Keynesian economics has always been much more potent and influential, for instance, than the more, I hate to say this, but more free market alternative. So I think it is true for some areas where we took things for granted, because there was a consensus.
Samuel Gregg:
You mean something like trade for example?
Veronique De Rugy:
Like trade. Yeah. And immigration to some extent. There were some things we took for granted, which we assumed we had made the case, and it was done. The thing, in my opinion, that is more puzzling about the last, let's say 20 years, and what has happened, is that we see people, at least in my case, I see people who have been battling with me in the trenches against the left on central planning issues, on government intervention into their lives, on all sorts of things, who have now flipped their position, and are talking about how the free market is not the answer, or is it worth overriding the allocation of the market in order to achieve a common good? And they are sounding a lot like the people they used to criticize. That, to me, is the most baffling thing. It's not that we had won, and we took everything for granted. There's some of that, that's part of the story. What I don't quite understand is how you can have such a reversal in beliefs. Not everyone, but in a lot of people. I mean, it's easy to say it's opportunistic, that Trump opened the door for a political opportunity that a lot of people were actually were ever that principled, but were more in the business of winning elections, and trying to be in power, saw and jumped into. But I think there's something more. I'm just not that cynical to think that that is all that is at play.
Samuel Gregg:
So are you suggesting that maybe the case for markets was not as widely accepted as perhaps we assume? That in fact, things like a more or less neo Keynesian outlook on the economy never really went away?
Veronique De Rugy:
Well, I think it... It's obvious. Listen, even when I say that the case for free market, like free trade for instance was established, right? There were always some people who were skeptical of free trade.
Samuel Gregg:
Right. Pat Buchanan for example.
Veronique De Rugy:
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there were always people. Or I mean, if you remember the whole debate about NAFTA, right? I mean, they really opposed two sides very violently. Two sides that I think overstated their position. The outcome of, for instance, I do think... And you talk about this in your book. And I, really, where I said a lot of the free traders at the time probably overstated the impact of NAFTA. It's not that it's not a net positive, but it's not this panacea that is going to make everything fine. And on the other hand, obviously the anti NAFTA people were completely wrong about how horrible it was going to be, and all this, and all that. So it's not as if everyone wants a free trade, or it's also not as if, I think, the way people understood the benefit of trade was ever the correct one. I think there was an understanding that was actually profoundly Mercantilist, or profoundly misguided, I'll say, I don't want to put a label on it, about it. Where we've always said, "You know what? Free trade is great, because it allows us to export more." And we failed to actually... Because we were getting what we wanted this way, we were getting free trade agreement based on this premise, right? I think we didn't do, maybe... I mean, I don't want to blame people. But we have really, it seems, failed to actually make the case that actually the real value of trade is what we import. And in fact, from an economic perspective, from a domestic perspective, export as a cost, or even just making the case that if you want to export more, you need to import much more, right? And so-
Samuel Gregg:
We never really got away from, let's call them neo Mercantilist arguments.
Veronique De Rugy:
I think the logic of the arguments as we were making them, as a matter of, listen, we're getting what we want, which are free trade agreements, even though they're not perfect, even though the logic is misguided, but we're getting what we want, probably meant that we took things for granted that we shouldn't have done because people did not fundamentally understand. Did not fundamentally understand what the value of trade truly is. So that's an example to minimize how far we've fallen. I think we were doing great, but maybe not for the best reasons.
Samuel Gregg:
Let's shift discussion now to an angle which I think you're particularly competent to talk about with this, a discussion of what's happened to classical liberalism and classical liberal ideas. You have been relentless, and I mean relentless, in your critique of corporate welfare and the cronyism that's so widespread in the business sector of the United States. So is part of the challenge for classical liberalism today the fact that many business leaders don't actually like markets, they don't like competition? Because if that's true, if it's true that large numbers of business leaders are not really onboard with the case for dynamic markets both domestically, but also internationally, that means that an incredibly influential segment of America is not in fact onboard with market and classical liberal ideas. So do you think that this describes part of the challenge for classical liberalism today?
Veronique De Rugy:
It is. But I think our biggest challenge, right, is ultimately, we live in a world that is... Where politics plays a big role, and where the role of government is oversized, and the existence of government, and its ability to actually grant favors, unless we win, and we get some sort of, I don't know, constitutional amendment that says that no government granted privilege for the private sector no matter what under any circumstances. I mean, it's always going to be there. And I think if you marry this with the same issue as with trade, which is that people saw the benefit of, at least business leaders, right? They see the benefit of free market. But they actually don't think about what actually makes it work. And that basically, when they're given an opportunity to actually get a government granted privilege, meaning a subsidy, a monopoly grant, a tax break that the competitors are not getting, they take it. And they take it because they just... It's beneficial to them, it's available to them, they answer to their shareholders, and they maybe not at a fundamental level understand how this behavior in and of itself feeds a dislike for capitalism, for lack of a better word, a free market, for the lack of a better word.
Samuel Gregg:
Whereas, what really is operating here is a type of Mercantilist outlook.
Veronique De Rugy:
Yeah, I mean, it is. In fact, one of the most detrimental and problematic aspect, I think, of cronyism, corporate welfare, government granted privilege, however you want to call it, is precisely that because the government tends to benefit and grant privilege to larger more connected political companies, companies that may actually, in most cases, not actually need it at all but like it, because who wouldn't want to have better terms for your loans? It feeds this idea, right, that the wealthy and the corporations are the enemy. I mean, if you think, if you go back to the Occupy movement during the Great Recession, I mean, these guys were way... They were right about sensing that there is a real problem of a government that is effectively letting everyone being crushed, but saving a bunch of big banks, having sheltered big banks for a while, and now they're being saved, the airlines are being bailed out. And it gives this perception, right, that there's this corruption going on. Of course, the things people mostly don't see is that you don't cure this kind of behavior with more government. Or more importantly, in my opinion, that these behaviors only exist because of the government ability to grant this privilege.
Samuel Gregg:
Right. Which is essentially Adam Smith's point in The Wealth of Nations, in his critique of Mercantilism. So, Vero, we've been talking about the economic side of what's happened with classical liberalism. And we've touched on some of the politics. Here's a question for you which is a little different. And that is, do you think that there are things on the cultural side, cultural developments in America that classical liberals have neglected when they're making their arguments about limited government, and markets, and all these sorts of things, is that, are there things on the cultural side that they've largely neglected to their cost now?
Veronique De Rugy:
Well, I mean, not just on the cultural side, even on the economic side. Actually, your book was, strangely enough, an eye opener for me. There's this one sentence that I just actually wrote a column about, just this one sentence in your book, which is to actually remind people that economists really make a terrible case for the free market, for what the free market does. And we make it in terms that are as if the price system is the beginning and the end of absolutely everything. When in fact, what is actually beautiful about the free market is that is all the institutions that exist to support it underneath that are necessary, that are conducive too actually create cooperation between strangers, and good behavior really, between strangers. So that, I think, is an issue. Is we economists talk about the market, and the price system in ways that sometimes are counterproductive. Instead of talking about competition as this cut throat thing, what we should actually highlight, at the very least occasionally, is an incredibly cooperation that is enabled by the market economy. I think on the cultural side, I think we have... And I wonder whether it is because a lot of the free market movement is actually made of economists. And so the cultural aspect of this defense for a market economy just totally ignore the cultural side. And I think for instance, you and I have talked about this in the past, I think that we have utterly placed so much emphasis on the market that we have actually forgotten that as important are notion of communities usually underpinned by civil society, which is, civil society is the way that we help one another, basically, outside of the market, right? There is the market ways to do this, but there are also just... There are communities, and there are ways that people actually do good for one another, support one another, feed one another. I mean, the market helps, because it provides wealth to support these activities, but it goes way beyond. I mean, civil society is such an important thing that we should constantly be cherishing. And instead, I think we've overlooked it at great cost in my opinion.
Samuel Gregg:
So you think classical liberals should be saying more about the civil society side of things. So all these associations, communities, that are not state, but they're also not economic associations either.
Veronique De Rugy:
And think about it this way, right? So again, I think that the fact that so much of our community are community of possible liberals are made of economist, I think basically puts forward this individualistic side of a market economy, right? It sure leads to cooperation, and even though no one plans it. At least let me talk for myself. I have neglected, for about two decades, the importance of communities and the role they play in people's flourishing. And it's not for lack of haven't read... I've read David Beito, I don't know how you pronounce his name, book on all these welfare institution that existed outside of the government. I mean, I should know better. I mean, I find stories like this incredibly inspiring. But I think in my own thinking, I haven't focused enough on the importance of communities.
Samuel Gregg:
So we've talked about the past, and we've talked a little bit about the present. I'd like to now shift our conversation towards the future, and what might lay ahead for classical liberals, and classical liberal's ideas. So this isn't the first time in history, right, that classical liberal ideas have been somewhat marginal. I mean, imagine living in the 1920s, or 1930s as a classical liberal. I suspect it was a very, very lonely time. So what do you think might be the opportunities for classical liberals to advance some of their ideas in the current conditions? Are classical liberals, in a sense, are they basically condemned to wait for a crisis to come along and then seize the opportunity? Or are classical liberals looking for a more piecemeal approach? In other words, skirmishes, winning skirmishes here and there rather than waiting for a massive catastrophe to happen, to which they will then step in with solutions?
Veronique De Rugy:
So I don't think that catastrophes are the way to go for us, because when people are scared, when people feel poor, they turn to the government. I'm not super optimistic that our moment is going to come about because of a crisis.
Samuel Gregg:
But that's what happened in the financial crisis, right? Remember, everyone turned to the state, across the world.
Veronique De Rugy:
Yeah. No, I mean, it's what's happened during COVID. This happens a fair amount, and the government grows during emergencies. And the attempt to stay grow is, I mean, at least in the last 20 years I'd say, that's definitely the case. I do think that our only way of doing this, first we need to regroup. I think we need to talk to one another more. The battle of ideas ultimately is going to be the solution to our problem. Besides, I don't know what else we can do. And I think we're going to have to take stock of what has worked and what hasn't worked. And I was actually thinking about this, and I'm writing something about this right now, is I think we've overlooked the importance of economic growth in our lives. And I think we haven't explained to people enough how ultimately it's not just... Focusing on economic growth, it's not just a sound economic case. But it's actually an incredible case that with economic growth, you don't just lift everyone out of poverty, especially poor people. But also, you actually promote a lot of the values that we want in society, like a liberal order, tolerance, peace, all of these things. And I feel like we have definitely grown much less, at a much slower pace in the last 20 years. And I don't think we've been alarmed enough about that fact, because that is working absolutely against us. But I think ultimately, we need to make the case... We need to be very careful not to oversell a lot of our solutions. So I mean, I've mentioned NAFTA. We did probably oversell the benefit of NAFTA. I mean, I'm still a big supporter of NAFTA. I mean, there's no question in my mind that it was extremely important and beneficial. I worry that there's a trend in our movement to oversell the benefits of technology, and supply side reforms. They're very important, right? I mean, I think they're extremely important to produce growth. I think we all have to recalibrate and find a way to talk to people about what they really care about.
Samuel Gregg:
Right. Because when we talk about economic growth, we often talk about GDP, we talk about living standards, and things like this. All of which is good. But that's also a quite materialistic way of approaching it.
Veronique De Rugy:
Yeah, but I mean, I think we need to focus on the moral aspect, the non-economic aspect. You get more safety, you get more clean environment, you get more tolerance, more peace, there are liberal values that do not. These liberal values just do not happen in stagnant economies. They don't. They don't. In fact, a stagnant economy, they breed resentment, they breed trying to look for a scapegoat, they breed the, a lot of what we're seeing right now about the fear of others, blaming others. So I think we need to make a much better case to actually talk about all these things we care about, and put them in the context of things that actually really matter to people. And I think we need to do a better job. For whatever reason, it baffles me over... I mean, it constantly baffles me. Government fails all the time, a lot, at a scale that's enormous. I mean, I don't know if you read the story about the high speed rail in California.
Samuel Gregg:
Yes.
Veronique De Rugy:
Typical case of industrial policy, government intervention, hubris. Even the French bureaucrats, the engineers were like, "We're leaving. We're going to Africa to build a bullet train, because this is too politically dysfunctional." This happens all the time. And yet, people fail to hold the government responsible, or actually to remember that maybe it should make us more skeptical about using the government for everything. And this is what baffles me the most about the New Right to use this...
Samuel Gregg:
The sheer degree of government failure we can point to. And yet, many people who describe themselves as New Right, or national conservatives, or whatever this new grouping is called, they don't seem willing to acknowledge-
Veronique De Rugy:
But it's…
Samuel Gregg:
That the government fails again and again.
Veronique De Rugy:
A lot of these people were our friends, fighting with us against government intervention, precisely because they understood government fails. So that's interesting to me. But to their credit, I think they are doing what maybe we failed to do. And that is to actually point out that there are truly things that are not working. I mean, when you look at areas in the US where there's high unemployment rate, low wage, and people are stuck there. And unlike what we've seen in the past, and these type of contexts, people would go, or they would train and get another job, they would leave, they would go somewhere else to find... People aren't doing this anymore. I mean, there are groups. And we tend to actually talk in aggregate. Well, I'll admit, everyone is better, I'll admit, everyone is better. And it is true, I'll admit, everyone is better, right? Even those people in the [bottom] they all have TVs, and iPhones, and all that stuff. But once you've said that, you've accomplished nothing, because those goods, and that level of wealth is your new baseline. So we are not talking about these specific problems, we've ignored them.
Samuel Gregg:
So you mean we need to move from the aggregate to the regional and local in a sense?
Veronique De Rugy: Yeah. And true, for instance, I look at these areas, and it's heartbreaking. But I can't name you 10 things that the government has actually done to get people stuck there, right? But I mean, if I don't ever talk about these areas, right, then I've allowed basically the narrative of the market has failed these people to basically, to take over.
Samuel Gregg: Well, we're getting close to the end of our conversation. And I'd like to conclude by asking you a somewhat different question. So, classical liberals, they have their pantheon of intellectual heroes. So in more recent times, they would be people like F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, for example. But there are also others who go back a few centuries, and were, of course, primarily English, Scottish, and Western European. So my question for you, which we're going to conclude is, who is, for you, the classical liberal thinker from the past that classical liberals need to be looking to today for inspiration? Now, I have some ideas. But I'd be interested in hearing, who do you think would be someone who can inspire classical liberals in the somewhat gloomy environment of today?
Veronique De Rugy:
Frédéric Bastiat.
Samuel Gregg:
Bastiat?
Veronique De Rugy:
I mean, there are many. By the way, you know why we're so attached to people of the past, to scholars of the past, to intellectual of the past? And this is one of our challenges, because there are no new ideas. I'm always annoyed when people say, "Well, can you come up with new ideas?" Well, actually, there are not a lot of new ideas out there. Maybe there are different ways to do things. Right at the margin you can do things differently, you can have a different messenger, have a different message, use a different medium. But when it comes to the arguments for freedom, the argument for classical liberalism, honestly, all the cases have already been made. The one person who I think actually does a remarkable job with a lot of humor is Bastiat. Don't get me wrong, I love Adam Smith, and I like... But some people can find it unbelievable boring, right? I think Bastiat has it all. And this is not any chauvinistic instinct that actually gets me to say this, because I will say, the first time I read Bastiat, I read it in English, because the French totally ignore Bastiat. But I think that we can take a page of the way he was fighting these battles, and he was... I mean, he was funny, he had always concrete examples, he was challenging people, the way they think, as well at the same time, making some incredibly profound arguments about the law. By the way, I mean, Bastiat, before Hayek, right, talked about the difference between legislation and the law, how these are two separate things. So I guess I want to put a plug for Bastiat.
Samuel Gregg:
Bastiat is, of course, as you know, buried in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. You can actually go, and stand there, and look at his grave. And the fact that he's buried there, I think, is indicative of someone who thought very widely, obviously, about economics, and the movement for liberty, but also some of the deeper traditions, which he clearly believed.
Veronique De Rugy:
Yeah, and if I can add something, one of the things that we're missing very often when we talk about these intellectuals of the past who are very inspirational, who have actually put out in books truth that are just... That we're still using to this day, is we admit that I think the baseline for all of them was a standard for morality that may be actually different than the one we have today.
Samuel Gregg:
Right. They sort of believed in moral absolutes.
Veronique De Rugy:
So we pick and choose what we want, but we ignore that overall environment where the arguments were taking place. They were things that were taken for granted that we don't take for granted anymore. And I think we tend to pick and choose. So I think this is a warning about using writers of the past selectively without acknowledging some of the most profound facts about them.
Samuel Gregg:
Dr. Veronique De Rugy, thank you very much for joining us.
Veronique De Rugy:
Thank you for having me.
Samuel Gregg:
You've been listening to Liberty Law Talk, in which we've been discussing what happened to classical liberalism with one of America's leading classical liberal economists, Veronique De Rugy. This podcast is available here, at the Law and Liberty website, and all good podcast sites, like Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Podchaser. If you like what you're hearing, please give us a five star rating to encourage more people to join us each month. I'm Samuel Gregg for Law Liberty Talk. See you next time.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
James Dominic Rooney joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent Law & Liberty exchange on Confucianism, as well as political catholicism in the West.
Brian A. Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.
James Patterson:
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is James Patterson. I am chair and associate professor of politics at Ave Maria University, a research fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, faculty partner with the Jack Miller Center, and president of the Ciceronian Society. Today with me is Father James Dominic Rooney. He's a member of the Order of Preachers, also known as the Dominicans. He's an assistant professor of philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. He works primarily in metaphysics, medieval philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He has a recent book called Material Objects in Confucian and Aristotelian Metaphysics on Bloomsbury Press. But today we're going to be talking more about a political discussion that occurred somewhat on Law & Liberty, also elsewhere. In fact, part of the reason why we're doing this podcast is because I heard one of his interlocutors, Habi Zhang, on The Pacific Century earlier this month. I sent the podcast to him and then remembered that he's actually already had this debate. Father Rooney, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
James Patterson:
The position that Ms. Zhang has taken is that Confucianism as a political doctrine or political philosophy is simply incompatible with any idea of freedom, at least as it's understood in the West. In fact, she says that freedom has no real meaning in China until it encounters the West. What is it exactly about the view she took that you took issue with, and what's the position that you take instead?
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Well, I should say I think Ms. Zhang's position is a bit odd even within the world of Chinese philosophy scholarship. I would say it's actually a very active debate, because there have been a number of people, basically, since the revolution, who have been arguing back and forth about the role Confucianism ought to play, does play, might play in a future political philosophy that is more liberal. There was actually a very good book by a Chinese philosopher from Rutgers, Tao Jiang. He argues in favor of Daoism being a philosophy of personal freedom. I actually think that's a good initial response, that there's nothing about Chinese philosophy in general that lacks a concept of freedom. I think that kind of Daoist view from Zhuangzi that he was talking about is one option, of course, if you just want to talk about freedom in Chinese philosophy as a whole. Now my area is Confucianism, which is I think what Ms. Zhang was attacking in particular. And there are quite a number of Confucian liberals, actually. It's really not that unusual to hold a position that Confucianism might give us a grounding for something like a kind of liberal view of society. It's not going to be the same thing as contemporary liberalism but for example, the sort of people that come to my mind are Joseph Chan and Sungmoon Kim, who teaches here at City U, right out my window. I'm pointing. He teaches here. But I mean, both of them here in Hong Kong are well known for defending positions about using Confucian philosophy to defend liberal positions about freedom. My position is a little different, because they're more contemporary political philosophy. They're more interested in other questions. Mine came from the position that I'm sort of working on projects right now that might come to fruition in natural law politics. I'm from the natural law tradition. I'm a Thomist and we have a long tradition from Cicero and Aristotle to Aquinas down through the Dominicans of the modern school like Cajetan, and de Soto, and Victoria. And the position we hold is very similar to the Confucians. That's why I went into Confucian philosophy and my point against Habi Zhang was just to point out a lot of the Confucian republicans at the time of the revolution actually recognized the parallels with natural law thinking, with natural law, political thinking. And they pointed out that the motivations for Confucian political doctrine are pretty similar to those that motivated people like Yves Simon and Jacques Maritain to defend natural law sort of theories of democracy, and constitutional separation of powers, and all those sorts of things that we think of as liberal doctrines. And so I just defended that well, I mean if Confucianism can hold all the things natural law does and they're relatively close, well, there's nothing about Confucianism as such that requires it to be kind of authoritarian. And I think her arguments about that why what in Confucianism leads it to be authoritarian had a lot to do with the idea that government is aiming to work for good lives of its citizens, that that's the purpose of government. She called it benevolent government. And I think one of my other interlocutors also pointed out this claim and said, "Well, it's really about benevolent government," but there's nothing about benevolence in government that just is to say, right, perfectionism is what we call it in contemporary political philosophy, perfectionist political philosophy. There are perfectionist liberals around like Steven Wall, Joseph Raz. It's not all that unusual for there to be perfectionist liberals. I think even from a natural law perspective, Confucianism shares a lot of the same presuppositions as natural law theory, and you can get to defense of these same liberal institutions through natural law theory. There's nothing that stops you in Confucianism from getting there either.
James Patterson:
One of the choices she makes that I thought made the article both compelling but also perhaps subject to a certain amount of criticism is that of all the people she selects to offer a western account of human freedom is she chooses Hannah Arendt. And it sounds to me that Hannah Arendt wouldn't really comprehend that. Not that she wouldn't understand, but that her body of thought does not really overlap much with the natural law tradition. Is that the issue at work here or do you think it's something else?
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Yeah, I mean, if I can put it bluntly, this is a very common strategy among people today to argue against kind of liberal institutions is they tend to say something like this. I was just looking at Habi Zhang's article, and part of the point here by quoting Hannah Arendt is to make a claim that western philosophy, western theories of liberalism require some account of an autonomous self, that free people are disconnected from families and nation and it's like, I don't know, Sartrean or something, that we have no commitments to anybody else or to nature. Political authority is just oppressive. It can't be natural. When you start off on this account of liberalism or what is required for freedom, I mean, of course natural law, Confucianism can't accept that kind of individualistic atomistic self. That's just obvious. But it's certainly not the case that that's required for things like democracy or separation of powers or popular sovereignty. I mean, Robert Bellerman gives one of the famous arguments for popular sovereignty that the Catholic church accepted and he certainly doesn't believe in atomic individuals and this kind of picture. It's a very common strategy, anti-liberals use or aliberal people will use. And it's rhetorically effective to some extent, but it's just not true that in order to have and support liberal institutions, you have to accept this kind of completely individualistic picture of the self. Or another strategy is you have to accept Locke's picture of liberalism. But of course there's no reason to accept, I mean, there's no reason if you think separation of powers, popular sovereignty is true, any of those commitments, there's no reason you have to accept Locke's account or Hobbes' account even more. To me, it's just a kind of non-sequitur that if you accept these institutions, you have to accept Locke or Hobbes or Hannah Arendt's account of freedom. I don't think you do.
James Patterson:
This is primarily for my benefit as well as maybe some of the listeners. There is something you allude to, you mentioned it but you don't quite explain it, it's this distinction about the legalists intervening in historical Confucianism. And as I was reading it, I made an association where there's this emphasis on virtue and moral improvement in Confucius that the legalists just attempted discredit in favor of arguing in favor of some nearly totalitarian regime intended to keep the people in line. And when I was reading this, it felt very much like I was reading about the transition from medieval to modern political philosophy. Is this a fair analogy or are there some things that are missing in the account, the Chinese? I'm assuming there are, I was just wondering what they were.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Yeah, no, certainly. Let me just to answer your question immediately, I think actually that's a very good way to think about it. Although the Chinese version legalism or fajia is the school of law is what it sort of means literally. It's one of the classical schools of Chinese philosophy and they've sometimes been called realists or different other kinds of terms, but actually, I think it's got a very similar vibe to somebody like Hobbes. The basic viewpoint of these kind of people we can go to one of the more important people would be Han Fei Tzu. And these kind of theorists have a kind of, you're right, a kind of totalitarian theory of the state. They are influenced by another earlier school called Mohism from Mozi and it's a kind of consequentialist ethics. They accept a certain theory of the state that became influential in China because it influenced a number of leaders to crack down on philosophical pluralism because they thought philosophical pluralism undermined the state. It led to a famous burning of books and elimination of alternate thought because this was the ideal was in order to have a state that really is effective, you have to eliminate alternative perspectives, you have to shut down, right, philosophers that might have alternate theories of justice. Because that's one of the things from the early Mohist Confucian school or the early Mohist school consequentialism, is that part of the problem in the state is different theories of justice because it causes disharmony in the state. The Legalists were famous for many of their sort, let's say, taking consequentialism and practice and operationalizing it. They did all the things consequentialists get accused of today. They want vicarious punishments and very harsh punishments to dissuade people from doing bad stuff in the state. They were famous for these sort of implementing very harsh punishments, cutting out dissent, eliminating philosophical pluralism. And I think it's pretty clear to me that those schools are actually closer to what Habi Zhang is talking about. In the history of Chinese philosophy legalism sort of took over during this warring states period. we're talking around, I mean Han Fei Tzu is 240 BC around, and these schools are got prominent in China and influenced the way Confucianism was practiced in China and the sort of relation it had with the state because it became a sort of way of, it gave rulers a certain kind of perspective that the philosopher should serve the state, right? And they shouldn't be allowed to be independent. And Confucianism ended up adopting some of the views. I mean we might call the state Confucianism of the time, adopted some of these views so that it wouldn't get totally snuffed out. It tried to come up with of accounts the Confucians could support the state in a similar vein, although the Confucians always rejected the sort of legalist idea of vicarious punishment and these overly harsh punishments. The Confucians were always trying to moderate the punishments. And there were others. The basic sort of view of later Confucianism even was Confucianism was famous for something that the legalists would not, I think, accept which was the role of scholars in the government to remonstrate with the emperor. That was a very Confucian institution that shows you a little difference with legalism. The legalists thought the philosophers need to serve the state and need to be suppressed. The Confucians, even when they were serving the state, have the idea, if we might put it this way, that the Confucian institutions, the scholars were really independent and were supposed to act as a moderating influence on the emperor. They were supposed to educate him and then if the emperor did something wrong, they were supposed to write memorandum to the emperor to correct him. And this generates a sort of theory that looks pretty, it's not separation of powers, but it represents... It was supposed to be a check on the autocracy of the emperor because the Confucian theory was always that the moral law, justice, stands higher than the state that is definitely 100% central to the Confucian doctrines. If you look at the first chapter of The Mencius it's anti-consequentialist. It's one of the kings of the time talking to Mencius about how Mencius can profit the state, which is let's say a very, this is before legalism proper, but would be a very legalist kind of way of thinking. And Mencius says, "Why did you ask about profit? You should have asked about righteousness and then you would've asked the right question." And that kind of perspective has always been the Confucian perspective. Justice stands higher than the state. There's a higher moral standard that the state cannot violate. If the state violates it, the state becomes unjust and illegitimate to the extent to which it violates the standards of justice. The Confucians, I think definitely did not share that kind of legalist perspective, but you can see that this kind of legalist perspective very much influenced some of the practices of China. I think Habi Zhang is sort of associating some of that, this sort of legalist consequentialist understanding of the state more with Confucianism than it ought to be.
James Patterson:
You actually referred to another interlocutor and it was, I believe David Schneider, he makes a great deal of use out of the understanding of heaven or the idea of pietas versus, what is this? You say xiao? And how these are, that these are not sufficiently parallel ideas, but heaven and Confucian sense and versus a Christian sense or pietas and xiao and that this is a confusion that you've encountered. Is this a accurate assessment of your position or does he perhaps miss something here?
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
If I can try to summarize the position as I understand Dr. Schneider, his position is, as you say, how is a virtue that is akin to, it's translated in English as filial piety. Xiao Is the virtue basically of sons to fathers. And I mean sort literally that's what it is, sons to fathers. And then it gets applied by a sort of analogy to any hierarchically subordinate person to the superior. Xiao is a virtue also of servant to minister is a kind of xiao. I think pietas is a good translation in a good analogy in the western tradition because piety is about the same sort of thing, gratitude to God, gratitude to your parents, gratitude to your government and your nation. I mean you find that in Cicero you find it in Aquinas. But the difference that David Schneider tried to claim is that in xiao, in the Confucian tradition, we might say, "No inferior person has a right to oppose the person in a superior position." That's sort of David Schneider's claim. Now in fact, I think that's false. I mean, I think even in the Confucian tradition. Because in fact you can find in the, I already mentioned the institution of remonstration with the emperor, which is certainly the Confucians thought that was possible. But in particular too, it's also just I think not quite true to say that xiao requires the inferior person always to do whatever the superior person tells them to do. The obvious case is in the Confucian canon there are clear cases where in the analect and in I believe The Mencius as well, you find clear statements that sons are not to follow the commands of their parents if their parents command them to do what is evil. I think that's a pretty clear statement, that there's something wrong with the view that no inferior person ever has a right to disobey his superior, because that's precisely when you can disobey is when it's against the moral law. We could go into more detail, but my basic claim was I think David Schneider's view just takes inspiration from, again, the same sorts of things. There is among Thomists, I'm going to go in a little bit now to the West. There's among Thomists exactly the same sort of argument that in classical Thomism, right, charity and justice are about normative relationships, natural, natural kinds of roles and duties we have to each other. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre makes the same argument that there's no such thing as human rights in Thomism, there's no such subjective natural rights that individuals have under Thomism and the natural law tradition. But I think that's just false and there are lots of people that argue that that's the case because it turns out right objective, right is right relationships between people. That's in the Thomist's natural law tradition. It's the same among the Confucians, like righteousness or xiao is about right relations between people and there are wrong relations between people. And sometimes that can mean, right, it's indistinguishable from a kind of subjective natural right. For example, if the son doesn't have to obey when the father commands something that's immoral, it looks to me like that's just indistinguishable from saying there's a kind of subjective natural not to obey when it's a certain kind of command. You have a right not to obey under certain circumstances. I think there are other things, for example, the Confucians clearly believe there are certain actions that no person, not even the government can command you to do that we might say intrinsically immoral. There are absolute moral prohibitions on Confucianism just as there are in the natural law tradition. If there are absolute moral prohibitions, then you get something like human rights right out of it. Because if the government can't ever torture you, then torture is wrong and you have a human right not to be tortured just in virtue of being human you have a subjective not to be tortured. You can get that out of, I think that's one of the things you could get out of absolute moral prohibitions. If the government can't do something or no human being can do it to you, then I think you can derive these kind of claims diirectly. I think the harder question that David Schneider brought up has to do with separation of powers. What I argued is this, in the classical tradition in China, there's not been much consciousness of the need for separation of powers. There's not been much consciousness of the need for it or how to do it. There are some people, there are some sort of hints in the tradition where people thought about it. There are some more modern Confucians that sort of came up with claims about this. I'm forgetting this one Confucian’s name, but I was just reading, I'm forgetting. It's called the Brightness of the Dawn or something. He was like 17 18th century Confucian. But he argued for reforms that would bring about a kind of limitation, constitutional check on the authority of the king, of the emperor on the authority of princes. And I just don't think there's anything in Confucianism that requires you to deny it, that requires you to deny the legitimacy of something like separation of powers or the possibility of holding individuals in the government, including the emperor to some standard. I just think there's, even though it might have been the case that Confucians in fact criticize this or didn't come to a claim about separation of powers, I mean, it took people in the West a long time to do that too. It just takes time. There have to be certain kinds of circumstances. The question is whether Confucianism is incompatible with it, and I just don't think it's a persuasive argument that Confucian ethics or politics requires us to deny something like the goodness of separation of powers. And I think you can give arguments for it just as you can in the natural law tradition.
James Patterson:
Well, we should move on. People who are listening to this may know about our encounters with a revived concept about the relationship between church and state, and that is what's called integralism, I sometimes call it neointegralism, but we've both had work that we've done on this. I know that one of the things that you're doing to take on maybe the broader issue that integralism's brought up is that you have a book coming out called Beyond Classical Liberalism. But before we talk about that book, maybe talk about some of the things that you've done concerning integralism and where you stand on it.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Yeah, so the Jihad lives. I am very dedicated to the claim. I think there's something very deeply wrong with integralism. I should say, I mentioned to you before the show began, there are lots of noxious political views in the air. The ones that concern me as a Catholic priest and theologian and philosopher are those that claim that Catholic doctrine requires them to be true. I have some papers I'm working on at the moment about problems, injustice, individualism that concede certain claims that I think they make that are clearly false. Integralists tend to claim that there are certain commitments from Catholic theology that require you to be an integralist. For example, our doctrine of grace, or Thomas Pink is the famous philosopher who argues there's a certain kind of privilege that the church has in relation to the state that the church is in, has an intrinsic right from God to civil penalties of the state. That's part of the church's power, it's indirect power over the state. He gets this idea from Francisco Suarez, who he's a very famous Thomas Pink is a very good and famous scholar of Francisco Suarez. he gets the idea from him. But in fact, in Catholic theology, that position on the indirect powers is terribly controversial. There are quite a lot of people that have rejected that claim. The most notable I think is John Henry Newman and Joseph Raz clearly reject. I think there are actually lots of people in the tradition that reject this claim. I think the Dominican tradition rejected some of these claims. But leaving that aside, I think that the deep problem with integralism is even if you concede this controversial claim about the church's power, let's just pretend it's true. I don't think it follows integralism. If I put it this way, my account of integralism, I got this formulation a little bit from Kevin Vallier, so I'll give him credit for it. But I think the idea is it's a theory about the ideal political arrangement. The ideal political arrangement. And the claim is something like this: the state has the obligation or the mission of advancing the temporal common good, the church has the mission of advancing the supernatural common good. And the integralist thesis is this, that there is the ideal political arrangement is one on which the church can mandate the state to directly advance the supernatural common good. That's basically the thesis, and you need to unpack it a little bit, what I mean by directly. I think the idea is right, if the state advances good things, like they prohibit murder, right? That's a natural good, right? Prohibiting murder. That advances the supernatural common good indirectly, right? Cause you can't be a saint if you murder people, right?
James Patterson:
That is uncontroversial.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Yeah, I know it's a controversial thesis, but directly advance, directly advancing the supernatural common good means that the state can use its power under mandate or delegation by the church or something like that in order to, for example, punish heresy, right? Cause heresy is a supernaturally, it undermines the supernatural common good of the church. The idea is from Thomas Pink, for example, that the church does teach, you're not allowed to coerce people who are not Catholic. You're not allowed to directly coerce the unbaptized to become baptized, we think. But perhaps we could use the state or we have an ideal arrangement on which the state could be holding Catholics to their baptismal promises through coercion, right? If you are baptized as a kid as a Catholic, we can punish you, put you in prison for heresy or something. If you're not Catholic, we can protect the Catholics from you, right? We can stop you from building synagogues, right? Cause that's bad for Catholics, I guess. I don't think so. I think that's a little weird. But anyway, that's the idea.
James Patterson:
That's one word for it.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
We're going to keep the bad Protestants away from the Catholics and all the atheists. We're going to put them under dhimmitude or something. My objection to this theory is pretty simple, which is the thesis is it's the ideal political arrangement. I think there's no such ideal, I don't think it makes any sense what the grounding is for this ideal, why it's ideal. And I think if you try to work out what those grounding is, it leads you to accept something intrinsically unjust, whatever explanation they give. There are lots of different explanations, but the basic claim is going to have to be something like this. You can do it of one of two ways, but the idea is going to be, I should say the first thing integralists are always going to retreat to is they'll say, "Well, once we have a legitimate constitution for a Catholic confessional integralist state, well nobody, there might be non-Catholics living in the state, but as long as the constitution is just, right, why do the Jews worry about us using state power to advance the supernatural common good of the Catholics? If the constitution is justified?" Well, my problem is of course the justification of the constitution because that's where the ideal political arrangement comes in, is to say that the constitution for this kind of integralist estate is ideal.
I admit that it could be legitimate for the state to advance the supernatural common good under some circumstances. Maybe there are circumstances under which the state could legitimately do that. If we have a majority Catholic population, maybe if there are certain ways in which I think, here's a good example. I buy Kevin Vallier's convergence theory of public justification. There can be things that we can agree with Jews about, that we can publicly justify the state doing things that I think advance the supernatural common good. Here's something we might want to do.
We can pass a federal law to preserve Sunday as a public holiday of rest. This advances the supernatural common good, I think, right? And it's something state power does, and there might be other things that the state can justify that I don't think have anything to do with integralism that I think maybe the state can advance those things. And I don't think there's any reason we can't do that. But when you try to justify this ideal constitutional arrangement, I think you end up having to say things like this. You have to say something like, "Well, what non-Catholics think about the constitution of our government doesn't count." The integralist has to say either one of two things, either that non-Catholic objections to a constitution in which we exercise this kind of church power over the state, either non-Catholics are just not publicly reasonable. a lot of integralists, I know, just think the objections of non-Catholics to government power being exercised by the church are just, we might say publicly unreasonable in contemporary political philosophy. We just disregard them. They're not important. We could pass the constitution anyway. We had a constitutional convention to pick what our constitution is for our country. We could just leave the non-Catholics right out. They're not admitted.
The problem with this is pretty clear, I think why it's unjust, because it seems to me that it would just say, for example, we could set up integralist states in other countries like colonies, right? Because the natives don't matter if they're non-Catholic, their objections don't matter. It seems to me to entail pretty obvious injustice. A lot of integralists I think just accept that conclusion. But I point out my Dominican confreres, Bartholome de las Casas and Victoria, have some very strong words against the claim that right non-Catholics have true dominion or that the integralist state could somehow override the natural rights that they have of dominion. I think that's a problem.
James Patterson:
Does this tie in to the project where if classical liberalism needs us to go beyond it, part of that might be because we have a sense that there's something inadequate about its present argumentation that perhaps integralism a symptom of it's sort of resurfacing? Is that part of the cause for you to write this book?
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
I'll just say there are other ways people could ground integralism. I think they're not going to work. I think they're basically going to be circular. They could say, I think there's a tension in integralism, but I'll just put this, sometimes they say, and they generally do say you need a majority of Catholics for an integral state to be justified, but in fact, and in principle, they end up treating non-Catholics as if they have no duties toward them in this constitutional convention kind of moment. In terms of the constitution's legitimacy, they own nothing to non-Catholics. Well, that's a pretty clear tension. Is the 50% or more of Catholics, how does that require true legitimacy? This is what one of my articles is about, is there's a tension here that's really serious, and I don't think the integralists seem to care, but in fact, I think it's just very clearly is going to either lead you to say, "Well, either the integralist state is not the political ideal or injustice. There are no rights for non-Catholics of the right sort." They tend to think non-Catholics should just be excluded from citizenship. I think that's the center point for the injustice of integralism. Now to the point on the Beyond Classical Liberalism. I certainly think this view is a symptom of a certain kind of problem. I'll just say what the problem is right out. I gave a talk this summer where it was the failures of liberalism. I think here's what happened.
Liberalism is very much a sort of strategy for toleration and it tries to go to minimal principles like John Rawls' kind of position. We're trying to find terms of cooperation that everybody can agree to. He was inspired by Kant, I think Kant had, there are some things of course that Kant said that were right, but a lot of Rawls and Kant, what they get has now become very controversial, I think, because they, they want to give a certain definition of reasonability. Then I think once they reject metaphysics, once they reject the sort of rich moral basis for these things, it becomes impossible to see why their account of justice is anything but question-begging. They're accepting. That's things that from the Christian tradition, from the natural law tradition is what they're doing. Those are the parts I agree with, but they don't give it a correct foundation and they sort of empty it of everything. It becomes a very formal account without the right kind of grounding in my opinion. I think this is what has happened is liberalism had some bits from the Christian natural law tradition that were right, and they tried to put them on a weird foundation that isn't able to support them.
And now what we have is this rise of authoritarianism is basically lots of people haven't been given moral reasons, strong moral reasons to support things like liberal institutions and respecting the rights of non-Catholics or other people. And it's a sort of breakdown we're looking for. There's lots of ways in which the liberalism might be breaking down, but I think liberalism is really a justification. It's not really the institutions. The institutions have their own problems, but the problem for the problem that I see from liberalism is really our ability to mount a moral defense of the institutions. And I think that is what you find today is people are grasping at straws and they're buying into really bad authoritarian theories and undermining what I think are real moral imperatives. I mean, I think the sort of culture we have, free speech, respect of other people, respect for Jewish citizens and other non-Catholics in America. I mean, I think our respect for people on the other side of the political aisle is a moral duty. I mean, I think that's why we should care about liberal institutions is because these things instantiate moral duties we have to our fellow citizens. And when we violate them, we're violating moral duties. When liberalism says we're being intolerant or whatever the hell else, I mean, that's weak sauce. And then we just use liberal language as a kind of moral virtue signaling to sort of exclude people we don't like. And there's no criteria for saying who's really intolerant or tolerant, and that's why it gets bandied about so much these kind of liberal terms, like tolerance or.
Anyway, that's sort where I come from is I think what we really need is kind of the deep, rich moral tradition to defend precisely these kinds of liberal institutions against the onslaught of really bad stuff that could be around the corner and is happening in some countries. Like I was in Myanmar, some of the brothers, or mean, some of the brothers from this province that I'm living with or in Myanmar. And that's bad news. That's bad news. And what kind of moral criticism can we make? The UN, I think is totally toothless in regard to this. And this kind of contemporary shallow human rights language is totally useless in criticizing the government and the abuses of government in places like Myanmar. That's what I'm concerned about. I think liberalism has deprived us of the ability to think clearly about what's wrong with places like the junta in Myanmar taking over and killing lots of people. I think if I can put it this way, a lot of these integralists like places like Hungary, because they see these, I think they're suckered in by certain kinds of things that they think are beautiful. Support for families. Now. In fact, my family's from Hungary.
James Patterson:
Oh, I had no idea.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
I live in China right now and in Hungary I know what the policies are like, and I know I think they're in fact intensely romanticizing what is actually occurring in these countries. In fact, I think there are lots of problems. I mean, for example, they have horrible problems with supportive family life. I mean, there are incredibly low birth rates. Now these countries recognize there's a problem. And I think there's a sort of romanticism here that I think Beyond Classical Liberalism, my book is going to try to address by bringing together a lot of different people to present alternatives. Let's look beyond classical liberal thinking to what kind of views could we give from a classical perspective, from different classical perspectives? Can we work together with other people who are, for example, I'm having Jews and Protestants, I'm having feminist, perfectionist political philosophers, civic republican, people that like civic republicanism. How can all these classical traditions kind of come together and can we advance and see ways to restructure our liberal institutions, to defend those liberal institutions on a moral basis and restructure them so that we can think better? How can we use them to advance family life to advance the kinds of policies we care about without going into the weirdness, without going into the strangeness and the authoritarianism of the integralist theory? I mean, the problem with integralism is not that they like families, nobody, I mean, very few people are going to think that's a problem everyone's going to think keeping Jews from being citizens is a weird problem, a weird hangup. But I think the question is, and I think it's a real question, is if you think the point of government is to make people's lives good, who gets to say what the good life is? How is that position compatible with the view that we're self-determining? That we're living in democratic liberal societies where not everybody thinks the same thing? Well, actually I think they are compatible. I think they're very compatible. And I think in fact that's the best way forward to advancing the things we care about. Because of course there are lots of people, the integralist and the authoritarian survives on painting other people as enemies that are totally unreasonable. You can never talk to the Jews, right, Just too different and they undermine the common good. Well, I mean, in fact, right. There are lots of things we agree with, even with atheist liberals, there are lots of things we can agree about to advance the common good. And a lot of the time it's just that we haven't formed the right kinds of alliances, right? I mean, I think this is sort of the problem today. Anyway, that's where I am is I think a lot of these alliances with other groups, there are lots of bases, there are lots of topics on which we can agree, for example, to support families better within democratic society. We just need a good moral defense of it that is able to bring other people together, I think.
James Patterson:
Yeah, the problem with the friend-enemy distinction is that we are called to love our enemies. It doesn't really seem to work that we would want to engage in such antagonism or to dominate. But I guess on that, we agree. Thank you so much for being generous with your time, Father Rooney. We have the name of the book Beyond Classical Liberalism, and what's the name of the metaphysics book in case anyone wants to get really technical, I've lost it.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Material Objects in Confucian and Aristotelian Metaphysics. I'm a metaphysician. I just play a political philosopher on television.
James Patterson:
You're quick study, Father. Thank you so much for coming on. It's especially important because last time I had a Jesuit, so I had to make sure to keep things balanced, fair and balanced, only on Liberty Law talk.
Fr. James Dominic Rooney:
Well thank you James for having me on.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz joins host Samuel Gregg to discuss his new book, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses.
Brian A. Smith:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.
Samuel Gregg:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Sam Greg and I'm distinguished Fellow in political economy at the American Institute for Economic Research, and I'm also a contributing editor at Law and Liberty, part of the Liberty Fund Network. Thanks for joining us today. Religion and religious liberty seem to be major points of contention today across the United States. Whether the issue is school prayer, religious exemptions from healthcare mandates, or the degree to which legislators, even presidents allow their faith to shape politics and policies. It's very hard to escape debates about the place of religion in the public square today. Overshadowing all this is the fact that a concern for religious liberty was at the forefront of the minds of many American founders. This was eventually given expression in the First Amendment, but what did the founders really think about religious liberty? Did they think of it as a natural right and therefore connected in some way to natural law, or was the securing of religious liberty essentially focused on securing social peace?
These and many other questions are discussed in a new book entitled Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses published by the University of Chicago Press. I'm very happy to be joined today on Liberty Law Talk by its author, Professor Vincent Phillip Muñoz. Professor Muñoz is the top field associate professor of political science and concurrent associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. He's the founding director of Notre Dame Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. His scholarship has been cited multiple times in church-state Supreme Court opinions most recently by Justice Alito in Fulton V City of Philadelphia 2021, and by both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas in Espinoza V Montana 2020. He's widely published having written several academic books as well as articles on topics like religious liberty, the idea of natural rights, as well as the American founding. He received his BA at Claremont McKenna College, his MA at Boston College and his PhD at Claremont Graduate School. Philip, welcome to Liberty Law talk.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Thanks for having me.
Samuel Gregg:
Today in America, Philip, we often think that it's hard to imagine a topic more controversial than religion and religious liberty. I suppose that's because religious liberty touches on questions ranging from Constitutional interpretation to the more generic place of religion in American society. Now you've been writing about the nature of religious liberty, its connection to ideas about natural rights as well as its Constitutional and wider political implications for many years. So tell me this, why did you decide to write this book at this particular time?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah, that's a good question. Thanks again for having me on. I'm a fan of the show and listen to it regularly, so it's a pleasure and a treat for me to be on it. Why did I write the book? Well, I suppose I thought, every author thinks, that I saw something or see something that others don't see, and I think that's the natural rights foundations of religious liberty in American constitutionalism. In our jurisprudence and in the scholarship, people don't talk about natural rights that much. And I think by ignoring natural rights, because we don't really understand natural rights, we don't really understand the founder's thinking. And I think that leads to misinterpretations of the First Amendment.
Samuel Gregg:
Now, I noticed in the title of your book, or more precisely let's say the subtitle, that used the word words, the original meanings of the First Amendment religion clauses. So not original meaning in the singular but rather original meanings in the plural. Now I take it that you are indicating here that to speak of original meaning in a singular sense is somewhat of a mistake. Am I right in supposing that or did you have something else in mind?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I think there are a different meaning for the establishment clause and the free exercise clause, but it's even more complicated than that. One of the chapters in the book, I think it's the four chapter is titled something like "How the Founders Agreed about Religious Liberty but Disagreed About the Separation of Church and State." What I'm trying to show is that there was an agreement on the natural rights principles, but at the same time still disagreement about public policy questions about church and state. So the founders are more interesting and more diverse than I think scholars have realized.
Samuel Gregg:
Now, was this something that you came to a conclusion to before and then you wanted to find out if your summation was true or was this something that you came to conclude after reading through some of the texts that are obviously very important for this conversation?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
That's a really good question. I think the light bulb went off when I read a correspondence. I can't even remember. It was George Washington writing to someone and I just can't remember whom right now. And he is talking about Patrick Henry's proposed funding law, a bill for Christian education or education in Virginia. This is right after independence. There's a debate between Patrick Henry on the one hand and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson on whether religious ministers will be funded in the new state of Virginia.
And George Washington in the letter, again, I just can't remember, it's in the book, I just can't remember to whom it is addressed, says he was originally in support of Patrick Henry's proposal. So here was George Washington on the one hand, supporting Patrick Henry, a patriot on public funding of religion, and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson on the other side. And I was trying to figure out what all the founders had in common, and they do have something in common. But then it was just obvious, well, they disagreed too. And of course they did. They do have natural rights principles, but what those principles mean in practice, just like we disagree about things, they disagreed about things.
Samuel Gregg:
Well, in light of what you just said, I'd like to quote something that you wrote on page 89 near the beginning of chapter four, which is entitled “The Founder's Disagreement.” And you write the quote, "While the founders agreed that religious liberty is an inalienable natural right, they began to disagree when they moved beyond the core right to worship according to conscience." End quote. The natural question to ask I suppose is why did they disagree once they move beyond this essential point?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
I don't know if all listeners that this will resonate with them what I'm about to say, Thomas Aquinas says, "When you move away from the first precepts of the natural law to more secondary considerations, what the natural law dictates becomes a little less clear." And I think it's an analogous to that. The founders agreed, what I say is an inalienable right, their language was an unalienable natural right. And they agreed that means the government has no authority to tell you how to pray, prohibit you from praying, tell you where to worship, mandate worship. So there's a core agreement. But when it comes to questions like funding, can government fund religious schools? The question in Virginia was, can government fund religious ministers? In the argument, Patrick Henry's argument was because religious ministers provide education for the citizenry, there's no public schools at the time. So it was about education according to Patrick Henry. When it comes to these secondary questions, there's just disagreement about what the natural rights principles dictate. Doesn't mean that there's a right answer and wrong answer, just you have to wade through their differences and try to figure it out.
Samuel Gregg:
So you mentioned public education on funding for religious education. What are some of the other, let's call them policy areas that the founders disagreed about once they moved beyond this core agreement about this right to worship according to conscience as you describe it?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Sure. Another example is can you use religious tests for office? We think of this as a core element of the natural right of religious liberty. It's actually not so core. In the argument for the pro religious tests for office is something like this, and the context here is let me just use Massachusetts, to be a governor in the state of Massachusetts under its first Constitution, you had to be a Protestant. And that was not uncommon. Other states had religious oaths for office that effectively eliminated Catholics or Jews or non-Protestants. It varied state by state. And the argument that the proponents of the religious tests used was, "Look, we need virtuous office. We need men," it was all men at the time, "We need men of good character." This is why we have age limitations. You must be 35 for president or 30 for Senate. And that's an indication.
The age is a substitute for maturity. Well, they said, "Well, we can use religion as a substitute for virtue." And it's clearly a legitimate public purpose to have a limitations on office holding that will foster good character. Religion, some founders said, can be used in that way. And that's how they justified religious limitations on office holding with the idea that religious liberty is a natural right. And they said, "Yeah, you can worship however you want, but we can use religion as a means to further public purposes such as virtue and office holding." That's one side. The other side was no religious affiliation should make no part of the government's considerations, like a colorblind constitution, race should not be part of the government's considerations. And so civil rights should not be conditioned on religious affiliation. That's a second area of disagreement.
Samuel Gregg:
So obviously you’re pointing to considerable ambiguity about the public policy implication of the First Amendment, at least based upon reading what different founders said about these things and the way that they disagreed about these things. So if there is this ambiguity, what does this mean for originalist approaches to the First Amendment today? Because if there is this ambiguity then that suggests that in many cases it's not immediately evident what the original meaning of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause is, at least as it pertains to public policy questions. So what does this mean for the originalist project of Constitutionalist interpretation, at least with regard to the First Amendment?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Okay, let me just preface my answer by saying it takes me about a hundred pages to answer this question in the book. So I'm going to give you the short version. The first thing we should, just because one founder said something doesn't mean that's the founding position on church and state. And you see this in jurisprudence, a citation to Jefferson or Madison. And because Madison said this, usually this is misinterpreted, but that's another problem because Madison said this, then therefore the First Amendment means that. And that's just a lazy way to do jurisprudence. And look, both sides do this. Conservatives do it. Liberals do it. It's just irresponsible, to speak candidly. Okay. The other thing it indicates, the founders disagreements, if you are aware of the disagreements when you go back and read the historical record, the historical record starts to make more sense. They disagreed about the proper relationship between church and state.
One of the ways we deal with disagreement at the time of the founding, less so now, but at the time of the founding was federalism. So part of my argument was the establishment clause and the odd language, respecting an establishment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment. One of the purposes, not the only purpose, but one of the original purposes was to say, "Hey, we disagree about these church-state matters. We will leave them with the states." And that's how knowledge of the disagreement starts to shed light on what they were actually doing when they drafted the First Amendment.
Samuel Gregg:
So given that's the case, what role do you think that the idea of natural rights has in terms of constructing a coherent originalist interpretation of the First Amendment in light of the fact that the founders clearly did disagree about some very important questions regarding religious liberty that are still playing out today? So what does the natural rights approach to this suggest in terms of how one should construct an originalist approach to the First Amendment?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Okay, so let me just start on the level of you're a good faith legislator trying to understand what your constitutional power is or judge trying to interpret the First Amendment. What would this knowledge of natural rights, how would it help you? Well, first of all, I talked about the establishment clause already, let me talk a bit about the free exercise clause. The First Amendment says, "Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion." Well, what is the free exercise of religion? It's not a term of ours. There's not a clear meaning of the free exercise of religion. So you have to go beyond the text. You can't just, "Well, the text is obvious." Text is not obvious at all. Well, how did the founders conceive of the idea of the free exercise of religion? If you go back to what they wrote about religious free exercise, you see they called it an inalienable natural right.
Well, what's an inalienable natural right? Again, this is a whole chapter in the book. An inalienable natural is a right over which we do not give authority to government. That's why it's inalienable. That term is actually very important. It refers to social compact theory. We don't give a certain degree of authority to the government over our religious exercises according to the founders. I'm going to make a big jump here. The core of that right was the right to worship, the right to worship according to conscience. What that means in practice is government has a jurisdictional limitation. It has no authority to tell you how to worship, to make legislation saying, "You must worship in this way at this time in this church." So the question was what does the natural rights, or what does the knowledge of the founder's natural rights philosophy do for constitutional interpretation? It gives us a way to understand the terms they use, the free exercise of religion, how they would've conceived those terms.
Samuel Gregg:
So you say it in the book, you say you're offering a method of interpretation that I quote, "Does not correspond to any existing jurisprudential approach." So tell us about how your approach differs from the primary ways in which the Supreme Court has approached First Amendment cases and how your approach might yield some different decisions to what we've been seeing coming out of the court in say, the past 10 years on these first amendment issues?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Okay, sure. I'm going to group, I hate doing this, but it's just for convenience, I'm going to do it. There's I'm going to call it, liberal approach and a conservative approach. I don't actually think those terms are really appropriate, but nonetheless, that's how people think about these things. So the liberal approach says, "Thomas Jefferson erected a wall of separation. That's the understanding of the establishment clause." And then they take off running. What does a wall of separation mean? Now they say all of this is originalist because Thomas Jefferson erected the wall of separation and that's how we get the lemon test, the endorsement test, other subsequent tests that impose the strict separation of church and state. I don't think any of this is really originalists. They don't really understand what Thomas Jefferson said. They take one metaphor, just for the record, Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with the drafting of the First Amendment.
He advocated a Bill of Rights, but he was in Paris at the time the first Amendment was drafted. He had no direct connection. The wall of separation comes from a letter he wrote an 1802. So to even use Jefferson is a little bit specious. But that's a different problem. But they take this idea of a wall of separation and run with it. Conservative judges do something a little bit different. They don't know what the text means either. They recognize the text is ambiguous, so they go to traditional practices.
Did the first Congress allow chaplains? Yes. Well then chaplains must be okay. Did the first Congress support religion? Well, in some ways they did in the federal territories, the northwest ordinance. So I guess that means support of religion is okay. So they look to traditional practices, especially the practices of their early founders. That's a common way of doing jurisprudence. There's much to be said for it, but that's not how the founders talked about religious liberty. It's not really originalist. When the founders talked about religious liberty, they used natural rights language. So if you really want to follow the founders, now it's a different question of whether we should, but if you really want to follow the founders, you have to understand how they conceived what they thought religious liberty was.
Samuel Gregg:
So you're arguing in a sense for a more philosophical approach to this rather than, let's call it a historical approach to understanding what the original meaning means?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
That's exactly right. I find that compelling because I think it reflects actually the founder's understanding. You could say there's an interesting historical question. How do we understand the founders? By what they did or what they said? And that's a rich historical question. I think we should understand the first amendment by what they said and then the philosophy behind it, not simply by their actions.
Samuel Gregg:
That brings me to the next question I wanted to ask you, very naturally actually. So you make it very clear that the founders by and large understood religious liberty as an inalienable natural right. Now this idea obviously did not just pop out of nowhere. So where did that understanding in your estimation come from? Is this a straight translation from say, Locke's letter on toleration or is it derived from older natural law sources like Protestant natural law theorists like Hugo Grotius or even medieval natural law thinkers or some combination of these sources? Or was there something distinctly American in the way that the founders talked about religious liberty as an inalienable natural right?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah. Good. That's a difficult question. Let me tell you what I try to do in the book and then give a fuller answer to your question. What I try to do in the book is just simply present the clear evidence that they talked about religious liberty. This way it's very easy to show. You just go to the early state constitutions. There was a great period of constitution making between 1776 and 1791 in America, mostly at the state level. Obviously we made the federal constitution as well. In these early state constitutions, there are declarations of rights, and these were not law per se, but they were statements of political principles. And when you go back and read those declarations of rights, what you see is they all say the same thing about religious liberty. It's a inalienable natural right or it's a natural right. So that's the evidence that the founders conceived religious liberty as a natural.
What I then try to do is explain using Isaac Backus, one of the most important Protestant ministers at the time, a Baptist minister, Thomas Jefferson, who's my representative of secular enlightenment philosophy, John Locke in particular. And then James Madison, who's an interesting, he's really unique, his natural theology. I try to show how through the traditions of secular philosophy, protestant theology, and the natural theology or natural philosophy, how the founders themselves conceived the natural right to religious liberty. I don't trace the intellectual heritage of that thinking. That's a different project really beyond my expertise. Certainly you can see elements of Locke in Jefferson's thought without a doubt. You can see elements of Locke in Madison's thought. But Locke, as far as I know, never uses the language of inalienability. That's a maybe uniquely American conception, consistent perhaps with Locke, but different than the language he uses. And then of course there's a rich Protestant tradition. We tend to oppose in light of philosophy or lacking in philosophy with Protestantism, but the founders didn't and I tried to show the harmony in their own thinking.
Samuel Gregg:
So is that where you would identify something distinctly American in the way that the founders talked about religious liberty as an in alienable natural right? It's a combination in a sense of Protestant thinking about this particular question as well as obviously enlightenment ideas about toleration that were becoming much more widespread in, let's call it the North Atlantic world at this particular point in time?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah, I think that's right. And if you really push me, though this will make my integralist friends go crazy, I think you can even find at least the preconceptions of a distinction between church and state and the makings of the beginning of an idea of a political right or civil right to religious liberty. And even the thought of Thomas Aquinas, that's a different podcast. But I think you're right to see, and what I'm trying to show is there are both theological and philosophical influences that the founders draw upon, but I just try to explain the founders as they presented themselves.
Samuel Gregg:
Well, you won't be surprised to hear me say that. I think you're right about Aquinas and I read other scholars who've suggested in this regard that you can find a type of argument for religious liberties and natural right in medieval canon lawyers. But as you say, that's a different discussion for a different podcast. I'd like to move towards the end now, but I'd really like to shift the discussion in a different direction. And it concerns part of your book that at least I found especially interesting, and that's perhaps because it's the area that I knew the least about before reading your book. And this concerns something you mentioned before, which is the way that different states and different state constitutions treated religious liberty. In fact, on pages 58 to 59, you list all the different provisions of the different states about religious liberty of and from worship between 1776 and 1786. So this leads me to two questions. First, what influences, if any, did these texts have upon the first amendment? Second, what were the starkest differences between the various state provisions for religious liberty?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Let me start with the second question because that will help me address the first, the starkest differences I think are the state of South Carolina 1778 Constitution of South Carolina. And then the Virginia Constitution as drawn out or filled in by Jefferson's Virginia statute for religious liberty. So the 1778 South Carolina Constitution, it's the one founding aero state that actually established a religion.
Samuel Gregg:
Only one. Because you often hear people talking the states.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Everyone says six or seven states established a religion. They say that because Leonard Levy, famous scholar, not always fully truthful scholar, famous scholar said six or seven states had established religions. The reason Leonard Levy said that is because he said, "If a state funded religion, it had an establishment." But he was imposing a definition of establishment. He was taking a mid-20th-century jurisprudential category. If you fund religion, you have an establishment and reading it backwards. The founders did not associate, at least not all the founders funding a religion with establishment. And that's one of the things I try to show. The language on whether you could or could not fund religion was separate from language concerning an establishment. So you have the South Carolina constitution that says, "We have an established religion." What that meant is certain religions, you had to be Protestant to be incorporated.
The state constitution prescribed articles of faith. It prescribed how ministers were selected. The state had authority to limit how much a church could raise every year. The state delegated taxing of power to churches. This is all part of an establishment.
On the other hand, if you go to the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights and then the 1786 Virginia statute for religious Liberty, Madison and Jefferson said, "No one's civil rights should be affected, both positive or negative according to religious affiliation." That's the range. That was your first question.
How does this all impact our understanding of the First Amendment? Well, as I alluded to before, because there are real differences, there was a real motivation to keep these questions at the state level and you see that in the respecting an establishment. If we said, "Federal government should make no law respecting abortion." We would immediately understand it. Oh, because that's a state question. I don't want to repeat what I said before. At the same time, the natural rights philosophy gives us an an indication of the substance of the free exercise class.
Samuel Gregg:
So here's my last question and it's very much directed to contemporary circumstances. What does your message about religious liberty and the way that the founders understood it, what do you think the most important message is on the one hand for those who take a, let's call it liberal approach to questions of the First Amendment? And what does your approach say to those who take, let's call it a conservative approach to the First Amendment?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah. Well, I should say, I'm not trying to advocate my approach, I'm just trying to set forth the founders understanding as best I understand it and as clearly as I can express it. So if you don't like the argument of the book, blame the founders, don't blame me. I'm pretty candid in the conclusion. I try to assess it. My voice comes out in the conclusion. I say, "This is what I see as the strengths of the approach. This is the weaknesses of the approach." So I'm just trying to operate as a scholar here. If there's one thing I'm trying to show, it's that judges have abused the founders and misused them. They're really rewriting the First Amendment.
Samuel Gregg:
And you mean judges who would self-describe themselves or be described as liberal and conservative on these issues?
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
Yeah, more so the liberals, but also the conservatives to be honest. Now whether this is malicious or accidental, I think it's pretty obvious when it's malicious. It's maybe less obvious if it's accidental. But either way, they're rewriting the First Amendment and that's one of the things I'm trying to show. Now we might like that rewriting or we might not, but let's have an argument about it. To have an argument about it, you first have to see what's been done.
Samuel Gregg:
And that seems like a good point to end our discussion. Professor Phillip Muñoz, thank you very much.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz:
It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Samuel Gregg:
You've been listening to Liberty Law Talk in which we've been discussing Professor Phillip Muñoz's, new book, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religious Clauses, published by the University of Chicago Press and available at Amazon, as well as all good bookstores. This podcast is available here at the Law & Liberty website and all good podcast sites like Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Pod Chaser. If you like what you hear, please give us a five star rating to encourage more people to join us every month. I'm Sam Greg for Liberty Law Talk. See you next time.
Brian A. Smith:
Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.
Nicholas Eberstadt discusses the phenomenon of workless American men with host Samuel Gregg.
James Bruce joins the podcast to discuss the challenges of faithful translation and how our sense of justice shapes our understanding of God.
William McCormick discusses Thomas Aquinas, his intellectual influences, and the "hard work" of politics with James Patterson.
William McCormick discusses Thomas Aquinas, his intellectual influences, and the "hard work" of politics with James Patterson.
Samuel Gregg:
Hello. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Sam Gregg and I am distinguished fellow in political economy at the American Institute for Economic Research, and I'm also contributing editor at Law & Liberty. Thanks for joining us today. 260 years ago in 1762, a middle-aged professor at the University of Glasgow was delivering as part of his normal teaching load you might say a series of lectures on jurisprudence. And in that audience a number of students were busy taking notes as any good student, I suppose, does even today. One set of those notes, however, was discovered in 1895. So over 130 years later. And it had come into the hands of an Edinburgh lawyer. Now, normally discovery of this type would be neither here nor there, except for the fact that these notes were from lectures delivered by Adam Smith, the great Scottish enlightenment thinker whose Wealth of Nations was a book that literally changed the world.
That book, as well as Smith's other writings including the book we're going to be discussing today, Adam Smith's lectures on jurisprudence, have all been published by Liberty Fund. And I think it's fair to say that lectures on jurisprudence is perhaps the least known of Smith's words that have come down to us today. So joining me to discuss lectures on jurisprudence, it's my great pleasure to welcome to Liberty Law Talk today professor James T. Otteson. He is the John T. Ryan Jr. professor in business ethics at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in business ethics, political economy, history of economic thought, and 18th-century Moral Philosophy. Previously professor Otteson taught at Wake Forest University, Yeshiva University, Georgetown University, and the University of Alabama.
Some of his books include Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life, 2002. Actual Ethics, 2006. Adam Smith, 2013. The End of Socialism, 2014. And The Essential Adam Smith, 2018. And his forthcoming book, Reexamining The Ethics of Wealth Distribution. He has a BA from Notre Dame and he also has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He's also, in my view, my humble opinion, perhaps one of the world's leading Adam Smith scholars today. Today he's joining me to discuss, as you may have guessed from his bio, Adam Smith and, more specifically, some of his writings that have received less attention—in particular Smith's lectures on jurisprudence. Jim, welcome to the Liberty Law Talk.
James Otteson:
Thank you so much, Sam. It's my pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Samuel Gregg:
So I thought we might begin by putting these lectures of Adam Smith in their context. So, can you tell us a little bit about how it was that Adam Smith came to be giving lectures on legal philosophy in the 1760s?
James Otteson:
I'm happy to do that and you're quite right. The lectures on jurisprudence are not something that get discussed very much anymore. So Adam Smith was the author of two published books, only two. The first was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which came out in 1759 in the first edition, and then the now much more famous inquiry into the nature and causes of The Wealth of Nations, which came out in 1776. So rather auspicious year. But those were the only two books that he actually published. They each went through several editions. He was born in 1723. He died in 1790. About a week before he died, he called a couple of his colleagues to his quarters. I guess he had a bit of a notion that it wouldn't be much longer that he would be alive.
He asked them to burn his manuscripts, and so those colleagues actually burned 16 volumes of manuscripts. We can only guess what was in them, but one set of documents that was probably in those burned manuscripts was what we now have as the lectures on jurisprudence. So these lecture notes, as you mentioned, were first discovered in 1895; they were the student notes from two different years that he had given this course called lectures on jurisprudence. He was teaching jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow. He first started at the University of Glasgow in 1751 as a professor. He was only 28 years old. In 1752 after just one year, the prior professor who had been the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow passed away and so Smith became the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1752. He was only 29 years old if you can imagine. And he began giving, among other things, these lectures on jurisprudence and that's what we have.
Samuel Gregg:
So tell us a little bit about how Smith saw jurisprudence fitting into the wider scheme of university education that he was engaged in teaching.
James Otteson:
Yeah. So as a Chair of Moral Philosophy, so something to note about professorships in the 18th century in Britain and in Scotland in particular, people were considered professors of one of two things. Either you are a professor of moral philosophy or you're a professor of natural philosophy. So natural philosophy was all of the subjects that related to the natural world, the non-human natural world. So everything from astronomy to what we would now, now that it has been subsequently broken up into disciplines like geology and botany and all these other fields that study the natural world. That was under natural philosophy. And then moral philosophy, which is what Smith was, that was a field that pertained to all of the aspects of the study of human behavior. So everything we would today recognize as being in psychology, in human history, in politics, and also in moral philosophy.
And all of those were fields that Smith was teaching in. So as the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow, he was teaching a range of courses—everything from logic to natural theology to moral philosophy and then to jurisprudence, which was, at the time and what Smith considered it, he study of the laws and regulations that were required essentially for a successful society. So when Smith was giving lectures on jurisprudence what he was effectively doing is giving kind of two parts of it. One was the history of the development of human societies. So he gave his theory about why you had different kinds of governments and different kinds of laws and regulations in different humans societies. And then also he was making recommendations about, given the kinds of goals that we might have in human society, what kinds of laws, regulations, et cetera, should we have? All of that fell under the topic of jurisprudence as one part of the study of human life and human behavior.
Samuel Gregg:
So clearly jurisprudence in the way it was taught, in the way it was understood in the 18th-century, particularly in the Scottish universities at the time, it clearly embraced a lot more than would typically be put under that type of topic today. So can you tell us something about the actual structure of Smith's lectures on jurisprudence?
James Otteson:
Yeah. So it was a year long course that typically met every single day. So you would meet once a day for nearly a full calendar year. So it was quite a bit of material. It wasn't just a three month long course, which you would get in college today, but the structure of it started out with what the subject matter of jurisprudence was and then began working out Smith's theory as it were of jurisprudence. So everything having to do with, according to Smith anyway and Mr. Smith's understanding, jurisprudence started with a conception of justice. What actually is justice? What are the different conceptions of justice? Then what are, he called police or what we might call policy today? So what are the rules or regulations or laws that are appropriate to the conceptions of justice? What are the proper objects of justice? Meaning what kinds of things should justice pay attention to and therefore what should the government pay attention to?
But he also, in his course on jurisprudence, went into the area that we would now think of as more appropriate to economics or his Wealth of Nation's book. He talked about revenue. So where did the government get its money? Where does wealth come from? So he talked about that as well. And then also, how do you protect the government and how do you protect society? So things like military and arms, et cetera. So it was quite a wide-ranging course, quite a wide ranging topic. And he went into enormous amount of detail, both historical—so, descriptive talking about how different times and different places approached these topics, and then also normative or prescriptive. What he thought we should actually have. What would be good for Scotland? What was good for Britain? What was good for Europe? What was good for even the Americas? He was talking about what was going on in the Americas at the time.
Samuel Gregg:
So, I'd like to come back a little later to talk about a few of those things that you just mentioned, in particular, some of the topics that get included under particular parts of his lectures on jurisprudence. But before we do that, I've got another question. I imagine that like any professor, there were things that Smith was obliged to teach if only because the people sitting in the class, many of them I suspect would've gone on to become practicing lawyers and practicing lawyers need to know certain things that have relatively little to do with the philosophical preferences or interests of a given lecturer. So you do something like contracts or torts or whatever it happens to be. And it's like a sort of professional training, but that said, I imagine, just any other professor, there were particular emphasis that Smith would have brought to bear, or at least tried to bring into the discussion, during his lecturing. So I was wondering if you could tell us what some of those particular emphasis may have been.
James Otteson:
Yeah. You're quite right about all of that. I mean, we do have one anecdote about Smith that I'll just relate to give you a little bit of a glimpse of what seems to have been his personality. When he first started teaching at the University of Glasgow in 1751, he was asked to teach a course on logic. And one of his students, who reported many years later about what that course was like, noted that Smith began the course and spent about the first week or so of the course teaching what he was supposed to teach. And then he immediately started going off onto other subjects, which were much closer to what we might think of in the Wealth of Nations and the lectures on jurisprudence even in his logic course. Even as a young man, he was only 28 at the time, he had a bit of an independent streak, but you're right.
The course on jurisprudence was in part intended. It was supposed to prepare people for a profession in the law. So many future attorneys would've been in the audience. And one of the central subjects, I mean, there are lots of things that were supposed to have been covered, but one of the things, and I think this might be a particular interest and maybe is even behind the question you're asking, one of the things that Smith would've been expected to talk about was natural law. So he would've been expected to review Locke and other major figures in the history of, especially British natural law theory and British common law as informed by British by natural law theory. And so in fact, he did do that. And one of the things that's interesting about it. So he talked quite a bit about Locke and others.
If we're talking about what constitutes an injury, and there are different theories of justice, what constitutes an injury? Well you can be injured, as Smith said, as a human being, as a man, as a member of a family, as a member of a state. You can be injured in your body, in your property, in your reputation center. So he walks through these things all with this kind of background of a sort of Lockian natural law. One of the things that I think is interesting about this, though, is that if you look at the other works that Smith talked about, that wrote, The Theory of Moral Sentiments or the Wealth of Nations, almost all of that is absent. There's virtually no talk of natural law, no talk of natural rights. So he did it, he discussed it in his lectures on jurisprudence. So he is obviously aware of the tradition, took it very seriously, but it did not come to inform much of his own theories.
Samuel Gregg:
Well that's interesting as well because I was going to ask you about that and the way he talks about natural rights. And as you say, he does make reference to people like Locke. Although it's not entirely clear that he accepts Locke's own particular thesis, but like any professor, you have to teach things you don't necessarily agree with because some of these ideas were taken very seriously by judges and lawyers at the time. But there's two particular influences I'd like to, if indeed they are there, that I'd be interested in hearing you say more about, and that is the two H's, David Hume and Francis Hutcheson. Do you have any sense of any particular influences of their thought upon these lectures?
James Otteson:
Yes. That's a good question. I think both of them were quite influential on Smith's thought. And they may help explain why it is that when Smith came to develop his own theories about justice and then ultimately about what we consider economics and the Wealth of Nations, that there's not a lot of reliance on natural law or natural law theory. I think certainly with Hutcheson and also with Hume, Smith's takes something of an empirical approach to these questions and he develops a theory, for example, of government. When he's talking about the origins of government, he explicitly rejects in the lectures on jurisprudence Locke's theory of a kind of original contract.
Samuel Gregg:
A sort of state of nature.
James Otteson:
Yeah. I mean, it wasn't only Locke who had this view, but I think here you do see the influence of Hume in particular, but Smith says, now that this is just a fiction. There really wasn't any original contract. There was nothing like an original contract. There was no state of nature when men came together and decided what the form of government should be. It's much more of an evolutionary process. So one thing that he gets from Hume I think is something like a developmental process as human society developed through these stages. So he offers a theory of stages of human society; You begin with hunters. Human beings are basically hunting parties where there's no government at all, according to Smith. They eventually develop into shepherds where they have their own herds of animals. At that point, they develop something of a root. That's the first stage of actual government according to Smith. They develop something of a rude state of monarchy. Then they develop into farming and agriculture where they have land and property. At that point they need a little bit more sophisticated government that's going to have conceptions of justice that apply to property in particular. And I think we see some influence from Hutcheson in the importance of property.
The kind of government appropriate there Smith thinks is aristocracy. And then the fourth and final stage, according to Smith, of human, social, or societal development is what he calls democracy. This emerges when human society develops to the stage where commerce becomes the dominant economic activity of society. That's the highest final stage. So at all of these stages, the applicable conceptions of justice and the right proper sets of laws and regulations or the proper form of government, changes according to human development as Smith argues. And that I think really is a very large influence of this kind of developmental and observational approach that shows the influence of people like Hume in particular, but also Hutcheson.
Samuel Gregg:
You mentioned the civilizational development theory. I imagine this also reflects Lord Keynes as well, right, because as I understand it, his thinking about law and society in general is very shaped by this particular type of account of Hume at the development of human civilization.
James Otteson:
Yes. That's a good observation, Sam. And I think these are elements of what came to be known as, and is sometimes called, the Scottish historical school of social science, which is we're going to try to apply the approach that Isaac Newton had such great success with for the natural world. We're going to try to apply that to the human world and what that means is we're going to try to actually look at various kinds of experiments that human beings have run. And by experiments, different human societies in different times and places.
We're going to see what kinds of principles we can see might be at work in these things, but it's not an apriori deduction. It's not sitting in our offices and trying to intuit or God's will, for example, and figure out what the essential nature of human beings is. And instead we're going we're going to look at the world empirically and I think that is influential, you're right, Keynes. I mean, in others, we're talking about the development of language, the development of law, the development of governments, all of this was this new way of trying to understand human society as being a process of historical development over time.
Samuel Gregg:
So I'd like to shift the discussion now to a topic which I'm sure you've thought a great deal about, which is lectures on jurisprudence and its relationship to the more well-known texts of Adam Smith, specifically The Theory of Moral Sentiment and his Wealth of Nations. So these lectures were, at least the notes that we have of these lectures, were recorded after the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. So, do you see traces of elements of some of the thought that's expressed in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments within parts or even sections of his lectures on jurisprudence?
James Otteson:
That's a good question. I do see a couple. In fact, I see a handful, but I'll just mention a couple. So first of all in the conception of justice that Smith discusses and lectures on jurisprudence, he had already articulated in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So as you mentioned, Theory of Moral Sentiments comes out a couple of years before the first report of the lectures that we get on jurisprudence. But right at the beginning of the lectures on jurisprudence, Smith talks about justice being what he calls securing people from injury. So, the kind of justice he's interested in is protecting people against incursions on their persons, on their property, or on their voluntary contracts or voluntary promises as he said. It's the kind of negative conception of justice. In other words, you're acting justly as long as you refrain from imposing harm or injury onto another person. That's exactly the conception of justice that he had articulated and quite carefully in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
So in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, this is the development, this is the conception of justice. He says that in all societies, it's both necessary and sufficient for human society to exist. And all of the positive moral duties of friendship and loyalty and charity, these sorts of things are what he calls the embellishments of society, but they're not necessary for society to exist. So in the lectures on jurisprudence, he elaborates on exactly that. Why is this negative conception of justice so necessary for the existence of any kind of human society whatsoever? And how does it apply to various aspects of human society from your bodily person to your property? What kinds of property even potentially your reputation, et cetera. So that's one way where I see a clear connection, but I will mention if you allow me just one other. So in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith develops this claim about sort of the ultimate or final adjudicator of moral propriety is what he calls the impartial spectator.
So if you want to know whether you're acting rightly or wrongly you imagine what a disinterested person who fully knows your situation, an impartial spectator he calls them, what would such a person think about what you are doing and how would such a person judge your behavior? That notion of the impartial spectator is all over in the lectures on jurisprudence. In particular on what counts as property. So it's very interesting. I think Smith developed something of an impartial spectator theory of property. So in other words, how long do you have to be farming a particular plot of land in order for you now to have property rights in it? Smith's answer to that is, "Well what would an impartial spectator think?"
Samuel Gregg:
Does he actually use that expression?
James Otteson:
Oh yes, he does. He does. In fact, quite repeatedly. So he connects it with what he thinks is reasonable. So he says, "What would a reasonable person think is long enough possession to now entail rights to land," let's say. Well the impartial spectator is the way you imagine what is reasonable. Or what's a reasonable contract of employment? Ask yourself what an impartial spectator would think. So that's a kind of impartial spectator theory of property, of contracts, etc. That's all through the lectures on jurisprudence and he develops that first in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Samuel Gregg:
Well let's shift to the second and of course the best known of Smith's works, the Wealth of Nations, published, of course, in that momentous year of 1776. Now, the Wealth of Nations is published after these notes on jurisprudence were taken. And I should mention that it wasn't very long after these notes on jurisprudence were recorded that Smith effectively retired as professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. So, I guess my question to you is this—In what way do we find particular ideas expressed in the lectures on jurisprudence, in what way do we find some of these ideas manifesting themselves in the Wealth of Nations?
James Otteson:
So in a handful of ways. It's a good question. So you're right that Smith actually retired, as you say, from being a professor at the University of Glasgow in 1764. He was the ripe old age of 41, but he left to become a personal tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch. So he did some traveling with the Duke of Buccleuch, became his personal tutor, and it wasn't until 1776 that the Wealth of Nations was published. And remember, the lectures on jurisprudence, what we have are students notes from his lectures. So we don't still have Smith's own lecture notes. We have carefully compiled, in fact extraordinarily carefully compiled notes, but they are students' notes, not Smith's own notes. But one aspect of the lectures on jurisprudence, one aspect of the course that he taught and so therefore part of the lecture notes that we have, pertains to what Smith calls revenue. So governments at different stages of their development will have different proper activities and some of these proper activities will require revenue to execute.
So for example, once we've gone from say farming to commerce, Smith thinks we're going to need to have protection against foreign aggression. We're going to need to have protection even against internal or domestic aggression. And against foreign aggression that requires some kind of military, an army, perhaps a Navy, protecting us against domestic aggression that requires police and courts, et cetera. All of that is pertaining to property. So as human societies develop, they begin to have a much greater dependence on property and property can only serve the function it's going to serve if it's protected, if people are secure in their property. So they need police, courts, et cetera, domestically and militarily for foreign aggression. In both of those cases, what Smith is assuming, which will become much more evident in the Wealth of Nations, is that what we want is increasing prosperity for our society.
So we want increasingly to generate revenue that will enable us to alleviate poverty, to increase the resources—what he calls the necessaries and conveniences that are available to people in our society, including in particular the poor—and in order to enable that to happen we need a government that's going to protect property and that means we're going to have to think about we, meaning people who are setting policy in the government, are going to have to think about how do we get the revenue that would enable us to support police, courts, military, et cetera? So you get a lot of discussion in the lectures on jurisprudence about what are the best ways to tax? What are bad ways to tax? What are the good things to tax for? What are bad things to tax for? And he's very sensitive to not allowing taxation policy to actually inhibit the growth and prosperity and vitality of a society.—to serve it rather than for society to serve it.
And I would just mention he, on more than one occasion in the lectures on jurisprudence, talks about the right to revolt. So he does think that onerous taxation can actually justify a right to revolt and a couple of times he says that, "If taxation reaches the level of something like half of our revenue, if the government is consuming half of our revenue through taxation, then maybe we should revolt because that means that the purposes it’s serving are the government's own services rather than the prosperity of society more generally." One place he actually suggests that not just half, but even if it's a fifth, one fifth, so 20% of the revenue of society, if that's being taken by taxation then citizens should take a long, hard look at whether that's really benefiting them and enabling the increase of prosperity or is it just satisfying the needs of people in government.
Samuel Gregg:
It sort of reminds me of what you just said. Reminds me of what John Maynard Keynes once wrote in a letter where he said that something like 25% of income is the upper limit he thought was appropriate for the government to take by way of taxation. So we are clearly living in a very different world today by that standard. And that brings me to my next question and you've sort of alluded to this. When you read these lectures, what do you think they tell us about Smith's view of the role of government in the economy? Because you look at part two of the lectures on jurisprudence, which of course is entitled of police, which goes back to something you mentioned before, the way in which this text or this series of lectures were structured. So I'm wondering what you think these lectures tell us, at least at this point of time in Smith's life and thinking, what he thinks is the proper role of government in the economy?
James Otteson:
That's a good question. It's a big question. So, I think what we see here is Smith's thinking about this probably evolving as a result of his study of the history of human experiments in government and in society. So he is astonishingly learned when it comes to human history and different experiments in human society. And if you read through the lectures on jurisprudence, you see examples drawn from numerous countries, numerous areas, and he's not just a cursory familiarity. He's actually done some very careful reading of law books and statutes, et cetera. So he's very well learned, but I think what we see is his thinking about this is evolving. And what he's beginning to think is that the proper role of government is to enable people, individuals, human beings, and groups of individuals, to improve their own lives rather than working directly to give them or improve their lives for them.
So I think what he's beginning to do is to sort invert the classical or at least a very influential classical view about the role of say elites in society where if you think about Plato's Republic, for example, going all the way back to Plato and the Republic, what's the role of the intellectual elite in society? Well according to Plato, the philosopher should be kings or queens. They're the ones who understand the good of society. They should organize society in terms of the good. In the lectures on jurisprudence what I think you see Smith seeing is that there have been so many attempts and experiments at this that so often don't seem to work out the way we want them to that perhaps what government should do and what elites in government should do is instead lower their aims a bit. Rather than “I'm going to create the ideally good city or the ideally good state or the ideally good country,” instead maybe what we should first try to do is to create conditions in which individuals can improve their own lives. And that's sort of lowering the sights quite a bit.
You're no longer the philosopher king who's going to determine the entire composition of society, but instead I think what Smith thinks is that this is something that might actually be achievable. In other words, in the real world with real human beings facing the cognitive and resource limits that we have, maybe something that's achievable and would not be such a small achievement.
Samuel Gregg:
So we're getting close to the end of this Liberty Law Talk podcast episode and I'd like to conclude by asking you the following sort of very generic question, but I think it would be important for our listeners to hear your thoughts about. If there's any part of the lectures on jurisprudence that you would recommend to those people who are interested in law, politics, political economy, or even just the history of ideas, what would be the parts of the text that you would strongly recommend for our listeners?
James Otteson:
Okay. That's a great question, Sam. So we have two students’ notes from the lectures on jurisprudence. I think I would look at the second set of notes. It's the report dated 1766. Sometimes called lectures on jurisprudence letter B. So the second set of notes. I think those are a little bit more comprehensive and a little bit more carefully constructed, but I think really all you have to do is read the first 20 pages or so. So if you just read the part one of justice, you're going to get quite a bit of the actual meat of Smith's theory, including his discussion of Locke and the American founding, his rejection of the notion of an original contract.
You're going to get some of his discussion of the stages of development of society from hunters to shepherds, farming, commerce, and the different kinds of government that he thinks is appropriate to it. And you're even going to get, even in just the first 20 pages or so, you're going to get a little discussion of how successful different kinds of government were in, on the one hand protecting the liberty of their subjects and on the other hand, encouraging prosperity. So I would say if you look at say the first 30 or so pages of the second report, that would be the first place I would recommend.
Samuel Gregg:
Well thank you very much, professor Otteson. I know you're a busy man and you've got other things you need to do, but we're very grateful that you've joined us today on Liberty Law Talk to discuss those lectures on jurisprudence, which I suspect you wish more students of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment knew more about. So James Otteson, thank you very much for being with us.
James Otteson:
My pleasure. Thank you very much, Sam.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal, Law and Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Hello, I'm Richard Reinsch, and today we're talking with Christopher Owen about his new biography of the conservative thinker, Willmoore Kendall. The book is titled Heaven Can Indeed Fall. Christopher Owen is Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma. Christopher, welcome to the program.
Christopher Owen (00:40):
Thank you, Richard. I really am excited about being on your program. It is Professor of History instead of English, but other than that everything's right.
Richard Reinsch (00:49):
I apologize for that.
Christopher Owen (00:51):
No problem.
Richard Reinsch (00:52):
Okay. So who was Willmoore Kendall and why does he matter?
Christopher Owen (00:57):
Yeah, a great question. Willmoore Kendall was probably best known as being the mentor of William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale, so he was a Professor of Political Science at Yale off and on after World War II. And at Yale, certain talented students fell under his influence. He was a dynamic, colorful personality and really a great teacher. So William F. Buckley and also L. Brent Bozell Jr. were both sort of his mentors, or he was their mentors at Yale. And he had a great influence on their life, and their thought, and their activism, which is important in itself. But I believe, and I argue in the book, that he's probably most important as a political theorist. So he was a founder of conservatism, one of the co-founders of National Review, for example, but his thought doesn't really fit neatly into any of the common categories that we think of as contemporary conservatism. So not a neocon, not really a state's rights guy, not really a theocon, not really a social or religious conservative exactly either. I call him in the book a populist. One might call him in today's lexicon, I guess one could call him a national conservative. Those were neither terms that he would necessarily have embraced. But when thinking about his ideas and his thought, that's really where I would put those. I would say that if you look at the early days of National Review for example, his ideas had some importance and resonance that in time kind of faded away, particularly as conservatism came closer to power and liberalism went more on the defensive.
Richard Reinsch (02:52):
He also worked in the CIA and part of his influence over Buckley was recruiting him to the CIA. Is that right?
Christopher Owen (03:01):
Sure. That's right. Buckley, I guess, was recruited by Kendall to serve in the CIA. That was one way he could avoid getting drafted and sent to Korea, I guess, was part of it. There were other people at work in the CIA with National Review, James Burnham, for example. Kendall's work as an intelligence officer was really important, and he was really good at it, and he was briefly head of what became the CIA for all of Latin America. He was also really important as an intelligence officer during the Korean War. But I think that experience that he had in the bureaucracy of the federal government made him skeptical about the federal bureaucracy and that it should be maybe more controlled by the popular will.
Richard Reinsch (03:54):
Yeah. That's interesting in itself, a PhD in political science who had spent some time in academia at that point, then making his way into the CIA. How did that happen?
Christopher Owen (04:04):
Sure. Well, he really spent most of his entire life really in academia. So he had been... In the 30s, Kendall was a man of the left. He was an isolationist. So he was sympathetic, I guess, with Trotskyism, though not so much as James Burnham would've been. He sort of, as the war broke out, which he had opposed the U.S. entry into the war, so after Pearl Harbor he had to figure out what to do. And what he ended up doing is falling in with a group that was led by Nelson Rockefeller called the CIAA, which is the committee for... I can't remember the exact initials, but essentially an intelligence group that where it's the... The Coordinator for Inner American Affairs is what that stands for. It was basically American intelligence work in Latin America. So Kendall was fluent in French and Spanish and so he put his language skills to work there. Worked in Columbia for a while and was really good at sort of public information, I guess we would call it propaganda, counterintelligence, not covert stuff, not spying so much as public intelligence work. His Spanish also kind of bonded him to Buckley, because I've heard that William F. Buckley's first language was Spanish, and Buckley's dad made his money in Mexican oil investments. And so that was probably one thing Kendall and Buckley had in common-
Richard Reinsch (05:36):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (05:36):
... was that language.
Richard Reinsch (05:38):
Thinking here, you mentioned Kendall was at Yale, so very bright obviously. Early on, his career took off academically. You write in the book and maybe help us understand this, he had a way of analyzing texts that was unique amongst political theorists and this seemed to really bring out the brilliance in his work. Talk about that some.
Christopher Owen (06:06):
Sure. So he had a couple of different influences in that way. He was a Rhodes Scholar and he was a student at Pembroke College in Oxford and was a student there of the philosopher, R.G. Collingwood. And Collingwood was an analyst of the philosophy of history and Collingwood really focused on sort of investigating questions, almost like a detective asking the right questions, trying to carefully, systematically work through your evidence logically to come to a logically coherent answer. That was part of the influence. The other was when Kendall, in the late 30s, taught at LSU, which at that time had a lot of money and was pretty prestigious. And there he became good friends with both Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who were sort of pioneering the new criticism of close reading of texts and they would sort of put historical context aside to really focus in on the text itself. Kendall became, I don't know of any other political scientists who did this, but he really liked to focus on a specific text and delve into and dig out its deepest meaning and putting aside historical context for the purpose of analysis. And so he was really able to do that with John Locke's Second Treatise on Government very effectively and kind of come up with some new ways of looking at that key text that others hadn't really brought out too effectively.
Richard Reinsch (07:40):
Also, I mean, I think this is sort of key to his unique position in conservatism is an author who's a foundation for Kendall was Rousseau. So talk about that, because I think that helps us understand his thinking better.
Christopher Owen (07:57):
Yeah. So Kendall was very sympathetic to Rousseau. He found him first really as a man of the left. A lot of Kendall's focus was on democracy and so he saw Rousseau as the sort of main theorist of democracy. Most conservatives, Kirk, et cetera, Russell Kirk, hated Rousseau. In fact, I don't know of any other conservatives but Kendall who really admired him. I'm sure there are some. Look, so Kendall said, "If we're going to have democracy, we have to figure out how to maintain it in the large nation state," which is a reality of the day. So how do you have both a large nation state and democracy? So that, I think, drove Kendall to focus on local government where he believed democracy was more real and so he really... When he got an assignment to do a discussion of local government, he taught classes on local politics at several different universities, but he went to Rousseau to make this not just a mundane routine assignment on the, I don't know, the commissioner system of elections, but something that was more fundamental to maintaining democracy. And therefore he came to believe, I think, that representatives in Congress and so forth really ought to protect and safeguard the interests of their own local communities, which they represented. And that ultimately was Rousseauian in the way to best preserve democracy in a large state.
Richard Reinsch (09:34):
So in that regard, it's interesting just to think about his work on Locke as well.
Christopher Owen (09:41):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (09:41):
And his dissertation on Locke, which very well received at the time.
Christopher Owen (09:46):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (09:46):
And he does something new with Locke. He says, Locke is a majoritarian theorist. He's not... To think of him as a proponent defending individual rights doesn't fully make sense of that.
Christopher Owen (09:58):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (09:59):
And talk about that too because that seems like it's going to play out later in his career, particularly when he turns to writing on politics in the 60s.
Christopher Owen (10:08):
Sure. So he starts out as, at that point, I call him an absolute majoritarian, Kendall, so the majority had the right to rule, the minority has the duty to obey. So in reading the Second Treatise, instead of relying on what others had said about it, he read it and analyzed it carefully. And one of the things he noted is chapter one focuses on the right of the majority to rule the community and to impose its will up to and including the death penalty for those who step outside of its bounds. And it's really only in the second chapter when Locke turns to natural rights. So the right of the community to rule as it sees fit is logically and prior to the rights of the individual not to be ruled by this society. So he argued really that there's a fundamental contradiction, I think, between those two things. That if individuals have natural rights that are not given to them by society and cannot be taken away by society, that seems to contradict the idea that the majority has the right to impose its will on the rest of society. So he sort of saw that seeming contradiction by suggesting that Locke had a tacit understanding that the majority was virtuous enough that it would never take away the rights that individuals deserve. That was his position, at least in 1941. That changed a little later.
Richard Reinsch (11:49):
He changed later. His thinking changes about Locke as well. I guess we should say Willmoore Kendall found the politics department at the University of Dallas.
Christopher Owen (12:02):
That's right.
Richard Reinsch (12:03):
And towards the end of his career, he dies, I think, in 1966?
Christopher Owen (12:09):
'67.
Richard Reinsch (12:09):
'67. And he taught at Yale. He had a, shall we say, a difficult personality wherever he went.
Christopher Owen (12:17):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (12:18):
I think it was said of Kendall, he never wanted to be on speaking terms with more than two people at the same time.
Christopher Owen (12:24):
That's right.
Richard Reinsch (12:26):
And he was an alcoholic, he was married three times, and very just challenging personal life. But he was also a genius who entered, was it he entered Northwestern at the age of 13 or 14?
Christopher Owen (12:41):
Right. 13, yeah.
Richard Reinsch (12:43):
Yeah, and overbearing father, his father was a blind Methodist pastor, a progressive pastor in Oklahoma in the early part of the 20th centuries. So I think that also is obviously a part of Willmoore Kendall's story.
Christopher Owen (13:01):
Absolutely. So he certainly had a contentious personality, but I think that was one of those things where it was a thing that also attracted people to him because people never really forgot meeting him when they did meet him.
Richard Reinsch (13:18):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (13:19):
Saul Bellow wrote a short story or a novella really about him called Mosby's Memoirs. He knew Saul Bellow and he just made a vivid impression on people when he did meet them. So he had a charisma about him, particularly when he was young, that attracted women and young people and his contentiousness was mostly focused on his superiors or his colleagues. He was never brutal or really argumentative with his students. In fact, he was never really ideological with his students, he was able to tolerate people of all sorts of shades of opinion within that. And I do try to... I don't really connect necessarily all the dots, but... Yeah, so his childhood, he was really rushed into a lot of stuff by his dad as a child prodigy and he had a lot of scars from that I think, and that really came out in his later life. I do mostly in the book try to avoid saying that his father, Reverend Kendall, that it was unfortunate that he did blah or whatever, because kind of my idea was that it is what it is and so the good that was in Kendall and some of the contentious parts all came from that. And he could have been an obscure professor somewhere and nobody would've ever heard of him, he might have lived a happier life, but made less impact. So I tried not to make too many judgements on that and just tell the story like it was.
Richard Reinsch (14:54):
Yeah, Kendall... I mean, if you're trying to consult him to understand sort of the essence of his thought there's several books of his that are really collections of his essays. The one that sticks out to me is the Conservative Affirmation and although there's a collection of contra mundum, but we've been talking about this, how would you define his approach to American constitutional thought?
Christopher Owen (15:20):
Sure. Well, it's also lined out in his book, Basic Symbols.
Richard Reinsch (15:25):
Basic Symbols.
Christopher Owen (15:27):
Really I think for American constitutional thought he really regards himself as a follower. I call him a Madisonian, but Madison himself is all over the place at times. He really calls himself, I think, a follower of Publius, and the Federalist, and the Constitution and the papers that explain the Constitution is really where he came down. And he even comes down with the original Constitution pre Bill of Rights because he believes... He cites Madison at a couple of points that the Bill of Rights are really part, what he calls, parchment barriers, paper that really don't mean anything unless you have a virtuous people who's willing to rule with restraint, carefully deliberate its course, and proceed into the future, so that's really where he lies. And he really puts a lot of emphasis on the Preamble to the Constitution as the purpose of American government, so more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare, and so forth. So his thought really uplifts the Constitution, the Preamble, the Federalist. He is less enamored with the Declaration of Independence, which he thinks is sort of hastily put together, not well thought through, and less coherent than the Constitution, which was carefully deliberated over months before it became the law of the land.
Richard Reinsch (17:08):
But you said, Publius mattered.
Christopher Owen (17:10):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (17:11):
How did Publius inform his thought and how did he understand Publius?
Christopher Owen (17:15):
Sure. So he likes to... The Publius of course is John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, the anonymous title, pseudonym, that they wrote the Federalist Papers justifying the Constitution. So Kendall, like his focus on textual analysis, he thought it was less important in trying to determine which of those individuals wrote each, Federalist 51, Federalist 10, or whatever, than to look at the document focusing on the text itself and what it said about the American Republic and how it was supposed to operate. So the Federalist, written by Publius, he thought was the best guide to how the Constitution ought to be understood and interpreted, and really the best guide for how the American system of government was supposed to operate. And that was a defense of the Constitution before the Bill of Rights was attached to it.
Richard Reinsch (18:21):
Uh-huh (affirmative). So talk more about that, because I know he had this idea of constitutional morality inside the workings of the federal government should guide those people, people working in the institutions and the branches. Help our listeners understand that.
Christopher Owen (18:37):
So Kendall believed that there was a constitutional morality of restraint, and a lot of that meant not seeking to impose one's will, or desires, or policy goals at the expense of other forces in society, that if you through, this is his later thought, it changed from what he was thinking early, that if social forces, reformers, et cetera, tried to impose their will and ran sort a roughshod over large groups who resisted, that that would almost certainly lead to social disorder, disrupt if not destroy the public government, the federal government. So Kendall really put the sovereign center and his focus on Congress, that Congress really was the place where sovereignty as loaned to Congress by the people resided and that as Congress went, so went the Republic. And when Congress was weak, that wasn't good, that that really threatened sort of dictatorship.
Richard Reinsch (19:50):
Thinking about that, he has a great essay about the different types of majorities in American politics, and there's a presidential majority and the congressional majority. And the presidential majority, I would say, I'm interested to get your thoughts, I think that largely governs us now. And Kendall was trying to say, well, congressional majority are different, that they're defined by districts, by personalities representing those districts, and it's going to be more directly responsive. And the goal should be to build around those majorities, which would represent something that approximates the majority of the actual people. And a presidential majority, it's about television, it's about grand ideals, it's foreign policy related, it seems to be more elite driven. It's a brilliant essay, but I think it's... Now, it's very much how we do politics and it has been true for decades.
Christopher Owen (20:52):
Yes. I think that's true. And he saw that coming and he thought that, that would be really destructive. By the way, I think in that he was, even in his day, he was butting his head or running against the grain there because a lot of political scientists believe that the presidential majority is where real democracy resided. So a lot of that, he uses the phrase structured communities, so your Congressman represents a particular community, a structured community, his constituents can know him. He understands the particularities of his place in a way that presidential candidates never can. So he talked about how in a congressional election the candidates can talk about something real, tangible, local that affects people. Whereas in presidential campaigns, he said, mostly the candidates were just full of hot air talking about nothing, just sound bites that really didn't mean a whole lot when it came right down to it. So absolutely he saw that coming and thought it would be destructive.
Richard Reinsch (21:57):
Yeah, and I think this leads into my next question. I'd like to get our listeners to understand. So Kendall defended Joseph McCarthy, why did he defend McCarthy?
Christopher Owen (22:07):
Yeah, that's a great question and that's something that I've really struggled with. And boy, if you want to turn someone's head say someone was favoring Joe McCarthy, that's still... McCarthy, his name is not well received, obviously. So look, that does go with what he's saying. So Kendall, and this is the early 50s, he basically sees that there's an out of control bureaucracy. So there's some resonance here when people today start talking about the swamp, et cetera, Kendall didn't use those terms, but that's what he was thinking back in the 50s. And there's a bureaucracy that doesn't really have a particular boss anywhere, it's kind of loosely under the control of the Executive Branch. There's an unelected judiciary and he links them together in what he calls kind of this three-headed great bureaucracy, which he says is the news media, the federal bureaucracy, and the judiciary, and that those three combined basically are imposing their will on the people.
Christopher Owen (23:19):
And his whole idea was in a democracy you need someone to right herd on this bureaucracy and the only real institution set up to do that is Congress. And Congress of course, that would be in this case, Joseph McCarthy, could have been Martin Dies from earlier on in the 1940s, and that the only way that the people can exercise some control on this bureaucracy is through their elected representatives in Congress. So that's why it sort of logically connects, I mean, he had no illusions about McCarthy.
Richard Reinsch (23:55):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (23:55):
He knew what McCarthy was doing and he didn't think of him as right on all accounts by any means, but he saw no alternative to what he said, right herd on this bureaucracy, the only body to do that would be Congress. And so I think that's why he would gravitate towards supporting some of what McCarthy was doing.
Richard Reinsch (24:16):
And he also wrote a brilliant essay on the trial of Socrates.
Christopher Owen (24:25):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (24:25):
And I think further revealed sort of the political thought of Willmoore Kendall.
Christopher Owen (24:29):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (24:30):
But why wouldn't he defend Socrates?
Christopher Owen (24:34):
Well, he might defend Socrates' ideas, but look, his basic idea is there. A great example, great article, he loved to shock people by saying it was right to kill Socrates, so he definitely got a rise out of people by doing that. But the basic idea there is that the Athenian's Assembly of the People's purpose, function, was to safeguard the Athenian way of life and that's the purpose of any government is to safeguard the life of its people. And if you have a dissident who attacks, attacks, and refuses to stop attacking that way of life, that the Athenian Assembly was within its rights in order to defend that way of life to silence that criticism any way that it saw fit. And then he of course goes on to make the argument that Socrates himself recognized the democratic Assembly's right to do so by refusing to flee when sentenced to death. So that essentially was the idea that the people have the right to defend their way of life, and that there are critics who refuse to stop attacking that way of life, then the Assembly has the right to silence them through death or exile.
Richard Reinsch (25:53):
So you would say he's an offender of the polity and the centrality of their needing to be a governing consensus, a moral consensus that governs the people, which I think that would make... That's another way to enter into his thought and even to think about... He's sort of reemerged recently, and you note this in the book, some conservative thinkers talking about Kendall again in the current moment, the present moment, applying Kendallian insights. Matthew Contenetti has done so in a couple of essays, Daniel McCarthy. I wrote a piece about Basic Symbols for the 60th anniversary last year and thinking about trying to develop that approach, the constitutional consensus approach. How do you see those efforts and how do you see Kendall's ideas? Does it give us leverage in thinking about problems today and should conservatism become more, or is it becoming more Kendallian, not necessarily intentionally, but just through experience?
Christopher Owen (26:56):
Yeah. Well, so I say in the book that really Kendall is the theorist of what I call conservative populism, so a brand of conservatism that takes seriously the right of the people to enact their will into policy. Some of that does have to do with having a political orthodoxy, a standard to which we adhere, a minimum standard to which we all adhere. And Kendall, a lot of what he says is a society that doesn't have that, a society that's open to every point of view, a society that says it's okay to talk about destroying the Republic, is not a society that lasts very long. It's destroyed. It comes apart at the seams. So he said at one point that the open society, that is a society where all points of view are equally fine, is an enemy to the free society because a society where all points of view are fine ends up destroying itself. And so the goods that we have, and one of the goods, the freedoms that we have, end up being destroyed in sort of what he calls the phosphorus of political debate, where everyone hates one another.
Richard Reinsch (28:11):
John Stuart Mill, he was not a defender of John Stuart Mill. He was a passionate-
Christopher Owen (28:16):
[crosstalk 00:28:16] Not a fan of John Stuart Mill, right.
Richard Reinsch (28:17):
... So the society that believes in everything, I guess Kendall would say falls apart because it can defend nothing.
Christopher Owen (28:26):
That's right. And it doesn't have a place to stand. It doesn't have a political, social orthodoxy to defend and with no social orthodoxy to defend, you suddenly sort of fall apart.
Richard Reinsch (28:39):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (28:40):
Another thing I've been thinking about some with current events is... So you mentioned McCarthy and I don't want to dwell on McCarthy per se, but one of the things I talk about in the book is Kendall made his conservative turn partly because he was personally involved in ferreting out some Soviet spies that were at work in some of the bureaus that he was in. And so I guess one of the things I thought recently about foreign influences on the American policy and if different actors, I don't know, it could be Russia, or China, or whatever, if they're having a major influence on our policy makers, or at least our bureaucrats and so forth, and that's negative for our country, who is it that can stop that? And I think the only place I can come up with is where Kendall came up with, which is Congress. Congress has to somehow reign that in if that is in fact what's happening. So a similar question in a different context to what was happening in the 50s, I would say.
Richard Reinsch (29:45):
No, that-
Christopher Owen (29:46):
40s and 50s.
Richard Reinsch (29:47):
... I think that's interesting and it also raises the point too of orthodoxy, that for example, American corporations acting in this country in ways that the Chinese government wants them to act.
Christopher Owen (29:59):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (29:59):
Or firing employees, if the Chinese government tells them to, silencing voices, pulling people off a social media platform, that raises this question of well, do we know what it means to be an American now? And I think Kendall... Kendall says, you probably know it, it's something like Americans live their liberty in their hips. I mean, it's just like something that they do.
Christopher Owen (30:25):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (30:25):
They know how to do it.
Christopher Owen (30:26):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (30:26):
And do we still know how to do it? Well, I mean, would Kendall just be pulling his hair out right now?
Christopher Owen (30:31):
I think he'd be pulling his hair out to some extent, but Kendall had really this abiding faith in the people to make the right decisions. So if he looked at what's going on right now, he wouldn't blame the people. Okay? He would blame sort of the corrupt institutions that are failing to enact the will of the people. So he always really did... He trusted democracy, but he believed that people could be misled by the elites. By the way, he stole that in the hips thing, that's a Lincoln Steffens thing I discovered.
Richard Reinsch (31:02):
Oh, okay.
Christopher Owen (31:04):
That he picked up from him, which I didn't know until I discovered that. But yeah, so that's definitely... I think he would have faith that the people ultimately can do the right thing. So his idea of the role of a political theorist or philosopher was not to tell the people what was right, but to try to guide them in the sense of if you decide A, the consequences will be B. That's what a political leader or political scientist was supposed to do, not tell the people what to do, but to tell them, let's say, if you mandate COVID vaccines, then this is a consequence that might ensue from that, not to tell them whether they should or they should not do that and that's a key point. Another key point I'd really like to talk about is his ideas about political parties.
Richard Reinsch (31:58):
Please do.
Christopher Owen (31:58):
So he was one of the few people in his day who thought it was good not to have ideologically distinct parties. It was good to have overlap. It was good to have conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, so that you had to have these cross-party negotiations in order to enact a law, in order to enact change, to make changes. So the votes that we've had really, I mean, I guess for the last several decades, but really, I think starting with... I did a thing on the Obamacare vote, where you have a vote that's pretty much right down the line, like zero Republicans vote for it, all but one Democrat's votes for it or whatever, or some of the recent votes we've had on spending bills that are right party line votes, that he thinks is really destructive because what you get is two camps, two choices, one side hates the other, and that's a division that cleaves right down the middle and divides us as Americans. And he thought that was almost certain to be destructive, which went against what almost every other political scientist at the time was saying, that they believe we needed two ideologically distinct parties. He thought that would be almost certainly destructive.
Richard Reinsch (33:22):
No and that's very well said in thinking also now we've become accustomed to it in the last, what? I would say, 15, 20 years to having these two ideologically distinct parties.
Christopher Owen (33:35):
Sure.
Richard Reinsch (33:35):
And it makes it... It's interesting watching the debate over this Build Back Better bill that even within, say the Democratic party, but the Republicans aren't immune from this either, but that there would be a handful of senators choosing against the President itself has become a spectacle. It's interesting in that regard.
Christopher Owen (33:56):
And that's part of the nationalization of politics. So Kendall would argue that those different representatives of whichever party they might represent really ought to be safeguarding the interests of their own particular district rather than serving well, what the national leader of their party might tell them what they should or should not do.
Richard Reinsch (34:20):
Also just thinking, Kendall was a part of National Review at the beginning and has a falling out with Buckley and leaves, and what was he doing in National Review? How would you characterize his writing?
Christopher Owen (34:36):
Yeah, so he writes a column called The Liberal Line, which is pretty much a regular feature in every issue from the founding of the magazine until 1958, so three or four years. And in that... It's amusing to read, so he could write in amusing... His best writing's pretty dense. You got to work, it works you.
Richard Reinsch (35:00):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (35:00):
But he could write in an offhanded kind of satirical way. So he basically used that as a metaphor, arguing that there was kind of a liberal machine that had told its echelons what the right story was that they needed to come up with and follow, and that there was kind of a liberal machine that tried to control both parties. So he really kind of set out, I argue in the book, to kind of denigrate the term liberal and to make it not a term of praise, but one that you might hold with, if not contempt, at least not a great deal of respect. So he was pretty good at that. He was initially also, I think, the book review editor and he was sort of dropped from that. So Kendall kind of distinguished between his serious writing I think and his popular writing and his serious writing was not really that accessible to a mass reading public. And I think he, over time, wanted to focus more and more on his political theory and a little less on his popular writing, but he did value National Review and that was really important to him. And I think getting kind of eased out of that, that hurt him. He was kind of emotionally hurt by the break with Buckley and kind of getting pushed out, eased out at National Review. That was, I think, hurtful to him.
Richard Reinsch (36:31):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (36:32):
But he had started focusing more on his formal academic political theory and less on his popular writing at National Review, which is one of the reasons he was eased out there.
Richard Reinsch (36:43):
That's interesting. In Kendall's overall writings, what do you find to be the most compelling?
Christopher Owen (36:56):
Gosh, that's a little tough to say because Kendall, he doesn't write one big, huge book, here's my total theory. I think the thing about when you read Kendall and the thing that got me really fascinated with him, when you read Kendall, you go, I never really thought about it that way before because he says stuff in a way that nobody else said it. So I would say with Kendall, it really starts with we the people. That's the key. How do we make democracy real in the modern world? He also comes in later life under the influence of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. So Kendall does believe that there is an ethical, moral component, there is a right and wrong independently of what we think, what we do, grounded in Christianity or grounded in natural reason, whether that be this Voegelin or Strauss. But he also believes that the people are the most likely to enact that virtuous society, more likely than smaller self-interested bureaucracies or nine people on the Supreme Court. Trust the people, don't trust the elite. Interesting, another thing he really talks about, this is really early, going back to 1938 in his career, he has a distrust that scientists know what's best for society. He argues really... I mean, some of this I've thought a lot about with the COVID stuff. He argues back in '38 that scientists know the mechanics of their field, but they don't have any special insight into what the good is.
Richard Reinsch (38:50):
Yeah.
Christopher Owen (38:51):
So determining what is the good, he believes the people are just as good, if not better at that than the experts. So he believes we should trust the people to determine the good and that the experts should help guide the people in order of how they might enact their will.
Richard Reinsch (39:11):
So he has an... I mean, it's a classical notion of politics in many ways of politics is an ethical pursuit, an ethical practice.
Christopher Owen (39:18):
Right. Absolutely.
Richard Reinsch (39:20):
And he's constantly... And I think also, as I've thought about it and you said, he really looked to the political philosophy in the Federalist Papers to ground the Constitution. Sometimes I thought his understanding of Publius is almost like an anti-Federalist understanding in the sense of he wants to bring out virtue as a part of political deliberation and Publius has some nods to virtue, but it's also very much focused on institutions themselves doing a lot of work and balancing those appropriately. What do you think of that?
Christopher Owen (40:00):
Well, Kendall did not like, in theory, the anti-federalists because that's one of the things where it gets complicated. So he focuses on local government, but he's not at all into states rights. He really-
Richard Reinsch (40:14):
No, no.
Christopher Owen (40:15):
... believes that Congress is the place... So it rests with Congress because Congress is where the structured communities from all over the country can send the representatives and these are, as I say kind of in the conclusion, they're sort of Aristotelian best men to deliberate for the future of the country. So he really focuses on the powers of Congress and he really puts the central symbol, I think he says, is the people deliberating together in their assemblies, that he says is really fundamental and that... So I think he doesn't say a lot about this, but I think he's enamored of the British parliamentary system as it was in his day, which he thought safeguarded democracy as much as the structured judicial review and so forth that was associated with the American system. So he really put a lot of focus on that deliberation of the people. He thought the anti-federalists were, I think, too provincial, maybe, too focused on state's rights, which he was not particularly sympathetic to, even though some have called him a Calhounite, I think that completely misunderstands where he's really coming from. So really he believes a powerful Congress where representatives deliberate can best safeguard democracy at the local level, but that sovereign power rests at the center with Congress.
Richard Reinsch (41:52):
Yeah, and you allude to Harry Jaffa, I think referred to him as a Calhounite, and Harry Jaffa referred to a lot of people as a Calhounite. Steven Hayward, a student of Harry Jaffa said, "That's an unfinished argument between Jaffa and Kendall and is worth reviving and worth thinking about." I agree with Hayward. Talk about, maybe we can end with this, the title of your book is a great title, Heaven Can Indeed Fall, talk about the significance of that.
Christopher Owen (42:21):
Sure, so that comes really from a lecture that Kendall gave at the University of Dallas and it relates to Kendall's reaction both to liberals who want to promote rapid social change and to conservatives in the Jaffa, I guess, Strauss camp. Kendall liked, actually he liked Jaffa for that matter, he got along with him fine on a personal level and he admired Leo Strauss immensely, but he saw danger in those who wanted to promote social change at all costs. So he says, "These are the people," in this lecture, "who will do justice, even if the heavens fall. And I say to you," he's talking to his students, "heaven to can indeed fall and it can hurt those heads it falls on mighty hard." And what he meant by that is if you promote your reform, liberty, or justice, whatever camp that might fall into at the expense of other social goods, you can collapse the whole social system. So if you want to promote liberty at the expense of the general welfare, well, that's going to cause problems. If you want to promote justice and you don't care about domestic tranquility, you'll end up having neither, neither justice nor domestic tranquility. So he really looks a lot at the preamble and those six goods enumerated there have to be held in balanced tension. You cannot promote domestic tranquility at the expense of justice nor justice at the expensive domestic tranquility. They have to be held in balanced tension with each other. So as you know, I mean, Jaffa wrote Barry Goldwater's “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty” speech and Kendall hated that speech.
Richard Reinsch (44:21):
Yeah, that's interesting.
Christopher Owen (44:24):
Because he believed that you can't... Extremism as a defense of liberty is a vice, if it destroys the other social goods in society. So those have to be held in balanced tension and if you're promoting liberty and the society general welfare is collapsing, rural America's dying, or something, then you got a problem.
Richard Reinsch (44:49):
Yeah. No, well said. Christopher Owen, thank you so much for coming on to discuss your new book, Heaven Can Indeed Fall. Thank you.
Christopher Owen (44:57):
Thank you so much for having me on Richard. It's been a pleasure.
Richard Reinsch (45:02):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm your host Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Michael Rentz about all aspects of the supply chain crisis. Mr. Rentz is the chief revenue officer of Gnosis Freight, an international shipping company based in Charleston, South Carolina. He also previously worked for Maersk in their shipping operations, so he knows the industry really well, and has thought a lot about its problems in our current scenario where they stem from, and is here to talk about it with us today. And I think he brings both an interesting perspective, both economically, both theory, and also in the practical problems, and details that he has encountered working in this industry. Michael, welcome to the program.
Michael Rentz (01:03):
Thank you, Richard. I appreciate you having me. It's an honor to be on the podcast, and I appreciate the opportunity. So thank you.
Richard Reinsch (01:10):
Great. So thinking about the supply chain crisis, this thing that has exploded in American life, and has affected everything from new cars, semiconductors, shelves at Target and Walmart, energy. And so we've got a lot of things happening that people don't like and are experiencing, and a lot of fingers are being pointed, and there's a lot there... As you and I were discussing offline, there are numerous causes contributing to this but maybe before we get into that, just to help us give us the context for the supply chain, international supply chain. I mean, as I was thinking about this, a small business owner has a supply chain. It may just be that all of his products are sourced locally, but he has some sort of supply chain he's got to do to bring his business together. It's just that the supply chain crisis we're discussing is truly international, but help us understand what is the supply chain, and what has it become in American life over the past two decades?
Michael Rentz (02:10):
Great question. And that's a great place to start to kind of frame up the fundamentals of what we're dealing with regards to supply chain. The way I describe it is I tell people it's a loose collection of a lot of different industries. It's not one monolithic industry supply chain. Under that umbrella are huge industries in and of itself like ocean carrier industry, ports, warehousing, factories, trucking, air freight, as well as trains... Rail. So a tremendous amount of economic activity under the umbrella of the supply chain. And what that means is it's a massive problem that deals with how they communicate with one another as they're passing goods along through the chain. The one ubiquitous part of the entire industry is the container itself, the international shipping container, which revolutionized the industry in the 1950s. And so that's ironically enough the perspective I take when analyzing the supply chain is that of the container as it goes intermodally, through the entire supply chain.
Richard Reinsch (03:15):
The container. I've read that this is an important factor. How did international shipping happen before the container, and what did it do in terms of volume speed, things like that?
Michael Rentz (03:29):
Right. So before the container, when it came to moving goods on boats, primarily, I mean, people literally picked them up in rope nets off the docks, and loaded it, floor loaded it onto the vessel. And you could... As many goods as you could fit on the deck of the vessel was about as much goods as you could transport. And it was just a massive bottleneck, and taking it from one mode of transportation to the next. And obviously, the throughput, the amount of goods you could fit through the entire system, was tiny. When they created the container, I think in 1955, it was a uniform point to which every different party involved in moving goods, adjusted to the trucks, the ocean carriers, the rail. And then, in addition, it made it much easier to store those goods on the vessels. So if you look at an image of a vessel, it's not just the containers you see stacked up on top of the vessel itself. It's stacked way below deck as well. So it really is almost unmeasurable or incalculable as far as the magnitude of difference that made.
Richard Reinsch (04:35):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (04:35):
To moving goods and really international trades.
Richard Reinsch (04:38):
So you're saying the container, it's not just international shipping on these massive cargo vessels. It's also, then you unload it, and it can be put on an 18-wheeler. It could be put on rail. Its goods can be easily dispensed with, and then reloaded. It can be shipped back to its point of origin, and then reloaded. It offers an array of uses that makes shipping quicker, stronger, faster, cheaper, all of those things.
Michael Rentz (05:05):
Exactly. It's standardized, there's only a handful of different container sizes and everybody adjusts accordingly.
Richard Reinsch (05:11):
Question. Just how big is a container. I mean, could you live in it?
Michael Rentz (05:14):
You could. People do. It's very trendy right now. The most common size is what's called a 40-foot container. It's 40-foot by, I believe, eight foot by eight foot. The other unit, depending on the entity, measures them in 20-foot. But I would say an overwhelming majority of the goods are moved in 40-foot containers. They have, in addition to that, what's called a 40-foot high cube, which is 45 feet long, and a bit more space you can utilize inside as well as what's called a 53-foot container, which is oftentimes referred to in this country as a domestic container because the United States is the only country on earth that has the infrastructure large enough to move those 53-foot containers. So you won't see those going around Europe or Asia. Ironically enough, they're manufactured in Asia, the 53 footers. And so, a lot of retailers compete to get access to those 53-foot imports. They'll ship the asset itself with goods inside of it. Then it will live here in the United States for the remaining time. The last point is if you see goods moving in a 20-foot container, it's usually incredibly heavy stuff. It's what's called loaded-out, as opposed to cubed-out, you move light goods in 40-foot containers, and heavy goods in 20-foot containers.
Richard Reinsch (06:23):
And also, I remember being in a hotel room in Savannah, Georgia a couple of years ago, and I was on the water. And I remember looking out my window, and almost losing my breath as one of these massive cargo ships sailed by. I mean, this largest thing I've ever seen, give us a sense of how big these vessels are.
Michael Rentz (06:42):
The new ones, I think Maersk calls them the Triple E vessel are large enough to put the Empire State Building inside of them. They're about 20,000-
Richard Reinsch (06:49):
That's incredible.
Michael Rentz (06:50):
20-foot equivalent to these container ships, which are huge.
Richard Reinsch (06:54):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (06:55):
And some of the largest vessels in the world, those don't even call the east coast. The infrastructure is not even big enough. So the ones you saw in Savannah are pretty big, but not the biggest in the world. Funny enough.
Richard Reinsch (07:07):
So thinking about America's ports, but before we get to that, let's just think more about... So we talked about sort of the nuts and bolts of how these goods travel. Why did the supply chain come to be so... Such an important part of American commerce? I suppose part of that is the free trade globalism story of the last 20 years, but also, in the search for cheaper costs and the ability to deliver products at that cost to American consumers, there's also something else which is, they seemed to really make it work and delivered high-quality goods and services that people wanted to buy.
Michael Rentz (07:38):
That's right. And I spent a lot of time thinking very deeply about this, and what I can come up with is about 40 years ago, you really start to see offshoring, and the primary objective of that was cost. And the reason they utilized it for cost is because cash became king. Ultimately, I mean the largest export in the United States really today is cash. And that is where most companies make their money is lending their dollars. And so, they wanted to create as much working capital cash-on-hand so they could invest it in the markets to make more money. Walmart, for example, their business model is literally to sell their products on their shelves at a loss. They have incredible terms. They collect on those goods immediately and have 90 or 120-day terms before they have to pay. And they just invested in the markets and take seven, eight, nine percent return. That's pretty much how they make a lot of their money. So I think that became a structural problem in the economics where everybody was optimizing for cost, as opposed to optimizing for efficiency. And that just kind of perpetuated itself decade over decade. And everybody assumed this is the way you do it.
Richard Reinsch (08:43):
So are you, and this is interesting, so you work in the international shipping industry, but you're saying that there's something structurally wrong with it?
Michael Rentz (08:50):
Fundamentally yes, I do think there's something structurally wrong with it. I mean, it's not just in our industry. If you look at the best and brightest minds are going into financial services, everybody's trying to optimize cash... I think that's not a sustainable way to do business ultimately.
Richard Reinsch (09:10):
Okay. So let's maybe think more about the supply chain issue here. I mean, cause I guess part of that would be we're the world's reserve currency.
Michael Rentz (09:16):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (09:16):
And as the world's reserve currency transactions are going to happen in dollars, they're going to be pegged to dollars. So foreign companies, foreign investors want dollars in order to engage in those transactions. I mean, part of that's understandable, and is that actually, most people say that's actually a benefit to America globally. And also it seems that the search for or lower cost is understandable and also allows for comparative advantage and to develop highest-end uses and the most advanced-
Michael Rentz (09:43):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (09:43):
Technology to dominate the American economy. So I understand that, but the supply chain itself becomes sort of, a product of offshoring, but talk about more in depthly about what happens, and we just pick a company, how do they operate? How do they work? How does this come to be?
Michael Rentz (10:00):
Yeah, great question. So, I think one component to chat about is landed cost, which is actually pretty simple. It's the cost to make, manufacture, plus the cost to import, your transportation costs. And when initially, globalization offshoring began that landed cost was very low. That's why it was such a good business objective. But as of recently, for a multitude of reasons, that landed cost has gone up tremendously. And unfortunately, that's being pushed a little bit to the consumer, and we can chat about that later. But most retailers, it's a giant pareto distribution. About 10 to 15 companies import an overwhelming majority of the goods. And then there's a long middle and smaller tail. And most of those companies are set up doing what their main objective is, take a garment importer or a clothing company that sells goods. They're great at selling shirts. And so their expertise isn't necessarily in moving goods or getting those goods in. They know what they want and they know who... How to sell it to their customers. So they outsource their logistics to a variety of different players. And here we go with the supply chain. So they have factories primarily in Asia, mainly in China, but some in Southeast Asia as well. And then once they are monitoring those inventory levels to try to sell as many T-shirts as possible, they cut purchase orders. They go to their factories that then start producing to make sure that they don't stock out on the front end to the customers. The last thing they want is to not have any shirts to sell to their customers and miss out on that opportunity to collect the cash. So the factory will make it. And then those t-shirts that are made, let's say, China for this example, need to get from the factory to the port. So they'll dispatch an empty container from the port. A trucker will pick it up, take it to the factory, stuff the container, and then bring it back to the port. Then that container needs to get onto a vessel, traverse across the ocean. While it's going across the ocean, it needs to clear US customs, which is a very burdensome process in a lot of regards, get off the vessel into a port, and then get from the port onto a truck to a distribution facility, probably from a distribution facility to a retailer. And that's the simplest way to explain it. So they say on average, a container changes hands 20 times on its journey.
Richard Reinsch (12:17):
Okay. So talk about one part of this is this idea of the bullwhip effect. And that's playing out right now in America, where I guess would be where the whip strikes, so to speak, but that's being delayed. Talk about that.
Michael Rentz (12:33):
So the bullwhip looks like a bullwhip. It's the small amplification at the beginning, but at the end of the tail, it's massive. And so, in that chain, when that retailer cuts those purchase orders, the factory sees a huge order come in. And then that factory places another order to their suppliers for more goods because they're anticipating that there's all of a sudden going to be a long sustaining spike in demand. And that just amplifies throughout the entire process where everybody in the chain orders more, and then you get a massive amount of goods trying to flow through the system that may not necessarily truly match the actual demand. And then, from there, everybody's playing catch-up, and that's exactly what happened, I think, at the beginning of the pandemic.
Richard Reinsch (13:20):
So with the bullwhip, but also there's this idea too, of like a delay results in a huge, huge delay on down the line.
Michael Rentz (13:27):
Right. Conceptually it's the same thing. So, everybody's pretty much operating on a weekly schedule, and maybe like a 10-minute delay, say, in Shanghai, could result in a 10-day delay in Denver, as those delays process through the system, the handovers miss, the windows miss for an opportunity to exchange the container, and it's pushed off a week, or it's pushed off a few days until they have the rhythm, the capacity to pick it back up and keep it moving. And, it just throws off the entire system, which is already brittle, to begin with. I mean, it's really stretched out like a rubber band, again, optimized for cost, not necessarily optimized for efficiency.
Richard Reinsch (14:03):
Yeah. So efficiency here. That's something I also want to discuss with you. So we know, I mean, COVID diminishes production across the globe for obvious reasons.
Michael Rentz (14:12):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (14:12):
A number of governments, particularly Western governments, the United States, print money, gives it to people in the form of stimulus payments, and then-
Michael Rentz (14:21):
That's right.
Richard Reinsch (14:21):
People spend it, and we've got, the money supplies increased dramatically in this country, and people are spending money. And we've also got this strange effect no one I think counted on of the workforce diminishing, although that would seem to allow with the incentives of giving people money. And so we've got labor shortages, increased cash. And so we've got all sorts of problems, and we now have inflation. So we know all that. We know that's a part of this problem. You and I are discussing on a micro level and tell me where... What you would add to that. But it's also the case. When we think about these issues, there's a lot of ways in which the government has interacted with the pieces of the international shipping supply chain industry that are not beneficial to a market. I mean, you said it's price-for-cost. Well, that, duh, we know that, but it's not priced for, or it's not acting according to efficiency. Maybe we should talk more about that.
Michael Rentz (15:18):
Sure. There are... We do have good examples, both domestically in the United States and globally as like the premier operating model for certain legs or certain components of the supply chain, take ports, for example, whether it's Rotterdam in Northern Europe or the Southeastern ports of the United States, the Virginia Ports Authority, South Carolina Ports Authority, Georgia Ports Authority, I think have the premier models, which is one governing managerial structure, the South Carolina Ports Authority, or the Georgia Ports Authority, for example, and a non-unionized competitive labor force that is a meritocracy fundamentally. And they are competing to be the best of their jobs because they get paid more to do so.
Richard Reinsch (16:00):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (16:00):
Compare that to New York, New Jersey, or the ports on the west coast. It's the opposite. There's a tremendous amount of friction at the top. The port is really a landlord. And then there's a lot of different entities that manage the port. So inherently, there's a lot of friction and communication issues. And then, on the labor side, it's completely unionized, and they're not ultimately competing to be the most efficient. They're trying to make the most money. And funny enough, they make the most money when they're working overtime. So it's... They're disincentivized to work as efficiently as possible. And then in a moment like post-pandemic world where there's a gluttony of goods flowing through the system, you absolutely need efficiency. And that is part of the problem.
Richard Reinsch (16:45):
So it's interesting. You mentioned the ports, so just comparing American ports to ports around the globe, which is at a comparative disadvantage in how we receive goods, but ultimately the voracious demand of the American consumer overrides that, those problems to a great extent, I imagine. So, but then not to say that we shouldn't fix it, but how do you... You mentioned the Rotterdam port, how does that operate?
Michael Rentz (17:09):
The Dutch have always been incredibly forward thinking and progressive with logistics or with water resources, and if you've ever been to Holland, you can see that firsthand.
Richard Reinsch (17:19):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (17:19):
The terminal that I have firsthand exposure is the APM terminals. The APM is the Moller - Maersk company, the parent company of Maersk, and it's completely automated. There are literally no human beings on the port. If you walk over a certain line, the entire port shuts down. The crane operators work virtually. They work in an office off the port, and they have a joystick. And I think it's virtual reality, and they operate the cranes from there. And so it's perfectly optimized. Now, would that work in the United States? Probably not. I think we need to give people good-paying jobs so they can take care of their families. But I think I read something. That's how the Virginia Ports Authority apparently was able to withstand the most recent crisis was they had relied heavily on automation. Now that's not the solution, but it's certainly a factor.
Richard Reinsch (18:07):
Well, I mean, I would think that is the solution. I mean, it's... This is creative destruction. This is how a capitalist economy advances, would be automation.
Michael Rentz (18:17):
Yeah. I mean, totally.
Richard Reinsch (18:17):
I would... I mean, I would disagree with the notion that we're supposed to lock in these jobs to help people protect their... Care for their families. I mean, to me, that's actually the recipe for decline. If we try to lock in the...
Michael Rentz (18:28):
Fair enough. Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (18:28):
Economy into one labor system. It's funny listening to you I was thinking of that. I think it's the second season of The Wire, maybe the third season of The Wire. Where we're... We get to sort of look at the Baltimore port through the lens of this family, intergenerational family, that's worked in the Baltimore port, and at the end of the season, they're introduced to automation, and they're sort of scratching their heads about it. This means to me, yeah, no, I was reading about the Virginia port. Semi-automated, and it's been of what I've read, it's been the only port in America free of backlogs. And that would seem to accord with what you are saying internationally, that this is just a more efficient way of doing it. And yet obviously there's a lot of built-in invested interest who resist that. And that's clearly what we're seeing in California.
Michael Rentz (19:20):
Right. I would add the port of Charleston in there. I'm pretty sure they'd never-
Richard Reinsch (19:23):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (19:24):
Sustained any type of backlog. And I'm from South Carolina, and any time I worked at Maersk, that seemed to be the sentiment globally. I would sit in the conference room, and they put a map at the United States up in South Carolina would be colored a different color, and it'd be for a good reason for the first time ever. And it was because it was the premier port, people globally recognize how good the South Carolina Ports Authority system is. I think we chatted about so Virginia relies heavily on automation. I know more about the South Carolina Ports Authority, and they rely on a competitive workforce. And as we also talked about, they also have the only recent CapEx infrastructure project, which started in 2009 to double the capacity of the port here in Charleston, in the entire country.
Richard Reinsch (20:06):
Well, now that's interesting as well. So that would be South Carolina as a right-to-work state is free of, say, the longshoreman's union-
Michael Rentz (20:14):
To a certain degree.
Richard Reinsch (20:15):
That dominates ports. So there is some unionization of the port?
Michael Rentz (20:18):
Right. But the overwhelming majority of the port's staff are employees of the Ports Authority, and it's a right-to-work state.
Richard Reinsch (20:27):
In Charleston?
Michael Rentz (20:27):
For example, and this is a few years outdated, and my numbers may be slightly off, but the base salary of the crane operator for a year, $70,000, but the top-performing crane operator, I believe, took home somewhere around $170,000.
Richard Reinsch (20:39):
Wow.
Michael Rentz (20:40):
That year, because they were paid per container to take off the vessel. And so at one point in the last few years, this may be off as of super recently, but the Port of Charleston was the most efficient port in North America, as well as the fastest growing and what they could turn a vessel over in one day, it would take people in LA Long Beach, seven days to do that vessel.
Richard Reinsch (21:02):
That's incredible.
Michael Rentz (21:03):
That's the comparative difference. And that I believe, is why elevating what I would call meritocracy at the labor level, so important to efficiency as opposed to call.
Richard Reinsch (21:13):
Oh yeah. So, but yeah, I mean, I was reading, just doing some research for our discussion here today, the longshoreman's union at the ports in California, average worker there makes over $200,000 a year.
Michael Rentz (21:26):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (21:26):
Which that seems like a generous income, but also seems like one, that's the result of a lot of protection, a lot of labor protection-
Michael Rentz (21:33):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (21:33):
A lot of insulation from competition to the detriment of a much broader group of people, namely the American consumer. And then, also thinking about our ports, dredging, which would be necessary for growing ports. I mean, so we think about...
Michael Rentz (21:48):
Yes sir.
Richard Reinsch (21:49):
International shipping increasing in volume, which I assume is a pretty regular thing or was, and will be again, do the ports themselves, are they able to update the way you think they should? Or are they themselves hemmed in by a lot of regulation?
Michael Rentz (22:03):
Yes and no. I mean, I'm looking out the window at the Charleston Harbor right now, and there's, there's always going to be dredgers out there. So the key number is 52 or 54 feet. You don't want to be tidally restricted to be able to handle the big vessels, and it's the ocean. So you need to constantly dredge to do that. That project started in 2009. So it had to go through the Army Corps of Engineers. It's just a very lengthy, clunky, and robust process that you got to have good leadership. You have to have good foresight and a good finger on the pulse of the macroeconomics of where the goods are going to go. And so, thankfully, the port of the South Carolina Ports Authority has probably the best leadership of all the ports in the country right now, contrast that maybe with some of the other ports who don't necessarily have that vision in-
Richard Reinsch (22:49):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (22:50):
Overly burdened with their regulatory environment per... By state.
Richard Reinsch (22:54):
Good. Just a question, the Charleston port, so you're singing its praises. This is great. That's what seems to compete with what I would think, but where does it rank in terms of volume of goods received routed to the other ports in North America?
Michael Rentz (23:06):
I think it's eighth right now. It could be seventh or eighth or ninth, but it's in the top 10.
Richard Reinsch (23:12):
Out of how many? How many ports do we have?
Michael Rentz (23:15):
It depends. I mean, there's a lot of niche ports.
Richard Reinsch (23:17):
Okay.
Michael Rentz (23:17):
But I mean probably 10 to 15. I could rattle them off.
Richard Reinsch (23:20):
Yeah. That's okay. That's okay.
Michael Rentz (23:21):
Yeah. Main ones. But I think it's important for everyone to know, imports go to population centers, imports go to cities. So in the Southeast, they go to Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, they go to New York, DC, Miami, LA, but exports come from the rural places of this country where land is cheap, and labor is cheap. So there's an inherent problem of getting that equipment. The container specifically from where it was unloaded, say Atlanta, to a rural part of Georgia or South Carolina to where there's a factory. If there's a factory, to put goods in it, to export it to somewhere. Unfortunately, because of the trade imbalance in this country, and this goes back to what we were talking about initially, the largest containerized export in the United States of America today is air. It is empty containers. We send more empty containers back to China to put more stuff in and then to bring it back into the country than we do anything. And I think second and third in that is scrap paper, scrap metal, scrap cardboard, things like that. Again-
Richard Reinsch (24:21):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (24:22):
To go back to those countries to make more stuff, to put it back in here.
Richard Reinsch (24:25):
Well, I mean, trade imbalance doesn't really bother me. It doesn't bother me one, just thinking about the dollar being the world's reserve currency, but also because the people outside of America are investing American dollars into American equities, also into bonds, treasuries, things like that. So you can say it's a trade imbalance, but I think what we actually have is probably an equity imbalance, and that doesn't bother them. I think that works long term to the benefit of our economy. And I think we export air because we have a lot of hungry consumers. We have a lot of voracious demand, and we want a lot of goods delivered here that it may not make sense for us to produce ourselves. We could produce them, but what would be the cost that we would bear doing that? Thinking about the Jones Act, I've read just things that have made things worse. I mean, both preceding this crisis but have made it worse. The Jones Act entails American chartered vessels have to move goods between the ports. And that, of course, is a high cost, and that's a regulatory cost and which would raise prices, et cetera, decrease of efficiency. What do you see there?
Michael Rentz (25:30):
Right. So American flagged to American made, and I think American owned and operated, which there are no American ocean carriers anymore. So inherently, that's a problem. The Jones Act, I think, was created in 1920. North America. The United States has the most navigable river system, I believe in the world, and we don't utilize it. So it's a huge problem. And it's not contemporary in the least.
Richard Reinsch (25:51):
And is that... And that's because of the Jones Act? The navigable river problem.
Michael Rentz (25:55):
I believe in part, yes sir.
Richard Reinsch (25:57):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (25:57):
So you can't deliver goods, let's say from New York to Miami via ocean, it's got to go over land.
Richard Reinsch (26:03):
Well, yeah. That's a problem.
Michael Rentz (26:03):
That clogs-
Richard Reinsch (26:04):
I-95 is a problem.
Michael Rentz (26:07):
Right? And so, it sucks up the capacity of trucks and trains to make these long haul moves when they could be put on what's called a feeder vessel, which is not the giant vessels that you can put the Empire State Building in, but smaller vessels, which is common to Europe, Southeast Asia, the rest of the world to transport goods domestically, via water. And with that new capacity, that's not being sucked up, to move these goods across the land, they could be used to do what's called drayage, which is short haulage from the ports to the distribution centers, usually about 30 miles. And that's where a lot of the congestion is, around LA, Long Beach, New York, New Jersey, Charleston, everywhere. Those trucks are taking the goods out of the port complex to a distribution center nearby and back. They try to make three or four runs a day. And a lot of that capacity, because there's already a trucker shortage of 80,000 drivers in this country are doing long hauls, because we can't use the navigable waterways. And because we're not using domestic ocean moves. So the Jones Act certainly is antiquated and old, and definitely needs to be revisited. I don't know if I have the answer myself, but if we get enough smart people around the table.
Richard Reinsch (27:15):
Well, I mean, you just delete the legislation, right? I mean, just end the legislation, which is inhibiting markets, inhibiting price discovery, it's inhibiting how people would actually engage in commerce, but for the cost associated with this bill, this legislation, and things would move a lot better. So I don't know. I don't think it's that complicated, do you?
Michael Rentz (27:37):
No. I mean, yeah, in theory, it shouldn't be. I mean, I would love to see an American ocean carrier come up. There are certain, what they call Jones Act carriers that will make feeder runs from Florida to Puerto Rico or from Seattle to Alaska. But they're tiny. They have like four vessels in their entire fleet, but I would love to see that. I would love to see an American ocean carrier emerge. I would love to see us take advantage of the navigable waterways with a barge system. Northern Europe does an incredible job of barges. And I think that would alleviate a lot of of the problems.
Richard Reinsch (28:10):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (28:10):
As well as a real infrastructure investment into some new ports.
Richard Reinsch (28:14):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (28:15):
Our ports are confined by these old cities that haven't grown. Take Charleston, for example, 400 years. It's confined to how the city developed, the population developed. And if you want to make infrastructure investments, if you want to find empty land to store containers, it doesn't exist. Doesn't exist in LA, Long Beach, it doesn't exist-
Richard Reinsch (28:31):
I can only imagine, and I know nothing about this, but I can only imagine the regulatory cost associated with trying to create a new port or enlarging an existing one to fit new market realities. I imagine it's a mess.
Michael Rentz (28:45):
Right? I mean-
Richard Reinsch (28:46):
Years, years, years.
Michael Rentz (28:48):
Decades process.
Richard Reinsch (28:49):
Yeah, exactly.
Michael Rentz (28:49):
It's a decades process. I know South Carolina and Georgia Ports Authority are exploring building a joint terminal in Jasper, South Carolina. And I think the goal was 2030 or 2035 and they started on it five years ago. So the foresight...
Richard Reinsch (29:04):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (29:04):
Is in leadership has got to be...
Richard Reinsch (29:08):
Talk about the intermodal chassis. I'm reading here 221% trade remedy tariff on imports of the intermodal chassis from China. That can't be helping us.
Michael Rentz (29:22):
That's a funny problem. It's not the main problem, but yeah, so there was the shortest of chassis, and chassis are the metal frame with the wheels that the container sits on. So, the 18-wheelers that people see on the road aren't really how the containers move. You have a truck, a big trucker that goes to the port, grabs a chassis, hooks it to their... The cab of their truck then goes and picks up the container. So it's three parts that metal part with the wheels is the chassis. There was a shortage of them. So they decided to order them. And they're all manufactured in China, and they're stuck in the same supply chain crisis that we're trying to solve. And they won't get here to the middle of 2022. So that's just a funny problem. The real problem is who owns the chassis. So I think about 10 years ago, the ocean carriers Maersk, CMA, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, these big international ocean carriers owned the chassis. And it was a problem. People complained it cost the industry billions of dollars a year. And so the ocean carriers said, fine, we'll sell them. They sell them to private equity groups. And so the private equity groups care about one thing, and that's sweating the assets out to get as much cash as possible out of them. They don't necessarily care about the industry or efficiency or anything like that. So the chassis are inherently a problem. And it's a big problem. And it's incredibly complex. I mean, I've tried to read and study about it, but it has to do with who owns them, how you rent them, who takes care of them, who fixes them when they break.
Richard Reinsch (30:46):
And I suppose, I mean, just for our listeners, the function of it, right? This is what allows you to move the containers.
Michael Rentz (30:52):
Right. The container is just a metal box.
Richard Reinsch (30:55):
Over land in a truck, right?
Michael Rentz (30:57):
That's right.
Richard Reinsch (30:58):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (30:58):
That's right. So, the trucks don't have... It's not a trailer, it's not hooked, like I said, you see the 18 wheelers, it's just the front of the truck with the trailer hitch basically.
Richard Reinsch (31:09):
Yeah.
Michael Rentz (31:09):
And they come to the port, they pick up the chassis, go get the container, et cetera.
Richard Reinsch (31:13):
As you've worked in this, international shipping. And you've thought about the elements of the "supply chain," quote unquote, is it a dynamic industry? I mean, we've been in sort of sending forward the case that it isn't, but shouldn't it be? Maybe parts of it are, you can enlighten this, but what do you see as the future and what do you see as holding things back? Am I overly insisting upon sort of the... A free market store here that's not being allowed to work or what's... What do you see as going on overall?
Michael Rentz (31:46):
So I'll take the perspective as an American, and I think we have stretched the rubber band about as far as we can possibly stretch it. I just can't conceptually in my mind, think about how much more globalization there can be. I mean, we've pretty much tried to extract as much value as we can from the system. That plus the pandemic, I think there is going to be a natural reshoring of goods. And I think the ground today is different than it was a few decades ago when offshoring began. And what I mean is I think people are more equipped today to move back closer to what I would call only mile delivery, as opposed to last-mile delivery, which is like a completely vertically integrated supply chain domestically for certain goods.
Richard Reinsch (32:24):
Mm-hmm.
Michael Rentz (32:26):
So I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back towards that way. Certainly, different administrations will help and probably incentivize people to do so. I think it would be best for the American citizen to have some of those goods back, but certainly, access to capital, access to information, and access to technology is different today than it was, say, 40 years ago. So if you and I wanted to go start a toilet paper manufacturing company in rural South Carolina, the likelihood that you and I could do that today versus 40 years ago is extremely high. I mean, we could take... The cash is there to go out and finance the equipment. The equipment is much more advanced today than it was. It could be highly automated. And then, with access to information, whether it's YouTube or any other online resources, we could learn what it takes to run a toilet paper business. And that's a very small and limited scope of an example. But I think in general that's the American spirit is people will take it into their own hands. And then that's a truly resilient supply chain. You're buying from your neighbors to a certain degree for certain goods.
Richard Reinsch (33:27):
Yeah. I mean, my sense is, thinking about the... Just to continue talking about toilet paper here. So, we ran out during the pandemic, a lot of panic buying, and we heard a lot about pharmaceuticals of not being available, potentially the way that China could make things unavailable and make things scarce for their own benefit. Vis-à-vis America. And of course, now this dawning realization that China isn't... Not is it not, no longer an ally, it's not even really a competitive partner or an opponent, but maybe an adversary. And the realization-
Michael Rentz (34:03):
Mm-hmm.
Richard Reinsch (34:04):
That the last 30 or 40 years of our thinking about China was wrong and okay. And of course the Chinese government in the last five or six years seems to be interacting in a much more aggressive authoritarian manner. Not that it wasn't before, but even more so. And so I understand all of that at and, but it is... I mean, it does seem to be the case apart from what's happened with the pandemic and the way governments have dealt with it, which I think has been not optimal. It does seem like the supply chain has worked and held up nicely. I mean, I don't know of anything. Certainly the pharmaceutical... I don't know of anything we really missed out on or that we had dramatic shortages and that weren't sort of replenished fairly quickly. And I wonder overall with the crisis that we're in, you tell me, seems to me, we're going to work through it, despite all of these government issues and the way they're impeding it, we're going to work through it probably by the middle of next year. What do you see?
Michael Rentz (34:55):
Yeah, no, that is the best point. And that's exactly right, is the industry as a whole is operating, it is working. It's not broken. It's clogged, but the people of the industry are the best workers in the world. And our entire country really sits on the back of them; whether it's the truckers or the port operators, or the inbound logistics managers for those retailers, they don't get enough credit. And they have been working tirelessly to make sure the goods keep moving. And they have. There might be delays on your new couch. It might not be six weeks, it might be six months, but ultimately those should flush through the system by the middle of 2022, barring that they don't inject any more stimulus capital into the system where people go out and reinitiate the bullwhip effect. So yeah, I mean, it should flow out, and then hopefully once the systems unclog and then more at a steady-state, we can start to have serious conversations about the regulatory environment at certain ports about real infrastructure projects, about opening up some of the navigable waterways to better prepare for the next system. I mean, really, the supply chain industry has dealt with one catastrophe after another. It's just the whole world knows about this one, but it seems like every few years, there's a problem. And the industry always seems to swallow it and handle it. But now's the time.
Richard Reinsch (36:16):
Well, that's testament to the industry and also to market forces themselves and how they can incentivize people to make things happen. Absolutely. Michael Rentz, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about our supply chain crisis and the industry itself. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Michael Rentz (36:33):
Thank you, Richard. I appreciate it.
Richard Reinsch (36:36):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal, Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Hello, today we're talking with Sam Gregg about the question, "what's wrong with America?" Sam Gregg, many of you will know, is a contributing editor at Law & Liberty. He's also, his day job, he's a research director at the Acton Institute. He's the author of numerous books, including, he's been on this program to discuss Wilhelm Ropke's Political Economy and Becoming Europe. He's also the author of the prize-winning book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. He contributes to a number of publications and he is also a visiting scholar at the Feulner Institute at the Heritage Foundation. Sam Gregg, welcome back to Liberty Law Talk.
Sam Gregg (00:56):
Richard, always good to be with you.
Richard Reinsch (00:58):
So Sam, this question now "what's wrong with America?" We can also discuss what's right with America, sort of inspired by GK. Chesterton's great book, What's Wrong with the World? Now we don't have to be as theological, obviously, as Chesterton, but it is to suggest that, or not to suggest, but to say there's something wrong with America. Many people sense it. It has many facets to it. You follow political economy, you follow law, constitutional thinking, social thought, just any number of areas you write on. And so, I think you can address this well. There was an essay published this week that a lot of people are talking about. Yuval Levin's, "The Changing Face of Social Breakdown," was the title, it was published in The Dispatch earlier this week, this being the third week of November. And Yuval Levin advances something in there that resonated with me. He said in the nineties, and that's sort of when I was coming of age, that we had this sort of impression of America, still the high crime rate, a lot of anti-social trends, up-ticking, and a lot of just frenetic energy, a lot of chaos in America, a lot of dislocated people who had not been formed well, who had been let down by institutions. And he said, and he says in this essay, we may have the opposite of that problem now in America. We may have a lot of passivity on the part of individuals pursuing education, pursuing career, pursuing family formation, having children, we've seen a decline in divorce in America, but we've also seen decline in marriage in general. We've seen a decline in out of wedlock childbirth, but we've also seen a lower birth rate. And so, you've all wondered why is that? And he thinks it, there really are no scripts anymore. And in the absence of scripts for people's lives, people become inert and passive, and that has its own set of consequences. Let me ask you, I didn't know if you had a chance to read that, but how do you react to that?
Sam Gregg (02:57):
Well, I did read the article and there are things that I had thought that Yuval Levin got right and there are things I suspect I'd quibbled with, because I think it's true to say that the scripts to use his term have broken down to a certain extent. The American story, which maybe because I'm an immigrant, I tend to pay more attention to, but the American story of people coming to the United States or being born in the United States, they're experiencing a path of upward mobility socially, economically, educationally, that story seems to have broken down. So that narrative, which has informed a lot of American political discourse has informed the way that Americans think about themselves and their country and the history of the United States. I think it's true to say that there are many Americans who are skeptical about whether it's even possible to live that story any more. There are some groups, some thinkers in the United States who would argue that it was always a myth and that it's a myth that has covered up numerous sins on the part of the United States that are being present for a very long period of time, whether it's the sort of the legacy of slavery or whether it's the various isms that they say are permeating American society. So there's lots of different ways of thinking about what's gone wrong with America. I would say in many respects, that it's also a question of ideas.
And to my mind, there are significant groups of people on the left. And now, by the way, some groups on the right who aren't just questioning the scripts or the script as it was laid out for so many people coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, there are people who are fundamentally questioning the founding of the United States, the key thinkers and ideas that have formed the basis of the United States, who are presenting a vision of American history as one of numerous forms of oppression. And many of these people, many of these groups have been very present in some of America's major culture-forming institutions for quite some time.
And I'm not simply thinking about obvious places like the universities, where since the late 19th century, we had many professors often educated in German universities who came back and had a whole vision of essentially dispensing with the founding in many respects and adopting what came to be called the progressive agenda, through federal government, top-down management and administration of society, because bottom-up faith in freedom was messy and disorganized.
And so, if you go through the 20th century, that influence has always been there. And I don't think you can discount the effects of the 1960s and particularly the generation of people that were formed in that period, that the thinking they were exposed to, the ideas that they imbibed. Now, that generation of course is, I guess you could say sort of on its way out in some respects, but their legacy is immense. And it's a legacy of skepticism, it's a legacy of distrust of basic institutions of America, a rejection in many respects of the ideas and the figures and the history associated with the founding and the way that that all played out in the 19th century.
So when a country, especially many of its cultural elites or political elites, legal elites, economic elites, when they start questioning the very experiment in ordered liberty, that's very dangerous for a country like America, because that's what defines the country. That's what makes America different from other countries where they have a history, a long history, they have symbols, they have events, they have even an ethnic dimension, linguistic dimension to their history. And America's always been different. The historian Gordon Wood makes this point in one of his more recent books. He says, what defines America are these key ideas, these key principles to which lots of Americans continue to refer when they're thinking about what should the direction of the country be? How do we deal with our problems? We go back to look at these founding documents and principles and ideas. So when all that gets canceled out in some respects or dismissed as the product of late 18th century, white male slave holders, we shouldn't be surprised a deep doubt starts to enter the body politic and no country can endure that for too long.
Richard Reinsch (08:31):
A Republic that depends on voluntary associations, voluntary political institutions, people have to want to be a part of them, have to want to run for all office or have to want to serve in various boards or anything about the vast network of voluntary civil society institutions in American life. All of those depend on people taking apart in the American project as a whole, and the inability to transmit your legacy, your memories to the next generation is certainly as you're saying a major problem, it seems also just thinking about moving, maybe moving over to the right from it, talking about the left, there's two conservative authors, one from the boomer generation, Mary Eberstadt, but also Helen Andrews, who would be a millennial, both sort of saying, I mean, Mary Eberstadt, if I've read her correctly, she wrote a piece recently saying to millennials and gen-Zs, "We robbed you," talking about the boomer generation, "In terms of the legacy we've left you." Helen Andrews has said, "Basically, more or less, yeah. You did. What we were left with is sort of fool's gold in terms of the America that we've inherited." What do you make of those, those critiques, which are kind of similar?
Sam Gregg (09:48):
Well, I think they carry some weight, because let's think about the boomer generation. So these are the people born after World War II, up until around about 1964. That's the generational cohort that we're really talking about. And they grew up in a period of immense American power, economic power, political power, military power, unparalleled, really unparalleled in many respects that put America as the number one country in the world that had slammed the national socialist and fascist colossuses. It had paid for effectively the allied victory in World War II. At the Second World War, the United States accounted to something like 50% of the world's GDP. The United States essentially saved Western Europe from becoming engulfed by Soviet communism, established bastions of freedom around the world. And I mean, literally bastions. You had American military bases all around the world and America was seen as a citadel, not just of democracy, but also of liberty.
So the children, and remember the people who did that, these were the people who had gone through the depression, they had been gone to war, they'd sacrificed immensely. We all know the story and their children of born into this world of immense affluence of security, et cetera. And they reject it, they reject so much of it. And it's partly, because they were reacting to things like, things they should have been reacting to like the ongoing presence of segregation in the south. They were disturbed and in retrospect, we can say rightly so by the prospect of endless war in Southeast Asia being carried out by the United States. So there were things to critique about the United States, but it's also very clear that this is a generation that abide ideas and even models of thinking that reflected a lot of what's often called the hermeneutics of suspicion.
So you look around the world and you think behind everything that seemed real and good, not everything is so good. And this is of course, when universities very quickly started the March towards the left. American universities had obviously been mostly progressive up to this point, but that goes in a very radical direction, the radicalization of so much of American higher education and culture. People like Michael Novak, the late Michael Novak used to talk about this, because he was one of them. He was one of the people that were part of this whole generation. And that I think to talk about the boomers in that way, Michael Novak himself wasn't a boomer, but he was very good at discerning what was going on among that generation of people that he was very much part of.
I think there's a fair amount that we can say yes, that the boomer generation with the skepticism, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and to a certain extent, the hostility that they brought to the public square about certain things that have been seen as always true, whether it's, America's understanding of itself, whether it's things like the place of traditional religion, place of business, the type of economic life that existed in the United States, despite the New Deal, despite The Great Society and all these things. So I think there's some truth to that, but I think we also need to think about some of the very grave errors, political errors that we were made in this same period, which I'm not sure you can put on the backs of the boomer generation.
So we see the Supreme Court, for example, in the 1950s, and this is not populated with boomers adopting a pretty progressive agenda quite deliberately. So you see that is happening. You see the Johnson administration embarking upon what was one of the biggest expansions of government into society and the economy in the 1960s. Again, the people who were in charge were not part of the boomer generation. These are sort of holdovers in the respects from the New Deal and that whole way of thinking about things. So on one level, I think the critique of the boomers is in many respects accurate, but I'm not sure it explains everything. Now, I don't think that people like Helen Andrews or Mary Eberstadt are claiming that either, all I would suggest is that if we're going to identify the boomer generation as being part of the problem in the sense that the legacy that they have bequeathed to the United States is at best a mixed one, there were other things going on, which reflected older forms of what you might call skepticism about the American experiment and ordered liberty.
Richard Reinsch (14:58):
Question that comes to mind and one responsibility. This is what democracies do, but does seem in the last 10 years, maybe even beyond that, we've lost any sense of fiscal responsibility. And thinking about, obviously this is a very, in the headlines right now, in terms of the amount of money that we're spending, it does seem there's something in the American psyche right now of they belief that this won't really hurt us, or that we can just continue to get away with this. Certainly, if you listen to Jay Powell, this is going on this sort of justification, legitimation of a lot of spending. And I just sort of throw that to you, is that also an indication of something profoundly wrong with this country?
Sam Gregg (15:43):
Well, it's not the first time the United States has experienced-
Richard Reinsch (15:47):
Outside of a major war though. I mean, it is quite amazing.
Sam Gregg (15:51):
Yes. Now I think that's true that what's different now compared to say the levels of indebtedness that the United States incurred during the Second World War in particular, we are obviously going heavier and heavier into debt. And as last time I checked, we weren't in involved in a major war against a major European power, and that hasn't been the case for a while. So there to be a loss of sense, not just on the left, but among considerable portions of at least the political right, of a sense of fiscal responsibility. Now, so what's driving this.
Well, one, I think is obviously the gap between income and expenditure. And it's very important to understand that most expenditures, for example, in the federal budget are pretty much fixed. Most of it's on what are basically, we would call welfare programs and that's been the case for a while. So the degree of what's called discretionary spending that Congress authorizes or it's supposed to authorize every year has actually shrunk significantly in terms of their wiggle room. So one of the ways they deal with that is by going further and further into debt. Now America's lucky in the sense that it's the world's reserve currency, that it's in a position whereby it can print more dollars, but this catches up. And it's clearly something that is driving a lot of irresponsible behavior on the part of a lot of the left and much of the right. So there's a certain detachment from fiscal reality that's going on. So you even see this, when you hear politicians talk about things like, "Well, we are going to reduce the rate of growth in federal spending." So they're not talking about reducing the actual real expenditure, they're talking about reducing the rate of increases in expenditure. It's really interesting to listen to that type of language, the notion that you might be actually reducing expenditures in real terms seems very foreign.
But I think it's also because a lot of Americans they'll say things like, "Well, I believe in limited government, but I also want a welfare state. I think we should be doing X, but I also think we should be doing Y." So the notion of fiscal responsibility, imposing choices that when you choose X, you therefore do not choose Y, that seems to have been dispensed with. And what's interesting, I find about this is that in many respects, this is somewhat new in American political culture. If you go back to the 19th century or even a lot of the 20th century, especially the early part of the 20th century, American political culture was very hostile to the idea of the federal government spending lots of money and even very hostile to the notion of heavy levels of debt, very hostile to this. And presidential administrations would brag about how much they had reduced the debt by in the 19th century and even in the early parts of the 20th century. So I'm not sure what's changed, but it's clearly a problem.
Richard Reinsch (19:23):
It is interesting. Just speaking impressionistically, Americans are very comfortable with carrying huge levels of private debt in their own personal lives in their consumer lives and not balancing ends and means, and the money they make and the money they spend. And you just look at the credit card advertisements, they appeal to that. And I just, I've always kind of, I mean, I've started to think, well, there's a line there between this personal behavior and the way you view the federal government and the way you view spending and the way you view things that you're entitled to. What do you think of that?
Sam Gregg (19:56):
Well, I have to say that when I first came to live in the United States in 2001, I was shocked by the attitudes of a lot of Americans towards things like credit. I was shocked that Americans so quickly resorted to credit to basically, overcome the problem of distance in time between my means and what I can buy now, as opposed to waiting to buy something in the future when I have a bigger income and I can probably afford it.
So credit is one of the magical things of any economy, which allows us to basically pay for things now and build businesses now and do good things now, and then pay back with interest, the capital that we borrowed to do those good things now. I mean, credit is a very important, very useful, very productive financial instrument, not just on a private level, but also in many cases, especially in times of crisis, this is what governments do. And so, a very important role that credit and sensible credit policies play in the role of people's personal lives and at the level of government. But it does seem to me that the sense of restraint that at some point you borrow now, but you know you're going to pay it back in the future and you undertake the responsibility to do so, and you use credit for things that are really important rather than things that just satisfy immediate desires and wants.
Richard Reinsch (21:39):
That's sort of like, Chris DeMuth has made this argument, the federal government increases its debt every year, but it doesn't really do it for things that might, we might think of as investments or things that actually build the strength of the country, various things of federal government might spend money for on. But we're a debtor nation to fund consumption in the form of entitlements.
Sam Gregg (22:05):
We're also a destination at the moment to fund social security programs, because the social security programs, as we all know, we're all told every time we get these social security statements, that the fund will be exhausted by such and such a date. That date doesn't seem to be going away, doesn't seem to be extending into the future very much.
And if you look again, if you look at American history, there have been times when the federal government has embarked upon extensive borrowing in order to fund very important things like winning the Second World War or paying for parts of the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War, or even further back buying Louisiana, that was a very worthwhile set of borrowings that the federal government undertook under President Jefferson to expand the United States, that was all really very important stuff. Now we are borrowing to basically pay for existing programs. And it seems to me that that is problematic on so many levels, because governments really shouldn't be doing that. You would think that they would stay within the limits imposed by revenue.
And this is, I mean, it also points to this dysfunctionality in the politics of some of these things, because Americans generally are quite hostile to high levels of taxation, it's a longstanding tradition in United States. And even a lot of people on the left are somewhat perturbed by high levels of taxation, but they also want the federal government to be spending on any number of programs, not just welfare programs, but also things like subsidies, subsidies to entire sectors of the economy. So it's not just the left who are guilty of this, there are sections of the right are also guilty of this.
We spend as much and we borrow as much, but we never actually get back to paying for what we need to pay for. So that does seem to me, interestingly enough, to be somewhat of a departure from the emphasis upon fiscal responsibility, and a certain degree of frugality, that was certainly present in the rhetoric of the founding, even if it wasn't necessarily lived out in practice by say, people like Jefferson himself, but even through the 19th century, in parts of the 20th century, the emphasis upon the federal government, staying within budgets, only spending what they can, that has gone. If you go back in the debate that they were having in the 19th century, presidential candidates would be bragging about how much money they'd saved, if they'd been in public office.
Richard Reinsch (24:58):
And better than Calvin Coolidge.
Sam Gregg (25:01):
Yeah, agreed, this is just Calvin Coolidge. If you go back to the 19th century, one of the reasons why after the Civil War, the American military was shrunk so quickly was because American legislators were so anxious to reduce public spending as much and as quickly as possible and to reduce debt as much as possible, that is a very different political world from the one we're in now.
Richard Reinsch (25:26):
Yeah. This is something that, struggle to formulate it, but John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths, makes an argument that if a people start to disagree about the ends of their political association, they should actually, they should agree on the end, they should have a consensus about the ends and extent they have public debates over things. It's really about the means. And it seems in my mind that we are at odds at the level of ends, do we want to be a constitutional people with what that implies in terms of accepting, fixed limits on government power, accepting that those who are in the government are actually accountable to people and we want to strive to work that way as a people?
We want to have a rich, simple society. That's actually the purpose of government. We want to have a lot of market activity. I mean, am I being too critical or negative to think, I'm not sure everyone's onboard with that anymore. And we're actually at odds over those ends. And that of course, makes a lot of other things really difficult to have a conversation about, because we're not even really locked into a consensus framework to begin with.
Sam Gregg (26:35):
Well, I think that's right. If you go back to the founding and you had disagreements between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, they had different visions of foreign policy, they had different visions of what they thought economic life would be like. They even had somewhat different visions of the relationship between the federal government and the states. They had different visions of what they thought, the role of what we would call monetary policy should be et cetera.
But no one was really disputing that the end was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And very few people were disputing the idea that by life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that there was a lot of normative context, which gave form to what that content of that life was, the way that liberty was lived, and the substance of what happiness consisted of. And that broad consensus was informed by a variety of sources ranging from let's call it a type of Protestant, Judeo-Christian conception of the world, what you might call also the moderate enlightenment associated with Scottish enlightenment in particular, French enlightenment thinkers, and a certain commitment to much of the heritage of limited government and constitutionalism, and even I would argue, natural law and natural rights discourse as developed in 18th century Britain and Scotland. And that persisted, I think, for quite a long time.
And even up until I would say maybe the 1980s, you would still find a fair amount agreement about what the ends were, even though you have two very different political parties articulating often quite different visions of what that should be like. So if you look at a president like Jimmy Carter or a president like Lyndon Johnson, not clear to me that they were aiming for anything else beyond this broad life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that just agreed with Republicans and people on the right about how to get there. So there wasn't really an argument about at least a deep substantive argument about the ends in the way that you clearly have today, because there are many people I think in among many educated Americans who have essentially rejected the founding, rejected the experiment and ordered liberty, and they're reflecting ideas that are coming out of many of the universities now.
I think of someone like John Rawls, for example, it's very clear that his vision of the United States is one of more or less Western European egalitarian social democracy. Now there's a big gap between that on the one hand and the type of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and all the emphasis, as you said, being a constitutional people and what that means. There's a big gap between all that and what you hear coming out of what you might describe as modern liberalism. And even modern liberalism looks moderate now, compared to some of the ideas that are being articulated about what America should be, that are coming from much of the left these days, but also on the right, because we have people on the right today who explicitly reject the American founding, who say that it was flawed from the very beginning. And so, I'm not sure they have a very different vision of, to the left in many respects of what they want. But I do know that what they want is inconsistent with the type of constitutional Republic and the normative foundations underlying that Republic that I think formed a reasonable consensus among a critical mass of the American population.
Richard Reinsch (30:48):
Yeah. Okay. They're going to call us "the grumps," Sam. Maybe we should change focus. Let me ask you this question. What do you think is right about America right now?
Sam Gregg (30:58):
Well, I think there are many things that are right about America. America remains, for example, for many people, the most desired country that they would want to move to, if they ever felt that they needed to do that. I'll never forget. I think it was Tony Blair. So this is in the middle of the 2000, when many people around the world are becoming disillusioned with the United States, primarily because of the war in Iraq and all the things that were entailed with that. And Tony Blair said something like, "Lots of people are very critical of America, but it's still the place that people want to migrate to. People don't want to migrate to China."
Richard Reinsch (31:40):
Julius Krein does.
Sam Gregg (31:42):
When people want to migrate to a place like Western Europe, why do they want to migrate there? Because they're interested in getting access to very generous welfare states. They not going to Europe, because they want the opportunity to flourish economically under their own volition. Many of them are going there because there's generous welfare programs. So the fact that I think America is a place that people want to move to, because they believe it is a place of opportunity, a place where they can exercise their freedoms and they can realize a degree of personal responsibility for themselves and their families, that's something that's really powerful about America, that doesn't seem to be diminished.
Another thing I find optimistic about, to be reason to be optimistic about America, is it still remains despite the fact that we have the legacies of the New Deal and The Great Society and things like Obamacare and all these regulations and government programs, America still remains by most indices of maybe even all indices of economic freedom, the number one country in the world for entrepreneurship, that's telling you something. That's a very powerful thing.
The third thing, which I think is a very good reason to be optimistic about America, is that Americans, a critical mass of Americans still are very uncomfortable with the idea of arbitrary power. They don't like the government telling them what to do. They don't like the idea of politicians behaving badly. Now lots of politicians on both sides do behave badly, but at least in America, there's still a critical mass of people who are disturbed when they see this type of thing happening. Whereas in many European countries, I think there's a certain degree of cynicism about all this. It's just part of the way things are. I think Americans still not all, but still Americans are still somewhat perturbed by that.
The fourth thing I would say America has going for it is I do think that the particular constellation of ideas of principles and institutions that came into critical formation in the 1780s is still a major reference point for Americans as we talked about before, but it has immense potential for America to renew itself, because whenever we go off-track, we can look back. We have this set of principles and ideas we can look back to and say, "Okay, we are departing from what we're supposed to be. We need to correct that."
And many of the best movements in America that I think have helped to shape the country in positive ways, generally speaking, that is where they're getting their inspiration from. And lastly, I'll say, I have a fair amount of faith in ordinary Americans. I have less faith in elites. I think in many respects, we have a problem of elites in America on many levels, but I'm astounded every day by just the common sense observations of ordinary American people who recognize silliness and nonsense when they see it and are willing to try and do something about it. And we see this today, for example, with the pushback against some of the things that are going on in schools. It's as if a light has been turned on in many people's minds, and they're saying, "This is bad, this is wrong that our children are being taught these things," but rather than just sort of accepting it and just saying, "Well, this is just the way things are," what do Americans do? They go in and they vote out the school board and they put new crew of people into the same positions. I can assure you that in lots of other countries, most other countries that initiative coming from below is far less evident.
Richard Reinsch (35:35):
And it's been interesting watching, and then the attempt to thwart this parental opposition, which has been very heavy-handed, which indicates to me a certain mindset of we really have to cram this down people's throats. This really may not have a lot of belief and a lot of support amongst parents, if you keep in track of even the federal government getting involved. And I thought that's been interesting. Something that also seems right with America is we talk a lot about immigration. Everybody talks a lot about immigration. It seems that apart from the federal government and what the federal government wants to do, particularly to the civil rights state to do to immigrants, that immigration is actually, when we look at what immigrants do, when they come here, it's actually pretty good.
Sam Gregg (36:35):
It is in fact amazing.
Richard Reinsch (36:35):
It's still a very positive story to tell. And that seems to be forgotten that we can talk, I mean, certain people will talk about, well, the rates of welfare dependence and expense and all that, but that's a function of the federal government programs that have been put in place. That's not necessarily the case that they are coming for that, I don't think that's true at all. And so, there's still something very good there to be told, but you've also got to have a rule of law system in place and that to be widely perceived in order for immigration to work also.
Sam Gregg (37:05):
Yes. So if you look at the rate at which businesses are created in the United States, or if you look at who is creating new businesses in the United States, immigrants are disproportionately represented in the number of new entrepreneurs, the number of people that are creating new businesses. So they punch above their weight, way above their weight, when it comes to creating new businesses, generating wealth, providing jobs for other people. And many of people come here precisely because they have an opportunity to do that in a way that's a lot less evident in Central America or Latin America or Africa, or in the case of Europe, it's less about the chaos, it's much more about the bureaucracy they're trying to escape. That makes it much harder to start and create businesses.
So immigration, in that sense, provides a way for people who are optimistic in many respects, people who are looking for opportunity, who are not looking for a handout, they just want to be able to exercise the freedoms in a way that they can't in their own country, that's something that's very, very unique in many respects and I think it helps the economy to keep ticking over, it means as if you like fresh ideas, fresh people coming into the country.
And remember, if America wants to continue to grow, it's going to need immigrants unless Americans start having more children again. So demographically, we are very dependent on that. And the other thing is that we often think of many immigrants as refusing to assimilate, of not wanted to be part of the American body politic. Most immigrants do want to be part of the body politic, they do want to become citizens, they do want to get involved, they do want to become American, they do want this. And that's a very powerful thing in the sense that it tells you that the idea of America is still extremely attractive to people all over the world.
It's a sign of hope, it's a sign of freedom, it's a sign that things can be done in a country that takes constitutional liberty seriously. But what you also said about rule of law is extremely important, because one of the reasons there are good numbers of people coming to the United States is because they're trying to get away from situations where they have constitutional anarchy, where they have rule of men, rather than rule of law. And I do worry, I do worry to a certain extent about how strong rule of law is in certain parts of the United States. I do worry about that, because I do know, I think we all know that a society that abandons a commitment to rule of law is a society that's inevitably at some level, going to undergo some degree of deep degeneration.
Sam Gregg (40:02):
And remember that that's why a lot of immigrants come trying to escape chaos in their own countries where you can't rely upon the court system, you can't rely upon judges doing what they're supposed to do, you can't upon the different branches of government, doing things in particular ways, rather than other ways. They're coming here to escape all those sorts of things and that's precisely why immigration needs to be structured under a rule of law framework, because we have in some respects, the worst possible immigration system you can have, because it's very easy to migrate here illegally, but it's very hard to migrate here legally, believe me, I know, I migrated here legally. It's really complicated. It's very hard. Whereas if you just swim across the Rio Grande, it's easy to get in, at least now it is.
Sam Gregg (40:57):
So if you're going to have immigration and I think America generally benefits from immigration at some level, all of us are associated with the immigration experiment. It has to be built within a strong structure of rule of law. And that I think is absolutely key, if you want to keep immigration as something that's a positive force in American society rather than what it is today, which is a source of division.
Richard Reinsch (41:24):
No, that's exactly right. And also gets turned into a way to drive Americans farther apart from one another. Sam, maybe we should end there. We've covered a lot of ground here. Thank you for joining us and sharing your immense knowledge on this general question that a lot of people are thinking about. And I think you've broken it out in several parts to help us understand it better. I appreciate it so much, Sam Gregg, thank you.
Sam Gregg (41:47):
Thanks Richard. And thanks to all the crew at Law & Liberty and Liberty Fund for having me on.
ichard Reinsch: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today we’re with Scott Lincicome senior fellow in economic studies at the Cato Institute about industrial policy, its prospects, what it means, and what its consequences would be if we had something like that fully implemented. Scott, as I mentioned is at the Cato Institute in economic studies, he writes on international and domestic economic issues, including trade subsidies, industrial policy, global supply chains, all the things that are in the news, we’re discussing. Scott, glad to have you on the program.
Scott Lincicome: Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Richard Reinsch: Thinking about industrial policy and I’ve read a lot of your work on it. What is industrial policy?
Scott Lincicome: Great question, because it’s funny to start there, but it’s really necessary because so often you hear, especially from industrial policy advocates it is anything and everything. It is what gave us the iPhone and COVID vaccines and everything in between, you name it. If it is a technological marble of any sort, you will hear that it was a result of industrial policy. The reality is as you and surprisingly, listeners might find out is far different. And that’s because if you look back at the history of industrial policy and we have a lot of it, in not just the United States, but around the world.
If you go back to Hamiltonian report on manufacturers, surely there was some industrial policy baked into that. The question is whether that actually first of all, was fully implemented. The history shows that it really wasn’t. But second, is, was that really effective? Did it actually achieve outcomes that were better than what the market would’ve done and that’s where I think, especially in that Hamiltonian high tariff, industrial intervention era of the 19th century, you really see that at least the scholarship on the issue says that, you know what, it really didn’t work as well as people will claim.
Experts tend to coalesce around a few really essential defining characteristics of what is industrial policy. First, you need a national strategy or a plan of some sort. This isn’t just government funding for basic research, for example, where, you give a bunch of smart people grants to do some research, and they might stumble upon some amazing thing while they’re doing their work at some university. You need a national strategy and a plan to achieve some sort of objective. The next thing is you need to then pursue into that strategy.
You’re going to have a targeted microeconomic meaning company, industry, firm, specific stuff. Microeconomic policies, things like tariffs or subsidies or localization mandates or the rest. And those policies are going to be intended to achieve specific market beating commercial outcomes. Making that really simple, this isn’t like building a fighter jet, and it’s not just simply to try to achieve some objective that the market could achieve. It’s essentially saying, look, no, the market has failed, and in order to achieve our national strategy, we have to intervene in the market. We have to beat the market.
Because there is apparently this market failure. And then the last part is there has to be an element of nationalism in all of this. This is not just simply establishing a prize and saying anybody who can deliver an amazing technology to us gets the prize. We don’t care where you’re from. We don’t care how you do it. This is far different. This is really the government saying, we want this on national soil. We want it to use American workers, American manufacturing. That’s the only way you can qualify for any of these goodies that we just talked about.
Richard Reinsch: As I think about things that I hear when I’m out there regarding industrial policy something that frequently gets trotted out and seems to be received with nods by a lot of people in the room. What is said is the internet is the outcome of industrial policy. COVID vaccine strategy, Operation Warp Speed proves industrial policy. Is there ever a need for industrial policy? And is there ever an argument for it? And I think, so another thing you hear is Alexander Hamilton in the famous report are manufacturers. America itself from our founding, some would say is rooted in industrial policy, is comfortable with it.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah. And I think that, look, if you go back to Hamiltonian report on manufacturers, surely there was some industrial policy baked into that. The question is whether that actually first of all, was fully implemented. The history shows that it really wasn’t. But second, is, was that really effective? Did it actually achieve outcomes that were better than what the market would’ve done and that’s where I think, especially in that Hamiltonian high tariff, industrial intervention era of the 19th century, you really see that at least the scholarship on the issue says that, you know what, it really didn’t work as well as people will claim.
That in fact, it was things like rapid demographic expansion and a lot of other factors that drove America’s rise in the late 19th century. It wasn’t really about industrial policy or trade protectionism. Now, the internet one is a great example of what I was just talking about. If you actually look in the history of the United States government’s involvement in the internet, what you see is that very little of those necessary conditions I just said really apply because certainly there was government involvement.
You look back at the creation of certain parts of the network and what became potentially modern email and all these things, but you see that a lot of these things were discovered by happenstance. You had a government contractor working on a different project and needed to develop a certain amount of technology or needed a messaging system through the department of defense, they needed to contact each other. The government wasn’t saying, “We want the internet.” They just, again, these researchers are very smart people on a contract and they stumbled upon it.
That’s not industrial strategy. That’s simply, there’s just a government touching the thing. You see that a lot in what we hear are industrial policy victories are oftentimes things that, again, people just stumbled upon and the COVID vaccines, I think are another really great example of where industrial policy gets credited for things that really weren’t a lot of industrial policy. Starting with mRNA research. Well, that was first of all, a basic research grant. The researchers were not trying to achieve some amazing market beating vaccine.
But beyond that, you actually see that there’s been some great work looking back at the scientist Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman who actually weren’t primarily being funded for mRNA research. In fact, his grant was on a totally different subject and they really came into their own when they left the government research apparatus and moved to Moderna and BioNTech the German company that brought it forth. And then with respect to the COVID vaccines themselves, one of the great things about the vaccines is that they really show us what a private market alternative would be.
And that’s very rare, because when the government gets involved in something, it’s going to tend to crowd out alternatives and then aha if there’s a success, then that was clearly an industrial policy success. But here, we actually had a really excellent contrast because the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was almost entirely a private endeavor. The only thing the US government did, well, two things. First, is they eased regulatory constraints.
Richard Reinsch: That was nice of them.
Scott Lincicome: Exactly. Allowing vaccine production to go in tandem with testing and all that stuff. Typically, they do those things sequentially. They were allowed to do this all at once, and then the other thing is they said, “We’ll pay you for finished doses.” Now, this is essentially a prize format. If you look into the contract of the Pfizer vaccine with the United States government, there’s an entire section that says that the United States government will have no control over the supply chain. Will have no control over the manufacturing process.
We will essentially just bring you on a vaccine and if it gets by the FDA, then you’re going to pay us. That is, again, there’s very little micromanagement and in fact, Pfizer used its own resources, its own manufacturing plant, BioNTech used its own research as well. The government only came in really at the end of the process. People talk about BioNTech got money from the German government, but again, that was after the vaccine had been created.
And if Pfizer’s executives before Operation Warp Speed ever even existed were predicting, so in say April of 2020, they were predicting have finished doses by December like they did. And so, you contrast that with a much more government centric approach. And here, in fact, we just had headlines today about Emergent BioSolutions. Emergent BioSolutions has been involved with the US government for about a decade or so. They were a plant in Maryland that was specifically funded by the US government to produce vaccines in time of a pandemic, produce medication.
Well, Emergent has produced almost none, almost no… At least in no significant commercial quantities vaccines and the government just canceled their contract because they’ve been having tons of problems in the manufacturing facilities in Maryland and J&J was contract the government arranged for Johnson & Johnson to work with Emergent and early on in the pandemic, you heard from a lot of industrial policy advocates that Emergent, that was it.
Clearly, this is going to be the success. And now of course they’re quietly… All of those comments have quietly disappeared. And when you actually look into the history of Emergent, you see that it’s connections with the government, it’s federal contracting and the rest were a problem that they spent a lot of money on lobbying. They spent a lot of money on winning government contracts, but they weren’t so great when it came to actually producing results. And again, in the vaccines, we see that.
You have a much more market-oriented vaccine in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and then you have a much more government-oriented approach in the J&J Emergent. And I think that that provides us really with this incredible contrast that we don’t normally have. And so, I think that’s the type of counter factual we really need to apply to industrial policy supposed successes. Because look, the government’s not going to go all for infinity. There’s going to be some successes in there.
And the question though, is were those successes really something that beat the market, that the market could not achieve in the absence of government intervention? [And again, I think the vaccines give us a really excellent teachable moment in that regard.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. And on that point, thinking about the internet, it is the case that government researchers and DARPA stumble onto the technology, create a dissent form of it. But it’s corporations in a market that develop a technology and make it a commercial product that changed the way we all live, basically.
Scott Lincicome: Exactly. And that goes for the iPhone too. There’s certainly parts of the iPhone. If you hang out on the internet enough and you are into industrial policy-
Richard Reinsch: And I do.
Scott Lincicome: …you’re going to run into this meme or picture or whatever that essentially says everything in the iPhone is coming from the government. The government invented the iPhone, right?
Richard Reinsch: Yeah.
Scott Lincicome: When you dig into that, unfortunately, some researchers have, I wrote about it in my paper, what you see is that certainly, there were some government… A couple guys on a government grant who developed the, I think it was the LCD screen, but they weren’t even trying to develop that technology. They were working on a totally different project, but they needed this tech for what they were doing.
But more than that, you look at Taiwan’s economic makeup overall and you see that they are heavily, heavily leveraged in one industry, semiconductors. That’s great when you’re talking about semiconductors, but when you’re talking about biotech and let’s use pharmaceuticals, for example, not so much, they’re laggards. And so, even where you admit there are successes, do you want the government to have that much… Do you want to have an economy that is that unbalanced, that the chances of having bigger problems for not having a more diverse economy are really rather substantial?
They stumbled upon it. But the bigger deal is that it took private, took apple and Steve jobs to package all of these different technologies into the iPhone and to develop a manufacturing strategy that involved a lot of globalization and offshoring and all of those nasty things that industrial policy folks, don’t like to achieve a product that would be a success in the commercial market and thus, get consumers to buy it. And that led to all the wonderful upgrades and adaptations and really, the amazing technology that well, I have in my hand right now.
And it’s that type of direction or whatever that is really rare in the industrial policy successes, you hear so much about. It’s much more, there are a few things that people stumble upon but then it’s the private actors that create the modern technological miracles.
Richard Reinsch: There’s two directions I want to go in. I want to talk about, because I think that brings up just the idea of the knowledge problem, inherent and industrial policy planning, and also I want to talk about other nations in particular Asian nations that we frequently hear about our successes in this regard, but one, just thinking about Steve Jobs’ example and bringing together all these technologies.
That’s about specialized knowledge that he in some great way was able to combine along with the people around him and all of the record they had in their industry of thinking about what could actually work and what could we actually build upon and creating this new product. And that gets the famous essay by Friedrich Hayek it was 1948, The Problem of Knowledge and what would a government bureaucrat have to know? When would they have to know it? How would they apply it? What incentive would they have to get it right?
And of course, and you’ve been saying this versus, and then compared to what? And is really the thing that they’re trying to do to achieve a political objective on behalf of an ideology or on behalf of a turf battle inside their agency or on behalf of Congress, congressional representative supporting them. All of those things factor in and it just seems like the comparisons ultimately [00:15:00] mean that a government official getting it right is really spectacular.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah. And like you were saying, having the specialized knowledge needed to achieve these things is something that requires not only a ton of input from all sorts of different actors. It also requires a willingness and ability to change course quite quickly to admit failure and to then adapt accordingly. Steve Jobs has had some failures too. It wasn’t just all iPhones, iPads and the rest.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Well, he was fired at one time. Right? And he came back.
Scott Lincicome: Right. And so, it’s the willingness to fail that is I think quite often missing from, and again, that’s part of the knowledge process and something that government actors are rarely willing to do. It took Emergent BioSolutions, going back to that company, it took years of failure before the government finally pulled the plug. And thank goodness we had alternative vaccines, because just imagine, if our entire vaccine production was on that model and reliant on the millions of doses that have never left that factory. Think of the damage that that could cause.
And so, that gets, I think to another big problem with industrial policy, which is the political influence. That even things that might seem good on paper, even things that might say, “Well, no. We’re going to actually use market input. We’re going to rely on the private sector and all of that.” Very, very often politics intervenes and you have all the public choice issues that arise from that. And that something that looks good on paper after it gets through the sausage baking in Washington, doesn’t look so good when it comes out the other side.
And then when it actually fails, it still continues for years and years because it’s hard to turn off the spigot once the technology pork barrel as we call it gets rolling.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. I want to ask you about some Asian supposed successes in industrial policy. You and I, it’s funny, in my research in industrial policy, I stumbled across the amazing statement you found as well, and that’s from the once wanted Japanese ministry of trade, MIDI. And they said, “We thought industrial policy was the source of our success instead we found it was the source of our failure.” Something like that. It’s incredible statement from this once incredible government agency in the Japanese government. Are there successes in say South Korea, Taiwan?
Recently I was at a political economy conference debating this issue and others with people on the right like Warren Cass and he was on a panel and forthrightly said, “The Taiwanese semiconductor industry proves what can happen.”
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: And the thing is, well, there has been a great success with semiconductors in Taiwan. We don’t know what would’ve happened without the government getting involved, but to your mind, is the Taiwan Semiconductor success story an industrial policy success story or is it more complicated?
Scott Lincicome: Well, yeah. I think it’s certainly more complicated and it’s more complicated in a couple ways. And first is that there’s a lot of myopia from the industrial policy advocates. They see government action, they see a tangible successful outcome and they think aha, that proves we should duplicate that. And it will certainly work as well as it did in that example. Now, the first issue with that though is and this is something you’ve written about as well, is that when you actually dig into what Taiwan did well, their initial innovations were very much Western technology and Western.
This was not the government fomenting actual innovation, it was essentially borrowing that tech. You start from that. Now governments have lots of money and they can throw around that money. And certainly, in Taiwan, government subsidies helped boost the industry, but also there was a lot of private action in that. TSMC, the large Taiwan Semiconductor Company is a very well managed private company and government involvement in TSMC is relatively minimal these days.
But more than that, you look at Taiwan’s economic makeup overall and you see that they are heavily, heavily leveraged in one industry, semiconductors. That’s great when you’re talking about semiconductors, but when you’re talking about biotech and let’s use pharmaceuticals, for example, not so much, they’re laggards. And so, even where you admit there are successes, do you want the government to have that much… Do you want to have an economy that is that unbalanced, that the chances of having bigger problems for not having a more diverse economy are really rather substantial?
Richard Reinsch: Yeah.
Scott Lincicome: And then the last part, as you know is the counterfactual. If you look at some of the research, Arvind Panagariya, for example, has done some great work on this. He’s at NYU. And you see that actually Taiwan grew more slowly in its peak industrial policy period than it did outside of those periods. And when you look at other industries outside of Taiwan, so look at South Korea, for example, or Japan, like you mentioned, you actually see that a lot of these companies and these industries ended up being less productive and these big hulking conglomerates that weren’t very innovative or had all sorts of other problems.
You certainly say there’s not a world where there aren’t going to be occasional wins, but you have to ask at what cost in terms of the economic makeup of country, in terms of the counterfactuals and the other unintended consequences.
Richard Reinsch: I’ve thought, just well you might succeed in the short term.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: Maybe the medium term. One question I’ve thought about in Taiwanese semiconductor success would be, there was government, I think it was a Western executive, maybe it was a Taiwan expatriate, I forget brings this technology and this idea to Taiwan and gets some initial funding through a research institute. And that becomes the basis of the company. But then the company within a couple of years is heavily private. And so, again, like the internet, but what really made it successful was it was private investment. There’s this initial public seed money, but that, to me, isn’t really industrial policy. I don’t think.
That’s just, we want the government to do some initial basic investing. And that then creates a lot of momentum for the government doing a lot of things in that regard. But I thought too, what if someone comes up with a better way to design semiconductors and a better way to manufacture them, and you’ve invested in this way and now what? How are you going to retool? That’s also there.
Scott Lincicome: First point on the infant industry subsidization and government seed money. This gets to something I wrote about in my paper and have written elsewhere as well, that looking at small developing countries and saying, “Aha, America can and should copy that.” It’s very problematic. The US capital markets are the thickest and most active on the planet. And the idea that we need government seed money for industrial and commercial applications is pretty far-fetched. We are not 1970s Taiwan. And that leaves even aside the political differences and political systems and the rest.
Just the same economic arguments that might support some sort of infant industry involvement by the government in a developing economy just really don’t fly in the United States.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Thinking about, I think the elephant in the room here which seems to give this life is China.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: And thinking about this new missile, hypersonic missile China launched. That made me do a double dig. Not that I think we’re going to go to war with China, but that they seem to be progressing. My impression is they seem to be outdoing us in certain forms of say super computer technology. Obviously, I think this missile they’ve launched is beyond our capability and that all brings to mind this idea again, of maybe the government should be actively engaging in technological discovery and innovation, and then allowing companies then to do something with it. Is that China? Is that what’s going on?
Are they a massive success in industrial policy and the interaction between the Chinese state? And I don’t know. I have a hard time thinking of companies being private in China. I know that’s not true. Even the private companies, I think have Chinese government members on their boards. The government is involved in something in every way, but is China this living rebuke and that’s something the economic nationalists point to as well as you know, is maybe we should be more like China.
Scott Lincicome: Right. Yeah, there’s a host of problems with that. The first and most basic is, can we be like China? Let’s assume everything is amazing there, that they are dominating in all these technologies. Just, we’ll assume that for the moment, the idea that the US economic and political system would be able to implement China style industrial policies, pretty farfetched. Not only does it require tolerating a lot of cost and a lot of failure and a lot of distortion.
But also just simply in sheer terms of how our economic systems are set up, the idea that the United States could somehow be directing bank funding and doing all this type of other stuff with state-owned enterprises is pretty loopy. Barry Naughton, the China expert wrote this great book on Chinese industrial policy and basically said as much. He said the stuff that China can do economically is not really something that Western more market oriented economies can do. That’s the first, I think big problem.
The second big problem though, is that when you actually dig into Chinese industrial policy, you see that there are a lot of failures, and certainly there are some successes. They seem to be progressing in AI. You mentioned the hypersonic missile thing. But there are a lot of failures too. For example, China’s been trying for decades to be a champion in semiconductors, and they’re still a decade behind TSMC and Intel and Samsung. Most experts say they might never reach the technological frontier in semiconductors without a massive influx particularly on the human capital side.
They need a lot of smart people, but there’s also other hurdles there in terms of materials and equipment and the rest. And so, that’s, I think a huge rebuke because that is one area that the Chinese government has been laser focused for 30 years and they have still not much luck. Automotive, cars is another one. Everybody likes to talk about electric vehicles. Well, China has also been trying to establish a combustion engine industry for decades. They have not done very well there.
I think the biggest success is the Chinese acquisition of Volvo, which again, that’s just simply borrowing others’ technology. And there’s several other examples out there of where, even things that look like successes. You say electric vehicles or ship building or the rest have been just immensely costly. We’re talking tens of billions of dollars wasted in bankrupt companies and leveraged loans and the rest. And those are, again, the types of things that well, is that actually good for the Chinese economy, has that actually put them in a stronger position in the long term?
And I think the answer there is no. And that gets to the third point, is that regardless of what you think about China’s industrial policy, the fact is that China’s economy and future, they have a lot of significant issues. And it’s funny if I had said this a year ago, people might have laughed at me, but now I think we, in the last year between the crackdowns on private enterprise and entrepreneurship between the Evergrande issue between a lot of folks starting to see China’s debt and demographic problems, China, they are going to get old very soon.
They are very top heavy when it comes to the organization of the populous. A lot of old people, not a lot of young people, not a lot of people having babies. Well, that’s a recipe for pretty substantial problems, not just in terms of innovative and productivity, but also things just simply like having a safety net that can function. And then you also look at how the productivity is going there. And a lot of that goes back to… China has significant productivity problems. They are not anywhere near the frontier in most areas. And a lot of that goes back again to their industrial policies.
These are state owned enterprises in China are increasingly ascendant. They were receding during the ’90s and early 2000s, but that has changed back. And so, you have a country that, it’s this big hulking ship out there, but then when you look a little closer, you see that it’s old and got some cracks in it. And now, that doesn’t mean that China’s economy’s going to implode. I’m not one of those folks that thinks that China’s on the verge of collapse, but I do think that they have a lot of headwinds and it’s those headwinds that should give us pause.
Do we really want first of all, to change the United States economic system because there is this immediate threat of China being a global economic hegemon? That doesn’t seem quite right, but beyond that is, do we want to have all the similar distortions and problems that that type of planning appears to have caused?
Richard Reinsch: It seems to be clearly in the last 10 years, something has changed in China regarding the government, which has never been limited by the rule of law, but a much more aggressive, powerful state intervening and killing their golden egg there or-
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: …breaking it, which had really launched China economically. Something you also hear a lot about is we invented, our American companies invented software technology and made great gains with it. But the loss has been, they’ve offshored it to China.
Scott Lincicome: Right.
Richard Reinsch: Or to other countries. And another argument that you then hear is, and of course you and I have a story to tell about that. That makes sense, a logical economic story, but then they say, “But software manufacturing…” Something in the software manufacturing produces ideas for further innovation. And because we don’t do that software manufacturing, we’re missing out on software innovation, what do you make of that argument?
Scott Lincicome: Well, it’s a weird argument, I think, because do we want to be truly innovative? Do we want to be the guys who invent the software or do we want to be the guys that just copy it? I’d rather have American companies focused on what’s going to be the next big thing, not focused on simply trying to crank out a bunch of the last big things. And you see this time and time again. If you look at the data on, say US R&D spending, if you look at the data on venture capital, things are still really active in the United States. And in fact, by some measures at all-time highs.
We just hit 3% of GDP for research and development spending for the first time ever I think in 2019, which is the last year available and venture capital funding and all these other things have just gone crazy both before and now after the pandemic. And I want folks focused again on the cutting edge and innovative stuff. That’s the stuff that really will define the next 50 years, not the last 50 years. And that’s where we still seem to be headed. Now, look, are there some headwinds and some problems here too? Yeah, sure. But I’d much rather be quite frankly in the United States’ position than China’s in that regard.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. The headwinds you mentioned for China, we have some of those.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: We have demographic problems. We have tremendous debt problems, which we don’t want to actually fix, among other things. All this debate started five or six years ago, industrial policy in America around this constant drip of an argument of manufacturing jobs. And with the loss of manufacturing jobs has hollowed out the middle class. It’s hurt men in particular, it’s been responsible for drug overdose deaths. It’s been responsible for single families and maybe perhaps the decline in our own birth rate. There’s all sorts of things that gets tied to industrial policy to bring back manufacturing jobs.
There are cities all over the country that were hit hard by the shift in the 1990s and 2000s. Whether it’s trade with China or automation or just changing industries, moving away from coal or whatever. But we hear a lot about these old industrial cities, what we don’t hear about is that the vast majority of them did adapt.
That’s an argument you hear from people I think are smart on a lot of other issues. What would that take? What would it look like? Do you think it’s even possible? I think manufacturing jobs are like 7% of the economy. And I don’t know what number would be good if according to the economic populists, they never say, but what would actually happen if you try to reshore manufacturing jobs?
Scott Lincicome: Right. Well, the problem that industrial policy folks have is just a huge contradiction in objectives. On the one hand, they want to have the most innovative and productive companies and manufacturers in advance manufacturing. On the other hand, they want to have a lot of jobs. Well, the problem is that the advanced manufacturing, first of all, the jobs that are there are going to be pretty high skill. They’re going to require if not advanced degrees, at least some, well beyond a high school education, what we call now, gray collar jobs.
Yes, you’re working in manufacturing, but also you know how to operate robots, you know how to program some basic programming, that kind of stuff. That’s your first problem. These are not going to be the classic guy working in a steel mill type job, but the bigger problem in advanced manufacturing, there just aren’t a lot of jobs there. And the fact is because they are very capital intensive, they’re going to use again, robots, computers and the rest, and that’s the real story of American manufacturing employment over the really long term.
But the bigger problem is that over the long term, going back to say, the 1940s, US manufacturing jobs as a share of employment are just steadily going down, they’re going down at essentially the same clip, and that’s a story of productivity games. There just aren’t a lot of jobs in the advanced, innovative industries that industrial policy folks want. By contrast where the jobs are, are going to be in labor intensive, low wage areas. We have some of those jobs, food manufacturing, for example. We have a very large food manufacturing sector. Most of the food we consume is domestic.
Those jobs don’t pay well. You’re lucky if you’re looking at 15 bucks an hour, but they’re the types of jobs that you would need if you’re trying to restore these classic men with a high school degree and nothing more in these small communities and having breadwinner families and all that jazz you hear so much about from industrial policy advocates. Well, yeah. I think theoretically we could reshore these jobs in textiles and the rest, but if we do so they’re going to be tremendously unproductive and thus pretty low paying. And that’s quite frankly, not going to be a good way to orient our economy.
I would much rather have industries at the high end and the most innovative and most productive than essentially forcing a certain part of the workforce into these low wage, low productivity sectors. And that’s the trouble we have in some of these issues like so you say male labor force participation and the rest. I don’t think anybody doubts that, hey, there are reasons to be concerned in some of this. There are reasons to be concerned about declining male labor force participation overall, but industrial policy ain’t going to solve the problem.
Having just a bunch of additional textile manufacturing in the United States or furniture or food or whatever is not going to solve the problem. These are really complex issues that are some cultural, some demographic, looking at women joining the workforce, some just modernity doing its thing, some related to education and the rest. These are not things that you can just simply flip a switch, impose some textile tariffs and then boom everybody’s having babies again.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah, and you mentioned this in your writing that there are a lot of places, regions, cities in America that were heavy industrial and they experienced a decline and then they recovered.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: One you mentioned resonated with me, which is Spartanburg, South Carolina. I’ve been through there a number of times, and it’s a nice city. And you get the sense of this city is robust, economically. Certain places in North Carolina as well, but then you’ve got Pittsburgh, another one, and then you’ve got Youngstown, PA, which never came back, and which… I can’t speak to the decisions that they’ve made but it’s like always wanting someone to save you or always wanting to bring the past back and you’ve just got to let it go and retool, and that hasn’t happened there.
And then this question too, of prime age working men. There are a lot of idle men. There’s also a lot of welfare dependency, I think there too. I think there’s a lot of government policies that have made this possible and that rarely gets mentioned.
Scott Lincicome: Exactly. Yeah. And that goes back to, I think, the complexity of some of these issues is, is the safety net in some cases doing more harm than good? There have been a series of papers out recently that look at work requirements that were a part of welfare reform in the ’90s and they said that these were at the time these reforms that were accused of being draconian and the rest actually ended up improving the long term out outcomes of single mothers or children in these families that were affected.
And those are, again, those types of really more complicated questions, but going back to what you said about Spartanburg versus Youngstown and the rest, and for those who are listening, I wrote an op-ed or a long column on this. But there are cities all over the country that were hit hard by the shift in the 1990s and 2000s. Whether it’s trade with China or automation or just changing industries, moving away from coal or whatever. But we hear a lot about these old industrial cities, what we don’t hear about is that the vast majority of them did adapt.
And they adapted, I think in part because of economic policies, I think certain states in particular had really bad economic policies and that makes change more difficult. The other big thing, though, like you said, is that there is this idea of economic nostalgia, that we were a city defined by a certain industry, textiles in Spartanburg or steel in Youngstown, and that’s what we’re going to be. Gosh, darn it, forever. Well, Spartanburg said, “No, you know what…” They saw the writing on the wall in the 1970s and they being industry and political leadership in the state.
And so, what did they start doing? Well, they started courting for investors in automotive manufacturing, in tires for Michelin or in automotive in BMW, but also they said, “Look, let’s diversify in the services again.” And they had the willingness and the economic policies in place to adapt and now they’re thriving and those towns, Pittsburgh, another one, those towns are all over the country. We never hear about them. Instead, we hear about Youngstown where Youngstown did not diversify.
Youngstown wanted to remain a steel town. Youngstown struggled to do anything beyond that, despite tons of federal intervention. And that I think is the story that we need to tell more on the free market side of things. That certainly some older industrial cities still struggle, but the vast majority of them have moved on. And it’s that contrast, you got to ask, well, why didn’t those cities move on? What were they doing wrong? It’s probably not a failure of federal policy, whether it’s tax, trade or whatever, surely may be some, but it’s far more likely that this is a problem of state and local governance and of other things.
I think one of the things we’re looking at in retrospect is that the Milltown economic model where you have a single mill at the center of a town and that the town is undiversified, it’s essentially dependent on a single industry, a single factory or company is a really bad model in terms of withstanding economic shocks. That a diversified city is, and it doesn’t even have to be a place like New York city or San Francisco or whatever. It can be a place like Spartanburg or here in Raleigh, for example, where I live. These are diverse areas and it’s much better to have your eggs in a lot of baskets instead of in one basket.
Now, is that a reason for industrial policy or for protectionism or something like that? I think that’s quite manifesting obviously not, but it’s again, an argument and a viewpoint that we rarely hear in the press. It’s all just simply closed mills, shuttered towns and economic populism.
Richard Reinsch: Also, there’s this view of America as a, we’re just in this free market country for the last three decades and these jobs just fell prey to the amount of capitalism. Senator Marco Rubio has said that at times, among others and then China got all the jobs and it seems to me it is the case. America has been very actively engaged in trying to keep and protect manufacturing jobs.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: Including steel jobs and that isn’t widely known and it hasn’t worked. And you pointed out in your writing, if you look at countries, Western countries, Germany sticks out, I think France sticks out, that have really tried to manufacture or keep their manufacturing jobs, they too have experienced a decline as well. It’s automation and also offshoring and also consumer decisions as people get wealthier, they buy more refined products and services with that income. And so, that also, but that takes a while to explain that.
Scott Lincicome: Yeah, exactly. That brings up another great point is that you hear so much that the plight of the American working class is due to decades of laissez-faire, free market fundamentalism, right? But when you actually dig into the history and the policies, you see that look, first of all, the United States has a lot of protectionism in place. You look across certain industries and across, whether it’s ship building or sugar, or even textiles and apparel and footwear, or then you look at anti-dumping and counter bailing duty policy where we have hundreds of special duties in place specifically intended to protect American workers and American manufacturing. And these things, it turns out that, like standing in the middle of the ocean and promising to stop the waves.
It might, maybe you have a little success for a second, but at the end of the day, you’re going to get soaking wet anyway. And that’s because these are bigger global phenomena that are happening all over the world, they tend to happen as countries develop economically. And it’s those seismic forces that are really what’s driving things at the end of the day. And that protectionism most often, and the subsidies and the rest most often do more harm than good by encouraging industries to not innovate in the face of competition.
By encouraging workers not to adapt and upgrade their skills or move on to other industries. And by creating bloated industries like the ship building industry, which has had a hundred years of protection from the Jones Act, and now can’t make a ship that’s worth a darn. It costs five times as much to make a ship in the United States, as it does abroad as a result, you’ve seen the slow degradation of the US merchant Marine and all sorts of other distortions. And, by the way, an industry that is far better at lobbying than it is at making ships, because they have a…
Honestly, it’s a really impressive lobbying machine to maintain that protection. And so, that’s the sad, but true story of a lot of industrial policy that it just doesn’t work very well in the face of these broader challenges. With that in mind, there are things that do tend to work pretty well. Nothing’s perfect, but we know that whether it’s streamline tax and regulation policy or high skill immigration, or just immigration generally, there are things that do tend to help, but it’s just not, like you said, it’s not an easy solution as opposed to just saying, “I’m going to save all your jobs.”
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. It requires patience. It requires a certain amount of prudence and the ability to see things in the long term and-
Scott Lincicome: Yeah. And an optimism too. One of the things I like about being on the free market side of things is there’s an inherent optimism in supporting free markets. The idea is that, I actually do think that the US economy for all its worth is a prosperity machine and has been one for a century plus. And I think that individuals can, if given the opportunity can better themselves and can make it. However, you want to describe it. It’s nice to be on that side because quite frankly, the industrial policy side is really quite pessimistic.
Workers can’t make it, industries can’t survive, innovation can’t exist without massive subsidies or protection or whatever. And that the best thing that we can do for these communities is to just let them stay etherized or frozen in Amber in a certain period of time that has long since passed instead of giving them a kick in the butt and getting them along the way.
Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Scott, maybe we’ll end there. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss what is industrial policy and what it would look like if it were implemented. Appreciate your time.
Scott Lincicome: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk today, I'm talking with Allen Guelzo about his new book, Robert E. Lee: A Life. Allen Guelzo is one of our great American historians of the Civil War, of Abraham Lincoln, of slavery, of reconstruction. It's an honor for him to join us today. I mentioned the subjects he's published on. He's published numerous books in those areas, also books that are award-winning, including Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list, won the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Roundtable, and the Richard Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable. Recently published a book, Redeeming the Great Emancipator with Harvard University Press, and Reconstruction: A Concise History with Oxford University Press. Allen, we're glad to have you on the program and we're thankful also for the contributions you've made to Law & Liberty over the years.
Allen Guelzo (01:20):
Richard, thank you for the invitation. I'm glad to be here, glad to be able to speak to the Law & Liberty audience, and especially be able to talk about this new book on what is really something, I guess, of an unusual subject for me to be handling.
Richard Reinsch (01:34):
Yeah, and I mentioned to our audience, I couldn't go through all of your publication achievements, because there's so many, but as I said, they include Lincoln. They include slavery, the Civil War, and you are not shy about the side that you take. And I think about you, Allen, I think about not only your historical work, but I think of you as a man firmly dedicated to natural rights, to the Declaration of Independence, and firmly to the American Constitutional Project. And so that leads me to ask you this question. What got you interested in writing about Robert E. Lee?
Allen Guelzo (02:13):
It might have been a certain perverseness or at least the perverseness of curiosity. I have spent a lot of time writing about the Civil War. I spent a lot of time writing about Abraham Lincoln, in particular. And you might say that in 2013, after I'd finished work on the Gettysburg book, the question that came to my mind was, what next, and the thought that came in accompaniment with that was, what would it be like to look at this Civil War from the other end of the telescope? Now, I'm a Yankee from Yankee land, no question about it. And I was always raised at my grandmother's knee with a sense of the righteousness of the Union cause. She had been a school girl in Philadelphia at the turn of the last century. And at that time there were still old union veterans who would make a point of coming to her school, the George Clymer School on what they then called Decoration day. We call it Memorial Day. And they would come and they would talk about the real meaning of the war and the real meaning of the war was not what those horrible, treasonous Johnny Rebs were telling people way down below the Mason Dixon line. So she imbibed early on the Union cause, and I learned that from her and that for me was the default position.
So that it was always a curiosity for me growing up to find people who would display the Confederate flag. What are you doing that for? That sets the flag of the enemies of the country. And people who glorified Robert E. Lee, I'd go, wait a minute, the man committed treason. So I thought in 2013 and into 2014, what would it be like if I was on the other end of the telescope, what would the Civil War look like? And in particular, I was intrigued by a question I just sort of barely alluded to. And that is, how do you write the biography of someone who commits treason? That's an interesting point of view because it's easy to write biography of people you can admire. If not entirely without any qualification, I don't think you can do that for anyone. But certainly, to write about people whose basic achievements are things that we admire today and take strength and take consolation from, Robert E. Lee is different because he did commit treason and I don't use the word lightly either.
Some people throw that around as a negative term that they would hang on someone like said, you are ugly. Treason has a very specific meaning for me. My father was a career army officer. He took the oath that all army officers take. My son is, United States Army and he took the oath. I took the oath when I became a member of the National Council of the Humanities when I was appointed there by President Bush in 2006, and I take that seriously. It was an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And Lee fought against that oath. He turned his back on an oath he had sworn and he raised his hand against the flag and the Constitution that I and my family had taken an oath to defend. So when I looked at the man, my most general sense was, I am looking at a face of a man who committed treason. How do you write the biography of someone like that? That's a challenge. And the challenge, well, the challenge appealed to me, I guess in the same way that Mount Everest appealed to Mallory. When people ask him, why do you want to climb Mount Everest? And you know, he responded "because it's there." So to Robert E. Lee I went, and what we have now is the result of seven years worth of work on Robert E Lee.
Richard Reinsch (06:19):
Trying to think about the treason point, trying to walk in Lee's shoes and think about the world as he did as best we can do that, just for even trying to do that on this treason point. And you can probably reproduce the quote word for word. It's something like "I'm a citizen of America, but I'm a citizen of Virginia first." Why didn't he think he was committing treason?
Allen Guelzo (06:45):
He wouldn't even talk in terms quite that specific. When he makes his decision in April of 1861, it's really a series of decisions. It's a decision first to turn down an offer that comes to him from Abraham Lincoln through an intermediary, the old Washington political hands, Francis Preston Blair. And Blair and Lee meet at the home of Blair's son, Montgomery, on Pennsylvania Avenue. That's Blair House, literally, that's where they met. And there, Lee declines the offer that is made to him to take command of any federal forces that are going to be used to suppress the Southern rebellion. He then goes and resigns his commission in the United States Army. He was at that moment, colonel of the First United States Cavalry, resigns that commission, then he goes back home to Arlington and he makes a third decision. And that is to leave for Richmond and to accept an invitation from the governor of Virginia to take charge of Virginia's state forces. That's really three decisions that happen in sequence, but they are decisions that take him, each one of them, a step further and further away from his original allegiance. And the one thing which runs as a common thread through all of those decisions is this insistence, I cannot, I cannot draw my sword against my native state. Now, people have interpreted that as saying, well, this is because in Lee's day, people understood their citizenship in their states to be on an equal plane with, or maybe even superior to that of their citizenship in the nation. I think that's questionable. I think that's questionable in 1861.
So what exactly is he referring to when he says I can't draw my sword against my native state? I think what he is really talking about is this vast network of kin. And I think he's also talking about protecting the property that he was charged with passing on to his children, and especially the property that today we identify as Arlington.
Richard Reinsch (08:42):
Yeah.
Allen Guelzo (08:43):
Yes, there was some constitutional uncertainty that's not actually clarified finally and utterly until the 14th amendment, but I don't think there's a whole lot in the way of Lee's decision making that was bound up with technicalities like that. I think for him, when he says he can't draw his sword against Virginia, what he's really talking about is the vast network of his kin folk and his family.
Richard Reinsch (09:07):
Okay.
Allen Guelzo (09:08):
Because many of the members of that family are people who came to the rescue of Robert E. Lee and his siblings and his mother when they were pretty well left on their own in Alexandria before Lee went off to West Point and he was thinking about the debts and the obligations he owed to this vast network of kin. And that was an important consideration for him.
Richard Reinsch (09:32):
So as I listen to you and I want to talk about that Lee in Virginia too, because that is new to me, this difficult childhood he had and being abandoned by his father, his father being "Light-Horse" Harry Lee, a famous man.
Allen Guelzo (09:47):
Oh yes.
Richard Reinsch (09:49):
And so one question, and maybe you've answered that. Lee is a political thinker. You don't at all think perhaps what was in the air was the compact theory of union, of Calhoun, other Southern thinkers that had become certainly part of the discourse, that somehow that legitimated what he did. To me, I listen to you and I think, well, this is home and men just don't turn against their home.
Allen Guelzo (10:18):
For Lee, the notion of the union as being a compact theory was nonsense. And he said as much in letters that he wrote during the secession crisis. For Lee, the United States as a nation had the primary authority. And he dismissed argument in favor of secession as being nothing but revolution. And we might say, well, what's the difference between secession and revolution? Actually, there's a big difference. secession is, technically speaking, a peaceable process of separation. It involves legal and constitutional niceties, but it's the kind of things that happen when two particular groups of people within a single nation state decide that they really, for a variety of reasons, want to go their separate ways. And you had secessions like this take place within Lee's lifetime.
For instance, Belgium is a secession from the Netherlands. And then later on after the of the 20th century, Norway. Norway as an independent nation is a secession from what had been the dual kingdom of Norway and Sweden. That's a secession, but a revolution is different. A revolution is when you cut the ties, you create discontinuity, you do what we did in our American Revolution. That's why we call it the American Revolution or revolution.
We didn't secede from the British empire, we had a revolution because we not only cut our ties to Great Britain, we actually got rid of the entire notion of monarchy, hierarchy, British law, everything that connected us in any real way to the British past. All of those things were thrown overboard and we created an entirely new nation, a Republic, based on entirely different principles than the British empire had been built upon. That's a revolution.
Lee looked at what Southerners were trying to do, and he was scornful when they tried to use the term, secession. He says, this is not a secession. This is a revolution. And if you take him on those terms, then you scratch your head and you wonder, well, if he understood what all this argument about secession and compact theory and so on like that was just a massive donkey's kidneys, then you wonder why did he do what he did. And I think the answer is bound up with questions about family and questions about family property. After all, Lee, although Lee is born in Virginia in 1807 at Stratford Hall on the Northern Neck, he actually does not live most of his life in Virginia.
When his mother decides that they're going to pick up from Stratford and move to Alexandria when Lee is less than 10 years old, Alexandria was not part of Virginia then. Alexandria was then part of the District of Columbia. Alexandria and that part of Virginia on the Potomac shore is not retro-ceded to Virginia until the 1830s when Lee is long gone. So Lee grows up in the District of Columbia, not Virginia. Then he goes to school at West Point in New York. His first assignment as a graduate of West Point is to Georgia. He works on saving the waterfront at St. Louis in Missouri. He has a brief assignment at Fortress Monroe that does take him back to Virginia, but then he is assigned to Fort Hamilton in New York. He serves a spell as Superintendent of West Point, again, New York. And he's assigned to coastal fortification construction in Baltimore Harbor. Look, you take all that together, the man actually spent more consistent time living in the state of New York than he did in the state of Virginia.
So what exactly is he referring to when he says I can't draw my sword against my native state? I think what he is really talking about is this vast network of kin. And I think he's also talking about protecting the property that he was charged with passing on to his children, and especially the property that today we identify as Arlington. We think of it as Arlington National Cemetery, but before it became a national cemetery, Arlington was the estate of Lee's father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And Lee felt a particular responsibility as the executor of Custis's will to make sure that that property got passed on appropriately to Lee's own children. When Lee talks about his native state, I think he's very largely talking about protecting family and protecting family property more than anything else.
Richard Reinsch (15:02):
It's almost like a deep, very deep Burkean sense of social responsibility, family responsibility.
Allen Guelzo (15:10):
Yes, but it's also connected because I don't think he would've, if we had quoted Edmund Burke to him, I don't think he would've even necessarily recognize who we were quoting. I think what it really goes back to is the experience of his own father. Light-Horse Harry Lee was a great hero of the American Revolution. He had come into the Revolution as a young man, fresh out of college. He shows a remarkable talent right away for command of horse soldiers. And he becomes part of that circle of young men whom Washington virtually adopts as his surrogate sons, people like Alexander Hamilton, people like John Lawrence, people like Marquis de Lafayette. And Light-Horse Harry, he acquired that big name from his talent at command of cavalry. He becomes part of that circle and he's very successful during the Revolution.
The problem is that after the Revolution, that was when the success dried up. Like many veterans of the Continental Army, he looked to make a fortune in investing in Western land, lands of the upper end of the Potomac River, lands in Western Virginia, which they hoped would be developed with a view towards establishing a water connection between the Potomac estuary and the Ohio River. And beyond that, of course, the Mississippi. That never ever practically panned out. And Light-Horse Harry Lee lost money, hand over fist.
He married his cousin, Matilda Lee, that made him the master of Stratford Hall, but he burned through her cash. When she died, he remarried, this time to her Virginia Carter and he burned through her cash too, so much so that he ends up in debtor prison. And not only does he make one catastrophic economic decision after another, he makes catastrophic political decisions. In Jeffersonian Virginia, he identifies as a Federalist and in the early months of the War of 1812 finds himself mobbed by a pro-war of 1812 mob in Baltimore and is beaten within an inch of his life. And after that, he decides it's time to go someplace else. So he decamps for the West Indies. And although he makes a brief effort to return to the United States, he makes landfall on Cumberland Islands on the Georgia coast, he's dying of cancer and he dies two weeks after making that landfall, never makes it back to Virginia, never sees his son Robert again. Robert, the last time Robert saw his father, he was six years old.
Richard Reinsch (18:03):
Wow.
Allen Guelzo (18:04):
And that meant that effectively Robert grew up fatherless and the trauma that inflects on children who are standing somewhere shy of the door of adolescence, that is one of the severest of all human hurts. And I think Lee carries that with him all his life. He carries with him the embarrassments of his father's actions and his father's shortcomings. And he carries with him the pain of his father's desertion for a good 40 years of Robert E Lee's life. He's always being introduced to people as the son of Light-Horse Harry Lee, yet Lee himself, only one time in all of his voluminous personal correspondence, and this is a man who's a compulsive letter writer, he writes something like six to 8,000 letters in his lifetime. In only one letter, does he ever refer to his father, and that's his application letter to West Point when he really needed to be able to cite the old man's authority. Apart from that, no reference to his father. In fact, he does not even visit his father's grave in Georgia until December of 1861 when he's finally coming into his own as the great General Lee.
So at the outbreak of the Civil War, people would've scratched their heads a bit and said, why should Robert E. Lee be given major command of anything? And I think the reason lies in the fact that Winfield Scott thought so highly of him, praised him so highly, pushed him forward first to Lincoln's attention. But the other person who was interested in him was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, because Davis had been the Secretary of War during the years when Lee was the superintendent at West Point. Davis was very impressed with Lee.
Richard Reinsch (19:32):
Yeah.
Allen Guelzo (19:33):
That is a remarkable omission. And I think it says a lot about how Robert E. Lee felt, that he was responsible for redeeming the losses inflicted by his father and I think that governs a great many of the decisions that he in life.
Richard Reinsch (19:52):
Now, Lee at West Point is a success as a cadet, as a student.
Allen Guelzo (19:57):
Oh, absolutely
Richard Reinsch (19:58):
Remarkable success. You are right, he's able to join what was considered the very prestigious civil engineering corps in the United States Army because of that great success at West Point. And he's in the military at that point. And what I thought was interesting is, civil engineering wouldn't exactly be battlefield command. I mean, he's like building fortifications and diverting water, things like that. How does he go from civil engineering to great battlefield commander? And maybe that's a sub-question, was he a great battlefield commander?
Allen Guelzo (20:33):
It doesn't happen naturally, let's put it that way. Robert E. Lee has this wonderful record at West Point, he graduates second in the class of 1829. And by the way, whoever remembers who graduated first? I'll tell you, it is a man named Charles Mason, who later became a judge out in Iowa. Robert E. Lee graduates second. That's good enough to get him a commission in the Corp of Engineers, which is the elite technocracy, shall we say, of the United States Army in those days.
But the Corps of Engineers was devoted entirely to constructing things, constructing roads, helping to build canals and especially constructing fortifications, which, in the American context, really falls under the category of what we call coastal engineering. That's the way he spends most of his Army career. And the only exception to that is the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848.
When the Mexican War breaks out, he is assigned as an engineering officer to general John Wool in Texas. From there, he's moved over to serve on the staff of Winfield Scott. Winfield Scott is launching one of the most ambitious expeditions of the 19th century. He lands at Vera Cruz on the Mexican coast, captures Vera Cruz and then marches inland to the capture of Mexico City. Scott had a sharp eye for military talent and that eye comes to rest on Robert E. Lee. He makes Lee into more than just an engineering officer. He makes Lee into almost his chief aide. It's Lee who does the reconnaissance for him. It's Lee who carries the messages and the orders. And Scott would say in years later that all the laurels he won in the Mexican War were really due to Robert E. Lee. But that's really the first time the man has any connection with active combat operations of the Army, and even then he's not commanding them. And when the Mexican War is over, he goes back to constructing fortifications, first in Baltimore, and then he takes charge of West Point.
After his superintendency at West Point, he's had really enough of the lack of promotion that you sustain in the Corps of Engineers and he accepts a transfer into the Second Cavalry, which takes him off to Texas. But even there, even what he is really doing is, is kind of frontier policing duties. It's sort of the Texan equivalent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And even then, he never fires a shot in anger. The very first time in Robert E. Lee's life that he ever commands soldiers in action under fire is in 1859 when he is called upon to take charge of suppressing John Brown's Insurrection at Harper's Ferry, which he does very successfully, very neatly, very cleanly, very responsibly, but it takes until 1859. He's been in the army for 30 years before he's ever really in charge of people who are initiating combat operation. And even then, it only involves two companies of US Marines.
So at the outbreak of the Civil War, people would've scratched their heads a bit and said, why should Robert E. Lee be given major command of anything? And I think the reason lies in the fact that Winfield Scott thought so highly of him, praised him so highly, pushed him forward first to Lincoln's attention. But the other person who was interested in him was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, because Davis had been the Secretary of War during the years when Lee was the superintendent at West Point. Davis was very impressed with Lee. Almost everybody who met Lee was impressed by the man, but Davis, in particular. And so Davis undertakes to have Lee put in charge of major aspects of the Confederate War effort in 1861. So there we find ourselves by this very crooked path with General Robert E. Lee, a man who, as far as 1861 goes, his sole combat experience was dealing with John Brown at Harper's Ferry. It's a very unpredictable, and I think the word really is, surprising development.
Richard Reinsch (25:03):
So you and I were talking offline about Lee, the legend. And you mentioned just now everyone that, virtually everyone, that meets him is impressed with him. So maybe let's just talk about that. Is the legend real or what were his personal qualities that so esteemed him in people's eyes?
Allen Guelzo (25:24):
Well, the legend is, it's as real as legends can be real because nearly everybody who laid eyes on Robert E. Lee was tremendously impressed by the man's bearing, by his dignity. And yet at the same time, as people are impressed by their dignity, there's also a certain coldness, a certain off-puttingness about Robert E. Lee.
On the road to Appomattox, he's ready to come to the point where he is going to surrender his army. He says to one of his, in fact, he says to more than one of his aides, this is how I knew it was always going to end. I knew it was going to happen like this. Why, because southerners just weren't up to the task. So he's willing, even at the end of the war, to point the finger at the behavior of his army, at the behavior of the Confederate people, themselves. They, in a sense you might say, they failed him. There's the perfectionist at work.
The famous South Carolina diarist, Mary Chestnut. Her husband was a Confederate senator. She kept one of the great diaries of the Civil War era. She met Robert Lee just before the outbreak of the war at the White Sulfur Springs in Western Virginia, because that was where Lee took his wife, Mary, because Mary Lee at that point was plagued by rheumatoid arthritis. And so they went to benefit from the hot springs there. Mary Chestnut writes in her diary that a man riding a beautiful horse joined us with a hat that somehow had a military look to it. And she said, he sat his horse so gracefully. He was so distinguished in all points. She regretted not actually getting his name. So she went around and asking afterwards, who was he? And the answer came back, Robert E. Lee. Chestnut marveled everything about him. She said, what's so fine, and the word that came to her mind was, perfection. You couldn't find a fault in the man if you hunted for one. And yet even Mary Chestnut, when she says that is not really enchanted by him. She said that she actually liked his older brother, Sidney Smith Lee better because Smith Lee was so affable and so friendly. One of these hail-fellow-well-met types. Chestnut wrote, I know Smith Lee well. And then she added, can anybody really say they know his brother? I doubt it because Robert Lee, she said, looks so cold and quiet and grand.
A cadet at West Point when Lee was the superintendent there wrote to his mother and described Lee as the marble model. And even Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, they're there in the McClain Parlor conducting surrender negotiations, and Grant, in his memoirs writes about how small he felt compared to Robert Lee who was sitting there dressed in this beautiful uniform, everything perfect. And here it was Grant and this muddy old uniform and his muddy boots. And it was almost the case where you had this sense, that Grant felt almost in the edge of apologizing for how he looked. Lee impressed people over and over again with that demeanor of the perfect man. But you see it was a perfection that arises out of this deep need for redemption. He is going to redeem the reputation of the Lee family destroyed by his father, and not only by his father, but by an older half brother who committed even worse offense and became known as Black-Horse Harry Lee.
Richard Reinsch (28:48):
Yeah.
Allen Guelzo (28:48):
But Robert Lee is going to redeem the Lee reputation. And I think that that determination, that passion to redeem is what drives the perfection of his behavior. He's going to show that he is not Light-Horse Harry.
Richard Reinsch (29:05):
So if we think about that, what are his faults? What leads him astray?
Allen Guelzo (29:12):
The perfection leads him to demand of people things that ordinary human beings are not really capable of doing. He's very demanding of his army. His adjutant, Walter Taylor, wrote in letters that Taylor sent to his fiancee during the war, General Lee is so unappreciative. I work for him and I do this for him. I do that for him. And there's never a word of thanks. Now, this didn't mean that Taylor didn't admire Lee, but he had to admire Lee from distance. Lee demanded much from himself and he demanded much from others. And so those who didn't live up to his expectations, he could be very, very hard on them.
He once erupted at another aide who had permitted someone to come in to his tent and argue with Lee. Lee came out afterwards and he upbraided his staffer. Why did you let that man come in and make me lose my temper? And he's particularly hard on other subordinates. At the end of the Battle of Chancellorsville, he really expected that his brigade commanders were going to close in and push the Army of the Potomac right up against the Rappahannock River and destroy it. And they don't, they allow Joe Hooker and the Army of the Potomac to escape across the fords of the Rappahannock River. And Lee goes on the tirade denouncing, well, he fixes on General Dorsey Pender, and he said, General Pender, how could you let those people get away? That is what you young men always do. I can never get my orders carried out.
After the battle of Antietam, he writes a letter to his two principal subordinates, James Longstreet and the famous Stonewall Jackson upbraiding them for the lack of discipline in the Confederate Army. And he lays out in this severe, scorching letter, how the Army has to completely restructure how its officers behave. We have to have an end to this. We have to have punishment. There has to be enforcement. We need brigade guards to force stragglers to rejoin their unit. It goes on and on and on. And I have this picture of Longstreet and Jackson reading this letter and looking at each other, rolling their eyes and saying, what is the old man want from us?
Richard Reinsch (31:43):
This is the Battle of Antietam, one of the worst battles in the war. It's incredible.
Allen Guelzo (31:48):
Yeah. This is after Antietam. Yeah. So he's extremely demanding of people. And probably the people he's the most demanding of are the Confederate politicians. He goes all through the war doing nothing to complain about how ineffective of the Confederate politicians are. He complains to his son, he complains about the Confederate Congress. He says, all they do is chew peanuts and spit tobacco. They take no action of any worth or any reckoning themselves. And even on the road to Appomattox, he's ready to come to the point where he is going to surrender his army. He says to one of his, in fact, he says to more than one of his aides, this is how I knew it was always going to end. I knew it was going to happen like this. Why, because southerners just weren't up to the task. So he's willing, even at the end of the war, to point the finger at the behavior of his army, at the behavior of the Confederate people, themselves. They, in a sense you might say, they failed him. There's the perfectionist at work.
Richard Reinsch (32:56):
That's incredible. Another question that comes to mind, which I'm sure our readers would, would love to hear more about. Robert Lee and slavery. How does he approach?
Allen Guelzo (33:06):
Oh yes.
Richard Reinsch (33:07):
How does he approach this?
Allen Guelzo (33:08):
The best image I can sum up for people in explaining this is a zigzag. On the one hand, Robert E. Lee never was personally closely wrapped up in the institution of slavery. He inherited one slave family from his mother's estate, but emancipated them in December of 1862. So on the one hand, you might say, well, he's only tangentially connected to slavery. Yeah, but he marries Mary Anna Randolph Custis. And by marrying into the Custis's, he is marrying a family that not only owns Arlington, but owns 190 slaves. That means even though Robert E. Lee doesn't own slaves in his own name, he still benefits from most of his life through the labor and the services that those slaves provide to his wife and to his children. So yes, he is involved in the slave system.
At the same time, the Custis' had a very dicey connection to slavery. Both of them, both old George Washington Parke Custis and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis were great supporters of colonization talk. I mean, Custis himself talks about slavery as a vulture, which is devouring the innards of the south. And in his will, he actually provides, mandates the emancipation of the Custis slaves within five years of his death. And Robert E. Lee is the executor of that estate, and Robert E. Lee is charged with that. And Lee, in fact, does go ahead after the period of five years to emancipate the Custis slaves, according to the will. He does that in December of 1862, and when you think about it in December of 1862, if Robert E. Lee had gone into any Confederate court in Virginia and said, oh, look, we're not going to go through with this. We're not going to emancipate slaves. Well, the Confederacy is fighting to keep people in slavery. Why should we emancipate slaves? If Lee had gone into a court and done that, I have a hard time imagining a Confederate judge objecting. Nevertheless, Lee insists. He signs up his son, Custis, in Richmond to make sure all the papers are done right. He ignores people who are suggesting that he should wait until the end of the war. He marches ahead to that emancipation. And as I say, also emancipates the one slave family he owns in his own name.
There were many things about Lee that I learned that I had not taken account of earlier. I had not fully understood the impact of his father's departure and the trauma that, that inflected on him. I had not fully understood the yearning that Robert E. Lee had for independence. He wanted to be able to stand on his own two feet. He knew what it was like to be dependent, and he disliked it intensely.
Beyond that, he is hectoring Jefferson Davis during the war, telling Davis that slavery is a millstone around the Confederacy's neck, that the Confederacy has to move to emancipation. And then finally in the spring of 1865, the early spring, he is the most vocal of Confederate leaders advocating the recruitment of blacks for the Confederate Army, with emancipation as a reward for themselves and for their family for service in the Confederate armies. That catches him a lot of criticism. When he goes public with that, the Charleston Mercury simply goes berserk with rage. It denounces ... this is a Confederate newspaper. They denounce Robert E. Lee as a sell-out, as just another old time Federalist, who was never with us from the start. And you know, there's one interesting footnote to this too.
During the war, of course, Arlington ends up being occupied by the Union forces. And that meant that the Custis slaves, many of the Custis slaves at Arlington just simply drifted away, across the river into the District of Columbia. And when they were there, a number of them were emancipated under the District of Columbia emancipation bill of April 1862. One of them was interviewed in the process by the emancipation officers and it turned out it was Philip Meredith who had served as Lee's valet. Well, this caused quite a ruffle of interest because here was General Lee's valet, and he's applying for emancipation in the District, so they interview him. And he says, well, you know, General Lee never liked slavery. General Lee always told me that he wished that I could be free and that there would be no slaves. And yet here's the zigzag. Richard, here's the zigzag. Lee will say things like that. He'll even write in a letter to his wife, slavery is a moral and political evil in any country, yet he will never actually do anything about it himself. He will emancipate the Custis slaves, but that's because he's the executor of the estate. He could have done it right away instead of waiting five years, but he doesn't. He knows that slavery is wrong. He says that slavery is wrong. And yet he looks at that and then he looks away.
Richard Reinsch (38:17):
Well, that sounds like Thomas Jefferson.
Allen Guelzo (38:19):
Yeah. Well, in that respect, yes, he is like Jefferson. He does not have the profundity of a Thomas Jefferson. He doesn't reflect on the inconsistency of what he's doing the way that Jefferson did when Jefferson talked about having a wolf by the ears.
Richard Reinsch (38:35):
Yeah.
Allen Guelzo (38:36):
Lee looks at slavery and then he looks away. And if there is a tragedy in the personal character of Robert E. Lee, it is that defect that he could look at what was wrong, know what was wrong, know that it was a violation of natural right and natural law, and nevertheless, look away from it and do nothing.
Richard Reinsch (38:59):
Yeah. I hear you. That also sounds like human nature to me.
Allen Guelzo (39:03):
Yes, it does.
Richard Reinsch (39:06):
It sounds like the way of the world.
Allen Guelzo (39:06):
It is very much the defect of human nature. Of course, we have the privilege 150 odd years later of being able to sit in judgment on that and saying, well, he should have known better. He should have done this. He should have done that.
Richard Reinsch (39:18):
Yeah.
Allen Guelzo (39:19):
Well, yes, he should have. And as a historian, it's my job to make judgements like that. And I do make that judgment about Robert E. Lee. On the other hand, I hope that in making that judgment about Robert E. Lee, I cause myself and all the rest of us to reflect on kinds of inconsistencies that we perform ourselves on an everyday basis so that when we find ourselves pointing the finger at Robert E. Lee, we recognize that we also ourselves stand under that kind of judgment. That's what brings me to a kind of Lincolnian view of the entire landscape of writing about Robert E. Lee.
Richard Reinsch (39:59):
And I wonder maybe that's sort of an answer to my next question. In the course of this project. And, of course, we set forward at the beginning, the history that you've done, Lincoln, slavery, reconstruction, Civil War. In the course of all your research and writing, what did you learn that surprised you? Anything cause you to rethink past convictions, past judgements, or did new thoughts and ideas form in your mind about America?
Allen Guelzo (40:30):
That is a difficult question to answer because every time you plunge into a subject this way, you find yourself dealing with so many aspects and so many details. There were many things about Lee that I learned that I had not taken account of earlier. I had not fully understood the impact of his father's departure and the trauma that, that inflected on him. I had not fully understood the yearning that Robert E. Lee had for independence. He wanted to be able to stand on his own two feet. He knew what it was like to be dependent, and he disliked it intensely. He had had to grow up dependent on the goodwill, and sometimes the handouts, of his Carter relatives and his Fitzhugh relatives and other Lee relatives. And like any person with a modicum of talent and understanding of his own gifts, he accepted that because he had to, but he also learned to resent it and to yearn for independence. And that's a theme that runs through Robert E. Lee all through his life.
The other thing that you learn in working through Lee's material and reading his letters is how much he yearned for security as well. He was not what you would call a poor man. Part of Anne Carter Lee's estate involved lands and money that today we would reckon as being fairly substantial. When he makes out his will, before he goes to the Mexican War, he makes out a will. And in it he has to itemize what his property is. And when you add all of that up, his estate at that point amounted to about $32,000. And so translate that into 2021 dollars and we're talking about something in between one and $2 million. The man was not poor. And yet all through his life, he does nothing but cry a poor mouth. He is one of those people who is perpetually convinced that he's about to go broke, that he's about to go to the poor house. And he puts all kinds of constraints on his wife and on his children this way. He writes a letter, advice for one of his sons through his wife. And he says to Mary, tell him to be just before he is generous, and to be wise before he is liberal. In other words, wise, before he is open handed. Don't give money away to people. He doesn't have the avarice of the get, but he really does have the avarice of the keep. And when you put that beside the fact that he really was fairly well off, that's just such a surprising juxtaposition. He just did not feel secure in that. And he's constantly, through his life in search of security.
And the curious thing is that I think that he finally, in the last five years of his life, he finally takes those three threads, that passion for perfection, that yearning for independence, that searching for security. He finally is able to take those threads and twist them together in a rope that really works for him, that he can really climb. And that's because after the war, he accepts this very strange invitation that comes to him to become the president of Washington College, in the upper Shenandoah Valley.
Now, Washington College was this very small college. It was not much more than a classical Latin and Greek academy for the Scots-Irish gentry of the upper valley. And it was almost wiped out by the war. He accepts the presidency to the surprise of almost everyone. And when he does, when Robert E. Lee takes over Washington College, he takes it over like he took over the army of Northern Virginia. He revamps the curriculum completely. He raises the endowment to a quarter of a million dollars. A lot of it from Northern donors. And he builds the student body up to over 400 students when it started out with just 12. He really makes Washington College into an educational powerhouse and a really, in educational terms, a progressive powerhouse, because he shoves to the margins, the classical education curriculum, and brings in majors in business in journalism, in engineering. I think that finally at Washington College, he's able to draw together all those yearnings for security, for independence, for perfection. He's finally able to call his own shots in life. And not surprisingly, he tells a student at Washington College, this is a real shocker. He tells the student, my greatest mistake in life was taking a military education. That point you think-
Richard Reinsch (45:49):
Wow.
Allen Guelzo (45:49):
Maybe he should have yielded to his older brother Carter's blandishments to go into real estate development, or maybe he should have just retired from the Army years before and lived at Arlington as a country gentleman, or maybe he should have just, at the outbreak of the Civil War, declared neutrality. He could have done all those things. But finally, he gets a measure of resolution in those last five years of his life and I think it's in those last five years as president of Washington College, that he finally gets a quotient of what we can call happiness.
Richard Reinsch (46:27):
Well, perhaps Professor Guelzo, we should end on that. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss your new biography, Robert E. Lee: A Life. Thank you. This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law talk available at lawliberty.org.
This podcast with criminologist Barry Latzer focuses on the surprising findings in his latest book, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. Latzer discusses the violent crime wave that began in the mid 1960’s and how its sharp fall in the mid 90s has recast urban life in America. However, Latzer urges humility in understanding […]
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Well, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with James Hankins about the problems of liberal learning in our current age and all the many facets of that. I'm honored to welcome James Hankins to Liberty Law Talk for the first time. He is a Senior Editor of Law & Liberty. He has contributed a number of essays in the past year on some of the things that we're going to discuss today. He is a Professor of History at Harvard University. He's one of the world's experts on the Italian Renaissance and the humanism of the Italian Renaissance and is the author of the much-lauded, highly-reviewed book Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. James, thank you so much for joining us today.
James Hankins (01:01):
Well, it's pleasure to talk with you.
Richard Reinsch (01:04):
Just thinking about that book, for a minute. That's sort of an interesting question for a lot of Americans, I think, who think about politics. What do you mean, Soulcraft and Statecraft?
James Hankins (01:14):
Well, I'm drawing attention to the fact that, in pre-modern political theory, going back to Plato and Aristotle, thinkers and political actors have attached as much importance to the character and educational levels of the rulers, the ruling class, the elites, as they have to constitutional forms and laws. In the modern world, we seem to try to solve every problem by adding a new regulatory agency or passing some new laws. They were convinced in pre-modern times, in the Renaissance, but also, I think, pretty generally, in the ancient tribune, that you had to have good people running the institution. So, if you had bad people making the laws, bad people enforcing laws, you weren't going to get any respect from the people, to start off with, and things would go bad very soon. In my book, I talk about this as a problem of the 14th Century, which was addressed by the great founder of classical humanism, who is Francesco Petrarch, who most people know as a poet, today. But he actually has a tremendous importance as an educational reformer. So he's the one who invented the whole idea of humanity as a way of training elites so that they would be people of good character and wisdom and education.
Richard Reinsch (02:43):
You've written on toward this idea that Americans can learn a lot from this period, Europe 14th Century Italy, and through general decay, general decay and authority. Could you talk about that for us?
James Hankins (02:57):
I think there are some similarities, and of course, it's very, very different, as it always is. But the similarities are the ones that strike me, mainly the problem with legitimacy, legitimacy of elites in institutions in rather remarkable parallels, such as epidemics which are, of course, 10 times, a thousand times worse in the 14th Century than they are today, like the Black Death. But the real problem that Petrarch saw, and other people to its time saw, as well, that the people who are leading the church and the people who are leading the various states, and the holy Roman Emperor, all these people, were either ineffective at their jobs or people who were corrupt and hard to respect. So the result was that you had a lot of illegitimate power and societies falling apart. Tremendous factualism, which is another analogy of the modern world, the terrible factualism in the republics of the... or the communes, they called them... We call them republics today... that the communes of Renaissance Italy. So there was constant fighting in the streets. Shakespeare did not invent the situation in Romeo and Juliet. He was channeling 14th Century history, when he talked about the Montagues and Capulets fighting in the streets. That was fairly common behavior. So we have the same problems of fascism, fortunately not quite as violent as in the 14th Century. And we have the same problems of illegitimacy, not that our institutions are illegitimate, but that the people who are running the institutions don't respect them. We have a great Constitution. We have some very fine laws that we... and government institutions, but they're constantly being bent out of shape by people who want to exploit them for their own ideological purposes. So Petrarch's idea was what you need. In a way it's like, what you need is people who respect their own institutions and want them to be preserved intact for the next generation, and people who understand that institutions have to be maintained by persons of good character, and they have to have a sense of cooperation with people of different backgrounds and different beliefs.
Richard Reinsch (05:29):
So Petrarch alights on what we would, kind of, look to a policy response or a grand political campaign. Petrarch plays for the long game in trying to rebuild education. And that, sort of... Maybe you could talk about that some. I know you've been talking about it, but also thinking about general condition of humanity's departments today. You said, the sum of your pieces, too, which, I think about, as well, which is, how much worse it can get, say, 20 years from now, as, sort of, even the moderating influences retire and leave the academy.
James Hankins (06:06):
Yeah, I've been thinking about that for a while, what the end game is, here. And one thing I'm about to write for Law & Liberty is a long piece on what I’m calling the exiting tendency, now, to leave union-controlled public schools behind, and go to private education or homeschooling. I've been in touch with some people at the Great Hearts Academy who tell me that the homeschooling population is now over 10% in this country. First of all, that's temporary because of... But it's growing, and the number of schools that are essentially dropping out of woke education is also growing. Catholic parochial schools, there's a lot of people, the good ones anyway, are attracting many more students. The private schools that have some kind of classical education or standard education are also growing dramatically. So I think that this may be an endgame that nobody had suspected to this whole problem of wokery taking over the secondary schools. I'm actually much more worried about K-12 than I am about universities. Universities are very established institutions that change... I think that the woke revolution... I can already see signs that we could be at an end, people have suddenly realized that they're subject to our trends and no one will read their publications if we all decide to give up on traditional education. Professors don't like that. They imagine future generations reading their work. So if you're a Shakespeare scholar and you suddenly figure out that the wokerati don't want to read Shakespeare anymore, then you, kind of, wonder, "Where's my subject going? Where are my graduate students going to go? How're they going to get jobs, and will anyone remember my name in the next generation, if everyone's reading Donna Gephart instead of reading Shakespeare?"
Richard Reinsch (08:15):
I was going to ask you, in your position at Harvard, what have you seen as one of the worst aspects of wokeism, critical race theory at your institution? What do you think is most troubling?
James Hankins (08:29):
Well, most troubling, for me, is the way that the entire institution has signed up to take the name BLM in 2020, without any kind of... I think they just regarded this as [inaudible 00:08:42] a good thing to do, and many people weren't aware of what the BLM organization was about. They felt badly about the George Floyd situation, and this was a way of showing how upset they were. But BLM turned out to be a little... having more commitments than people suspected. So the main thing that's happening how is a lot of pressure to hire people who are supposedly going to help us end racism and prejudice against BIPOC people. Last year, I don't think that the top administration is very sympathetic to this, but they like to blow with the wind a bit. I think they would problem say they would like to yield to the wind and then snap back into place. That's a fairly typical Harvard thing. So the big question that the very few conservative faculty have around here is whether we're going to be Savonarola or we're going to be the witch hunts. The Savonarola, kind of, fanatical preacher of Renaissance Florence basically lasted two and a half years. The witch hunts lasted 50 years. So I don't think we can keep up this level of anger and hatred for very long. But there are a lot of demands. I think the most radicalized element at Harvard is the graduate students who are demanding that people be punished for saying things that they don't like. But we haven't had any really bad cases, such as we've had at other universities, of people being canceled for an incorrect thought. People have been canceled for behavior with women, which I think is more understandable. But the idea... We haven't had many cases of people who have been condemned for their ideas. It's mostly... It's not the Institution that's doing this, at that point. It's the graduate students who are trying to get the Institution to do that.
Richard Reinsch (10:47):
You know, it's something which I think would be, sort of, applicable to Harvard or elite prep schools, sort of, adopting this thought model as well, from what I'm reading and hearing. So they come to school, a fist, sort of, already formed in their minds, I've wondered.
James Hankins (11:01):
Yeah, and it's starting very early. I mean, I have a friend who is... He's got a first-grader, and they already had DEI trainers at his grade school, although I have to say this kid is very amusing. He's a smart little kid, just over six years old, and the DEI trainer tried to get them to identify something they're good at, saying, "Little boys, tell us what you're good at." So, then, the next step would be get the children to acknowledge that their special ability was owing to white privilege. Right?
Richard Reinsch (11:35):
Yeah.
James Hankins (11:37):
My friend's little boy says, "I'm good at DEI." That, kind of, plummets the teacher a lot. But it's really distressing what's going on in these elite schools. So parents who are ambitious for their kids and normally want to have them in the best schools available, are discovering the best schools available are all taken over by this stuff. So, there's a search for schools that are not going to give in to all of the latest fads. And I think what affects a lot of these parents is what they're seeing on the curriculum. I have another colleague who has sent his... Well, he was looking at the most expensive private in Cambridge, Mass. Okay? He wanted to send his kids to the best place, and he decided he was going to check out the curriculum. So he went in to ask the English teachers what they're teaching, and he didn't find a single work from published before the year 2000. They weren't reading any Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, none of that, not reading any of the classical works of Western canon. They're reading books that are going to help them end racism and prejudice against BIPOC people. So, I suppose, if you're a political type, you don't have any love for literature for its own sake. One author is as good as another. So this guy, who is a European, he's actually... He was totally astonished by the lack of education that his child was going to get. So he sent her to another school. But you know, it's a real trouble for parents, who aspire to elite status for their children, whether they're going to subject them to an elite school which doesn't teach them anything or whether they're going to send them to someplace which, maybe, is not so well-known, but will have better, more traditional standards.
Richard Reinsch (13:32):
You wrote an essay, "How to Build Your Own Renaissance," a few months. Help us understand, sort of, the Renaissance humanism education and, you seem to be saying in this, could be served as a model, in some ways an adaptable model, for us today. Could you talk more about that?
James Hankins (13:51):
Well, I understand that I sounded like a historian with a bee in my bonnet. So I studied one period of history too much, and then finding all sorts of patterns that are really not applicable. But I think that the general strategy is the right one, that Petrarch develops, is that you have to have a long-term strategy. Petrarch started out thinking he was going to have a revolution. He latched onto a guy named Cola di Rienzo, who was the subject of an opera by Wagner in the 19th Century, essentially rather a famous person in the 19th Century because he was a popular revolutionary. And Petrarch became his publicist. He was absolutely keen on the idea of not taking out the elite and bringing back the people. And he was hoping that this would turn into a revolution. Unfortunately, it occurred at the same time as Black Death. So, that put a kink in things. But also, Cola di Rienzo turned out be a weak reed. He ended up trying to be a tyrant, even though he's calling for the return of the people. So Petrarch becomes very chastened after the experience and decides that he has to go in for long-term solutions. One of the things he does is to start hanging out with tyrants, all the North-Italian cities have been taken over by tyrannical types in the early 14th Century. The Republics were all disappearing, one by one, and being replaced by tyrants. I guess the second idea is that, "I'm going to go live with these tyrants and try to educate them so that they will be into better people." He does this with three sets of tyrants, and he does make some progress, in a way, because tyrants aren't all bad in the 14th Century. They're not necessarily what we think of as tyrants today. They're just people with illegitimate power. So, then his final solution is that he's going to change education. So that's the real problem, is in the hearts of men, the hearts of men and women too, because the Renaissance Movement is both genders. So he's going to spread a new form of education which he calls Humanities. He's the inventor of the Humanities. It's called the Studia Humanitatisin Latin. And the idea is that you're not only going to be preparing yourself for a professional career. But you're going to study a curriculum that's really going to transform you and make you into a better person, a wiser person, and more of a person of practical wisdom, a person who cares about the whole society, has love for the common good, someone who wants to distinguish yourselves for virtue. That's what he found, and that's what actually becomes the standard education in Italy, by the middle of the 13th Century.
Richard Reinsch (16:44):
So, thinking about the type of character that Petrarch wanted to form with this approach, what type of character does our education system form now, in those who are the elite levels?
James Hankins (16:57):
Well, I'm trying to remember where I read this, but I read an article. Maybe it was Theodore Dalrymple. I'm a big fan of his, who says that the type of virtue that modern education wants is for you to agree with principles, so that virtue is signaled, but it's not acquired. Being elite means holding a particular set of ideas. Right?
Richard Reinsch (17:19):
Mm-hmm.
James Hankins (17:19):
It doesn't mean acquiring character traits. And the result of that is you learn what to think, but not how to think. You end up not developing character because that's not important. What's important is that you agree with a particular set of ideas, which of course, constantly changing, six years ago, no one thought that it was important to affirm transgender people, that, that would become a requirement to be a member of the elite. But now it is. Right?
Richard Reinsch (17:47):
Yeah.
James Hankins (17:48):
So, that sort of thing is what the moderns are after. They're trying to enforce a certain way of thinking. It's very ill-knowledged, basically. That's basically the difference between what the ancients wanted, what the Renaissance humanist wanted. They wanted people to acquire the virtues and encourage prudence, justice, and temperance. They wanted all those virtues, and they thought they were important for political leaders to have those virtues, and they had a whole educational system built around the idea that you should acquire that kind of virtue. As actually, if you read Aristotle, I'm sure you know that there is a couple dozen virtues in Aristotle's ethics. And they're perfectly aware of that. But they want to get the character traits that are necessary for people to acquire moral legitimacy. That's the form of legitimacy we had in the Renaissance because Renaissance period is one where political authority simply lacked legitimacy. They've gotten power in ways that are not legal, where the legal system itself is corrupt, or they... the Renaissance republics, for example, there's a kind of, formal populism, but the oligarchs, who are actually running things from behind the scenes. Somewhat like the modern America. So the idea is that, if you can get those people who are running things to care more about the whole society, not just themselves, and try to understand everyone in a society, and to give them good leadership and good examples, that you'll have much more integration in the society.
Richard Reinsch (19:26):
There's also this example of, it seems to me at least, like the upper level of, say, higher education in America, then where they go professionally, what they do after that. There's this sense of, "We earned this. This is ours by who we are, by what we've achieved, by what we're capable of doing," and it seems to... I think it spawned an enormous amount of ingratitude. Whereas, typically, which I think you wanted the people at the top of your hierarchy to have a sense of ownership of the entire society, and political, social order that they have a responsibility given to them that they have to fulfill. And I don't see that in our current group, so much to the extent they think that way. It's being a part of an NGO or some new cause or something like that. That's how they serve. It's not like the oil barons or the railroad barons, building parks, new schools, seminaries, libraries, things like that. So I felt that, as well, and I think that would be the outcome of the kind of education that they've been brought up in.
James Hankins (20:36):
Well, I wrote about that a bit in a review I did of a book by Adrian Wooldridge, called the... I think it's called... It's about meritocracy and I've forgotten the exact title, but-
Richard Reinsch (20:48):
Yeah, he did that for-
James Hankins (20:49):
... it's about... He is somebody who is dead keen on modern meritocracy. He thinks that's what we need and all we... should have people effortlessly rising from the lowest to the highest place in society. Some obviously get good grades and score well on tests, and their competent and they're able to bring in the goods, and so forth. But for members of corporations and they improve the profits. So, that's not the kind of elites that I think we need today. I think we need more localized elites who are more responsible to the local population. I'm not saying necessarily a face-to-face society, like the Renaissance, but people who more really invest in their local communities. I've been told by people who live in small American cities that, that still survives in America. If you go to New York and Boston, Washington, D.C., everyone's globalized and they've been brought up among other, especially elite, universities and brought up among an international population of people that think globally. Many of them want jobs in NGOs, diplomats, and they're wanting jobs that are not particularly rooted in any one society. But if you go out to smaller cities, you still find people who are trying to use their wealth to serve the community, building parks and all of those things you talk about, museums, and maybe they're not building museums anymore, but they're adding a wing onto the museum here or there. They're supporting arts groups and they are on to do what they can to support good education. So I think it's not really dead in America. It's just that there's a kind of, super elite in America that's very globalized. And it makes perfect sense, when you think about it, if you're a global elite, that you would want to have open borders, because all those people are... If you are a global leader, then the entire population of the world is... You're responsible for. So you don't want to see any borders between your nation's state and the next nation's state. They're all you know, the non-elites that you are presumably managing. One thing that would really help improve the moral quality in elites is for people that tend to be more localized and more deeply involved with communities more involved in civil society so that there is some kind of integration in the community between elites and non-elites. That's what we're lacking right now.
Richard Reinsch (23:19):
That, yes, sort of a more connected tissue.
James Hankins (23:22):
Well, it's not only that, but it's also the question of culture. Right?
Richard Reinsch (23:25):
Yeah.
James Hankins (23:26):
Because the global elites have a completely different culture, completely different moral standards and, with the advent of wokery, and DEI, that difference has really become stark, to the extent that those elites are in control of public schools. It creates a real problem for parents because they have parents who are traditional somewheres rather than everywheres, parents who have traditional values. They're Christians, or they're Muslims, or they just want their kids to be brought up the way remember they were brought up in high schools, 25 years ago. They want them to have a good education. When they're confronted with this elite that wants to basically brainwash and I hate to use that term because it's very loaded, but they want people to think a way that's quite different from the way their parents think. And that's very divisive.
Richard Reinsch (24:18):
As we've seen play out across the country, in the past couple of years.
James Hankins (24:24):
But I think it's also... If you'd let me just say this because it popped into my head, and I'm always... And I'll forget what I just thought up. But I think that it's actually an opportunity, now that we can try to expand non-unionized schooling, public charters, and all of these private academies that are coming into existence. There's a whole bunch of new school opportunities, these so-called hybrid education, classical schools, private academies. There's a break-off group in the Catholic Church who's trying to establish classical liberal education. Many Catholic schools are-
Richard Reinsch (25:10):
The state model.
James Hankins (25:12):
... Yeah, they're trying to approximate the secular schools. So there's a movement, now, to reform education, which I think is given a lot of impetus by the COVID year, and by BLM demonstrations.
Richard Reinsch (25:28):
Do you see humanities in higher education? I've got a friend of mine who's taught in political theory for 30 years. He thinks humanities are finished in America, and the current model in higher education. Do you see it that way, or is that too extreme?
James Hankins (25:48):
The universities humanities are a little different from K-12 humanities, in that there's more intention on professionalism and less on character formation and acquiring cultural literacy, and that sort of thing. One thing that's, perhaps, unique to university education is you need to be able to measure someone's achievement as a humanist. So that's typically publications, but the type of publications that's going to be valued are ones whose impact is easy to measure. For a long time, when the humanities originally lost steam, in other words, they lost their reforming purpose, it was already in the late 15th Century, one of the things that happened was that people started to be valued for their philology, for their scholarship more than for the moral character they were trying to communicate to the schools. When we see that a bit, the kind of professionalization of the humanities, means that we're less concerned with what's going on in the heads of students, and we're more concerned with our professional community thinks is good and, in value, is able to... You know, if you can do a critical edition, that's something. A critical edition, wonderful that is, and I've done... My entire life... I've spent my entire life in critical editions. It's making anybody any better, except in some very remote sense. The real problem with humanities is it got invaded in, as early as, the '70s and '80s, by theory mavens. And it began to be the fad to try to apply French theory Foucault, and so forth, to and Derrida, to the study of humanities. And I think, recently, people have realized that was not a good move from the point of the enrollments... very small number of people who want to wear the beret... I call it wearing the beret, like wearing French theory beret, at Harvard. But most of the people, they want... There's still a large body of people out there who just want to read these great authors. They've not being served very well by humanities programs. Belatedly, we have realized, here at Harvard, that there is this large population of people who want to read the authors, what the authors have to say. Then, all of this theoretical manipulation with authors, and authors who are being essentially silenced, or negated, by the way that they're read. You haven't seen the hits... You've not seen the hits or followed any of her work. She has a very interesting distinction between primary and secondary reading. So primary reading is where you read the author in the way the author wanted to be read. So if the author wants to entrance you or to inspire you or to send a message to you or just to have you enjoy the beauty of his or her language, then that's primary reading, receiving what the author wanted you to receive. But then there's secondary reading, where you try to show that the author's writings demonstrate some private theory of your own, or some theory that's popular in the academy, which is great for getting professional status, because everyone says, "Oh, this person knows the latest theories. He's able to apply the latest theories to these texts." But, from the student point of view, it's not so popular. There're some students, of course, who play along and think this is great, but I think the majority of the students have voted with their feet and they're doing something else. Our department... I'm the History Department, and I'm the Literature Department, but we have lost enrollments dramatically in the last 10 years. And it's partly what we're teaching. It's also, I'd say... This was explained to by my brother-in-law, who is a former high school principal, that what happened in the [1990s] and the noughties, is that history was basically cut out of all the testing regimes that came in, in the wake of No Child Left Behind and National Standards. They basically weren't interested in adding history to the National Standards. And, of course, SATs don't test it. Only if you take an AP History are you going to have any of that knowledge tested. So, lot of students simply never got the chance to be interested in history because, if you're a high school, teaching to a test, and there's no test in history, you don't teach history. So that's one reason why we're losing historians. But I take your point that the other reason is that the professors are far too taken up with their own status hierarchies, and not... Maybe it mirrors, in a way, the way elites act, in general, that they're taken up with their own status hierarchies, not paying enough attention to the needs of the students.
Richard Reinsch (30:55):
Yeah. I think that's right, in a certain sense. Want to switch gears and just think about politics, for a minute. We talked about this at the beginning. So your book, Virtue Politics, one of your contentions that, through the modern political project, that a firm constitution, with institutions, could constrain people and induce them to act in socially cooperative productive ways, and we wouldn't need to think about character or virtue as much, because the rules would just keep things going. I take it you challenge that, and virtue politics, in a basic way. And also, it seems to have resonance in thinking about a lot of things today, what we've been discussing.
James Hankins (31:38):
Yes. I want to specify that I think that you need both good institutions and good character, but they work together. The humanist tended to believe that... They follow Socrates, the ancient or Greek rhetorician, who thinks that institutions don't matter as long as you have good character. It doesn't matter whether it's a tyranny or a oligarchy or a democracy, it's all going to work fine, as long as you have good character. I don't believe that. Many humanists did. But there were also humanists who understood that institutions are terribly important, but you have to have both. And what happens historically is that this great interest in recruiting the character of rulers, which comes out of Petrarch and dominates the 15th Century and well into the 16th Century, it runs around. And it's partly because of the religious controversies of the period, when there's a great interest in making people prove their doctrinal orthodoxy in order to be members of society.
But one thing that comes out of the Reformation is the great distrust of laws, and Reformation's the first great superfactionalized period of European history and goes well beyond Central Europe or into a totalitarian town, all of Europe and European colonies, were ridden by the struggle between the Protestants and Catholics, and Catholics and Lutherans. So, one result of that is distrust of rulers. We see this today. The more factionalism there is, the more hatred of rulers and contempt for rulers there is. One of the results of that was a greater attention to constitutionalists. So, instead of trying to make good rulers, 17th Century becomes obsessed with blocking the effects of bad rulers, stopping the worse consequences of having a bad ruler. One of the worst consequences, from the point of view of religions sectarians, is that the ruler will force you to believe a false religion or religion you believe to be false. So you have to stop that.
So one of the earliest forms of constitutionalism is guarantees of religious freedom would have been certain limits like Locke's liberalism. A great deal of Locke's liberalism is focused on preventing the state from being involved in religion or making too many religious texts. It's to say that Locke wanted the state not to be involved in religion, but he wanted a great deal of tolerance within certain limits. You couldn't tolerate Atheists. You couldn't tolerate Catholics. But all of the Protestant groups should be tolerated. Puritans and high church people should all get along, and the state had to be set up in such as way... The unwritten constitution, in Locke's case, had to be conceived in such a way that that was not part of the role of the state to enforce Orthodoxy. So that would be an example of what the practical aim of constitutionalism was, and it also applies to economics in the 18th Century. Above all, there's certain things we don't want the state involved in because the state's going to make a mess of it. So the focus, I think, throughout the late 17th and 18th Centuries, the 19th Century is how do we keep the State from being oppressive? And we do that through law and constitutions. But they're not thinking in terms of... Well, that's not quite true, but they're thinking less in terms, I would say, of character.
As you know, if you read Adam Smith, Adam Smith thinks a capitalist free economy depends on virtues of some kind. He has a different list of virtues from the Renaissance, but he certainly believes that behavior patterns are very important. That's the only reason why Petrarch crossed to liberalism, to neo-liberalism, of the Hayekian kind, because someone like Adam Smith, and all the early icons understood that economic behavior couldn't be absolutely free, in the sense of letting people do whatever in the hell they wanted. You had to be constrained by social norms, and by good character on the part of people involved in markets. So there's actually some... I've been writing a little bit about that, as well, that it goes back to the Renaissance, the idea of the moral economy, that the way to prevent economic injustice is to try to convince economic actors to behave well and to put the community and family ahead of the private greed. So greed should be turned into something socially useful, as a legitimate desire to make money. If you have a family, you want to support your local city, you have all these good things you can spend your money on, it's perfectly legitimate. What's illegitimate is seeking money for its own sake and for power and status, and so forth.
Richard Reinsch (36:48):
And I was just thinking, too, what's the virtue politics? What's the conception of politics is there, what it's for?
James Hankins (36:54):
Well, it's the idea that ways of reform the polis, the state, is you have to pay great attention to education. Anda that goes back to antiquity, where Aristotle's ethics designed to go with the politics, you studied ethics first, so that you know what virtue is, you know what good behavior is, and only when you know what good behavior is, can you then try to create a quality which produces good people. None of that's Aristotle's highest measure of a policy is a quality that creates good people. And Plato has exactly the same approach. They differ in so many things, but Plato agrees that education is a fundamental importance to the State, as you know, or several books of the Republic do not even set out to its education system in saying that the laws, that there's effort to create an educated citizenry, as well as educated leaders.
I think what I would say is that education has always... In the virtue of politics, tradition is part of politics. And, in the liberal tradition, I think we tend to think of education as something that's separate from politics. I'm not sure we have the luxury, and that should be a question for the modern world, because we have secondary school educators who want education to be political again. But what I'm saying, I guess, is that there's politics in politics, and what you want from the liberal tradition is the idea that people learn not to choose their own good, but to make their own decisions and internalize the values of character that get habituated to act in good ways. We want an education that's going to free people to act well. You don't want an education that's going to terrorize them into believing certain things. So you could say there's a virtue politics and an ideological-
Richard Reinsch (39:04):
So we wouldn't want a-
James Hankins (39:05):
... There's virtue education and there's ideological education, and what you want is virtue education, where it sets people free and enables them to be good, rather than ideological education which is designed to get them to think in a certain way. We can tell the difference. It's the difference between love and fear. All right, you terrorize people into believing the correct ideas or they will be punished. But a good education is what I already knew, is one that uses love because the educators have to love their students and want them to be free and independent. It's the difference between a mother who is a smother mother, a helicopter mom, who wants to control every aspect of the child's behavior, so that the child grows up to be exactly what she wants him to be, and a mother who understands that the child has to choose for themself, at a certain point, that can give them direction and that can give them good values, good examples. But, at a certain point, you have to let the child flourish on their own.
Richard Reinsch (40:12):
I was just thinking about our own national education history. It occurs to me most of what higher education would've been in this country in, say, 18th and 19th Centuries, would've been something like, I don't know if you want to say it's Renaissance humanism, but it would've had a lot of elements of that, I would think.
James Hankins (40:31):
Yes, I think that's right.
Richard Reinsch (40:33):
Just reading of the Amity Shlaes's biography of Calvin Coolidge, and his education at Amherst seem to resonate with me on that. But then you know, things start to really change and diversify, and education starts to become different, and have different purposes, more straightforward utilitarian purposes. And it seems to me, now, that's largely how Americans think of education generally. It's, all of a sudden, economics dimension. That's the most sober way people think about it which, of course, instrumentalizes it completely.
James Hankins (41:06):
No. That's an old thing in education, too. I mean, that's Plato and Socrates and Aristotle's critique of education in their own time. They could, sort of, critique the sophists wanted to teach young men with political ambitions how to achieve those ambitions so they would learn speaking ability. Particularly, they would learn how to school people and to argue both sides of the question, get the skill of being able to persuade people to do what you want to do. But I think you're right, that modern education, at a certain point, became much less concerned with character and much more concerned with getting people to roles in society.
James Hankins (41:52):
I think it starts at Harvard with Charles William Eliot, who is the great transformative president of Harvard. He, of course, is a huge figure and with a strong very influential figure, in the generation before Dewey. But he... Harvard had basically standard humanist classical education up until 1869. Then he took over, after the Civil War. And then he decided... He was a chemist by trade. He decided Harvard should basically give up any type of requirements and let people study whatever they wanted. And he thought that it was, kind of, like a educational version of John Stuart Mill, that he let a thousand flowers bloom and people would be happier because they'll be doing exactly what they want to do. That didn't last after his presidency.
James Hankins (42:45):
President Lowell came along and decided to reintroduce some requirements and make people learn some one thing. One of the results of Elliot's presidency was that there was a condition known as the Harvard Ignorance, where Harvard graduates didn't... You couldn't count on the Harvard graduate knowing anything because they could take any course they wanted. So it was putting... There was no Harvard, except that you could never rely on them knowing even basic stuff. So Lowell came along and reversed that, to some extent. There was still some choice, but there was also what we call a concentration here, which is like a major, just so you know something.
James Hankins (43:29):
I'm not sure it's really correct to say that American education has always been dominated by utilitarian instrumentalist purpose because I think that there's always been people around who had humanistic vision, and who understood that human beings need to have ethical and moral development, and religious belief, even, as well as be trained for some purpose. I think it's maybe gotten worse in the period of meritocracy. Meritocracy really takes off after the Second World War, and that's where you start having all of these standardized tests, the goal of which is to displace the old laws, but lead to creatability that people who are good at taking tests, basically, and who will be productive members of society. As they go into a corporation, they'll be most successful at hitting targets and so on.
James Hankins (44:26):
So, that, I think that the post-war meritocracy became a little bit... That's when you start getting the division between an elite that cares about their own community, and an elite that starts being nationalized and internationalized.
Richard Reinsch (44:41):
James Hankins, maybe we can end there. Thank you, so much, for coming on to discuss, with us, liberal learning, challenges and opportunities in contemporary America, or liberal learning in a time of disrepair. We thank you so much.
James Hankins (44:54):
A great pleasure. Thank you, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal of Law and Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. I'm Richard Reinsch, today we're talking with Philip Hamburger about his new book, Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power and Freedom. We're glad to welcome Philip Hamburger back to Liberty Law Talk. We featured his work extensively here, including his wonderful book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? He's also the author of earlier studies, Law and Judicial Duty and Separation of Church and State
Philip Hamburger (01:15):
Well, thank you. It's great to be here with you. I love these podcasts and everything you all already do, so it's an honor to be here.
Richard Reinsch (01:21):
Thank you.
Philip Hamburger (01:22):
Really appreciate it.
Richard Reinsch (01:23):
So tell us about this book, Purchasing Submission. Who is purchasing submission?
Philip Hamburger (01:30):
Right. The government. It's, of course-
Richard Reinsch (01:37):
Aren't they always.
Philip Hamburger (01:38):
They collect our money and use our own money in a sense to suborn us and to purchase our freedom. And they do it in more interesting ways than I think is commonly recognized. So when the government gives one money or it gives one some other privilege like a license, they often attach a condition to it. You can get a license as long as you let us use a piece of your land, or you can be a lawyer subject to the following conditions, or we're going to give you research grants, but you have to do the following. And these conditions are widely recognized by scholars of constitutional law and the sort of technical legal question, a technical question as to when conditions violate constitutional rights because, ordinarily a right is violated when some sort of coercion is supplied, some sort of force of law of bought.
And so when you're simply asked, well, how have you done X, Y, and Z, and if so, we'll give you money. It doesn't seem terribly pressured and coercive. And as a result, it seems a technical problem, when did these conditions actually violate one's rights and when do they not, and this whole literature on this. But it's not just that literature I think is incomplete, I think this fails to recognize what's actually going on, this much bigger problem. It's not just the threat to rights. There's a purchase of consent to a whole new mode of governance, an alternative mode of control. And so when you step back and see that, conditions are no longer a technical problem, that's actually a profound question of political theory and law.
Richard Reinsch (03:12):
Thinking about these conditions, which you kind of go through a range of different types of conditions that seem to be attached to privilege as the government is offering you. Do you see yourself as sort of, is this sort of groundbreaking in the sense of people have noticed this, talked about it, there've been some judicial notice of it, although I take it from the book, not enough. And you see yourself with this book trying to call our attention to this way the government is increasingly operating by sort of stripping us of rights and offering for porridge. And we give that because we want that.
Philip Hamburger (03:55):
So I hesitate to say anything I do is groundbreaking, but I do think it is new to see the breadth of the problem and there are two layers to the problem, to the difficulty. One, as we discussed is the threat to rights. They give you money in exchange for giving up some of your speech, for example, which is very common I'm afraid, but it's a much broader problem in the sense that it's a new mode of governance. One's giving up, not just our rights, but one's freedom of self-government. One way of thinking about it is it's a new irregular pathway of power. So we're all familiar with a regular avenue of power through acts of Congress and the courts. And you can get that from School House Rock, or you can get that from the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. Then there's an alternative pathway of power, an irregular path, which is through administrative rules and adjudications where you're commanded, do this, don't do that. And if you violate that, we're going to bring you in front of the administrative law judge to punish you, make you pay a fine. And that imitates the regular avenue of power in creating binding rules and binding adjudications, but not in our institutions. Those are the constitution, but new institutions that have an unelected law makers, the bureaucrats and judges who aren't really independent. And that dichotomy between the regular and irregular path between the acts of Congress and administrative rules is quite familiar, but it turns out that's another irregular path.
There are a host of these, but the main one that's been missed is this purchase of submission because sometimes the government, when it cannot get something through Congress, or doesn't think it will, and it cannot get an administrative rule because it might be unconstitutional or politically unpalatable, it then will turn to another irregular path, not an agency rule that purports to bind, but rather a condition on the receipt of money. And what's interesting about these conditions is they do not purport to bind. In fact, the whole point is they're not binding. They don't really restrict one, so theory goes because they're just conditions on the money and that liberates the government to do all sorts of things that never otherwise could have done, things that would have been impossible even to administrative power. So it's an additional irregular path and therefore profoundly dangerous. Because if you think about this as evasion as a cascade of evasions, you first evade the Constitution through administrative power, and then you evade it yet again through purchasing submission. So it's moving ever further away from law.
Richard Reinsch (06:24):
Listening to you now, as I was reading this book, I thought I was reading this book with your other book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, In mind. And you've been talking about this. There you argued, you weren't so much concerned with constitutional law regarding the administrative state, what you wanted to show is how the administrative state operates outside the bounds of constitutional norms, basic structural powers and responsibilities and accountability. And as I read this book, I thought, well, he's done something like that here, too.
Philip Hamburger (07:00):
I beg to differ.
Richard Reinsch (07:01):
Yes, sure.
Philip Hamburger (07:02):
I actually, in the administrative law book, I actually was making a constitutional argument, but it wasn't the conventional one in case of the doctrines. But rather by showing that there was a danger out there of this irregular power, which was familiar to the framers of the constitution and so we shouldn't assume that administrative law is something new and unattended to by the constitution. Here, there is some parallel you're absolutely right, that this is similarly a study of an irregular path of power, but this was actually much worse. If you thought administrative law was bad, worry about conditions. And if you think administrative power is actually okay, just need little trimming at the edges, you shouldn't be complacent about the next irregular pathway, conditions, because this subverts our rights and undermines our self-governance in a way that administrative power does not. You at least had administrative rule, as published, we all know what it is. And it goes through a process. Conditions don't have to do that. And many of them are private.
Richard Reinsch (08:10):
Help us help listeners understand maybe more concretely what you're describing here. What are prominent instances of conditions that the government uses?
Philip Hamburger (08:20):
Well, Joe Biden, our president, helps people understand this. And so in that sense, the book is unexpectedly relevant. When the administration tells states, we're going to give you money for Medicaid and Medicare, but only if you make certain requirements regarding vaccines, what they're doing is regulating the states and the people within the states through purchase of compliance. When the government gives money to let's say, Columbia University for research and says, here's money for research, but the way, though, you have to first assure us that you have institutional review boards, which will censor what one can read and what one can say and what one can publish. What it's doing is it's paying these institutions to regulate people like me. It's a regulatory condition and it's doubly bad because it works for a private institution. So what we have are a lot of, not just unconstitutional conditions, that violate rights, but conditions that are regulatory, that are substitutes for the command of a statute or the command of an administrative rule.
Richard Reinsch (09:34):
As I was reading your book, one thing that comes to mind is sort of a prior choice, a decision that's been made that the spending power, that there is sort of a standalone spending power the federal government possesses, and can do whatever it wants, like build a sidewalk for fitness reasons in towns across America, fund that, or be heavily involved in education or things like that, where you say, well, why does the federal government have this power? Well, as I was taught in law school, it's the spending power. And how do you think about that problem?
Philip Hamburger (10:11):
It's funny. I was also taught that, but the difficulty is to find that spending power, I thumbed through the constitution, where is it? Is it on page one, page two? You read through it. It was found there. Article one, section eight gives the power to lay and collect taxes, duties and so forth. And there's a limit on that power to collect taxes, which, and that limit is you can collect these taxes to pay the debts and provide the common defense, general welfare of the United States. What we've done is we've replaced the comma after exercises is an inserted, a semi-colon. And in fact, Gouverneur Morris drafting, the constitution tried to do this. And then the convention said, no, no, no, no. This is one clause. You're not splitting into two, but by interpretation, we've created a general spending power. So where it's spending had to go through individual enumerated powers and that's what's limited in subject matter. It now just can be done, is not limited. And so conditions on spending are unlimited, which means you can regulate through conditions in ways that you could not regulate even with the expense of reading of congressional power. It gets worse than this, of course, because the so-called spending power or the limit on the taxing power, has to be for the common defense, general welfare of the United States, which if it means anything is, it doesn't go to or for the states. So in fact, all the spending and aid to the states is unconstitutional, but the courts have just ignored this. And with that spending to and for the states, a lot can be extorted from them.
Richard Reinsch (11:49):
And then you couple that with, as I was thinking about it, the ability of the federal government to borrow unlimited amounts of money, and also having vast revenue as well, coming in. It's an unlimited source of power. And there's also this aspect of, John Diulio has written about this acronym called, BIGPAP and the idea being that the federal government is able to use states, nonprofits, all sorts of other agencies to in effect, regulate the country without actually doing it itself, but doing it through partnerships. And I was reading your book, I thought, well, so Professor Hamburger has uncovered yet another, is bringing to our attention in a dramatic way, this new mode of power. So how does one go about, I'm just sort of thinking practically here, because you say these are sort of, I mean, one is old Medicare. I mean, that's obvious but constraints on Medicare, but you said these are a lot of just almost private deals because I read it and I thought, well, this is just another mode of administrative power.
Philip Hamburger (12:54):
It's done by the same people, it's usually done by the agencies, but the agencies don't just have administrative power, which the power to make rules or edicts or expectations that functions rules. They also can dangle some money in front of you or a privilege like licensing and then say, but we're only giving this to you after you've done something, X, Y, or Z, seeking so-called assurances about what you've done. And that's the mode of control that's quite profound. They can do almost anything that way. So an agency may pass regulation, continues conditions. So HHS has regulations stipulating the conditions on which universities get research funding and requires establishment of review boards and the like, but much of the conditioning that's regulatory comes in site visits, private conversations, or just letters. Because these are private deals essentially, all sorts of bad things happen. For one thing, you don't know whom it applies because only those who consent are subject to it. So in really rare cases, do we know who has submitted to the conditions. You don't know who has, who hasn't. What's more, additional conditions are added in an informal way. And when there's no way of knowing what these are, even within one's own institution, because these things are often kept private even within the effected institutions. And this happens to banks and universities. And if it happens to banks and universities, which have so much power, what's the fate of individual?
Richard Reinsch (14:28):
As I was also thinking about your book, you think about the administrative state and and it has sort of official legal channels by which it's supposed to operate in terms of proposing a rule and debating it, implementing it. But then increasingly we know it operates outside of those rules and does a lot of unofficial things. Like say a dear colleague letter to every university in America, if you want federal funding, you will basically wipe away protections for those accused of sexual assault, longstanding protections. So is that unofficial? Do you see that as, is that conditioning as well?
Philip Hamburger (15:04):
That's right. And Title IX has the sex discrimination condition on federal funds to educational institutions. But of course what's happened is then that gets interpreted in semiformal and then less formal ways. And of course, ultimately it may depend on private conversations. And just to give you an example, Congress hands off regulatory power to the Securities Exchange Commission, hands off power to private regulatory groups and the like, or the exchanges. And they in turn regulate their members, but they regulate their members in ways that are overseen by the SEC. So you've essentially privatized regulation under the oversight of the federal government. Now this is highly advantageous, of course, for the federal government. For one thing, they say, we're not forcing you to do anything, it's just a private matter. So they can escape any accountability, again, much of it often for that to be private in conversation. And then of course, when rights are violated and there has to be an adjudication, well, there's no violation of rights, it was just a private organization so no state action. And what's more, when this adjudication, not only do you not get a jury, you don't even get an administrative hearing because these are private institutions that can handle it as they wish. So this is complete degradation of our regular system of government through statutes and court proceedings to just private little inquisitorial tribunals and Title IX tribunals are a good example of this.
Richard Reinsch (16:41):
Thinking about, you said individual rights. In your research, what kept troubling you about this mode of governance?
Philip Hamburger (16:51):
I got into this, the book actually begins with an explanation of how it happened. An after dinner conversation, I was having a very nice dinner with wonderful friends. And after dinner I made offer the foolish question. Why haven't you published an article that you were circulating in draft? And indeed it circulated like samizdat only in manuscript, quite widely read, but not published. He said, oh, I can't publish it. The IRB won't let me. I said, what? That sounds like the 17th century inquisition. No, no, no, it's real. I can't publish it. I could publish it, but they'd never allow me to publish again if I did. And then his wife, a cited geneticist and one of the best in the country said, yes, I lose several children each year this way, because under HIPAA, I can't consult the tissue banks. And whatever you think about the use of that information, it's quite sobering that someone with a scientific endeavor cannot consult information in these circumstances. So what was going on here? And I learned it was IRBs. I never heard of them before.
Richard Reinsch (17:58):
Yeah, talk about this.
Philip Hamburger (17:59):
Well, I never knew what an IRB was. I thought it was bizarre. And for three years, I refused to do anything about it though I was upset because of course I didn't want to do administrative law. I didn't want to do conditions. That's boring. But it turned out to be ever more interesting. And the final straw was when a friend of mine went and I went and talked to the local ACLU and they said, oh yeah, we know all about this. Indeed, they knew the law beautifully, but they said they weren't really against it. They weren't against the censorship. And what institutional review boards, should I talk about that?
Richard Reinsch (18:32):
Please do.
Philip Hamburger (18:34):
So most of you have never heard of these things. They're the ones that introduced the oversight, sensitivity about the speech into campuses ages ago. If I want to do research and want federal funding, I can't get the money directly, instead under HHS guidelines, I have to get the money to the institution. And that's because institutions are more easily controlled and institutions then gets the money only if it has made an assurance to the federal government that has established a sort of ethical review of research, institutional review boards. Now that sounds all very jolly, that can't be bad, but what these institutional review boards are mostly concerned with is speech. They're worried about insensitive speech or harmful speech to the people who study. For example, if you're interviewing somebody, if I were to interview a member of the KKK, I don't really care that much about the harm to the individual, but the IRB will. And I can't ask questions that might cause not only legal and financial loss to the individual, but also might cause stress. And so then also one can't publish details that the IRB worries might be harmful individuals. The net result of course, is the complete deadening of research and it's worse in medicine. So in medicine, when there's actually a death toll to this because when you discourage research, and by the way, you particularly discouraged research on minorities, one of the goals of IRBs, the net result is of course you don't have information to save lives. I give you one example just to make this real. Dr. Pronovost of Johns Hopkins, I think it was 2006, did a study of Michigan intensive care units of catheters inserted into the heart. These procedures are necessary to save the life of the patient, but there used to be something like a two-thirds death rate because of infection. So what Pronovost did, went to the intensive care units in Michigan and said, let's ask the doctors before they do it to wash their hands. And lo and behold, when they washed their hands, they saved, I think 1500 lives just in the course of the study. And then it was shut down by HHS because it did not have sufficient approval from the institutional review board. Nonetheless, by miracle, it gets published. And the publication of this, because of information about keeping clean, how important it is to these operations, has saved 17,000 lives a year in the United States alone. And what this tells you is that the suppression of information, the institutional review boards, even if it only suppresses a few important studies a year, quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives lost. That's sobering. But this is the blessing of conditions. You can suppress speech without accountability.
Richard Reinsch (21:16):
Where have, in your research, where the federal courts been on conditions? From your book, I take it they've largely stood down. How should they step back up?
Philip Hamburger (21:32):
Well, so the book, although it's at a broad level about the problem and it's near political theory, much of it is also technically about law and actually ends the checklist for lawyers and judges. There are things that judges can do. And I think the first step is just to recognize the problem. Once it recognizes the seriousness of the problem, I think there will be a response. The other thing that's important to do here is to recognize that actually there isn't much precedent barring the development of doctrine or recognizing the constitution as to say. There are precedents, occasional precedents protecting freedom of speech, for example, but they're fairly mild. The precedents have very little to say actually about, for example, regulatory conditions. The courts just haven't recognized the problem. So I think one can go to the courts and ask them to work on this difficulty without even having to undo precedent. Now that's not entirely true, there are areas where they will have to reconsider precedence, but much of it is just unexplored territory. It's terra incognita, which is sad. Isn't it strange, we have a method of government that's now been in place for at least 70 years, perhaps a little more, but it's been widespread since the 1960s and we don't see it.
Richard Reinsch (22:56):
And I was going to ask you is, so when did this really kick into high gear?
Philip Hamburger (23:02):
Right. Probably, I'd say the sixties and seventies. Yes. But also in the nineties and since then, where the amount of money spent on the states is massive.
Richard Reinsch (23:05):
Yeah. You note that in the beginning, that 30, for most states, it's about 30% of their budget comes from the federal government. And I've read previously is state bureaucracies have grown, state employees have grown. Federal government employees really haven't I've read, which kind of speaks to this phenomenon, I think, of indirect government.
Philip Hamburger (23:33):
Part of it also is that we think of conditions to the states is violating rights. They also regulate state policy in violation of so-called commandeering doctrine. But they don't just regulate state policy, they actually reshaped state governance, which I don't think anyone's really paid attention to other than Martha Derthick in the 1970s. She noted it briefly. Grants to the states when used to convert elected power to administrative power because the federal agencies like to deal with state agencies. They don't want to deal with state elected officials. And so they give money on the condition, for example, that the power once exercised by selectmen in Massachusetts towns gets handed over to administrators. And there's a class issue of course, because it means taking power out of folks in a community who may not have college degrees and giving the power to people in Boston who are distanced from the communities, but have PhDs.
Richard Reinsch (24:31):
Yeah. Oh yeah. In government administration or something. Thinking about this, also you hit too that maybe the New Left was onto something and the protection of privileges in the late sixties, which I thought that was an interesting argument and made sense in light of the book.
Philip Hamburger (24:50):
I don't want to praise the New Left generally, but Charles Reich, Charles Reich was brilliant and wrote a piece called "The New Property."
Richard Reinsch (25:02):
Right.
Philip Hamburger (25:02):
And he discusses this problem very accurately and candidly. And he's worried about it, but he phrases it in terms of property, not power. So if he were here in our conversation with us is I would simply beg him to say, it's not really new property, it's a new power. He recognizes that the government is buying its way into regulation and buying its way to adjudication of any process. And he worries about this, but because he's so focused on the new property, the property that consists of government benefits and the like, he didn't address the question of power, but he sure was on to it and I must say if there's any prior scholarship that I thought was illuminating, it was his. It was more on point than I think anything else I've read.
Richard Reinsch (25:53):
That's interesting because I've always seen it as sort of the turning and progressive government in America or the attempt to legitimate it more and more. So I've always sort of recoiled from it. So I thought that was an interesting part in your book. Yeah.
Philip Hamburger (26:06):
Right. So I would not agree with him about the analysis of the new property. I think actually that did a lot of damage to, for example, rights of due process rights. I think that endeavor to get processed for grant, for the denials of, let's say welfare ended up degrading, diminishing due process across the board, including constraints illustrated, for example, by Hamdan vs Rumsfeld where we now can imprison people without anything more than a neutral adjudicator deciding it, no jury, no judge, et cetera. And that's a product of this is a new property as well and the attachment of due process to that. But at the same time, I want to give him credit where it's due. He did understand that there were risks in the purchasing compliance.
Richard Reinsch (26:53):
More sticky question. I take it you don't think all conditions are unconstitutional.
Philip Hamburger (26:58):
No, most conditions...
Richard Reinsch (27:00):
So how in thinking about the government extending conditions on privileges or attaching them to privileges, how do you sort of work out an analysis like this, it's something like plea bargaining. What do you think about that?
Philip Hamburger (27:11):
Right. So most government conditions such as we'll give you money for an airplane on the condition that it flies are perfectly reasonable and lawful. And the book goes out of its way to emphasize is not a complaint about conditions on the whole. I do see contracts law, and I know the value of conditions. But on the margins, there are conditions that are being used for less innocent purposes and to regulate and deprive people of rights, to control the states and so forth. And that's what's very dangerous. So for example, Cass Sunstein discussed nudges. I can't say that I think most people like being nudged feels more like a push usually, but that's not necessarily unconstitutional. What becomes problematic is when the conditions deprive one of rights or it's used as a mode of regulation. And plea bargains, let's talk about that. Is it 95, 97% of criminal cases end in plea bargains, at least at the federal level. It's prodigious and many of those conditions are not unreasonable, but they can overstep the line. And it's an interesting delicate question. So for example, suppose you're asked to give up your right to a jury trial. Well, that's not necessarily unconstitutional, the jury trial is not mandatory. You can agree to give it up voluntarily or when you're given something. But what if you're asked to give up your jury trial in future cases, that would be different. That's an attempt to restrict your exercise to the right in the future. More commonly, more typical sort of condition would be to require one to provide testimony or not exercise ones right against self-incrimination. If that extends too far into the future, then I think when runs into constitutional problems, but if it's confined to the case itself, there needn't to be a problem. So one has to parse these things in a fairly careful way to get there. What I found most interesting-
Richard Reinsch (29:23):
And I'm ignorant here, are you saying federal prosecutors are frequently-
Philip Hamburger (29:27):
I'm talking about federal prosecutors.
Richard Reinsch (29:29):
Federal prosecutors are frequently reaching beyond the case at hand to future cases with defendants.
Philip Hamburger (29:32):
I don't know how frequently it happens. It just happens occasionally, but sometimes it does happen. And then one has to be careful. When we get to the free speech conditions, I think there's something important to be observed in the word "abridge." The first amendment is actually carefully worded. Congress should make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. And that word, abridging actually is helpful because when Congress passes a statute that restricts what you can say, one might have a difficult question as to whether or not the law abridges the freedom of speech, but when it or an agency using money on the condition that you similarly restrict your speech, it's actually much easier because if the condition goes further than what is constitutionally allowed in a direct restraint you know that it's abridging the freedom of speech, because the word abridging suggests you're going a little bit further. And so we actually have some clarity in the speech cases. That isn't always true in some of the Bill of Rights.
Richard Reinsch (30:36):
So for example, you don't have to pay taxes, you're a non-profit, but with that comes all sorts of restrictions on your speech.
Philip Hamburger (30:47):
Right. And so the limitations on nonprofits, not to get involved in politics, political speech and elections or in lobbying. As we know, I've written on this, and it actually, it's first proposed by Hiram Evans, the rather unlovely Imperial Wizard of Ku Klux Klan, and it's a way of silencing relatively Orthodox, IE Catholic institutions even if that's the risk of silencing others. This is a constraint on speech and on political speech. We would've thought we'd all be concerned about that, but we're told reassuringly that no, no, no, it's just a condition on a privilege, that of tax exemption. But it's really just saying, you're going to get different tax rate depending on whether you silence yourself. And once you understand it that way, it's quite clear this is actually a penalty on speech. But even if you just understand it as a condition, and by the way I say that, because lowered taxes and receiving money are actually quite different. You have a choice as to whether or not you receive money, not as to whether or not you're on the tax system. But even if you just do this as a condition on a privilege, and there's no sort of coercion here, this is a condition that one could never impose directly. The only reason it's been accepted is because it's thrown in as a condition on a privilege. And that shows how these are used to evade the first amendment.
Richard Reinsch (32:16):
And I take it. I mean, there is a level of political theory, there's this sort of assumption here working that rights themselves, property is something that the government really has control of and doles out. So I'm not violating. Like to the nonprofit, it's like, well, you're getting this tax deference, aren't we generous to you. And it's like, well, why did you assume that it was yours to begin with? I mean, that's kind of the way I've always looked at it.
Philip Hamburger (32:46):
Right. So this gets back to the debates between Pufendorf and Locke. Pufendorf understood the contract proceeded government, but he thought that property was the product of agreement. And so from that perspective, it wasn't clear that property necessarily preceded government, could have followed from the government, in which case property is dependent on government. Marcez had a certain priority of government before property and property is really protected. John Locke, so he's often thought to be responding to Hobbes, is also responding to Pufendorf quietly. And John Locke offers a different account of the development of property. It's the so-called labor theory of property, put labor into something then it becomes yours. Why would he do this? If you take this as a grand theory of property, it doesn't explain all property. And so therefore seemed rather weak, but he wasn't trying to explain all property. He was just trying to show that some property, institutional property, preexists government. And that's crucial because property is his metaphor, if you will, for all liberty, it's something that's yours and that proceeds government. And so that conversation between Pufendorf and Locke, although I think often missed and misunderstood these days is very relevant here, property proceeds government. And by the way, notice if the IRS could treat any sort of tax exemption as largess to which you can attach conditions depriving you of your rights, notice it can just give you a hundred percent taxation. And then when it lets you keep 1%, he says, but of course, on the condition that you could subvert all rights instantly this way. So I don't think it makes sense.
Richard Reinsch (34:34):
So the progressive mode of government has to dispense then with, I think that was a lock-in position necessarily if it's going to be able to move money around and engage in the transfer payments and the regulatory system that it needs to. So it sort of has to disestablish that mode of thinking. You find in the book, I think that Americans have largely accepted this, but maybe they need to be reminded of what they've forgotten.
Philip Hamburger (35:01):
Well, I think what's happened is that money has appealed to people, as always. And the folks who get money, don't worry too much about the conditions. But as they pile up, there are profound costs, not only to the individuals and institutions, but also to the whole nature of our society, where we're turning into a society in which everything can be bought. And I think actually a lot of progressives understand that this is dangerous. A lot of progressives regret commodification as they would put it. And what we've done is commodified our government. And there is something which I would have thought people from many different perspectives can agree on that. This is somewhat worrisome. Can I add a thought about the work, just how dangerous this is?
Philip Hamburger (35:48):
To the degree conditions are the primary means of privatizing control, privatizing regulation by funneling it through employers, universities, banks, and so forth. There's a very great danger that all institutions will end up being aligned under centralized control and I discuss this towards the end of the book. The danger is that if federal money and policy runs through the states, runs through the banks, runs through the universities, runs even through churches who tried to silence their members to avoid violating 501(c)(3), we end up in the system in which all of institutions are aligned. It used to be because institutions were not aligned in this way, either those institutions were different and because regions were different, you could find some sort of solace, some safety, if not at one level of the system than in another one type of institution or another. If you don't fit into the banks, you fit into the universities. If you don't put in there, you can fit in, let's say in the state government. That's no longer true because they're all being aligned in their policies, mostly through conditions also to some degree through direct regulation. And that ultimately is very, very dangerous.
Richard Reinsch (37:11):
Just to go back to the dear colleague letter to higher education. I mean, did any institutions receiving federal funds object to that?
Philip Hamburger (37:17):
I don't know, but there certainly wasn't mass objection of that.
Richard Reinsch (37:21):
Yeah.
Philip Hamburger (37:24):
And notice, it's one administrator to another. They're talking to their own people.
Richard Reinsch (37:29):
And realizing that their institution would fall apart without federal funds.
Philip Hamburger (37:34):
That's right. But they fail to realize that their institutions are going to be rendered impotent and unfree and utterly, utterly irrelevant if they accept the conditions.
Richard Reinsch (37:46):
I can think of, since that letter was issued, a number of private, higher education institutions coming into being, which made it very clear, they would never take federal funds, but those are a few.
Philip Hamburger (37:58):
Very, very few.
Richard Reinsch (37:59):
A scattered few.
Philip Hamburger (38:01):
Right. Hillsdale doesn't take federal funds, but Hillsdale is a lonely voice.
Richard Reinsch (38:06):
And I think a lot of these new class, schools that are coming online, they're very clear even in states like where I'm at in Indiana that have very widespread voucher programs, they will take none of that money because they're worried about conditions that come with it. Is this just though the way of, I mean, I'm thinking about it. I mean, there is just sort of a, they're offering people something, they're going to take it.
Philip Hamburger (38:28):
Yes. But they're corrupting us with our own money. They're bankrupting us by dangling in front of us things we can't afford with conditions that will destroy our freedom.
Richard Reinsch (38:39):
And as you think about this, what are the low hanging fruit that could be picked here, the fruit, to try and peel away this mode of governance?
Philip Hamburger (38:50):
So I think it's already happening. The states increasingly are being offered money on the condition they submit to conditions, dictating their policies. Certainly any connection with vaccines from like this is happening, right. Or the tax reduction earlier this year, the states were told you could have federal money, but you're not allowed to reduce your taxes.
Richard Reinsch (39:13):
Yes.
Philip Hamburger (39:14):
So this is problematic on many grounds. So one thing it's a mode of regulation through conditions, which shouldn't be allowed. For another, it's the spending into the states, is unlawful. But at the very least, there's a commandeering doctrine, which really just reflects the structure of our constitution. Now the judges will say, commandeering, that's about the relationship between two separate sovereigns. Not really. They got that wrong. It's really about our right of localized self-government, it's about freedom, not just structure. And the structure depends upon that freedom of localized self-government, so it's really much more threatening than they think.
Philip Hamburger (39:52):
And although the term commandeering suggests that there has to be coercion or gun to the head, that's what the Supreme Court's apt to say, that's actually the standard for duress in contract law, actually 19th century contract law, not even contemporary contract law. And structural problems, which is what this is, do not need any coercion. You can corrupt the construction of the constitution with money as well as by force. So I think we're going to see arguments along these lines, arguments, I hope I can draw from the book that in fact commandeering doctrine is grossly misunderstood by the court and that these demands on the states not to lower the taxes or to impose vaccines, the like are unconstitutional interferences with separate sovereignties and with our right of localized self-government. So that's, I think, would be an opening wedge.
Richard Reinsch (40:40):
There's also something, as I'm listening to you, and I'm thinking, I think it was with regard to the states is sort of the increased ideological competition over policies and which policies lead to growth and flourishing, economic flourishing in particular. And it seems to be, you're also getting this realization amongst both sets of governing elites of how they want to live. And red states are making decisions based on that as to what money they'll take from the federal government. Witness red states, like Florida, not taking money regarding unemployment benefits because they think it actually would lead to a decreased labor market, depressed labor market. So already it's almost like politics, the return of politics could also help here.
Philip Hamburger (41:22):
Possibly. Anything that helps, I think, would be welcome. My fear always has been, we'll be woken, not by ideas, not by ideology, but by calamity. And it's a stiff competition. Will it be in foreign matters or domestic matters that our collapsed will get our attention and will it then be too late? I don't know.
Richard Reinsch (41:45):
Philip, maybe we'll end on that note.
Philip Hamburger (41:48):
Thank you for giving me an optimistic ending.
Richard Reinsch (41:50):
We've been talking with Philip Hamburger, author of the new book, Purchasing Submission, I hope it has the impact all of your other books have had. Thank you for discussing it with us today.
Philip Hamburger (42:04):
You're very kind. Good talking with you. Thank you so much.
In this episode of Liberty Law Talk, I discuss with Professor John Inazu his new book Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. Inazu offers his thoughts on resurrecting this most important constitutional doctrine from the doldrums where it languishes as a result of Court rulings. Consequently, Inazu argues that the freedom of assembly is […]
Steven Smith discusses his book Fiction, Lies, and the Authority of Law.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Mike Gonzalez about his new book, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Allison Center for Foreign Policy. He's had 20 years of experience as a journalist. He's been a speechwriter in the Bush administration, and he writes widely on national identity, diversity, multiculturalism, nationalism, and related issues. Mike is also a regular contributor to Law & Liberty. It's his first time on Liberty Law Talk, we're glad to have you on the program, Mike.
Mike Gonzalez (00:53):
The pleasure is all mine, Richard. Thank you very much for having me on, it's an honor.
Richard Reinsch (00:57):
So Mike, as you say in the book a couple of times, and I'll state it here, the book is about Black Lives Matter and is taking you inside the organization, who funds it, what it believes, what its objectives and purposes are, who composes it, who leads it. But in all of that, you are not, and certainly the purpose of this interview is not to dispute the idea that black lives matter, the sentiment or the statement. We are talking about the organization and suite of organizations or allies who are a part of Black Lives Matter, the movement. And so with that said, what are the goals of Black Lives Matter? Or what is it built on?
Mike Gonzalez (01:44):
Let me actually first make a comment on what you just said, because I believe there are four things here that are really quite distinct. The first one is the concept. Black lives matter. The concept is unimpeachable and I embrace the concept and I actually never say "All lives matter," I say "Black lives matter." I'm very proud to say that. And that is because black Americans have gone through incredible hardships that no other American has gone through. I don't need to... slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, et cetera, and incredible discrimination. So "Black lives matter" is a great slogan. Then there's the movement, and I'm not sure what that means. I think that means people who turned out to the demonstrations and the marches and were peaceful about it, or who embraced the concept. Then they are the organizations. The organizations are primarily as you very well put, it's a suite of organizations, but there are two main ones. If you Google Black Lives Matter, Google sends you to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, BLMGNF. That is the premier, the flagship organization, that is itself the coalition. And then there's the Movement for Black Lives, which is yet another coalition, but very important. It was set up right after Ferguson. And then fourth, there are the founders of these organizations and the founders are all Marxists. They say they're Marxist, it's not me saying they're Marxist.
And then we go into your question, what are their goals? Well, if you listen to the founders and if the journalists listen to the founders, they have been very candid. Alicia Garza, one of the three founders said very clearly to a group of Maine Marxists in 2019. So not that long ago, that what she wanted was "the dismantling of the organizing principle of this society." Quote unquote. That what she wanted was to change how we're organized as a society. So for those listening at home, that means not just things that are racist in America, it is everything. It's your son's little league game, it's your daughter's volleyball team, it is your book club. It's everything, it's American lives, it's our way of life. And they're very clear that they're Marxist. Patrisse Cullors, a second, also a very important former executive director of BLMGNF, and also a founder of Black Lives Matter. She said very clearly, and she states it all the time that her and Alicia Garza are Marxist, and she actually uses the term trained Marxist. And this is a very recent, there's a very good reason and why she says trained, that's because she was recruited by Eric Mann. Now that is his word. Eric Mann said he recruited Patrisse Cullors. Eric Mann is a former member of the Weather Underground. That was an FBI designated terrorist group in the '60s and '70s. A lot of the members spent time in prison because they tried to use terrorist tactics to bring revolution to America. Eric Mann spent time in prison. And then he set up the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, which recruited Patrisse Cullors and trained her in Marxism. Alicia Garza too, was trained in Marxism-Leninism, she has said this herself. So that is who they are and what they want. They hate capitalism. They say that capitalism is racist and needs to be destroyed and smashed, and they like Marxism-Leninism. So it's the organizations and the founders, not the concept to which I subscribe.
Richard Reinsch (05:19):
Talk about the ideological structure here. A term we hear a lot, critical race theory, we also hear the term anti-racism. Talk in depth about critical race theory, what it is, where it comes from.
Mike Gonzalez (05:36):
So critical race theory is really the academic discipline behind Black Lives Matter. It emerges in law schools in America in the late '70s, and then really gathers strength in the '80s. It comes from critical legal theory or critical legal studies, which postulated that American racism was... That the systems of oppression, that the inequality was written into the law, by people with money, by the powerful who wanted to perpetuate their power and they wanted to keep it, and they wrote the American laws to do that. Now, black professors and black law students attending these conferences of critical legal theorists agreed with all that, but then they added, "but all these people are white. And what this is, is just racism. And you're refusing to deal with that." So they had incredible arguments, and in 1989, they left, they split, they created their own organization called critical race theory, which is the first time that that term is used. It was at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin. The organizer was Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor.
Richard Reinsch (06:49):
Did you say a convent?
Mike Gonzalez (06:49):
A convent.
Richard Reinsch (06:52):
Okay.
Mike Gonzalez (06:54):
A former convent outside of Madison, Wisconsin. In fact, just a few years later, Richard Delgado, one of the godfathers of CRT, of critical race theory gave an interview in which he said that they were all there, these two dozen law professors, and looking at the crucifixes and looking at the stained glass windows. And he said, "It was an odd place for a bunch of Marxists." This is Richard Delgado. Indeed, it was an odd place for a bunch of Marxists.
So what critical race theory believes is that racism is not individual, it's not an individual sin that people commit when they refuse to follow Christ's dictum to love thy neighbor, when they refuse to love their neighbor because of their race. According to critical race theories, it's nothing to do with an individual, individual practice or individual beliefs or individual sin. It's a systemic thing that all of American society is suffused with racism, and has been so since the founding. And then they, these law professors kind of took over or in the '90s, kind of became dominant in the civil rights domain, within the law schools. They evicted their white colleagues because they... the critical legal theorists, they evicted them and they became dominant. But they had very limited impact on public policy for about 20 years. And then in the last 10 years or so, they begin to really grow in K-12.
They begin to get its grips on education, primary education, secondary education, but then it really explodes with 2020, with Black Lives Matter, which is the subject of my book, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. And then it enters all aspects of our lives. This is why we're all talking about critical race, why I'm traveling the country from coast to coast, I've been to 15 cities in the last three months. I'll be in another 12 cities in the next three months talking about critical race theory, because Americas are up in arms about what is being taught to their children. Now I should add parenthetically, and maybe you want to ask me more about that. That critical legal theory itself is an outgrowth of critical theory, which was born in Germany, in the '20s and '30s. And was again, a Marxist group of scholars who believed that they had to criticize and really ridicule all institutions in society, in order to introduce the idea of revolution. So that in a nutshell, the intellectual pedigree of these disciplines, critical race theory, critical legal theory, and critical theory.
Richard Reinsch (09:31):
Critical theory come to this country in the 1930s in the forms of intellectuals practicing it. And when you say it's criticizing every aspect of society, I assume that's according to Marxism.
Mike Gonzalez (09:45):
Yeah, no, they-
Richard Reinsch (09:46):
And one of the things they want to do, it seems from what I've read is, they want to take things that Americans take for granted and enjoy like consumer behavior and ridicule that.
Mike Gonzalez (09:58):
Yeah. They want to denigrate all aspects of our lives. They sit there, they're very conflicted. And in the early '20s, they realize that what Marks and Engels had promised, which was revolutions everywhere, the working class, the proletariat rising and overthrowing the capital as the bourgeoisie, it's just not happening. It failed in Germany, failed in Italy. It only succeeds in a backwater place called Russia, and it succeeds very temporarily in Hungary. So then they begin to ask themselves, all these communists, "Why?" And they ask them in Germany and Italy especially, where revolutions fail in 1919. And they'll come up with the same answer, whether it's Antonio Gramsci in Italy or Maxwell Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School in Germany. And that is, they realize that the worker has embraced religion, has embraced God, has embraced the family, has embraced capitalism and has embraced the nation-state. He's religious, likes his family and he's patriotic. And so they think that the worker has false consciousness.
So as you rightly put it, because of the Third Reich, they come here, Columbia Teachers College offers them a place where they can gather and work. And so people like Maxwell Horkheimer the director of the Institute. We call it the Frankfurt School, but it's really called the Institute for Social Research. It was first of all going to be called the Institute for Marxism, then they realized that that was too upfront. They really tried to hide their Marxism, but they're Marxists. If you read Horkheimer and for my sins I do, you realize that they themselves say it, they admired the Soviet Union. So they come to America and they hate America. They hate America even more than they hated the European worker. They think this place that offers them this salvation... But they're very curious about America, but at the same time, they say, "Well, the Americans are a bunch of boobs. They go to their movies, they're happy. They have their Hi-Fi sets, and they have this split level homes." I'm quoting Horkheimer there. And Horkheimer before he dies, by the way, he gives this interview in which he says, "Look, capitalism is better at producing material reward. The material needs of the individual are better taken care of by capitalism. And that's what makes capitalism so dangerous because it prevents revolution." And so that is really their work, is to denigrate all the institutions, the family, capitalist system, which they think is irrational, even the nation-state in some ways. They want to get all these out of the way.
Richard Reinsch (12:38):
It's critical legal theory itself, I think as you were alluding to. Kind of a straight Marxist critique of the law rooting it in power and wealth, and it's on behalf of that class, the capitalist class that our laws have been written and enforced. And critical race theory changes that in many respects, not changes it, but inserts race as the explicit motivation.
Mike Gonzalez (13:03):
Yeah. Right.
Richard Reinsch (13:03):
And that's what we're dealing with now is, race becomes the prism through which we understand all of American life and institutions. Trying to also get a grip on the ideology behind BLM is, to my mind what they do with history. In the sense of, it's just a battle of narratives. And heard Nikole Hannah-Jones say this about the founding, "We are contesting the dominant narrative with new facts." But the facts aren't really facts, they're interpretive methods to sort of change thinking. So history itself becomes very plastic.
Mike Gonzalez (13:38):
Yeah, no. They try to undo, and I'm going to paraphrase Aristotle here. Aristotle had this great maxim that says that, "The only thing that's denied to the gods is to undo what has been done." Well, they tried to undo that, they tried to do what has been denied to the gods. They tried to say, "No, these facts didn't happen. Or these facts are going to be interpreted in this other way." Another old maxim, "He who controls the past controls the future." So they tried to reinvent history along their lines alone. But when they do that, you mention Nikole Hannah-Jones, they just plainly lie. So when Nikole Hannahh-Jones says, "well, the revolution was fought because the colonist feared that the mother country Britain was going to take away the institution of slavery." That is just an outright lie. She gets that from a court decision, the Somerset decision in London, in the '70s. In which a slave who had been brought by an American planter to London, is found not to be a slave. But that's just a minuscule, that did not matter at all. That's not the reason... It came after the 1760s with John Adams, called The Revolution of the Mind. By that time the wheels are going. So Nikole Hannah-Jones, is a complete fabrication, that this is what motivated the revolution. And yet they say it. The New York Times had to actually retract that part because it was so embarrassing. But you're quite right when you talk about critical legal theory. What the critical theorists did in the '60s, is that they strongly influenced the New Left, cap N, cap L, especially Herbert Marcuse. And out of that ferment, grew critical legal theory. In fact, the godfather of critical legal theory, Duncan Kennedy said in an essay quote, "I was very influenced from the beginning by the two strands of confidential thought, the critical theory, the Western Marxist and post Marxist strand, which include Herbert Marcuse" et cetera. So he is a, strongly Duncan Kennedy and the other critical legal theorists, influenced by critical theory, but they just apply it to the law. They say, "Yes, this is super structure," which is a big thing for the critical theorists. It's almost like the movie, The Matrix. There's a super structure that is oppressive, but the critical legal theorists say, "It's written into the law." You're quite right. What the critical race theorist do, their innovation is to say, "It's race." And race is the big thing in America, as we know. So they look at everything through that lens.
Richard Reinsch (16:13):
Give us something else, another term we hear a lot, structural racism, systemic racism. How are they defining those?
Mike Gonzalez (16:22):
So that is really the apex of critical race theory. As I said, they believe that racism is systemic, structural. It's built as Richard Delgado says, "Into the little things that we do in everyday life." And so it's the little things we do in everyday life that need to be replaced. The power struggle needs to overthrow the way we just organize as a country. That is very similar to what the BLM founder, Alicia Garza says, that we need to get rid of the organizing principle of society. So it's not just racist laws or racist events, for which we have very strong laws already, by the way. We have the civil rights act. And if an employer can be shown to have acted in a racist manner, to have made a racist decision, he or she can be prosecuted and rightly so. We need to strongly prosecute people who have acted in a racist manner in the public sphere, where it is illegal to do so. So we do have very good laws already, thank God. Until 1964, we had legally imposed racism. In the South, even if you wanted to sell a sandwich at a lunch counter to a black person, you couldn't because the law forced you to say, "No, I can't." We changed that, and thank God for that. With the promise that we're going to have color blind policy hence forth. The critical race theorists hate that part of the Civil Rights Act and Civil Rights Movement. They hate the promise of color blindness, and so does BLM. They want to have color conscious policies.
Richard Reinsch (18:09):
So this is interesting too, as I read some of the literature from critical race theory, it seems to me with the Civil Rights Act, the way they're reading it is, it still protects capitalism. And what it's saying is, we have these competitive markets for jobs, education, incomes, and sometimes there are these breakdowns, there are baddies, they discriminate on the basis of race and we're going to help correct for that and make that difficult to do, and we're going to punish it if it happens. But it's still preserving the structure. And I take it, and this is like the intersectionality point, it's increasing the ways in which wrongs can happen. We're not really about that, we're about something else. We're about saying that, "Well, racism is actually so embedded that we need to really get inside the government and remake it and remake how it interacts with the economy, civil society," et cetera.
Mike Gonzalez (19:06):
Yeah. Again, to quote Delgado, he says that, "Racism happens in the ordinary business of society." But by the way, all critical race theorists and all the founders of Black Lives Matter, hate capitalism. And this is not just the founders of Black Lives Matter, but this includes the retail practitioners of critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, they're all on the record as saying that capitalism is racist and bad. And that is because they say that capitalism rewards the wrong criteria, that we have to change their criteria. It's not punctuality or hard work that we need to reward, we need to reward other areas of life, which they never really define. This is the old criticism of capitalism. For example, somebody who can hit a curve ball has a contract for $400 million, or somebody who's able to come up with an option to a new option or a put, can make millions and millions of dollars. Whereas a teacher has a salary that's $50,000. They say that is unfair, that's a result of capitalism. Obviously you're looking at a skillset. The people who can hit a curve ball are very, very, very few. And as long as there are thousands and thousands of fans, including myself, are willing to go to a ballpark, that person who has the ability to hit a curve ball is going to make a lot of money and should be rewarded. But they're at war with that system.
Richard Reinsch (20:43):
On this point, on Black Lives Matter in this... The way I think of it is like, it would be a racialized socialist system as I read this work. And it's the structural racism licenses tremendous power to get to that point. I wanted to just think for a minute about, you've written this book and you said, you're traveling a lot and dealing with critical race theory in the schools. Black Lives Matter this time last year looked ascendant, looked powerful, had a Democratic party unwilling to criticize it, unwilling to link it to any of the violent protests that were happening. Although, I think the linkages were obvious, you talk about those in the book. Seems to me though, that's not the case a year later, in the same way. It does seem like a lot of Americans, including a lot of minorities have confronted this and don't like it, and the progress has been halted, even though there's still these ongoing attempts to do things. But seems to me a lot of Americans have woken up. And that was my worry last summer was, where is everybody?
Mike Gonzalez (21:53):
Well, there's two things here. One is, we're very much living with the effects of Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020. We have what I call the twin legacies of 2020 and Black Lives Matter. One is the critical race theory, which has now in invaded all aspects of our lives. That is a direct result of the summer of 2020 and Black Lives Matter. The reason why your daughter, her AP Spanish class just spent the whole semester studying systems of oppression in Guatemala rather than Cervantes, that is a direct result of Black Lives Matter. The reason why many people listening to us right now will be dragged by HR into a quote unquote anti-racism training program in their places of work, which are quite racist or break the law themselves, that is a result of Black Lives Matter. So that's one legacy.
The other one is a huge spike in crime, in homicides that we're seeing in our cities. And we put anywhere between 25% and 35% in 50 to 75 largest cities in America, where a lot of Americans live, especially impoverished Americans, that is also the result of Black Lives Matter, and studies substantiate that. So the America that we live in today has made worse and inferior because of Black Lives Matter. Now, what you said is exactly right. A lot of Americans are saying, "No, we don't like this." That's the reason why you see these divisive conflicts arising from coast to coast. Because Americans who are quite attached to Liberty uniquely, exceptionally attached to Liberty, say, "No, we don't want our lives torn up this way. And we don't want the system thrown out this way. And we don't want the foundations of America to be pulled out from under us." And so opinion polls have shown that support for Black Lives Matter has steadily declined. But that is because a lot of people like me, a lot of people... not just me, a lot of people have been writing this, but not the press, that the journalist not writing this. So I have two people whom I blame for the fact that many Americans still do not know the truth about Black Lives Matter. One is the mainstream media, they did not cover Black Lives Matter.
And the other one is the political class. The Republican party has not been great in this. Yeah, they'll pound the table about Antifa. And that's because Antifa is... We don't know Antifa as well, but it looks like there's a lot more white than Black Lives Matter. Antifa doesn't have Black Lives Matter in its title, but Antifa doesn't have anywhere near the power that Black Lives Matter does. Black Lives Matter has a curriculum now that is being taught in the majority of the countries 14,000 school districts. Black Lives Matter has a bill in Congress. Black Lives Matter is partnering with the musical Hamilton. So even though we hear less about it and there's less support, we're living in a Black Lives Matter world.
Richard Reinsch (24:53):
It's interesting too... I didn't know it'll be in majority of school districts, that's interesting. One of the things that's worked in their favor I think, in a sense of the systemic racism point is, there are pretty stark differences between whites and blacks on wealth differences, income differences, health differences, private property ownership, home ownership, things like that. And we can debate the causes of that. You and I probably agree on the causes, but that's not what most people in official positions of power are willing to accept. And that seems to give rise to saying, "Oh yeah, this is systemic racism."
So I guess one question is, how do you deal with that point? We can talk about causes, we can try to make the arguments, but it's difficult to break through in that regard. And something else is this point about crime, that BLM has always been associated with, has latched on to. The violent crime, mass incarceration and these differences in incarceration rates between blacks, and primarily black men and white men. How should we think about that?
Mike Gonzalez (26:06):
Well, that's one of the reasons I wrote my book and it's all in my book, I want to expose all of this. Look, if we want to solve all these problems, we need to talk about them. We need to talk about the causes of the disparities. First of all, we need to disaggregate black, we need to disaggregate the data and whites. We need to look at for example, if you disaggregate from country of origin, you realize the Nigerian Americans and Ghanaian Americans have a much higher income per household than white Americans. Professor at Columbia University, Van Tran who does very interesting studies, looking at the second generation West Indians in New York.
Why second generation? Because they're the children of immigrants. The immigrant is the first generation. So they don't have an accent. They have what Van Tran calls zero visibility as an immigrant and 100% visibility as blacks. So in other words, they're going to encounter racism. If there's a racist store owner and they're walking into the store, the store owner is going to be chasing them around. If it's a racist policeman, the policeman is going to be harder on them because they're black. However, the second generation West Indians that have been looked at by this professor at Columbia in New York, have closed the gap across eight measures with whites and not completely, but a great deal.
And why is that? He's looked at the family structure. Not only is the family intact, but the parents are very strict. They live in the same neighborhoods in New York, they live in the same inner city neighborhoods and yet they force their children to come in. When the lights go on the children, come in, they succumb less to peer pressure. There's a number of reasons why they do better in the cultural indicators. And then you have also to look at black Americans, native black Americans with intact family. Again, the measurements improve vastly. So you have to disaggregate... You have to look at that and white Americans, and look at white Americans with intact families and white Americans with no family, the father is not there. All they did is this functions that we know about, they don't do very well. Family dysfunction in this structure of family is an equal opportunity killer, is color blind.
So it depends on how we look at the data and how we look at the cultural indicators, and then we'll have a much better picture. But in terms of mass incarceration, as I've mentioned in my book in 2019, the percentage of black Americans who were being put in prison had been declining at a much faster rate than that of whites. So that was improving just as we entered the year of 2020, after the harrowing death of George Floyd, and the deft use of that video by the Black Lives Matters organizations.
Richard Reinsch (29:16):
Excuse me, you have an interesting history in the book which I was not aware of. The Soviet Union forms and pretty quickly they were thinking about ways they can infiltrate countries. This is a missionary... communism being a missionary ideology. And one way they think they can penetrate America is through the injustices that black Americans had experienced. And they start reaching out to intellectuals first to try to find ways to build inroads. And as I read your book, I took you to be making the point that this is just a common problem in America, the racism that we've had. And it becomes a source of... It's been very difficult to deal with. But it becomes a point of infiltration. And it's been there, it predates Black Lives Matter. As you pointed in the book, you go back to the '70s and the '60s. You have an interesting chapter, "Then the '60s Happened," in terms of a change in thinking amongst intellectuals about how to use race, or what racism should mean in the law. So this is ongoing, but the point being, I think is... your point being, it's not about the racism. Racism is the entry point to increase or demonstrably increase socialism in American lives and thinking.
Mike Gonzalez (30:45):
Yeah, that's an excellent point, Richard. Actually thinking back to the '20s, right after the Soviet Union is created. And they really see huge potential, they actually want to divide America into black America and white America, and they invite black intellectuals... Let's not forget that at the same time, you have the Harlem Renaissance, which had seen incredible outpouring of writing of music, of a population that had been enslaved just a few decades earlier, shows what it can do once it's free. All these great... Langston Hughes is a good writer, and yet they become enamored of the Soviet Union, and then he goes to the Soviet Union.
W.E.B Du Bois, a very insightful black writer also becomes in love with the Soviet Union. In fact, he applies to join the party right before he dies in the '60s, he goes to see Mao and everything else. However, rank and file black Americans have no truck with this, they don't want it. All they're asking for is for their white compatriots to accept them into American life. They want to be accepted. They don't like communism. They understand that communism is going to destroy their families, it's going to destroy their livelihoods. So there's a rejection.
And in fact, the Soviet Union in the '50s ends up giving up. It realizes that black America has been a complete failure and it gives up this idea of dividing America. It has won only intellectuals. And just like it does with white Americans, by the way. It won only intellectuals. Rank and file families, whether they're black or white of Americans say, "No, thank you" to the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, following the Cuban Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in China, we have a lot of American students do become radicalized. But also they're radicalized by the fact that the critical theorists are here. Marcuse, the guru of the new left. And then you do have the Black Panthers. You have the Weathermen, you have Students for Democratic Society. You have all these radical groups running around, the Black Liberation Army, that are quite the Malcolm X, that are quite Marxist and quite revolutionary in their outlook, Stokely Carmichael goes to Havana and so forth.
And that is really the people from that era go on to influence Black Lives Matter. Let's not forget that the intellectual mentor of the Black Lives Matters organizations founders is none other than Angela Davis. Angela Davis is the grand old Dame of American communism. She runs on the communist party ticket as vice-president twice. She still goes to colleges, universities, she's still around and she's very active. She goes to college and universities, she says, "I'm a communist, and I've always been a communist." And these poor college students from Santa Barbara to UVA stand up and give her a rousing standing ovation because they don't know any better. And she was a student of Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis. So there's a direct link between the critical theorists and Black Lives Matter through Angela Davis. Which as, I pointed out in my book, BLM: The Making of a new Marxist Revolution.
Richard Reinsch (34:01):
You talk about the '60s happened, you have a chapter call that. What do you mean? How did that change?
Mike Gonzalez (34:10):
Well, as I said, I think that the... First of all, there's Vietnam. Second of all, blacks have had it with segregation in the south, and they're quite rightly demonstrating and marching. And all of a sudden these suburban white kids in the north are seeing on TV what is taking place, and they rightly don't want to ignore it anymore. And then there's the Vietnam war, which is kind of leaderless and Johnson just gets us further into it, without really any plan for success. And that provides a spark for, I think, a lot of radicals to come in and try to revolutionize Americans. The leaders of the Weathermen look at Che and look at Fidel Castro, and they say, "These are white law students or white medical students who are able to revolutionize an entire society, we can do the same thing here." Of course, they can't. And they proved to be the keystone crux of terrorism. But they, as I said, I think their main influence... Because they failed to revolutionize America. America does come through, but now the people they have intellectually influenced are changing us more deeply than they ever dreamed in the '60s.
Richard Reinsch (35:30):
Thinking about this moment that we're in, what do you make of the success of Black Lives Matter in the suburbs? I know we've been talking about it. You've been describing it with a Marxist analysis, has having built on a Marxist analysis, I don't dispute that. But what do you think is going on in say wealthy suburbs? I think about the one I live in where we had Black Lives Matter protests, which were just basically white kids. What do you think is going on there? Is this a feeling of religious like characteristics, of this movement filling a need in their lives, a void in their lives or what's going on?
Mike Gonzalez (36:06):
Yeah, that's a good question. I do discuss in my chapter on the '60s, the manipulation of white guilt. And I think that a lot of people looked at the harrowing death of George Floyd, this awful nine minutes captured on film or video rather, and they were... Nobody looked at that and came away not disgusted by it. And I think the message that Black Lives Matter wants is social justice, has resonated because it has been filtered by the press. The press will not mention any of the things I mentioned in my book. They will not mention that the Black Lives Matter leaders are Marxists. They never mentioned that they want to completely change the American system, American society. The press just says that what they want to do is discuss history for the first time, that people like me, we don't want history to be discussed. That is a complete canard by the way. And not only do... I want more history to be taught.
I want Frederick Douglass, I want even W.E.B Du Bois, even though I disagree with him, I want him taught. I want American students to learn more about this, not less. And I tell you that I'm in close contact with everyone in my space. And I don't know anybody who says, "No, history should not be taught." Whether it's the history of slavery or segregation or Jim Crow. So I think that the people in the suburbs, good Americans, my neighbors, who pitch Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns, in many ways, they're completely unaware of what is taking place. They completely unaware of who they are, the Black Lives Matter leaders, they lead busy lives. They don't want their lifestyle to be upended. They don't want their lifestyle to... If they did, they would just sell their big houses in the suburbs and share the money with the poor. So that's not what they want. They don't want their lives to change, they just want social justice.
What they're embracing though, when they embrace Black Lives Matter, the organizations, is something that will have very nefarious consequences on everybody. Now, there are people who, I don't know how, make the case and say, "Well, you have to differentiate the leaders and the organizations from the movement." The movement is a formless word. What matters is the organizations. They have millions and millions and millions of dollars. They have a bill in Congress, they're making real change in America. The Soviet Union had a great term for people who just went along and refuse to believe that the Soviet Union was evil, they called them useful idiots. That's a harsh term to use for people who are well-intentioned but misinformed today regarding Black Lives Matter. But there is a certain link there to the old Soviet term.
Richard Reinsch (39:05):
Essentially, one of the ways, something that we're seeing now, federal courts turn back this attempt... and I think this is directly related to BLM, the Biden administration through the agricultural department. Making loans available to farmers who are minorities, but not to white farmers who may be even more financially disadvantaged, who knows. And the court system said, "Well, you can't do that. We have laws here about discrimination, what it entails, how to prove it. And you're offering this loan to someone just on the basis of skin color, without even proving the discrimination or any of the ways we tried to have evidence for that." So that's just one sign of... And it's quite striking to me to think about. And a lot of state governments have done similar things. So we really are dividing ourselves up by race at that point., if that were to continue.
Mike Gonzalez (39:59):
This is a ginormous step backward. This is something that is very serious and we must really be very aware of, and it's also a direct result of Black Lives Matter. Because this is the first time since the end of Jim Crow that we have the US government not affording Americans equal protection under the law because of their race. We decided as a country that we're going to stop doing that. We decided as a country that the Plessy era did not work, the separate but equal did not work, that discriminating on the basis of race did not work.
To go back to that, which is exactly what CRT and BLM wants, it would be... In fact, I think most Americans would say, "No, you're quite right. A judge in Florida said that the Raphael Warnock amendment that president Biden so unwisely signed into law was unconstitutional, and you can make these decisions based on pigmentation." And thank God for that. And I hope that every time this is tried again, a judge will step in and say, "This is little matter of the constitution, you can't do that."
Richard Reinsch (41:15):
So it seems to me, it's interesting sort of that parts of the ideology, trying to find legal application. So it seems to me like defund the police has already proven to be a failure, as we knew it would. Seems to be in the bluest of jurisdictions that it's being turned back. And even those leaders in those cities, while they might say defund the police, they're also trying to recruit more police, the articles that I've read. But something like this, like making loans available, you can sell that as, "Well, we're trying to help people who are the victims of past discrimination," something like that. And that might actually work. So it seems there's different parts of the agenda that might have greater or lesser amounts of success.
Mike Gonzalez (41:56):
Well, it didn't work. Because we could say, "If you can show how somebody was discriminated against and he incurred a loss because of the discrimination, we can make him whole," but you have to have evidentiary rules. We have to be able to prove that this happened, in which case somebody broke the law and we're going to make a right. That is different from a blanket, "We're going to give Oprah Winfrey this benefit, and we're going to give Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio this benefit, that we're going to deny some poor sharecropper in Alabama because his ancestry came from Northern Ireland." That just doesn't sell.
With regards to the defund the police, I visit the Black Lives Matter site fairly often. They're putting up all sorts of videos on how successful they're being in stopping the building, not just the prisons, but the building of prison hospitals and prison psychiatric wards. What do they think they're doing? They're very proud of this. So they're proud of the fact that they're stopping the building of hospitals, where are sick prisoners going to go? What they want, and Patrisse Cullors is very open about this in a video she made just a few months ago, is they want to not just defund the police, they want to end the prison system and they want to end the court system, and no society can live like that.
And we also have the rogue prosecutors in American cities, in San Francisco, in Boston, in LA, in many different places, even nearby in Virginia, which the police are making fewer arrests because they're pulling back, surprise, surprise, because of the criticism they've come under. But when they do make arrests, the prosecutors are putting these people back onto the street. They're not prosecuting, they're not charging them with anything. Do you want to know why have a 25 to 35% increase in the homicide rate? There is a pretty good reason why. So I think even though politically to say defund the police... And by the way, Cori Bush just made a video two weeks ago, this Congresswoman who's a BLM supporter saying, "No, I want to defund the police. We need to get rid of the police." So I think we're living, even though we may not know it, we're living in a BLM world.
Richard Reinsch (44:29):
That's interesting. So as you have traveled and thought about these issues a lot, what do you think is key to getting beyond this moment?
Mike Gonzalez (44:38):
I think exposure of the issues, was just the reason I wrote my book, BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. I think to prove to people... I think that's already succeeded, as you put it yourself earlier, support. The polls show that yes, especially among white Americans and this Americans who designated themselves as Hispanic, support for BLM has dropped substantially. I think that we need to continue to do this work. I think we need to have a real reckoning in America. Not the false faux racial reckoning, that the journalists, that the media class tried to pretend that we had last year. We need to have a real reckoning of who we are as a country. What do our would be leaders, people who want to lead us, what are they saying? Do they think we're evil? Do they think that we're systemically racist? Do they think we need to overturn the system? We need to put them on the spot and then make them accountable. And so I think that that is the way. First, we need to have a revolution of the mind, so like the colonist had in the 1760s when Britain had intolerable acts, and then we need to act on that revolution of the mind. Once we change minds, the politicians, even the bad politicians will do the right thing. That's a Milton Friedman quote. "We can't expect just the good politicians, we need to create such an environment in which the bad politicians will do the right thing."
Richard Reinsch (46:05):
All right, Mike Gonzales. We've been talking with the author of BLM. Thank you so much for your time today.
Mike Gonzalez (46:11):
Thank you very much.
Angelo Codevilla comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations. Our conversation focuses on Codevilla’s main argument that American statesmen increasingly fail to understand the nature and purpose of statecraft: the achievement of peace. So what does it mean to achieve America’s peace? […]
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Hello, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Steven Smith about his new book, Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law. Steven Smith is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, at the University of San Diego. He's the author of numerous books, including The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom, Law's Quandary, and, he's been on this podcast... I think this is your third appearance, Steven, so we're glad that you're-
Steven Smith (00:47):
I think I might be.
Richard Reinsch (00:48):
... a repeat offender. It was Pagans and Christians in the City, I think was the most recent appearance.
Steven Smith (00:53):
I think we did have a conversation about that one, yes.
Richard Reinsch (00:56):
It's great to have you back, and you've written another provocative book here, Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law. So tell us, what's going on?
Steven Smith (01:04):
Well, the book combines some things I wanted to write about various subjects that are all connected, I think, by the problem of authority and questions of authority. I tried to have a lead into that by quoting Hannah Arendt's, I think, very intriguing claim that she made about the middle of the last century that authority has disappeared from the modern world. We no longer know what it is. In losing authority, she said, "We have lost the groundwork of the world." So that's pretty provocative, but also puzzling and raises lots of questions. So I used that as the way to get into some of these various questions. Some of them are more standard law professor type questions about constitutional interpretation and statutory interpretation, and so forth. Some of them are more straight jurisprudence questions that legal philosophers like H. L. A. Hart and so forth have dealt with. Some of them have to do with things that I think are really on the minds of and kind of worrisome to a lot of people today about cancel culture, living with lies, that sort of stuff, is also the subject of one of the chapters.
Richard Reinsch (02:13):
Yeah. I'll confess this. So coming to your book, before I started reading it, what got me interested in it and thinking that this could be an interesting interview is just looking at contemporary America right now. We've got this heavy movement, we've covered it extensively at Law & Liberty, that insists basically America is founded on a fraud. It goes beyond even the old progressive claim that we're ill-founded, but that we're just founded on something like slavery and racism, and the perpetuation of that through our institutions. Then, of course, the way in which political claims are debated, or rather not debated, in many respects, in our country and how we label one another as not just wrong, but people we struggle to even dialogue with. Just thinking about right now, this question about masks reemerging with the Delta Variant in certain states, and are masks going to be required and how we deal with people who don't want to wear masks and vice versa. All of this, I mean, the general tenor of our politics makes me think there is nothing in our constitutional order that we see as transcending heated contemporary differences. Do you see it that way and has that led into what you're doing in the book?
Steven Smith (03:29):
Yes and no. I think, actually, it's turned out, with all of the anti-racism concerns and the COVID restrictions and so forth, that there are a lot of ways that the book has immediate applications. More than I thought it would have as I was doing it or even when I was pretty much finished with it, which was I finished writing it really almost a couple years ago, before a lot of this happened. You know it takes a while to get something published. In the meantime, it's been gratifying and alarming to see that I think there are quite a lot of applications to some of our on the ground current practical concerns. One way to get into that, I suppose, would be to say that our system of government is based on the idea that government has to come from the consent of the governed. That's a foundational proposition. It's in the Declaration of Independence. It's been recited innumerable times over the course of our history. That's kind of axiomatic in many ways. It's also a privilege familiar, and lots of people have written about this, that that's a problematic idea. Do we really have the consent of the governed? I deal with that in what I think is a little different way saying, well, in a certain sense, no, it's a fiction to say that we have the consent of the governed, but we can have accounts of authority, I think, that can be based on fictions if the fictions are widely believed. I try to combine the consent of the governed idea with the idea that people like John Finnis, but other people have developed a coordination account of authority. You know that authority comes from the need for coordination, not just punishing offenders and so forth and anti-social criminals and so forth, but coordination that'll allow us to coordinate for the public good a lot of our projects that we have. So that we have a need for that and the ability, as Finnis and others say, of some group or institution to provide that coordination is the foundation of authority. I find that to be quite a plausible account, but it creates a question of where do people get or where do some person or institution get that ability to provide coordination. The answer, I think, is, at least in part, they get it because we think they have authority. In our system, we think they have authority goes back to the consent of the governed. So the consent of the governed does sort of figure in authority, even if it is, to some extent, a fiction, I think. If it's a fiction that's widely believed and beneficial, I think it can be the basis of actual authority. But if the fiction becomes frayed and so forth, there's discussion, then the authority can disappear. I think we're seeing real concerns about that just over the last couple of years.
Richard Reinsch (06:24):
What do you think Hannah Arendt meant by the modern world faces the evacuation of authority? What did she mean by that?
Steven Smith (06:34):
She has a long answer on that that traces this back to Roman ideas and so forth. To be honest, I don't really go into that much because she's not the only person who has claimed that. I quote several other people who have also said... Søren Kierkegaard for example, and other more recent observers who say that authority has disappeared from the modern world or that it's very problematic or that we don't understand what it is. So I say upfront that this isn't going to be an exegetical sort of work trying to figure out what any person in particular had in mind. But I admit, I use it more as a point of departure to explore. I keep coming back to Arendt's claim, but I'm still using it less to figure out what exactly she meant and more as a point of departure to consider a lot of things that I mention.
Richard Reinsch (07:25):
I haven't read or written a lot, but that ground work of the world. I mean, is this some sort of classical-
Steven Smith (07:35):
I doubt she meant what I end up-
Richard Reinsch (07:37):
... classical political philosophy account of reason and politics? I don't know. Question on consent of the governed though. My understanding, the root of that concept from Harold Berman's Law and Revolution is monastical reform in the early Medieval Period. The principle being within monasteries, voting amongst the monks on who would be your abbot, what would be the rules that would govern, and the idea being what touches all concerns all and therefore, should receive consent by all. In my understanding, that's like a natural law root of that, taking man as a dignified being created by God seriously and His reason seriously, therefore, is consent as to what touches him and law. I've always thought that's not someone trying to articulate a fictional account, but maybe a truthful account of who man is and how he should be governed, and then that spreads one account. As Berman documents, that makes its way through a lot of Western legal thinking, in particular in the English Medieval law. Then it comes out in what I would think of as the good Liberalism and the American founding, as... Then it becomes a more general political teaching. So, I guess, when you describe the consent of the governed maybe as a youthful fiction, I think, or it's a better fiction than other fictions, but what do you make of that? Then also, a consent of the governed, but in American context would be Republican or representative consent. Not consent of each and every person, but of those who have appointed, so necessarily that's why the Philadelphia Convention wants state ratifying conventions, not just the state legislatures, because it wants that approval apart just from state authorities. So what do you make of all that?
Steven Smith (09:38):
Good question. A couple points here. One is as far as the genealogy of the concept, I don't really try to trace that through here. I mean, to the extent, I rely on historical work in this book, it's more on Edmund Morgan's, I think, really good book on Inventing the People. He talks about the idea of the people and consent and so forth. But he's starting with the English Civil Wars in the 17th century, I think, is what he's mostly talking about and that's as far back as I go here. But I'm sure the idea does go farther back. Berman's book, one I've relied a lot on for other purposes, but I haven't really focused on it for this purpose. I do quite a bit of work in the area of religious freedom, and other people do, and trace, you might say, very related ideas way back to Tertullian and so forth, that religion has to be consensual. Those things are not unrelated, I think, to this idea that authority needs to be accepted by... It can't just be coercively imposed and so forth. So the fundamental idea probably has a lot of roots. It's also one that I don't in any way mean to disparage it. I mean, I think it's a very valuable, and for lots of purposes, it contains real truth. But just in a couple steps, I mean, the most common objection, I think, though to this as an account of the authority of, say, modern governments like ours is that most of us never really did have an opportunity to consent. No one ever sat us down and said, "Do you consent to be governed by this regime? If so, initial here." We just didn't. Theorists who try to make up for that with theories of implied consent or constrictive consent say some good things, and I think even relevant and valuable things, but don't really supply actual consent by most of us. So that's why I argue that it's a fiction. But in explaining how a fiction works, I do say that a fiction will work... It needs to satisfy a couple of conditions. One is plausibility. It doesn't need to be true, but it needs to be true-ish. You can't really work with a fiction, even a movie or a book and a big political fiction like this unless it is true-ish. The fiction of the consent of the governed, I think, is quite true-ish for our system, but its plausibility does hinge on things like voting rights and freedom of speech. These are all, I think, very valuable things. So it's a fiction that, though it is partly fictional, that's had, I think, very beneficial effects. It's an ennobling fiction, you might say, and one that works to make government, I would say, better, more enlightened, and so forth than it would be coming from some other fiction. For example, the parties for the vanguard of the Proletariat, for example, and it's going to lead us to the revolution. So it's a very valuable fiction in that sense. Again, by fiction, I try to carefully distinguish between a fiction and a lie. I mean, those blur together at some point, but they're not the same thing, I think. In saying that this is a fiction, I don't mean to be saying it's our system is based on lies. I think it's based on things that are partly fictional, but valuable, ennobling fictions in so far as we act on them.
Richard Reinsch (12:59):
So you've used, you said, true-ish, truthful fiction. Is there a truthful account of legal authority and how would we know it?
Steven Smith (13:09):
Yeah, well, towards the end of the book, I try to get into that because the first chapters are mostly trying to expound the idea that authority can be based on a fiction... what we call authority, the functions of authority can be based on a fiction, but that one of the consequences of that is that is that there are a lot of questions that we perpetually debate, seemingly never reach answers and that one of the reasons for that is that we're treating what's at bottom of fiction as if it were a fact, as if there were some fact of the matter that could settle what the Constitution means, for example, for some particular thing or what a statute means. To the extent that those things are based on fictions, there's not going to be any fact of the matter that can settle a lot of those debates. So I think that helps to explain why we never do reach any sort of real answers and we probably never will, because it's not the kind of thing that could yield those kinds of answers. But that's still dealing with, we call it authority, I call it authority in the first part of the book, but later I suggest this might be a faux authority. So if you ask, as you just did, is there any sort of true authority, could there be? The latter chapters, the last two chapters and the epilogue, try to address that question more directly. I might mention the evolution here. Some of this is based on an article I did about 10 years ago which suggested that no, there couldn't really be true authority. Even God's authority is not exactly true authority. But reflecting on that in the intervening period, I've come to the idea that no, that's a mistake. I think our modern commitment to autonomy and equality is so emphatic that I think it makes it very difficult for us to recognize what true authority would be. But I argue in the last chapter and the epilogue that, for example, in a Christian perspective, I think there's, in some ways, a standard answer to this, although one that probably most, even Christians, today no longer think in these terms. That is, yeah, there is a true authority. The king of kings, the early governments that we respect have a kind of authority, but it's a shadow of the true authority that is there and someday will actually be more operative. I try to explain how that kind of authority could satisfy the conditions of real authority in a way that Earthly governments just really can't.
Richard Reinsch (15:46):
Something you also write about in the book is anthropology and the significance of who we think man is, what do we make of ourselves, what are we for, as getting at this question of legal authority. So, as you were saying, the dominant understanding, I think, particularly amongst elite classes, is we're autonomous, we give the law to ourselves from deep within our conscience, which we conceive of in a very subjective way. Who the human person is is growing in sophistication with his own law giving or her law giving. The other conception of that is, I think you used this term, which I like that term, is that we're deeply relational and we're not autonomous. We're dependent on others for everything, and that's a recognition of wisdom there, that we need other people not just for contracts, but in deeply embedded ways. But, I guess, my question to you is, and that's the position you side with, I largely agree with that position, what does that mean though for law and for government? Might that give us a way for thinking about it that moves it beyond a fiction? Even the noble fiction you describe.
Steven Smith (16:58):
Well, I guess, I think that... Again, I think this is, and obviously there are lots of different views on this, including lots of different Christian views and so I'm not suggesting that even all Christians would agree with this, but I think it's actually a fairly common Christian position to say that... Let's say that the governments of this world have a kind of authority, I sometimes call it faux authority, but I don't mean that it's not real or that it's not valuable. They have a kind of authority, but it isn't really the ultimate authority. So to that extent, human law, positive law, will never have the really ultimate authority or reflect the kind of ultimate authority that, say, divine law would have. That, I think, is actually a fairly... I don't think that's anarchic or nihilistic or anything, I think that's a pretty healthy understanding to remind us, on the one side, yeah, there is a real authority there, but on the other hand, it isn't really the ultimate authority and we need to keep that in mind. I think that reminds us of the limits of law. It prevents law and government from becoming objects of idolatry. But in this book, I'm not really trying to argue that on theological grounds at all. I'm just trying to say... My take out point here is actually H. L. A. Hart's famous argument about the gunman situation where he says a gunman holds you up and says your money or your life. You give him your money, but you don't say that you were obligated to do so. You might say you were obliged to do so. That was Hart's point, which quickly, I think, means the gunman didn't really have authority. The gunman did give you reasons to do something, but it wasn't truly obligation that he imposed and it wasn't really authority that the gunman exercised. I try to argue that Hart was right about that and if you extend that logic, that would apply actually to most other contemporary accounts of what we legal theorists and others typically call authority. That closely examined, even if the accounts are persuasive, they don't really yield authority. They yield reasons to comply, but not truly authority if we think hard about what authority would be. I think that's the situation we're in for most legal purposes and so on. Again, there's nothing particularly worrisome about that. Then someone might well say, my colleague Laurie Claus or [Heidi Herr? 00:19:32] would say, "We should be law-abetting anarchists. If we're decent people, we will follow the law, but not because it truly obligates us or reflects real authority." I don't fully agree with that. I think it actually does give us a kind of practical authority, but again, not the ultimate authority. Again, I think that's healthy to keep that in mind, to recognize that, that this isn't ultimate authority.
Richard Reinsch (19:56):
Your chapter on totalitarian governments and through particular experience of Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and dealing with the Czech Communist government, I thought was instructive of, we can call it a fiction, but I think just a lie about government and what government can do, what it should do regarding people and orders and commands. So that might be... I guess, just, if you contrast that with consent of the governed, it seems to be... If we're going to say consent of the governed is a fiction, it's a fiction, I think, tends to build on a truthful, dignified, conception of the human person. Whereas I think what Václav Havel was confronting, and you use of the example of, say, the grocery store owner in Czechoslovakia who complies with the government and puts up some sign or something like that and wants to indicate he's with the regime to avoid any problems. So that sort of society which is blind obedience and they have control over what you're doing seems to move in a direction that disregards human nature or thinks it can remake human nature.
Steven Smith (21:08):
Yeah. So I do have a chapter on that. Honestly, I wrote that chapter mostly five or six years ago I think. It's become, I think, more relevant in a worrisome way in the intervening years.
Richard Reinsch (21:25):
You touch on this in the book, but I was thinking of last summer, store owners putting up Black Lives Matter signs to try and protect their property. Videos I've seen of people putting their fists in the air to avoid being persecuted while they're eating or something by marchers and protesters. You talk about that this was well noted, sessions people get put into at work where they have to talk about diversity or inclusivity and say things they don't really believe because they don't want to lose their job. So it's not as foreign as we might think.
Steven Smith (22:03):
Oh, not at all. As I say, I think, unfortunately much more pertinent than it was when I wrote it five or six years ago. When I did it, I thought, "There are some analogies here," but I think the analogies are much stronger now than they were then. Let's just say Havel... A couple points here. I distinguish between fictions and lies. I say that our system has been based on a fiction, but that's not the same as a lie. One of the ways of distinguishing is to say, "Is this a proposition that people are willingly entering into, engaging with the fiction the way they do when they go to a movie, for example? Because it's plausible and because it yields benefits." In the case of a movie, it might be wisdom or it might be entertainment. In the case of a political fiction, it's authority, necessarily coordinating authority. So as a fiction, what starts out as a fiction becomes less and less plausible and also less and less beneficial if people continue to be basically induced or compelled to recite it. It becomes harder to say that's just a fiction, then it becomes more of a lie. That's what Havel said was pervasive in Czechoslovakia that he was living in and was probably true through most of the Communist countries, I think, at that point. He thought that this was just deadening to the soul. So in that chapter, I tried to investigate whether he was right in saying that these were lies, but it turns out to be a more complicated question than it might seem to be at first. But in the end, I think he was right. Also, was he right that this was deadening to the soul as he claimed that it was? I tried to investigate that as well. Anthropology again comes into this, but if you think we are beings who have a special dignity by trying to live in accordance with truth, there's a sense in which it really is deadening to the soul, I think, to live in a situation in which you are constantly being forced to recite things that you don't believe. Havel was, I think, a powerful witness to that. Solzhenitsyn was another, and so forth. But I think that's becoming increasingly true in lots of aspects of our life today. I mean, the book is now a year or two old. Douglas Murray's book, I've forgotten the title, the-
Richard Reinsch (24:20):
The Madness of Crowds.
Steven Smith (24:22):
Yeah, yeah. I think makes a pretty good case for that. I just think if you work in the university as I do, that this just becomes more true every year. I don't know if the trajectory will continue. I certainly hope it won't. But Havel's sign, the one that he, in his famous essay, talks about, is the grocer who has to put up "workers of the world unite." I sometimes thought that academics who might get forced to recite things, do certain training, affirm certain things, maybe ought to just put up a sign in their own windows, and maybe I'll do this at some point if it comes to that, workers of the world unite as a way of invoking Havel's essay because I do think this becomes a pretty distressing situation that applies to us as well.
Richard Reinsch (25:10):
So one question that comes to mind here is so what would account in... How does that good fiction begin to break down? I guess, a related question is what do you make of loyalty? Where does that come from?
Steven Smith (25:24):
Loyalty. Every now and then, I've thought of... Josiah Royce wrote quite a bit about loyalty and self-worth and every now and then, I've thought of trying to undertake some project on that, but I never got very far with it. So I think it would be related to this. I think one reason, for example, to cooperate in the project that may be based on what's, in a certain sense, a fiction is a sense of loyalty to, well, the enterprise, to those who maybe have sacrificed a great deal to get the enterprise going and to start it and so forth. So I think they do relate. But then when you ask something like what's the difference between a system like ours based on what I regard as a wholesome, let's say, ennobling fiction and something like a fiction in, well, Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia and so forth. So I think there are a couple differences. One you've alluded to already, but some fictions, I think, are going to have more beneficial effects than others. Our fiction of consent of the governed is one that tends to have pretty admirable, desirable implications like it promotes voting rights, it promotes democratic participation, it promotes freedom of speech, I think, because those things all follow from the fiction and make the fiction more plausible or true-ish, and those are good things I think and so forth. Whereas the other fictions won't be nearly as wholesome or beneficial. Like Marxist fiction, so I would say for example. But the other thing is, I don't really endorse this idea, I just consider it as a possibility at one point in the book, that maybe fictions have a certain kind of career of life course or something that something begins as a fiction and it seems so true-ish and so ennobling that it just really doesn't seem like a fiction at all. Maybe saying that government must be based on the consent of the governed. When Thomas Jefferson says it, seems not really even a... more like a self-evident truth as he said. Then perhaps over the course of time, things change, whatever, and the fiction becomes less plausible, so it moves more into the realm of a lie more than a fiction. That may have been true with the sorts of fictions that Havel was talking about. Maybe early in the Communist Revolution, maybe those were such exhilarating propositions that they seemed to be not just fictions. But, by his point, I think it's clear they're lies. You wonder whether a similar career might apply to some of our fictions, but I just pose that as a question. I think I'm reluctant to give even a real tentative answer to those.
Richard Reinsch (28:09):
You talk about by the '70s, it was hard for most people behind the Iron Curtain to believe in, say, Marxist revolutionary claims because of what they had observed. I think one of the things they had observed and felt was their regime did not respect them as persons and wanted to remake them in an abstracted image and that just hadn't worked. That raises the question of truth. I think in the case of our regime, what I think has happened in the shorthand is the moral relativism somehow disestablishes truthful claims, but it doesn't stay in relative land. Somehow relativism has opened itself up to these claims of identity as being the valid way to think about what it means to be a human person. Identity, race, sexuality, gender, whatever. That's now what a lot of people are latching onto. So something like consent of the governed doesn't really make a lot of sense because, well, that's just how the dominant group stays in power or something like that. So I think it's a two-step process. Relativism then turns inward and looks for another source of... You can't stay a relativist for very long. It's sort of has looked for something else and this is pre-reason, pre-logic, it's an identity and some ascriptive characteristic, and that becomes, well, this is how we should think about government and who we are and blah, blah, blah.
Steven Smith (29:42):
Yeah. Well, I agree that definitely that sort of trend is very apparent. It may relate to this consent of the governed proposition in a way I hadn't exactly thought of. But to tell you the truth, I am developing more in another book that I'm working on, pretty much finished, but has more to do with freedom of conscience, but Jefferson's proposition that we have inalienable rights and the government has to be based on the consent of the governed were based... he claimed were self-evident truths, but they were linked to the idea of a creator who makes these things true and endows us with the rights and so forth. So in a certain sense, they get their normative value from theistic premises, I would say, that I won't say that people no longer believe them. A lot of people still believe them. I believe them. But that have become publicly unavailable. They're not available to use in public debate and so forth. So once you get rid of the foundation of those kinds of claims, you move to something else. I think we have moved increasingly to... In this other book that I'm working on on conscience, I think, conscience becomes less of a response to truth and God as it was for Thomas Moore and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and more of just a matter of personal authenticity. Authenticity then becomes itself problematic because once somebody's... What gives them their... a person their identity to which they can be authentic. So there's a natural dissolution into various forms of trying to figure out what identity means. So there is that, I think, movement to identity and I think you see that very clearly in a lot of what I regard as extremely worrisome modern developments and so forth. I guess, in that way, it probably does relate to... It's not just the proposition that the consent of the governed is in itself a fiction or not entirely true, it's that the whole meaning of the meaning of the proposition is embedded in a view of the world that no longer is available. That may be another way in which that fiction could break down and become something much less healthy.
Richard Reinsch (31:53):
I mean, in a way, you're making the argument in a different key, maybe, than John Courtney Murray made in his 1960 book We Hold These Truths. The natural law framework was sort of coincidental to a lot of the framers' political thought, although they maybe didn't realize it as much. But that's what they're implicitly drawing on in their writings about revolutionary government and separating from the British and the reasons why. So they've got this framework. Some of them understand it, but a lot of them don't. It's just in the air. But it's still available to us as a resource to use to develop arguments for, as Murray says, the natural law framework of our Constitution. Another phrase here is built better than they knew, speaking of what the Founders did. So I'm sympathetic to what you're doing. One question that comes to mind is is your project, and thinking about authority, does it presume, say, a political liberal, political modern principle that government is artificial and so we have to try and find a way to account for its authority? As opposed to, say, another way of thinking about government is that its natural and man is a political animal. It's a part of who we are. We're born into political society. We don't create it. It wasn't created at one point in time. Therefore, if it's natural, then maybe it's authority isn't an intractable problem.
Steven Smith (33:22):
Right. So I guess, I think that suggestion ties very much into some of what comes towards the end of the book and what you and I were discussing a little bit. The really modern prevalent assumption, you could call it Kantian or whatever, but it actually probably comes from lots of places, and that autonomy is our basic nature and the source of our dignity, I think, does imply that there's something artificial about government. I mean, government is... you got to account for it in terms of some social contract or something or other because it isn't exactly natural to us. Our nature is to be autonomous, meaning giving law to ourself and so forth. The idea of that we're, by nature, political beings and that basically our essence does consist in part in relations to others, including within a hierarchy, let's say, government and so forth, I think that is much closer to the relational view and makes much more sense in those terms. I am a little bit wary about just signing onto that though because, I mean, I think that could go in an unhealthy direction to say our nature is to be submissive to some sort of authority. I think you have to be careful about the nature of the authority to which we should be submissive. But when I try to develop the relational account towards the end, that's the direction that is going, I think.
Richard Reinsch (34:46):
Yeah. Well, and it suggests if government is natural and it's a part of who we are, and as languaged beings, we give reasons, but we're also radically incomplete, so we need other people, so we need law, we need authority, we've got to develop, I think, not... but also the reasons why we continue to do it and uphold it. I think also it's the anthropology of being relational would suggest there are limits to government. It should uphold these good things of human persons like... Because you suggest in the book, you talked about real authority in the book, but it's not in government. It's family. I think you say coaches, friendships. Those are things of authentic authority. So we would want the government to uphold those things because those are really accurate accounts of personhood where we can flourish and that would be a way of thinking about good government versus bad government and what it should do.
Steven Smith (35:38):
Yeah. The other side of that is conversely you know what you don't want government to do, is attempt to basically take over, commandeer, interfere with the sources of genuine authority that still exist like family and these other sorts of associations. Because I do suggest that... I mean, not that they are inherently sources of good authority because they can be dysfunctional too, but they can be sources of genuine authority that help us to be constituted as full people, I think. Connections to family and other sorts of mentors and so forth, I think, in the relational view are necessary to basically realizing our personhood. So it'll be very unfortunate if government decides to impose its norms all of those associations and relations as well, to which there is some tendency, I think, again, there's a pretty strong tendency in recent decades.
Richard Reinsch (36:30):
Maybe a final question, a big question, does classical natural law influence you either way here in your argument? When I say classical natural law, I'm meaning this idea that we can participate in discovering the law with others. It's not that we don't make it, but we don't really make it. It's something that we find. So the participation meaning there's just something above us or beyond us or for us that we're going to discover and use in crafting law. Does that shape your thinking about authority or should it?
Steven Smith (37:08):
Well, I think I would say this, that I don't really try to develop anything like that in this book. But I think to the extent that the argument is persuasive could be fit nicely into that kind of framework in the way that would make sense of a lot of what we do and so forth. In the classical framework, I guess, I think it would still... So if you take Aquinas, let's say, as the premier expositor of that sort of view, I think it'll still follow that governments have authority and that law would be, well, a lot of it would be not directly derived from the natural law, it'd still work through tradition and positive law, determinant, I might say, and so forth. But the government will have a kind of genuine authority. Even then, I think it's still not the ultimate authority. It needs to be seen as derivative of or modeled on and authorized by ultimate authority and so forth. Then I actually think you can get to a fairly plausible and wholesome picture of the whole condition that way. But that'd be a lot more for me to take on, I think, in this book than I'm really up to.
Richard Reinsch (38:23):
Maybe something that I've wondered is I assume you started writing this book, maybe I'm wrong, because you think we were experiencing a diminution of authority in our country. I guess, maybe just your big thoughts there too. Is that why you wrote the book and did you find something that you didn't think would be there?
Steven Smith (38:43):
Yes and no and yes I can say to those two questions. So actually, I mean, I did write some of the different sections at different times in response to more particular concerns or motivations. I got interested seven years ago in just the more jurisprudential question of authority with various legal theorists who try to explain authority and growing out of H. L. A. Hart. I thought that was a pretty interesting and so I did some work on that. Then the middle chapters that have to do more with Constitutional and statutory interpretation are things that I just... I work with those things and occasionally write things relevant to them and those are pretty interesting in their own light. So I already had been working on those, thinking about them, and written some other things related to them. The chapter on living with lies is something that was provoked more by concerns that have just gotten much more intense in the years since I did that thing. I never published that, I think, before, but I had written that some years back. So that was prompted by something else. So the motivation was various, I might say, for the different parts. Then it seemed to me that, particularly using Hannah Arendt's provocative claim, actually, these things kind of fit together in terms of some overall problem of authority in the modern world. So I did try to connect them up in that way and so forth. But I didn't initially think of them all as part of a single project prompted by some particular concern. But as it did come together, I just think the concern has grown much more urgent and intense. I mean, I think there are just a lot of what I see as unfortunate directions in our politics and our society, frankly at my own university for that matter.
Richard Reinsch (40:24):
Yeah. Well, I think it's when we look and see those in leadership positions in, say, law, government, education, and then those who give us ways of thinking about our time, like media figures, or put thoughts in people's minds, when they start to lose faith in the country or actively despise it, it seems to me then the country starts to fall apart at that point.
Steven Smith (40:51):
Right. In a way, I think this book, I hope it doesn't contribute to that necessarily, but it does give an account of it because, I mean, it does say that in so far as... I mean, this is just the mundane analogy would be if you go to a movie and you or your friend, whoever, who goes with you keeps saying, "This didn't really happen. This is all..." it's going to undermine the... A fiction is, I say at one point, a conspiracy where the author and the reader or the hearer agree to participate in something for their common benefit, which involves, in some ways, suspending judgement about certain things, understanding that these are fictions, whether they're beneficial fictions. If we keep reminding ourselves these are fictions or trashing the fictions and so forth, that will ruin the project. Now, there are reasons for it. I mean, sometimes that's the appropriate thing. I mean, I think, for example, those in the Communist regimes who undermine the fictions are doing something that was a good thing and so forth. Even though they were undermining that kind of authority. So I'm not saying this is always necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that we see a lot of that going on today, picking up steam and everything. It's a concern. Interestingly, it ties into... I read something about authority's the groundwork of the world. I mean, it undermines, I don't say the ultimate groundwork, I trace that, I think, in the end, suggests that's more a transcendent ground, but in a more mundane sense, yeah, the groundwork of the world, I think, is really shifting in a way that is troublesome.
Richard Reinsch (42:27):
Steven Smith, thank you so much for joining us. We've been talking with the author of the new book, Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law. Thank you so much.
Steven Smith (42:34):
Thank you.
Richard Reinsch (42:36):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:19): Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with John McGinnis about the recently concluded Supreme Court term of 2020 and 2021. John McGinnis, many of you will know is a contributing editor at Law & Liberty. He’s also the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law […]
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with John McGinnis about the recently concluded Supreme Court term of 2020 and 2021. John McGinnis, many of you will know is a contributing editor at Law & Liberty. He's also the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. He's the author of a number of books, including Accelerating Democracy, Princeton University Press. He's co-author with Mike Rappaport of Originalism and The Good Constitution published by Harvard Press. He has published in leading law reviews, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Yale, and in many journals of public opinion, National Affairs, National Review, Wall Street Journal, among many others. So John, we're glad to have you to talk about the Supreme Court term.
John McGinnis (01:05):
Glad to be here.
Richard Reinsch (01:07):
So overall, what we should note about this term, all of the cases were heard by teleconference because of the pandemic. We welcomed a new member of the court Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed before the presidential election, and so in that sense something new. But how would you characterize this term? Any startling developments that you've read, John?
John McGinnis (01:28):
Well, I do think it is important to understand that this is a new court. I think it is well said that when always as a new court, whenever a new justice joins and so the dynamics change. And I think this is the case more so than with other changes, because of course Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that is a dramatic change in jurisprudence, ideology. The only a comparable change in modern time, I think is that between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. And you might say that this is even greater because this really solidifies, as many have said, a majority of some people would call conservative, other people might call it a more formalist, in jurisprudential terms, majority on the court. And the reason that's important, I think going forward in the longterm is I think, the justices particularly someone like John Roberts is very concerned about 5-4 decisions. And I think 6-3 decisions may give them a sense that there's a little more leeway to rule even the way he would like. And so those are important changes of the court.
With Justice Barrett, I think we saw in the first term, a fairly cautious judge, this is not a surprise. Again, court watchers think that to get their sea legs justices have to be on the court for around four, five years, and that's when one really takes their measure. On the other hand, Justice Barrett, I think has been quite clear in some of her cases that she's an originalist, at least when there's no clear precedent online, I think that's... On the other hand, she's cautious about changing the court's precedent. She's not going to be someone like, for instance, Justice Thomas, who's willing to simply throw out precedent when it conflicts with the original meaning, if there has been some precedent. Good example of that is the Fulton case in which he wrote a concurrence suggesting she doesn't think the famous case of Smith is correctly decided. If you recall that case was one in which Justice Scalia said that, so long as the law was neutral, you really could not have protection under the free exercise clause. She doesn't think that's right, but she's very cautious about throwing it out, which is not to know exactly what's going to come afterwards. And that's very much in contrast with not only Justice Thomas, Justice Gorsuch and in that case, Justice Alito were more willing to overrule precedent. So I do think we see both an originalist and a cautious judge in the newest addition to the court.
Richard Reinsch (04:20):
And Barrett's appointment to the court also makes you suggest on Law & Liberty, not suggest, but argued, Justice Kavanaugh to be the new median justice on the court.
John McGinnis (04:32):
I think that's right, and that is born out by the statistics. I think I suggested that was likely going in and then at least this is one prediction I think that was right. He was in the majority, I think something on the order of 98% of the time. And that's a pretty good indication, you're the median of the court when you're at that height of joining the majority. And that's not a surprise in some sense, I think. One way of thinking about Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Roberts is I think they are, people who're more attuned, more concerned about the political reputational capital of the court there. Of course, Washington insiders in a way that the other judges and the conservative majority are not, who spent a good deal of their time outside Washington. And I think people who are in Washington just are necessarily going to be looking out on things, reflect off that small beltway community.
Richard Reinsch (05:38):
Yeah. Not a problem for Clarence Thomas, even though he did spend a good portion of his career in Washington prior to the court.
John McGinnis (05:44):
That's right, that's a good distinction. But of course, Clarence Thomas is I think someone who's very consciously established himself in complete contrast to the establishment, particularly in the area he worked in, civil rights. So I think that makes him a little different showing a kind of willingness to buck the establishment, even at the cost of public perceptions. So I think he's a little different and I think you're right about that. But the other judges are sort of quintessential Washington insiders, talking about Roberts and Kavanaugh.
Richard Reinsch (06:18):
Let me ask you a question from a different angle. Just something that occurred to me thinking about this interview. This is an incredibly contentious period in our nation's politics, do we find this tumultuous politics in any way finding reflection in the court's opinions for this term?
John McGinnis (06:34):
I think we do. I think we find it most in the voting rights opinion, the case I'd never know quite how-
Richard Reinsch (06:41):
Brnovich vs. DNC perhaps?
John McGinnis (06:44):
Brnovich.
Richard Reinsch (06:44):
Yeah.
John McGinnis (06:44):
There, I think we see, and voting rights of course has been a fault line between the parties. And that was a very bitter dissent by Kagan, somewhat uncharacteristically. So in my view, so what, I'm happy to go into the facts of that case, if that's some interest. So this is a voting rights case about a question about a federal statute, whether the federal voting rights statute makes certain laws in Arizona illegal. And Arizona had two kinds of laws. One was a requirement that, if you did in-person voting and Arizona allows quite a bit of in-mail voting, it's allows early voting. But if you did an in-person voting on election day, you have to vote in the right precinct or your vote won't be counted. And also it has what is called anti-harvesting provision, suggesting that while you can mail in your own ballot and maybe a family member can, people who are unrelated to you can't collect a lot of ballots and mail them in. The concern there is not only fraud, but that there can be undue influence exercise too. For people to say, "Well, here's a ballot, please mark it in the way I'd like." And that's a problem.
So the question was, the provision of the statute that requires an equal opportunity for all groups to vote. And there was some very small disparate impact on African-Americans, but we're talking, I think in some cases 10ths of a percentage point, very small disparate impact. And the question was, was that enough to invalidate these laws? Even the Biden administration said, no. The Trump administration had said no, the Biden administration did not change the position. And the question is, how do you interpret what is an equal opportunity? The Senate said, "Well, it's an effects test." So essentially you have to have an incredibly strong reason, even if there's any disparate impact. The majority said, "No, that's not the right way to read the statute." And I think the very powerful argument here is, in the house, there was a provision that was like that, an effects test. But when it got to the Senate, the Senate added a lot of language saying, "We've got to look at the total circumstances and you just have to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to vote." And I think the majority correctly said that was not an attempt to change all of the voting laws to make sure that there were no disparate effects, because that would have made that language rather superfluous given the change from the House. So I think the majority is right there, but not surprisingly given the fault lines we see about voting rights act, I think that was the most divisive issue in the entire court term.
Richard Reinsch (09:37):
So that opinion will have consequences rippling out in our politics and future elections. As we see, say Republican state legislatures trying to, I don't say reduce the number of people that can vote, but putting up just more strictures on voting. Making sure it seems to me, they want to have more in-person voting, but they seem to be, the view is those provisions will be more insulated from legal challenge after this opinion.
John McGinnis (10:03):
Yes, I think that's right. And note, a lot of these provisions actually are just going back to what the rules were, not all of them, but a lot of them were going back to what the rules were pre-pandemic. And so if the dissent had been correct, I think even those kind of rules would have been really opened the challenge. But the majority said, "Well, the laws have been around a long time." The laws for instance were around at the time that this federal statute passed. And there was only a relatively small disparate impact, and there seem to be some reason for them, this does not intend to wipe away those laws. So I think it is an important decision that allows for more state authority to change their election laws. But it's not a carte blanche by any means, if there's a substantial disparate impact, if there really don't are no good reasons, and this is a new kind of law, these laws are still open to challenge other than the majority's opinion.
Richard Reinsch (11:01):
So I want to get to ad law and any implications for ad law in this term. But let's talk Fulton vs. Philadelphia. Another contentious case with connections to our politics, which the Supreme Court ruled that the City of Philadelphia could not prevent Catholic charities from being involved in its adoption programs because even though that agency did not refer adoptions to same-sex couples.
John McGinnis (11:29):
That's right. And what distinguishes this case from the Brnovich case is that it's a... well, not a unanimous opinion, it's a unanimous result. All of the justices said that what Philadelphia did was illegal, but there were two very different approaches. And they're kind of characteristic like the approach that came in the majority from the Chief Justice was I think, a really a characteristic kind of a decision. Working within the law to make it more friendly to free exercise. Doctrinally, the concurrence by Judge Alito wanted really to overturn Smith. So beginning with a majority opinion, the majority opinion plays on one aspect of Smith. Smith says that, "The laws to be insulated from challenge under free exercise have to be laws of general applicability." And the argument was, well, this law that's saying they could not participate because they wouldn't refer about same-sex couples was not a law of general applicability, because the law itself permitted administrative exceptions, and that made it not generally applicable. The interesting thing about that was that there hadn't been any administrative exceptions.
So this shows quite a weakening in some sense of general applicability. Even if you have the possibility of administrative exceptions, that means the law is not generally applicable and you can make a free exercise challenges to it. And that's quite important. Indeed, it suggests that in some ways, state laws are more vulnerable if they have administrative exception which they haven't used. Because if they do use administrative exceptions, well then you can compare them and say, "Well, is this comparable to the exceptions, the religious organization wants?" But here there was no exception at all, and that made the law vulnerable. So I think it's an important doctrinal move and so I disagree with those who said, that really the majority opinion does not improve the situation for religious believers. In the sense it does, if there's any kind of administrative exception, you got to make a free exercise challenge. And even if it's not an exercised administrative exception.
Richard Reinsch (13:51):
So you're saying, just for my clarification, the law at issue in the City of Philadelphia allowed for exceptions to a non-discrimination policy, but those were never actually exercised by the agencies participating in the program.
John McGinnis (14:08):
That's correct.
Richard Reinsch (14:08):
And that's funny, because I read one of the administrative exceptions was race, that agencies could discriminate on the basis of race.
John McGinnis (14:17):
Well, they could, but as I understand it, this had not been an exercise exception. In other words, they had not permitted agencies to do that. So I think that is significant that there was no part of the opinion that if indeed an agency had permitted an exception, I think there would have been questions of, "Well, is this comparable? Are there stronger reasons for denying the religious exception than the other exception." But I think there were no actual exceptions granted, at least in the specific respect that the religious agency was asking for an exception. I think that's one of the significant aspects of the case myself.
Richard Reinsch (15:02):
On this, we're talking about Scalia's opinion, a famous opinion in the Peyote case, Smith case, whatever you want to call it, in Oregon in the early '90s. Do you sense in the opinion a desire to overturn that reasoning?
John McGinnis (15:22):
Well so there are two concurring opinions. One the Alito's opinion says it should be overturned and goes to a very long historical originalist analysis.
Richard Reinsch (15:33):
Did you find Alito to be correct in that regard?
John McGinnis (15:36):
I think that's a hard question as a scholar, I'd want to study it a longer time. I think he makes some very powerful points. It's certainly more persuasive than Justice Scalia's opinion as at least as understood as an originalist opinion. One of the striking things about Smith is for the most famous originalists on the court, how little originalist analysis there is. And so in that sense, I think just as Alito is pushing against an open door and makes a persuasive case, Justice Barrett I think is persuaded by the textual argument that, the free exercise clause doesn't seem to be a clause about neutrality and we are actually allowed free speech claims even about laws that would neutrally apply to all speech. So it seems anomalous to understand free exercise in that way, and structural arguments like that, I think our originalist argument. So in that sense, I would say that I am persuaded at the moment at least of Justice Alito is position, but open as always I think an originalist must be, to arguments on the other side based on evidence.
Richard Reinsch (16:52):
So Barrett's claim is something like, religion in the first amendment is actually regarded like speech, it's good. It's a good thing and we want to protect it. And laws of neutral applicability aren't really the issue, it's are you impinging on religion period, and that automatically triggers a claim.
John McGinnis (17:12):
Right. And that structurally appears to be the way rights work, and so why should religion be different in that respect? So that's their argument. She's not persuaded, she says in her concurrence by another kind of argument, which is that historically people were granted exceptions. And the problem with that argument is that exemptions, is that seems to be a kind of common law argument, and maybe it didn't carry over to the constitution. So I think that is perhaps less clear. In any event, the difficulty then for Barrett is because she doesn't have that historical understanding of when exemptions were granted. That's one of the things that worries her because she doesn't have a test that is a touchstone for when you should grant exemptions. Whereas I think Alito looking at the history says there is a test and it's something that may approach something on the order of strict scrutiny. So that's the difference between Justice Barrett and Justice Alito in Fulton, and why Justice Barrett I think, is not willing at least at the moment to overrule Smith, which is a little unclear what should replace it.
Richard Reinsch (18:28):
Okay. So now John, we were talking before the podcast that you said every Supreme Court seems to have its heart at a certain area of the law. And perhaps this court has its heart in the era of administrative law. What happened in this important body of law this term?
John McGinnis (18:45):
I think that's right. I think Rehnquist court you can describe is very focused on federalism, and this court very focused on administrative law. And I think indeed Trump's appointments through the White House counsel of McGahn certainly Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, were appointed in large view for their skepticism about certain doctrines of administrative law. And their concern about the administrative state as a headless power that really was unaccountable. And we see these appointments bearing fruit, I think in two very important cases in this term. And one is the case of Collins, which is a case about an obscure, I know there are hundreds or 150 or so federal agencies. That's probably one your listeners haven't heard of them. I hope I get this right, The Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Richard Reinsch (19:39):
I think that's right. Yeah. FHFA.
John McGinnis (19:42):
It's director is insulated from removal. And the argument was based on another case about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where its director was also insulated from removal. And the court said, "Well, you can't do that." You might be able to have multi-member boards because we have precedent on that. But the basic argument, they basically accept the unitary executive argument, that's the background principle. By unitary executive we mean, the president is in charge of the executive branch and therefore must be able to fire his subordinates. And they accept that in this case and say, there really aren't any strong distinctions between this and the CFPB. There were a few distinctions, CFPB couldn't make its own budget, but they said these weren't strong enough. What's really significant about this case is the amicus who is appointed to defend it after the Trump administration would not defend the constitutionality of this statute and said, "Well, you could put others in its place. For instance, well, what about the chairman of various federal agencies and other actors who seem to have authority that they exercise without going through a board. And the court, doesn't say those are not open to challenge. Indeed, it seems to be inviting a challenge." So my impression is that what's going on here is, they're going to cut back and back on some vulnerable precedent. The precedent of Humphrey's Executor, which says, at least that wards, like the FTC, the FCC can be insulated from removal. And we say, "Well, the chairman can't be insulated from removal." And I think ultimately they're trying to isolate those cases, and we may even see Humphrey’s Executor overruled who is once you get enough of these cases that seem intention with it, they'll say, "Well, this case is really an isolated anomaly and then kick it over." So I think we may be seeing this slow, but complete triumph of this theory of the unitary executive. That's the significance in my view of Collins.
Richard Reinsch (21:53):
The so-called independent agencies and commissions just for our listeners, their heads, or their board of commissioners or agencies or whatever you want to call them, are insulated from removal, exactly why?
John McGinnis (22:11):
Well, the theory before was that, I think here's the theory that because these agencies get not only executive power, they are rulemakings, they make judicial decisions, they're not purely executive agencies and therefore they should be insulated from the president's whims. I think that's the argument. The difficultly with that argument is the whole theory of why they can be in the executive branch is, they have to be executive agencies and that's the anomaly here. So once you decide that Congress can delegate power to the executive, you have to say, "Well, it's really executive power it's exercise. And the executive branch can't exercise legislative power." And so the theory in favor of insulation is in conflict with the theory of delegation itself.
Richard Reinsch (23:05):
Okay. But the people in those roles, they're not directly challenged here. It's an agency head insulated from presidential removal. That's where the court seems to be pulling us in.
John McGinnis (23:17):
Going I think. That's my... Because as I say, I think this is one area I think that Roberts and Kavanaugh may care more about as Washington insiders actually. And one other point I would make, I'm making a kind of formalist argument, which I think is the right argument. I think there's also a realist argument about why Republican appointees are much less sympathetic to independent agencies and indeed independent inferior officers, because the bureaucracy leans left, there's enormous evidence of that. And so if you don't have the precedent tugging on the other side, it means it's going to be much harder for Republican administrations to do what they want to do. Because it's quite understandable that agency heads they're going to say, "Well, I better get along with the bureaucracy, otherwise it's going to be more difficult for me." Of course, if the president says, "I'm going to fire you, unless you go with my program," there's a vector the other way. And so I think there's a realist as well as a formalist reason that we're likely to see a continuation of the whittling away of these exceptions to the unitary executive.
Richard Reinsch (24:33):
I wanted to ask you briefly about this case, because it puzzled me just in my own knowledge and thinking about how unions organize. Cedar Point Nursery, 6-3 decision that union organizers can't compel their way onto, in this case it was corporate agricultural property, to engage in union organizing. And I guess, and I'm sure you have better command of the facts than me, but isn't it always the case though that a union has to go on to company property to organize? Is this a significant case or not?
John McGinnis (25:06):
Actually I don't think it is always the case that they have to go on company property to organize, as I understand it, I'm not an expert in labor law, this was a kind of particularly California statute. So I don't think it is a national statute and the court doesn't say that you can't go, you can't grant easement that you'd have to pay some amount of money for it. That's the significance of this case. It's a 6-3 decision where the majority says that, "We've got to have a bright line here. Physical invasion takes away people's property." So I don't think it's the case. The court makes it very clear that government officials can come on to people's property because the common law was understood that they could do so because there may be laws to enforce. It's very different when you allow private individuals to come on to the property. So I think the significance of this case is in some sense, it's also a regulatory case and Breyer has as he often does a multifactor tasks to say why this isn't a taking. Here the court is giving a clear rule and saying that regulation just can't whittle it away, and you're going to have to pay to be able to get onto a property. So I think that's the significance of this case, that the alternative, it means that everything is kind of up to regulation. You don't have clear rights that are protected by the constitution, they can be whittled away.
Richard Reinsch (26:42):
A question in my mind in thinking about this case and the facts would be different, but it seems to me there's a carryover with this desire to regulate social media companies, what they can say, what they can't say. I don't know if you find a connection there, but just the ability to tell them as a government, well kind of go onto their property and give them commands and instructions. Do you find any connection there with that or?
John McGinnis (27:09):
I think it is. So your argument would be that, so the government regulates, so you've got to permit other people to speak. And that's a lot like going on to other people's property to speak, and I think there's something to that. Of course, one is a first amendment case, another is a property case. The government in a property's case can require you to let people on your property, they just have to pay for the right to access. The first amendment is often a trump card that the government can't force you to allow someone to speak in your newspaper, regardless of whether it pays for it. So in that sense, it's different, but there is a similarity that in both kinds of cases, the government is permitting an intrusion of someone into your space.
Richard Reinsch (28:01):
Okay. Now this prompts, I think an easy segue into the next case we should talk about. Americans For Prosperity, a California case implicating the first amendment. California law mandated donor disclosure by non-profits to the state of California. And this was required by California law. And the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that this impinged, the first amendment rights. Is this a significant victory for free speech?
John McGinnis (28:26):
I think it is a significant victory for free speech. And what it shows is that the majority is taking account. And that is one point I think, needs to be underscored about Supreme Courts generally. Even if you're an originalist, even if you want to follow precedent, the question is you still have to apply precedence to the facts of the world. And I think this case should be understood as, recognizing the reality of cancel culture. So I think the way to understand the case is to think of the case that it builds on. It builds on cases from the south in the civil rights era, when some Southern states required organizations to disclose their members. And it was pretty obvious that although these laws were often neutral, that they were hoping to disclose the membership of the NAACP. And that was really obviously quite problematic. And what prompted the court to say that, "Well, you have to have some really good reasons for that, and it has to be pretty narrowly tailored. Otherwise, we think we're ferreting out that you're really trying to make it harder to speak, by revealing donors and members." So that's that era. We're now in a new era and you might say, "Wow, it's not as terrible, of course, as the era of Jim Crow and the era that people are fighting against segregation." On the other hand, we have a pervasive issue here of the cancel culture. And I think that's what's behind this and in sense it's say, "Well, we may have a more general cultural issue, particularly with the social media and having your name be able to be put up in lights and being fired from your job, that we're all a bit more vulnerable in this era." So I think it's not only an important first amendment case, in my view underneath it all, is an important recognition that the world of social media has made people more vulnerable to having their decisions about who to support broadcast to the world and used to harass them. And so in that sense, it's I think a very important case.
Richard Reinsch (30:47):
We also have significant instances in recent years where donor information of nonprofits or to political arms released to the government, found its way into the public square.
John McGinnis (30:59):
Well that's of course actually true of that case, but so-
Richard Reinsch (31:02):
And it happened... In California, one goes back to the same sex marriage referendum, where lots of people lost their jobs in California when that emerged, they had donated to the anti same-sex marriage groups. So yeah.
John McGinnis (31:16):
Well, I think that's on the court's mind. But I think it's interesting that in this very case, and just to go back to the facts of this case, this is about charities and having that there was a requirement that you list all the important donors to your charity. And then that was what was being challenged here. California had, well, they said they would keep them confidential, they had released many of these donors. So again, and the example was California didn't seem to be being very careful and maybe for political reasons releasing these donors, or at least not being cautious. But it's interesting, the court... you could have written a more narrow opinion. You could have said, "Well, there's clearly a chilling effect in California, at least for the next 10 years, because who's going to believe California they're not going to do the same thing?" But the court did not... it wasn't as narrow as that. In some sense, the dissent, I think said, "Well... the dissent said this." If you're really sad just about the facts of this case, that you didn't think they should have to give in this information, maybe you have a point. Their real problem was the more general requirements for information generally about donors that even if it hadn't been disclosed in recent times, even that, you have to have a very strong reason not to show that it's important for enforcement and you can't do it another way. And I think that's what suggests that the court is not wedded to the particular facts of disclosure, but to the general fear of cancel culture, that as you correctly point out, they have its origins and epicenter in California.
Richard Reinsch (33:03):
Another first amendment case, Mahanoy Area School District, a case in Pennsylvania where a teenager didn't make the cheerleading varsity squad. So on social media, she used the F word several times to refer to her school. And then she was then removed from the junior varsity team that she had made. And the Supreme Court ruled, "Social media used by a student in vulgar fashioned can't be used to discipline the student." As I read the case, what also was in my mind was critical race theory and other attempts more recently by governments to impose sort of a more comprehensive doctrine on students, and parents and students objecting to this. And it seems to me, this case might actually offer greater protection to those who are objecting to government policies inside schools, in terms of how they might react to them on social media, other than just the narrow facts of the case. What do you think?
John McGinnis (33:59):
I think that's right, just as I think cancel culture is in the mind, at least of some of the justices in the previous case as least that's how I would connect them. The culture of indoctrination is on the minds of some of the justices, particularly I think that's true of the Alito, Gorsuch concurrence here, which I think makes it... So let me suggest that this majority opinion is by Breyer, and as with all of Breyer's opinions, it's a multifactor test of whether you can possibly discipline students for off-campus social media expression. And he says, "No, you can't do it in this case. They didn't really have a very good reason." And I think it gives a kind of presumption against it if you're off-campus.
And I think the reason that in my view, that's a correct presumption and it should be a pretty strong presumption is that, I think the reason that schools can discipline students for on campus action is, one, necessity, of course you can require people to talk about math in math class and not talk about anything else, but also there are sort of acting in Loco parentis, and that's a venerable doctrine that was around when the time the constitution was created. But once they get off campus, I think it's really hard to say that a school can be acting in Loco parentis. And so I think Alito, Gorsuch concurrence, while I'm not saying that's an absolute bar, tries to erect a pretty strong barrier. And I think that's one of the reasons I think they fear that whatever, what concerns about indoctrination within the schools, that schools will try to, at least some schools may start to regulate speech outside of schools, to create a new and worrying orthodoxy. So I think you're absolutely right. And so I would just underscore that these cases really show how important it is to understand that these Supreme Court cases are not just doctrinal, they reflect our underlying cultural moment, the cancel culture, the culture of indoctrination in schools. Those larger issues are very much on the justices minds when they decide these cases.
Richard Reinsch (36:28):
Okay. Is it worth talking about California v Texas? Perhaps last of the grand challenges to Obamacare we'll see.
John McGinnis (36:36):
I think there's not much there, frankly. I think that it was pretty clear who was going to lose all. And it was lost on a very technical standing issue. And I don't think... Well, of course, standing issues or issues interesting to lawyers, I think are little interest to people outside the law. Moreover, many people think the standing doctrine is one of the most manipulable doctrines. And so you might well think that the majority of the court just wanted to dispose of this. They didn't think, I think ultimately that it was a very good argument. I think just practically that this could strike down all of Obamacare, because Obamacare... I think the real reason had been the statute had been passed at not wholly again, but had been passed. And so it's very hard to understand how it could be passed and yet you could say that the result of taking out the-
Richard Reinsch (37:37):
Mandate.
John McGinnis (37:38):
... the mandate and understanding it's being an unconstitutional tax and now having no money being paid, how one can understand that, by taking that out one could destroy all of Obamacare. I think people like Roberts and others thought that would have been seeming to encroach on Congress's power, Congress had never made a decision to get rid of Obamacare. So I think that the decision here was for ordained and the standing issue was a way to put the challenge out of its misery.
Richard Reinsch (38:10):
Okay. So I'll introduce this case by way of saying I was reading in, I think it was The Wall Street Journal, the famous coach of the University of Alabama football team. Nick Saban said that his quarterback, who is all of 18 years old is now worth several hundred thousand dollars, because of name and likeness contracts he's received. And that results, if I'm not mistaken from this opinion, NCAA versus Alston, where the NCAA was ruled to have violated antitrust law with strict limits it had held on student athlete compensation. So it seems to me, this has the potential really to change the nature of highly competitive college sports.
John McGinnis (38:49):
I think that's right. Again, I think it's very interesting culturally this case, as an antitrust case, and I teach antitrust. I don't think it's that surprising a case. So let me give you some background. This is a kind of what I call an antitrust, a frenemies case. So the NCAA is an interesting position. On the one hand, in some sense, it's constituting the sport of college football. On the other hand, of course the teams are competitors, and so that's why it's a frenemies case. So they have to have the ability to constitute the rules of the game. They all have to play the same game and they also have to even constitute the idea that this is somehow different from professional sports, that it's amateur sports.
The difficulty though is that, unlike constituting the rules of the game, where the court's going to give a lot of deference to what it does, the restriction on any kind of compensation, including image compensation, including extra support for students, really goes to the heart of antitrust it goes to competition for labor, for wages. And so I think what the court saw was this is going to be decided under a rule of reason case. The rule of reason is you're going to look at both sides, what's the justifications of the partnership as it were, the NCAA are for this? But you're also going to look at it's a substantial effect on hurting competition, the competition between college athletes to go to what, which school they're going to be going to, and getting out as high a compensation as they can. And they pretty much defer here to the district court's findings, which were that this was a substantial intrusion on the ability of these students to compete and to earn money, I think there's no doubt about that.
And their other point was there were a lot of surveys here and it's suggested that so long as they weren't actually paid a salary, but they got image money and things of that sort, people weren't awfully bothered by the fact that they wouldn't be amateurs in the classic sense. And I think that tells us also a lot about our culture. And that also doesn't surprise me and the Olympics Of course, was once wholly amateur, people were not bothered by a moving away from that line. And I think the court is in that sense reflecting or the district court is reflecting and looking at the survey data, is that this really isn't necessary for college football to survive as independently from professional football.
You need to have, maybe you have some line, you can't be paid a big salary, but we can still allow these college athletes to benefit from their talents. And I think there's also a sense, the other cultural factors, is there is a recognition at least that many of these big sports college schools, that some of these students spend all their time on the field and not learning much. And they actually don't have great prospects, if they don't get into professional football, they don't have great prospects with their college degree. And so why shouldn't they be able to earn a little more money now? So that's, I think what's going behind. I don't think it dramatically changes antitrust doctrine, what it dramatically may change is the nature of college sports.
Richard Reinsch (42:07):
It's interesting hearing you say, it's not an innovation in antitrust doctrine. It sounds to me like you're saying it's sort of brass tacks and fundamentals of antitrust doctrine. And yet it took... this has been an issue for decades, and only now finds a resolution, that's interesting.
John McGinnis (42:23):
Well, I think one reason is, is I think at one point, and this goes to the cultural point. At one point, I do think there was an image in people's mind of the student athlete that really was sacrosanct, but now when it's people have understood perhaps more about what student athletes are like, is understood more I think in the public's mind that isn't as true anymore. And so you actually could say, well, maybe 40 years ago the case should've come out the other way, because this was necessary to constitute, people wouldn't have been interested in college sports, if they had felt that they were being paid at all, that that was so important to their sense of what it was to watch college sports, but I think that's probably not true today. So as the facts change, the law changes, it changes often. And I think this may be another example of that, and we've seen several. If I'd say, that's one of the themes of our discussion. The rise of cancel culture, the concern about indoctrination, and now I think just the sense of the permeability of the status between amateur and professional. These all are crucial changes in the culture that are driving Supreme Court opinions.
Richard Reinsch (43:40):
Maybe we'll end with, as an originalist, as a formalist, as a classical liberal, were you satisfied with this term or crucial exceptions that disappointed you, or what would be your final thoughts here?
John McGinnis (43:53):
I'm satisfied with this court term as a beginning. I certainly think the court has many things to work out if we're to move more back to originalism, and particularly the relationship between originalism and precedent, and that's where the court made a lot of progress on thinking that through. I think Justice Barrett is going to be one of the most key judges in that respect, whose concurrence and fault really doesn't attempt to do that. Other than to suggests she's not with Justice Thomas and being willing to overthrow precedent. That's the real question going forward. I think there's little doubt that a majority of the justices are good faith originalists when there's no precedent. And that's good for classical liberalism in so far as I think we have a constitution that by and large is a charter for classical liberalism. The difficulty of course is, we've had 40, 50 years of precedents that are not originalists. What do you do with them? We have Justice Thomas whose view is pretty much, "So we get rid of them." We have Justice Roberts who I think is very reluctant to overturn them. The question is, can there be a via media between these? And that's really where I look to Justice Barrett to be an intellectual leader. And we haven't seen that so far, but that's not a surprise, that would be a tall order to ask her in her first term on the court.
Richard Reinsch (45:20):
Well it looks like there will be opportunities coming in the next term.
John McGinnis (45:24):
Absolutely. The Dobbs case about abortion, I think being the most important case that's come for many years.
Richard Reinsch (45:32):
We'll be looking for your commentary on that, John. John McGinnis, thank you so much for joining us to discuss the Supreme Court term 2020-2021.
John McGinnis (45:40):
Glad to. Thanks Richard.
Richard Reinsch (45:44):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Walter McDougall discusses how America's civil religion has shaped our foreign policy.
Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally posted on October 13, 2014. This conversation with Roger Scruton engages his defense of the conservative disposition. Scruton’s just-released book, How to be a Conservative, might be said to take on the challenge Friedrich Hayek issued in his famous essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” There, you will […]
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're with Benjamin Storey, talking about a new book he has co-authored with Jenna Silber Storey entitled Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment. His co-author, also his wife, Jenna Silber Storey couldn't be with us, but Ben will do a great job talking about the book. Ben is the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs and is the director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman. Jenna Silber Storey is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, and Executive Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University. Ben, we're glad to have you on the program.
Benjamin Storey (01:00):
It's an honor to be here and talk with you, Richard. Thanks so much for having me on.
Richard Reinsch (01:04):
Excellent. So, I'll just ask you a straightforward question here: why are we restless?
Benjamin Storey (01:10):
Well, thanks for the question. It's obviously prompted by the title of the book. Your question requires a two-pronged answer. In the first place, human beings are naturally restless. Saint Augustine famously remarks at the outset of the confessions, that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And so in some ways, restlessness is a permanent part of the human condition. But the restlessness that we're trying to trace in this book is more specifically a modern kind of restlessness that is a restlessness that springs from trying and failing to make one's self content within the confines of imminence, that is trying to make one's self content in the here and now. And we think that one of the things that defines modern life, is the widespread attempt to find happiness in an imminent way, an attempt that we keep trying to consummate, but that's a project in which we continually fail. And so those failures to find happiness in this imminent way, that failure gives rise to the kind of restlessness that we're describing in this book.
Richard Reinsch (02:32):
You mentioned, or you've discuss at length I should say, four figures: Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau and Tocqueville. Maybe we'll just try Montaigne here. Who was he, and how does he contribute to this sort of predicament?
Benjamin Storey (02:47):
Yeah. Montaigne is the first figure that we deal with in the book. And Michel de Montaigne is a 16th century French essayist, he's the father of the literary form known as the essay. That is, nobody ever called a piece of writing an essay until Montaigne did so. He lived in the midst of France's wars of religion, which lasted for most of his adult life, second half of the 16th century. And he looked around him, at his contemporaries who were ready to kill one another over the meaning of pronouns, different pronouns in their time than the pronouns that we get worked up over in our time. They were worked up over the pronoun "hoc," that is used in the Catholic mass at the elevation of the host. They were worked up over the question of whether that "hoc" was to be taken literally. The [inaudible 00:03:43] was at the heart of the quarrel over transubstantiation. That is so much a part of the Catholic Protestant divide. So, Montaigne's contemporaries were ready to kill one another over these kinds of questions about the transcendent. And he looked around and said, we need to lower the temperature a bit. And so, Montaigne made a very powerful case for skepticism, and particularly for skepticism about the question of the summum bonum, of the highest good, of that good which would make a human life worth living.
He said philosophers have been arguing about this for centuries, they haven't come up with any consensus answers, and so we should just stop asking. That is, Montaigne makes the case that it is possible to live a good human life with a kind of indifference to the question of the highest good. And that that way of seeking happiness, is what we call the quest for imminent contentment. And the happiness Montaigne celebrates, is a dabbling kind of happiness. That is, instead of asking is philosophy going to make me happy, or is religion going to make me happy, or is citizenship going to make me happy? Montaigne does a little of everything, but he does it all with a light touch. So for example, he reads, but he tells us that he doesn't like the heavy stuff, Plato and Aristotle. He prefers lighter authors like Plutarch and Ovid, his version of light might be a little different than ours. He travels, but when he travels he doesn't go with the ambitions of an explorer, or the aspirations, the piety of a pilgrim, he's just taking a look around. And Montaigne says this kind of nonchalant existence, in which we enjoy all the pleasures and pursuits available to us, but don't make too much out of any of them, this is the true way to happiness.
Richard Reinsch (05:41):
It's interesting you mention Plato and Aristotle, he didn't like reading them. As I read your chapter on Montaigne, it seemed to me it's not just he's rejecting Christianity of his period, he seems to be rejecting the bulk of the Western tradition. Insofar as the classical philosophical tradition, and also biblical religion, calls you out of yourself, calls you after a third principle, something that transcends you, that's before you, that lives on after you. And it's just real, and you are supposed to understand it, participate in it, perhaps conform to it, and he's rejecting all of that. So what then, help us understand what does he really think that these motives we have, these desires, quests, thoughts, where are they going to go?
Benjamin Storey (06:30):
That's a terrific question. I want to concentrate on the first part of what you're saying. And I think you're right to sense in Montaigne a rejection of the whole classical and Christian tradition. At the same time, he of course inherits and transforms elements of those traditions. And one element that he inherits and transforms, is the quest for self-knowledge, which Socrates so famously dedicated his life to. But Montaigne does this fascinating thing. For Socrates, the quest to know one's self is a quest to understand human nature, and the deepest aspirations of the human soul. And Montaigne says, "I'm not really interested in the question of man. I'm interested in the question of me." And Montaigne lived in an era in which there was still a taboo weighing on writing in the first person, and writing about one's self. And in the course of Montaigne essays, he violates that taboo about 8,000 times, which is roughly the number of first person pronouns that he uses in the course of this book. So, he writes as he says, entirely about himself. And so, he thereby transforms the classical quest for self knowledge. It's no longer knowledge of man, it's knowledge of me. And Montaigne makes this into an act of a kind of modesty, "I'm no longer to ask the pretentious question, what would make a human life worth living? I'm going to ask, who am I, Michel de Montaigne, in my distinctive individuality?" And so, the modern focus on distinctive individuality is very visible in Montaigne.
And so, I think with respect to the second part of your question, the question of where these longings for transcendence, for things that are real and outside of ourselves, where that goes, Montaigne seeks... I think he had that longing in himself, but he seeks to bring it back around to himself. He seeks to attain it, to circumscribe himself is the language that he uses for this. And so instead of imagining that, for example, erotic desire should take us off to contemplate the form of the beautiful, as it does in Plato, Montaigne says why can't it just be what it is? Why can't a desire for a beautiful body just be a desire for a beautiful body? And so in this sense, Montaigne is trying to tame, or block every entrance you might say, to the concern with transcendence as it shows up in human life. He says what we need to learn to do is be at home, be at home in this world, and he thinks we can do that. The great literary, literary critic Sainte-Beuve, commented about Montaigne that what this book, his essays is really all about, is a presentation of nature complete without grace. He thinks if we learn to tame these longings, to bring them back to ourselves, we can be content in the natural world without any help from anything above or beyond it.
What is common to Montaigne and the bourgeois existence is that this is somebody who makes the self centered life that we associate with contemporary bourgeois existence, he makes that kind of life attractive. So in this sense, I think you're right that Montaigne is the precursor of the modern bourgeois.
Richard Reinsch (09:38):
You guys argue in the book, he seems to have invented the self. And I thought that as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, he said that he's not into human nature, he said just me. He would also, I think, assume then that he is just endlessly interesting and fascinating, and should write about himself and we should learn from him.
Benjamin Storey (09:55):
A couple of points there. One, the self in French is le moi. And Montaigne, he hates abstractions, and so he's not going to coin an abstraction like that, le moi, the me. It's a strange thing to say. But by talking so much about me and not moi, he helps legitimate it as a subject. And Blaise Pascal will come along after Montaigne, he doesn't object to abstractions, and he will stick the le in front of the moi, and he'll talk about the self. And he seems to be the first person in French to have joined these two terms, le and moi in this way, to create this French version of this notion of the self. And so yes, I think it's fair to say that that Montaigne by talking about moi, about himself so extensively, helped legitimate that, helped invent the self or at least make it a legitimate object of study.
And I think most readers of Montaigne who encounter this guy, do find him endlessly fascinating. He had a rich and varied experience of life, although he doesn't encourage us to read the classics, he read them all. And he can draw from that stock of learning with an extraordinary facility, to create a book that is endlessly engaging and charming. And so, if you want to see what the appeal of the modern self is all about, Montaigne is a great place to look, and he's attracted a long train of readers for precisely this reason. That his, Montaigne's essays are thought to have been one of the most widely read books in Europe, over the course of the 17th and 18th century. Everybody from Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, all these people are steeped in Montaigne. And a little time spent with him will tell just about any reader why.
Richard Reinsch (11:50):
Do you think, so as we move through the book, one way to think about Montaigne is he's actually, to my mind he's sort of preparing us... I'm putting a lot into this, but he's sort of preparing us for a very horizontal, bourgeois, consumer-driven society. That is, maybe the extent of your self reflection is in the mirror in the morning, but then you go off to work and that's really where all your energy goes. And then you come home, and you kind of sink and rest in leisure of a certain kind. Not necessarily reading or thinking deeply, but just you're so tired and you just sink into some diversion. Is there a connection there, the way Montaigne's writing about don't let your motives go vertical, just keep them horizontal?
Benjamin Storey (12:32):
Your sense that this is a horizontal portrait of existence is very right, and it's something that we see also in the later thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The one thing that I would say is different about the Montaigne-ian of existence from the bourgeois existence that you just described, is that Montaigne was of course an aristocrat. And so he didn't have to work, and so he spent lots of time reflecting on himself. But what is common to Montaigne and the bourgeois existence that you just described, and you're right that Montaigne has been described as the first bourgeois, that this is somebody who makes the self centered life that we associate with cotemporary bourgeois existence, he makes that kind of life attractive. So in this sense, I think you're right that Montaigne is the precursor of the modern bourgeois. And we see that this combination that I think you're describing shows up in our texts, when we get to Alexis de Tocqueville, who sees what happens to Montaigne-ism when democratic peoples who have to work for a living try to find their happiness in this way. It's very much like the rhythm that you just described, except that it is haunted by a kind of existential anxiety that Montaigne at least tries to write out of his portrait of himself.
Richard Reinsch (13:49):
It seems to me too, you mentioned he's an aristocrat and also incredibly learned, he's drawing on a lot of thick traditions that come before him, and that have accumulated over centuries, Christianity, classical philosophy, also just do various aspects of being French, of a civilization that's pretty rich, that's going to give him a lot to reflect upon as he thinks about whittling in a way, or whittling it down to some concept of the self. That is to say, he doesn't find himself in say, at a time like maybe our own, where there really isn't a lot. There's a lot of thin traditions around, and maybe there's a desire to reconstitute things.
Benjamin Storey (14:34):
I think that's right, Richard. And Montaigne's text has been described, and there's a book about Montaigne that describes it as a cornucopian text. There seems to be an endless amount there, in all of his reading, and all of his travels and all the experiences, that he can relate to us. One of the things that's interesting about Montaigne's way of talking about everything that shows up in his book, from people like Epimenides and Alexander the Great, to stories about his peasant neighbors. He tells us that he tells us everything that he tells us, so as to reveal something about himself. That is, he's less interested in things outside of him, than he is in the reactions they stir up inside of him. And that's the way in which this book that seems to be about everything, is ultimately all about Montaigne.
Richard Reinsch (15:23):
Let's move on. The next thinker discussed in the book is Pascal. How does he answer Montaigne?
Benjamin Storey (15:30):
Well, Pascal's a fascinating figure, I think in the world of political philosophy that you and I both to some extent inhabit, I think the two later thinkers that we deal with, Rousseau and Tocqueville are pretty well-known. Montaigne and Pascal are less so, and Pascal perhaps the least studied of all. And one of the things that we hope this book can help do, is make his genius something that is more commonly recognized and studied. Pascal was a astonishing polymath, who made world historical contributions in geometry with his work on conic sections and another problem called the cycloid, in mathematics by elaborating modern probability theory on the basis of what is this numeric sequence, it's called Pascal's triangle, in technology by inventing one of the world's first working calculators back in the 17th century, which could add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers of up to eight digits. He was a great physicist, who demonstrated the existence of the phenomenon of atmospheric pressure, to this day units of pressure are called Pascals.
Then Pascal jumped into literary and theological controversy with his provincial letters, which are these fantastic satires of the Jesuits who were at the time, the most powerful churchmen in France, and one of the greatest bestsellers of the 17th century. Then he wrote his Pensées, which are on the one hand one of the greatest works of Christian apologetics of the modern era, and perhaps of Christian history as such, and also generally acknowledged as the first work of existential philosophy. And then Pascal created the world's first system of public transportation, the five cent carriages for Paris. He did all this by the time he was 39, which is how old he was when he died. So the later French writer, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, has called him a frightening genius. And frightening is right, this is a terrifyingly powerful mind.
So Pascal, he captures in many ways the whole modern spirit, particularly in his physics and his conception of nature. In this sense, he's very much a modern man, but he looks at Montaigne's way of seeking happiness and he says, effectively, "You've got to be kidding. You can't make the human soul happy by this kind of dabbling approach to the good life." The human soul is both greater and more miserable than Montaigne recognizes. Pascal has a three-word phrase that I think in a way, sums up his whole anthropology, which is he says, "L'homme passe l'homme," man transcends man. And I think that's a very nice summation of his response to Montaigne. Montaigne wants to be at home in this world, at home in himself. And Pascal says you can't do that, that's just not what human nature allows.
Richard Reinsch (18:34):
You've talked about Pascal saying, "Man is a being of misery and greatness." And if man is a being of misery and greatness, then necessarily he can't be at home in the world the way Montaigne wants. But what did he mean by that, misery and greatness?
Benjamin Storey (18:50):
So, I think maybe one of the most famous lines in Pascal is the best way to talk about this, Pascal describes man as a thinking reed. And what he means by that, is that human beings are as fragile as reeds, as blades of grass, "A drop of water can kill us," he tells us, something that we in the coronavirus era are all too aware of. He said we're as fragile as anything in nature, at the same time, we have these uniquely powerful minds which can think thoughts as vast as the word universe. If we think about it, as far as we know the universe never thinks anything at all, but we do. And in this sense, we encompass the universe with our minds. And so, our thought is our greatness, but our thought is also the source of our misery, in the sense that insofar as the human mind can think a thought like eternity, we are aware that we are cut off from that. We are aware that we're mortal. And we can't help being miserable in the face of our own mortality, we can't help hating the fact of our own death. So for Pascal, man is this kind of exception in the universe, in the sense that every living being is mortal, but man is haunted by that fact, and feels like it is somehow an injustice to his nature. He tells us that we all feel like we're deposed kings, like, "I ought to be king, but there's some other guy in my place." That's the human experience for Pascal.
Richard Reinsch (20:34):
It's interesting listening to you describe that, because as I think about Montaigne and the motives going down, and Pascal says, "No, the only real way to make sense is if they go up, or they go up towards God, and you can find rest in God." And I'm thinking there's also a third possibility that Pascal probably understood, Montaigne probably didn't. Those motives go down, but they go down with the grandiosity of God. And that is to say, one tries to perfect things that really can't be perfected. One tries to perfect man, one tries to perfect politics, use science in a God-like fashion, things like that. There's this interesting way in which that will come true in modernity, not too far after Pascal is ushered off the scene. Rousseau maybe helps us to think about that. But these possibilities are all there.
Benjamin Storey (21:29):
That's very nicely put, I hadn't thought of it that way previously, Richard. One of the things that Pascal and Montaigne share in common is their meditation on this character they called the demi-habile, the half educated. And Pascal sees that half educated people are constantly pointing out the insolidity of the foundation of social customs or political arrangements, and so they'll constantly be noting that, oh, I don't know, the electoral college doesn't really do justice to the present constitution of population in America, or our penal laws need to be reformed in this way or that way. There's a constant poking of the defects in our justice, and those defects in our justice are really real. What's troubling for somebody like Pascal is I think exactly as you say, that when we limit our horizons to the confines of imminence, we're deeply dissatisfied with the imperfection of all human institutions. And instead of turning that dissatisfaction towards projects of on the one hand, incremental reform, and on the other, of eternal hopes, we direct that restlessness into an unending project of social amelioration, which because it is unending never satisfies. We want a kind of justice that we can't give ourselves, and we make ourselves perpetually discontent by seeking it.
Richard Reinsch (23:14):
Talk about a bit, Pascal and the Jesuits. In a way there's a sharp confrontation there, what's going on?
Benjamin Storey (23:22):
So, the Jesuits in Pascal's times, Pascal lived from 1623 to 1662. And in that era, the Jesuits were the most powerful church men in France, I think there had been a long succession of Jesuits who had served as personal confessors to the French kings at this point. And what Pascal saw about the Jesuits, is that they were very influential in the upper reaches of French life, and the way in which they maintained their influence was by being what we call permissive moral authorities. That is, people look to them as moral authorities, as representatives of the church. And those moral authorities respond particularly to the attentions of powerful people, by letting those people do most of what they want to do, that is by giving them permission to get away with a lot. And this is a very powerful formula, this formula of acting the part of the permissive moral authority. This is a very powerful formula for advancement in life, which I think a lot of people have recognized since Pascal's time. And what Pascal says to the Jesuits, and he's engaged here in a common effort with some of his so-called Jansenist his friends, it's worth pointing out here that Jansenism is a title that was given to Pascal's friends by their enemies. They just thought of themselves as Augustinians. And the Augustinians say to the Jesuits and to the France of their time, that Christianity is not a permission slip to do most of what you want to do in life. Christianity is a heroic enterprise that makes very serious demands on a human being. And Pascal tries to recover this demanding sort of Christianity for the 17th century, when he thought most people were living out a kind of cultural Catholicism, in the sense of a Catholicism that was passed on to them as a kind of birthright of being born in a Catholic country. As opposed to a real commitment of their lives, made in a serious way with the intention of pursuing something like sainthood, which I think was what Pascal wanted.
Richard Reinsch (25:40):
You described Pascal's immense contributions to science, and mathematics and technology. In the chapter you also talked about that this also makes him aware of the inadequacy of science regarding man himself. And we are constantly, I think, facing being defined by science or scientism, that is to say the only thing that's real are measurements, or what we can learn empirically about nature, and so that would also include human beings. But what isn't real, what we don't take seriously, would be the questing of Pascal and trying to understand who man is. Scientific pursuits though, make him aware of that, I think.
Benjamin Storey (26:21):
I think that's right. I think Pascal is the guy who demolished the ancient scholastic commonplace, that nature abhors a vacuum. He's also the guy who is famous for saying, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces." That is for the ancients, and in some ways for Montaigne, nature is a home to us. And for Pascal, nature is not a home, nature is a void, nature is space. This is I think a very common way to think about nature now, but it's a terrifying way to think about nature, if one really faces what it means for human experience. And so for Pascal, when you think about nature in a truly modern way, that doesn't blunt your need for transcendence, it accentuates that need. That is, the more of a modern you are on scientific questions, the more you ought to be engaged in what Pascal defines as the anguished quest for real meaning in our existence. And Pascal is not at all vague about what kind of meaning he has in mind. He means the man God of the New Testament. He thinks that's what we really want, and if we seriously seek it, perhaps God will show it to us. Although we can never force God's hand on that point.
Richard Reinsch (27:54):
Okay. So, the man who needs no introduction, Rousseau. What does he do here, how does he respond to both of our previous thinkers?
Benjamin Storey (28:04):
We read Rousseau as a character who draws something both from Montaigne and from Pascal. He begins with Pascal's diagnosis of what the inner lives of educated people in his own time are really like, and he agrees with Pascal. He looks around the sophisticated Paris of the 18th century when he lived, and all these people with their salon and their literary enterprises, and their artistic delights. And he says, "Come on, you guys are fooling yourselves. You're not happy. And moreover, you all hate each other," just as Pascal had intuited. And so, Rousseau thinks Pascal is right in his diagnosis of the pursuit of happiness lived out. But Rousseau also thinks Montaigne is right about something, which is that it is possible to make one's self happy on this horizontal plane, as you described it earlier. It is possible to make one's self happy without grace, within the confines of nature.
Just as Montaigne made self-centeredness attractive, one might say that Rousseau makes narcissism attractive. He's just very good at getting you fascinated by his own very strange life, which proved to have, lots of people have seen a mirror of themselves in that life. And I think that's one of the things that causes him to be so fascinating.
Rousseau lays out a number of different ways that we might achieve that happiness, from his citizen on the one hand, to his solitary walker on the other. These are, one might describe them as the extremes of the horizontal plane that you're describing. That is, somebody who's wholeheartedly invested in his community, that is Rousseau's citizen, or somebody who's wholeheartedly invested in himself, that is Rousseau himself, particularly as he appears in the later autobiographies. What these very divergent options have in common, is a quest for a kind of wholeness that Rousseau sees in his natural man. And Rousseau thinks that human history has been the process of losing that wholeness, and becoming divided. That's what Rousseau thinks the problem is, we're divided against ourselves. So, to overcome that dividedness, he wants us to go all the way to one extreme with a citizen, or all the way to the other with his solitary walker. He wants us to invest wholeheartedly in something, and he thinks that's a way in which we can find, even contentment, contentment here and now. Although contentment with a very different content than that attributed to it by Montaigne.
Richard Reinsch (30:23):
Why do you think Rousseau has been such a mesmerizing figure for so many? Intellectuals, artists in particular, also political thinkers?
Benjamin Storey (30:33):
Rousseau is, first of all, he's a wonderful writer. Even people who deeply disagree with Rousseau have to acknowledge that he has extraordinary skills with a pen. Secondly, he does something very clever in the second discourse, which is I think maybe the clearest succinct statement of the heart of his thought. Which is that he takes the Christian story, the story of the fall, and he transforms it and he borrows it. He uses a lot of its pathos, but he makes it into a secular story of a fall. That is for Christianity, we've fallen by falling away from God, into the condition of fallenness in which we find ourselves. In Rousseau, we haven't fallen away from God, we've fallen away from nature. And we've fallen away from nature by corrupting ourselves through our own historic activity. But insofar as that corruption is self-inflicted, it could also potentially be self-cured. And by suggesting that, Rousseau raises very great hopes for what is possible for human beings. And so, I think those hopes are part of his appeal. And just as Montaigne made self-centeredness attractive, one might say that Rousseau makes narcissism attractive. He's just very good at getting you fascinated by his own very strange life, which proved to have, lots of people have seen a mirror of themselves in that life. And I think that's one of the things that causes him to be so fascinating.
Richard Reinsch (32:13):
Okay, so we'll move on just in the interest of time here, because there's so many fascinating thinkers that we could discuss for hours, Tocqueville. Tocqueville and the American soul, Tocqueville and the democratic soul, he'll take these three thinkers and apply it, or use it to understand man, most powerfully in democracy in America and the democratic commercial Republic, and what the activities of that Republic reveals to us about ourselves.
Benjamin Storey (32:43):
Yes. I think one of the great pleasures of working on this book was that it gave Jenn and I the chance to understand the deepest sources of what we take to be following our mutual friend, Peter Augustine Lawler, Tocqueville's deepest insight, which is this insight that appears in this little chapter called "Why the Americans Are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity." So Tocqueville came to America, and he looked around, and he deeply admired this country, particularly its political institutions and its institutions of small town self-government. But he also saw some very disquieting things in America, some of them the obvious things with which Americans are traditionally preoccupied. He was very concerned with slavery and with the dispossession of Native Americans. But he was also very attentive to the kind of disquiet that he saw in the American soul. He said, "These people are freer, more enlightened, more prosperous than any people the earth has yet seen, and yet they are grave and almost sad, even in the midst of their pleasures. And they're always reaching out for the next thing."
And what I didn't understand until we worked through the authors that we study in this book, is how Tocqueville was able to see this. In part he's just a genius, but in part it's because he was steeped in this tradition. And in particular, his friend and traveling companion Gustave De Beaumont said about Tocqueville that he just loved Pascal. Beaumont said the two souls were made for each other. And so, when confronted with this people that is always reaching out for one thing after the next. They build a house and they sell it when the roof is being put on, he tells us, because they've got to move on to the next thing. He sees this disquiet underneath the surface of prosperity, and success, and freedom and enlightenment. And I think he's able to see that because he's read his Pascal, and he knows that so much of human life is a diversion, and that we love our diversions because they take us away from ourselves. That's one of the great things that Tocqueville was able to see about Americans. That's why his book, while it's a wonderful history of America in the 1830s, and it's a wonderful analysis of our institutions, but what it brings to the table that so many American books about America lack, is this characteristically French psychological penetration. And I think Tocqueville gets that from his being steeped in this French tradition.
Richard Reinsch (35:29):
Now, on the other side, one could say it's good Americans are immersed in commerce, in work, trying to store away capital, or starting new businesses or worried about their future in that regard. But what they're not really worried about his ideology, typically. They're not going to put people in concentration camps, they're not going to put people on barges in the Sienne and sink them because they're on the wrong side of the revolution. Things like that. Does Tocqueville think, yes, Americans are restless in their abundance, but they also work hard, so of course they want their money, and they want to do things with it, they've earned it? Doesn't that all sort of balance out in a way?
Benjamin Storey (36:14):
I think so, in the way that you describe it. I think one of the things that Tocqueville loves about America is its liberal character, in the sense that liberalism is an art of separations. And so, while Americans love their commerce and reasonably want to enjoy the fruits of their labor, that's not their whole lives. They have Sunday. Tocqueville was astonished that this incredibly commercial nation just came screeching to a halt on Sunday, which was a time in which people opened their Bibles, and as he put it, "Cast a distracted glance at heaven," just a lovely way of capturing this element of American life. And so, that division, Tocqueville says that while religion never directly touches the public sphere, this is not a theocratic government or anything along those lines, nonetheless he describes religion as the first of America's institutions. And so, I think one of the things that Tocqueville thinks is healthy about American life, is precisely its division and compartmentalization.
And I think what he would be worried about for us, is that as we become a more secular society, we have a stronger and stronger impetus to break down some of our most basic divisions, that is some of our most basic protections. If we think that secular and imminent pursuits are really the only legitimate pursuits, well, why would we accord religion protected status? It wouldn't make sense anymore. And so, I think you've nicely described the way in which the commercial pursuits of American life, that are not the only pursuits of American life, can actually make for a kind of sane people who do one thing six days a week, and then something quite else on the seventh. But what happens when the seventh day is effectively gone? And I think that would be one of the concerns that Tocqueville might have in looking at America in our own moment.
Richard Reinsch (38:22):
And also as you know, it's the falling away of religion, but also the ways in which Americans find ways to interact with one another. Not just in the market, but apart from the market. And that too appears to be in decline from most of the things that I've read, not to mention also family life falling away. All of those things working to shape a different kind of a democracy, not the local scale democracy that Tocqueville saw, but sort of a top-down democratic, administrative, bureaucratic welfare state that we increasingly are moving into.
Benjamin Storey (39:01):
I think your point about the dissolution of human connectedness in the modern world and in the democratic world, is very important. This is something that came out to us in a striking way in thinking through this book. Because we saw beginning in Montaigne, the celebration of a distinctly sincere and humanistic version of social connection, Montaigne celebrates under the name of friendship. And he has this wonderful friend named Étienne de La Boétie. And he writes this line about La Boétie, that their friendship can only be explained by saying, "Because it was he, because it was I." That is, it's a friendship that rests on that horizontal human plane that you and I talked about. There's no third thing, there's nothing above or outside of ourselves that justifies that friendship. And Montaigne celebrates this as an alternative to the conventional social ties that he as a 16th century Frenchman was necessarily embroiled in, in every aspect of his existence. Montaigne celebrates this, and we can see it also in Shakespeare's celebration of romantic love. He celebrates the human tie freely formed, the soulmate if you will.
I think one of the things that you see in Tocqueville, is that the soulmate has in a way, become the only game in town. By which I mean that the progress of modern life has done so much to attenuate, and to weaken other forms of human connection, like a more conventional notion of family life, that if you don't find your soulmate, you're really on your own. Which is really a very difficult condition to put human beings in. And so, Tocqueville was worried already in the 1830s about what he calls individualism, which was not a sort of up by one's own bootstraps kind of mentality, but a form of social self-isolation. And one can see that that has gone much further in our own time where, we have unprecedented numbers of people literally living alone. Well, when you have all that loneliness, when you have all that disconnectedness, it's ultimately going to have a profound effect on your politics. Because lonely people, I think, are typically very unhappy people, and that unhappiness is then going to make its mark on our public life.
When we see students at the beginning of their collegiate lives, one of the first books I like to read with them is Plato's Gorgias, which puts very forcefully to them the question, how should I live? And it puts that question in the form, what is the best life for a human being? And most students look at me when confronted with that question and it just doesn't compute. In the sense of. "The best life? You can't ask the question the best life, there is no best life, right?
Richard Reinsch (41:39):
Yeah, the restless soul you're describing also could be a way, enormously helpful way of thinking about partisan division, partisan rancor. Not listening to one another, or turning politics into more than it can actually be or provide.
Benjamin Storey (41:54):
I think that's right, and I think it's something that we see on both sides of our political divide right now, in particular in the formlessness, you might say, of our most intense political moments. That is, we have protest movements of both right and left, of both the extreme right and the extreme left, but we don't really have governing movements, that is people with serious and constructive ideas about how to organize human life. And I think one of the reasons that's so difficult for us is that we have an instinctive suspicion on both sides, again, of the whole principle of human organization, where we don't like having our ties to other human beings defined, our roles with respect to other human beings defined. But a social life without roles and defined human ties, is kind of a free-for-all. And I think that free-for-all mentality does a lot of harm in both our public life and also our private lives, in which we just don't know how to relate to the other human beings we face every day. Should I treat a student as a subordinate, to whom I have a special kind of obligation because I'm in a position of power with respect to that person? Or should I treat that person as an equal, and therefore have a completely different set of relations with them? I think those are the kinds of questions that come up for all of us, all the time. And that makes for a very undefined, and therefore agitated and restless social life.
Richard Reinsch (43:28):
Okay. So, we have talked about four incredibly consequential French thinkers you and your co-author argue are key to understanding contemporary restlessness. What then, does liberal education do, or what could it provide?
Benjamin Storey (43:45):
One of the things that was both an entry point and an exit point to this book for us, was an attempt to connect what we've seen in the French thinkers to what we see in the students in front of us. And so, we open the book by describing a student. She's a composite of many students we've worked with over the years. This is a student who has done everything that the college has asked of her. She has succeeded handsomely in a couple of majors. She's founded one club, she's the president of another. She's been on study abroads, and not just different countries, but different continents. She's done internships, she's done everything. And she comes toward graduation, and she doesn't know what to do with herself. She could go to law school, she could go to graduate school, she can go work for a consulting firm, she could go back home, she could become a teacher, she could go abroad again, she could become a farmer.
We have frequent conversations with students in which the options are every bit as wide open as that. And when they get to the point of this, one could call the first really adult choice one makes in life, which is the choice of what to do immediately after college, they have no idea what to do with themselves. And why is that? We started to wonder. And we connected this to what we were seeing in the authors that we were studying, in the sense that our students have not been trained in the art of choosing. They haven't been trained in the art of thinking through what might actually make them happy. And so, they can take the most divergent options about how to live their lives as all equally serious, and all equally suited to them, which is just a profound failure of our educational institutions with respect to these students. And so, what we've tried to encourage in particularly the conclusion to this book, is to rethink liberal education as an education not aimed at cultivating the Renaissance man or the Renaissance woman, the human being who is good, a kind of jack of all trades, can do just about anything. But liberal education as an education in the art of choosing, because choosing is so much of what human beings with the freedom and equality that we enjoy in our society, have to do in our age. Our educational institutions ought to be doing more to help students learn that art.
Richard Reinsch (46:25):
And learning that art would be, I take it, reading great works in politics, literature, philosophy, law, history, and seeing how other people have made choices, been faced with difficult circumstances, and how they've understood themselves and what they've done?
Benjamin Storey (46:45):
I think that's right. I'll add to it that, I've mentioned at the beginning of our discussion here, Montaigne's attitude toward the question of the summum bonum, in which he conveys his skepticism about that question to us. And I think contemporary Americans, probably contemporary citizens of most liberal democracies, inhale that skepticism like a gas, that's TS Eliot's way of describing Montaignian skepticism, it's an atmosphere you breathe in. And so when we see students at the beginning of their collegiate lives, one of the first books I like to read with them is Plato's Gorgias, which puts very forcefully to them the question, how should I live? And it puts that question in the form, what is the best life for a human being? And most students look at me when confronted with that question and it just doesn't compute. In the sense of. "The best life? You can't ask the question the best life, there is no best life, right? Everybody knows that," is I think the instinctive reaction of many of our young citizens. And we want to give them the courage to ask that question again. And I think you're exactly right, that the great works are a great way to learn to do it. And so, if you walk a mile in the footsteps of Aristotle, if you really try to think through life in that way, it may not be your ultimate, final answer to the question of how you should live, but it'll help you think very seriously about what it means to live according to the dictum, that happiness is not in fact contentment found though a variety of pursuits and pleasures, but activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. That's the Aristotelian perspective on this question.
Richard Reinsch (48:20):
Your description of your student just there, made me think that they're thorough disciples of Montaigne. "What do you mean? I'm happy sunk into myself, into these other pursuits, like my phone, whatever's on my phone. And here you are trying to draw me out of myself. How dare you?"
Benjamin Storey (48:39):
I think that's a nice way to capture their reaction. But the thing is, you push through that first day.
Richard Reinsch (48:46):
And then they want to come out, right? They've never really been invited, most of them, in an honest way.
Benjamin Storey (48:52):
You're right, because they couldn't be, because one can't actually make one's self happy in this way. Staring at one's phone is addictive, but I don't think it puts one to bed with an easy conscience. And I think most of our students have the experience from the inside, of the restlessness that we think is the sign of abiding modern discontent, with the ways we try to make ourselves happy.
Richard Reinsch (49:19):
Ben Storey, thank you so much. We've been talking with the author, co-author along with Jenna Silber Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment. Thank you so much.
Richard Reinsch (49:31):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today, we're talking with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn about her new book, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is professor of history at Syracuse University. She's the author of many books and essays, including the award-winning Black Neighbors, which won the Berkshire Prize. She's also the author of Race Experts. Elisabeth, we're glad to have you on the program today to discuss this book.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (00:50):
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Richard Reinsch (00:52):
All right. Tell us, what's going on in the art of living? What do you want us to recover?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (00:58):
Well, I think that we should pay attention to our intellectual traditions. They're so rich and they're so multifarious and intricate that we abandoned them at our peril. And we also abandoned them at our poverty because it impoverishes us not to have this treasure trove of different kinds of approaches for how we can live our lives and think about all of the various problems that faced human beings over time and then specific problems that face human beings in the times that they live in. I go back to ancient Greco-Roman philosophical schools of thought, because I think that even today in our popular culture, we see signs of an interest in those schools of thought even if a lot of times it is inchoate or just suggested or implied or maybe even just hidden and unconscious.
Richard Reinsch (02:01):
We can talk more about that. Because at one level to think, wow, so ancient philosophy, stoicism, Platonism, Epicureanism, we're going to bring those into conversation with all of our problems that we have now and they can enlighten us and guide us and give us wisdom and truth and all those things. That's ambitious. But also as I read your book, a huge part of your book is a critique, a negative moral judgment of how we live now, of how we think now, of how we approach ourselves and living with others. Talk about that because that to me, we can't get to the classical philosophy until we understand more of what you're saying there.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (02:45):
Yeah. I think part of why I think it's so relevant and important now in particular is because how we are living, not we as in you and me, but our dominant cultural sort of habits and trends and even mores or lack of mores. I do think we're living in a moral crisis. I think we're also living in a social, political and intellectual and spiritual crisis. It's really a tough time. There are a lot of divisions among us. There are questions of principle, even obscurity about the very existence of a truth, not even talking about what the truths might be and debating them, but just is there even such a thing? It's a pretty major crisis we're in. I think sort of a perfect storm of different things going on. One of the main cultural movements since really since the late 19th century, but particularly taking up speed in the mid 20th century and then on into our own day, I think it's still dominant is the therapeutic culture. And I draw very much on Philip Rieff, the classical sociologist who wrote the 1966 classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. And in that he was talking about this movement he saw over a long period in culture, particularly with Freud as a kind of pivot into the modern therapeutic, in which shared understandings based on religious or transcendent belief that helped communities cohere and also helped individuals think about why they would give up certain things, certain freedoms or other instincts or urges and wants and needs even.
Why would they do that? Well, there was a sort of transcendent purpose or a sense of what was sacred, what the community was aiming at, the telos in a way. Then that shifted particularly in post World War II era United States, but the so-called West more broadly, as individual freedoms sort of began to be enshrined as the ultimate principle. This was part of how many people sort of lost their sense of commitment to communities or families or polities. And instead it sort of gave a legitimacy to the pursuit of individual instincts and even greed and such. The sort of therapeutic where you just let it all out or you pursue everything that you want, regardless of other people. That sort of ethos really imbues a lot of what we have in our culture, even if it sometimes has other things laid over it or coming through it, maybe mitigating it a little bit. But there's really a strong therapeutic push to social life now. And I think that we need something, we need to figure out really what is at the root of that therapeutic? And then what traditions of thought might be rich enough and deep enough to give us an alternative? Because I think it really leads to an impoverished way of living and there's so many signs of that, of spiritual crisis.
Richard Reinsch (06:24):
Yeah, the author novelist, essayist, Walker Percy had this phrase, the consumer therapeutic culture.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (06:31):
Oh yes, yes.
Richard Reinsch (06:33):
And I thought of that as I was just reading your critique. And consumer, he didn't necessarily mean, although he didn't exclude it, just sort of the materialism of our period, but consumer as in consuming ideologies as meanings of truth and those ideologies, you take your pick. Marxism, feminism, nationalism, whatever. And these sort of become ways in which people understand themselves, but what they're divorced from would be metaphysics or theology or sort of the traditional things that have guided people throughout the course of say Western civilization broadly understood and being replaced by an ideology or the therapeutic. He was very much alert to the therapeutic. And what do you think is at root of the therapeutic? Is it the dismissal of virtue? The dismissal of sort of a truth that transcends human beings and nature that transcends human beings but sort of I'm making things up as I go and what I'm making up is kind of what makes me feel good. What do you think it means?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (07:32):
Yeah, I think so. That's a good summary. And all that you said is so fascinating to me. That reminds me so much of Eric Voegelin, who was critical of those same sort of ideologies when used especially to split the world usually in two camps of those people who are all evil and those people are all good because they ascribe to that particular ideology and it's really a terrible way to live and it doesn't work. It just pits people against each other. Using etiology instead of really deep ways of thinking and traditions of thought and living is not helpful and is really part of the 20th century tragedy. But yeah, so what's at root of the therapeutic. I think it's got different sort of elements to it. And so in my book, I put my own definition of the therapeutic because there's a set of scholars and thinkers who have written such insightful things about aspects of the therapeutic culture, such as therapeutic as it comes through education or as we see it in the practice of religion even, which would seem to be the very opposite of it. But there are certain ways that some people practice religion that are very much in line with the consumer therapeutic. At the root of the therapeutic in my view is self interest and also a manipulative view toward other people.
Once we are shorn of any transcendent or higher reference outside of the individual that could possibly be a source of connection and meaning and commitment that gives us direction for our striving and a reason to practice virtue, we are sort of left to our own devices and the emphasis on the individual's quest for what feels good, what is supposedly therapeutic, it makes it seem as though other people exist only as kind of auxiliaries at best and kind of stepping stones at worst. That they are just there to help fulfill the individual's needs and wants. And so without any sense of shared purpose or the sense that shared purpose is important, people end up in a manipulative mode and not even aware of why that's wrong or that there would be a possible alternative. It's just widely accepted that it's fine to pursue your needs. That would almost sound funny to many people to say, "Wait, hold on. Why did you just talk about it being so great to pursue your needs?" Because it's such a given now that that is what the main project for each individual self is. I think those things, other things like having a health paradigm is the main kind of worldview, that everything is related to that. As long as it is sort of healthy in any individual's idea of what healthy means, because that becomes very subjective, then it's fine. Instead of having this phrase...
Richard Reinsch (11:05):
Hear this phrase self care a lot now.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (11:05):
Yeah, self care. Oh my goodness, yes.
Richard Reinsch (11:08):
Yeah. You're unfriendly to people who work out and spend time in the gym, but those can be good things too, though.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (11:17):
Yeah, I'm not unfriendly to those people. I love those people. They're me and everyone else around us. No, working out and things is fine. I think it's all about with all of our human activities, don't you think it's all about how you do them and why you do them? And where does that activity fit in the larger scheme of your life? And would you run over someone to get to your gym because you're on your way to be so virtuous in working out that you accidentally ignore that there are pedestrians? That kind of thing that we need a sense of perspective and proportion of what really matters and how to go about living our lives, whether we're working out or cooking or shopping or caring for children, all the different things that we do. And one of the things that I wish we could do more is think about the ends. What is the point of different things? And then maybe we would be clear on how we should be doing what we do.
Richard Reinsch (12:30):
That's another part of our culture too, is the instrumentalization of everything in a way and not seeing things as finally true or good in and of themself. You talk in the book, you go on in separate chapters to talk about stoicism, Epicureanism, cynicism, Platonism and then you sort of have a final summing up chapter of what all this means. Thinking about stoicism, maybe just give us the classical understanding of that and how you see that reviving in contemporary times.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (13:04):
I basically encourage everyone to read the texts themselves because they're so rich and fascinating and strangely so easy to understand even all of these years later. It might seem too old, why would we ever want to read such an old, difficult to understand text? Well, these are translated into wonderful modern English versions or if your're Spanish, Spanish versions, Italian versions. All over the world, Chinese versions. There's beautiful translations of all of these ancient texts because they've been around for a long time. Find an edition. People should find editions because I really feel they're systematically being deprived of some of the best, most helpful resources for living, just getting by with some of the things we have to face in the human condition. That just kind of leads up to, you can see that I feel rhapsodic about stoics. People like Marcus Aurelius and his meditations and Seneca in his letters and Epictetus and his sort of programmatic list of ways to think. I don't agree with it all and I don't think most readers would agree with every single thing they read. And they all differ. All of these stoic authors are very different.
They have a different tone, different style, different genres they write in. It's worth the reading lots of them, if you can or if you're interested. But they share certain overarching things and one of them is an understanding of the various demands on the individual, on a person. They have the idea that you should really think about what the priorities are, what you should be pursuing. And then that helps you deal with all the rest and let some of the rest fall away. They really want you to be clear about what the point is and what you're pursuing and then really dig in. And it's about endurance and overcoming some of the at least initial emotional reactions that can steer you away from the things that you're pursuing. I do see this coming back now. We see it in a lot of movies like the movie Gladiator.
Richard Reinsch (15:21):
You see stoicism in Gladiator?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (15:23):
I actually do. I think we can debate it. And anyone ever wants to talk with me about any of these movies that I write about in a book or any other movies, I think it's fascinating to see whether there's a school of thought coming through a particular cultural form and movies are so prominent now. But any, any one you can think of, a painting from the Renaissance, a song from Bruce Springsteen that he just wrote or you can look at these and see what's the sensibility behind it. And I think you can kind of see that they lean toward one of these schools of thought, not just the ones in my book, but there are more that I didn't include in one book like the ancient skeptics, et cetera. Yeah, I think I do see stoic elements. And even if you don't agree that there are stoic elements in the movie itself, the movie refers to those. It's trying to say that stoicism's still interesting. But there's a whole movement of the new stoics. And these are real people today who gravitate toward websites and online schools and classes and also events in the real world like Stoic Week. And there's a real following for stoicism today. I think a lot of it is unconscious and you can see it in many places where no one's proclaiming the new stoicism, but there's also a conscious element of it. When I look at some of the new forms, I do see a difference sometimes with the ancient forms. That's what I do with each of the schools of thought that I look at in the book.
Richard Reinsch (17:04):
Do you see the stoicism now, you say in the book is sort of like, well you write about one gentleman who writes a book on stoicism for business. He profiles sort of famous people in history and how they exemplified stoicism. And you think this is kind of a bit rich and it seems to be sort of stoicism is now understood as be tough or have true grit and buckle down. But of course, stoicism in the classical perspective was something else that there was truth, the world was composed of reason, there was natural law and you tried to situate yourself in accordance with it and not be overly worried about fortune or various calamities that might befall. You wanted to live in accordance with the reason of things.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (17:45):
And I would just add fame, don't be obsessed with fame and things because time passes and people forget, so don't be just pursuing immediate sort of self glorification.
Richard Reinsch (17:59):
Yeah. You wouldn't be a social media, an Instagram influencer. That might be hard if you were a serious stoic.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (18:07):
Yeah. Or if you did, you were really practicing a different kind of craft, but maybe using that maybe input. One thing about the stoics that's fascinating is that they have this view of time and space of the universe. And in modern forms, it's often reduced to basically pretty much the AA mantra, which is about leaving aside things that you can't change and only focusing on the things that you can change and far be it from me to criticize. I think that Alcoholics Anonymous has saved many a life and many a family, so all good. But when you go outside of that and see where it's coming up and it's really kind of scary because you can use stoicism getting rid of all of the bigger worldview to pretty nefarious ends as you just implied that you can let everything else fall away and just say, "Oh, it's all about grit." And oh, the way I interpret it because this is the therapeutic society and the individual reins supreme, I just choose to interpret it as being really mean to people or being aggressive or being violent. That's not at all a stoic sense. And the stoics had a whole sort of cosmology. They tried to sync.
That's what's fascinating about these schools of thought is they thought not just sticking, just want a paired of down self help regime where give me five steps for how to live my life. They were really about understanding our life and ourselves, of understanding in light of the fact that we live in this infinite universe and we are just this speck, they would emphasize we're just this tiny speck. Considering that we are and that our moment in life is so fleeting, then how should we live? And I'm not trying to say they're all saints or anything. I'm just saying that if we look at their more complete worldview, it can't be hijacked so easily by the modern therapeutic and the hyper-individualism that I'm worried about and it can present an alternative. One of the things that's missing about the many modern forms is the focus on virtue and moral goodness, which was really at the heart of these schools of thought. And that's unfortunately one of the elements that I don't see as, and some of the new stoicism is fantastic. It's great writing. It's really reaching. It could affect your life for sure. There's really good stuff. And then there's others where it's just really been hijacked by the therapeutic self help culture.
Richard Reinsch (21:07):
Something that occurred to me thinking about stoicism in the Roman Empire, at least what I've read, it doesn't really penetrate beyond the aristocratic class. Have you thought about why that might be?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (21:16):
But do we ever really know though about that because the sources are so slim and there was Epictetus who was a slave. He's one of the maybe the most prominent stoic that we still know about now. I'm not sure. Well, maybe you know, you've read more about what we can know based on the limited sources to say, but I would never generalize about beyond, because what we have is the sources that we still have tend to be elite sources so it's probably all we can really know about anyway, but that doesn't mean other people didn't have any forms of stoicism.
Richard Reinsch (22:03):
As I thought about it, I don't know what that necessarily means, but I've wondered about that. Something I was thinking about in your book and the stoicism discussion one, stoicism to my knowledge is sort of the operating philosophy of the United States military. To the extent there's a philosophical bedrock, given its stoicism. In fact, Donald Trump's first Secretary of Defense, I think it's apt to say is a stoic, certainly studied Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, we know, thoroughly. The way he talked about duty in particular to the country reminded me of a stoic talking and was thinking about those things. Also known for saying in any room he goes into, he has a plan for killing everyone in the room and getting out alive, which I thought was an interesting thing.
But there and then there's also thinking about this aristocratic tradition, at least according to Walker Percy, the leadership class, both of the antebellum South and then the post Civil War South, at least until the early 20th century, was stoic. He said it wasn't Christian so much. They had really one foot in church, but really they were more Cicero and they thought of their own obligations in life and their actions and things they did in stoic terms. And he talks about the men in his own family in that term and he thinks stoicism is so far so good. He doesn't think it's enough because a person he says, "It can't really help you love." Or doesn't really call forth grade love, a great relational love. And he wonders about that.
But I was also going to mention that probably one of the most listened to podcast in America today is Jocko Willink's podcast. And Jocko was the former trainer of Navy SEALs. He was a Navy SEAL for a number of years, served in the Iraq War and everything pulsating through this podcast is stoicism. And how not just to what he does, what podcast he does is he brings sort of lessons of leadership that he learned as a Navy SEAL and he has a consulting practice and he sort of helps other people with leadership through the things that he had learned as a SEAL but the way he's described himself and the reasons he gives you for acting on your own are very stoic in nature. And it's an endless push, I should say, but he's also, I wouldn't say cheapening stoicism as we were discussing, but is writing about sort of the full realm of how you should act in a range of different responsibilities and how you should treat other people and things like that. I was just going to mention that to you as something you might take a look at.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (24:35):
Thank you.
Richard Reinsch (24:36):
One thing you write about Epicureanism, we can say that's definitely been devalued in our time. But what about Epicureanism is good for thinking about now?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (24:45):
Well, the early Epicureans were very different from some of the modern or current manifestations, which it's true. The ancient Epicureans did think that pleasure was the ultimate point of life. That's true, but in their version, it was very still grounded in a moral framework when they thought, what does pleasure mean? It is something that you get from your relations with other people and your relations with just basic activities in life. Things like eating were definitely sources of pleasure, but they were also in a particular setting among friends, among family members. There was still a sense of kind of moral community, a very strong sense of that. And there was also a sense of holding back on your appetites, which we would probably just automatically say, "Oh, that sounds more stoic." And maybe there is a little bit of stoicism there, but it is very much an Epicurean value to hold back and to keep your wants more trimmed down so that you can satisfy them and so that you can keep pursuing pleasure throughout your life.
They had a very strong sense that you can't just abandon yourself in every given moment to an unbridled pursuit of momentary titillation or gratification because then what's going to happen is you're going to have terrible results and the next day is not going to bring any pleasure whatsoever because you're going to tear apart all of the good things in your life and pay huge consequences and then your life is not in any way, a pursuit of pleasure. They had a sense of perspective and proportion and the duration of a life. Yes, they were talking about the main thing is pursuing pleasure within one's own lifetime, but it was not anything that would help with the modern consumerist.
Richard Reinsch (27:05):
Well, I suppose they would, just thinking about the meal and thinking about purpose. The meal itself, it wasn't to gorge or if you enjoy the food, but I take it, there's a range of experiences that that they're concerned with.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (27:20):
Yeah. Because if you gorge on things, that's not going to lead to pleasure. It's really an interesting way to think of things that I think is very helpful for us because we do live in this consumerist era. And so there are some movements that I think are kind of truer to ancient Epicureanism. When I was living in Rome, I had half a year as a Fulbright fellow and I knew someone who was interested in the slow food movement and she invited us to a several day conference on the slow food movement, which I didn't really know about. And it was held at, it's called Bra, Italy where that movement had its origins. And it was all about the gourmet emphasis of our time, where you care about the way you prepare food, but it was so embedded in a sense of again, kind of moral community where the reason why you pay all that attention to how you're cooking is not just because you're thinking about yourself and this is another part of my image or my identity or anything like that.
It's more that we should because of morals, we should care about how we're raising livestock, we should care about how we're farming and so that there are a lot of movements like that, buy local movements, farm to table movements that emphasize kind of having a moral sense when you go about getting your food and preparing your food. But the slow food movement in Italy also emphasizes the pleasures of actually sitting down and then dining and consuming the food in a positive sense. It could have us reorient ourselves toward consumerism if we thought of consuming in that ancient Epicurean way, that it has has a place in the moral community and helps shore it up and gives us a sense collective purpose and just belonging. And a sense of enjoying each other's company and such.
Richard Reinsch (29:49):
The pursuit of pleasure, as I'm thinking about the classical Epicurean pursues pleasure, but they're not really pursuing pleasure per se. It's pleasure of what comes out of virtuous actions.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (30:00):
Yeah. That in itself is the source of pleasure. That's how morals and pleasure are still united for them. Whereas for us, they tend to be separated because we just talking about the individual's pursuit of pleasure and then that's outside of a moral framework.
Richard Reinsch (30:19):
You talk at length in the chapter on Epicureanism about the novel film Eat, Pray, Love. Does this film exemplify Epicureanism? Or is this something else?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (30:32):
I think it's trying to. I think it instead is an instance of what I'm trying to warn of in the modern forms of these schools of thought that I'm really deeply, profoundly worried about where we are, what's happening in our times. I think we're in cultural crisis and we have been for some time and if we don't find ways to renew our sense of sort of why we exist together, not just separately, but individually too, we're just not going to be able to continue. I'm really worried about the state of things. And so when I see Eat, Pray, Love, I'm pretty excited because there is an unconscious reference to ancient Epicureanism. And even to some other traditions, there's a lot of sort of spirituality in that film and things like that. But then ultimately it seems like it's shoring up the ethos of our time.
Richard Reinsch (31:38):
Consumer therapeutic.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (31:40):
Yeah, I think so. I don't want to dismiss it all together. And all of the cultural forms that I analyzed in the book, I have at least some empathy for otherwise I wouldn't spend so much time on it. I think they're worth looking at, thinking about. And there's something just so amazing about the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon, because many times it's mothers and daughters who went to see that film or it was sisters or it was friends and they really found a lot of meaning in it. And so I don't just dismiss things and that people find meaning in. And I think sometimes they were finding meaning that probably came out of their own understanding of their embeddedness in moral communities and their relationships. And if that helped renew that, great. But I think ultimately I found that the message of that was pursue your own pleasure and at any cost. And the saddest part of that movie to me is this wonderful scene with her ex-husband, she's divorcing him and he's in the elevator and it's one of those uncomfortable things where it happens to open and she's standing there and they had both been to the lawyers about their divorce and he's just crying. And it's awful. It's just chilling to the spine because she didn't really have a distinct reason for leaving him. She wasn't leaving him because he was cruel or violent or their life was just impossible to sustain. It was more of that sort of generalized discontent on her part that maybe there's something more. And then you realize what the cost is when you look at him and he did not want to end the relationship. To me, that speaks volumes about what is wrong with the consumerist therapeutic, where people can just sort of become pawns that you cast aside when they're not really helping you fulfill what you think is going to be therapeutic for the individual.
Richard Reinsch (33:56):
Okay. On to Platonism, which seems to be, as I read you, the school of thought you find most hopeful.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (34:03):
I do.
Richard Reinsch (34:05):
And I would sum up your chapter on Platonism led by truth, inspired by beauty. That's what it can give us.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (34:11):
Nice.
Richard Reinsch (34:12):
And we desperately need it. Could you talk about this chapter?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (34:17):
Yes. I think this is the school of thought that is most rare today. And so what I want is to help join those other people who would like to bring the whole conversation back among these schools of thought because that's partly what I think is interesting and important is not just saying, "Oh yeah, stoicism is the answer. Let's forget about everything else." And I think stoicism has a lot to offer, but it can also be, as I said, hijacked for use for just the individual, maybe even to shore up aggressive, violent urges. That's not good. That's a terrible combination of the stoic and the modern therapeutic consumerist culture that can be toxic. And there are toxic versions of the other schools of thought as well. But the Platonist one, I think that needs to be brought back into the conversation. Many of the other schools kind of had their origins in the Platonist perspective and they kept some of those elements, even if they went in a certain direction as in Epicureanism with the pursuit of pleasure, but there was still that moral sense. And that was largely, wasn't originated in Platonism, but Plato was the composer of the symphonies on a whole symphony, philosophical symphony, his whole oeuvre was about moral goodness. And I think we need that part of all of those ancient schools to come back. But I think Platonism, if we could bring it back into the conversation, would help us think about all of our various struggles and difficulties in light of the overarching question of, well, what is good as in morally good in this case? It doesn't seem like that's the habit of mind that dominates today.
Richard Reinsch (36:15):
Well, I think we're sort of like, what is truth? In a mocking sense, not in the Socratic sense of asking that question. We should bring Plato back into the conversation, what would that look like institutionally? Something that I thought as I was reading your chapter is the rise of these classical schools all across America. What I thought was interesting about that is a lot of these are very religious schools, Catholic schools, Protestant schools and so they actually want to return to the ancients, but through Christianity, did you think about that as you were writing your book?
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (36:44):
Oh, absolutely. And in the end of the book I come to Plotinus and Augustine. St. Augustine was so deeply influenced by Plato and Plotinus. He says that that was really what changed his trajectory was reading them and you can see it in his thought and it's basically, you can't, I don't think completely appreciate Christianity without realizing the profound Platonism in it but also it has the other elements. It has the other schools of thought as well. Stoicism is very much in Christianity. These schools of thought aren't in any way sort of opposed. And that would be something that would scare me if people, again, it's that urge that we have probably to commodify and make simple and manageable and usable different philosophies. And so I think there would be some people who might think, oh, you can either recommend a religion or you can recommend a school of thought. And I think that the whole conversation is what we always need, because you could take Christian beliefs and practices and you could say, "Well, which here, do we see any stoic leanings? Do we see any Epicurean leanings?" And Platonist leanings are so important, because a lot of the modern practices of religion are basically one and the same with the consumer therapeutic. And so how would we sort of work against that and retrieve or invent what is best about religion in our lives? I think it's being attuned to the Platonic elements would help a great deal.
Richard Reinsch (38:38):
Yeah, as I thought about your book too, just this idea of faith and reason working together, interacting and needing one another. And I think, probably one of the most dramatic papal statements was the Regensburg address in my mind, by a Pope in the 16th often misunderstood. In which he's basically trying to recover a classical version of reason and saying that this has been debased by a modern positivist and utilitarian understanding of reason. And so we're not even able to think about who we are anymore. And he tries to show ways in which this has devalued Western liberal democracies. I was reading your book, I just thought about that as well, that this sort of loss, and you're talking about philosophy as a way of living and I'm maybe talking about how to think, but this overall loss of conception of our full intellectual tradition, something we definitely need to recover. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, thank you so much for coming on to discuss your book, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living.
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today, we're talking with Donald Drakeman about his new book, The Hollow Core of Constitutional Theory: Why We Need the Framers. Donald Drakeman is distinguished research professor in the program in Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame University, where he also teaches in the law school. He's the author of a number of publications, some of which I've read over the years. Why We Need the Humanities, Church, State, and Original Intent, along with many articles and book chapters. Donald, we're glad to welcome you to Liberty Law Talk for the first time.
Donald Drakeman (00:52):
It's a pleasure. Thanks very much.
Richard Reinsch (00:54):
Thinking about this book, I like the title. So we are awash, it seems to me, in a cacophony of constitutional interpretive methods. Originalism itself boasts... I don't know. Over a half a dozen different schools. We've also got the living progressive Constitution, which can be a very moralistic Constitution. It can also be a very pragmatic Constitution, driven by policy concerns, in terms of reaching outcomes. So what's the hollow core of most of these approaches?
Donald Drakeman (01:26):
I think that the basic problem is that we're arguing about what the words might've meant, what the words should mean, what we'd like the words to mean. And what we're missing is that, from really the beginning of written laws in the Western legal tradition, the law was the written instrument that was made by a lawmaker. Then, it would have been an emperor. Now, ever since we've had legislatures, it's legislatures. They make the law. And throughout all of that history, really for the better part of 20 centuries, the core of interpretation was trying to discern and apply the will of the lawmaker, or what we usually call the lawmaker's intention. That's what Coke said. "Every statute ought to be expounded, according to the intent of them that made it." Joseph Story even said, "The first and fundamental rule of interpreting legal instruments is to construe them according to the sense of their terms and the intention of the parties." The intention of the lawmaker was what judges were expected to look for and how they were expected to interpret. And when Justice Scalia said, "Well, Blackstone told us that we should look for the words in their ordinary meaning," he was right. Blackstone said that. But what he said was, "That's our best evidence, subject to other evidence, of what we're really looking for," which was the will of the legislature by, as Blackstone said, "Exploring his intentions at the time the law was made."
So it is by looking at the area where a number of leading originalist scholars have said we ought not go, which is the debates that, our record of the actual bargaining process, and see what those individuals thought they were talking about.
So what we're missing is what we really should have been looking for all these years, which is the intentions of the lawmaker, what the lawmaker was trying to do, why the lawmaker was trying to do that. And we've gotten ourselves into two very separate corners of judicial policymaking, say, on one side and a hunt for some sort of dictionary definition on the other.
That was not anchored to what real people were trying to do with the words being used.
Richard Reinsch (03:34):
When I interview most originalists, when I read most legal scholar originalists now, what is described is "Well, there was a time," say Raoul Berger, Robert Bork, 50 years ago, "of this, 'Well, we want to know what the intentions of the founders are.'" And we realized that was just impossible, if you really did historical work, that how would you ever know what their intentions were? And they intentions cancel each other and they're different. And what's really important is to know what the texts mean at the time and to know how people would have described them and understood them. So the better way of doing originalism is original public meaning. I mean, I know you know all that. But for our listeners. And that's seen as displacing original intentions. So I mean, is that because primarily, originalism wanted to be academically distinctive? Or is that, in itself, this sort of a methodology of just trying to make it more stable?
Donald Drakeman (04:31):
Well, I think they're probably a collection of reasons, one of which is that the old version of original intent was often focused on looking at what a small number of prominent framers might've said about an issue outside of the debates in the first Congress or the Constitutional Convention. I mean, take, for example, the famous Everson case in church and state law. They go back to Virginia and they're looking at what James Madison said in a petition he wrote called the "Memorial and Remonstrance ". Or they're looking at a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote a bunch of years later. And assuming that you've got all these framers that thought one thing, and you have a bunch of framers from New England that thought another thing. And there's no way to figure out how you can blend all that. And so, we're going to look just at the meaning of the words. And that seems really sensible if there's only one meaning of the words. And that's really how I got started in this research is that I've been a church-state scholar for a long time.
I decided I would do a very careful analysis of the original public meaning of the words. I mean, there aren't many words in the Establishment Clause. And what I came out with is that there are at least four equally plausible meanings if we look just at how somebody, somewhere, was using that language at the time. So how do you pick? Which of those public meanings? I'm not arguing. And I think some of the so-called bad old originalism sometimes argue that we ought to pick a meaning that's different than what the public might have understood. I think, to the contrary, the key here is to look at which of multiple possible public meanings the public actually did understand. And they understood it because they understood that's what the framers were doing. So the intentionalism that I'm focused on is not the intention of James Madison in particular or any other framer. It is the intent of the body. When they got together to debate the various terms, they had ideas, they had intentions. "I want this for my state. You want that for your state. We disagree." And then, finally, they vote on something that they all understood did something in particular. And it may not have been what any of them wanted, what they intended to get when they got there. But they knew, at the time when they were voting, what they were voting on and what that meant, what it was supposed to do, what their intention of the whole body as a group. So that's what we're looking for here. So we don't go back and look at James Madison's or Jefferson's or James Wilson's life histories.
And try to discern the meaning from their own personal philosophies. It's, they hammered out a compromise. And they knew what the compromise was.
Richard Reinsch (07:21):
How do you delineate and understand the contours and nature of that compromise for a legal decision?
Donald Drakeman (07:28):
Well, that's where the thing that has been excluded from many of the, perhaps most of the original public meaning discussions is the debates in the convention and debates in the First Congress on the Bill of Rights. And it is there where we have the best sense of what the lawmaker, as a group, thought it was doing as a group. And so, we see that James Madison probably disagreed with a number of people in New England about what the word "establishment" meant. But they all knew what the clause was designed to do, which was to prevent the formation of a national church like the Church of England. So it is by looking at the area where a number of leading originalist scholars have said we ought not go, which is the debates that, our record of the actual bargaining process, and see what those individuals thought they were talking about.
Richard Reinsch (08:26):
Okay. But in thinking about what they were talking about? I mean, I guess the overall question of just getting, you call it the summing up, or people call it the summing up problem. I'm fishing for something concrete to think about, in terms of applying to a judicial dispute.
Donald Drakeman (08:42):
So let me pick, instead of the Establishment Clause, the Excise Clause. Because unfortunately, so many of us have notions of what the Establishment Clause meant or ought to have meant, that it's hard to talk about it without bringing in all those old arguments. So let's pick the Excise Clause in the tax provision, which is a somewhat more emotionally neutral topic. So it turns out that, in the Excise Tax language is, what is an Excise Tax? Is it a tax on a transaction, like a sales tax? That was one definition. Or basically, any tax that the government might levy on a thing, like something you own. Not something you buy. But just something you happen to have in your house, like your fireplace or your dog or your clock. And there were different regional meanings of the word excise. And we find out actually that people in New England had a completely different view of what excise meant, based on their own statutes and what was collected by the Excise Tax collectors in their own states, from what the people in Virginia thought. And one of the early Supreme Court cases was all about, essentially, whether it would be this New England version, which says it includes taxes on things you own, or whether it was a Virginia version, which is just taxes on things you were buying or selling, a sales tax.
And Justice Patterson, in the 1790s, very early case, by a framer. Patterson was one of the framers. Represented New Jersey. He said, "Look. We've got a semantic summing problem here. We've got two definitions. And they're both equally good. The question is, 'How do we resolve that?'" And the answer he gave was looking at the intention of the Constitutional Convention. And the intention here was to allow broad government taxation with specific limitations that would be called direct taxes, which would have to be proportional. And that was really a concern of the slave-holding states because they did not want to have taxes that would allow the North to tax their ownership of slaves. And so, what he said was, "This is not what I, as a framer, wanted. But it's what we, as the framers, decided that there would be this broad taxing power, subject to these specific limitations, to protect the Southern interest." And so, he found the, based on the nature of the bargain, the outcome was what he called, obviously, the intention of the framers. So it's not a mathematical process, as some have been trying to do with corpus linguistics and so on, to just come up with a number. "How many times did we read this word in 1787?"
That's a meaning. But it's a process that says, "We take all of the possible definitions." And there was more variation then than we might appreciate now, because the regional differences were so distinct. So many had been immigrants from different parts of Europe or different parts of what we now call the UK. And therefore, there were significant semantic differences that we actually only see if we go looking for them, which is the case here of the Excise Clause.
Richard Reinsch (11:58):
So it's something, I was just thinking about your approach. There's a problem. There's something that requires a remedy from, say, in the Constitutional Convention or a legislature. A remedy is proposed, debated, discussed, and a compromise is reached. And I guess it's like you're really pointing to, "Well, what's the compromise?"
Donald Drakeman (12:21):
Absolutely. "What's the final deal here?"
Richard Reinsch (12:24):
Okay.
Donald Drakeman (12:24):
And, "How do we implement the deal in light of what they were trying to accomplish, not just what the words might be able to mean or what we think policy ought to be." That's exactly well said, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (12:35):
Now, many originalists; or maybe just me; from the first time I read Scalia's Matter of Interpretation, think about legislative history as a grab bag and can tell you all sorts of things. Would legislative history, though, be key to what you're doing? Or maybe Scalia was just wrong?
Donald Drakeman (12:52):
I think he was overreacting. I think that legislative history had been used badly. The Everson case is a great example where Justice Rutledge, who really drove the discussion of Jefferson and Madison and all the Virginia church-state battles as being the heart of the First Amendment. He later wrote to a friend, "This was really all about my worries about Catholics getting control over the public schools. And we had to stop it." And the Virginia history was really convenient for that purpose. So he was able to take his preconceived notion of what the clause ought to mean and he wallpapered around it, this veneer of 18th century history. And it made for a good-sounding story. And I think what Justice Scalia, in those kinds of cases, and in statutory interpretation cases, saw, was that people doing essentially bad legislative history, you know? Sort of cheating the history. We’re reaching outcomes that were inconsistent with actually what the bargain was. And he tried to make a clear rule than... And you're trying to get me to say a clear rule. And I keep saying, "You've got to go look for the deal!" Because it's hard to have a clear rule when you have a bunch of people coming together to haggle over how to solve an important question of public policy. And I think we ought to go look to see how they wrestled with that and what compromises they made. So I think Justice Scalia was just trying to emphasize. And you actually can see, from time to time, he cites the framer's debates. He found it tough to stick to the strongly-worded advice he gave.
Richard Reinsch (14:30):
Do you find any of the current originalists on the court or other justices using your method or parts of your method in their opinions frequently?
Donald Drakeman (14:41):
Well, one thing we see with the Supreme Court Justices is that they tend to spend less time talking about constitutional theory and more time actually doing it. And I would encourage more theorists to actually interpret and more interpreters to think about theory. This book, to some extent, was trying to bridge that gap. The Supreme Court routinely, from the left and the right? I was going to say in the center. I'm not sure there's much center left anymore. But from the whole spectrum of the court, in terms of both their judicial politics and their actual political positions, have cited the framers. In fact, the Excise Tax case I talked about was cited again in the Affordable Care Act. Framers get mentioned. That's been fairly routine. It's been the realm of theory where a need to try to match a jurisprudential basis for original public meaning has come out. And it's really drawn a sharp line that says, "We're only looking for the semantic meaning of the words in context." And that the most we can look at from the framers is how they used the words as just educated Americans of the time. Not that they were any sort of special...
Had any special track towards the meaning here. And I'm trying to reverse the polarity there and say, "We have to look at what the words could mean." But when we find out the words could mean more than one thing, then the tiebreaker is what they were really trying to do, which is what interpreters and interpretive theory have said for about 2,000 years.
How do we take the answer to an old question and apply that same answer to a new set of facts? That's been part of the tradition for a long time. What was new, and what I think originalism is reacting, or even sometimes overreacting to, is the idea that we're going to take an old question and give it a new answer because the court believes that a new answer is more appropriate to the modern age than the old answer that the lawmaker gave.
Richard Reinsch (16:15):
No. Original public meaning, from what I can tell, in the scholar world, is the most dominant originalist school. You claim it's an overreaction, though.
Donald Drakeman (16:27):
Yes. I think it doesn't work in real life. Theory is fine at the level of pure theory. But if you actually are recommending that your theory fit with a real-life application, you need to be able to get a point where your theory and the assumptions in your theory overlap with the way the world really works. And the assumption of original public meaning is that, through looking at word use in dictionaries, we can identify a single best original public meaning. And I think, in practice, that's not the case in many, but perhaps not all, constitutional provisions. And therefore, we need a way to decide which public meaning is better than which other public meaning. And that's the role that intention has played for many centuries.
Richard Reinsch (17:20):
On this original public meaning and the search for the words, you have a chapter on their use of corpus linguistics, which the way I understand is, we can put together now technical databases and analyze words and really get systematic about how we think they were used in the time period. That sounds promising to me. Why do you not think that's promising?
Donald Drakeman (17:43):
There are a lot of technical details in that chapter. And I will try not to give you all of them. The bottom line is that corpus linguistics is like a scientific experiment. It says we can collect data about a phenomenon and that we can analyze that data to tell us true things about that phenomenon. And so, you need to subject it to all of the questions that you subject to any other scientific experiment. "How do you know your data represents the phenomenon you're talking about?" Turns out, for constitutional purposes, the main corpus that everybody's looking at right now? Which has been a great effort, by the way. I think it's a wonderful thing to have. The question is, what do you do with it? But it's been put together with a collection of just a small handful of the papers of specific founders. So like four or five founders. And a certain number of things like newspapers, which weren't really like the newspapers of today. They reprinted mostly sermons. If you look at the documents that represent the 10 largest documents in the collection, in terms of words? So if you're searching for words and you say, "Wow. There are 10 documents that provide a large percentage of the words here." Then, that's where you're going to get a lot of your information about word usage.
And only one of them was written by an American. All the rest were written by people who lived in England. And some were translations of things written in Latin. So is that a representation of the way the American public understood things? I think the answer is probably not. Then, if you say, "Okay. Now we've got..." Let's say we're going to, forget that problem for a minute. Assume it works. Now, let's go to the next stage. How do we do it? We're trying to figure out what excise means. Does it mean this broader definition or the narrower definition? And the typical way people go about that is they find out, in this database, that it's been used, let's call it 500 times. And their research assistants, usually law students, then read a snippet of the text around it and make a decision about what the word means in that context. So now, you're saying that here, we have a word that's in the Constitution that we have a big disagreement about what it means. And we're going to take a bunch of law students, who may not have studied 18th century language or literature or history, give them 10, 15, 20 words around that word use, and have them assign a meaning. So basically, the same thing we're trying to do with the constitution. "What's it mean here?"
They're doing 500 times.
Richard Reinsch (20:22):
Yeah. There's something unreal about the process itself and thinking about how judges in our tradition... I mean, as you note in the book, across the centuries, have approached their craft. I've always thought this about corpus linguistics. It's a craving after certainty that just isn't there.
Donald Drakeman (20:38):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, what it tells you, even in cases where the words seem to appear more often to mean one thing and not another thing, it shows you that there are multiple uses in play amongst the public at the time.
And why picking the one that, in this particular database, occurs most rapidly, perhaps because it's in more sermons or because Thomas Jefferson really liked to use it, seems like just an artificial imposition of order, and as you say, certainty, on something that was much more fluid than that. And I think it's a recognition that we need to have a tie-breaking mechanism. And I think it's a useful thing to look at and to examine whether you feel as certain as you ought to, once you look at your method. But then, really, what are you looking for? You're looking for what a lawmaking body was trying to do.
What they decided, not... I mean, these legislatures and constitutional lawmakers did not just pull words out of a hat and say, "We'll choose these 10 words now. Let's go onto the next clause." They haggled over things that were important and made decisions. And we want to know what those are. And we want to ask judges to apply them to try to achieve the goals that lawmaker was trying to achieve.
Richard Reinsch (22:01):
A question that I have for you? And the best answer I've ever had to this was Michael Greve's book, The Upside-Down Constitution. So when I started learning about originalism? And I've got Scalia and I've got Robert Bork and I've got Raoul Berger, those were early thinkers important to me. But I started thinking. "Well, what did they do before progressivism?" Which seems to be the launching point of originalism. "What did they do in the 19th century? What did Joseph Story do? What did John Marshall do?" I mean, how did they... I mean, these are men who really shaped a Constitution a lot, to put it mildly. Do you see your approach in how they crafted some of these legendary decisions?
Donald Drakeman (22:41):
I mean, absolutely. Interestingly, John Marshall, who we tend to hold up as one of the greats, was working pretty hard to make the court a more powerful political body. And so, in his own opinions, you see the word intention somewhat less. But otherwise, as I said earlier, Story said, "We're looking for the intentions of the framers." A law professor writing a commentary; in fact, it was a new edition of Blackstone commentary in the turn of the 20th century; "the method of interpretation employed in the Roman Law is the will of the Prince. And in all free countries, the will of the legislative body." This is just the way people saw this. They also, by the way, understood that word meanings change over time. Because we now have this divided world between those who see the original meaning as correct and those who see some sort of updated or living meaning as correct.
We've lost the nuance that even Justice Scalia and some of his opinions picked up on, where sometimes, you have to update, you have to take into account that technology changes, that our understanding of the world changes. And so, is there a way to do that consistently with what the lawmaker was trying to do? And I really see updating as the good updating and the bad updating. And they're opposites. The updating that has been part of the tradition for centuries says, "We have a clause. We applied..." Let's say this law applies to telegraph companies. Now, we have somebody invented the telephone. Does it apply to them? Well, that's a brand-new set of facts.
How do we take the answer to an old question and apply that same answer to a new set of facts? That's been part of the tradition for a long time. What was new, and what I think originalism is reacting, or even sometimes overreacting to, is the idea that we're going to take an old question and give it a new answer because the court believes that a new answer is more appropriate to the modern age than the old answer that the lawmaker gave. And that's, I think, the line that is crossed when you go from a judge applying the will of the lawmaker to a judge applying the will of the judge. And I have another chapter that talks about the risks inherent in allowing small judicial bodies like Supreme Courts to make policy, which is just, it's not something they're good at. They're good at interpreting laws in light of the intention of the lawmaker. They've been doing it for generations. They're not good at figuring out how to make the world a better place in the future. That's, for better or worse?
Big, bulky cumbersome, sometimes hard to deal with. Legislative bodies are better at that.
Richard Reinsch (25:36):
Yeah. Well, I like it when they also say... And it's perhaps good saying Planned Parenthood vs Casey, where they say, to both groups, "You should drop this."
Donald Drakeman (25:46):
Right.
Richard Reinsch (25:46):
That works really well. "We've made a decision here." A question for you. Within originalism, most originalists say the ratifiers matter. You say the framers matter. What's the significance of that in constitutional interpretation?
Donald Drakeman (26:03):
So one of the public meaning tricks is to say, "The law wasn't made into law until the ratifiers ratified it." And therefore, whatever the framers said or did is irrelevant because it's what the ratifiers said and did that's important. And since we don't really have good records on the ratifiers, and we've just decided that the framers aren't relevant, then all that intention stuff and all the debates and what have you are irrelevant. Which is, I think, a very clever argument. But it misses one of the framer's great tricks. So the Articles of Confederation were in place when the Constitutional Convention met. And they had a provision on what it took to amend the Articles. And it would require, among other things, the agreement of all the legislatures of all the states. And that looked like it would be cumbersome. And so, the framers came up with this new idea of ratification. One of the framers said, "Who cooked up this idea of ratification? This is new." And the idea was it could be ratified by conventions, not legislatures, and nine states instead of all the states. And so, it was. And so, it became the Constitution. Now that actually, if it had been part of what the articles had said, then you'd be all right. But it's not. This was made up by the framers. And the framers, meanwhile, are doing this so that it looks like the ratifiers are really making the constitution. But it's just a great big Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to the framers behind the green curtains." Because it's the framers who said it's going to be law when it's ratified. Nobody else. And in fact, it was contrary to the law at the time, which was the Articles of Confederation. It's fascinating. So that's one answer to that question, which is just, it's a little too clever to say that it was just the ratifiers that made this into law. And then, secondly? And I think-
Richard Reinsch (28:02):
Could it be both?
Donald Drakeman (28:03):
Well, it is. And that's where this next piece comes in, which is to say, you can't have secret meaning of just the framers who were at the convention. Only they really knew what this meant. And the ratifiers didn't know and the public doesn't know. But we discover it 200 and some years later. And shazam. This had to be understood by the ratifiers and the public. Because otherwise, the ratifiers and the public wouldn't know how to obey the law. And public meaning had to be used, even if it was sometimes public meaning that differed from state to state. And besides, there was a framer at every ratifying convention. And there were framers, other than James Madison, who later published his notes, of framers who wrote lengthy discussions of what went on at the Convention. So that what was going on, what the framers were trying to do, was information available to the public and to the ratifiers when ratification was happening. So they, for all we can tell, were on board with what the framers had done and why they had done it and had information to that extent. And then, for the Bill of Rights, where we have a lot of our arguments, those provisions were debated in the 1st Congress. And the House of Representative's debates were carried in the newspapers. And so, our sources are their sources. And the people at the time saw exactly what we see when we look at them. So I think the idea that well, intentions? "Oh, good." Because only the framers were huddled together and it was all in secret? It's just not the case.
But in the Roman era, it was banishment and forfeiture of all their property if they interpreted other than just reading the words of the law. In England, they had this Star Chamber if people interpreted certain laws incorrectly, judges included. And there's all sorts of judicial jurisdiction, curbing and legislation, to strip jurisdiction from the courts that has been entertained. And whether that will go somewhere is an interesting question. It's beyond and above the questions in this book. But that's historically what has happened is, at some point, the other branches of government have just said, "We're really not going to put up with this anymore. And you should go back to what judges are supposed to be doing."
Richard Reinsch (29:33):
You think about, so Madison's notes? One scholar in particular has argued that he padded the score. Well, it wasn't exactly producing sort of an accurate rendition. But I guess you could say we have a lot of different sources of the convention that you can put it together.
Donald Drakeman (29:51):
And you question the sources. We've got Madison, who was very pro-Constitution. And we have a leading anti-federalist, Luther Martin, who wrote a very long discussion of the proceedings of the convention. And he had his own views of what went wrong there. And so, in between all this, you can get the best sense you can at what they were doing. Now sometimes, you're just not going to know. And if you don't have evidence from the debates, then you go with the best evidence you have, which is, as Blackstone said, the meaning of the words as they're ordinarily used. And if you have multiple meetings, then we argue about them. That's legal history. Back in the day, way back in the early days of the British parliament, judges would get a tough issue of interpretation. They'd go over the legislature and say, "What do you mean?" I can't do that with the Constitutional Convention. But it shows their view that what they're trying to do is to accomplish the result that the legislature had in mind, not to take advantage of the language to come up with a good idea.
Richard Reinsch (31:01):
Yeah. I suppose... Well, one question. My understanding is the Committee on Style, which produces a formal rendering of the Constitution to be voted on. They slip terms in. They do things that weren't exactly apparent, if you follow the length of the debates with certain scholars. How do you deal with that problem?
Donald Drakeman (31:21):
You know, it's like anything in history. There are sometimes conflicting pieces of historical evidence that lead to somewhat different views of something that happened. If, in fact, those conflicts are strong and there is no particular reason to favor one over the other, other than what I think is the standard version in the law, which is the law says history is, which way makes it better for my client? You just say, as a historian, "Geez. This is unresolvable by looking at that particular evidence." And that's fine. If we were less certain about a lot of this stuff, we would probably have better decision-making. We need to be as thoughtful as we can about what we can know about the past and how much authority we give that. But that's not a license to make things up in the future. It's just to say, there are limits to our knowledge.
Richard Reinsch (32:14):
I was reading your book. The central problem here is still, whatever originalism you're in, you're confronted with various ideologies that just dismiss making intentions or public meaning of the founding a central part of the judicial decision. It might be where we start but it's not going to be dispositive because of various ideological or policy needs. Overcoming that, it seems to me, ultimately is the major problem, that need to produce the result that certain enlightened members in the judicial class want.
Donald Drakeman (32:50):
I think that's absolutely right. And that, for better or worse, law schools, for a long time, have started their students off on the case method and have taken students through the common law approach to judicial lawmaking by building case on top of case. And it's a rare law school that teaches this history of statutory or constitutional interpretation along the lines that I have described in the book. And I think that's a shame. We have this built-in feeling, for about the last probably 50, 75 years, that the law and the world is there to be shaped by creative judges. And my sense is that we could do; and this is perhaps my political sense, as well as my historical sense; with more of a dose on all sides of the political spectrum of that judges have had something they've been good at doing for a long time and it wasn't setting policy. And a lot of times, policies aren't particularly well-made by bodies that have to pick one principal over another, which is the way judges tend to go at it. And we should let judges go back to doing what they did for a long time and allow issues of major public import to be resolved by the people's representatives. And I think we've gotten away from that. We've tended to assume that the Constitution is really a bit of an empty vessel for us to fill with good ideas, for judges to fill with good ideas. And that leaves interpretation out in left field. It's an after-the-fact rationale for setting up good policy. I think a lot of policy questions are not solved by the Constitution and therefore, ought not to be solved by judges. But that gets into a whole bunch of issues of interesting jurisprudence that we probably could talk about on another call.
Richard Reinsch (34:50):
Yeah. I agree. Do you see a concern, just thinking about what prompted you to write the book, that a bit of a question in my mind is, are we just going to abandon interpretation at some point? And just formally admit what the court's doing?
Donald Drakeman (35:06):
There are certainly constitutional theorists these days who say just that. That judges make policy, they should make policy. And the question is just whether they should pretend they're interpreting or whether they should give just policy reasons for their policies. I think, if they're going to make policy, they ought to act like policymakers and tell us why they really think this. And not because it's post-hoc, layered on, constitutional rationalization. And then, from a separation of powers issue. And the rest of us just have to think about whether that's a good idea or not. Historically, when judges have gotten a bit creative, shall we say, in their interpretations, lawmakers have fought back pretty hard.
Richard Reinsch (35:50):
Ours don't.
Donald Drakeman (35:52):
Well, yeah. I mean, maybe that's what the Biden Committee is thinking about. But in the Roman era, it was banishment and forfeiture of all their property if they interpreted other than just reading the words of the law. In England, they had this Star Chamber if people interpreted certain laws incorrectly, judges included. And there's all sorts of judicial jurisdiction, curbing and legislation, to strip jurisdiction from the courts that has been entertained. And whether that will go somewhere is an interesting question. It's beyond and above the questions in this book. But that's historically what has happened is, at some point, the other branches of government have just said, "We're really not going to put up with this anymore. And you should go back to what judges are supposed to be doing."
Richard Reinsch (36:45):
Yeah. Donald Drakeman, thank you so much for coming on today to discuss your new book, The Hollow Core of Constitutional Theory. Thank you so much.
Donald Drakeman (36:54):
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Richard Reinsch (36:57):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today, we're talking with Keith Whittington of our new organization he is the chair of, called the Academic Freedom Alliance. Keith Whittington has been on Liberty Law Talk on a number of occasions. He's also contributed to Law and Liberty. He is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of politics at Princeton University. His scholarship record is incredibly impressive. He's the author most recently of Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from Founding to the Present, which won the Thomas Cooley Book Prize. He's also the author and ties into our podcast I think, of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, and is the author, a co-author editor of a number of other publications. Keith, welcome to the program.
Keith Whittington (01:05):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Richard Reinsch (01:06):
So this new organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance that you're the chair of, tell us about it, what its work is, what it's doing, and what sparked it?
Keith Whittington (01:16):
Yeah. So at heart, this is a faculty-led organization committed to defending academic freedom and free speech rights of faculty at American universities. Our concern over the last several years has been free speech on campus is under threat from lots of directions that affects lots of members of the campus community, including students and others. I've had conversations for some time now about the kinds of problems we're seeing on college campuses, the growing dispute about whether or not free speech is actually valuable on college campuses and what the scope of it ought to be. It's partially through that kind of concern and those conversations I wound up wanting to write the book, Speak Freely. Then, more recently, a series of conversations led to thinking about, "Well, what else could we be doing that might help advance these principles and secure them more effectively?" The opportunity rose to try to launch an organization like this.
So, it's essentially committed to, as I said, defending academic freedom principles and doing so in part by intervening in particular disputes that arise between faculty and their employers over things that the faculty member has said. Often, professors that find themselves in the midst of these free speech controversies feel very isolated and alone and don't really know what they ought to be doing under these circumstances. So, partially we want to emphasize to people that they're not alone. We want to emphasize to the university administration that the faculty member is not alone, that we want to help inform people of what their rights are and help them navigate that situation, try to bring attention and public pressure when appropriate on universities to actually live up to their commitments on free speech. We want to provide legal assistance to faculty in those situations and so we have funds to provide something of a legal defense fund for individuals who find themselves in these situations. I think it's crucial when faculty find themselves under investigation, under threat or sanctioned by their university, that they have good legal advice that can help them navigate through often a maze of internal disciplinary proceedings and if necessary, that they be prepared and able to defend themselves in court and vindicate their rights against the university if it turns out the university has behaved badly.
Richard Reinsch (03:40):
So the Academic Freedom Alliance primarily is going to be working with academics?
Keith Whittington (03:44):
It is. That's the primary goal.
Richard Reinsch (03:46):
So what are academics facing? We know what students go through, I think, fairly well in terms of problems they face. So academics are actually experiencing more censorious conduct as well?
Keith Whittington (04:00):
Professors are facing it as well, so it is certainly true that a lot of the free speech controversies involving students get a fair amount of attention, that those are real and the problems facing students are quite real. There are some very good organizations, including the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that spend a lot of resources and time trying to defend students who find themselves in these situations and there's important work that needs to be done there. But it's also true that professors find themselves in these situations as well. Sometimes those become very public controversies and they do get a fair amount of attention, but a tremendous number of times, they get no attention at all. They're really local conflicts that don't attract any media attention, but nonetheless, faculty find themselves facing sanction from their employers for something they said and it can involve a wide range of situations. So we've seen lots of examples and they're often very public examples in some ways.
Part of what I think we need to be doing is making sure universities are aware that there are costs to doing that, that the path of least resistance is not necessarily to undermine faculty free speech rights, but instead, sometimes to actually live up to those rights is also the easier thing for universities to be doing, but that requires putting public pressure on universities. It requires making them aware there's a cost to be paid for not living up to their commitments.
We literally see them they are more transparent of a professor saying something controversial in public and then there's reaction to it that calls on universities to fire those faculty members for saying something controversial. So the rise of social media, because it really made a big difference in this regard, it's allowed faculty to reach a much broader audience in expressing their views than might, otherwise, have been the case. When you reach a much wider audience, that means there's a lot more people that can potentially be offended and it's, unfortunately we're living in an environment where people, when they are offended or upset, want to organize themselves to try to punish the person that's offended them or upset them. It means that a lot of people are now exposed to the unfiltered opinions of professors sometimes those are fairly inflammatory and controversial and so we do see public reactions that occur to those kinds of public statements.
But there's also lots of instances of faculty saying something in the classroom, saying something on campus that upsets other members of the campus community, in particular, that leads to complaints against them and then the university's investigating them. We still see examples of faculty being attacked because of their scholarship and things that they have published. Unfortunately, a lot of those attacks results in things like journals retracting journal articles. I think that's, unfortunately, not as easily remedied because it's not as if you have any kind of legal rights normally to those publications. But when employers get involved and universities started threatening employment sanctions on individuals for their scholarship, then that's a serious issue and one that people do, in fact, generally have rights that prevent universities from doing that. We're concerned, we're trying to vindicate those rights.
Richard Reinsch (06:39):
My understanding on faculty speech is a number of precedents from the early Cold War period where professors who are accused of Communist or accused of traitorous conduct on behalf of the Soviet Union litigated claims and they were, ultimately, vindicated in federal court. So is this just a matter of getting people to sue, getting people to stand up and getting these in the federal courts and you have a really good chance of prevailing?
Keith Whittington (07:06):
Well, it's more of a mixed bag of that, but it is true that, in general, I think American academics are fairly well situated in this regard, partially as a consequence of a lot of efforts by professors and their allies in the early 20th century. So the American Association of University Professors was founded in the early days of the 20th century in order to advance the principle of academic freedom in the United States. It was a principle that was really first advanced in Europe and was being brought into the United States in the context in which American universities simply didn't recognize those kinds of principles. At the same time, they were encouraging universities to adopt a system to tenure, to protect faculty from being fired in the midst of these controversies. It took a lot of effort, but they were very successful in convincing American universities to build into their own governing documents, protections for academic freedom for faculty, as well as adopt tenure systems, although those have generally been eroded over time.
So on the one hand, a lot of American universities have fairly robust protections for faculty speech built into their employment contracts, built into their governing documents and the key is to make them live up to those commitments. Then, it's also true for public universities you have a further backstop of The First Amendment. It is true that the U.S. Supreme court issued some opinions in the mid-20th century, mostly involving Communists and arguments surrounding any Communist efforts in the education environment, in which the court recognized that there were some First Amendment protections for faculty and the kinds of speech they engaged in, in public universities, but the Supreme Court has mostly stepped out of that. A lot of the subsequent cases dealing with those kinds of controversies have been handled in the circuit courts and it is a bit of a mixed bag. The court sent somewhat unclear signals about how to think about those protections, how exactly individual faculty members are protected by the First Amendment and in what context and certain courts, I think, have struggled to some degree with those protections. So in a public university context, there are some First Amendment backstops, but I think even in those contexts, faculty would better off so they have a robust protections for academic freedom built into their employment relations with their universities. That's also, of course, true in the private university context where the First Amendment generally is not applicable.
Richard Reinsch (09:26):
Do you see the Academic Freedom Alliance assuming a major public role in its efforts, or is it just going to be their word-of-mouth, people know it's there and it's a formal organization with principles and procedures and things it's going to do, or do you see the organization becoming an advocate as well?
Keith Whittington (09:45):
I think it would be both. I think part of our hope is to be advocating for these principles in public. I do think that we're in a situation where people don't really appreciate the value of academic freedom principles or even understand them very well. I think we're in a context in which there's a fair amount of concentration over whether or not we should want those kinds of principles and we ought to continue them to the future. So one reason why I'm very interested in organization like this is precisely because I think we need to be continually reaffirming the importance of these principles, thinking about how they apply in new and evolving contexts. So a certain amount of public advocacy needs to be done on behalf of these values because we live in a world in which these values are not taken for granted and there are people pushing in the other direction. So in the long-term, I think there's a battle for hearts and minds that has to occur surrounding free speech principles in general and in this specific context. It's also true that I think you, sometimes, can bring public pressure on universities in ways that will lead them to do the right thing in the midst of these controversies. Often, the way free speech controversies play out now is the people that want somebody fired get a lot of attention. They make a lot of noise. Universities feel under a lot of pressure from one side in these disputes and so the path of least resistance, the universities often just give in to those demands and throw the faculty member under the bus.
Part of what I think we need to be doing is making sure universities are aware that there are costs to doing that, that the path of least resistance is not necessarily to undermine faculty free speech rights, but instead, sometimes to actually live up to those rights is also the easier thing for universities to be doing, but that requires putting public pressure on universities. It requires making them aware there's a cost to be paid for not living up to their commitments. It's also true I think we're going to have to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work as well, so especially when these kinds of controversies arise in a way that's not very public when faculty members find themselves under attack, but this is not drawing media attention. The professors involved would often prefer that it remained quiet. They think it would damage their professional reputation if the controversy became more public. They'd prefer, simply, to have this resolved as quickly and quietly as possible, but they need to help in doing that. So we want to be sensitive to that. We want to help people in the situations they're in and try to make things better for them. Sometimes that will mean trying to work behind the scenes to help persuade university officials to live up to their own commitments and particular cases. Hopefully, a fair number of those situations can be resolved without having to draw regular public attention to what universities are doing.
Richard Reinsch (12:18):
Well, I thought as well, the presence in higher education of a large number of non-tenured faculty, of adjuncts, and their situation, obviously, much more delicate than a tenured professor. So I imagine they would be reluctant to press their claims, but it seems to be that's where the Academic Freedom Alliance and building culture rules and institutions better, the thinking about academic freedom could really help them in a way that they might be reluctant to press a claim on their behalf because they would worry about getting renewed.
Keith Whittington (12:50):
I think that's absolutely right. When individuals find themselves in individual controversies, they need help and we want to provide help to them. But often, that's a worst-case scenario, right? You're already in trouble at that stage and we'd be far better off, if we can build a better culture, build better institutions, build better rules that are more protective of academic freedom in general, so that we don't find ourselves having to fight each one of these individual battles and one of those really important institutions, from this perspective, is tenure. So as I noted in the early 20th century, American universities didn't even have tenure systems. They built them up over the course of decades. Though, we've seen over recent years is an erosion of those tenure protections, in some cases, because universities are actively trying to get rid of or undermine tenure protections, but in lots of cases, simply by hiring faculty outside the tenure track and so hiring faculty who were going to be doing teaching and research on the campus, but have no hope of getting protected by tenure rules and that's just extraordinarily damaging to the intellectual environment on those campuses.
In the long run, it's certainly the case that reversing this trend toward having more contingent faculty who are on these semester- by-semester or class-by-class contracts is really important because one thing that we find in these kinds of controversies involving speech of faculty members is that if somebody has tenure protections, it's not that they have more academic freedom. All those professors are entitled to academic freedom, whether they're tenured or not tenured, but those who are tenured have more procedural protections from being disciplined as a consequence of their speech. So it's easier to force universities to explain themselves as to why they're taking action against a faculty member and it's easier to mount a defense of those people when the reason for sanctioning the faculty members are not good ones and can't be justified under the university's own rules. In the context of untenured faculty members, as you say, it's very easy simply not to renew a contract, provide no explanations as to why and as a consequence, it becomes very difficult to defend those individuals and hold universities to account, precisely because the procedural protections for academic freedom are so minimal in those contexts. So we certainly hope that we can help out contingent faculty who are in some of these situations. They are the most vulnerable people who find themselves in these controversies, but in the long run, far better solution is to bring more faculty under the protection of tenure.
Richard Reinsch (15:21):
Talk about the membership of the Academic Freedom Alliance because I think that's an interesting story as well. This isn't just a conservative or libertarian organization. This has wide support, from my review of the website, across academia.
Keith Whittington (15:34):
Yeah, that was absolutely the goal. I do think this is a common threat for academics across the political spectrum. Unsurprisingly, when you talk to people, you find that both inside of academia and outside of academia, that people have a picture in their head of who is vulnerable, who comes under attack under these circumstances. In our polarized world, they often imagine that one side is particularly vulnerable coming under attack for these things. But if you talk to a range of faculty, what you find is everybody's very anxious. Everybody feels like they could easily come under attack. Everybody thinks that people like them are under attack and I think that reflects the reality is that it's not just faculty on the right who are threatened for consequences of their speech; it's faculty on the left as well. Under those circumstances, there's an opportunity there to try to build a broad coalition in support of these universal principles of free speech and academic freedom for everybody, but there are also some challenges. There are weary coalitions that have to be built across the political aisle to convince people that even though they may disagree with each other about all kinds of substantive issues, on this issue, they actually have agreement. Moreover on this issue, there's actually a commitment to defending people across the board. That does mean sometimes you have to hold your nose and defend somebody with which you have very deep disagreements, that you think that they had said things that by your own lights, are in fact offensive or dangerous or wrong-headed are false in various ways. Nonetheless, when they're acting within their rights, they ought to be defended because that's beneficial, I think to all of us, so that's the kind of coalition we built.
We very much explained to the faculty who have joined the organization about what our principles are and that we have this broad civil libertarian view and I was very pleased by how many people wanted to sign on. When we first started talking about this kind of organization and what it might do and what it might look like, we initially started thinking, "Well, it might be good to get a few dozen faculty together who would be willing to sign some petitions, for example, on this issue." Then we started reaching out to people and realized that there was just going to be a lot more interest than we initially figured, that people were eager to join up, that it was easier to reach across the aisle and persuade people on both the left and the right to join an organization like this than we thought. So we wound up, by the time of our public launch, having over 200 founding members who were willing to join up, which was far beyond what we were initially hoping to get. Like I said, I think, on the one hand it's very encouraging because it's very good. I think that people see this as a problem and are willing to do something about it. On the other hand, the fact that there is so much eagerness to join up with an organization like this is also reflective of just how nervous everybody is and how much of a problem people think universities are in at the moment.
Richard Reinsch (18:28):
That was my question, is it increasingly the case that progressive or liberal academics find themselves under strain? This isn't just a right of center problem, but it's under, say, critical race theory with your students, with certain deans that saying things that were once normal or considered standard in thinking about race in America no longer are and people find themselves on the wrong side.
Keith Whittington (18:53):
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think sometimes that the source of the attack is different, whether we're talking about faculty on the left or the right. So it is often true that for more conservative members of faculty that when they come under attack for something that they've said or written, it's an attack that's coming from inside the house, so to speak. It's coming from on-campus; it's students, it's colleagues, it's university administrators who were upset and trying to get that faculty member sanctioned in some way. When it's faculty on the left to come under attack, that is sometimes true too, they find themselves under attack from other members of the campus community, but they often find themselves under attack from people outside the university campus.
Political activists to media figures, politicians, donors, and alumni are often disproportionately likely to be criticizing faculty on the left side of the political spectrum. But it is still true that faculty on the left as well are often nervous about people you might think of as being their own ideological and political allies on the left there on the college campus itself. Some of this, I think, is a generational divide and that younger faculty, students are much less supportive and much less appreciative of broad, civil libertarian principles of free speech. And they're much more willing to attack people that they disagree with and not just argue that they're wrong and we shouldn't be persuaded by what they say or that they ought to change their mind, but to argue that they ought to be silenced, suppressed or terminated as a consequence of what they've done.
Americans, in fact, don't value free speech, even as an abstract principle let alone in the context of particular controversies. That I think is particularly discouraging and worrisome about where we're headed in the longer term.
I think that's part of what makes this a very worrisome situation that if we don't explain why these values are important, I think we will, over the course of the next several years, find ourselves in a much worse situation where the majority of the members of a campus community, students and faculty alike, no longer support ideas of academic freedom and free speech and are perfectly happy to abandon them entirely, which has just be an extraordinary reversal of 100 years of effort to try to get these protections built into the university environment. It would not shock me that if current trends continue 30 years from now, those protections will no longer exist.
Richard Reinsch (21:08):
Wow. Do you see a litigation opportunity or opportunities for your organization regarding diversity statements that many academics or many on campuses period are required to sign of ways in which they're going to advance diversity in their teaching or in their job on campus? This seems to be something like compelled speech and it's almost like a loyalty oath. Have you thought about that?
Keith Whittington (21:32):
I think that's why, as an organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance does not have a position on diversity statements. We have not taken up the case. I personally do think they are quite troubling and do represent a real threat to intellectual diversity on campuses and to academic freedom principles, more generally, as you say, that they are very comparable to the kind of loyalty oaths the faculty are required to sign at many public institutions in the mid-20th century, swearing they were not Communists and didn't believe in Communist principles. These current diversity statements often take the form of a kind of statement that really is trying to filter by people's political views in order to out conservatives, for the most part, although not entirely.
So it has political consequences. I think they're designed to have political consequences. They are a form of compelled speech, which this court has ruled as unacceptable. I think they are contrary to other university policies in many places, so there are versions of this that I think are probably more acceptable, but there are increasingly versions of diversity statements being adopted on university campuses that really are just requiring compelled political statements from prospective faculty members. I think these things can be very hard to litigate, in part, precisely because they are being included in the job application, so there's not a requirement that current faculty find these documents. Instead, they're incorporated into application packages for graduate school, for jobs. As a consequence, then, it becomes much more difficult to determine if a given individual has been excluded from a university, that they've been denied to start in their graduate program; they've been denied a job because of what they said in the diversity statement or for some other reason. So they will be, I think, complicated to litigate in ways that was less true of the loyalty as where you required faculty or across the board to sign them. But it will not surprise me if we don't wind up with litigation. It may not be litigation that the Academic Freedom Alliance is involved in, but I'd be very surprised if at some point we don't get some litigation over these statements because they clearly run afoul. It seems to be some existing constitutional doctrine regarding compelled speech.
Richard Reinsch (23:55):
On just, in general, the campus environment, I had a sense that things were going to get better maybe 20 years ago, with regard to free speech and that FIRE's work and other public interest firms, their work generally would improve the tenure on campus. Yet, I think things have gotten worse, particularly, in the last 10 years. Why do you think that is? One part of it, to me, is when I was in college in the late '90s, if you were offended by something that happened on campus, in particular in the classroom, what we were told is, "That's probably a good sign you're learning," or that you need to do some more reading, some more thinking. But that the professor got your attention, then that's a good thing and learning, at times, should be hard as things that you've held dear maybe take on a different color. Now it's, "If I'm offended, the person who offended me has violated my constitutional rights," or, "my human rights," or something like that. How did that switch take place?
Keith Whittington (24:50):
Yeah, I think it's a good question. I do think that you're right, that we're in a worse situation now than we were several years ago. On the one hand, I think these are perpetual battles. I don't think there's ever been a golden age of free speech in which everybody embraced these principles and were consistent and good about actually implementing them. It's long been the case that people will endorse the abstract value of free speech, but in particular contexts, they tend to want to carve out exceptions and exclude examples of speech that they find particularly troubling. That's just a persistent problem that requires a constant vigilance, I think, to try to defend these principles because it just runs against human nature in the midst of particular emotional controversies.
But we've had cycles of when things were better and when things were worse in this regard and I think we're certainly on a downturn right now when things are much worse. Some of it is that we actually are seeing a reversal of that basic tendency that's been true for several decades I just mentioned, which is if you ask people on surveys, for example, "How important is free speech?" That traditionally, the answer Americans gave was, "It's a very important value," and then the challenge is to get them to actually live up to that value in the context of specific speech that they find offensive or disturbing. Now, increasingly, and this is a generational issue as well as especially true of younger people, Americans don't think that anymore. Americans, in fact, don't value free speech, even as an abstract principle let alone in the context of particular controversies. That I think is particularly discouraging and worrisome about where we're headed in the longer term.
We absolutely need to turn that around and persuade people that free speech itself is valuable once again, and really, in some ways, the starting point for making that defense and providing that explanation has got to be the university campuses because, in part, it is younger faculty. It is students who simply don't think this is an important value or think it's not a very important value. It has a consequence. It can easily be trumped by lots of other kinds of concerns. I think it's also true that this generation, it's not a single generation, it's a range of people, but particularly younger people, have come up in a different environment than older generations that as as a compass, their reference points for thinking about free speech controversies and what it means to talk about free speech are just a whole different set of reference points. So if you talk to people, faculty members, for example, who are older than me, their reference points are often things like the Civil Rights Movement, the free speech the ant-war controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s and those kinds of conflicts. For them, those are the exemplars of free speech and why free speech needs to be protected. On the other hand, if you talk to, for example, the current generation of college students, that's ancient history. It's off their radar entirely. That's not their reference point for when they think of free speech controversies. When they think of free speech controversies, they're much more likely to think about neo-Nazis demanding free speech rights to harass people online or worse, right?
So their context in which they hear people waving the flag of free speech is very different than older generations. As a consequence, they often see it being used in a manipulative way, in a hypocritical way, in a way that simply seems to be designed to protect the harassing behavior that doesn't advance ideas, particularly, or seem to serve any larger value. So that's what they think of when they think of people who talk about free speech. It's unsurprising, that they don't find that a very sympathetic kind of value or something that we ought to care about, particularly. Of course, it's because a lot of their reference points are online as well, for them, it's also easy to imagine, "Well, the right thing to do when people are bugging you online is to get them thrown out," right? You block them. You get them removed from the forum or whatever. So if that works in the online world, then surely, that ought to work in lots of other contexts where you could also block people and remove them from the environment as well. So it's just we've encouraged and, I think, supported a kind of cultural expectation about how these dynamics play out and what free speech looks like that once you export it into this larger context, is just extraordinarily troubling for the future of a free society.
Richard Reinsch (29:25):
It seems to me, also, and in the last five years, and now it's spread throughout the general population, I think, is just the idea of I don't come to these debates or discussions or arguments using reason or logic alone, but I come to it through an identity and that may be the most crucial thing. What you have to think or say about the identity matters above all such that that becomes another way in which I might cancel you because the view is that you're questioning my existence or something like that and that seems to be the source of the, "Well, I'm offended; therefore, it stands you should have to be escorted out." Or think about the recent example at the University of Virginia where the medical student questioned microaggressions in a seminar and was escorted off campus, I'm told, by a dean and then removed from the program. I think a federal judge is going to, I don't know if he's going to reinstate him, but he's getting some sort of redress of that. That's one example of it, and then you've got now the diversity, equity and inclusion dean or administrators increasingly being hired. It seems to me this makes it all the more difficult just to think about ideas themselves apart from whatever we attach to them about our personal meaning.
Keith Whittington (30:41):
Yeah. I think there's multiple things going on that all lead to very bad outcomes to a libertarian perspective. On the one hand there's lots of forms of speech and expression of ideas that you can easily wind up leverging the mechanisms of harassment and discrimination and equity policing inside of organizations and inside universities to wind up excluding people who express that speech. So you would hope that when we set rules and procedures in place to deal with harassing behavior, that that will not have significant implications for the ability of people to express opinions and engage in arguments and discussion. It's certainly possible to leverage those kinds of tools to try to suppress each end and people have. Unfortunately, universities I think, are on the leading edge of being willing to use their policies and allow their policies to be used for the purposes of suppressing speech. So we need to do a much better job of weeding through those procedures and rules and practices so that we can simultaneously address harassing behavior while also protecting a robust speech environment and we just are not doing a very good job of that right now.
It's not enough for the universities just to articulate them; not enough to just have them in the faculty handbook. You've got to have institutional rules and practices and procedures and a culture that supports those principles and increasingly universities don't.
So we've created a whole administrative structure that is easily exploited to suppress speech, and unfortunately, they are aggressively doing that. It's also true, though, that I think that we just have a serious problem with a rise of illiberal tendencies on both the left and the right in our culture in general and they get expressed on university campuses, but they can express in lots of other contexts as well, in which people would much rather suppress their opponents than actually have to deal with them. So if you give people with those illiberal tendencies an option, their preference would be to suppress and exclude anyone who disagrees with them to silence them so that they can't respond. Unfortunately, there's a lot of desire to do that and we see that play out in lots of contexts. I think the identitarian concern is one aspect of it, although I don't think it's exclusively that, but there is also, I think, and unfortunately, a general pessimism about the ability of reason and persuasion to actually make any difference, right? So I don't think it's necessarily the case that people don't think ideas are important, but they have, I think, increasingly lost faith in the idea that conversations about ideas are important.
Instead, people, and not everybody, but certainly lots of activists on both the right and the left, have adopted the attitude that what politics is, is a power game. It's a mobilization of resources and numbers and instruments of power to defeat your opponents and advance your preferences. But it has nothing to do with actually persuading people and it has nothing to do with actually talking to people and coming to some common accommodation. It has nothing to do with negotiation or bargaining or recognizing and reacting to people's disagreements or different interests. It's all about gaining the upper hand and then using it and that's just depressing. That's not a good situation, certainly, for how universities ought to operate. This is not a good situation for how free society, more generally, ought to operate. If we give up on the idea that you can actually persuade people, you actually have some obligation to talk to people that you disagree with and try to find some common ground in order to make decisions about how we ought to live together, then as a democracy, we're just at a very bad place. Unfortunately, I think that's increasingly where we are in the views of an awful lot of people.
Richard Reinsch (34:38):
As you think about the future as the chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance, short term, medium term goals that you have for the organization to achieve?
Keith Whittington (34:47):
Well, I think in the short term, certainly, we hope to be successful in trying to defend some individuals who find themselves in these speech controversies. We've already been involved in some cases and we have, in fact, been successful in those cases and so that's encouraging. It's encouraging that the model might work. I think we are still in this situation where the rules on the books are actually good and favorable for these issues and so it really isn't a situation where we're trying to get administrators to live up to the rules rather than trying to have to change the rules. That's a relatively good position to be in and so we want to take advantage of that. I think we're still in a situation where sunlight is a good disinfectant, but if you make what's happening transparent, it can put pressure on university officials to uphold the values of free speech rather than to suppress it. So, and that's still encouraging about what our current situation is in. I think in the longer term, you hope that these kind of individual offenses become less necessary, that university administrators will behave better on the whole. You hope that you have some deterrent effect that university officials will get the message that they can't simply railroad faculty members, that they have to actually respect people's rights and it will be costly for them to try to take advantage of them in that way.
So you'll get fewer of these individual fights and you hope in the long term that you can build a better culture and a better set of practices surrounding these kinds of principles so that these values of academic freedom and free speech are better protected than they are now. But that certainly is a long-term goal, right? That's a very important cultural battle that has to take place. I think organizations like this are part of that cultural battle and I think it can go either way, I'm cautiously optimistic. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think that there was a chance of success, but things could go very badly, I think, if we aren't willing to engage these fights and if we can't successfully persuade people that free speech is actually a good thing and matters and we ought to uphold it. Likewise, I think changing the institutional practices of universities, for example, getting more faculty on a tenured basis will be a very difficult long-term challenge that universities like contingent faculty, not only because it makes it easy to fire problematic or troublesome faculty members, but also, because it gives the university administrators a lot of flexibility. It's a cost-cutting move. It's cheaper to have contingent faculty. It's easier to rearrange faculty, if you don't want them. It's easier to run a university where you don't have permanent tenure track faculty around that can push back against administrators.
So there are lots of forces that encourage universities to prefer a contingent faculty to a tenured faculty and it would be a very hard challenge, I think, to try to turn those trends around and get more universities to offer tenure. I think we are increasingly in a situation like we were in the early 20th century where for the bulk of faculty and local people doing teaching and research on college campuses that they don't have tenure protections and they don't have any hope of tenure protections and getting that for them, changing the basic practices of universities I think it's going to be pretty important to really implementing the principles of academic freedom. It's not enough for the universities just to articulate them; not enough to just have them in the faculty handbook. You've got to have institutional rules and practices and procedures and a culture that supports those principles and increasingly universities don't. It's going to take time and a lot of effort and not just by us, but by lots of other organizations as well, to try to turn that around.
Richard Reinsch (38:25):
Keith Whittington, thank you. We've been talking with the chair of the new organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance, about their work. Thank you so much.
Keith Whittington (38:33):
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today, we're talking with Scott Yenor about his new book, The Recovery of Family Life. Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Boise State University, and he is the Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life. He's the author of several books on the family, and is also a frequent contributor to Law & Liberty. So Scott, we're glad to have you on the program.
Scott Yenor (00:50):
Thanks for having me, Richard. It's my pleasure.
Richard Reinsch (00:52):
So The Recovery of Family Life, the full title, Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies. What's going on in The Recovery of Family Life?
Scott Yenor (01:02):
Well, the book is divided into three sections. The first section is really on what those powerful modern ideologies are that are undermining family life. I identify modern feminism, contemporary liberalism, and sexual liberation theories as really powerful ideologies that are shaping the way young people, and even now by the time we are middle-aged people, think about their lives, about themselves, about sex. The attitudes that are cultivated by those ideologies make it very difficult for people to imagine married life, to live responsible family life, to cultivate character in their children, sometimes even to have children. All of these basic things that we took for granted that a civilization needs can no longer be taken for granted. These ideologies are the reason for that, I would say.
Richard Reinsch (02:03):
We think about the modern liberal state, which under its official ideology, it's going to leave us alone, largely, to pursue our own different visions or things we want to do or what we think is good. It's going to leave us alone. Why should the modern liberal state concern itself with the family? Isn't that just something private? I mean, does the law really care about family? Should it?
Scott Yenor (02:29):
Yeah. I mean, I think that no matter what happens, the state is in someway concerned about the family. It takes an official stance of neutrality, but it's always legislating a kind of morality. Let me try to illustrate that with an example. I think the best example of that is obscenity law. It used to be that the state prevented the circulation of obscenity because it was worried about how exposure to obscenity would cultivate kinds of character, or kinds of states of mind in people, point them away from marital life, and that was the justification for limiting the circulation of obscenity. But, now that we've gotten rid of all of those limits, the state is officially neutral. You can watch pornography, or you can choose not to watch pornography. But, the circulation, the mass circulation of pornography makes it more desirable, more available. It appeals to something that's deep within us. Therefore, the removal of restraints and the official stance of neutrality has done a lot to pornify, if you want to say that, the culture and to shape the minds of men and women when it comes to how their relationships will go. So it's true that you can choose not to watch pornography, but it's also true that by removing those restraints, the official stance of the culture has become much more open to it. There is ever increasing venues for both making and viewing it. There is more public acceptance of it. You could use other examples in the same way.
Richard Reinsch (04:18):
But now, with regard to the family, I'm trying to think about things that developed 40, 50, 60 years ago. I mean, I had a conversation with a older lawyer when I was just starting practicing. He had actually had been involved in marriage cases under the old fault-based standard for divorce, and had defended people against becoming divorced and trying to prove that fault had not occurred. I will think about that, but my understanding is that was thrown out, because the courts were flubbing it because they had so many people who wanted divorces. And so, basically, the people largely wanted this in terms of maybe the first wave of how America changed the public law regarding marriage. That this was a response to the democratic demand. I guess, one question to you is, was there just something about the way we did things in the past that people found oppressive?
Scott Yenor (05:22):
Yeah, I think they found it oppressive. However, their view of what was oppressive was shaped itself by the culture that they were in. I think, what the example that you're using of divorce is an excellent example of that, because I think it's a two-way street. If you change the law, you're doing that partly in response to popular demand in a democracy for changing the law. Then once you change the law, you shape the way people think about those experiences. So no doubt, many more people wanted to get out of marriages by the 1970s. This was, perhaps, a reflection of a change made 50 years earlier in marriage law, and which unsettled marriage. And that change in the law rebounded, and then shaped the way people approached marriage and approached their experience within marriage. We often just focus on that first angle, or that first part of the relationship, the way that our laws reflect popular opinion, and we neglect the ways in which law shapes public opinion. That's really what I try to emphasize in the book. I think it's the classical approach to understanding how the laws shape the minds, the culture, our view of advantageous, good and just on family matters.
Richard Reinsch (06:54):
I was thinking about the descriptions that you have in the book of these different, you say ideologies, and I think about also anthropology as well. Talk about this, you call it the rolling revolution. Does the rolling revolution, does it necessarily aim at the destruction of the family, or what's going on there?
Scott Yenor (07:10):
First of all, what is the rolling revolution? What I try to do is show how each of these three ideologies, but especially the ideology of feminism and sexual liberation theory, have posited for themselves a goal. The goal of feminism is to get beyond gender, so that no one's life is affected by their sex, and no expectations about how you live would be determined by your being a man or a woman. Sexual liberation theory wants to get us beyond repression. Repression is a reflection of our desire to have somethings about our lives, our sexual lives, be private and pointed toward love and community. The changes that have been wrought by these ideologies have been toward those goals. Feminism and sexual liberation theory are trying to erase really important parts of human nature that are very difficult to erase, so that they have to keep doing more and more reforms. It's an endless, almost infinite aspiration that they have set for themselves. Since it can't be achieved, it always has more work to do. The family, I would say, is collateral damage on the way toward achieving those goals. Married life and family life really have a lot to do with sexual restraint. And if you're going to achieve a culture that is beyond repression, you're going to have to get rid of expectations that men and women will be faithful to one another in marriage, that they will produce children, that sex is related to procreation. You're going to have to roll over those expectation. So that the family and married life are collateral damage in the achievement of the goals that these ideologies have set for themselves.
Richard Reinsch (09:11):
Many people, women who call themselves feminists, would, I think listening to your description would say, "I don't know if that's what I'm aiming at. I just want opportunities in the workplace, to be treated according to my work, to not have double standards." It is the case, they can look back and point to history where women were treated not just differently, but oppressed under quote, "the old regime." How do you respond to that?
Scott Yenor (09:38):
I do think that those things are true. Many women just think of feminist as simply in terms of expanding opportunities or ending discrimination. The general ideology of feminism wants to sell their ideology on a level that is acceptable to many people. What I call that in the book is retail feminism. The goal is choice, they say, or opportunity, they say, but the difficulty is when you get down to brass tacks. How do you know when choice has been accomplished? The deeper feminist thinkers deal with these questions. They say that you can only know that women are freely choosing when they choose exactly the same as men, that the world has to be 50-50, so we would consider it to be an injustice if there were not 50% of the women being CEOs. They never say 50% of the plumbers have to be women, but 50% of the engineers need to be women. So these high status jobs need to be divided equally among the sexes. Choice is something that can be justified on liberal grounds. If understanding when choice, so-called, is achieved takes the feminist beyond liberalism towards a social engineering angle that becomes really necessary for feminism. So I think it's one of the greatest successes of feminism that they sold their ideology in terms that are broader than their actual aims, and they've achieved a great political success as a result of that way of framing it. But, when you get underneath it, you realize that it's a much deeper, more radical agenda that requires the remaking of an entire culture.
Richard Reinsch (11:30):
Yeah. I mean, as I was listening and thinking about your argument, the Scandinavian countries comes to mind. Sweden comes to mind where, to my knowledge, I think it's Sweden where parliament, I think, their legislative chamber has to have a certain number of women. I think they mandated representation on boards. It has to have a certain number of women, corporate boards. And that seems to be what the situation you're describing. When I think about this ideology working in American life, do we see it that way and do we see it impacting, say, the state and the family in an ideological way? I'm thinking about also family dissolution. Is that feminist ideology working in a lot of these cases, or is it something else, a lot of other things going on? What do you say?
Scott Yenor (12:20):
I think feminism works itself out more in the failure of families to form than it does in compromising families that do form. So I think it does have effects there. So I think the way I would respond to that is that feminism teaches women that a career oriented life is the most fulfilling life. It recognizes, or I'd say it stigmatizes those who would be, quote, "near mothers," or "only mothers," or "just a mother." Therefore, it judges itself based on the extent to which women are career oriented. I should say, therefore, again, it valuates institutions based on whether or not they have achieved a balance between men and women. We see that the more career oriented women are, the less likely they are to enter into marriage early and to enter into marriage at all. The younger generations we see, the predictions are, that about 40% of the people who are now under 40 will never married. I think feminism considers that a great achievement, because people are prioritizing other aspects of their identity over being mothers or wives or fathers and husbands. And that is precisely where the rolling revolution, as feminists articulate it, want to take human beings. So I think the Swedish example was a good example, because there you have fewer families forming and a great career orientation among the women.
Richard Reinsch (14:02):
Within the modern liberal state, because I don't see an America... You can correct and I know you know public policy better than I do. I don't see the government so much directing outcomes according to this particular ideology. And if, in fact, it is the case that women are making these choices, I mean, isn't that just something we live with?
Scott Yenor (14:21):
I do think the government is really involved in that. The way we treat education is a governmental matter. The emphasis in all of our education toward career orientation as opposed to what it looked like probably 60, 70 years ago, where there were some assumed sex differences in education, because there was assumed sex differences in future life roles. After you do that for a few generations, there is actually no one left who will sit there and talk about how there is an expectation that men and women will do different things in their lives in order to live complimentary lives with one another. There is also anti-discrimination laws. One of the rages right now on universities is trying to increase the number of women in STEM fields, because they're thought to be underrepresented. There is a lot of, I think, violations of anti-discrimination laws in those scholarships and recruitment programs, because there is an aim toward getting 30% women in engineering. Then after 30%, it will be 35% to try to ratchet it up. So I think there are a lot of ways in which government promotes careerism, but the broader point that you're making that I think I agree with is that there is a reflection of culture in all of this. The feminist way of thinking, the way of imaging what a woman and a man should be has been very successful in cultivating the attitudes and the state-of-mind of young people, and as I say, now middle-aged people, at this point. And because of that, whenever there is a disparity between men and women in a particular institution, people are embarrassed by it. Whenever there is not a woman on the faculty, it's thought to be a problem just in itself. So there is no doubt, it's a powerful culture, but I want to always emphasize that I think the culture has been built, at least in part, through laws, intensions in order to reshape it.
Richard Reinsch (16:25):
One of the interesting things about Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart, and has been a source of a lot of interesting commentary, is how put together upper middle class families are. I would just mentioned, many of those are going to be two-earner households. Then Murray points out, but family life gets less stable, less married to two parents the more you go down the income distribution scale, so middle class and then working class, things really start to drop off. But, I would just take my experience in higher education working with a lot of academics, to the extent you're going to have women who really think of themselves in this capacity. They actually maybe have, maybe are working and having strong families, stable families. Have you thought about that, that interesting disconnect?
Scott Yenor (17:17):
Yeah. I mean, there is two Americas when it comes to marriage. And so, the upper class marriage that Murray describes in the Belmont of America, it's what Robert Putnam calls the neo-traditional marriage. The neo-traditional marriage, there is probably a lot of sex before marriage, which happens later. It happens after careers have been established for men and women. But after they are married to one another, they stay married, they raise children. The children are responsible. It's almost the exact same stats when you look at the extent to which marriages stay together now as it was in 1980 among the upper 20%. And then when you look at the lower 80% in America, and I imagine this as the problem of rural America and the problem of urban America, where you see the marriage rates are a third of what they were in 1980. About 25% of people will get and stay married in the rural whites and urban blacks in America, and this is the failure to form problem. So how do we account for that? How do we account for the fact that marriage has really been destroyed in communities among the lower, more than half of the population? My answer to that is that the upper class doesn't enforce any kind of morality or sex roles for the lower classes. No one is prepared to be a wife or a husband in their eduction, in the expectations that people have for them and therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that no one is actually fit for it. The examples have been erased. The education that one would expect to point people toward family life no longer does. There is no official teaching of what the proper role of a man is, and what a proper role of a woman is. Without those proper roles being taught, men and women are lost at sea, especially in the lower classes. So these people are not genuinely feminist. The women of the lower classes are not feminists. They don't study Susan Moller Okin and Betty Friedan. But, they live downstream from feminism. Living downstream from feminism means that they live in a culture without expectations for what men and women should be. As religious practice declines among the lower classes, as the idea of sex roles decline among the lower classes, what we're getting is two different kinds of men, either hyper masculine gang members or men who retreat into themselves and spend a lot of time playing video games and watching pornography. We're getting women who want to be independent, but therefore don't know how to attract and keep men around. And so, it's a huge problem in the lower class, but I would say it's caused by our official ideology.
Richard Reinsch (20:22):
The men is interesting. The data that I've read, 25% of prime working age men in this country do not work, which is a depression, Great Depression type statistic. There is not a lot of thought about that. I mean, there are people who write about it. But, that is a striking number. What do you make of that?
Scott Yenor (20:41):
Yeah. What I make of it is that when you don't expect men to be providers, if you don't give men a purpose for their ambition, for their work, if you don't give them something to sacrifice toward, they are purposeless people. One of the things that over the course of human life that people have always aspired to do is marry, have children, be responsible for them. If you destroy that particular ambition, well, what are the men supposed to provide for? What are they supposed to channel their ambition for? How are they supposed to understand the sacrifices that they're willing to make for something outside of themselves? So I think one of the great crimes of feminism is to stigmatize the idea that the most loving expression of male life, the desire to provide, is actually an expression of tyranny. And that has just effects downstream of feminism. That's the problem we see in both rural and urban America.
Richard Reinsch (21:46):
One of the reasons why I've wanted to interview you is, looking at virtually every country in the West, it's striking to me, I know it's striking to you, that I don't think there is one that actually has a replacement level birthrate. There might be one or two.
Scott Yenor (21:59):
Israel is the only one.
Richard Reinsch (22:01):
Israel has above, right? I mean, they're like three.
Scott Yenor (22:03):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (22:04):
Yeah, three children per family. Jonathan Last, formerly of the Weekly Standard, now editor of The Bulwark, wrote a book about this maybe six or seven years ago, and describing it not just as a Western, but a worldwide phenomenon of flagging birthrates. When we think about the flagging birthrates, to me, that's just a big signal that there's problems in the moral ecology, social, cultural ecology of Western countries. But to the extent there is reflection and thinking about it, well, government should give people more money and more resources. He wrote a piece on this recently for Law & Liberty, in which he didn't think that was necessarily going to do much. What do we know about those policies, just in terms of trying to deal with this problem, which to me indicates you're onto something in thinking about the lack of family formation?
Scott Yenor (22:54):
Yeah. I mean, many countries have these policies now. They seem to have a marginal, short term benefit. Hungary has adopted, I think, the most generous policy on these matters, and its birthrate skyrocketed from something like 1.2 to 1.35. Conservatives all across America took this as evidence that we need a family policy and rallied behind Mitt Romney's child assistance program. I'm not opposed to the child assistance program, but I just think we have to have genuine expectations for what any of these programs can do. The decision to have children is not an economic decision. It's a decision that is shaped by what is honored in a political community and how much hope the human beings have for the health of their political community and their own lives. If people have no faith in the future, if people do not trust any of the institutions of government, if they don't trust churches or schools, if they think the country is headed in the wrong direction, all of these things are just indicators that they don't have hope for the future of their country and therefore, they are less likely to have children. Another point is, if a political community doesn't honor having children, it doesn't consider it part of a good life, the genuine narrative of what contributes to a good life, there is going to be fewer people marrying and staying married. These factors are much more crucial than the marginal economic benefits that you can get from child assistance programs. When I wrote that piece for you, I got a picture from someone sent to me by email, which was of a very impoverished Nebraska family living in a dirt hut with cornstalks as their roof. They were standing outside of this and there were 13 children and a mother and a father. I don't think they were asking for the child assistance program. They weren't, because the family life was honored and there was a lot of hope in the country, and this was probably something like 1880, that the best days of the country were in front of it. So I think the birthrates are genuinely a crisis of confidence in civilization and an indication that marriage and family life are not honored in that civilization.
Richard Reinsch (25:24):
Something that I think about is just prosperity itself and how that changes community, because community is hard. I mean, I'm an advocate. I mean, Robert Nisbet is a significant thinker in my life, but I recognize how hard they are, how hard family life can be, how the people closest to us can be hard to deal with. People have those experiences. Another way of thinking about this, and get your reaction, prosperity, a welfare state that it underwrites, makes individualism fun. We can have community on the cheap when we want it.
Scott Yenor (26:02):
So let's think about that for a little bit. I mean, so the great thinker of individualism that I turn to when I think about this stuff is Alexis de Tocqueville. He saw America as one of the... There is no inherited ranks in America. The idea that the individual heart is a standard of justice and where the good life will be lived, "self-interest rightly understood," he called it, but it's a moral center, though he recognized the individualism of America. The investigation that he undertook is, well, why did America not fall for the idea that individuals are better off alone? His answer to that was I think had several aspects to it, but one was that Americans were almost all raised in families in an environment where that was expected and honored and there were strong roles for men and women. Another aspect of it was that Americans would get together for civil activity, but they were prepared for that because they already learned the sacrificed and lived beyond themselves in families. But they would get together in civil associations to accomplish great things. It was more powerful when people banded together and therefore, government didn't have to become very powerful. And so, I think, really at the root of the whole way of teaching individualism or enhancing the purview of the individual for Tocqueville was family life. I think Americans understood that for the longest time. Really, only until the powerful ideologies that we're talking about here became prominent in the American landscape gives a Tocquevillian synthesis, or the way of improving individualism fall apart. The argument was that community is hard. Family can be oppressive. Family can be the source of great disappointment. There is something true about that. So let's throw out the bathwater and the baby went with it. Oh, and the babies went with it. I'm going to have to use that somehow in the future as a tagline.
Richard Reinsch (28:11):
And what I think too. I mean, I think about that a lot. Family can be oppressive. It can be a source of disappointment as you say. But then the question is, what are you going to replace it with? Because as we look to, say, countries in Europe, which I think socially are a generation typically ahead of America, the answer is not much. I mean, a large welfare state. Individualism, creature comforts, and things like that, it seems to me that's not the most satisfying way to live and yet, there it is. A question for you too, you mentioned Tocqueville, I mean, that was something I was going to bring up, is this... You've got these ideologies in your book that you describe. Is it that or is it just something, maybe this isn't opposed to it, but is it just democracy itself leads us towards egalitarianism, leads us away from these sorts of arrangements where people are marked out to do particular things and it just, democracy over time, just flattens us? You're right, Tocqueville pointed to things he thought that would make America stand out. But it's just this slow process that we're going through and I don't know how it ends.
Scott Yenor (29:23):
Yeah, I mean, that's something I think deeply about too, Richard, because the whole decline of family life and marriage do seem in some way to be the working out of the liberal principles of liberty and equality, which are right there at the beginning, and is there no stopping point for these particular principles? We can understand equal protection of the laws or equal treatment of the laws, but feminism takes that same principle and says that there needs to be equal outcomes between men and women if there is going to be a just society, but it's still the principle of equality. How can we find a limit on equality, stop it from becoming equal protection and becoming equality of resolve? Do those qualifications on equality have to come from outside of liberalism? I think the answer to that is yes. They have to come from outside of liberalism. So liberalism is friendly to those things that come from outside of it. It's friendly to the idea that some limits on equality will make human beings happy, will make them better, will make for a self governing community better, will make people more civilized. So liberalism is open to those qualifications. So what I try to spend a lot of time doing is showing ways in which we can leverage the resources within human nature, within public opinion still, so that we can ratchet back some of the aspects of the rolling revolution. But whether or not I'm hopeful that those things will be accomplished is another matter.
Richard Reinsch (31:01):
When we think about immigration policy in Western countries, I mean, we roll off this statement that, well, we need it. We need more immigration because of demographics, aging demographics, not enough children and so, we'll have to have immigration. Well, one, I understand that argument, I guess. I always tend to think in the back of mind, well, what does that mean about us thought, that we need people, in many cases? In Europe's case, you've got people from a different civilization coming in, which is going to inherently bring problems. But I think that's a question I have. Isn't there something wrong with us profoundly?
Scott Yenor (31:37):
I think about that question a lot too. One of the things I went and wrote for Law & Liberty about a year ago was an analysis of an old book, Christianity and Classical Culture. I looked at what was happening in the Roman Empire, because people recognized it was falling apart. The things that characterized that falling apart were steadily declining birthrates, the desire to integrate whole classes of people from outside of the empire within in the empire, that is to become Roman citizens, the Barbarians, in this particular cases. I think all of these thing go together, declining birthrates, failure to marry and live for beyond the short term, decadence, political decadence. We call it progress, because it's progress in the rolling revolution. But, I think all of these things are ultimately signs that civilization is teetering on the edge of collapse, and that the society has become decadent. It's really hard to image. I mean, people send me a lot of articles, because I write a lot in public these days. Just in the last two days, I've gotten articles like, "Father Wants to Marry Daughter, Adult Daughter," from The New York Post. There was an expose about a new kind of pornography. I can't remember its name, but you can own your own pornography and become your own agent instead of having to use something like PornHub as a middle man. These things are all really celebrated. It's really hard to imagine that any healthy political community would celebrate what we celebrate. We can only really understand what's going on there in terms of this next roll in this revolution that's been going on. But, as a civilizational principle, something that you can imagine lasting 100 years or 50 years, it's difficult to see these ideologies as very fruitful. I think, one of the leading edges in our understanding of political decadence is this collapse of family life. Another indication of it is the fact that we're willing to make up for it by importing new people into the political community. Historically, that's never led to health. Luckily, no one knows anything about history anymore, so they can't talk about Rome.
Richard Reinsch (34:03):
The point has been made too, America was... Up until I think 2008, from things that I've read, we had a positive birthrate, largely I think because of new immigrants, and now we don't. Part of that, the pandemic is working and then the financial crisis in 2008. I don't think they've ever really recovered though in the last decade. Something people will say is, "Well, people who are newly arrived to this country aren't having children the way that we expected." I tend to think to myself, "I guess, we have a faster acculturation process maybe than we thought." The modern liberal state as you think of it... I mean, there are a lot people, conservatives turning against liberalism broadly. Do you see the modern liberal state being the problem necessarily, or is it not necessarily that, it's... I mean, and I guess maybe this question answers itself with your idea of the rolling revolution. So if we did have a classic liberal state, could we just put these things to the side and say, well, the state is not really going to be concerned either way. It's just going to focus on basic tasks. Would that be a better way to go and just try and get out of all of these cultural war scenarios and let private institutions work?
Scott Yenor (35:15):
Yeah. I mean, there is good solutions and there is less bad solutions. And so, the way I would rank them is that a state that's actively trying to break up the family is worse than one that actually takes a night watchman's approach and doesn't do that much damage. I still think there is a real limit on what can be accomplished under such a state, but the situation to be in is one where the state favors a kind of indirect support for an enduring marital form between a man and a woman. So perhaps, we'd want to work toward limits on divorce. There would also be a culture that would be shaped through regulations that would limit things that are hostile to married life. So once again, we'd talk about limits on pornography, but also things like limits on maybe adultery can be a crime instead of just a civil matter. This was the old way of approaching these matters. I think there is wisdom in these old ways. I don't think they can be accomplished in the same way, but the general tenets of the liberal state are that the state should favor a particular kind of marital form and the state should be interested in cultivating an environment where people are more likely to marry and stay married. Those are things that can't be really thought of in terms of just retreating. But retreating is obviously better than active hostility.
Richard Reinsch (36:53):
If we think about states and localities had through most of American history a very strong moral police power. And so, things like adultery were, in many cases, illegal. I mean, many things are proscribed that if people knew about it, or if they're told about it, they can't believe it. The idea being that it would undermine the family and that would undermine community and social, political order. I guess, that's not something people now are going to agree with. A libertarian idea is well, let's just get the state completely out of all of this stuff. Easier said than done. I asked that question too as a, do I see... I mean, we have people to point to. We have a government that just recently passed policies that the Biden administration for the next year, I think, is going to pay every family with a combined income under $150,000 a year a monthly payment per child. Can you confidently say that a federal government and state governments undermine family life, or is it more of just a cultural and social choices people are making?
Scott Yenor (38:01):
Yeah. I mean, I think I can confidently say both.
Richard Reinsch (38:03):
Okay.
Scott Yenor (38:04):
So I mean, when you look at things like sex ed, which is now a pre-K thing in some states. Certainly, there is pretty radical agendas in all states. We're just actually having some of that come up here in Idaho where there is a pretty radical sex ed curriculum in the public schools for first through third grades where... It's a family show, so I won't discuss exactly what's going on in that curriculum. But, I will say that one of the representatives was going to read from the state's House floor what was in the curriculum and she was ruled out of order because it was indecent.
Richard Reinsch (38:40):
Interesting.
Scott Yenor (38:41):
Which is a great irony. Basically, that's just the next roll in the revolution is the sexualization of children. Now, that is happening in the culture. There is no doubt about it. You can see that in commercials and television shows and probably teen magazines and things like that. But, it's also an intentional government ambition. It's happening all over the country. They're moving in tandem, so they're probably even coordinating their actions. And so, I don't think that either of them exist in the absence of the other. But, the important thing that you're talking about there is that just limiting what government does, it's probably not going to save as much as you'd help. But, it does give parents more space to operate if government isn't actively undermining things. So as I say, the first thing is, do no harm. And then see if you can do good. And so, just removing government from sex ed would be a kind of neutrality. It's interesting that no matter how much we confess that we're a liberally neutral political community, we haven't gotten government out of the sex ed business. It's gotten more and more into it, trying to do a sex ed in a neutral way. But obviously, peddling a morality to the youngsters who are in there, and parents have to do a lot of counteracting. So I think the framework you're setting up is a good one and we should recognize that both of these, of the elements of the law and culture, are working in tandem in the same direction.
Richard Reinsch (40:13):
It's interesting to think about there. Yeah, no, Indiana proscribes any sexual education in the government schools here. I mean, think about the homeschooling rising. There is an interesting article I was reading on these hybrid home schools too that have spontaneously formed, classical schools that have formed. I mean, is it the case too, I think people have already just... Many people are trying to exit and have exited and are just trying to build again. I mean, that seems to me also a solution. I guess, in my mind, the political battles have really gone nowhere. If you're thinking about these things, you're effectively painted into a corner. Maybe, it's just the best you can build new institutions might be a much more, or a part of a more effective response.
Scott Yenor (41:00):
Yeah, no, I agree with that with one qualification, that is even these carve outs that people are seeking to build are a part of America. Therefore, they're infected with the same aspects of the rolling revolution that the rest of America is. I mean, what I'm hoping to do is, through the book, describe the various ways in which these powerful ideologies are shaping our lives unwittingly, even the enemies, to some extent, of these ideology accept some of their premises. And so, that building new communities or trying to find ways out, first, it's never going to be enough. It's a short term strategy, but it's also difficult because of the hegemonic nature of American culture to find a way out. So it's necessary, I think in the long term, to gain back ground to try to win back institutions, try to identify institutions that are teetering and try to make them more solid. A retreat is obviously a losing strategy, so there needs to be selective offensiveness in order to win one's own space to live a life.
Richard Reinsch (42:11):
Scott, I think that's a good way to conclude. We've been talking with Scott Yenor, the author of The Recovery of Family Life. Thank you so much for joining us.
Scott Yenor (42:20):
Thanks for having me, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Mark Mitchell about the ideas and work of Robert Nisbet. Mark Mitchell is the Dean of Academic Affairs at Patrick Henry College. He teaches in political theory. He's authored a number of books, The Limits of Liberalism, The Politics of Gratitude, and a book on Michael Polanyi called, Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing. He's also the founder, a co-founder of the webzine Front Porch Republic. As my friend, the late Peter Lawler would say, "He's a porcher," and that's all for the good. Mark Mitchell, thinking about Robert Nisbet, welcome to the program. How did you get interested in Robert Nisbet? Why did you gravitate towards him?
Mark Mitchell (01:06):
The first time I encountered Robert Nisbet was in graduate school at Georgetown. The Quest for Community was assigned to me by a late Dr. George Carey, who was my mentor there, and I think it was a course on conservative thought and he just gave me a pile of books to read and this was one of them.
Richard Reinsch (01:27):
Excellent. Thinking about Nisbet there, when you think about his career and what he had to offer, what did you gravitate towards?
Mark Mitchell (01:34):
In many respects, Nisbet represents a sort of updated version of Tocqueville's project that Nisbet brings Tocqueville's project up into the second half of the 20th century. And in that respect, he provides, I think, a valuable analytical source for helping us to understand our own situation, even though in some respects, our situation has changed since Nisbet passed away in 1996, but in many respects, he understood the trajectories we were on. I think he wouldn't necessarily be surprised by the situation we find ourselves in now.
Richard Reinsch (02:14):
Yeah. What alarmed Robert Nisbet, what drove him to write the work he's most famous for, The Quest for Community, which was published in 1953?
Mark Mitchell (02:22):
It was what he understood as the rise of, and total domination of what he called the monolithic state. And what he does is a kind of historic analysis of social and political forces. He points out that in the medieval world, sometimes we mistakenly think that the King for instance, had absolute power and was without rival, but he points out and he does so in ways that are very similar to someone like Bertrand de Jouvenel as well, whose book On Power, I think can be fruitfully read in conjunction with Nisbet, that in the medieval European world, how was it centralized? There were rival centers of power. Surely the King had power, but the nobility is constantly struggling against the King. The church has a kind of political role as well as the spiritual role. What you have is centers of power competing with each other. This has the effect of limiting the power of all. There's ebbs and flows. But as Montesquieu puts it in his book, and this is something that was influential in the thinking of the American founders, is that the only way to limit power is with rival powers. What happened over the centuries is the nation state, the centralized political national power gained ascendancy, and there's a complex story there, but that it includes things like the granting of titles of nobility to be commoners, which in effect waters down the power of the nobility while achieving allies in the nobility. In addition, it includes the King doing things like giving grants of largesse, giving goodies to the people as a way of undermining their affection and the relationship with the people, to the nobility. What you have eventually, according to Nisbet, is the consolidation of the national political power and the creation of the people who are isolated, individualized, and those are the two nodes of social existence. It's very similar to Hobbes' vision for society, an absolute power and individuals that directly comport themselves vis-a-vis that national power. This creates a power of unimaginable strength, and there's nothing to compete with it.
Richard Reinsch (05:01):
The Quest for Community, as I was rereading the book in preparation for our interview, what struck me, and I don't think these were facile comparisons, but how remarkably relevant the book is right now, 70 years, roughly in the future. And obviously it's not 1953 when he wrote this book. I think he started writing it in 1950. He was in his late thirties. I think it was published when he was 40 years old as a faculty member. He was asking questions about these losses of forms of community underneath the forms of a modern centralized, progressive state. Obviously, World War II had transformed America. The New Deal was in the process still of working through America and making changes. He sort of understands... I think what struck me reading it now is we are community questing, seeking beings. We will have it in one form or the other. And in that respect, one begins to understand sort of mass identification as a strange form of community building.
Mark Mitchell (06:10):
Right? He starts with a psychological insight that human beings are creatures of community. We long to belong. Throughout most of human history, there have been a variety of overlapping complex points of association, family, group and so on. What he worries about is the demise of the kind of associational life. When those dissipate, when we lose the possibility of inclination to affiliate with church, with local organizations and so on, the longing for community doesn't go away. And the only thing left that seems solid enough, that seems permanent and attractive enough to warrant our allegiance is the national state. So, people that are radically individualized, isolated, and alone are drawn naturally to the national state as a form of community. It becomes what he calls a redemptive community, it takes the role of these other associates. It takes the role of the church, he makes this point several times. With the decline in affiliation or membership with the church, the state steps in as a kind of pseudo redemptive community. There is a kind of religious impulse that lies behind this gravitation towards state affiliation.
Richard Reinsch (07:38):
Rereading The Quest for Community also brought to mind this notion, it isn't just... Religion isn't just [inaudible 00:07:47] anthropologically. It isn't just creedal, speaking of Christianity, it isn't just belief, but it's the identity, the participation, the concrete reality of religion in people's lives. He said something similar about the family too, and what local community means to you. If these things are not functional, you don't see them as a part of making your life whole or concrete or standing it up in any way, you start to retreat from it. It becomes invisible to you. He said underneath modern standardization, centralization, that was undoubtedly the case. How does that hold up?
Mark Mitchell (08:25):
It's quite true. One of the things that motivates this dynamic is a false understanding of freedom. He knows that in the 19th century there was... He dispositioned to understand freedom as relief, as emancipation, as the extrication of any commitments or relationship from institutions that seem to impose duties or restrictions on freedom. He calls that a false freedom, that freedom is a central part of this discussion that he is having, and what we have is a pseudo freedom that doesn't satisfy. As a result, we go looking for the very things that we've abandoned and because those things have been left behind and in some respects, disintegrated by state power, the only thing left is this national state seeming to hold out its welcoming hands as a source of meaning. And in the other hand, obviously, its social services as goodies that the state offers as kind of an incentive to command loyalty.
Richard Reinsch (09:39):
I think it was the 2016 Democratic National Convention, whatever banners hanging that said, the government is the only thing we all do together. I think in the progressive understanding, that's quite true. But, Nisbet would have understood the sentiment where that issued from. Thinking of Nisbet on these sorts of losses of forms of community, and I like what you said, because as I was reading him, he talked about words that sort of define an era. The late 19th century we had rationalism, individualism, the notion that one becomes free to the extent you are sort of thrown back on your own resources and you're not sort of working within a civilizational inheritance of any kind. I mean, that's clearly the idea of the French Revolution and much of social contract thinking. And he had said, "Well, where has really this has left us." In the 1950s, he's seeing, I mean, of course we think of the 1950s and the popular mind as an era of conformity of women not working, of all these sorts of things that we think are wrong. He thinks alienation is defining America and the coming apart of America already.
Mark Mitchell (10:47):
Isn't that interesting that in the 1950s, the decade that we sometimes tend to look back on as idyllic, that Nisbet is identifying a kind of illness, social illness that he thinks is maybe embryonic in the 1950s, but certainly is growing. We see, I think, the fruits of this today, Nisbet was, as I said, concerned with the decline of church affiliation. He was not, I don't think, a religious man personally, but he understood the importance of religious form and the social function that the church affiliation had. He predicted, I think, and understood that that outlet, that impulse is going to be satisfied. I think if we look around, we can see a kind of a religious fervor in so much of our politics today. If you think of how identity politics, for instance, seems to be so consumed with the kind of religious fervor to purify and to perfect, this is a religious kind of sentiment and it's seeking to harness the power of the state to bring about a kind of redemptive outcome. I think Nisbet would not have been surprised at this at all.
Richard Reinsch (12:06):
No, and I was going to raise that point because he has a discussion of communism, which I thought was very provocative. He said, "The doctrines that we are surprised that people would believe in communism when you look at the ideology." He said, "But we're missing what it's really offering many people." He sort of tracks what Whittaker Chambers, the great anticommunist writer says about communism. Chambers says it gives people a reason to live and a reason to die and I think Nisbet would agree with that. But Nisbet says, "No, it's community building." It's this opportunity of people to do things with other people to enact something, achieve something that matters. And so it's filling people with hope and a sense of meaning. That's the power of communism in the West and the reason why, particularly some of our most brightest and sensitive people are attracted to it. As I was reading that, I thought exactly what you were just saying with identity politics. And it also adds, I think it's not for nothing that this thing really kicks up in the midst of a government imposed lockdown and we have this horrible thing that happens in Minneapolis. Then the next day we wake up and all you hear about is systemic racism and the need to redeem America's past, or not redeem America's past, but wipe it away and build something new.
Mark Mitchell (13:22):
I think that's right. There's sort of a coalition or a coming together of certain events, including as you say that the George Floyd riots and the coronavirus, that sort of perfect storm of events that all indicate this longing that Nisbet is talking about. A longing that has been misdirected and it's coming out in ways that are, I think, deeply troubling. He knows even in a later book called the Twilight of Authority that was published in 1975 and started being the wake of a long protracted war and the recent collapse of a president, things that sound very similar to our situation. He notices that the rise of religious fervor and a kind of irrational religious impulse. I think we're seeing this certainly on the left, but also on the right. It's hard to look at what happened January 6th and not see a kind of religious, a cultish impulse that seems to be animating certain facets of the right. Again, this is a longing, it's kind of bursting out of a longing that is not finding satisfaction in the natural organic associations that are property human beings. I think the term that's useful here is, even in terms of, or in the relationship to the communist enterprise, to the national socialism or to what we see today is human scale. One of the things that I think Nisbet, he mentioned this term a time or two, but I think it just pervades his work is, we'll need to think about what's property human beings in terms of scale and national community is not property human being, that's not the primary locus of belonging. We need to think of neighborhoods and families and parishes that are, exist on a scale that is suitable to our psychological and social needs.
Richard Reinsch (15:17):
The thinking there too, this irrational, so with the Qanon conspiracy, which was news to me until the last few months. I didn't really understand what it was doing. Now, I think I have a better handle on it. And apparently some of the people who mobbed the Capitol on January 6th were really fired by this. This drives their thinking and actions. The woman that was shot and died, who was a 14 year air force veteran I read, really did believe in this and was behind her motivation for being there that day, I've read. Also thinking previous to that mob was the Jericho Prayer Rally, which I read about, I watched some footage and it seemed to be running Trumpism, America and Christianity together as one thing. It leads you to think there's, it is something like the concrete forms in people's life aren't providing satisfaction, or maybe people have irrational expectations for politics and it's sort of leading to this, these sorts of outbursts. As I think about that. And I'm looking back to Nisbet. We've talked about Nisbet sees these traditional forms falling off, and this has continued to happen. I mean, you think about the 1950s, but as I'm reading this and I'm thinking about family, religion, this was... Most people would say, this is a high watermark for religion in America in terms of participation and attendance certainly. Certainly for Catholicism in America, this is part of the Golden Age. Family life is very sound, at least in terms of divorce rates. Out of wedlock, births are very low and all of these things have sort of changed dramatically as we go forward. Certainly in our day now, I mean, it's almost abnormal. I think like over 40% of children are born outside of marriage. Marriage rates themselves have declined. I guess these traditional forms seem to increasingly be falling off and being filled by these voids. How would Nisbet, though? Does he offer us any ways to think positively about this and what we might do?
Mark Mitchell (17:24):
At the end of The Quest for Community, he argues that there's two ways of conceiving the state, the national or monolithic state, and then he would discuss the pluralist state. He argues that what we need is a new laissez-faire, a laissez-faire not of individuals but of community. And he does suggest and argue that the purpose of the state is to support and encourage associational life. Plenty of critics of The Quest for Community have complained that his few pages of solution doesn't really stack up hopefully, against the 200 plus pages of analysis leading up to the last few pages. But he does try to expand that a little bit in his 1975 book, Twilight of Authority and never left. I think that's the weak part of his analysis. What do we do? Because even in Twilight of Authority, he notes that it's sort of a continuation of development of his Quest for Community book. He argues that the attractiveness of the nation state is beginning to wane. And this may, in fact, he's saying, provide space for the rejuvenation of the kinds of associational life that he thinks is so vital. He even makes a point that the rise of globalization that is helping to undermine the strength of nation states may help to facilitate a new birth of localism. Would that he were right, but when you think of the other kinds of dynamics, for instance, a worldwide war on terror, that's been going on now for two decades, this helps to embolden the nation state, expand the nation state, a worldwide pandemic. These have not served to undermine the aggressiveness of the nation state, but have actually served to embolden and expand the power of the state. I wish that something like a new age of localism was on the horizon, but I guess I don't see a lot of reasons, I think.
Richard Reinsch (19:29):
A couple of things there, and I had similar thoughts in thinking about Nisbet's analysis. It does seem so Brexit, a lot of the political forces that congealed around Trump, challenges to European Union authority, not just in Britain, but other countries. I don't see in this, that sort of nationalist fervor that Nisbet was scared of, or that Nisbet could have identified. I don't see that sort of nationalism as an ideology of barrier foes and it becomes us versus them. Parts of that are there, but it seems like currently it actually is a desire to recover this concrete, political reality on behalf of the constituted people or politically constituted people, and that could be a positive development. It could move on from there into various, into damaging ways, but that he actually may have been onto something there. I mean, I think people have looked at aspects of globalism and thought, okay, where does this leave 40, 50% of our population? Another thing that kind of comes to mind, and I think it was a failure. The War on Terror, I think most people just look at that as something of a failure in terms of its global ambition. It achieved something concretely in protecting America from further terrorist attack. But a lot of the other things, it did backfire on America. Certainly, as we look at our forces in Afghanistan, it's just sort of head scratching. What are we still trying to achieve? I think opinion is coalescing around that. Certainly what we've tried to do with China and bring them into some sort of global liberal democratic project has just massively failed. I think leaders in both parties are recognizing that. But, the concrete reaction, or the concrete attempt, one, to implement something like Nisbet's ideas was the Bush Faith-Based Initiative, George W. Bush's Faith-Nased Initiative, but that drew all sorts of reactions because it seem to be bringing the government into religion, or into nonprofits and it would weaken those non-profits, a lot of conservatives thought. That's one way you could see government trying to both relinquish power, but stand new forms of community up.
Mark Mitchell (21:34):
Yeah, I think that's right. I posed the question or what at least one question is, what is going to happen with the sort of populist resurgence that we saw maybe signaled in 2016. The election of Donald Trump seemed to be an indication of a populist movement, the Brexit seemed to be in an indication of that. Is that carrying into hopeful directions, maybe in some respects. In political terms, one wonders with the domination of the democratic party. How much of say, something like the Green New Deal is going to be implemented, which I think Nisbet would say is a perfect example of kind of religious fervor. We're going to save the world. There's a kind of apocalyptic language that the world is going to end if we don't act aggressively, broadly and faithfully. And this seems to open up tremendous opportunities for the expansion of state power. When you see the kind of aggressive movements that are going to be made and already are being made against systemic racism and patriarchy and all the things that seem to be so deeply infecting our society, so the story goes, this seems to create opportunities for a dramatic expansion of state power and the demise of, or constriction of the freedom of individuals to associate in a kind of pluralistic associational life.
Richard Reinsch (23:04):
As I was thinking and listening to you, there's something, this aspect of our politics of the Green New Deal, one of the architects of it, if you want to say architect, admitted privately, because I think he was working for Congressman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, that this was all about, really, this is about using the nation to control people and to bring the economy underneath the control of the government and using this sort of ideological wedge to do it. Another aspect of our politics that sort of drives this is social media and social media obviously, the lifts you out of a place and puts you into various forms of contact with people all over the world, not just in your country, but obviously, people who aren't, you don't see them as people as attached as having a life, a biography, a story you're just put face-to-face or with their avatar, I should say, in some form. How would Nisbet think about social media?
Mark Mitchell (23:53):
He notes the rise in modern world of what he calls pseudo forms of friendship. He's writing this in 1950s, early 1950s, and pseudo forms of friendship certainly seems to be a pretty good description of Facebook, where we claim to be friends with a variety of people, or we even turn that into a verb, we friend people. But it's superficial and friendship then becomes something that is disembodied and lacks the thick kind of qualities that constitute genuine friendship. Again, I think he anticipates this, even though he doesn't see the actual technology. And in so far as some of our social media technology, gives individuals a sort of short term illusion that they are making contact with others, that they belong, that you can belong to a group by liking a post or signing a petition or whatever online. This is, again, a kind of parody of the true kinds of association of life that will satisfy the kinds that Nisbet sees so clearly are necessary for a human life and for thriving. To get this very clear, for him freedom, political freedom thrives in cultural diversity, and this diversity is diversity of association, that the state needs to create the space and opportunities for different people to associate and to express their own proclivities and differences and preferences in a way that's unimpeded by the state. That doesn't seem to be the vision that's being handed down at this point.
Richard Reinsch (25:52):
No. The part of government that would be most able to accomplish that would be the representative branches, Congress, Senate, and then at the state level, the state assemblies. Those are the weakest parts of our government. The executive branch is incredibly strong. We get very excited about presidential elections. I think about the inauguration earlier this week, the pageantry around it, and we don't have the same sort of muscles all when it comes to legislative government, but that's where actually you could see deals and compromises happen, and needing to happen in a diverse society, such as ours and the way that Congress can do that versus how an executive really can't. Certainly a judicial branch that really can't weigh a lot of different competing voices and decisions, it's got to come down on one side or the other. That also fires our politics and fires how people engage and negotiate with one another. One of the things, and we've been talking about this in a way throughout the interview, what kind of a conservative was Nisbet? As people who are listening to this interview would probably think Nisbet is a social conservative of some kind, but I don't think that really describes his thought, what do you say?
Mark Mitchell (27:02):
No, he's hard to pigeonhole. He's a conservative of sorts. I would say he's very much a Burkian. He quotes Burke a lot and he quotes Tocqueville a lot. If that's any indication, it kind of gives you a sense of where he's coming from. He sometimes is called a communitarian, although with the 1990s, the communitarian movement, that really doesn't, because they tended to be much more favorable to and in-bed with the national government. He's a decentralist I think in important respects, he's a localist in important ways. He wants to champion the little platoons that Burke speaks of and thinks that those little platoons, human scale associations, are the lifeblood of a healthy and free society. And in so far as he's critical of big government, he's also critical of big industry, big business. He's sort of skeptical of concentrations of power. I think that made some people on the left gravitate towards him, the critique of giantism in industry and in business. So in that respect, he's a bridge builder too, I think. There's something that some on the left can find in Nisbet that is attractive and perhaps in that respect, he can help us to generate a conversation, maybe across some of these very hard lines that have been developed recently.
Richard Reinsch (28:30):
I came across an essay he wrote in 1993 called, “Still Questing,” and he talked a bit about the attraction he had found his writings were having amongst the left. I think some of them have contacted him, but he said he didn't think it would go anywhere because ultimately being a progressive or being on the left of politics is about using the monopoly arm of government to achieve things, to force things. He didn't think that would really bear fruit. Certainly, as we think about mass concentrations in business, many are concerned about things that are happening in Silicon Valley and the power of those companies. But of course, if you look at the solution of breaking them up, or it seems to involve also the government having a lot of power as well, over what they do. I think that sort of illustrates maybe the problem that Nisbet would have with a left wing response.
Mark Mitchell (29:23):
Yeah, it's a vexing problem and it recalls something that Hilaire Belloc said in one of his books, The Restoration of Property, he recognizes and argues that big is the problem, whether it's political bigness or economic bigness, but concentrations of economic power, he thought has to be broken up. And the only entity that's capable of bringing that about is the state. He says something rather glibly, I think that, "Well, the state has gotten us into this problem and the state can help us get us out." But that strikes me as a kind of worrisome expansion of state power for the sake of what might be good end.
Richard Reinsch (30:04):
Well, and certainly, I mean, people have noted. I think Josh Hawley had a bill on Silicon Valley has control over information, but inherently it would involve the government having a stronger hand over the information that those companies illicit or produce or manipulate and that introduces all sorts of problems. Kind of thinking here also, Nisbet's book as I was reading it and it asks you the question, what type of conservative was he? One of the things that I noted in my read was he praises Edmund Burke. He praises Tocqueville. He refers to them as sort of the philosophical conservatives, I think, of the 19th century, all of whom are realizing that this sort of rationalist, individualist, emancipated approach to freedom and life don't really stack up and introduce many more problems. It seems to me that's, as I think about the type of conservative he is, I'm sort of putting him in with those guys who aren't... We can call them conservative liberals, people who believe largely in something like rule of law, limited government, markets, but want a ring-fence, I think is the way I think about these guys, want a ring-fence, a lot of other institutions and make sure they aren't impacted by constant progressive ideas.
Mark Mitchell (31:19):
I think that's right. He's a liberal in the way that some of the American founders were and he quotes in Quest for Community, he notes that Jefferson, for instance, could speak of liberty and of the individual, the freedom of the individual, but he was doing so within a social context, and it was deeply formed by tradition and associations and non-governmental structures so that it's really one of emphasis and context. When those things are burned away, when the traditions of local traditions and affiliations and local associations are burned away, speaking only about, or primarily about the individual and individual liberty, it looks very different because of the absence of that deep context out of which someone like Jefferson speaks.
Richard Reinsch (32:13):
You've written extensively and thinking about problems in American life, as we approach our problems with Nisbetian eyes, what do you think are some markers or some ways that we should look at these things?
Mark Mitchell (32:25):
Trying to think about that just in light of all that's been going on in the last year and I think the answer, if there is one, or at least the start of an answer is something that seems so modest and humble that some might just roll their eyes, but I think Nisbet would agree and that is, look around you and do everything you can to build the local communities of which you're apart. Pay attention to your neighbors, to your neighborhood, to your church, to your parish, to your local schools, get to know your neighbor. We've become so focused on national politics and presidential politics and national or international problems that we've lost sight of where life and politics really begins. And that's at the home. That's next door. That's with the things that I think Nisbet would agree with are the things that matter. The things that will ultimately sustain us are the things that are closest to us that often get overlooked in the frenzied rush to save the world.
Richard Reinsch (33:31):
I think that's well said. Ben Sasse released a statement about the January 6th mob, and he had a line in there, he said, "We people yell at each other on Twitter, but do they even know their neighbors?" I thought that was well said. And I also thought the banning of, or the way Parler was kicked off of the Amazon web servers and then it was removed from the iTunes app store, so basically it goes from being the number one app to it doesn't exist. And I thought to myself, there was so much hand wringing over this and other moves taken by Silicon Valley companies. I thought, "Well, so what, is it the only way we can communicate. Free speech has not been abolished. There are new ways and forms to communicate." Then I thought about them like five minutes later that, "No, actually, maybe it is in a certain sense." And it's certainly the most powerful form of national political interaction is on these forms of communication. I'm not sure that I have a good answer for that, but what that also means though is, as kind of, as you were saying, we more and more see ourselves in these abstract forms instead of concrete forms.
Mark Mitchell (34:42):
That suggests a good place to start. Is limit or abandon social media and go out and meet your neighbor.
Richard Reinsch (34:50):
Yeah. Yeah. I like that. That's so that's how we'll end, go out and meet your neighbor. Mark Mitchell, thank you so much for your time and discussing the life and work of Robert Nisbet. We appreciate it.
Mark Mitchell (35:01):
It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with David Goldman about prospects for inflation in the American economy. We're glad to welcome David Goldman back to Liberty Law Talk. He's a senior writer for Law & Liberty. He's the president of Macrostrategy, and he writes the Spengler column for Asia Times Online. He's the author of a number of books, including You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-Form the World. David, glad to have you on the program today.
David Goldman (00:50):
Richard, it's a great pleasure to be back. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Richard Reinsch (00:53):
We're glad to have you on this topic, in particular. The smart people tell us that inflation fears have subsided. There are a group of economists who strangely call themselves modern monetary theorists, who argue that we can take on an unceasing amount of debt and spend it however we want on various social programs, environmental programs, and none of this will have untoward results or result in things like inflation. We've spent, rounding up, $5 trillion in pandemic stimulus recently, almost 3 trillion, 2.9 trillion in expenses. And I'm told the Biden administration wants to spend another $3 trillion on infrastructure and climate change policies. What do you make of all of this? And what would it mean for the value of the dollar, this incredible spending?
David Goldman (01:46):
Well, I think in the short-term perversely, the dollar is likely to go up, but then I think it's going to go way, way down as a result. And ultimately this largess will threaten the dollars global standing as a reserve currency and America's capacity to finance itself on the scale we have in the future. The numbers you cited are truly astonishing, by historical standards. We're presently looking at a deficit, including this $1.9 trillion of stimulus just passed, at roughly a fifth of our gross domestic product. We haven't done that in the past, except during war time. The last time we had a deficit that big was in fact in 1945 and the federal reserve is financing virtually all of that because there simply isn't anyone else in the world with the wherewithal or the desire to own that many treasury securities.
David Goldman (02:47):
Just to give an example, after the 2009 crisis, we ran a big deficit, not nearly this big, foreigners financed about half of the Obama debts. Foreigners so far have financed zero of the net treasury issuance over the past year, which is ominous. So there's really nobody in there, but the federal reserve and US financial institutions doing that. Now, does this turn into realized inflation? A great part of the problem we have is the measurement of inflation. Every American family has two really big ticket items on their budget. One is the house and the other is the car. Now, the price of houses in the United States has gone up 10% in the past year, more than 10%. So we're back to the level of housing price inflation, if that's the right word, that we had at the peak of the housing bubble in the mid 2000's. We haven't seen that kind of housing price increase since 2005, except briefly when we hadn't recovered from the crash. And the price of used cars and trucks is up 10% over the past year.
David Goldman (04:00):
So, from the standpoint of affordability of life for an American family, the situation's quite dire. But if you look at the consumer price index published by the American Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's only up 1.7% year on year and fed chairman Jerome Powell has said, "Well, we think inflation of 2% is kind of a desirable thing." That's a whole other question. We're well below that. So I'm not worried about inflation. Now, the way the federal reserve measures such things is, for example, they don't look at the price of a house. That's a capital investment. They look at the cost of rent. Now rents are actually moving very modestly, but in a situation where the federal government has an eviction moratorium and vast numbers of Americans can't pay their rent, that number is completely meaningless. So, I submit that the 1.7% year on year at consumer price index number, doesn't really reflect what American families have to pay. That the explosion of housing prices, and explosion of used car prices is a much better indication.
David Goldman (05:17):
So inflation's already hurting people badly. And if we keep pumping stimulus in, but we don't have the productive capacity to meet the spending power, one of three things could happen. One is prices go up. So the amount of money spread over a smaller amount of goods becomes less valuable, the value of money goes down. The second thing is that people stop buying things because prices are going up, so the economy either slows or goes into recession. And the third thing is we import a lot more from China. And all those are happening, at the same time.
Richard Reinsch (05:59):
So you're saying we already have inflation in asset prices.
David Goldman (06:04):
That's correct. And they're assets which every family has to accumulate. There are very few families in the United States that can do without a house and a car.
Richard Reinsch (06:14):
And that would include, when we say asset prices, we also mean equities in that as well.
David Goldman (06:18):
Yeah. So equity prices have gone up, there's a nearly one for one correspondence between the so-called real interest rates, so the rates on medium term inflation index treasury bonds, and the price, say, of tech stocks. So there's absolutely no question if looking at the numbers that the federal reserve monetary stimulus, which has included zero interest rates for deposits and negative yields, real yields your terms are your securities, no question that this has put a lot of error into the stock market.
Richard Reinsch (06:52):
So inflation is here. Because I guess that doesn't seem to be widely discussed or widely known in, say, popular accounts or press accounts of what we're dealing with. But what we do seem to hear a lot about is this notion that we have very low inflation and to the extent, as Chairman Powell has said, Secretary Janet Yellen, that if we see inflation start to creep up they can tame it relatively quickly with conventional tools. And you're arguing, that's not true.
David Goldman (07:23):
Well, inflation could be a demand side or a supply fund phenomenon. One of the things that's most distressing about the state of the US economy is chronic underinvestment in capital equipment and infrastructure in the means of producing things. In real terms, orders for capital equipment are back where they were in the 1990s. So US manufacturers have done very little investment in the past 10 to 15 years. Our production capacity, our supply chains are now constrained. So we have a large number of press accounts and studies coming out saying that as all this demand pours into the economy, manufacturers simply don't have the supply chain capacity, the production capacity to meet the demand. And many reasons for that, part of it's blamed on the Texas weather. Part of it is blamed on a global semiconductor shortage, but I think all of the blame is we haven't been investing in manufacturing capacity and in infrastructure, and that's had some really perverse effects.
So when you say we can tame inflation, how do you do that? You can take money away from people so they can't spend money, that would tame inflation. You could send the police round to take money out of everybody’s bank account, hypothetically, that would tame inflation, but is that a solution which would help us or be politically acceptable? I don't think so. I think the federal reserve has a tiger by the tail. They don't fear it, let it go.
Richard Reinsch (09:08):
About the fed policy, and you've mentioned the federal reserve buying the debt. So you're saying of the 5 trillion, roughly 5 trillion we've spent in pandemic stimulus, most of that has been issued by treasury and purchased by the federal reserve and other US banks. And I want to try to lead into a question on the policy of interest on excess reserves by the fed and what role that's playing in all of this. How do you see that?
David Goldman (09:34):
I think the excess reserves issue is relatively minor. The management of excess reserves affects the extent to which commercial banks are able to buy treasury securities and make loans. Banks have been a significant contributor, net purchases are in the range of about $400 billion in the past year, which is roughly a tenth or so, of the total amount of financing required, but I don't believe that's a decisive issue. I think the critical issue is interest rates, the deficit, and the fact that the giant sucking sound here is all the capital in the United States going into financing the deficit.
Richard Reinsch (10:18):
I guess the reason why I asked that question is some say that the policy of interest on excess reserves allows the fed to both monetize the debt and curtail inflation because the money is then parked. And these banks fed reserve accounts does not immediately go out into the economy or competes with other rates.
David Goldman (10:38):
Yes. I mean, technically that's true. If you look at M2 money supply, it now stands at about $20 trillion. And if memory serves me, roughly a quarter of all the money ever created at American history has been created in the past two and a half, three years. That's a staggering rate of monetary expansion. But as the textbook says, it's not the amount of money that determines the price, it's the amount of money, times the velocity of money, how fast it turns over. And it's true that the excess reserves policy keeps money parked and reduces the velocity of money. But that is a relatively minor thing because as the commercial bank, if you have customers who are willing to take on debt and they're credit worthy, you want to make commercial and industrial loans for them. Whatever the excess reserves policy, that's going to affect your incentive to do so in a relatively minor way.
David Goldman (11:42):
The main thing happening right now in the banking system is that people are not taking on debt, commercial and industrial loan growth is shrinking. In fact, the volume of commercial industrial loans has shrunk over the past 12 months of pandemic. Instead the banks are buying treasury securities and that's because the kind of customers who typically are the big borrowers at the banks, the small and medium sized enterprises, have been flat on their back and aren't taking on debt, or aren't able to take on debt because they're not credit worthy. Large corporations tend not to borrow from banks, they tend to borrow rather on the bonds. There's been an enormous amount of corporate borrowing, but the medium-sized smaller companies who tend to use bank loans, don't have access to the bond market, happen off the market. So I think it's really the... Velocity of money issue is really a matter of the demand for bank loans and not the management of reserves.
Richard Reinsch (12:40):
Thinking about the federal reserves policy. We have this piece we published by Alex Pollack a few weeks ago, inflation comes for the profligate, and he says the federal reserve has purchased including unamortized mortgage premiums, a sum of 2.3 trillion. Which is, Alex says, 2.6 times its total assets in 2007, I guess, meaning the federal reserve's balance sheet. That's got to be part of the earlier comments you made about entering into a new housing bubble.
David Goldman (13:13):
Absolutely. Well, when you push mortgage rates down to one and a half percent, then the number of people who can buy houses is enormous. People have long memories. Back in the 1970s, there was only one major asset class that showed positive real returns, and that was houses. Stocks lost money, bonds lost money, well gold made money. But for most people, the American middle class didn't do all that badly in the seventies because if you bought a house, you had the positive real returns. Now that was in a situation where family formation was much higher, we were at the peak of the baby boom. People born in the late forties and early fifties were then just forming families and buying houses. So the inherent demand for houses was higher, but still, from the standpoint of the ordinary American family, if you have the ability... Housing prices are running at 10% a year, and you can take a mortgage at 20% down, then you're making 50% a year on your down payment, in fact your invested capital. That's a very good rate of return.
Richard Reinsch (14:27):
Yeah, as you would say, what can't go on forever won't go on forever. That seems to be true-
David Goldman (14:34):
The famous Herb Stein law.
Richard Reinsch (14:35):
Yeah. Just in thinking about all of this. So the federal reserve continuing to buy the securities, continuing to monetize the debt and grow its balance sheet. What's the end game for that?
David Goldman (14:47):
Well, there are several possible end games, but all of them are ones that we don't want to see. One is that, as real returns to US financial assets are effectively suppressed, the rest of the world effectively stops holding dollars. Now to give an idea of the size of that, I estimate the low interest loans, which we're getting for the rest of the world, at around $25 trillion. That's about eight to 9 trillion of foreign holdings of treasury securities and 16 trillion of dollar deposits in overseas banks, which are held as working capital for international trade or international capital flows. That's what's called seignorage or the premium that a country gets for effectively having reserve currency, it's used for the difference between what the King got for minting coins, the difference in the value of the coins and the bullion they were minted off, but the term persists. And if the federal reserve keeps real returns negative forever, eventually people will stop using the dollar and then we will lose loans to the rest of the world, which now amount to more than a year’s gross domestic product, we can't sustain that.
David Goldman (16:14):
And modern monetary theorists say, well, look, the federal reserve can print money and the US government can borrow all it wants at effectively a negative real interest rate. The interest rate on five-year, carefree, inflation protected securities is -1.7 percentage or so. So, at a privilege, if I buy effective security for five years, for the privilege of letting the US government use my money, I'm losing 1.7% a year in real terms. Or I would expect to be, just based on expected inflation. And that's a great deal for the US government, but it's not a great deal for the creditors of the US government. So eventually we'd lose the dollars. And if you read publications close to the state council of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, I've read article after article saying the US, because it has a global reserve currency, can get away with it for a certain period of time but eventually that's going to wipe out the dollar's role as a reserve currency, and that's the end of American power.
David Goldman (17:24):
That's one way things could happen. Another way things could happen is that inflation really takes off. And that creates so many distortions that eventually the federal reserve is forced to raise interest rates, call a halt to this, and then we have a real buy because if we have US debt equal to our gross domestic product, and it's increasing at 20% of GDP a year, for every percentage point that our debt increases, we pay another $250 billion in interest. Let's say we go up three or 4%. Suddenly our interest builds us up by another trillion dollars and exactly at the point where we are forced to reduce borrowing, we also have to increase spending to pay the interest. In other words, we look like Italy during its economic crisis of several years ago. We look like a third world country, look like Turkey and at that point, we're in a world of pain.
David Goldman (18:33):
So those are the two principle outcomes. And I don't think any of this will happen at a one-year horizon, but at a five-year horizon it's very possible. And if you can imagine the United States will wipe something like a quarter of personal income over the past year is coming from government cheques of one kind or another, and you're forced to cut that back. The hardship on Americans and the shock to American politics would be horrendous, very difficult for any of us to conceive.
Richard Reinsch (19:06):
So that inflation episode, the way you try to get control of it is dramatic cuts in spending and dramatic increases in taxes, with hardship all around.
David Goldman (19:16):
Yeah. Well, look at Italy. Look at Greece. Look at third world countries that have been through this. Or even so look at Britain during the Sterling crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. I was a graduate student in London in 1974 and 1975. And I remember the lights out in Piccadilly circus. This was a poor country in deep crisis.
Richard Reinsch (19:42):
Talk about that. How did that affect Great Britain, when that moment happened?
David Goldman (19:46):
Well, people were pretty miserable. Britain went from being a global power to being a second rate power, to being much less important. Margaret Thatcher fortunately came in and set things right, but the North of England has never really recovered. So the United States could end up being a second rate economic power, while China becomes a dominant power in the world as a result of this. I'm not against spending money from the federal government, Richard. If Biden had said, let's spend 1.9 trillion on infrastructure, research development and STEM education, I wouldn't be unhappy about that. But simply to put money into people's pockets in the hopes that they spend more means, namely, that they buy more smartphones and computers from China, and China's exports to the United States are soaring.
Richard Reinsch (20:38):
As I was doing research for this interview, I came across a number of articles where people would take on your argument that you've made and say, yeah, but people were saying this in 2009, people were saying this in 2008, that America would become like Greece or America would become like Italy and it didn't materialize. And it didn't materialize for a number of reasons, many of which we've discussed or touched on. And this global reserve currency thing is noted, this need to hold dollar denominated deposits, trade situation. And America is the best deal on the block sort of thing. We can do more. And what do you make of that? Here we are, 10 years later, we've dramatically increased the money supply, dramatically increased public spending. We seem to be in this late great society, 1960s mentality regarding government program thinking. And what of it? How do you respond to that?
David Goldman (21:34):
Well, I think from the standpoint of American families, the outcome wasn't particularly desirable. We had, under the Obama administration, effectively eight lost years, where we never got back to the trajectory of growth that we have in the past, we had chronically low growth. The economy in 2016 was about 10% smaller than it would have been if we had had a normal economic recovery, if we'd caught up and compensated for the lost growth of the great financial crisis. So I think the dissatisfaction in large parts of the American population, which gave rise to Donald Trump's populism, is a pretty good gauge of how unsatisfied most of us were with the outcome after the standpoint of investors in Facebook and Google and Microsoft, things were great. The other thing in terms of the dollar US international role is we really didn't have any competition. The Europeans were in some ways in worse shape than we were, Europe went through a severe financial crisis in the early 2010's, parts of it are still in very dodgy condition.
So although the international use of the Euro has grown at the expense of the dollar, the Euro simply isn't likely to substitute for the dollar as a world reserve currency because Europe has its own weaknesses. The difference now is we've got shot. China has its own problems, but China is 15% of world exports and only 5% of world stock market capitalization. The Chinese are very cautious about opening their capital markets in such a way that would allow their currency, the RMB, to become a global reserve currency, at least for the present, but on the five or 10 year horizon the Chinese have ambitions to make the RMB a global reserve currency. And if China's economy continues to grow faster than ours and the Chinese manage to realize their extremely ambitious national program for the fourth industrial revolution, and they manage to assert themselves as the leading technology power in artificial intelligence and the 5G telecommunications manufacturing and so forth.
Then at a five to 10 year horizon, we will have a challenge that can push us out of first place. And this is not a nice competition we're involved in, this is Glengarry Glen Ross, first prize is a Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives. If you lose your ability to borrow in your own currency globally, that is reserve status, and you lose the dominant position in the world market for high tech. It's not just Huawei that's the dominant telecom producer, but if Chinese companies are the dominant AI providers in a number of fields, then the United States would go through a decline similar to what Britain went through in the 60's and 70's, it doesn't mean we disappear as a country, but it means we have lower living standards. We have even more deeply fractured body of politics. We have less military power and generally we hate life.
Richard Reinsch (24:57):
Those are the stakes. Related question, is just thinking about China. What did China learn, do you think, from our financial systems near collapse in 2008 and the way we managed that crisis?
David Goldman (25:12):
Well, China was terrified by that, in 2008.
Richard Reinsch (25:15):
And I suppose the related question is how did they change their approach to us, also?
David Goldman (25:21):
Well, the most important thing that the 2008 crash did was to persuade the Chinese that they shouldn't emulate the American model. We now say with 2020 hindsight that the Chinese would never change, they'd never reform, they'd never be like us, that letting them into the World Trade Organization was a terrible mistake, that believing in Chinese reform was a terrible idea. But in fact, before 2008, there was a substantial body of opinion in China who said look at this wonderful American model with its technological marvels and its incredible living standards. We should be a lot more alike. After 2008, the Chinese said, this thing was a scam. The Americans are running a bubble, they're hollow inside. We're going to do things our own way.
Now that's a very long-term proposition because, from the Chinese standpoint, remember in 2007, something like 35% of China's GDP went to exports. They were completely dependent on the American market and they very narrowly avoided a severe recession when we went into recession. Now the export dependency has fallen by roughly half. China's exports to the world are 17% of GDP and much smaller amount is exported to US. And they're determined to be less dependent on exports over time and build up the domestic market because they don't see the United States as a viable prop for their growth. So to the extent that the 2008 crisis put us flat on our back, it persuaded the Chinese to challenge us, to become more aggressive and pursue a policy quite different from ours, not to reform and to challenge us eventually.
Richard Reinsch (27:21):
I think I know your answer to this, but I think a lot of our listeners would gain from hearing it. Modern monetary theorists would point to, and this surprises me, but countries like Japan that have taken on a lot of debt, I mean much more than we have. I think Japan has 240% of GDP, more than twice the American ratio, but why couldn't we be just like Japan and just continue to take on debt and support a lot of social spending that a lot of Americans apparently now want.
David Goldman (27:50):
If you're a net lender to the rest of the world, as Japan is, Japan has a net foreign asset position of about plus $4 trillion, if I'm correct. Several trillion dollars. The United States by contrast has a net foreign asset position of negative $13 trillion. If you can fund your deficit with domestic savings, then effectively, what you've got is the Japanese owing money to each other and they can keep doing that as long as they feel like. It certainly hasn't been optimal for Japan, Japan has had very low growth, but part of the very low growth is a rapidly aging population and a declining workforce. Part of the reason for so much saving in Japan is because people approaching retirement save a great deal more.
So, for a whole bunch of reasons, Japan doesn't look like us at all. My point, Richard, is that if you're running a current account deficit of 60, $80 billion a month, and you have a net foreign asset position at negative 13 trillion, then your ability to finance a deficit of 20% of GDP becomes very dodgy and particularly, and it's not just the net foreign asset position. If you look at, as I've said, the total holdings of dollars globally, and how much credit the global reserve position of the dollar allocates the US, we're talking 25 to $30 trillion, by my estimate. And if that starts to erode, if foreigners say, "Well, we just don't need the dollar anymore. Why should we hold these balances? Why should we hold those treasury securities at a negative yield?" And at that point, we're in a world of pain.
Richard Reinsch (29:38):
When you say America has a net international investment position of negative 13 trillion, what does that mean exactly?
David Goldman (29:47):
It means we've imported net $13 trillion of capital more than we've exported. We either owe foreigners or have foreign investments in our stock market of $13 trillion. Our monetary system, our economy has been dependent on capital flows coming in, and that roughly corresponds to our trade deficit over the past 40 years. If we keep importing more than we export, we've got to give people our paper, our IOU's for that difference. We sell them assets, we sell them bonds, stocks or whatever. That's how you get a negative net foreign asset position.
Richard Reinsch (30:27):
And right now we're balancing that with being the world reserve currency or buffering that somewhat?
David Goldman (30:33):
That's correct. I mean, it's also true that this capitalization to the US stock market has helped, that's a fact that some of our tech companies have been so successful has attracted a lot of foreign capital. So what worries me is not simply the monetary situation, it's that if the Chinese become the dominant players in artificial intelligence and the next generation of great tech companies with mega market capitalization, the next Googles and Microsofts and Apples and so forth are Chinese companies instead of American companies, then we could be in double trouble.
Richard Reinsch (31:11):
And you and I talked a lot about that in our previous podcast, when we discussed your book, You Will Be Assimilated, on China's policies there. And I assume you still hold most of those views that China's tech prowess is going to outpace us soon.
David Goldman (31:26):
That's a view which has been widely expressed by people who know a great deal about it. There was a report about three weeks ago by an entity called the National Security Council on Artificial Intelligence, a report shared by Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Google and Robert Work, who was deputy secretary of defense in the Obama administration. Now Work is extremely bright. And that report said that there is a very significant danger that China will dominate the trademark industry, trademark technology, which is artificial intelligence with of course, applications to many industries. And they propose some very dramatic measures to avoid that.
Now China is spending $600 billion a year in US dollars on technology subsidies, support, R and D and so forth. The United States is spending a fraction of that and that $600 billion, by the way, in China buys a great deal more skilled manpower than it does in the United States because qualified engineer salary is about a third of that in the United States. So the Chinese are outspending us massively on the cutting edge technologies which very well may define the economy of the 21st century. And we're in danger of falling behind, the Biden administration has said some reasonable things about the need to catch up, but they haven't done anything or proposed anything serious so far.
Richard Reinsch (33:01):
You and I have been talking and I know you've had a lifetime in capital markets and finance and economics. And we've been talking a lot about those concepts and consequences of abusing certain notions in finance and capital markets and fiscal policy. But to what extent also, and I suppose it's not either, or, it's related, is America's position, and a relatively declining position it seems, do also it's not that we don't understand these things. It's we lack the virtue, the seriousness, the desire to discipline our appetites and have a medium and long-term perspective on what's best for this country. And that includes also our leadership class. How do you see that?
David Goldman (33:43):
A Chinese acquaintance told me you're having your cultural revolution now with your struggle sessions and your policy of sending people to go out and work with peasants. What's happening at our universities where engineering departments are run by diversity deans is quite concerning, but apropos of your point, it's not simply the work lacks, I think that the national sense of virtue is, to put it mildly, challenged. By way of contrast, in China, 10 million high school kids take the university entrance exam, the gaokao, every year and admission to universities, which is a sure determination of a future career, is entirely determined by your exam score. Your grades, your club membership and so forth, your sports don't count at all. So only that single grade, people have studied for years, the average Chinese family spends a year’s income on tutoring. The average. 50% of the kids to take the gaokao in China will fail. Won't get a university position. They'll go to a trade school to get some technical education, but they won't get to university.
David Goldman (35:01):
The Chinese set the bar so that half of the contenders will fail and the Chinese people are willing to accept 50, 50 odds. And the fact that the Chinese have such a ruthless, and in many ways heartless meritocracy, which demands so much effort and so much competitiveness from their kids, gives them an advantage. That's the kind of thing you used to hear in top law schools, where the Dean would tell the incoming class, look to your left, look to your right. One of you isn't going to be there in three years. That kind of competitiveness and willingness to work is something we've lost. Chinese schools, they've got to make kids do calisthenics because otherwise they study all the time and waste away.
Richard Reinsch (35:50):
I think that's a fitting way for us to end as we think about what America has to do to get its house in order. Part of that is just the recovery of discipline and the willingness and the desire to succeed. Thank you so much, David Goldman, we've been talking about the prospects for inflation.
David Goldman (36:06):
Thank you Richard, it's been a pleasure talking.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm Richard Reinsch. I'm glad to welcome to the program today Michael McConnell to discuss his new book just out from Princeton University Press, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution. Michael McConnell is one of our most profound constitutional thinkers. He's the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, and the Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University Law School. He's also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was formerly on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals from 2002 to 2009. He has appeared before the Supreme Court 15 times. He also has another book coming out very soon from Cambridge Press, Establishment of Religion: Neutrality, Accommodation, and Separation. Michael McConnell, we're glad to have you on the program today.
Michael McConnell (01:12):
It's a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Richard Reinsch (01:14):
Michael, I thought I'd start maybe with a more popular question, and it's a question on a lot of people's minds. I think it's a bipartisan question, depending on who's in the White House. The view out there is, in large measure, presidential power in the United States is increasingly exercised not under the Constitution, but on top of the Constitution or in an extra-legal fashion. Do you think that is the case in the course of your studies? So has the Presidency in America increasingly become extra-constitutional or unconstitutional? Or do you find it to be a much more nuanced approach?
Michael McConnell (01:54):
I think the answer to that is sort of or almost.
Richard Reinsch (01:59):
Almost under the Constitution?
Michael McConnell (02:00):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (02:00):
Okay.
Michael McConnell (02:01):
That it's become extra-constitutional, but a lot of that is because Congress has invited it. So it's very difficult to say that many of these things are unconstitutional when Congress has passed vast delegations of power to the executive branch in sloppy language, and then, of course, the presidents have run with it. Take just a current example, which is folks urging President Biden to cancel student debt. Well, what has Congress done here? Congress has given the executive power to negotiate and compromise individual claims. Now, this is just like any other debtor thing. If you're dealing with Best Buy or whomever, and you owe them money and you're not going to be able to pay, they'll negotiate that down. That's what that's exactly for. But Biden's advisors are telling him, "Well, you can just compromise them all, and you can compromise them down to zero. You can thereby eliminate all of the student debt that is owed to the United States." Now, I think that is just an outrageous misunderstanding of the statute. Right? But the problem with it is that the state itself is ambiguous. So when Biden's advisors say ... Biden himself is resisting this, according to the newspapers. But what his advisors are saying is, "Take advantage of every little ambiguity to do this." It's very similar to what Donald Trump did with the building the wall on the border with Mexico when Congress refused to appropriate money for it. Instead, he takes a highly dubious interpretation of the Emergency Powers Act and just runs with it.
Richard Reinsch (03:52):
And there's also this issue of how do you fund things. With the wall and the Trump administration, there was debate over was it constitutional, was it lawful for him to move money around? I guess the view of the administration was, "Statutorily, we have that authority."
Michael McConnell (04:05):
Yes. But again, the typical problem today is not that the executive branch does things that are absolutely out of its wheelhouse, but rather that they stretch ambiguous statutory authority and use it in ways that Congress never intended.
Richard Reinsch (04:24):
And then Congress seems unwilling or unlikely or too partisan, depending on who's in the White House, to stand up for its own institutional power.
Michael McConnell (04:34):
Yeah, Congress is basically no longer interested in institutional questions. They are only interested in partisan questions. And given that the Congress is pretty divided, Senate's 50/50, democrats are just barely in control of that. The democrats in Congress are not going to rein President Biden in, just as the republicans when they controlled both houses of Congress under Trump were unwilling to rein Trump in. There was a time not that long ago when Congress cared about its institutional prerogatives, and they would join together on a bipartisan basis to object when presidents did things that they believed cut into a congressional authority. And there is no authority that is intended by our Constitution to be so exclusively congressional as the power over the purse. There are actually two provisions of the Constitution that protects Congress's exclusive power here. We've now had three presidents in a row that rather blatantly have been spending large sums of money on pet projects that Congress disapproved of, and have gotten away with it. Actually, Obama didn't quite get away with it, because the court stepped in when he spent $7 billion on healthcare subsidies to insurance companies that Congress had refused to appropriate. The court actually stepped in and said that that was illegal.
Richard Reinsch (06:08):
That was interesting, too. Because Congress, if I remember correctly, deferred to the court in that case, and they wanted to bring in the court rather than press their own power.
Michael McConnell (06:16):
That's right. In a way, it's a confession of weakness when they have to go to court.
Richard Reinsch (06:20):
Yeah.
Michael McConnell (06:21):
But most of the book, as you know, is not about current events. I use the events to illustrate some of the principles, but most of the book actually takes place back in the end of the 18th century.
Richard Reinsch (06:35):
Turning to the book and helping us to shed light on a lot of these controversies, talk about what you're doing in The President Who Would Not Be King and what your research revealed to you.
Michael McConnell (06:45):
This is, I think, the first comprehensive account of how the presidency was put together by the delegates of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. I think the last real attempt to do this was in the 1920s. I think it's a fascinating story. It's a story that isn't often told. It's a story that makes current politics look not so good, either republican or democratic. So the very first part of the book is how it happened at the convention, but then with reference to each of the powers that they debate and allocate had a history. So we look back at the history, mostly in British constitutional practice, but it's sometimes in a colonial or early state practice, or under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution, and then looking forward, ahead to the first controversies over many of these powers, mostly during the Washington administration, but occasionally up through Adams and Jefferson. The idea here is that the convention was very careful about allocating powers that are of an executive nature. Now, when I say of an executive nature, their sort of rule of thumb for this is they looked at the powers of the king. And they understood those to be, most of them, prerogative powers, which means powers that are actually vested in the king as king, as opposed to through parliamentary delegation. William Blackstone in his commentaries on the laws of England, the book known to our framers intimately, he lists, depending on how you count, perhaps 41 different important powers of the king. Our framers allocated all but one of those either explicitly or implicitly, giving many of them to Congress, giving some of them to the president, which in most cases they actually trim the scope of the power when they're giving to the president, and then in some cases denying that power to the Federal Government all together. A conspicuous example of that being the kings power over the Church of England. Well, we don't have an established church in America. So they allocated these powers very carefully. Their basic strategy was to give many of them to Congress, and then to carefully limit the scope of the powers that they give to the president.
Richard Reinsch (09:32):
As the framers go into the Philadelphia Convention, substantively, what's on their minds regarding executive power? What's going to guide them in thinking about this allocational division of power?
Michael McConnell (09:44):
Actually, we can tell in what I think is the most dramatic moment at the convention, which is the very third day of substantive debate. The Virginia Plan was sort of their first draft of a constitution prepared by the Virginia delegation, mostly written we think by James Madison. It had an executive power section in which all of the executive powers that had been vested in the Congress under the Articles of Confederation will now be moved to the chief magistrate. They hadn't yet decided that the name would be president, though I'll call it president because it really doesn't matter. But those powers were extensive, so they included, among other things, the power to take the nation into war, and then to get it out of war. These are called the powers of war and peace. And under the British system, the king could do this unilaterally. He did not have to go to Parliament. So they see this, and the very first person to comment is a 20-something from South Carolina named Charles Pinckney. You can almost hear him gasp in the records. I mean, it's not. He says, "Why? This will make the president a king because the powers are so extensive." And then they scramble. And in those first few days, they create an executive power which is extraordinarily weak. They basically strip the office of all powers except the power to carry into a effect laws passed by Congress, plus some powers of appointment, plus the power to veto a legislation. That would be a mere shadow. That would be basically parliamentary government with a little executive branch attached largely for law enforcement purposes, and then they don't touch that again until late July. The convention begins in May and ends in September. Late July, there's this committee rather amusingly named the Committee of Detail. I say it's amusing because this committee did not confine itself to detail. They rewrote major portions of the Constitution. The truth is that more important constitutional decisions about the structure of government were made behind the closed doors of the Committee of Detail than were made on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. And that committee, which was made up of five people, completely rewrote the executive branch. We don't have any records of what they said, but we have several drafts of their internal drafts as they worked through it. I think it is pretty clear. I mean, this was an inference on my part, but I'm quite convinced that what they were doing was they were using a mental list of executive powers, royal powers from Blackstone, and then parceling them out. For example, 13 of the 29 explicit powers of Congress had actually been royal powers in Blackstone under the British system. So important powers like powers of war and peace. Remember, that's what set off Charles Pinckney on the first day. The power to make war is given exclusively to Congress, and then they divide the power to make peace, giving the president the power to negotiate the treaty, but the Senate, by two-thirds vote, the power to decide whether to put it into effect. So actually what's left is a very powerful presidency compared to the shadow that they had created in response to the original idea. A very powerful presidency, but seriously limited compared to the king.
Richard Reinsch (13:36):
You make a point that the Committee on Detail also, with regard to congressional power, moved from what seemed to be a general grant of power to Congress in the convention to a more detailed, to what we now called the enumerated powers of Congress. I thought that was interesting. The thing about this allocation of power, you also make the point we frequently think about that in terms of federalism, powers not held by Congress or powers held by states. You make the point, and you've been talking about this, this is also about what's between Congress and the president, and things are taken from the presidency. So in a way, the baseline of power is executive power, and that's what's they're carving and giving out to Congress. But there's this assumption of executive power that's there, that's in reserve maybe, and it's just being whittled down. So in that regard, what do they think should be left?
Michael McConnell (14:32):
The decision to enumerate the powers of Congress is a really interesting one, because the chair of Committee of Detail actually made a motion to enumerate. The day before the committee was set up, he makes this motion. It's voted down in favor of simply a very broad description of power given to Congress, and basically to be able to enact laws that are genuinely national in character as to which individual states are incompetent. That would essentially give Congress very nearly a total legislative authority. And that's what the delegates voted for, but John Rutledge had the made. His motion lost. He then becomes chair of the Committee of Detail. And what does he do, along with the other four members? They disregard the vote, and they enumerate the powers of Congress. It's a lot of what they spent their time doing, and that accomplishes two things. Everyone has always understood that that's where federalism come from, because the national government is given certain powers and everything else is left to the states. That's the substance of our federalism system. But in addition to that, and I think this has not been appreciated very much in the past. The other thing that it was by giving a number of royal executive powers to Congress, this is the way that the committee dealt with the boundary line between the authority of the executive branch and the authority of the legislative branch. It's primarily, not exclusively, but primarily done in Article I by defining what powers Congress has rather than an Article II, which is a kind of slightly disorganized description of presidential power.
Richard Reinsch (16:24):
In the book you proceed, I think, in your research and your writing as an originalist. You talk about original public meaning and original intention, originalism. What did you take though from your study here? The Committee on Detail does so much work seemingly, I won't say under the table, but on their own without a lot of public or historical discussion. You talked about the drafts we have of their work. You also mentioned the state ratifying conventions don't really seem to take up executive power the most, which was interesting to me. I'm recalling James Madison's statement, that a crucial way to understand the terms of the Constitution is by looking to the state ratifying conventions. So do you find these to be holes in the record for originalist research and writing, or do you think the silences and the inferences you can draw are compelling here?
Michael McConnell (17:15):
That's a great question. I think that a lot of times the way originalists talk, let's say, at Supreme Court confirmation hearings and that sort of thing. They talk as if on every constitutional question, all we need to do is find out, what was the original public meaning at the time? And there's an assumption that there was one and that we can find it out. But in history, you can't wring any more out of history than is there, right? I think we originalists need to be modest about identifying, what do we know and what do we not know? I think that the obligation of a 21st century interpreter is to stick within the lines of what we do know about the original public meaning, right? But we shouldn't expect to find all the answers to everything. What we'll find is some kind of boundary, some sort of approach that often times we have to fill in the detail. It's my personal view, and here I'm maybe not as strict an originalist as some people, I think what we do is we look not just ... First of all, we do identify what is the range of possible meaning, and stick with that. But then we look at the course of historical development over time, and the 230-some-odd years since the adoption of the Constitution. That precedent, not just in court but also in the political branches, that precedent is also a major guide. What I think courts should not do is just make it up. What they need to do is they need to comply with the constraints. And then in the end, if the statute where they're evaluating the constitutionality is not contrary to the text, not contrary to what we know about original meaning, not contrary to long-standing practice or precedent, what they should just say is, "That means it's constitutional." The judges may not like it. They might not vote for it. They may disapprove of it. But if it doesn't contradict any of those sources of constitutional law, they should leave it in place and let the representatives of the people make their mistakes.
Richard Reinsch (19:35):
Well said. If we're in the Philadelphia Convention, one could say, "All right. Well, if the Committee of Detail makes all of these changes and no one really seems to kick up a fuss or say, 'No, that's not what we agreed to. That's not what we came out at.'" You could draw a number of conclusions from that. You raise the example, though, in the convention that perhaps this gentleman, Gouverneur Morris was influential in thinking about a philosophy of executive power that they could live with. You cite him in several instances saying things that sort of look like the president that we have or that we got out of, or that emerged in the Constitution. And this is something I came to your book thinking, having heard that they looked at the New York State Constitution, which had the strongest executive of the state constitutions, and that was one they tried to fashion. You dismissed that or say it's not as important as people make it out to be. So I'll just throw all that at you.
Michael McConnell (20:29):
The Committee of Detail comes back. And as you say, nobody makes a big fuss. I think there are two logical explanations for why not, and we should not overlook this. We do not have good records of what was said at the convention after about this period of time. There's a very important book by Mary Sarah Bilder called Madison's Hand, which is a close examination of the records that we have. And Madison begins the convention taking copious notes, but there's a period of time roughly corresponding to when the Committee of Detail's report comes back. There's a period of time in which he ceases taking notes. So all we have is sources from elsewhere, including the journal which reports the motions and the votes on things, but doesn't report the debate. So it's not impossible that when the Committee of Detail came back with these audacious innovations, maybe people did raise a fuss and we just don't know about it because the records weren't kept. The other logical possibility is that they did such a good job, both with respect to the federalism dimension and the executive verus legislative dimension, that the other delegates were satisfied. The Committee of Detail was itself a very representative group. They may have been able to predict what the full convention was willing to accept. This was a committee with one member from the Deep South, one member from the upper South, one member from the middle states, and two members from New England. That's a very representative group.
Richard Reinsch (22:18):
Including James Wilson, right?
Michael McConnell (22:20):
Including James Wilson, who was probably the very best lawyer at the convention and one of the best lawyers in the United States. But as you say, so it did come back. It isn't as if the draft then is just completely accepted. They go through several weeks of debate. They go through it in the full convention. They go through the Committee of Detail draft provision by provision. There are numerous motions for amendments. Some of them are accepted, some of them are voted down. The basic structure survives, but it's not 100%. And as you say, Gouverneur Morris in particular has a quite sophisticated and more modern-seeming conception of the executive branch, and makes several proposals which are subtly worked into the draft. What Morris seems to have understood that very few people of that day did was, you shouldn't think about it as a single person like the king or the president. You have to understand the executive branch as an institution, which is going to have multiple offices, and that the power, although the president will have ultimate power over the executive branch, he's not going to be making all the day-to-day decisions. And because there are going to be officers who are only somewhat under his control, power is going to be diffused within the executive branch, so there are going to intra-executive branch checks and balances. The most conspicuous example of this is that the Senate has the power to give advice and consent to presidential appointees to the principal officers. That means the president does not have full discretion to run the executive branch just with the people whom he most trusts. We just saw this with President Biden yesterday with his nominee for the Office of Management and Budget being turned down. Every president, no matter how popular or republican or democrat, they've all had some of their cabinet choices rejected by the Senate. That means that the executive branch is being run by people who are not just the toadies or lackeys of the president. And then the president does have the power to fire them if he doesn't like what they're doing. Certainly, President Trump did more of that than most presidents do. But the president can't actually force them to issue the regulation or do the enforcement that he wants. He can give them instructions, but then his only enforcement mechanism for those instructions is to fire the officer. And that creates a certain distance between what the president wants to have happen and what actually happens in the executive branch. Effective presidents think about this, know about this, and figure out ways to make the executive branch work for them. Ronald Reagan was a genius at doing this. Others are not so good. Donald Trump didn't have a clue, and so he was constantly fighting with his own people and did not have control over the executive branch. The result of that was a much less effective president than he might have been.
Richard Reinsch (25:43):
Would you shed light on this term, the unitary theory of the executive? Is the plan that comes out of Philadelphia a unitary executive?
Michael McConnell (25:53):
Unitary executive means that the ultimate power is all in one person. Now, at the convention, the delegates considered and rejected the idea of having a multi-headed executive. For example, remember Ancient Rome had two consuls. The first republic in France first had a committee and a directory of five, and then three consuls and so forth. They voted that down. We're going to have a single-headed presidency, but the idea of a unitary executive is that that's not just in form. That's in reality that ultimately all executive power is vested in the president of the United States. So when he's elected, he basically controls all executive power. I used to believe more in that theory than I do now having done this study. I now describe the system as ultimately unitary, but not immediately unitary. That is, the president cannot just by snapping his fingers make the executive branch do exactly what he wants it to do. Sometimes there's going to be resistance. Trump encountered huge resistance within the executive branch. Even the people he named to office very frequently stood up to him. I think that that's a feature of our Constitution, not a bug. So I think our Constitution actually has an only incompletely unitary executive. I do believe that ultimately the president has authority. I think he can fire officers. I think the idea of an independent regulatory agency is completely contrary to the original constitution. I think that that's wrong. But I do think that the structure that the framers set up creates at least a little bit of friction, and it may be a good thing. Because when you have a president who does things that are ill thought through or maybe even illegal, and there have been many presidents over our history that have done that, the cabinet officer who is in charge of actually putting that into effect can say no, or at least say, "Well, maybe." I mean, in some instances with Trump, I think what the officer would say is, "Yeah. Well, we'll get around to that, Mr. President." And then, just quietly let the idea, the bad idea drop. That's not orthodox, what you learn in political science about the Constitution, but that's the way I think it works, and I think that's the way the framers set it up.
Richard Reinsch (28:36):
There's also just the sheer size now of the executive branch. Maybe we can talk some in a moment about the administrative state, what people refer to as the administrative state. We've talked about this some already. As an originalist, part of your book is a textual study of Article II, itself. What's the logic of this article? There seems to be three major provisions or powers: A Take Care Clause, the Vesting Clause, and the Commander in Chief Clause. All of which, the arrangement of Article II is very different from Article I.
Michael McConnell (29:12):
Yes. Actually, I think Article II is the most difficult to understand. If you just pick up the Constitution as a casual person, not knowing much about it and just read it, I think the powers of Congress are fairly clear. I think the powers of the courts are fairly clear. But I think you would be hard pressed to understand the powers of the president just from reading Article II. But I think once you see the logical way in which the Committee of Detail created the structure, then it makes a whole lot more sense. The way I see it is this, that there are three different types of power given to the president. One type is prerogative power. This is power that is vested in the president by virtue of his office and cannot be touched by Congress. Examples of this would be, say, the pardon power or the veto power. The president can exercise those powers however he wishes. They can be and often are in service of things many of us would disapprove of, but Congress can't do anything about it. Commander in chief power is like that, although it's seriously limited in certain ways. Appointments powers and treaty powers are like that, but with the Senate having effectively a veto power through its power to advise and consent. So that's one kind of power, his prerogative power. It's obvious that the framers were a little worried about prerogative power, so most of them are trimmed down from the extent of a king. Maybe we should talk about that in just a second. But the second kind of power is delegated power. This is where I think powers that are really of an executive nature are given to Congress. Take for example the power to spend money. It takes an act of Congress first. So for all of the delegated powers, the president cannot do anything ... At least this is the formal theory and as it should work. They can't do anything without Congress first authorizing them to do that. So that includes spending money. That includes borrowing money. That includes taxing. It includes going to war. It includes imposing criminal penalties, prosecuting people criminally for things, and a number of other things as well. So the president does not have any inherent constitutional authority over those things. But when Congress exercises its authority, then the president in effect gets delegated the power. The fact that the laws are passed and that the president then carries them into effect, gives the president a great deal of enforcement power. So that's the second category. And then the third category is what I call residual powers, and this comes through the Vesting Clause. Your listeners should be aware that a lot of people disagree with me on this point, so this is my view. But the residual powers through the Vesting Clause are ones that are of an executive nature, and the president can go out and do them without advance authority from Congress, but Congress has the power to come in after the fact and limit or abrogate those powers. So this is where the president has the power to be the first mover, but the power to be a unilateral, final decision maker.
Richard Reinsch (32:49):
On those residual powers, would that include the power to initiate hostilities?
Michael McConnell (32:54):
No. I think it's quite clear that Congress, only Congress can start wars, but it does give the president power to respond to attacks, to take defensive measures. In this modern world of ours where communications are instantaneous and things happen all over the world, it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference sometimes between defensive and offensive measures. That was essentially the line that they had in mind.
Richard Reinsch (33:27):
Crucial question now of powers delegated by Congress to the executive branch and delegated to the executive branch to actually make rules, implement rules, judge or adjudicate violations of those rules. With this originalist research you've done, did it shape or change any of your thinking about executive power in the administrative state now?
Michael McConnell (33:54):
Yes, in some ways. I think there are insufficient safeguards for congressional power. I think that the Constitution assumed that Congress would be vigilant about protecting its own authority. And that probably was true for most of our history, but it is no longer true. So I think that the president now can get away with things that he probably shouldn't. An example. For most of the convention, up until I think three days I think it was before the end in the middle of September, Congress was going to appoint the treasurer. It was going to be the only domestic officer of the United States that was named by Congress rather than being named by the president with senatorial advice and consent. Now, the treasurer would have authority to decide about spending. So the treasurer would look at the appropriations bill and see whether a proposed expenditure fits with it or not, and that person would be answerable to Congress. Today, that isn't true. We do have a Congressional Budget Office, but it doesn't have the authority. It can declare presidential spending illegal, but it doesn't have any real enforcement authority. I think maybe that was a good idea. If we really want Congress to be in control of appropriations, then Congress needs to have some more control over how appropriations are interpreted. Because what we've learned from the last three presidents is that they can play fast and loose, and when they can play fast and loose, they do play fast and loose. I also think that the administrative state needs to have some sort of way for Congress to check regulations pursuant to delegated power. The Supreme Court held in a case called the INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service versus Chadha that the legislative veto is unconstitutional. The legislative veto was the idea that when the executive branch issues regulations, that Congress can veto those regulations without the president being able to veto the veto. I think Chadha is a correct interpretation of our Constitution, but I think it's a weakness in our Constitution. If I were to propose one or two amendments, one of them would be to allow for a one-house legislative veto of regulations initiated by the executive branch. Because after all, these are powers that were delegated to Congress. There's something wrong if the executive branch can issue regulations which might be a rather wild misconstruction, intentionally wild misconstruction of a congressional intent, and then keep them in place. All that's required today to keep them in place is for one-third plus one of either the House or the Senate to side with the president, because that's all that it takes to sustain a veto, and the president gets away with it. I think that is not the way delegated power was expected to work out.
Richard Reinsch (37:13):
So when you think about the allocation of power between the Congress and the president, say a view that Philip Hamburger would take, lawmaking powers are delegated to Congress and that's it. As a textual matter, they can't then do another delegation to the executive branch. You wouldn't take that position.
Michael McConnell (37:30):
No, actually I think that's wrong. I mean, my good friend Philip, he's a great historian. I think his position is only true with respect to regulations that affect the life, liberty, and property of individuals within the country. A motion was made by James Madison very early in the convention, on about the fifth day of debate in the convention when they were trying to figure out what to do about Charles Pinckney's reaction to the original executive power plank. Madison proposes that Congress be given most of this power, but be permitted to delegate it back to the executive. His motion read, and I'm quoting from it from memory, "That power that is not legislative or judicial in its character." So you have to figure out, what did they mean by that? I think the absolute core of the legislative and judicial powers were the power to pass laws that affect people's life, liberty, and property, and to issue final adjudication. Now, a lot of today's executive power does exactly that, and I think that is unconstitutional. But a lot of it doesn't. There are many. The most important powers of the president involve administering governmental properties, spending money, exercising foreign affairs powers. Doing all kinds of things that do not actually affect individual people's personal liberty and property. Madison's motion would have explicitly allowed that. So what happened to the motion? It was voted down, but the leading speech against it simply said it's unnecessary. That will be implied. But that's implied, not in the terms that are already there. So if that was unnecessary rather than objectionable, unnecessary, then I think it's fair to say that reflected the delegates understanding of the way delegated power would work. We shouldn't think of all delegations of power as being in the same boat. Some are of an inherently legislative or judicial nature, and that should not be allowed. But a lot of the delegated power is simply re-delegating to the executive powers that were considered to be executive under the British constitution, and that there's nothing wrong with the president being given delegated power over that. Again, nothing wrong in the sense that Congress can do it if it wishes. But everything, it's Congress that gets to decide. As a policy matter, I should say, I think Congress should be more parsimonious and careful in its delegation. But in terms of constitutional authority, I think they can do that. I mean, an example of this is over immigration. Remember Trump's so-called Muslim ban. That statute allows the president of the United States to restrict any group of people from entering the United States that he thinks would be contrary to the public interest, which is why Trump was able to issue such a sweeping order. He doesn't have to answer to anybody for that. And in spite of that particular order being so controversial, it was eventually upheld by the US Supreme Court. Congress used a shovel to give the president power rather than a teaspoon.
Richard Reinsch (41:11):
Sounds like we need a master framework or set of legislation along the lines of Madison's order to help us think better about delegation.
Michael McConnell (41:21):
I think so, because a lot of the modern delegation is based on just really on ... To call it a lie is too extreme. The Supreme Court has said over and over that simply delegation of legislative power is unconstitutional, and yet they never actually strike it down. It's such a bizarre area of constitutional law because the Supreme Court says one thing, and then just does exactly the opposite. It would be so much better if we went to, say, Madison's proposal, or there presumably are alternatives as well that are more careful in setting forth what the metes and bounds of delegated power can be, and then stick to them rather than saying that delegations are sort of unconstitutional in principle and then never doing anything about them.
Richard Reinsch (42:19):
Michael, I think that's a perfect place to end. We've been talking with Michael McConnell, author of the new book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Michael McConnell (42:30):
Thank you, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (42:32):
This is Richard Reinsch. You have been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Leon Kass's new book shares a lifetime of reading and teaching the book of Exodus.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Steven Smith about his new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. Steven Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He's the author of numerous books on Leo Strauss, Spinoza, Hegel, and he previously appeared on Liberty Law Talk a few years ago to discuss his book, Modernity and Its Discontents, which has been released in paperback. So Steven Smith, it's great to have you on again.
Steven Smith (00:53):
Thank you, Richard. It's a pleasure to be back.
Richard Reinsch (00:57):
Steven, thinking about the book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, why do we need patriotism?
Steven Smith (01:06):
Well, that's a good question to start with, why do we need patriotism? Because obviously, not everybody thinks we do. The book began, or grew out of, an attempt to distinguish patriotism from people... Or to reclaim patriotism, I should say, as the title is, to reclaim it from people who don't like it and therefore who think we don't need it at all and from people who... What to say? Like it too much. And patriotism, I want to argue, is a disposition which I think is inseparable from politics so long as we are what Aristotle called political animals. So long as we live in polities and political end states. We need patriotism, it's inseparable from a sense of loyalty and identity to the place where we belong. But patriotism, we can go into this, is an easily misunderstood virtue. As I suggested a second ago, from one side, it is identified often with all that's wrong or even what is responsible for all that's wrong in our politics today. And from the other side, it seems to express everything and it's only what's good in our life, in our political life. So it's a difficult virtue. It is a difficult virtue and it's a contested virtue. We can talk about that if you like.
Richard Reinsch (02:36):
Well, thinking about the title of your book, an Age of Extremes, let's just bracket for a minute. I think you and I both agree patriotism is a good thing, it's a needed thing. It's, I think, a consolation in a difficult life in a difficult world. But what are the extremes right now that are currently operating that are leading us astray from properly understanding it?
Steven Smith (02:57):
Patriotism has always been contested. Go back to the ancient world. One example I use in my book is Sophocles' Antigone which puts forward a conflict between loyalty to his family and loyalty to country. Patriotism has always been contested by other loyalties we have and that will never go away. We are beings with conflicting loyalties, and so long as we remain beings with conflicting loyalties patriotism will be challenged by other loyalties we have. The two dominant challenges to patriotism today come from, I've already suggested it to left and right to pretty much map onto that distinction. I'll start with the left, what we might call the cosmopolitan left, the kind of view that you find particularly in educated circles, among business elites, among educated people, among a range of people who believe that we have become, or are becoming, citizens of the world. Our allegiances are to a kind of global humanity and we owe no particular allegiance to the individual states of which we are members. We see that in the enthusiasm, particularly among young people, and it's just the admirable in many ways, I'm not discounting, but they're admirable goals to work for international NGOs, to become part of Doctors Without Borders, to think of global concerns like the environment and other things. Again, absolutely real, but the tendency is to downplay or to minimize the role of their identity as citizens, as citizens of a country rather than global citizens of the world. The other extreme is nationalism and that of course has, in the last five or six years or more, even maybe more, become a very potent force throughout the world. In the US too, including the US. We've seen nationalism arising in China, in Turkey, in Russia, certainly in places like [inaudible 00:05:16], Brazil, and many other places. Nationalism is a very potent course of political identity, but different from patriotism, I want to argue. They are often linked, but one of the things I try to do in my book is to decouple them. They grow out of a common root. Nationalism and patriotism are not opposite as it's sometimes said. They are not opposite. They grow out of a common root. That root is to have your way of life and your culture and so on to be strong and respected, natural and within limits, understandable and admirable quality. But patriotism and nationalism are growing out of a common root but move in different directions. Nationalists see the country as the only source of their identity. And then this is very easy for it to become coupled with feelings of anger, resentment, and most dangerously the attempt to identify enemies beginning often with the foreign enemies, but then always becoming domestic enemies, domestic others who are seen to present some kind of existential challenge to the national identity. And it is this kind of friend enemy logic that I think invariably grows out of the nationalist mindset, the nationalist imagination, that is quite different from the patriotic disposition that I try to defend in my book. But those are the two, I think, challenges that kind of frame the debate as I see it.
Richard Reinsch (06:58):
Do you see, as I read your book, it seems to me also nationalism arising from perceived excesses of, let's say, humanitarianism, or sort of downplaying what I think would be legitimate interest of the nation. And I think about Brexit. When the Brexit campaign was happening, I saw good arguments on either side for that position. And I ultimately thought, "Well, if the people come out and vote at like 70% and they vote 52%, then I would respect that vote." But I also said that to be this belief that the European Union was just ever increasing and some of their statesmen actively downplay I think what I would call legitimate interest of the nation. And so you get nationalism arising from that, but that in turn feeds it's opposite. And I think as I read your book, what makes patriotism a virtue, as you say?
Steven Smith (08:04):
Well, let me say, I discuss, I'm certainly not an expert on the EU, but it comes out for some discussion in my book. And I do think the debate about Brexit and I listened to it and followed it. There were powerful arguments on both sides. But I do think the EU is seeing what is or was... The EU is now becoming terribly fractured. But it was seen by many, sort of in the heyday of its ascendancy, as sort of a model of this kind of notion of trans national or trans political citizenship or sovereignty or something. A seamless world of open borders, of common currency, of free trade. It had many dimensions, many of them quite valuable and useful but it created aspirations and dreams and ideals that cannot be satisfied. And this movement was always combined, as you pointed out, with a heavy handed bureaucratic apparatus that really ended up, in many ways, overriding people's national institutions, their loyalties. They were told they are members of Europe. What is that? And so there was always this tension between, in many ways, the aspiration and, again, the bureaucratic apparatus in which those aspirations were enfolded. So the EU is one example of how exactly this kind of tendency towards cosmopolitanism and to believe that we are now outgrowing the nation state as the basis of our political identity and show how this can go wrong. Let me just say before I sound like I'm simply in the camp of the EU skeptics or the anti EU, I am not. And why do I say that? Because the EU, for everything that is questionable about it, they've done one very important thing that I don't think we can entirely forget, and that is it has managed and still managed to maintain the peace in a continent that was the most violent continent of the last century, certainly the last century, and perhaps even the most violent continent in all of recorded history. The world wars, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings that European States imposed on one another were just terrible blemishes on humanity. And the EU has rose to respond to that and to some degree it's very admirably pacified many of these aggressive European tendencies. So that is nothing to sneeze at. And so I just want to mention that. It's something that I think deserves to be said about the EU, whatever its other failings.
Richard Reinsch (11:11):
Yeah, that's well said. Although it does seem to me now and the history of, you recounted it well and all of its wars, it does seem to me... I guess what comes to mind when I think about Europe in many ways, it's sort of a lethargic continent now. I was reading recently by 2007 the economy of the European Union was largely on par with America's, but what's happened in the last 14 years is it's barely grown and the American economy has grown and we've sort of moved beyond them in a lot of ways. And a lot of people thought the EU economy would overtake us. And then of course now our big concern is China and what it's doing. And I could produce a lot of examples, demographics. Where Europe just seems, although it was this tremendous dynamo, to me, it just seems sort of like a large vacation park at this point. But I wonder if this reluctance to understand these sorts of virtues of home that are at least I think a part of patriotism.
Steven Smith (12:11):
I agree. I don't want to sit here and opine about the future of Europe-
Richard Reinsch (12:16):
No ...
Steven Smith (12:16):
... I don't know, but two devastating world wars within a 50 year span can do a lot to take the life out of a people.
Richard Reinsch (12:26):
Yeah, that's true.
Steven Smith (12:27):
I don't know. I hear what you're saying and what you say is probably right in some respects.
Richard Reinsch (12:32):
You have an interesting epigraph here and I thought it might be a way to get into a question that I've got for you, which is you said patriotism is a virtue. And I think that's at the center of the controversy. You have the epigraph, "I am an American, Chicago born. From Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March." Can you elaborate more on that for us?
Steven Smith (12:53):
Yeah, that's great. Thank you for mentioning that. I'm glad you caught that because that epigraph means a lot to me. Why? First, I've been a more or less lifelong admirer, lover, of Saul Bellow's literature. That famous opening sentence, "I'm an American, Chicago born," first sentence, opening sentence, of The Adventures of Augie March captured something to me, not just of the spirit of that novel, but of me. I also am an American, Chicago born, and I lived away from Chicago for many, many years. More than half my life has been spent in New Haven where I live now. But this identification with a place I think is very important. It shaped me to a considerable... For good or bad. I don't necessarily simply have a kind of rosy nostalgic image of the place where I grew up. I don't at all, really. But we are shaped by our past, by our histories, our family histories, our national history and I thought that statement, that sentence, captured something pretty important about that. It did to me, at least.
Richard Reinsch (14:12):
It reminded me of the opening of Ulysses Grant's memoirs. He says, "My people are American." That's always resonated with me. When I read that sentence I always thought, "That's something new, I would think, in American life at that time," that you think of this as an American civilization and your people being shaped by it.
Steven Smith (14:30):
Yes, and Augie March is a very American story. Of course, the difference between him and Grant is Grant traces his ancestors back to the Puritans, back to the real founders. Bellow's Augie March is like Bellow himself, is the child of immigrants. I am the grandchild of immigrants. So there's a kind of vibrancy about this too. And the title of the book, The Adventures, it shows that this is a kind of a picaresque novel, an adventure. It's an adventure story in some ways. And I think that's very much the American story. And I hope I tried to capture in my understanding of patriotism that it's an adventure. It has an aspirational quality to it. And that to me is very much one of the things that distinguishes patriotism from nationalism also is this sense of aspiration and adventure. It's not just a land and soil ideology. It's not just America first, it's not simply, "My country right or wrong." There is an ideal and an adventure and a creed to it that makes, I think, American patriotism unique.
Richard Reinsch (15:46):
Let's talk more about that. In your book, you talk about the elements of American patriotism. Talk about that because as we think about patriotism, you said it's a disposition, a virtue. So there has to be a common thread there. It can just be purely an adventure.
Steven Smith (16:03):
Sure. No, no, absolutely. There is a core, a broadly defined core, that for generations was called, very loosely, the American Creed. What is the American Creed? It was not anything formulated necessarily in a document or legal text of any kind, but it was a set of beliefs and ideas growing out of our founding documents that shape what it is to be an American. For example, let me just mention three, our commitment to equality, going back most famously to the equality clause in the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal." We are all endowed with a certain basic dignity that is worthy of respect. That egalitarian impulse is a very important aspect of American patriotism. What does equality mean? In part, it means there are no more aristocrats, no more monarchs and aristocrats. It is an open field. It's an open field for all of us to rise or fall. It's a field of rights that we have liberties and rights that are essential to that. And once again, these are aspirational that, as Lincoln points out, probably most famously in his speech on the Dred Scott case, that our aspirations to equality and dignity have not been fully achieved. They are constantly being labored for, being worked upon, being, in a sense, a work in progress. But this idea that we are creedal nation, a creedal people, and be a core of the idea of some of our best students of American politics. Let me just mention three of those students, Samuel Huntington, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Martin Diamond. All of them saw this sense of creedal peoplehood as central to America and that's in part what my book is an attempt to reestablish.
Richard Reinsch (18:14):
Yeah, and as I read that, you think about what country has something like the House Committee on Un-American Activities? Obviously, there's a creedal idea of America that could also be used in various ways. Thinking about that creedal concept, is that enough, I guess was my question for you? And I guess I say is that enough, because as I think about the human person, I think about our relationships with others, our communities, communities of moral worth and meaning that we find. It's a long conversation, but I think that's a huge problem now in America is I think a lot of people look around them and don't see communities they want to join, or they feel abandoned in various ways. And then what about memories and battles, ways in which people attach themselves to the country? How does the creedal concept incorporate those things?
Steven Smith (19:09):
A great point, Richard, and it's one that I work on in the book. I've been emphasizing and reemphasizing here this aspirational or creedal dimension of American patriotism. But in many ways that's only one side of the coin. And I argue in different ways in the book that patriotism is, like all virtues in many ways, patriotism is a matter of both the head and the heart. It is both an intellectual virtue, based upon understanding of our founding documents and the principles for which we stand. But it's also a matter of the heart and it's also connected to loyalty. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about what is loyalty and how is loyalty a virtue associating it, as you were calling out these ideas of membership and being a part of something, patriotism isn't just or can't be exhausted by our aspirations, although it's that. But it's also an appreciation very much rooted in ideas about appreciation, of gratitude. It's a term that I used at times throughout the book, is a sense of gratitude. Being a patriot is, in many ways, I say like being a member of a family. And here I think that helps us also distinguish patriotism from nationalism. We have been shaped by our families. For better or worse, we've been shaped by our families, but we love our families. We usually do, some of us it's another story. We usually love our families. It would be absurd to say, "My family is better than your family. My family first." No, in many ways, we love our families because of their imperfections. That's what makes our families, in some ways, but they have shaped us. And I think patriotism is a virtue, it's a loyalty virtue, like family membership that is rooted in loyalty and gratitude for shaping who we are. Yet at the other side of it, I call it the head and the heart. I think I used two fancy Greek terms in the book. I speak of logos and ethos, reason, logos, and ethos is character. And I do speak of patriotism, is a character shaping virtue. It is the virtue of character, it shapes who we are. I cite a famous Greek philosopher, Hereclitis, who says, "Our ethos, our character, is our destiny." That may be a bit too strong, but I do think he captures the quality of what I call ethos patriotism which I think is the way I sort of interpret what you were trying to bring out. I think it is a very strong component in what I think of as the patriotic disposition.
Richard Reinsch (22:09):
Let me ask you, you said loyalty. And I agree with you, we struggle with that, contemporaries, we struggle with that idea of being loyal to something. And you discuss in the book, I'll say, two of our leading cosmopolitans, Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb, who both in various ways, and you could talk about it more, seem to argue patriotism is an affront to enlightenment principles of liberty. Why? Well, it's because of this loyalty thing. It's because of the dispositional thing, "I don't get to choose. I don't get to be a willing agent of my self development. I'm sort of with everyone else by virtue of where I've been born and all of that history and what all those people think and I don't get to be me." And what's really me is to be transactional with a lot of other people across borders around the world, around civilizations, and to have sort of this menu of things I can choose from. That's very attractive. And from what I'm reading, it's very attractive to people in their twenties and thirties. They want to live their lives like this. But, of course, Roger Scruton always would talk about this and this will be strong. The claim would be patriotism is subject to xenophobia, but there's also an oikophobia here too I think we could discuss, or fear of home, hatred of home. And I thought maybe you might address those concerns. I don't think you're saying ethos and character is destiny. I think you're also saying, particularly with regard to American patriotism, it's contested and we argue about it. And even the elements you list of American patriotism, it's an ongoing argument. We can lose balance. Say egalitarianism runs amuck. You say that's an important American value, I agree, and it starts to win out and we lose a lot of other things. So I just wanted to throw all that in.
Steven Smith (23:59):
You probably said it, at least as well, better than I would. I'm glad you mentioned the article. I got an email the other night from George Kateb congratulating me for the book and also expressing disappointment that I don't see things his way. I said, "George, what the hell. The argument is better than the agreement." So anyway, George is a great man. I unhesitatingly say that, I do, even though we passionately disagree on the nature of the subject. And he's right, there is much in the American experience that he draws on, going back to Emerson, going back to sort of the American transcendentalism, that was the first movement to really to give voice to this kind of free wheeling individualism that we have. In many ways, once again, it's an admirable quality of Americans, our individualism, our sort of sense that nobody can tell me what to do, or that we want to figure things out for ourselves, we shouldn't be constrained simply to live in the way that our parents lived if we don't want to. This is, in many ways, a crucial part of America and one that I think is invaluable. I very much appreciate that claim yet, I would say, and I think we were getting into this a little while ago, that is only part of the story. In many ways, this kind of expressive individualism that Thoreau and others have, they presented it as a heroic disposition, the ability to break free custom and tradition, to live as you like, these are cliches today. But there was originally something heroic in the model of how to live in a certain way. It's not to say that most of us aren't heroes in that way, but it is say that many of us in fact find meaning in the way we've been brought up, in the traditions we've inherited, in the customs and habits that have formed and shaped us. Most people don't feel a need to challenge and to resist the courses of history, tradition, and family and customs. So we have to find a way to hold those two together. If you want to bring this up to the moment, in some ways, I think what we're witnessing today in much of our culture, in politics, is the outgrowth of a kind of angry libertarianism that says basically, "Nobody has the right to tell me what to do." That is not a good formula for society. It may work in some occasions and in some contexts for individuals, but as members of a society it's not a useful, to put it mildly, it's not a useful formula. And I think a lot of this, I would say, angry libertarianism we see expressed in the response to COVID, that's it's a conspiracy, "Nobody can tell me that I should put on a mask," or something. We live in a society and that requires that we make certain sacrifices. It seems to be pretty minimal to me, but for many people it's an affront to their liberty. And I think that's one of the dangerous sides of the kind of what they call abstract individualism that is very much a part of the American character.
Richard Reinsch (27:53):
Thinking here, angry libertarianism. There's also this notion too of to make patriotism work it requires enough of us who disagree with one another. To put things like law and the nation and, I'll say, the Constitution or being constitutional people that that is above everything else. That's above who's going to win an election because what we know is probably the next election, the other side is going to lose or the following election and so we're able to live with those results. We're able to live with say some laws being passed that we don't like because we know there's probably going to be a reversal. And that's how I have looked at a lot of things, and this is a very dour look, even that sort of formal consensus breaks down. And I think that's really at the essence of patriotism or, I'll say, a humane loyalty to your country that there are things we just don't question because we acknowledge that it's so good. It's not that we're ignorant or silly or are not educated well. We just know these are good things and so that must be unquestionable. And that itself is now in dispute. So I see a lot of like the COVID stuff happening like this basic distrust, not that the government at times doesn't earn it, but this sort of a basic distrust out there you see and I think that fuels a lot of this stuff.
Steven Smith (29:21):
I couldn't agree more with the way you just framed the issue. I think it is a matter of patriotism requires trust. It requires stability. There are a series of kind of qualities that it embraces. It also requires a sense of our own fallibility, an awareness that we may be wrong or at least what we believe is maybe only partially true. These are qualities that are essential to a decent society and have been eroded with the talk about the sources for the erosion of social trust, and this kind of ethos, as I call it, the glue in a certain way for what binds people together and what makes patriotism possible. And a lot of sociologists, political scientists, have talked about this in kind of more empirical ways in recent years. I think probably most famously, remember Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, the decline of associations in America kind of resulting in atomization. That was written back in the nineties or maybe the early 2000s where we hadn't really seen the full consequences of the breakdown of what happens with that atomization. And I think what happens with it is not just people no longer join with others, it leads to a breakdown of trust among people, among neighbors, among citizens. And that breakdown of trust leads us to see others as enemies, in some ways. They are not just others to us, they are enemies. And this is, more and more, I fear the world we are living in. And the question in the book, if I knew how to restore this I guess I would win the Nobel Prize or something, but it is trying to find both institutions, but also not just institutions, habits of hearts and minds that will restore the conditions for a decent patriotism.
Richard Reinsch (31:19):
I agree wholeheartedly there. I just think too, in the past year, we've had these sorts of jarring experiences, obviously, with COVID being one. And it seems to be our political class, every conflict we get and they manage to find the most intense way to come at it and so things can't be negotiated or compromised and that sort of drives things. So I look around my neighborhood, which no one has any reason really to be that upset about much. I see neighborhood signs with, "I believe in Peter Fauci." I see signs about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These are suburbanites in Indianapolis, you're this plugged into politics? This just sort of being someone who is interested in politics, is most people for most of my life have not really cared and think that I'm kind of weird for caring so much. And now this is upfront in everyone's mind, not in a good way. I do think in terms of patriotism, something that every most nations struggle with, particularly in the West is just as the harder question of borders and immigration. And that's obviously very contested and has been for much of American history. How does the American patriot think about immigration?
Steven Smith (32:33):
Yeah, that's something I talk about in the book and, like most people, I don't have an answer to it. There's not a simple answer to it. Just state the obvious. We are a nation of immigrants, not to say the history of immigration has been a happy one. We have not always welcomed the immigrant. "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," this was not always the way immigrants were treated, going back to the early part of the Republic. But we are a nation of immigrants. And the question is, how does a society like ours both balance diversity, ethnic, racial diversity, immigrants, new immigrants, new people to the table with a sense that we are still one people in a way, "E Pluribus Unum," out of many, one? That balance between to kind of put it in high falutin philosopher's terms, how to combine the one and the many, how to do that? If we say our borders are endlessly open, everybody's welcome in all at once, we lose our ethos. We lose any sense of who we are as a people. But if we begin to say, "We're filled up, no more," or very few, then we are in danger of losing our humanity. And I would only say, there's not an algorithm for determining it, it's just a willingness to people, our leadership class, to compromise on these issues. Immigrants can be a source of new blood-
Richard Reinsch (34:24):
Yeah, new businesses.
Steven Smith (34:26):
New ways. And at the same time we live in a world with borders, I very much believe that. I totally believe in the Treaty of Westphalia solution. We live in a world of states and states are defined by borders and they have the right to determine who's in and who's out. Of course, you can determine that broadly or narrowly. But I very much believe that, that is the basis of our stability. And again, I would say, you ask maybe the hardest question facing American public policy or legislation today on this question of immigration. It's so powerful and it's so potent on all sides. It requires statesmanship. It requires state craft, statesmanship, compromise, and willingness to stop demonizing each other.
Richard Reinsch (35:20):
No, I think that's well said. Another hard question, maybe less controversial... Well, equally controversial, but not in the public eye as much. And this is something that I think Nussbaum and your friend George Kateb would point to are conflicts between our loyalties and how do those get settled? And does patriotism not offer a fulfilling settlement? Speaking of our country, our family, for many of us, our religious faith, and our conscience. And those do come into conflict. And so how does the patriot think about these conflicts?
Steven Smith (35:56):
Wonderful question. I have a section of the book going back to our earlier theme of our discussion when I talked about conflict of loyalties. When in fact patriotism comes in conflict, love of country, with other duties or loyalties that we inhabit, my favorite example, I used a few, but I'll just mention my favorite, is the one that Lincoln encountered. I should say for those who haven't read the book, Lincoln figures prominently in it. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln was visited in the White House by a lady named Mrs. Eliza Gurney, a Quaker. She came as the head of kind of a Quaker delegation. And Lincoln very much appreciated the visit. Not because she was coming to hector him about something, but they wanted to pray with him. And the Quakers were in a difficult dilemma because they were antislavery. They favored emancipation and anti-slavery and yet at the same time, we know they are anti war. And Lincoln appreciated that dilemma. How, if they fall on one side of the equation, they cannot support the war effort. If they fall on the other side of the equation, they seem to be in violation of their religious beliefs. It's a painful moral conflict. And Lincoln sent her a beautiful letter stating to the effect, stating that dilemma very beautifully and saying something to the effect that, "I have and will do all I can as commander in chief to honor both sides of that." But he admitted, more or less, that even Lincoln couldn't figure out which of the sides was right and what to do. That was going to be left obviously to each person, each member of the Quaker faith, to have to work out for themselves. So that was a very powerful example, a real world example, of that kind of very, very serious conflict of duties between patriotism and, in this case, religious fidelity. There are others too. I consider some examples from literature, some from film. There's a wonderful scene in The Godfather, one of my favorite films, that it deals with exactly this question. In that particular instance, it's a conflict between family loyalty and loyalty to country. Things are real. And that's why I say patriotism is a contested virtue. I also deal with the question of patriotism and protest. There are issues, not only when we have a conflict of obligations as it were, the kind that I was just talking about, but then there's questions is it ever patriotic to protest? We hear this almost as a cliche. It is a cliche, "Protest is patriotic." Well, my answer is yes and no. Like so many things in politics, it depends on the context. So I try to sort that out a little bit as well. But my point being in general, patriotism does not automatically just trump every other loyalty and obligation that we have. It is, as I say, contested. And it's probably a good thing too. It remains and always will remain a contested virtue.
Richard Reinsch (39:33):
But at the same time, one we can't do without. Steven Smith, thank you so much for your time. We've been talking with the author of Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk available@lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal Law and Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today we're talking with Helen Andrews about her new book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Helen Andrews is senior editor of The American Conservative, before that managing editor of The Washington Examiner, she was a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Times and First Things, among others. She's also written for Law and Liberty in the past. So we're glad to have her on the program to talk about Boomers, Boomer nation.
Helen Andrews (00:53):
That's us! We are the boomer nation.
Richard Reinsch (00:55):
So Helen, what got you interested in writing about the Boomers? I mean, there's been obviously a lot said about them. What did you want to add?
Helen Andrews (01:03):
Well, I'm a millennial to start by laying all of my cards on the table. And the millennials and the boomers are natural enemies, in many cases because the boomers are our parents. And as I looked around the world, when I graduated from college in 2008, into the teeth of a massive financial crisis, I started thinking that the world that my generation had inherited was not the one that we were supposed to, that something had gone wrong, somewhere. And so I wanted to trace back, where mistakes had been made, in the economy, in politics, in religion, in the family. And every time I tugged on a thread, I found that it led me back to the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and started running the world in the 1990s. And that was the baby boomers.
Richard Reinsch (02:00):
Something that I've always thought about with the baby boomers. And I think about it in terms of my own family, one of my grandfathers grew up on a farm during the Great Depression, in northern Indiana. He talked a bit about that with me difficult times, then very early in his life goes off to fight in a world war in the Navy, and then comes back. And GI Bill goes to college, becomes an engineer, and raises a family. And when I juxtapose his early life with the life he was able to create for his children. And this is I think, throughout the baby boomer generation. And so he would be a part of what's called the silent generation. So we have a boomer generation that grows up, obviously, underneath the specter of nuclear war. But they grow up compared to previous American generations and conditions of unparalleled prosperity, and peace, and good education systems, largely very much intact families. And what do you think goes wrong there?
Helen Andrews (03:13):
The long and short of it is that the boomers, as you say, came of age, at a time of unparalleled prosperity. I don't think America has ever been wealthier in the fullest sense than it was in the 1950s and 60s. And it was also a time of great social cohesion. All the things that make American society great, we're still functioning at full capacity then, our churches were exceptionally strong in the 1960s, our civil society, and informal volunteerism, all of that good stuff, was hitting record highs in the 1950s. And all of this together gave the baby boomers a sense that that was just the natural order of things, that the natural state of the world is for everybody to be rich, and for society to work well. And for there to be high levels of trust among the people who live together. And they behaved on that assumption over the next six decades. And the result was that they thought they could act out and destroy institutions and that society would continue to function in the wonderful, healthy way that it had when they were young kids.
Helen Andrews (04:31):
And of course, that's no longer the case. Prosperity, as we have discovered is not the natural order of things, and that if you destroy institutions like the churches, then the result will be what you see today in the Protestant mainline, which has churches their moribund, is not on their literal deathbed. So that was what happened to the boomers. They came of age at the time when everything was great. And they assumed it would always be that way, no matter how badly they acted.
Richard Reinsch (05:00):
Question, in your research for this book did you ever take up the question, something that I've been interested in. What's the interaction between, say, the silent generation and these children that they're raising? And it seems to me at some level, there was just a failure to inculcate time-honored habits and the American past, at some level, did you think about that?
Helen Andrews (05:26):
I did. But the thing that first made me start questioning that narrative, that it's actually the silent generation fault. And the greatest generation fault is reading about the phenomenon of the 1960s in other countries because, of course, the baby boom 1960 that was a global phenomenon. And the people in Germany and France, who asked themselves, why is it that all of our students are rioting in the streets and throwing cobblestones at cops in 1968? The answer they came up with was, well, they hate their parents because their parents bequeath them a world of war. Their parents were the generation of fascism and collaboration. And that's why these young Frenchmen don't trust anybody over 30. I thought, well, that's almost the opposite of the situation you had in the United States. Here, the narrative is that the generation that were the boomers' parents were the good guys, and they made things too nice for their kids. And that's why they hated them. And you can't have two opposite explanations for an identical phenomenon. So eventually, I ended up concluding that the generational boomer phenomenon, the 1960s, that rebellion, was a product just of simple demographics, when you have a very large generation, as the boomers were, when they become of age, they start to throw their weight around because there are just so many of them and that makes their desires just so important to the rest of society. So that was what was going on not in the actual... The substance of generational debate did not have a lot to do with it.
Richard Reinsch (07:00):
You profile six boomers in your book and you in many ways mirror very successful book Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, which was a very successful book at the time for dispelling a vaunted legacy of the Victorians in the English mind. I take it you wouldn't mind taking that place here in America with regard to the boomers, you profile Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, and Al Sharpton. I'm wondering, why not Bill Clinton? Isn't he the quintessential boomer?
Helen Andrews (07:35):
He was absolutely on my shortlist. And the reason why I ended up passing his name off, even though he is as you say, the quintessential boomer, I agree with you 100% is that I wasn't sure there was a lot left to say about Bill Clinton that hasn't already been said. And also, I got a chance to say most of what I wanted to say about Bill Clinton in the chapter on Aaron Sorkin. Because if people out there don't know, if you watch an episode of The West Wing, there's a 75% chance that at least one of the plotlines in that episode is ripped from the headlines, as they say in Law and Order from something that actually happens in the Bill Clinton White House. If you know anything about the Clinton years, you will see familiar news stories and anecdotes pop up in The West Wing all the time. So that was where I got my chance to say what I have to say about Bill Clinton.
Richard Reinsch (08:32):
Yeah, and then in that regard to Hillary Clinton. Yeah, I know there is so much that has been said about them. It's the handprint. If I think what the boomer generation is so large, and their print on all aspects of American society continues today. And it to me he just he exemplifies that and what he was able to achieve and also dissolve.
Helen Andrews (08:56):
And also Clinton was a man who squandered what were great gifts, not just the power that he was granted that he then abused, but the gifts that God gave them. He had many virtues, and he did not turn them to as good use as he should have. And that's the boomer story in a nutshell.
Richard Reinsch (09:14):
Okay. You profile first, Steve Jobs, he seems to be the one you're the most sympathetic to.
Helen Andrews (09:22):
People have told me that I get gradually less sympathetic as the book goes on. That may be true.
Richard Reinsch (09:28):
Yes, with Jobs, you profile him. Why?
Helen Andrews (09:33):
Because you really can't tell the story of the last six years in the United States without talking about technology. And nobody shaped our view of technology more than Steve Jobs. He's also somebody who exemplifies California more than just about anybody. If you bought Apple products in this century, you'll probably remember turning over on the back of your iPod or whatever and seeing made in China, but designed in not in America, designed in California. So Apple was very much a California company. And if you think about the boomers' effect on the world, pretty adequate way to summarize, it would be making us all look a little bit more like California. And that's what Steve Jobs represents to me.
Richard Reinsch (10:20):
Jobs in the Apple company and creating the smartphone, which has, I mean, in my mind, transformed so many things and in conjunction with social media, in terms of how we interact with information and interact with one another. Jobs also you say you write about, there's certain countercultural strains in Jobs, but also certain other strains as well, in terms of I didn't know that he wasn't going to allow pornography apps to be sold on Apple products, et cetera. And he said, "We're going to do what's right for our customers." So there was this interesting, sane part of Jobs that you had profiled.
Helen Andrews (10:58):
Absolutely. He was a quintessential boomer in some ways, but the anti-boomer in other ways, the stand against pornography in the Apple Store is one example. He hated politics. I mean, he would go to a meeting at the Obama White House if they invited him just because there's always a hobnob with powerful people. But the strain that you see in Silicon Valley now where everybody's very woke and political, he just had no time for that. And he insulted Bill Gates and his dabbling in philanthropy. For Steve Jobs, he was a true-believing capitalist. That was what he thought was his contribution to the world, which is, in many ways very unboomerish, as well.
Richard Reinsch (11:42):
There's the side of Silicon Valley that it was this myth of the hippie in the garage, inventing new tech products that we would use, but it was about creativity, with some amount of bourgeois productivity and business acumen, but this was really the flowering of a new ethos and way of being in business. And do you think Jobs fulfilled that? Or is he a crossways, with that?
Helen Andrews (12:07):
One of the most fascinating subjects to me of California and business in Silicon Valley, is how the hippie side and the aggressive capitalist side are two sides of the same coin, that they are more alike than people tend to anticipate. I think my favorite thing that's ever been written about Silicon Valley is Tom Wolfe's essay that's collected in his collection, Hooking Up about noise in the early founding fathers of Silicon Valley. And because he's Tom Wolfe, one of the things he notices is the way everybody's dressed. And he notices that California has a much more casual style and you can spot somebody from East Coast Wall Street when they come out to visit a Silicon Valley company in a second because they're the only ones wearing a suit and tie. But when I talked to boomers, just to have my personal acquaintance about things that they thought had changed in the last 50 years, one of the things that a lot of them mentioned was workplace attire, that is a lot more casual now than it used to be. And that's a great example of the Californication of the rest of America. It used to be, you only saw that kind of thing on the west coast. Now you see it everywhere showing up in jeans and sneakers to an office job. But one of the boomers that I talked to about this phenomenon made a chilling observation, he said that this casual workwear coincided exactly with longer hours, that it used to be even in my hardcore New York law office, that everybody kept basically nine-to-five or nine-to-six hours, everybody understood even your boss, that everybody ought to be home for dinner. And it was only as the go-go '80s started going and especially into the '90s that they started thinking it's okay to ask your employees to start staying till 10 o'clock at night on a regular basis. And so supervisors said, "Well if I'm going to do that, I can't ask them to be in an uncomfortable suit all that time." So in that way, the rise of casual wear in the office went hand in hand, with employers demanding more and workers losing leverage in the workplace. It's not about self-expression and dressing how you want no, it's about them squeezing every drop of labor they can out of you. So I think that's the kind of California workplace the Steve Jobs represented.
Richard Reinsch (14:26):
As you say that I think I'm recalling something I read about Marissa Mayer, who's the CEO of Yahoo, that started on the ground floor of Google, that she didn't go home for 30 days or something like that, something ridiculous like that early days of Google. I guess one thing that comes to mind here is so the wokeplace phenomenon in some ways in which is such a part of Silicon Valley and it's become at least what you and I do. It's something we interact with every day, an unpleasant reality. And that's postboomers though, isn't it? Isn't that something that, did they prepare the way for that? Is that a part of this merging of workplace and values and virtues? Or does that come after them? And it sparks the question. Are we afraid of an America after the boomers? Do we fear what that might look like? One place is, the presidential race, we were actually afraid of the next generation of Democratic politicians. So we chose Joe Biden.
Helen Andrews (15:27):
I think that's absolutely right. But we can't let the boomers off the hook because the reason those Millennials are so terrifying, is because of the things that the boomers taught them. And the reason why the boomers are failing to be a bulwark against crazy woke fanaticism is that they feel like these kids are just believing the same values that they do. You see it in Silicon Valley all the time, the people who run Google in the top management positions, the boomer generation people have the same values as sensibly as the millennials who are terrorizing them. It's just that they thought we could pursue those values and still be nice to each other. They weren't fanatical about it. So the millennials know that they have the leverage in these battles. Because the boomers claim to believe in the very same thing. So yeah, the boomers are the last barrier between the coming insanity that is the world takeover of absolutely everything. But they were the ones who created the monster in the first place.
Richard Reinsch (16:37):
I want to skip, this being Law and Liberty. The last person you profile is Justice Sonia Sotomayor, talk about her for a minute. There was a lot of interesting facts about her in your reporting that I wasn't aware of. But one of the things it calls to mind and is and there's another person you profile before her, the Reverend Al Sharpton, that there's this awareness, particularly for later stage baby boomers of how civil rights has turned into maybe not so much transformational, you talk about that, but a way in which one can really further one's own projects.
Helen Andrews (17:17):
I think that's an accurate description of Sonia Sotomayor and she learned it back in college. She writes in her own memoir about how... she went to Princeton on a full-ride scholarship. And rather than express gratitude for being able to attend an Ivy League University for no money, she decided to attack the university for cultural genocide for not having enough Puerto Rican professors.
Richard Reinsch (17:43):
She used that term cultural genocide?
Helen Andrews (17:46):
I don't think she used the term cultural genocide, but she did say the obliteration, eradication of an entire culture it was something suitably hyperbolic.
Richard Reinsch (17:56):
Yes.
Helen Andrews (17:57):
But we shouldn't hold it against her. She was an undergraduate at the time, and undergraduates are just naturally hysterical. The real fault lies with the Princeton administration, which responded to the blackmail letter that she sent them about not having enough Puerto Rican-born staff, by falling all over themselves, and saying, "Oh, of course, we'll appoint a diversity manager right away." And that was an early lesson for her, that if you just invoke the right narrative of victimhood, everyone will fall over themselves to comply with what you're requesting. And that's the way that the law is, that's not just a product of culture, that's a product of civil rights laws, and has come to be interpreted. And now that she's the one doing the interpreting, she's very happy to expand its reach so further.
Richard Reinsch (18:43):
Yeah, and that institutionally, obviously, that goes on today, throughout all universities, Princeton's response to the latest round of protests we've been experiencing in this country is to accuse itself of systemic racism and to promise ways in which it's going to counteract that including building more majors devoted to the studies of other cultures that aren't affiliated with European civilization. Sotomayor, though, you talk about her pushing forward. There's a conversation one time she has about affirmative action with a law partner of a major firm. And I thought it was a law partner quizzing her about does she think it's fair for minorities to be in certain positions when they've likely obtain those positions through race and affirmative action? And she's incensed about this. And I can understand how that would be an aggressive question to ask someone from a minority background.
Helen Andrews (19:46):
You're right that that was an aggressive question on the part of the law partner. The setting this clarifies the anecdote for listeners is that she was a three L at Yale Law School about to graduate and go look for a job and it was at a job fair when all of the big firms in New York and across the country come to Yale Law to interview prospective hires. And it was at a dinner of about a dozen people where the partner was there and went around the table quizzing people. And he really got into it with her saying, "Do you think you're only here because you're Puerto Rican? Do you think it's fair for our firm to hire people on affirmative action grounds when we know they're going to wash out in a couple of years?" And she complained to Yale Law and said, "If you don't do something about this, I will file a complaint, saying that that firm should not be allowed to send partners here to interview law students for jobs ever again." And the firm submitted a letter of apology and was actually forced to submit two letters of apology because the first one was not apologetic enough. But the reason why I liked that anecdote is that there is an exact parallel one about Antonin Scalia. When Scalia got out of Harvard Law, he went to interview at a Midwestern big law firm, I think Jones Day and the partners there said, "Oh, you're a Catholic? Well, then you must believe in blue laws saying that we got to close our shop on Sundays. Don't you think that's imposing religion? Aren't you just a retrograde, Pope follower, or whatever?" And he really aggressively attacked his Catholicism. He was, of course at the time, the only Catholic at the table. But the reason law partners do that is to see how you respond under pressure. Because judges will sometimes get into it with you, and sometimes the judges will be wrong or irrational. So seeing how you respond to aggressive, angry, irrational questioning is something that prospective hirers might want to know if you're applying for a job as a lawyer. And Scalia himself, even though a lot of the questions they asked him were unfair and racist, just gave as good as he got. He really got into it because he enjoys the feeling of debate. That's what he lives for. And the fact that Sotomayor responded in such an opposite way. There's a lot about their respective characters.
Richard Reinsch (21:57):
Just, as I was thinking about Sotomayor, one thing that came to mind, you probably came across this, PJ O'Rourke has this analysis of the baby boomer generation that is so large, and it takes into account so many different aspects of America, given that how rapidly America changed as they came into their own, that there's this first tranche of baby boomers who are the most left-wing, and were the most committed to social change, were the ones leading protest later as an early adulthood, then you have this middle group, who moderates more, and they're following. But they're also the first ones to really go home and call it a day. And then you have this later group, which he puts Barack Obama in, who pretty much figure out which way the wind is blowing and adjust accordingly. So maybe they're left-wing, maybe they're moderate, maybe they're something else, they're corporate, or whatever. They're willing to cut deals. And he says, "This is precisely how the boomers understood Barack Obama and the famous Reverend Wright episode where Obama was in his church, presumably, while this man was preaching and saying a lot of hateful things. And Obama's response was, "Yeah, I didn't take any of it seriously. And I was just there because I was in Chicago politics. And that's what people did." And the boomers instantly accepted that because many of them actually knew that to be the way they've handled things in their own lives. I'm curious what you think of that. But is Sotomayor seemed like, as I read your account of her one of the ways in which she found a way to succeed was precisely to rely on the things that she was being given to rely on to succeed?
Helen Andrews (23:39):
Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the PJ O'Rourke book because, in some ways, the book that I wrote was a response to his. He even wrote a whole book about the baby boomers, which is very acute and very funny.
Richard Reinsch (23:50):
Yeah.
Helen Andrews (23:51):
But it ultimately a little bit too fond. And so when I read it, I thought he hadn't really stuck tat knife in quite the way that I wanted to see the boomers be treated. So I wrote my entire book because I thought PJ O'Rourke was too nice.
Richard Reinsch (24:05):
Okay.
Helen Andrews (24:06):
But the framing that he uses is really useful. It's what you say that there are divisions within the boomer generation. I think he compares them to seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen at a high school. They're all in the same cohort, but they're different generations. And yeah, that might be a good way to think about Sotomayor. And one occasion, when Sotomayor the younger boomer came into conflict with somebody from just slightly, the generation ahead of her somebody born in their early 1940s was when she was confirmed and Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor, decided to attack her and almost along the lines that you're saying, he said, "For me, left-wing law is a matter of intellect. I have the arguments. I've thought about this deeply. I know what I'm doing with bringing my liberalism to the law." Sotomayor, Laurence Tribe famously said in a memo that he wrote to the Obama administration is, and this is a direct quote, quite simply not as smart as she thinks she is which is rather a rude thing for a Harvard professor to say about somebody who was about to be a Supreme Court justice. But it was really the argument that you're presenting that for the younger boomers, it was just something they absorbed, they were not on the front lines of these protests, they did not arrive at their liberal opinions through deep thought or outrage response to social conditions. They just saw that it was the dominant belief system and adopted it because that's what you do to get ahead. And Tribe was worried that in close cases, when the outcome depended on the liberal justices managing to win arguments with Anthony Kennedy, Sotomayor would not be impressive enough in those intellectual arguments to get Kennedy's vote because her liberalism was not sufficiently intellectual. Now, I think the moral events or the outcomes of that story, proves something important about the baby boomers, which is that Laurence Tribe was wrong, the non-intellectual, more emotional, more therapeutic style of argumentation that Sotomayor prefers, has actually been really successful. She is everything he said she was. And yet she has won. And she has prevailed in arguments and won in cases. So I think maybe the intellectuals were not as powerful or as influential as they might wish they were. And it's the people for whom liberalism is just an adopted belief system because it's in the air supply are the ones who have the power.
Richard Reinsch (26:47):
You note the dissenting opinion, she writes in the Michigan case where voters in a popular referendum had eliminated racial preferences in that state, and a suit was filed that this in and of itself was racial discrimination. And Sotomayor wrote a blistering opinion of basically equating the voters in that state with Jim Crow voters. And there were some other things she said in that opinion as well that were just howlers and she was criticized directly by Chief Justice John Roberts. And also she was criticized by, it was Scalia, I think, but you said that actually referring to this, this may have changed Kennedy's mind. You argue.
Helen Andrews (27:28):
Yeah. And Joan Biskupic, is a Supreme Court reporter has written biographies of I think, at least three sitting justices, maybe four. But she is a Supreme Court journalist. And she believes based on evidence, that Sotomayor blackmailing dissent was what changed Kennedy's opinion. And if you look at Kennedy's jurisprudence, from the moment he was confirmed, he has been a reliable vote against affirmative action. Justice Kennedy did not like racial preferences. So it was a genuine surprise that in this Michigan case that you're talking about, he ended up on the Sotomayor side. The rumor mill attributed that really startling defections on Kennedy's part to this blistering dissent, and really something that called out for explanation because it would require something extraordinary for Kennedy to come down in defense of racial preferences.
Richard Reinsch (28:24):
Helen, now, maybe switching gears here. You include, and I thought this is an interesting choice. You include Jeffrey Sachs, in your list. I'm curious why I don't naturally think of him when I think of him and at boomers. But you explore the arc of his career. And I thought that was interesting.
Helen Andrews (28:43):
He was one of the first people that I thought of when I was thinking of people who capture the essence of boomerness, maybe because he personifies the combination of idealism and hubris. Nobody can question Jeffrey Sachs' idealism. He's a professional do-gooder, but not a humanitarian in the philanthropic sense. He's a an economist, which is also, in my mind, very representative of the baby boomers. Their consummate do-gooders are not people who run charities. They're people who have PhDs in economics, this elevation of social science and expertise to the highest value, and that that's who we should give true power to people with PhDs. That's something that the boomers invented, that's a boomer phenomenon. So you see, it's right at the intersection of a lot of different boomer qualities, and also one of the three most famous economists living.
Richard Reinsch (29:46):
Yeah. Do you think his contributions and what he has done in the developing world you write about his first foray was in the country of Bolivia, one of the more impoverished countries in Latin America also heavily involved in transitioning communist countries, Russia, Poland into a more market-oriented settings? And then obviously his work goes on in Africa. What do you make of his overall contributions there?
Helen Andrews (30:12):
I think he's done a lot of good. And this is probably a good moment to mention that I think a lot of the boomers that I've profiled, did a lot of good. None of these chapters are intended purely as takedowns. I want to give a full and objective assessment. And in the case of Jeffrey Sachs, I think a fair and objective assessment would have to say he did a lot of really good things. The downside of his career, a lot of people hate him for what he did in Russia. And there's no question that the transition from communism to capitalism in Russia was devastating. The '90s were just a horrible decade. And the reason why everybody loves Putin now is because he refers to the 1990s as this national trauma. And so it was, but the terrible things that happened in Russia, happened very frequently because the people in power did not listen to Jeffrey Sachs' advice. He's gotten so sick of people blaming him for the catastrophe of the '90s in Russia that he wrote an entire essay titled, "What I did in Russia," explaining that all the things that went wrong, were from people not listening to him. And I think most of what he says in that essay, "What I did in Russia," is accurate. But the way that he approached development economics, was fundamentally deficient. He was a big believer in not cheating, national particularities. Jeffrey Sachs would frequently say, "Every finance minister I've ever consulted with has said, "No, Mr. Sachs, you don't understand my country is different." And then the reasons they give me for why their country is different, or the same as the one I get from every other finance minister, I'm an economist. Don't give me your nation's history. Give me the numbers. And that is all I need to know." And that's a very Harvard and boomerish and social scientific way of approaching questions. I'm married to a Russian. And so I think I can say that the Russians are nationally distinctive people. If you go in and try and treat them like your average homo economicus, you will not come up with an adequate solution to their problems. And I think that that was what was missing from Jeffrey Sachs development economics when he went around the world trying to consult. Just an insufficient appreciation for the complexities and the human factor in this place.
Richard Reinsch (32:48):
You've written on empires, the British Empire, and its experiences in Africa. And I think I remember reading essays from you on that. When you look at this and think about that learning and Sachs' career. Did you ever put those together and what see what washed out?
Helen Andrews (33:02):
A lot of people have accused Jeffrey Sachs of being an imperialist. A lot of people on the left, really the same kinds of people who use the word Neoliberal as a consonant slur. Those guys hate Jeffrey Sachs and colonialist is the word that they always throw at him. And he bristles at that insult. He hates the old empires. Me, I think that the left-wingers are accurate, insofar as they have gone and appropriated an analogy between what Jeffrey Sachs says and what the imperialists do, I just don't think that's necessarily a problem, I don't consider Empire to be a flaw the way that they do. And that was something that I really wanted to talk about in the book because it's one of the most astonishing achievements of the boomers in the last six years. Empire is the most common political form in human history. And many of the greatest governments in human history, those under which human flourishing has reached its highest summits, have been empires, it's very difficult to make a historical case, for the idea that Empire is per se, a bad thing, or an evil thing. And yet, today, it has become conventional wisdom. All it took was one generation, saying that Empire is evil, for it to be ruled out for all time as a possible political arrangement. And that's just really weird. One of the frameworks that I adopted and going through what to talk about in the book was to imagine a time traveler, somebody from 1950, or somebody from 1850, or somebody from 1250, transports to today. What things would they find weird? And the fact that we've decided empires per se evil would definitely be on the list of things that a time traveler would find very puzzling.
Richard Reinsch (35:03):
Well, I remember talking about William Easterly, which I've read some of his books and Easterly and Sachs opposites in the sense of Easterly classical liberal emphasizes trying to allow the spontaneous order of an economy in a developing country to come to fruition. And that this would be the best way for economic growth to happen and human flourishing, and that counteracts Sachs to a great degree. And you said, well, they're both wrong, and what they should do, I think, they should actually look to the British Empire. I thought that was interesting. Just in light of this conversation, that's a bold statement, Helen.
Helen Andrews (35:42):
I don't know if I would say that they're both wrong. I would also say that they're both Right. And there are a lot of debates within the discipline of development economics. And Easterly versus Sachs is a good example. And I read a lot of them in the research for this chapter. And they were all very fruitful. They were all really smart people arguing about important topics. But for me, I think it's worthwhile to take a step back from those debates, which are very insular within the tiny world of professional academic economists. And just consider big questions like how do we make Africa a better place to live in a slightly longer lens, from the perspective of centuries of history because if you get too much into the minutiae, you lose that sense of perspective. And so many people have gone to that wonderful, infuriating continent, trying to make it a better place to live. Many of them think many of them heroes, a lot of them great people. And a lot of them have done wonderful things. But in the end, humanity is humanity. And Jeffrey Sachs goes around saying that we can eradicate extreme poverty not alleviate it, eradicate it. And that history lacks, and claims like that, and so do I. And there is no solution to the problems posed by Africa or the problems posed by any human policy, other than imperfect human judgments, and learning from experience. And so the thing that drives me crazy about the boomers and about Easterly versus Sachs and about development economics is the discipline, is that it cuts itself off deliberately, from a wonderful source of imperfect human experience. And that is the history of the 19th-century empires, not just the British, but the French, the Portuguese, everybody who has gone to the third world and tried to make it better, through the means of Empire. If you're going to say that Empire is evil, and those people don't have anything to say to us, you're cutting yourself off from people who were if you learned a little bit more about them, would remind you of yourself and would have really useful things to say to you. So that's the point of defending Empire is that it's a resource, and we should learn from it. And if we start off from the premise that all those people were battling evil racists, we're never going to learn the lessons that they could teach us.
Richard Reinsch (38:24):
I think you've got your next book, The Shifting Gears. No, I'm serious. I would read it. Camille Paglia, you are critical of her. I think overall, you discuss what's been a very interesting career. She's somewhat, I remember beginning to read her in college, favored by many conservative thinkers because she... Very aggressive ridiculing at times, feminist writers and thinkers, and certain claims of the gay rights movement she's been very critical of, but you place her within also a boomer deformation of culture.
Helen Andrews (39:02):
I understand why conservatives like her. Not only does she beat up on the feminists, but she also was a valuable warrior in the PC wars of the 1990s. She was right there next to Allan Bloom, saying that the western canon is worth studying. And don't you dare come in here telling me Emily Dickinson is bad because she was white. Don't even start with me on that. And so good for Camille in taking that line in the '90s when it took guts to say things like that. Where she parted ways with Allan Bloom was on the subject of popular culture. She loved Madonna. She loves Hollywood movies. Hollywood is just a running theme in all of her books. And that really, to me, is-
Richard Reinsch (39:51):
And pornography.
Helen Andrews (39:53):
Well, that's almost a story in itself but if you're a millennial, those are two very important things in terms of explaining how your life is different from how it would have been if you had lived 50 or 100 years ago. On the one hand, your head is stuffed with all kinds of pop-cultural knowledge. I sometimes wonder if the space in my brain that is currently occupied by knowing the tracklisting and personnel of every Steely Dan album might not have been better deployed knowing things like I don't know the Emperor or Rome or something, anything more useful. But I cease to marvel at the classical literacy of the Victorian once I realized just how much pop culture minutia was occupying space in my own head. If I can memorize 1000 facts about rock and roll post-1970 surely the Victorians could have memorized all of [inaudible 00:40:51] or whatever. And Camille Paglia is right there at the front saying those two things are equivalent. It is just as worthwhile for someone to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the films of John Crawford, as it is for someone to have encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Milton. And I just don't think that's true.
Richard Reinsch (41:08):
How would she square that then with the defense of the Western canon? Was she just being irksome to PC activists because that's a contradiction?
Helen Andrews (41:17):
She wanted to elevate pop culture, to the level of the Western canon she held them both in highest. She's a believer in standards, which is one of the things that I respect her for. When the PC wars when people were saying there's no such thing as standards, everything is relative. She said, "No, shut up. There are standards, there is a difference between things that are good and works of genius, and things that are bad, and not." She just happens to think that the films of Ingmar Bergman qualify under the heading of works of genius.
Richard Reinsch (41:47):
Where do you think she falters? Or why? Is it because she dismisses perhaps a classical account of the soul and virtues or something along those lines by which one would begin to evaluate of great thought and writing.
Helen Andrews (42:02):
She wanted to put pop culture, side by side with the Western canon. And she assumed that people would learn both of them. But as a millennial, I am in a position to tell her that that is not the way it has worked out in practice for my generation. Yes, she was very successful in getting my generation to be taught to take pop culture seriously. The problem is that that crowded out the Western canon learning that we should have gotten. And I also think it's important to consider the vast impact of pop culture, not just in education. The boomers were the first generation to grow up surrounded by television. And I think that television has had all of the terrible brain-deadening effects that the doomsayers in the 1950s predicted that it would. One of the greatest anecdotes about Camille Paglia that I mentioned in that chapter is that she had a very famous debate with Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he really took aim at pop culture and media, the way that the media landscape was deadening and warping the human mind making us all perpetual adolescence. And in this great debate with Neil Postman, Camille took the side in defense of visual media she said, "TV is great. I wrote my great magnum opus with my TV running in the background." And that actual debate that she had was inconclusive. But a decade later an anniversary edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death was put out by Penguin Random House, and Camille Paglia blurbed it and she says in her blurb, "I used to think that Postman was just a doomsayer. But now I have come to the conclusion that he was absolutely right."
Richard Reinsch (44:04):
Wow. Yeah, I remember reading it.
Helen Andrews (44:08):
And I think some of that might be the result of teaching college students to be. Camille Paglia is a working professor. She teaches at a college in Philadelphia. And I think she has seen in her own students, just how ignorant they are of the Western canon. So maybe that's where that disillusionment came.
Richard Reinsch (44:26):
No, that's something I hear from professors all the time, every year the students get worse. And this is at universities we think of as elite. And every year, their thinking and writing skills deteriorate. And also the fact of what they know gets less and less relevant. Yeah, that's the Neil Postman reflecting on that is interesting. Thinking about and then the conclusion of your book what do we need to unlearn? As I finished your book, it was like, "Wow, if Helen's right then we really got a lot to do here." In terms of thinking about the legacy of the boomers, one of the things I took from your book is Millennials are further deepening these holes that have been dug for them by the baby boomers.
Helen Andrews (45:16):
That's absolutely right. The baby boomers rewrote American history to center it on themselves. They said that America was a terrible, horrible racist country where nothing good ever happens until about the 1960s when we showed up. So the only good thing about American history is the baby boomers themselves. I don't know how they got away with that. That's just transparently narcissistic and ridiculous to try and pull on the American people, but they succeeded. And now the millennials are, to my great dismay, in agreement with the boomers that the only good thing about American history is what the boomers did. And so the millennials are keen to adopt all of the boomers favorite political causes and reenact their methods, have their own 1968 student rebellions in the streets. I think that's what's going on with Antifa I think that's what we saw over the summer. So in order for things to get better, we first have to break free of the boomers set of values and their way of looking at the world and their version of our story of ourselves. It's understandable that the boomer version has been able to dominate America for so long because so much of the boomers and why they are the way they are is explainable by their demographic tests, there are just so many of them, and they have outnumbered the rest of us for so long. And that's why they managed to get away with so much. But as their numbers dwindle, I hope that we are able to take advantage of the boomers weakening demographic positions in order to get some alternative storylines going around there, which the millennials, sadly has so far not shown any interest in doing.
Richard Reinsch (47:04):
Something you note, which I agree with that I have thought about when thinking about the protest this summer. When I hear stories, anecdotally, from boomers of protests that they were involved in, I've also talked to people who were counter-protesters in the 1960s. And the awareness that basically America was out on the side of the protesters, and we forget when we think about the Kent State tragedy, Americans weren't exactly sympathetic to what they were doing there that day but this has really changed. And you note this and it's a society where the guardrails have fallen off. And there's this insistence on, "Well, let's further deplete what good resources we have." And as you think about what's one thing that's been working well in America the past few decades, and it's been control of crime, particular in our larger cities, and that's now at least temporarily, perhaps, fallen off from these latest rounds of protests, which do seem to regurgitate or revive or rhyme with a lot of theories from the 1960s.
Helen Andrews (48:07):
I think the moment that I realized things were going to be different this time around, was when NASCAR went woke, and the NFL went woke, I thought, "Gosh, if even bastions of reactionary culture are falling in line behind the latest woke BLM line, then things must be a lot worse than I thought whatever silent majority I thought was out there, it clearly is not anymore. And we saw that in polling results over the summer, when even after these riots had led to death, and millions of dollars in property damage, you still saw a large majority saying, "Yes, I support Black Lives Matter and their current protests." So the silent majority is gone. It is absolutely gone. And that means that there's not going to be a correction of the kind that we saw in the 1970s where America acted out and got its protest on. But then in came Richard Nixon and we have a return to normalcy, round two. And that's not going to happen this time. So I think the widening gyre is just going to keep on a widening, and I'm very apprehensive. I wish I had a better, more optimistic answer for you, Richard I'm really wishing I had some hope to extend. But I just don't think I do.
Richard Reinsch (49:27):
Yeah, no, I tried to write a piece. It's in National Affairs right now. I played around with Montesquieu and faction and how there is still a group of Americans who they think they're moderating our politics and they're willing to change sides if they think some things are getting out of control. You did see in the 2020 election, this is one of the more interesting things of the 2020 election amongst a very interesting election overall was the willingness of certain minority groups to be open and actually crossover and vote in the Republican party and I think a huge part of that were the protests. And so the silent majority maybe is more silent but is open to appeals along these lines because of these tendencies. So maybe there's something there.
Helen Andrews (50:13):
I don't know, people said that Biden winning the nomination was evidence for a silent majority within the Democratic Party. And I can see why people think that because Joe Biden, he's not even a boomer. He's a pre-boomer and he says things like "malarkey," and he's very old-fashioned. So he's not a crazy, woke, insane person. And yet, when you see how he behaves, he is perfectly willing to recite whatever woke platitudes his handlers give him. Kamala Harris is number two on the ticket she's going to be taking over soon and she's way out in left field on all of this stuff, that people staffing his administration are fully paid up believers in the most extreme version of millennial wokeness. So putting a sensible middle-of-the-road guy at the top of the ticket doesn't seem to actually help anything. So that makes me maybe even more pessimistic than I was before rather than convincing me of the existence of a silent majority.
Richard Reinsch (51:15):
Okay. Well, Helen on that we can end. The book Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. We've been talking with the author, Helen Andrews, thank you so much for your time. It's been great.
Helen Andrews (51:30):
Thank you. This is fun.
Peter Conti-Brown of the Wharton School comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his most recent book, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Today we're talking with Leon Kass about his new book, Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus. Leon Kass is one of our most significant thinkers and writers.
Richard Reinsch (00:33):
He has the distinction of having a medical degree and being a practicing physician at one point in his career, but also is known for teaching the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago for decades and also being a major public intellectual. He is at the American Enterprise Institute and is the author of a number of wonderful books and essays, including a book on reading Genesis. He was also the chair of George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics and, I should also mention, co-editor along with Amy Kass and Diane Schaub of What So Proudly We Hail, a book that American civic educators definitely need at this point. Leon Kass, thank you so much for coming on the program.
Leon Kass (01:22):
Thank you very much, Richard for having me. Pleasure to be with you again.
Richard Reinsch (01:23):
It's my honor to have you on. This book, Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus, now, at one level, you write a book on Genesis, so maybe it's natural or logical that you would turn to another book on Exodus. Yet, this is a weighty book, a lot of analysis, but one that pays well in reading. I can say that to all of our listeners. But why did you turn not just to reading Exodus but wanting to write a book on it?
Leon Kass (01:51):
Well, I mean partly, as you say, Richard, it is a sequel to the book on Genesis which, like the first book, is being read in search of its wisdom. In Genesis, we saw how after the first 11 chapters from the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the flood, Noah and his sons, and Babel, where it would show us what human life would be like left to its own devices. Beginning with Abraham, God embarks on a project to introduce into the world a way of life that can minimize the evils of human life uninstructed. The rest of that book shows how the germ of that new way of life barely survives two to three patriarchal generations. If you want to know how you get from families to peoplehood, you got to read Exodus. So in terms of subject matter, I want to follow the emergence of the Israelites as a people. For historical reasons, they are one of the world's oldest and most consequential nations. But continuing to read philosophically, I hope to learn from reading Exodus about nationhood, using the case of Israel as an example. What actually makes a people into a people? What forms their communal identity, holds them together, guides their lives? To what do they look up and for what should they strive? On the assumption that this particular case might provide material for thinking about and maybe even teach us a thing or two of importance about those permanent human questions, that really was what I was hoping to find.
Richard Reinsch (03:32):
You say you read Exodus philosophically. Now, I thought that was interesting. As a Christian, I've always read it as something revealed directly from God through human agency and those who wrote it. You sort of outline that. What did you discover in a philosophical reading of Exodus?
Leon Kass (03:53):
Well, I should perhaps say a sentence or two more about by philosophical. I don't mean reading as they would do in a philosophy department necessarily or reading it irreverently. I mean that I treat this book regardless of the authorship and even if it's a revealed book, I'm reading it not necessarily because it's binding on me, but because it has wisdom that's available to me even if I'm not yet a member of the community. Moses, in fact, says deep in Deuteronomy about the laws. He says, "These laws are your wisdom in the eye of the nations." So there's a sense in which, although the Bible might be binding in terms of its law and obligations only on the people within the covenant, nevertheless, there are teachings there that if people were willing to have a look, might be available to everybody. So that's what I mean by philosophical, wisdom-seeking. I don't want just to learn about the book, but I want to learn from it and to learn from it by dwelling with it, by living with it, by imagining myself a participant in the story, but also stepping back with the aid of the text to reflect on it. I suspend whatever disbelief I might have about God or anything else. I'm just going to enter into this leaving my own prejudices aside as much as I can. I treat the book as a whole book, as an integral whole with a beginning and a middle and an end, not some patchwork quilt from different sources, like the source critics like to talk about. I read it naively. I try to keep my own opinions to myself. I read it without commentary and try to learn from the text how it wants to be read. I treat every word as if every word matters, the juxtapositions, the ambiguities. The silences are invitations to reflection. If you just slow yourself down and ask yourself, "What's going on here? What does this mean? What sense does it make? What can you learn from it?" It's amazing what you could learn from it, even if you haven't signed up as a member of a faith community to begin with.
Richard Reinsch (06:28):
I wanted to ask you a question. I've got a lot of questions about something you just said. How does the text, Exodus, want to be read?
Leon Kass (06:37):
How does the text want to be read?
Richard Reinsch (06:39):
Yes.
Leon Kass (06:42):
I mean this is perhaps presumptuous of me to say, but dwelling on it, dwelling in this text for, well, more than 20 years, I first started teaching it at Chicago in 1998, a full course devoted just to Exodus, 10 weeks, four hours a week, undergraduates and graduates. I repeated that five more times, had a study group in Washington with friends and family members, really high-caliber people. I taught a class in Jerusalem at Shalem College, Israeli students, and another very intense seminar where people who really knew the Bible much better than I do read my draft chapters with me and actually got me across the finish line. I had to produce a chapter a week because they were meeting to discuss it. So over this time, look, it tells a story. If you want to read it, you could either read it the way the scholars do as a prism, as an information about the beliefs and myths of an ancient people. Or you can read it as the Orthodox Jews do and pick out from this narrative story what are the laws that are obligatory? The rabbis have, in fact, treated the text in that way to extract the details of the law that have kept alive a way of life even though they were no longer living in the land for 2000 years till Israel was reestablished. Or you can read it by sort of submitting and saying, "What's going on here?" And try to enter into this text as intimately as you can, to imagine yourself each character, even to imagine yourself Pharaoh, even though he's the bad guy in the story, and to try to see the world through his eyes so that the power of the contest between Moses and God and Pharaoh turns out to be a real victory and not just beating up on some fellow who's stupid and stubborn. I think the thing that finally came to me is that the story is not a history book. The story is a book that's intended to somehow move the soul of the reader to understand certain things, to believe certain things, to come to know not just the story of the people but also of their God. Maybe this is premature in this conversation, Richard, but a person who doesn't know anything about the book picks it up on the first page, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth." I mean we can't help being moderns in a Judeo-Christian tradition, having some idea of who this character, God, is. Our head is filled with stuff on it. But for a reader who doesn't have all of that going for him or her, the name, God, is a kind of placeholder in the text, the meaning of which is going to be filled in as you read along. I have to say that these last few times through, the thing I've learned the most about in reading Exodus is because I've allowed the text to work on me to live with me, to live inside me. If I've had a filling out not only of the political, philosophical questions with which I began, but also in who and what exactly and less who and what, but more what it means to live in relation to this voice and this teaching and this source of this teaching because, as God says to Moses, "I will be what I will be," which is a rejection of the answer for a name that would give His essence, but basically says, "You want to know who I am? Pay attention and see what I do." In the course of Exodus, you see what He does and you see the effect of what He does. When the tabernacle is erected and you imagine yourself inside with the people, a building that you've built under His instructions so that you might have an experience of His presence in your daily life, I imagine myself in that place. I begin to see what it might be like to acknowledge the source greater than us, a teacher who has given us our law, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the thing that I've learned this time through, the book wants to be read by a person who imagines himself a character in the story, not one of the ones talked about, but as a living participant in this book, both through memory but also through allowing the text to be actively at work in him. I've done that reading Plato's dialogues. I've done it with other books. But it takes a while before you make this book as a book, not just as selected passages, but as a whole book, something that you live with and it works on you.
Richard Reinsch (11:58):
Building on that question, I love the way you write about Moses in the book. How did you live with his example and trials in the Book of Exodus?
Leon Kass (12:13):
Look, this is an absolutely astounding figure. God needs a champion to bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. He doesn't find some Spartacus to lead a slave revolt. He gets Himself an outsider who's born to the Levi family, the spirited tribe. He gets an Egyptian rearing an education in the palace. The text doesn't say a peep about it but, boy, it would be really interesting to know what did he study there? It makes a difference. When you first meet him, he's a spirited defender of the underdog. He's offended by injustice. He's a passionate young man, but he also has a kind of philosophical side. He wants to know, and God catches him on the curiosity side of the burning bush. Moses turns aside to see why this bush is not consumed. None of the patriarchs ask why. Moses wants to know the cause. Although he's curious, his wonder turns to awe when the voice speaks to him out of the bush and says that, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Take off your shoes. You're standing on sacred ground." It's the most beautiful description of awe in literature that I know. And yet, Moses' philosophical disposition isn't silenced. He still wants to know God's name in the conversation there. He takes on the job, but a very reluctant leader. So beginning, you've got Moses who's a spirited young man, a very philosophical man, sort of reluctant about this job, but he goes. Then you see him get on-the-job training with Pharaoh. He's sort of courageously holding his own in the administration of the signs and wonders known as the plague. He gains stature as God's agent, but he increasingly takes his own initiative. At the end of the story of the plagues when the Egyptians finally know about God, the Egyptian who's learned most about him is Moses himself. He learns the difference between a God who is a voice in his head as he goes along the rest of his life. He's got this voice traveling with him. He learns about God as the antithesis of Egypt and, in a way, as a correction of whatever philosophical teachings he picked up there. Then the next great moment is at the sea of reeds after the Egyptians drown and the children of Israel now trust in God and in His servant, Moses. What does Moses do with that trust? He becomes a poet and he writes the immortal song of the sea which interprets for generations to come the meaning of the event that's just been witnessed. He teaches the Israelites that this was not a victory that I caused, but this is a victory of the Lord, the man of war who is like you among the gods. This is the equivalent of Lincoln at Gettysburg teaching everybody the meaning of the sacrifice and the meaning of the war. So Moses is not only philosopher and not only spirited leader, but poet and interpreter.
Richard Reinsch (15:53):
Interesting. Different parts of the way you write about Moses, one of which is something that perhaps we need to learn, although when I say it we'll automatically think authoritarianism or something. But his obedience to what he's called to do, because it doesn't happen right away, that meaning the liberation of the Israelites. But he keeps at it. The first time he goes in to Pharaoh, you point out, he's arrogant. He goes in with his brother, Aaron. He's arrogant. He wants to do it his way and he fails. He almost loses everything. And then he has to go back and do it the way he was told by God. I just thought, obedience. I mean I've been thinking generally obedience is something we need in appropriate ways to reconsider our culture. But I thought that was worth mentioning.
Leon Kass (16:40):
Yeah. He is obedient, but gradually as he gets the point, he's able to embellish and act on his own, not from arrogance but because he's gotten the spirit of it so that there are certain things he says to Pharaoh later on that he's not told. In a kind of crucial time for him, I mean we see him ... Well, one of the great moments, and this is not generally noticed, Moses doesn't really like this people, and not without cause. They're slavish. His first encounter with them when he tries to break up a fight between the battling Israelites and one says to him, "Who made you a prince ruler over us? Do you want to kill us like you killed the Egyptian?" Moses says these people are ungovernable and repeated episodes of that. So he always calls them either, "Your people," when talking to God or, "That people." It's only after the episode of the golden calf where he starts to plead for them against God's threat to destroy them, that he finally identifies with them and starts calling them, "We, my people, our people, us." His relation to God is on an intellectual plane. He doesn't really understand why the people need ... He can go 40 days and 40 nights without food and water. He doesn't understand ordinary people. But finally, finally, he embraces them. He stands for them. It's really one of the most beautiful moments where you see God makes him, in a way, plead for them. As a result for pleading for them, he now owns them and owns up to being part of them. That's, in a way, the leader really becoming of the people and not as he's in endanger of being seen by them as a separate god high and above them.
Richard Reinsch (18:45):
It's funny. As I was reading your book, I thought to myself, "I've never really given that point consideration, Moses' separateness." What did you make of that, that the liberator would be separate from the people? I thought, "I've never given that consideration before."
Leon Kass (18:58):
The problem of political leadership could be stated something like this. I mean you start with slavery. Then you move to a condition of anarchy. And then you get that before the law is given and they work on Moses' charisma. Then the law is given and there's still hierarchy. But in the end, Moses disappears into his law, not in Exodus, but in Deuteronomy. You then have equity under the law. That's sort of the sequence of political things here. But if you're going to have a political leader and you cannot somehow expect the people to liberate themselves from servitude, then the danger is the leader has to be sufficiently above the people to command their respect and to be followed, but not so high above them that they mistake him for God and that he himself might mistake him for that. He can't be so close to the people as Aaron gets to be, that they can manipulate him, hold him in contempt, and revolt against him. So the problem of the relation between the leader and the led is one of the late ... It's not a theme. The book doesn't have themes. But it's a thread that you can follow here in how Moses came from being, in a way, much too good for them, to not only taking pity on them but embracing the cause not just from on high but from among them.
Richard Reinsch (20:40):
I mean just a big question here. How did this change or did it change your thinking about freedom and virtue generally?
Leon Kass (20:49):
Well, that's very welcome. The Book of Exodus is taken by lots of people as a kind of basic text and inspiration for various struggles of national liberation. To go from slavery to freedom is thought to be the main theme of the first third of the book. But it's very curious. It's not the language of the text. There are Hebrew words for freedom, but they don't occur at all in the story of the liberation from Egypt. Instead, the terms are redemption and deliverance. The transition really is said to be from service, I should say servitude to Pharaoh, not to autonomy but to service to God. In one of the most powerful insights that I think I had from this text in reading the beginning of the 10 commandments, it begins when God says when He starts to speak out of the mountain to the people, "I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage." Now, as a historical statement in the text, that's true. He is the same one here on the mountain who was the one who brought you out of Egypt and then, redundantly, out of the house of bondage, suggestion. The Israelites are told basically, "You people have two great and enduring possibilities. You can either be aligned with me and follow me and have a relation with me or the alternative is there's the land of Egypt and the house of bondage." Those are the two enduring human possibilities, either some relation with God or live in the kind of way that ultimately will lead to being enslaved to men and to the mightiest of men. I think that even though the language of freedom doesn't occur, I think it can speak to our understanding of freedom in the following ways. First of all, if freedom is opposed to being in bondage, it's clear. They're no longer subordinate to human will and to despotism. Second, they acquire national self-rule under wise legislation, in this case, divinely given and/or inspired. The rule of law is consented to. The covenant is consented to. This rule of law, unlike comparable law of the ancient Near East, all are equal before this law. There's not one law for the nobles and one law for the commons. Third, the law doesn't speak this language, but the law aims to free people internally from the enslaving passions, from fear and despair because we think we are lowly and of no consequence, from the opposite pride and hubris because we tend to believe in our human superiority and self-sufficiency, from our greed and stinginess because we think the world is inhospitable and will not provide for us. In a way, freedom here means not doing as you please, but doing as you should so that you will no longer be slave to Pharaoh or be enslaved within. I mean the formula would be getting the slaves out of Egypt was the easy part. Getting Egypt out of the slaves took forever and is not finished. These are people who have been emancipated or have been delivered from servitude to acquire a way of life, a kind of law that will make them free, make them free to be what it means to be the only creature made in God's image.
Richard Reinsch (24:48):
I said obedience earlier talking about Moses. In listening to you, there's almost this idea maybe obedience takes the form of participation in the law. Through that emerges your freedom. The temptations to lowliness or the temptations to arrogance fall away and you actually find who you're supposed to be maybe. That is a thought that I had listening to you.
Leon Kass (25:14):
That's wonderful. There are two nice formulas about the Torah. The Torah is a yoke and the Torah is a tree of life. In my formulation, putting them together is, the Torah is a tree of life because one has voluntarily put one's neck in the yoke. The yoke sounds like slavery. It's oxen. You tame the stiff-necked beast by yoking him. But if you voluntarily put your neck into this yoke, it enables you to live upright, rooted, reaching for what's highest.
Richard Reinsch (25:56):
Yeah. Something else you said, law and self-rule. What kind of a nation is formed in the Book of Exodus?
Leon Kass (26:05):
This is complicated. English language has two words that we use interchangeably often, I do it myself, nation and people. The word, nation, comes from the Latin word, natio, meaning birth. A nation would be a large, distinct group of people who are united through generations upon generations of common descent from which follows by their separation, probably common language and culture. Whereas, a people is less a naturally constituted body, but would be a group of human beings who are united by a common story, by common mores and law, by shared aspirations, shared ideals and institutions, a common way of life. We would say, I think, of the United States, but we sometimes call it a nation. But the United States are a people, "We the people," et cetera. That's a people-defining act in the constituting law, just as the covenant approving consent is the constituting moment, the first major constituting moment of the children of Israel. I would say that I use the word, nation, but I, in a way, mean it in the sense of people. I would say that Israel becomes a people in the Book of Exodus in three phases, and its peoplehood rests on three pillars. First is the shared story of slavery and deliverance. This is told from generation to generation. In fact, the deliverance is for the sake of the story. One of the most astounding things is the commandment to tell the story annually at Passover is given the night before they actually go out. So they go out instructed already thinking about their children and their children's children who have to hear this story. So one of the fundamental features of being a nation is you have a shared national story that tells of your servitude and divine deliverance. Second, is they get a comprehensive law governing all aspects of life through constraint, through encouragement and uplift. That happens at Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the ordinances. But third, and this is in there and I used to neglect this because a lot of the description's just boring, is the building of the tabernacle, which is a place of worship. This embodies the people's aspiration not only to have rules governing their conduct with each other, but to remain in contact with their God, with what is highest. Those are the three pillars of Israel's founding. If you're reading this not just historically but for its wisdom, you can then ask yourself the question, "Can a people, a people such as ours, flourish if it lacks a shared national story, if it shares an accepted law and mores, and if it shares common aspirations of something higher than our own comfort and safety?" The book doesn't do contemporary politics. There's a paragraph or two at the very end, but I think it's a serious question for us whether we can substitute technological progress, economic prosperity, private pursuits of happiness in place of a national story which is now contested and partly despised in the nation when our morals are weakened, when the national dedication is abandoned. It looks like we're in danger of losing our national fabric and submit to angry passions, technocracy, and hedonism.
Richard Reinsch (30:21):
Reading your book, that came to mind because I think what was going on, particularly this summer when monuments were being defaced and destroyed, was something like ancient tribal warfare in the sense of we destroy your gods. We reject your gods. That's why we pull them down. That's why we rename high schools. Just reading before we got in this discussion today, a high school in San Francisco named Abraham Lincoln High School is going to have its name changed, these sorts of things, yeah, losing your shared national story. I thought also, and this is more controversial, thinking about the tabernacle discussion in the book, it suggests that a good nation also has to have a third term, that being not just the people in the law, the people in the government, but something higher than both that they submit to, participate into, that grounds them. I think that's also a part of any well-regarded, healthy national loyalty.
Leon Kass (31:25):
I agree with you completely. Near the end of the book, I quote Chesterton, his remark, "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything." The other thing, really important thing I learned, you see, Israel is formed as a nation or a people in a context that has several other very dominant nations, Egypt, the Canaanites, and the Babylonians or Mesopotamians. These are just ancient peoples, but what they represent or what the soul of those nations were are permanent human alternatives. In Egypt, you have the techno-administrative state finally ruled by one man and his will. Among the Canaanites, you have Earth-worshiping people with licentious sexual practices. In Babel, you have the cosmopolitan soulless dream that man can be a god to man. Those alternatives are here waiting in the wings. They're waiting in the wings. With atheism on the rise in the West and in America, we could very well return to those dehumanizing pre-biblical conditions where the choices will be the battles between the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the Babel builders. The achievements of biblically-based Western civilization could be permanently lost. My serious Christian friends tell me despair is a sin. I have a close Catholic friend who told me, "Leon, God will win in the end. You may not live to see it." I hope he's right.
Richard Reinsch (33:21):
I thought too your discussion of Egypt and Pharaoh, the overwhelming power of this state, of this empire, and also Pharaoh's power, the attempt to use science and magic, to worship and also control nature I thought was significant in thinking about the modernist quest. And then also Pharaoh's attempt to control life and death, in particular, to control birth, and you made the observation, "This is every what tyrant does, to control birth of those worth dwelling on."
Leon Kass (34:00):
Yeah. Look, we're halfway there. I mean the technological project to conquer nature, to relieve the human condition begun by Francis Bacon and friends in the early 17th century, the ultimate goal of the project, the mastery of nature, is to eliminate mortality. At the end of Genesis, one saw the two alternatives very starkly laid out. We had the funeral of Jacob in which his sons take him back and bury him in the cave and which the idea is you bury the dead and you transmit their way of life in remembrance of the covenant with God that began all of this. The alternative was the mummification of Joseph in Egypt where he will lie in rest. He actually asks to be taken out, but with the pharaohs lying in wait until the magicians can figure out how to reanimate them. There it's this world and this life for ourselves and for the mighty alone rather than a way of life which is transmitted from generation to generation, excepting for now the limitations of our mortality but keeping alive a righteous and a holy way of life which is why we're put on Earth to live. The West has been nourished by this fountain. Now the project to finish the Egyptian project is back and it's doing very well. By the way, lest I be misunderstood, only an idiot would complain about modern science in the age of COVID. God bless them, but within limitations.
Richard Reinsch (35:52):
That's why I wanted the modernist quest or the notion that some of these can relieve us of the human condition, that somehow economics or science alone or medicine alone can somehow answer the deepest questions finally is a source of many problems. Something else that's working in Exodus is the plagues, the visiting of the plagues on Pharaoh. I think that, to me, was instructive in the sense of power meeting power and one man's quest to use power finally defeated and that being something that Moses and the people need to see. I thought that was worth dwelling on.
Leon Kass (36:37):
It's certainly about power, by the fact that Pharaoh's magicians can only imitate two of the plagues. With each passing one, everybody else in Egypt tells Pharaoh, "Quit, we're all going to be destroyed." Pharaoh, strengthening his heart and refusing to give in, plays the game to the end. But the plagues are also a metaphysical contest about an attack on the gods of Egypt and finally on the highest god of all, Pharaoh himself. Pharaoh has wanted to be in command of life and death. Pharaoh finally yields when a god can come into a house and distinguish the firstborn from all the others, including in Pharaoh's own house. So there's a kind of contest not only about pure power, but the question is who's right about divinity? That's really very, very important. Let me try to say this slightly differently. If you're simply thinking about liberation or you're simply thinking about power politics, you will miss the fact that God says He sends these plagues into Egypt, "So that Egypt may know who I am," that the purpose of all of this, in a way, is knowledge. It's knowledge. It's knowledge to begin with with the Egyptians, including Moses the Egyptian. It's finally because the greatest civilization of the world as they're sinking into the water after the sea of reeds, the last thing you ever hear from Egypt in this book is, "It's hopeless. The Lord fights for them." It's, in a way, the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Lord God of Israel. When the Egyptians pay that tribute, the Israelites will know it and then the world might know it as well. So it's a kind of correction of the wrong metaphysics of the belief in nature gods, on the one hand, and the belief in man's godly powers on the other that are both at issue in that contest with the plagues.
Richard Reinsch (38:51):
Something I just wanted to circle back to here at the end, you said you taught this book for a number of years at Chicago and then in Israel. What did you discover from American students and Israeli students reading this book?
Leon Kass (39:09):
I had a class of mixed religious and nonreligious kids in both places actually. There were a small number of students in the American classes who were reared on the Bible, including a couple of evangelical Protestants who, they really knew the book. I learned from them because they pushed me on this or that or showed me things that I hadn't yet seen. But they were willing to enter into my wisdom-seeking reading. In Israel, there were religious kids who had read the Bible from childhood. They read it with commentators. They never read it as a whole book. Favorite practice is to find passages and dilate upon them for their teaching for their law, for their wisdom. But that there could be a coherent political teaching through the book as a whole, that they had not done before, and what I was doing was strange. I was also teaching in English and some of them didn't have adequate English. But it turned out, in certain personal terms, the teaching of this text in Israel was just an extraordinary experience. I can't find the right words. I'm teaching the founding text of the Jewish people to really admirable, noble young people. All of them had done national service being coming to college. I'm reading it in Jerusalem in a reborn land of the people after 2000 years of dispersion, kept alive only by adherence to this book and the ones written on top of it. They're reading it and speaking a language which until 100 years ago had not been spoken in public in everyday life anywhere in the world for 2000 years. I have this privilege to do this, aged 77. I said to myself and I think I say it in the book, "Even an atheist would have to think this was a miracle." It was as if I was on a kind of journey to have this experience to teach this book in this place to these people at this time of my life and that there was still something for me to see and learn. Teaching was frustrating, but I couldn't shake this feeling that this was a kind of destined experience for me. It moved me immensely and has still.
Richard Reinsch (41:41):
Maybe we can end there. That was excellent. Leon Kass, thank you so much. We've been talking with the author of Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus. Thank you for coming.
Leon Kass (41:52):
Thanks very much, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (41:55):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:19):
Hello, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Gregory Collins about his impressive new book, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke's Political Economy. Gregory Collins is postdoctoral associate and a lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Gregory, welcome to the program.
Gregory Collins (00:43):
Hi, Richard. Thank you for the opportunity to talk.
Richard Reinsch (00:44):
Excellent. So thinking about political economy, which is the term you used throughout the book, what is Edmund Burke's political economy? And maybe also, what do you mean by political economy? I think that's worth thinking about too. We usually just think about economics, and economics almost as a separate sphere of study, but I think you mean something more here.
Gregory Collins (01:04):
Yes, that's a great question because much of my book really hinges on an appropriate understanding of what political economy meant in Burke's time and what it means today. So as you suggested, in Burke's age, statesmen, thinkers, they studied political economy, not economics. Economics today is more of a specialized narrow field with particular quantitative methodological approaches. While in Burke's time, it was a more capacious, holistic understanding of the intersecting concerns of commercial activity, trade, both domestic and foreign, as well as the broader social/religious/ethical preconditions for commercial activity. It was in this wide sense that Burke understood and tried to study the implications of commercial activity, which included, certainly, a particular insight into trade, taxation of revenue, but also broader considerations about the role of commerce in the wider social order.
Richard Reinsch (01:59):
What did Burke... What was his approach to political economy?
Gregory Collins (02:03):
His approach was... I would characterize it as a resistance towards specialization, in the broadest sense. He used this premise to inform his understanding of commercial activity, both in regard to the free internal grain trade, which was the subject of his primary economic writing, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, and it informed his understanding of the political economy of the French Revolution and the political economy of European civilization as a whole. So, one of the core arguments in the book, which I'm going to jump to it right now, in the chapters on the French Revolution, and the great intellectual historian, John Pocock, the first, I believe, to recognize this in a pioneering essay he wrote on Burke's political economy on French revolution. Burke grew out of particular ethical preconditions that predated the mass commercial economy. The prior religious and social and ethical traditions that were built up throughout the ages by what he called the 'spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion.' So British establishment, such as the Church of England, and the hereditary aristocracy, which provided and encouraged a culture of learning, patronage, moral and religious instruction, all furnished the conditions of stability, moderation, an element of courtesy, chivalry, of course, that provided the necessary environment for commercial activity to emerge. Commercial activity which was more prone to vicissitudes, vagaries, unpredictability, and then the more stable orders of religion and the landed aristocracy. So, for Burke, these two pillars were essential for applying this foundation for the emergence of the mass commercial economy. If those two pillars withered way, this is part of Burke's argument on French Revolution, then social order would decline, which for him would include commercial activity.
Richard Reinsch (03:49):
You note in the book, this put him at odds with many Enlightenment theorists, including many in the Scottish Enlightenment, on the origins of markets and the perpetuation of markets as well.
Gregory Collins (03:59):
Yes, yes. This is really a distinctive quality of Burke, with regard to sovereignty at the time. Many of the Scots, who I have to be fond of them, David Hume, Amanda Smith, Adam Ferguson. Well, Adam Ferguson's argument was probably closer to Burke than the other two. But the general tenor of their understanding of markets is not that they severed markets morality. In fact, as we know Smith's was moral philosophy, and he wrote a great book on moral philosophy, but as I... I outline the book... And Pocock also mentioned this, they didn't appear to draw Burke's specific argument that commercial activity grew out of these preconditions prior to the Enlightenment. And so not only, for Burke was there a necessary moral foundation for markets. This moral foundation was not a modern moral foundation. It was a pre-modern moral foundation. This is not to say that Burke elevated a romantic shimmery, but he thought that the roots of commercial order could be discovered prior to the industrial revolution, prior to the available-hand concept, prior to the elevation of profits as a worthy human endeavor. And then in addition, Burke he held an interesting attitude towards the idea of the doux-commerce theory, which is embraced by the Scots, embraced by the French, Enlightenment theorists as well, Thomas Paine, famously.
Richard Reinsch (05:08):
What's the doux commerce theory?
Gregory Collins (05:10):
So doux commerce theory is the idea, and this idea persists today that the increase in commercial relations between two parties, including two nations, tend to produce peaceful effects over time. Two trading partners, as opposed to invading one another for land or power, they will find mutual interest in trading goods and services from one another. And therefore they have an investment in each other that would discourage them from starting a war with one another. The reasoning goes, therefore, the enhancement of commercial relations will promote peace relations over time. Now, Burke, he does not dismiss this. And in fact, he adopts this reasoning in regard to Ireland and England in his most comprehensive statement on free trade when he wrote two letters to merchants of Bristol, the community who was representing that opposed the free trade measures with Ireland. Burke argued in favor of the free trade measures, for many of the reasons that advocates doux commerce theory espouse today, that they do tend to promote peaceful social relations on their mutual interest and increasing trade with one another. And he also does this reasoning with regard to the American colonies in his famous speech on America. He lavished his praise on the Americans for their ingenuity, their industry, their intelligence, their hard-work, their commercial undertaking. And these are two of the clearest instances in which Burke does embrace this idea that the increase in commercial relations will tend to promote peaceful social relations, but he does not necessarily adopt this in his broader political thoughts. And the most glaring case was the French. There are a couple examples. In 1786, Anglo-French Commercial Treaty. I mentioned his speech on Traders' Correspondence primarily 1790s, during the French revolutionary wars, which Burke, push back against this idea that increasing commercial relations with France, or pre-revolutionary France and France during the revolution, would not necessarily have peace relations. The simple idea is that if you are engaged in commerce with an avowed enemy or rival, that is not a guarantee that that rival will tend to adopt peaceful measures. For Burke, in that sense, commercial considerations should be subordinate to wider national aims of honor of national interest. And how I harmonize these various strands of his thoughts and doux commerce, and as has been said before, it was not necessarily systematic thinkers, not treatises mostly. So you have to piece together his different thoughts from various speeches and writings. I argue that, for Burke, even the doux commerce thesis, somewhat to his broader point about how modern commercial activity requires ethical preconditions. The doux commerce thesis, especially international relations, also requires pre-economic commitment, shared values, shared principles, which is why he thought that free trade between England and Ireland, England and the Americans best reflects the doux commerce. But in the case of France, which not have broad shared political principles, he did not think that increased commercial activity between England and France would have a peace relations. And so that's the distinction I carve out in the book.
Richard Reinsch (08:09):
Okay. So you wouldn't say Edmund Burke was a free trader, but you also wouldn't say he was a mercantilist.
Gregory Collins (08:14):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (08:15):
You would say he is balancing international trade, or transnational trade, for its good effects and good consequences. But those aren't its own justification. It has to also be balanced against national interest and the needs of the empire, and what's going to best serve it, which... As I read your book, I heard you to be saying, "Generally, Edmund Burke favored pretty liberalized trade, but he made crucial exceptions." And you've kind of articulated some of those here. And thinking about Burke's political economy, I thought we might go to the beginning of your book and think about the arcane topic of Britain's internal grain trade. You write at the beginning... Because I think it's instructive in a lot of ways. You write at the beginning of chapter two, you say, "Burke discerned poetry in the elusive motions of England's internal grain trade." Gregory, talk about that poetry.
Gregory Collins (09:14):
Yes. The internal grain trade turned out to be one of the primary protagonists in this narrative. The internal grain trade was a subject of Burke's primary arcane treatise, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which really wasn't a treatise. It was a private letter written for government officials that addressed the particular circumstances of mid 1790s England, which in the middle of French revolutionary war has experienced a number of difficulties, including spiking green prices, increasing normalization, population growth. There's only a few years before Thomas Malthus wrote his famous book on whether the food supply would be able to sustain the population growth. And for Burke, however, his principle argument in this track, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, is that there was, what I call, poetry in order to their internal grain trade of England, that was delicate, that was fragile, but that nevertheless tended to work absent arbitrary meddling government intervention. And so Burke's principle message in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, he wrote this in light of calls to intervene in and increase regulations of the labor contracts between employers, employees, laborers, and farmers, and impose harsh controls, published in the new public graineries. Burke argued for government restraints. He thought that there was this order that emerged from the private contractual arrangements and interactions between farmers and laborers in the grain economy. And particularly in times of scarcity, he was very suspicious of the idea that government meddling, suppress controls, wage regulations, coopered to more beneficial consequences than if the grain trade was left to its own order. Now, this sounds like, and it is, a defense of a free market, a free domestic market. Throughout the book, I decided that this was, for Burkes, the most comprehensive intellectual statement on the internal grain trade. He defended the internal grain trade a number of other instances in the early 1770s and later in 1787, when they were tends to revive bans on, what we today call, middlemen trading activities, forestalling, rebranding and engrossing, which were various ways in which traders would buy up provisions before the edge of the market, and then we sell them at a higher price. So in these various instances, including in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity work issued a robust defense of the middlemen in the grain economy or enabling the efficient distribution of resources, particularly those in need. And the other additional point is that Burke anticipated as it's described in the book, as a Hayek insight into the limits of rationality in coordinating complex socioeconomic activities. In Thoughts and Details on Scarcity
Richard Reinsch (11:55):
So, in this period, that he's writing the Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, you've got a crisis, we've got food shortages, we've got spikes in prices, we've got people not making enough money, it seems. You've got all of these conditions. We confront those periodically in our own economy in different ways. And he's pushing back against this... And from what I could read, in a way that Hayek would agree with, that Milton Friedman would largely agree with, he's emphasizing that in a time of scarcity of seemingly economic failure. And he's confronting proposals like a minimum wage. As I think about it, they wanted to have the government take over granaries. So you could think about a public option for health care, as an analogy, there's this desire to eliminate, as you were talking about middlemen, but those are just people who are making money, but they're also providing an efficient way for grain to reach downmarket buyers. And this is an efficiency thing. So he's confronting all of this, and he's saying, "Look, you're actually going to make the situation worse. You're going to depress the market for longer conditions. The recovery is going to take longer. It's going to be less robust, but we're not going to know what the real prices are." So, all of these provisions are going to backfire," as we say. "They will have unintended consequences." And I thought that maybe you can tell us how successful he wasn't disregard, in this debate. But I thought that was incredibly instructive. These things continue. These battles over market failure, not taking into account government failure, policy failure. All of this Burke is confronting here in a nice instructive way.
Gregory Collins (13:32):
Yes, this moment in the 1790s was the defining moment in England's global economy, including its grain economy in the 18th century, really emerging for the more conspicuous presence, when Burke entered parliament, in 1760s. There were these periods in which there were food shortages, spikes in grain prices, instability in the grain market. And this was a constant subject of Burke's concern of legislators concern about the [inaudible 00:13:54] time period. As exemplified in 1772, I should mention, when Burke led the repeal of the bans on middlemen trading activities, which were enforced... Not really enforced, but they're still on the books. Edmund Burke or the repeal and parliament of these bans on the basis of what you just said, that these regulations tend to create conditions that were even worse for participants in the agriculture economy, when back in Burke's judgment, they actually facilitated smooth efficiency of the distribution of goods and services. In fact, last semester I taught a course on constitutionl and business ethics. And antitrust cases, Standard Oil cases, it referenced this repeal of middleman trade activities. It didn't mention Burke's name, but it mentioned this repeal in the early 1770s, as an example of which the English grew to realize that these bans actually tended to help the operation of economic forces in the long run, as opposed to undermine them. And so Burke had an immediate impact on this debate. This is when Burke's free markets really come out, and it could easily see Milton Friedman endorsing these arguments, and Hayek as well.
Richard Reinsch (15:02):
I mean Burke is developing the Hayek's famous knowledge article. He's developing those insights. He's understanding that the market requires a lot of information that comes to you in bits and pieces. And it's the participants in the market who can make the best decision, not this comprehensive rationalist approach that is being urged upon the market.
Gregory Collins (15:24):
Precisely, precisely. And then he has a couple of great quotations in Thoughts and Details that outline that point that individual legislators, magistrates, justice or the peace at a time, simply did not possess the amount of knowledge necessary to regulate his employment contracts and to regulate the flow of grain with vigor in effect. And therefore, there should be great deference paid to the actual participants in the economy, who are actually making decisions on whether to enter into contracts with one another, because they simply hold more wisdom, knowledge and experience about the particular conditions, which vary from person to person from farmer to farmer, labor to labor. Now, as I mentioned the book, I tend to be sympathetic to Burke's argument in this case. But a couple of criticisms are necessary to mention. One is Burke, perhaps, paint two positive picture of these supposedly harmonious relations between farmers and laborers, and because there is a vast amount of literature on this particular time period. And whether these structural relations in the agriculture economy was as peaceful and harmonious and as mutually reciprocal as Burke suggests in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. And so I mentioned a couple articles that pushed back against this... They're not Burke per se, but pushed back against this idea of a harmonious relations between farmers and laborers. But given that... Because this is when Burke's brought a philosophical project. He does not deny that there are hardships at the time period. What he is arguing, and what you were suggesting, is that given limited alternatives during periods of difficulty, such as scarcity, which is the best out of imperfect options. That is his main point. And his judgment in this case is that the best off imperfect option is to practice government restraint as opposed to metal in the internal economic activities of farmers and laborers.
Richard Reinsch (17:01):
Let me ask you more broadly a question, Greg. So would you say Edmund Burke... I mean, someone listening to his podcast might say, "Edmund Burke, kind of a classical liberal, locking in market rights, small government guy, and capitalism, very a good thing, can solve a lot of problems." How would you situate him broadly in the relationship between government markets and civil society?
Gregory Collins (17:24):
Yeah, that's a great question. And when I was writing this, I had sort of a running debate with myself about whether Burke was or was not a classical liberal, to what extent was he, to what extent was he not, which was probably detective from reading the book. I determined that he did overlap with elements, what we considered to be classical liberalism, and admittedly, sometimes we parse these distinctions too finely for people, which maybe work in a classroom, but in reality what the actual practical difference between some of these different thinkers. But Burke did depart from fundamental presuppositions of classical liberalism, such as locking at the most famously in his criticism of the idea of that social contract as a consensual pack and [function 00:18:02] do free and independent individuals who joined the society to preserve the pre-political natural rights. Edmund Burke famously attacks his reasoning in Reflections on the Revolution of France
Richard Reinsch (20:21):
The other thing about the French Revolution too, in this regard, you write about the Edmund Burke problem. That is to say generally in favor of markets, widespread commerce. At times, he says that markets come from nature, they emerge from human nature. And yet he also condemns the French revolutionary's argument that rights, abstractly understood, come from nature. And that justifies the erasure of literally centuries of French tradition, religion, culture, law, they're going to build again. Talk about how Edmund Burke understood those things.
Gregory Collins (21:02):
And that is a fundamental philosophical dilemma, but in general, if something is by nature natural, and anything that does not accord with that idea of nature exists, all those institutions' practices, customs, illegitimate because they don't conform to nature. For Burke... As I mentioned in the first chapter, French Revolutionaries, they did, at moments, endorse a free internal grain trade, but then they ended up meddling and imposing price controls, which was one element of the historical backdrop for Burke in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. And so Burke also endorse a free internal grain trade. So, to what extent was Burke sympathetic to some of the revolutionaries' arguments. Also, the other historical consideration is the emergence of the physiocrats, the French economist, who embraced the idea that society should conform to nature. And therefore they justified a free marketing grain, and they were also accused of being very, very rationalistic and pushing this idea of abstract rationalism in the 18th century. So how would it Burke overcome this idea that if he embraced free markets, in part, because they were based on nature, but the physiocrats were embracing free markets, but they were embracing abstract rationalism. And the revolutionaries embracing free markets to some extent, but they were overturning French society. But whether did Burke come down to this issue, unfortunately, Burke does not provide a sufficient answer for this, but I pose that Burke, as he mentioned on his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, supply and demand laws were part of the laws of nature, which was the laws the commerce, which were the laws of nature, which were the laws of God, that's sort of the phrasology that he uses. Recognizing the finite resources in society for him was a law of nature. However, insofar, as he held the conception of evolved nature, a natural law in general, which he called the moral law, binding people together, this law of nature was not the end-point for discussion on these issues. It could be a starting point, but it's certainly not the end point. This is so much his critique of natural rights. He never fully reject the idea of natural rights, but what he does is question its import in these practical questions of how to actually establish and maintain political society. So if Edmund laws were a part of law of nature, to what extent, for Burke, could we integrate this idea of law of nature within a wider framework of what is necessary to perpetuate civilization? And for him, then you integrate this law of nature with what he considers to be the foundations of civilization, which is religion, aristocracy, learning, chivalry, this ethical code that predate a commercial economy. If you merge all these elements together, it could provide for commercial prosperity while also providing for these elements' stability to cool the process of commercial prosperity. And so that's how I thought and try to tease out the tension in the top between embracing the law of nature and embracing this idea of cosmic tradition. For him, they were mutually symbiotic and could balance one another in a way that could both promise the fruits of material goods while also protecting against the crass commercialization, commodification of civil society.
Richard Reinsch (23:56):
You also know too, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, that Burke seems to... He argues... "What I'm saying is coming true. You have eliminated your past, you've attempted to do that, and you want to create a market on paper money. You want to create a market heavily funded in debt, giving things to people and look what's happening to you. The French economy is now awash in corruption, inefficiencies." I thought you wrote about that well. Maybe talk about that, how he sees that the paper money thing playing out.
Gregory Collins (24:31):
Yeah. So this is one of the underappreciated aspects of Burke's thoughts for the economy, otherwise. But he provided a thinking, comprehensive rebuke of what he called the paper money despotism of the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries, they seized the property of the Gallican Church, which owned around one 10th of landmass, I believe, in France, at that time. They were going to sell the church property to help pay down France's debt. They have a financial calamity and short France's finances. And they also introduced what was first the kind of bond, then they use this fiat paper money called Assignat, pardon my French. But I believe it's called Assignat. And this paper money was distributed throughout France and with a lack of prudence in disregard for the potential destructive consequences of paper money not backed by any sort of metal. And what ended up happening was this paper money led to the depreciation of the currency, inflation, hyperinflation as Burke predicted, price instability, price unpredictability, a lack of distrust from participants in France's economy at the time. It led to the invasion of private property rights of French authorities seizing grain in the countryside when farmers were hoarding grain because of this lack of regularity, the lack of consistency, the lack of predictability in these internal French markets, which in Burke's judgment, were exacerbated by this worthless paper money that for him reflected both the economic improprieties of the revolutionaries and also some of the philosophical abstractions of the French Revolution as well. The idea of paper money, that that could be used as a saving grace to save the French economy. And for Burke, as Burke predicted in the Reflections of the Revolution of France, he criticizes these Asignats, he predicts that they are going to create hyperinflation, and that's what ends up happening. And so this is another dimension of his political economy.
Richard Reinsch (26:26):
Let's switch gears to India, to the India question. You write at length on this in relationship to Edmund Burke and his approach to the East India Company and its policies in India and the authority it held for the British government to operate in India. Burke initiated an impeachment of Sir Warren Hastings, who was the director of the company, the overseer of its operations in India, for many abuses, physical cruelty displayed towards Indians among them. You have a quote from Edmund Burke, the opening of his impeachment in 1788 of Warren Hastings, "The East India Company became that thing which was supposed by the Roman law so unsuitable. The same power was a traitor, the same power was a Lord." Talk about that because he sees the East India Company, it has a monopoly on trade in India. Burke says that's just because it's in this new exotic market, it should deserve a degree of protection. But then it proceeds by accumulating power to itself, accumulating the economies, local economies in India, to itself, destroying them and their own internal workings and then taking them over, and then also having this sort of quasi governmental power. And Burke opposes all of this, maybe just give us a broader understanding of that.
Gregory Collins (27:48):
So Burke did defend the East India Company charter because he thought... Especially in this time, we have to remember that international trade was still a novel phenomenon, and so there was great risk in trading in foreign lands. If no other reason, that there's great physical risk in trading these lands in which you held limited amount of knowledge and experience in trading in these different territories. So for Burke, he defended the East India Company Charter for the purpose of promoting the commercial interests of the British empire. The problem for Burke, the East India Company in a series of victories in 1750 to 1760, including the Treaty of Allahabad, 1765, aggrandized the powers of the East India Company so that now they did not simply hold a commercial power to trade in India, but also, they acquired the powers of war and peace, revenue collection, public administration. And for Burke, this was a disastrous step that fueled the expansion of arbitrary power from the East Indian Company and exacerbated by Warren Hastings. For Burke, the East Indian Company now was not simply promoting the commercial interests of the British Empire, but they start to intrude on and regulate and dictate the flow of goods within internal Indian markets. And as they describe in the book, the company ended up establishing monopolies on these Indian markets, which for Burke, read the typical negative disastrous consequences of monopolies, such as price controls, wage controls, the disruption of supply and demand laws, which allowed businesses to reach more participants in an efficient manner. And for Burke, this was representative of the gross maladministration and misconduct of the East India Company. So for Burke, when he seeks the reform of the company in 1783, he does not argue to end the Company Charter. This was actually a different that Adam Smith.
What he does argue is that it's harder to recover its initial commercial purpose of trading for commercial aims in India while gradually loosening its control over local Indian markets and it was also being held accountable with the board in London. And for Burke, this would allow the East Indian Company to recover its commercial integrity while also relieving the Indians of the miseries that were encouraged by the company. And this is also reflected as part of imperial, political and economic thought, that the Brits... there has been running a debate about whether Burke was a defender of empire or was a critic of empire. And many of the argument is between them on both sides. But this still represented Burke's broad imperial, political and economic thought, that the British Empire did have a right in his judgment, due to a series of treaties and military victories with local rulers, to remain in India. But they also had the moral responsibility to act with the devil at hand, and therefore, preserve the internal liberties, customs and traditions of the Indian people. And for him, the East Indian Company disrupted these traditions by extending its power of the local Indian communities. I will say that he wrote a number of reports on the political economy of India. I mentioned I discussed one report at length in the book called the Ninth Report of Select Committee. This in many ways was even more of a passive objective analysis of the economic implications of the East India Company in India. This was written for public consumption, it has more of a neutral tone than the sort of the passionate pros of Thoughts and Details of Scarcity
Richard Reinsch (31:05):
It seems there are similarities when it comes to the empire and how the mother country relates to the colonies. You write at length about North America and Britain's possessions and the West Indies or the Caribbean. And Burke at length seems to be defending something like free trade. He's defending it for... He says, "This will be good for us. It'll be good for the colonies. It will help them to continue on their course of growth. And so we should loosen restrictions on their trade." While at the same time, he does favor the Navigation Acts, which you can enlighten us on that.
Gregory Collins (31:41):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (31:41):
In my understanding, it requires them at least to sell first to the mother country and to receive goods from England also. And then also when it comes down to the great debate for American independence, he defends the right of the empire to regulate internal affairs of the North American colonies, but says, "You really shouldn't do it. Not that often, not without a clear overwhelming reason." And he does that, I think, not from an ideological perspective, as you note, he does it because he thinks in the circumstance and the time, this is an approach that will yield the best results for everyone involved, including the empire.
Gregory Collins (32:22):
Yeah, absolutely. And first start off by saying that I start writing the book, and scholars, everyone, a lot of people today tend to read 20th and 20th century conceptions of free trade mercantilism, these classifications into prior time periods, when... In my research in this time period, these distinctions weren't as rigid as we make them out to be today, which is why this question about whether Burke... Extend this the question to Adam Smith also. The extent to which they supported free trade versus mercantilist policies. Take Burke for example, as you mentioned, he defended the Navigation Acts, which were considered the heart of mercantilism. They were the series of trade laws dating back to the 17th century, the modern law dating back to the 17th century that restricted the flow of goods within the British empire. And the goods had to be in an English man crews, English vessels, they had to go from English ports before going to foreign markets. And so this was a monopoly on the international colonial economy of the British Empire. But Burke also supported what we typically today consider to be free trade, free trade between England and Ireland, free trade between England and the Americans. Americans and the Caribbean British traders as well. So as I try to explain the book, Burke supported free trade within this context under this imperial British umbrella that was governed by the Navigation Acts. So I'll leave it to the reader the judge, to what extent does that mean he was a free trader versus a mercantilist. But his thoughts show that you could accommodate these two different strands of thought on trade policy during that time period, even Adam smith himself defended the Navigation Acts.
Richard Reinsch (33:55):
Yes, he did. That's right.
Gregory Collins (33:56):
The older forms of Navigation Acts because it's a famous line, "Defense is much more important than opulence." And this actually captures Burke's ways with regard to the Navigation Acts, that yes, in some ways they restricted the flow of commerce, but they also supported the national security interests of the British Empire. And, people don't realize, they also promoted the commercial interests of the British Empire as well. If you have the Navigation Acts, then you are assured that the transport of commerce, transport of goods will be on ships that won't attack you, as opposed to trading with ships of foreign enemies that may threaten the transfer of your goods and of your trade. And so there's a national security interest. There's also a commercial economic interest in the Navigation Acts as well. Now, for Smith, Burke also thought that the later iterations of the Navigation Acts were economically counterproductive.
Richard Reinsch (34:44):
Here are thinking towards the end of our time, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith or Edmund Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Scottish Enlightenment would say markets provide their own internal reasons for their continuation and will guide people to participate in them successfully, peaceably, prosperously, Edmund Burke disagreed with that. We have now moved forward from that period, from that debate. And that debate sort of continues. Who do you think was right?
Gregory Collins (35:13):
I'm sympathetic to Burke's arguments. I will also say, however, that I think sometimes descriptions of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers tend to read libertarianism, a little too much libertarianism, Smith himself praised the landed aristocracy in The Wealth of Nations
Richard Reinsch (36:09):
Gregory, thank you so much for your time. Wish you the best of success with this book, Commerce and Manners and Edmund Burke's Political Economy. This has been wonderful. Thank you.
Gregory Collins (36:18):
Great. Thank you very much.
Richard Reinsch: (00:18)
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today, we're talking with Furman Daniel about his new book, Patton: Battling with History. Furman Daniel is an assistant professor in the College of Security and Intelligence at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He's the editor of 21st Century Patton and he's the co-author of The First Space War, which sounds interesting. Furman, glad to have you to talk about Patton.
Furman Daniel: (00:50)
Richard, it's great to be here.
Richard Reinsch: (00:52)
Not General Patton, it's not General Eisenhower, I guess we say Ike. It's just Patton. And everyone... Automatically, a lot of different things come to mind. What got you interested in General George S. Patton?
Furman Daniel: (01:03)
I was lucky to have parents that introduced me to reading and military history and trips to military museums since I was a little, tiny kid. So, some of it is I've just been interested in these types of topics for a long time, but kind of like you said, he's one of these figures that if you're going to read about World War II or if you're going to talk to veterans or learn about this kind of stuff, it's hard to escape him. Because he has this larger than life persona, because he has the 1970 George C. Scott biopic and because he's always the person that people like to tell stories about, like to talk about, like to read and write books about, it kind of seemed like a natural thing, even as a little kid, to read books about him, read his own works, and the fabulous Martin Blumenson volumes, The Patton Papers. And then when I got a little bit older, when I got to be a professor, actually be privileged to write in books about him.
Richard Reinsch: (02:02)
And you've written extensively about Patton. You confront this early in the book. There's this Patton that's been presented maybe in popular culture primarily, but also, sort of part of the mythos even that he wanted to create about himself of the natural warrior, sort of a pagan spiritual warrior who in his soul touched a thread of military greatness perhaps and many Americans certainly know the movie Patton and just think of him as our great general. How do you think about him in relationship to America as a whole?
Furman Daniel: (02:35)
I think you put your finger on something really important, that separating out the popular George C. Scott mythos from who he actually was is really important. I often say that the biopic with George C. Scott is both a blessing and a curse. It's largely accurate and it shows lots of his exploits and keeps the memory of that alive. The George C. Scott portrayal is fantastic, with a couple of few small things, but it actually comes at a cost. It obscures the fact that he was a very complex person. He had a much more interesting and developed background than even the three-and-a-half-hour movie had time to go into and unfortunately, because movies are so vibrant, because that kind of popular mythos is so easy to digest and understand and enjoy, often that takes over. I'm reminded about the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the truth becomes legend." With George Patton, the legend has been printed and put on film and put in popular media in a way that I think now, even 75 years after his death, it's time to go back and say who was he really? And I think when you do that, when you actually say what was he really like and how was he different from the movie, it actually gives you a more interesting view on the man and a more interesting view on his success. The movie, the one thing it gets very, very, very wrong is the voice. So Patton's voice basically sounded like Mickey Mouse. It was high and squeaky and nasally and very different from George C. Scott's gravely, rough, kind of inspiring voice. It's very interesting when I give talks on Patton. A lot of times, I'll lead with an audio clip of Patton and it just blows people's minds because they have this popular view of George C. Scott standing in front of the American flag, big gravely, inspiring voice, "no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country," when in fact, George Patton actually kind of sounds like Mickey Mouse. It's one of many examples of the truth is actually in certain ways more interesting.
Richard Reinsch: (04:48)
My references here might be kind of weak. Do Americans still revere Patton in that manner of George C. Scott? I was thinking of popular culture references recently. I don't know if this is recent, I guess these came out about 20 years ago. Band of Brothers in the Bastogne episode, it's a very derogatory reference to Patton. They didn't need him to rescue them. They were fine. They just sort of put him down. And then the film Ike, which I guess now is also about 20 years old, which featured Tom Selleck playing Dwight Eisenhower in the planning phase of D-Day and right up to the moment when the troops launch. There's very derogatory reference that Ike is actually in the film because the justification of why Patton is going to be a decoy for the German Army. Where they positioned him is explained, but it's explained as sort of a punishment in the film because Patton is a racist, Patton is a hot head, he's arrogant and foolish. And I've wondered has that now become more of the Patton Americans think of?
Furman Daniel: (05:49)
I think Americans want the sanitized heroic version of Patton. I've been giving talks on him for five or six years now and sometimes, when I bring up his less savory side, the fact that he, like you said, was a hot head, that was a racist, an anti-Semite who at times, gambled with the lives with his men and did things that certainly would not fly today and really didn't even fly then, people push back. When I talk to audiences, they're like, "No. That can't be right." They're arguing with the historian that has written two books on it, telling me why the movie is right and my book is wrong. At first, I was shocked by that and then the more I've thought about it, I think people want that simple narrative. They want the narrative of World War II was the good war, George Patton was this kind of maverick who understood it and understood how to win and was willing to do whatever it took to win and that he rode in on a white horse, defeated the Nazis and then disappeared from the scene. And I think some of that is just people want clean narratives of history, even when history itself is rarely that clean narrative in reality. Some of that, I think, is the popular effect of books like The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw that again tells this sanitized version of history and then again, Movies like George C. Scott. So I wish people would get into historiography. The college professor part of me would love that, but I think people like their history to be a morality tale. They like it to be simple and Patton kind of fits into that nicely in a way.
Richard Reinsch: (07:24)
Some of the things I was reading in your book I'm now thinking about identity politics and critical race theory on campus, how long until Patton is canceled. It's something that a lot of figures might fall into that one, too, fall into that role. But I thought Patton, we'll see how long he holds out. So what's the truth about Patton? Was he the natural warrior with the soul of a general or was he something else?
Furman Daniel: (07:47)
The answer is yes, he was a natural warrior and yes, he was something else. So he had a lot of talent, just natural talent. He could shoot a gun. He could ride a horse. He could read and write. He could quickly analyze an unfolding battlefield situation. He was naturally talented at best. But he also worked exceptionally hard to make that natural talent better. I have often used the analogy of nobody gets to the major leagues or the NFL without a fair amount of talent. But they don't get there either if they don't work pretty hard. There's lots of talented people, there's lots of hard working people. To really excel at that highest level, you have to be both. And as I talk about in the book, he really spent his entire adult and much of his childhood life reading, writing, practicing military art and thinking about how he'd fit into this larger picture. And then once he made history, actually manipulating the historical record so that he appeared even greater than he was. So yes, he was a natural and yes, he also worked very, very hard to build on those natural talents.
Richard Reinsch: (09:03)
Something that stands out in your book is it seems as a child growing up, his imagination was formed around being a warrior.
Furman Daniel: (09:11)
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And his parents encouraged that.
Richard Reinsch: (09:14)
It was part of his ancestral line, as well. Two men died in the Civil War, fighting in the Army of Northern Virginia that were directly related to him.
Furman Daniel: (09:22)
And his bedtime stories were about his relatives and about the American Civil War and also, about stories from primarily the Old Testament in the Bible. So it's this odd, I mean actually kind of similar to my childhood, but stories about your relatives, stories about the Civil War, stories from the Old Testament. It was this odd mix of destiny and a morality tale and a you are part of this continuous line going back to King David of brave and virtuous warriors who made a difference. And it worked out for Patton, but in retrospect, it actually seemed kind of odd that at a very young age, you would tell kids this kind of stuff. And kind of anachronistic, as well, particularly the family's worship of their Confederate ancestors and their glorification of The Lost Cause mythos. But yeah, it's one of those things he was born into. He was told he was special and different from a very early age.
Richard Reinsch: (10:22)
The story of he's attacking on... When he's turned into an armored wagon, he loses control of the wagon and it kills some of the family's chickens. They lived on a large ranch in California and he justified himself to his father, I think he said he was on a military attack and it just got out of control.
Furman Daniel: (10:40)
So the story is, he built a wagon into a war cart and to test out the war cart, he crashed it into his family's chicken coop, killed a bunch of the chickens. A couple of them also ran off. He got in trouble or at least initially. His parents were about to punish him, but they asked him as good parents do before they punished him, "Why did you do this?" And he said, "Well, I was reenacting John the Blind of Bohemia's war carts from several hundred years ago." And they were like, "Okay. How do you know about John the Blind?" And he said, "Well I thought it was John the Blind." And this is a very young kid, probably 5 or 6 or 7 years old. The sourcing doesn't say his exact dates, but very young kid. I actually see this as a really interesting example. You can over-interpret it, but the example is he had already been studying military history to know who John the Blind was. He was putting it into practice by building this war cart and crashing it into the chicken coop. He got in trouble and then manipulated the historical record and created this mythical version of who he was and what he was doing to get out of trouble. And I think you see this again and again and again in his career. He worked very hard. He tried very hard. He had this natural talent and then he manipulated the historical record to make himself appear better than he was or to get himself out of trouble. So excellent that you brought that example up.
Richard Reinsch: (12:05)
It's interesting. A lot of your book is about Patton the intellectual historian and not an amateur intellectual historian. This is someone who read widely, particularly in military history. You report he reads the Quran on the boat that is taking him to Operation Torch, it was the invasion of North Africa. Because he was going to be dealing with a large Muslim population, he wanted to get a sense of Islam for himself. He published widely in military journals and that's one question I have for you is was that exceptional to repeatedly publish or was that expected of officers? But he did not do well at West Point. In fact, they held him back a year. He didn't get into West Point initially. He had to go to the Virginia Military Institute. And you say at one point, a lot of people think he may have been dyslexic. So how does all of that work?
Furman Daniel: (12:59)
I in the book, like you said, I document his early academic struggle and I address this question of dyslexia. So the real answer is nobody knows. And all of the doctors and people that are credible experts say you can never diagnose somebody, a patient that you haven't actually seen. So I purposely try to avoid making the diagnosis. My two cents, however, is he probably was not dyslexic. He probably suffered from having inadequate schooling as a child. He bounced around to a bunch of schools in California that were not particularly good. And where he struggled was in issues of foreign language and mathematics, which these school curriculums, some of the historians had gone back and looked at these elementary schools that he went to curriculums say they didn't really teach. So no wonder he struggled when he went to a US Military Academy, which was at the time primarily an engineering school with also a very heavy requirement for the French language so that he could read Napoleon and Jomini in the original. So I think some of his academic struggles are actually just a lack of preparation. It's just as valid an example of an explanation of this as dyslexia. So the second par of what you said, though, was he a lifelong reader? Yes. Absolutely. He loved reading. He loved writing and that to me does not seem like somebody who's a dyslexic. He also like you said, read things like the Quran with an eye for "what's the practical value?" I'm about to go into North Africa and deal with potentially millions of North African Muslim as the human terrain that I'm about to go into, so I'd better learn something about it. And so he, again, on his own initiative, read the Quran on the boat to North Africa. That was very unusual and the army in the 1910s and '20s and the inter-war period after World War I and before World War II, was not a particularly intellectual organization. It had some very intellectual people, Patton being one of them, but overall, it was not an organization that rewarded original thought, that rewarded deep study or rewarded publication in journals like Patton did. It rewarded seniority, it rewarded spit and polish, it rewarded marksmanship, lots of other things other than brain power. So Patton was pretty unusual there, as well.
Richard Reinsch: (15:35)
You write about throughout the book his publications in military journals. But he also seems to take it upon himself at no one's request, just on his own initiative to write long, we would say memos, about an issue and how he sees it or how he thinks the military should develop on this front based on his experience and his research. That is, to my mind, this is someone actively engaged in what he's doing and wants to come to terms with it in the written word and then spread that to others. So this is an intellectual man wanting to communicate ideas.
Furman Daniel: (16:18)
I think that's exactly right. The one thing I would add to that is there was a self-serving element of it. The self-serving element was "let me bring a solution to the Department of the Army so that they can see how brilliant I am." I see that as yes, he was genuinely curious and yes, he really thought he would have an opportunity to put it into practice at some future date, absolutely. But he was also trying to show off and basically show how smart he was by solving a problem or bringing forward a solution that nobody was asking about.
Richard Reinsch: (16:53)
There's always high ground and low ground for him.
Furman Daniel: (16:57)
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch: (16:58)
He serves in the military at times when the American Military is very small, very inconspicuous. Before World War I when we can talk about his trip into Mexico to get Poncho Villa and then he goes... He has World War I. But he remained in the Army in the inter-war years. It was a very small force. Did he communicate how he saw the relationship of the American Military and the warrior ethos in American society as a whole, which was skeptical of large armies and was primarily about business and private life?
Furman Daniel: (17:32)
Yes. He thought about these types of questions quite a bit. Probably, if you're looking for one single writing on this topic of how does the professional soldier fit into American society, I would point you toward his 1932 Army War College thesis, which was actually flagged as an honor thesis for the War College at the time, was circulated around the War Department. In this, he talks about this kind of tradition in the broader scope of military history between professional armies and mass armies and the strength and weaknesses of both. And then he tries to apply that to the American experience and says, "The Americans are skeptical of large armies, but they're not so skeptical of professional armies." And that the United States needs to overcome this. We need to build a professional cadre in time of peace so that we can use that to train and lead a mass army in times of war. So he's writing this in 1932, a good nine years or so before America actually had to do that. And I think he puts his finger on this problem. We don't want a military class in the United States and particularly in the inter-war period, we didn't have the budget or the political will for a large army. So he's trying to solve this issue which he sees as this sticky problem for the United States. How do you have the best of both worlds? So he does it, again, kind of on his own initiative. The War College made him write a thesis, but he way exceeded his mandate and wrote a lot more than they wanted and tried to, again, solve problems they weren't really asking about. But he was so influential that it actually got the attention of people in the war department and again, showed off his intellectual fire power during those lean years in the 1930s.
Richard Reinsch: (19:21)
And trying to articulate, you said, the reason why America needed a larger army and one better trained, better equipped and it needed to have a strategy, needed to have its mind right about what it's doing. I don't know if he was unique in this regard. You say he highlighted the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor well before the attack.
Furman Daniel: (19:42)
Yes. So he had two different postings to the Hawaiian Islands during the inter-war period and he was the head of Army Intelligence for our forces in Hawaii on a second posting and actually repeatedly warned about the vulnerability of US Naval and Air Forces on the Islands to an attack. He got that exactly right and this is one of the less savory moments that people like to forget about. He actually in the '20s and '30s advocated for the interment of Japanese civilians in the event of war. That hasn't aged well and most people don't know about it, but he talked about the need to round up Japanese-American civilians so they could be put in a prison. So yeah, he got some stuff right. He's got some stuff that hasn't aged, as well.
Richard Reinsch: (20:32)
Yeah. I'm thinking also... This is something we kind of skipped over in his biography. I did not know until I read your book, he competed in the Olympics in the Pentathlon in 1912. And the Pentathlon in those days was not a track and field event. I didn't know that, either. It was more broad: Fencing, swimming, shooting, running... I'm missing something.
Furman Daniel: (20:55)
Horseback.
Richard Reinsch: (20:55)
Horseback. And got... Was it he got fifth place? No he didn't get... Did he get fifth?
Furman Daniel: (21:00)
Fourth place.
Richard Reinsch: (21:00)
Fourth place. That's incredible. And you write about... I love this. I read it, the other editors, at the end of the swim, they have to pull him out of the water with a boat hook because they think he's about to drown. He's just expended himself. And then the same thing at the end of the run. People thought he might die. Then the fencing, he didn't know proper defensive techniques, so he just went as hard as he could at the opponent. That to me, that's Patton. That's the Patton that I know.
Furman Daniel: (21:29)
It is. The Olympics were a little bit different back then and the US in particular, most of the Olympic athletes at that period were actually US Army officers. Jim Thorpe was actually kind of the exception. During that period, most of our Olympic athletes are either rich college kids or Army officers because they had to pay their own way to the Olympics and they had to train on their own. This was long before the days of Olympic training centers and stuff like that. But yeah, Patton actually wasn't selected until a couple of months before the Olympics were going to begin. So his training program was eat raw steak and salad every day.
Richard Reinsch: (22:09)
Raw steak. That's incredible.
Furman Daniel: (22:12)
Raw steak. And quit smoking. And then when he was on the boat over there, he ran laps on the deck and created a pool on the deck where he could swim, suspended on a little mechanical arm that dipped him down into this pool so it would hold him while he swam and keep him from moving in the small pool. But yeah, his athletic career was much like his military career, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack and the consequences, you can worry about later.
Richard Reinsch: (22:43)
In thinking about his military career, something that emerges in your book beyond a way that is intellectual history reading he brings forward and it seems to allow him to separate himself from his peers in many ways. But he also gets interested early in mechanized warfare and in the defensive measures that he's a part of under General Pershing in the Mexico after Poncho Villa had raided a town in New Mexico, killed what 20 people? They go back into Mexico in pursuit of him and at one point, Patton leads a raid on what he thinks are part of his, I guess, posse, was using automobiles coming in four different directions, exit the automobiles and start firing. I didn't know that story, but to me, that was the entry point for him into thinking about mechanized speed warfare.
Furman Daniel: (23:36)
Yeah. And it's a wonderful theme because it's this odd combination of the past of this gun battle with banditos in Mexico. Patton has his revolver and at the same time, using Dodge automobiles to rapidly surprise this safe house for the bad guys, get them and then get out before reinforcements could come. It's this wonderful inflection point on this is old and new at the same time. It's familiar and modern at the same time and I think that's really interesting. Patton was interesting in that way because he was practical and romantic at the same time. He loved horses. He was one of the best riders in the United States Military and after World War I, he actually went back to the Horse Cavalry, but at the same time, he loved automobiles and he understood that automobiles and later tanks, gave mobility and in the case of tanks, protection and fire power that was a potentially war-winning weapon and despite the fact he loved horses, despite the fact he loved history and old-fashioned things, he was flexible enough in his mind to say, "You know what? Maybe the internal combustion engine, maybe armored protection, maybe some of these other things are worth me spending my time on and maybe the United States Military should get on board while we can." So like I said, an interesting reflection.
Richard Reinsch: (24:55)
Something I took from the book is this is a man who reads Julius Cesar and reads Napoleon, so he is aware of military marshal virtues, I think, clearly and how battles have been won and yet, to me, he's only willing to update that with technology or to see okay, how does that fit technology, the rapid, oncoming technology? He understands American business, as well, and what it can do and what it's going to produce and how that's going to change warfare. I thought, that sort of ability, that is an aristocratic ability he had, I think, to survey the whole and think about it.
Furman Daniel: (25:32)
Yeah. And I mention this in the later conclusion section of the book. He was lucky in that he came from an aristocratic background, knew people that were leaders of business, who owned automobiles in the early 1900s when automobiles were kind of a toy for the rich. And he also had this lucky part of his career where he just moved around and saw different parts of the country. So he saw factories in New England and New York. He saw harbors and he saw the stock exchanges in Chicago and things like that. He grew up in California and saw the ability of large farms and ranches out there, the ability to have ports on the West Coast to project power in the Pacific. He saw this and was again broad-minded enough, intellectually curious enough to look at this and see why does it matter that we can ship grain all over the world? Why does it matter that we have finance? Why does it matter that we can produce machines better than any country on Earth? And he, like you said, built that into his way of war and that was very, very, very forward thinking at the time.
Richard Reinsch: (26:40)
He had an interest in mechanized warfare. World War I, you write he's there, but he's dejected because he's not in the front. He's not in combat and he thinks that tank warfare to be his way in and a decisive way into the war. Talk about that.
Furman Daniel: (26:58)
You're exactly right. He gets over to France very early. He's actually one of the first American soldiers to go to France. He was on General Pershing's staff. He had impressed them in the campaign in Mexico a couple years before and he attached himself to Pershing's staff because he wanted to get over there as quickly as possible. He quickly got bored as a staff member for Pershing going to dinners in Paris, writing and censoring mail for the general, things like that, and he wanted very much to be part of a front-line unit and saw that he'd kind of gotten the golden handcuffs. He got over there quickly, but then wasn't doing anything. So he was actually in the hospital and as kind of a fortuitous thing, he overheard people talking about the tank corps and then started thinking while he was recovering in the hospital from a bout of jaundice, he started thinking the tanks seem like a new potentially war-winning weapon. They're looking for volunteers, so this is a new space that I can create for myself and there's not a lot of competition. And it gets me out of this admin hell I'm in attached to Pershing's staff. So he did it partly because he saw the value of it, but partly because he was willing to gamble on it. He wanted to do something that he thought was fun. So when he applies to the tank corps, actually they ask for a written resume. So he writes about a 20-page document about why he's the perfect person to be one of the first officers in the tank corps. He actually mentions the raid. And some of Poncho Villa's men in Mexico said that he's the first person in American history to lead an armored assault. A little bit of creative license, but we'll go with it. And then gets accepted and then takes off. He creates an American tank school. He visits the front line and actually watches British and French tanks in battle. He visits the Renault Factory and sees how French tanks are made and actually recommends new starter motor assembly and an armored bulkhead for the tanks. And again, it's energy and insight and initiative and pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. During World War I, he really carved out a place for himself as the expert in the United States Military on tanks.
Richard Reinsch: (29:16)
Thinking about, just moving forward here, World War II. He's in World War II. What does that reveal? Does that finally reveal him, those experiences, that leadership as a great general? Can we print the legend?
Furman Daniel: (29:33)
I think in a lot of ways, we can. I think World War II shows that he could do what he always wanted to do, which was be a general, command large units in battle and master large-scale mobile warfare. Mexico proved he was brave and could improvise on the spot. World War I proved he could master a new technology. World War II means he was still brave, he still could use new technology and new methods of warfare, but he could do it on a much, much, much larger level.
Richard Reinsch: (30:04)
Yeah. Thinking about his role in World War II, this is borne out in the movie, there's failure in the North African Desert campaign. There's a pretty decisive defeat and Eisenhower relieves one general and puts Patton in his place. And that's really where Patton gets his tremendous opportunity and he makes good on it and sort of pushes the German Army back.
Furman Daniel: (30:28)
The movie, for time's sake kind of simplifies that, but yes, an American general, Lloyd Fredendall had gotten the frontline combat command before Patton, but in some of the initial engagements with Rommel's Afrika Korps, most notably the Battle of Kasserine Pass, his soldiers don't fight very well and he loses control of the battle. There are charges of cowardice on some of Fredendall's staff against him and Eisenhower says, "Well we need somebody that can come in here quickly, get up to speed, fix this, restore morale and restore the American drive east across North Africa." And Patton is the logical person to put in charge there. And like you said, he takes charge. He really maximizes that opportunity.
Richard Reinsch: (31:15)
Yeah. It's the sort of movement, isn't it? As I was reading your book, it was the focus on moving which seemed to be, also, part of the Sicilian campaign and this desire to beat other generals to objectives is also a part of what he's doing, it seems.
Furman Daniel: (31:32)
So yeah. I think they're twin things. So Patton really, truly believed that movement was the way to win, that we would dominate our enemy by moving faster.
Richard Reinsch: (31:44)
It's interesting, just interjecting here. You wrote he studied extensively the German military manuals prior to World War II. And they clearly, the Panzer movement, that was clearly speed, right?
Furman Daniel: (31:54)
Right.
Richard Reinsch: (31:54)
That's what brings France to its knees in two weeks, so he was clearly onto something.
Furman Daniel: (31:59)
He had read things like Guderian's famous quote that the engine of the tank is more important than the guns or the armor and really believed that. Patton's view of warfare was if you create problems for your opponent and create confusion in your opponent's mind through speed and movement, you're constantly making them respond to things you're doing. You're maintaining the initiative and even if you're not perfect in your own action, the fact that you're putting friction, the fact that you're putting problems and chaos on your opponent by moving and maintaining the initiative, means that you'll be successful, even if on small things you mess up. He also was very much influenced by the trench warfare in World War I, where there wasn't a lot of movement. Where it was bogged down and people were slaughtered for a couple hundred yards of movement. He desperately wanted to avoid that. So how do you avoid that? You keep moving is how you avoid that. The second part of your question, though, did he do this to make himself famous, to beat other generals, to grab more land, to capture cities before other generals did? Yes. Absolutely. It's hard to fully separate his desire for fame and glory and headlines from his honest and genuine belief that speed kills, that speed keeps your enemies guessing and that's ultimately the operational tactical solution to victory.
Richard Reinsch: (33:28)
I was thinking of the Battle of the Bulge, the sort of last-ditch effort of Hitler to use his army to break through allied advances. Patton is involved in this, moving what, 100-something miles very rapidly, rescuing the 101st Airborne which is in Bastogne, which is famously depicted in Band of Brothers, the series. But he's successful and then moves forward rapidly, advances farther or fastest than the other American armies into Germany. Talk about that and how he's successful there.
Furman Daniel: (34:03)
Battle of the Bulge, as I depict it in the book, is the cherry on top for Patton's career. It puts together pretty much everything he had worked for his entire career up to that point. It's the largest battle he ever fights. It's the most important battle he ever fights. It's arguably the most decisive battle he ever fights and he wins it because on the front end, he's spent decades thinking about these types of problems. He has studied the German doctrine. He knew the history of German surprise attacks and he thought that bad weather would actually help the Germans, now a winter attack because it would mitigate American air power advantages. So he had thought through this and he had actually planned with his staff before the Germans even attacked, he'd planned his response. So the battle, before it even got fought was something he'd prepared for. He'd prepared his entire life for building this wonderful resume, but he'd prepared the week or so before, thinking this part of the front is vulnerable. What would I do if I was the Germans? I would attack here. What would I do if I'm Patton and the Germans do that? I would counter-attack into their flank by pivoting and moving my forces over and that's exactly what happened. He was able to anticipate what the Germans were going to do. He was able to respond to it and he was able to use his enormous charisma and energy to drive his men forward during awful weather, with low supplies, lack of food and things like that. He was able to inspire them to do wonderful things and ultimately relieved Bastogne. The folks from the Screaming Eagles, the 101, they still to this day don't like saved, they like relieved. I actually had an editor correct me on that in the book. They said, "Yep. Don't ever show that to the 101." But I think it shows his ability to think, act and inspire and then win based on that. And as you said, after the Bulge, a lot of the German resistance collapses and he argues to push into Germany as fast as possible to capture territory and deny it to the Soviet Union, already anticipating yet again, a step or two in the future, what's the Cold War going to look like? Wouldn't we be better off if we had more of Europe under our control, the Soviet Union had less of it under theirs?
Richard Reinsch: (36:25)
Yeah. That's a crazy thought. Patton, then we get into the post-war difficulties, though.
Furman Daniel: (36:31)
Yeah. He has a lot of post-war difficulties. He desperately wanted to fight in the Pacific theater, but was blocked by MacArthur, who was a brilliant general in his own right, arrogant person, very protective of his own place in history. In his own right, MacArthur had kind of blocked Patton from going over there. Patton then kind of asks for a transfer. He wants to go teach. He wants to either be at the war college or the commandant of West Point, but is actually denied those two jobs because technically, he's too high of rank for those military billets. So he's denied the jobs he wanted, actually teaching history ironically enough. He's given the job as Military Governor of Bavaria, technical job where he's Proconsul of Bavaria. So it's a Roman-sounding job title. He does a mixed job there. He actually does a pretty good job of getting the local economy running. He does a pretty good job of changing Nazi street names, taking down Nazi statues and symbols from public squares and things like that. What he does not do a good job of is controlling the narrative. So there are some German politicians in Bavaria who have Nazi affiliations that Patton refuses to get rid of or get rid of right away. This creates a public relations nightmare for Patton. He makes this public relations nightmare worse, by a series of comments, one of which compared the Nazis to the Democrats and the Republicans, saying, "Well if you want a job in Nazi Germany, kind of like being Postmaster in the United States, you need to ingratiate yourself to the local Democrat or Republican Party boss." That didn't go over so well. And then he had some displaced persons, many of whom were Jewish in his zone of control that had pretty abysmal living conditions, so that was kind of a scandal, as well. He ultimately gets relieved by Eisenhower for this combination of seeming to not care about the denazification, making some very ill-considered statements and then having this issue of displaced persons not being properly taken care of in his zone of control. He's actually then reassigned to a job that's a pretty good job for him. He's given command of the US 15th Army. You might ask, "What is the 15th Army?" Great question. It was an army that was originally going to be a combatant command. It was going to be an actual military force, but it wasn't needed. We won the war in Europe faster than we could really get the 15th Army into combat. So after World War II, they tasked it with collecting information and documenting the lessons learned for the war in Europe. They put Patton in charge of that and for the last three months of his life, he actually goes and does a fantastic job yet again, writing history of World War II and indoctrinating lessons learned. And while he's doing that, he also writes his own memoir which is published posthumously as War As I Knew It. So interesting last act. One that a lot of people don't know about, but one that's actually consistent with his overall approach.
Richard Reinsch: (39:43)
Yeah. It's interesting. Of course, there's West Point and the Virginia Military Institute and there's those official armies, but this is someone who I don't know, an overly bureaucratized world army training probably doesn't emerge it seems to me. You could easily see him being stifled. This is sort of...
Furman Daniel: (40:05)
Today you mean?
Richard Reinsch: (40:06)
Yeah. I don't want to make a facile comparison, but it seems to me this is someone who emerges precisely because of just the dynamism within American life and institutions of the early 20th century. Do similar figures in the military emerge today?
Furman Daniel: (40:21)
I really don't know. It's a question I poke at, but don't fully answer in the last two or three pages of the book. I'm tempted to say no and I'm tempted to say no, not because the American Military does not attract fantastic talent. We really do attract fantastic talent, but largely for the reasons you said about bureaucracy and limit to what people can do now. I would also add two other things, one that we've already discussed quite a bit, which is Patton had a very toxic side of his personality and in an increasingly bureaucratized military, one that's increasingly worried about the very real problems of abusive leaders, the very real problems of racial and sexual bias and things like that, I think any one of a number of his incidences would have absolutely destroyed his career. The other thing I think and this is a unique thing about the military now, we haven't given our junior officers and our mid-career officers time and the reason why that is, is we've had for the last sum of 20 years ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we've given people lots of deployment opportunities, we've given them lots of combat experience, but we haven't given them time to read. We haven't given them time to think. We haven't given them time to write. We haven't given them time to decompress. The mobilization schedule has been so hectic that I really wonder if we develop the intellectual side of our military the way we could or should or would.
Richard Reinsch: (41:58)
Well yeah. One could argue that this deployment schedule you're referring to is itself the result of a lot of static thinking.
Furman Daniel: (42:04)
And it's worth mentioning, the officers that are seen as the intellectual elite recently in the military because people like David Petraeus who is a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. People like John Nagl, again a Rhodes Scholar, people General Deptula for the Air Force. They came up a decade or so before, right? So they had most of the '90s. They got their combat done in the early '90s in Gulf War I and then they had a decade to train. They had a decade to go to school. They had a decade to think and write and go do these types of things. So Petraeus, H.R. McMasters of the world, people like that, maybe are the last kind of generation that has had that time.
Richard Reinsch: (42:47)
Yeah. Something to think about. Furman, thank you for joining us and for discussing your new book Patton: Battling With History.
Furman Daniel: (42:56)
Thank you very much for having me, Richard. It was a really fun time.
Richard Reinsch: (43:00)
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Today we're talking with Carter Snead about his new book, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. Carter Snead is the director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame University where he is also a professor of law and a teacher in the political science department. He is also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the principal bioethics advisory board to Pope Francis.
Carter, we're glad to have you on Liberty Law Talk for the first time.
Carter Snead (00:57):
No, it's great to join you. I'm a big admirer.
Richard Reinsch (00:59):
Great. So what does it mean to be human, and why do you think public bioethics is getting the answer wrong?
Carter Snead (01:09):
Yeah, so the first claim of the book is a kind of methodological claim, and the argument that I make is the best way into understanding law and public policy is to ask the question of what vision of human identity and human flourishing is underwriting the law and the politics and the public policy?
The question of what it means to be human is a perennial question that has been debated and discussed ever since human beings became capable of self-reflection. But my argument is, and this may be counterintuitive to some folks, some people think of law and politics not only separate from normative questions, but separate from what I'm referring to in the book as anthropological questions, as the contested question of what it means to be and flourish as a human being.
But the argument in the book that I make is that because law, fundamentally, and is really only intelligible through the lens of its purpose, which is to promote the flourishing of persons and to protect persons, the law has to have an ex-ante assumption about what person is and what constitutes human flourishing. Otherwise, the law, there'd be no way to know if the law is doing what it's supposed to be doing, there'd be no way to measure its successes, you have to have the metric of its purpose and the premises that underlie those purposes. And so my argument is that if you want to understand the law most richly, most deeply, that's the question that you have to ask. And it's especially true in the context of public bioethics, which deals with not only the question of what human flourishing is and what human beings are, but the boundary questions of who counts as a human being? Or who counts as a person rather, the question of who counts as a human being as a biological matter is an easier question, but the question of legal personhood and moral personhood is really the central question of bioethics.
And it becomes operationalized in law and policy when it enters the public domain, either through political branches or the judiciary. And so you'd ask, why does public bioethics get the question wrong?
Richard Reinsch (02:54):
And by the way, just wanted to say, I was pretty sure when I read the title, I knew what public bioethics is, but maybe just set forward that, too.
Carter Snead (03:01):
Yeah, absolutely. So bioethics as a field of scholarly inquiry emerged in the United States in the late '60s, early '70s, in reaction to a series of scandals, public scandals involving human subjects protections in Tuskegee, Alabama, and really all over the country, as documented by Henry Beecher in a article in the New England Journal of Medicine. And so as the field of inquiry, people sort of asking questions about how to think about the clinical relationship and doctors and patients and the ethical dimensions of that relationship, as well as the public policy questions associated with the governance of science, medicine and biotechnology. And when I say public bioethics, what I'm referring to is that area of law and policy, the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods, and that takes place at the level of the political branches. It takes place in legislatures at the state level and the US government, the federal level. Also takes place in the judiciary, the most prominent bioethics case and maybe the most prominent case of the modern era is Roe vs Wade, which set in motion a cascade of legal policy and ethical disputes over abortion. And so the distinction between bioethics as a field of inquiry and bioethics as public bioethics, is the latter relates to governance, it relates to actually the work of lawyers and judges, and lawmakers.
But the interesting thing that happened is, each case, Tuskegee, the Beecher studies, as well as the case involving the just-aborted newborns, the solution was rooted in a kind of vision of human flourishing and human identity that didn't track the violations that they were responding to. That is to say, every single individual that was violated in those three instances, was not operating at the full range of human autonomy.
Richard Reinsch (04:17):
What has shaped public bioethics in America? Because you mean to uproot, or really challenge, the standard operating premises and legal assumptions and conclusions of this field, but what's shaped it?
Carter Snead (04:30):
Yeah, so public bioethics as a field of law and public policy is reactive. I mean, a lot of law and policy is reactive, but it's been reacting to scandals. And the first piece of legislation that relates to public bioethics was the National Research Act, which was adopted in the early 1970s, in reaction to these scandals that I just mentioned a moment ago. So there were these scandals of 22 human experiments, documented by Henry Beecher, which involved the most prominent and elite institutions in America, including the Federal government. Research protocols in which individuals, especially very vulnerable individuals, were treated in grossly abusive ways. We had children with intellectual disabilities and injected with hepatitis, we had elderly patients suffering from dementia injected with live cancer cells.
This was all done almost entirely without any mention of consent at all, and those narrow cases in which consent was secured by proxy, nothing of the material risks in these protocols were even mentioned. Tuskegee, the 40-year-study, natural history study of syphilis done by the Public Health Service, the US government in Macon County, Alabama, in which they systematically deceived poor African American sharecroppers about what they were doing. It's been reported that they colluded with local health authorities to prevent them from having access to antibiotics, which became standard of care for syphilis in the mid 1940s. For 40 years, this went on.
Richard Reinsch (05:53):
Wow, that was incredible reading that in your book. And also they persuaded medical providers locally not to treat these men.
Carter Snead (06:00):
Yes, that's exactly right.
Richard Reinsch (06:03):
It's incredible.
Carter Snead (06:04):
It's shocking. It's a shocking scandal. It was a shameful abuse of an already vulnerable community in Alabama where I grew up, and then a third scandal that is actually less, and a lot of people have heard of Tuskegee, a lot of people have head of Beecher and his study.
Not many people have heard of the third scandal that set in motion American public bioethics, which is a scandal involving researchers from the United States who traveled to Scandinavia, probably with funding from NIH, although that's not been definitively established, to perform experiments on babies that had just been aborted. And Scandinavia, they performed abortions by C-section, and they would remove the babies intact, and they would expire shortly thereafter. These doctors would go to Scandinavia, contract with the abortionists and the women who were involved and would perform kind of grotesque experiments on these imminently dying newborns who had just been aborted. And The Washington Post had three front page articles about it in the early 1970s, it was a huge scandal. In fact, the Kennedy family, Eunice Shriver, sister of Ted Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, was so upset by this that she reached out to her brother who convened hearings and her daughter, Maria Shriver, who everybody knows is the former First Lady of California and successful American journalist, organized a protest with the Catholic schools in the DC area to come to NIH to protest this research. And so, after a series of hearings, the National Research Act was passed which imposed a moratorium on this live fetal, live neonate research. They created the National Commission on Bioethics, and it was meant to be a kind of national response to these emergent ethical questions that had public policy dimensions.
But the interesting thing that happened is, each case, Tuskegee, the Beecher studies, as well as the case involving the just-aborted newborns, the solution was rooted in a kind of vision of human flourishing and human identity that didn't track the violations that they were responding to. That is to say, every single individual that was violated in those three instances, was not operating at the full range of human autonomy. They were vulnerable, they were diminished, either by circumstances or by their physical condition, their cognitive impairments in the case of the Beecher studies, and the case of immaturity with respect to the babies that were being experimented after they had just been aborted.
The solution was to extend informed consent, which is rooted in the concept of autonomy and self-determination, as the primary bulwark against these kinds of abuses. But you don't need to think about it for very long to realize that people who are not capable, either by virtue of circumstance or their cognitive impairments, of exercising free will to the extent that would be necessary to protect themselves through participating in an informed consent procedure. That's not the right solution to the problem, and that, you can see immediately that the issues of vulnerability and embodiment that arise in these contexts and the asymmetry between the problem and the solution, the solution is suited for a population of able-minded, able-bodied people who are not subject to circumstances or conditions that impair their free will.
And so that kind of asymmetry plays out from the early 1970s to the present day, and in my book, I take the three vital conflicts of American public bioethics, the vital conflict of abortion, the vital conflicts relating to assisted reproduction, and then at the end of life, end-of-life decision making and assisted suicide. And what I try to through this analysis of the premises that underlie the law regarding human identity and human flourishing, I find that we have very much the same problem. The problem is the vision of the person that's assumed by the law is one that doesn't reflect or track the lived reality of the people who are endangered in those circumstances.
Richard Reinsch (09:51):
So talk about this, you set the standard, define the standard, call it embodiment versus expressive individualism. What is embodiment, and why should we follow that standard?
Carter Snead (10:06):
Yeah, so the simple insight, and it's a simple insight and I think it's an insight that's easy to understand and easy to verify based in reflecting our own experiences, that we human beings are embodied. That is we don't just have bodies, but we are bodies. That is we come into the world embodied, we experience ourselves as bodies, we experienced one another as bodies, we experience the natural world around us through and as our body. We're living bodies, we're dying bodies, we're subject to the fact that our bodies are corruptible, the fact that we are dependent upon one another by virtue of our vulnerability as embodied beings.
We are mutually dependent and we're subject to these natural limits. And from that reality, the law and policy and the way we relate to one another has to be informed by that reality of embodiment. Now, you take that vision of the human person that is taking the body seriously, and understanding that embodiment is an essential aspect of being a human being, and you contrast that with the anthropology of what Robert Bellah, social scientist who wrote the classic in 1985, Habits of the Heart, and then later philosopher Charles Taylor, and after a fashion philosopher Alistair McIntyre and Michael Sandel, and others refer to as expressive individualism. It's a very different vision of what it means to be a human being. It's a kind of abstraction, it conceives of a human being, primarily as a disembodied will.
What defines the human person is his or her will. And what constitutes human flourishing is the interrogation of the interior of the self, to discover one's own unique, authentic, original, maybe transgressive truths, and then configure your life and your destiny according to what you discover inside yourself. You express it, and then you configure your life accordingly. And the fundamental unit of human reality is the individual, is the atomized individual will. And so the world is a world of individual atomized wills seeking to pursue their own hopes and dreams, and everything else is instrumental to that end. Relationships with other people, the natural world itself and fundamentally, also the body is an instrument to realizing the goals of the will. And within this framework, there are no unchosen obligations, there are no obligations that you didn't agree to in advance. Everything is viewed through the lens of your projects and your purposes as you devise them through the internal interrogation of the depths of yourself.
in Paradise Lost, you have this amazing scene where Lucifer addresses the other fallen angels, denying their creaturely status before God and saying, "We have no recollection at all of being created. You tell us that we're creatures that have obligations of creatures to their creator, but we don't remember being creatures. We don't remember any time when we weren't operating at the height of our powers, when we weren't self-determined, when we weren't powerful and able to make our own way in the world."
And Robert Bellah, when he did hundreds of interviews with Americans in the 1980s, found that this is a vision of human identity that is very common in the United States. And Charles Taylor traces the genealogy all the way back to Rousseau, who sort of transposed and reconfigured the human identity from a position that is defined by one's role in a particular community, or society, or family, or civilization, to focusing on the inner voice as definitive and decisive regarding what one should do and be. And this took hold, not surprisingly, in artistic and literary communities and the romantic literary movement even before that. And you see artists who were reacting against the sort of linear, harmonious traditional standards of art, to try to plumb their own interior depths, to find their own originality and to project it, and not just to project it in their art, but to live it in their lives. And then somehow, in Bellah's account, is through developments in psychology and Freudian psychotherapy and different corporate forms and different kinds of sociological changes. That notion of expressive individualism moved into the conventional communities and the conventional populations.
And then in the 1960s and '70s, the sexual revolution sort of fixed on the proposition that human sexuality and sexual expression is a key element of expressive individualism, a key element of defining oneself. And it's not surprising that around that very same time, we see this emergence of public bioethical questions involving abortion, assisted reproduction, end-of-life decision making that largely track that same anthropology.
Richard Reinsch (14:07):
And just thinking about these three very controversial areas, expressive individualism would seem to have a hard time with the unborn and saying, "Why are they worthy of legal protection?" Anyone who is not sort of fully active and able, mentally and physically, but it extends out to children even, to infants, to the elderly. A lot of people come under that standard, that purview. So I guess in a way you've deified the individual or you've made the individual sovereign under this standard.
Carter Snead (14:43):
Yeah. No, that's exactly right. I mean, it's not just that one doesn't recognize his or her obligations to children, the elderly and the disabled, one can't even give an intelligible account of what they are. They remind you of Bertrand de Jouvenel's comment about certain social contract theorists, that they're like childless men who forgot that they were children. And even before that, obviously, in Milton, in Paradise Lost, you have this amazing scene where Lucifer addresses the other fallen angels, denying their creaturely status before God and saying, "We have no recollection at all of being created. You tell us that we're creatures that have obligations of creatures to their creator, but we don't remember being creatures. We don't remember any time when we weren't operating at the height of our powers, when we weren't self-determined, when we weren't powerful and able to make our own way in the world."
It's a kind of anthem of expressive individualism, and it's not unlike the passage from Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood versus Casey, when he talks about what's essential to the kind of liberty that he is espousing, that includes the right to abortion, is the liberty to define for oneself, the mystery of life, the universe and to follow one's spiritual imperatives unmolested by others or the law.
Richard Reinsch (15:56):
Yeah. Now, expressive individualism, I would argue, is sort of a heretical thinking here within liberalism. I don't think liberalism is doomed to end up there.
Carter Snead (16:07):
I agree.
Richard Reinsch (16:07):
And it's not necessarily the case that it, as a certain scholar at your school would argue, that this is sort of an inevitable outcome of liberalism in America, I don't think that is the case.
Carter Snead (16:17):
I can't imagine who you're talking about.
Richard Reinsch (16:18):
I can't either, but here we are. And it did emerge, freedom as will, I think is what you're articulating here, and this sort of deified person. And by the way, I mean, that notion goes back, I mean, to the transcendentalists, early 19th century America.
Carter Snead (16:33):
Oh yeah.
Richard Reinsch (16:33):
I mean, the famous Harvard "Divinity School Address."
Carter Snead (16:37):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (16:38):
Which has sort of looked into your own self for your truth.
Carter Snead (16:41):
That God is in every man.
Richard Reinsch (16:42):
God is in every man. So in that regard, I understand it, but I guess... So the public bioethics emerges in the 1960s, and clearly something does change throughout every western country in this time frame, as the West sort of, I would argue, sort of gives up on some things and tries to latch on to new things to understand itself. You have a quote in there, and I think it's also key, and it's from Walker Percy and I love the quote. Everyone has an anthropology. Everyone has an anthropology, yours is embodiment, that we have to understand ourselves in relationship to others, and to other people, and the gifts that we owe them. So what happens... I mean, I think we know very well, I mean, our entire world as Americans is dominated with this idea of expressive individualism. I mean, have you thought about, well, what would it look like if your idea, if your anthropology came into play?
Carter Snead (17:31):
Yeah. In the book, I make the point that expressive individualism is not utterly false, right? It's a kind of distortion and a deeply incomplete account of who and what we are. It is true that we are individuated, right? We are individuals. It's also true that we're free. And those are important things, and it's even true that the interrogation of the depths of one's self can be valuable to try to discover certain kinds of truths and certain kinds of ways of being that, in some cases are correctly transgressive of repressive norms and wrongheaded standards in our culture, in our society and our tradition. But that's not the whole truth, you run into trouble when you think that's the whole truth about what we are.
I talk about augmenting the anthropology of expressive individualism with an anthropology of embodiment, which is to say, we have to also embrace the proposition that we are, as embodied beings, vulnerable, dependent and subject to natural limits, which situate just in relation to other people that bring with it certain kinds of unearned privileges and unchosen obligation. And in order to bring about a culture, a society, a legal framework that takes that seriously, we have to look to what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving which are essential for the flourishing of embodied beings. You have to have these things. You have to have a world, you have to have a society and a community in which there are people who make the goods of others their own goods, without expectation, without a contract, without a transaction, without thinking, what am I going to get out of this? That they're actually making another person's good, their own good.
And we all depend on that, literally, for our survival when we come into the world, and at that those moments in our life when we become heavily dependent, and for sure, for everybody, as our life is nearing its end, when we're completely dependent on others. You have to have these networks in place. And in order to preserve these networks, you have to have a people that are willing to practice the virtues of what MacIntyre calls the virtues of acknowledged dependence. That includes the virtues of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving. The virtues of uncalculated giving are things like just generosity, hospitality, what he calls misericordia, which is the virtue of accompanying other people in their suffering, as well as gratitude. The idea that you have to be grateful for the fact, that need to practice gratitude. You have to be open to the unbidden, you have to be tolerant of imperfection, you have to be humble, you have to respect the dignity of others, you have to be honest.
And these are all the virtues of authentic friendship, rightly understood in their kind of Aristotelian sense, leavened by, as my good friend Yuval Levin reminds us, by the proposition that all human beings are created equal, something that Aristotle didn't quite understand or agree with. And to have a community, to have a civilization that takes the body seriously, the civilization that cultivates those virtues, that supports those networks, and the law as we all know, can play a role, has a wide array of very granular mechanisms, including just leaving people alone and giving them space for private ordering to allow them to create communities that take care of folks in those ways without interfering. But in those instances where that help and care is not forthcoming, then sometimes the law does have to intervene to protect people. And so a society that takes seriously, a community, a legal culture that takes seriously embodiment, is one that is committed to shoring up, protecting and advancing networks of uncalculated giving and ungrateful receiving and helping people. And helping can sometimes just mean leaving people to private order to cultivate those virtues and practice them.
Richard Reinsch (21:08):
You have three areas here where you sort of set forward how embodiment would change current law, current practices around abortion, assisted reproduction, and death and dying. Kind of off the wall thought here, I don't know what you think of this. Since we've been living expressive individualism for a while, I had a thought. Is identity politics sort of the dialectical outcome of expressive individualism? Because what I was thinking is, there's a point at which people realize that this is sort of empty. It sort of implies the sovereignty component sort of drops off at a certain point, and you actually want to recreate community. You actually do want to recreate some sort of dependency, some sort of meaning, order, something that has value and status. And that's igniting identity politics in a certain way. It's an attempt to recreate community apart from this sovereign self that we've been living with now for several generations. Have you thought about that?
Carter Snead (22:11):
Yeah. No, I think that's a really interesting idea. I mean, Bellah and others say that one of the problems with expressive individualism, and Peter Lawler said the same thing, is that it is disorienting. The radical freedom of expressive individualism is so disorienting, because we can't understand ourselves if we are a blank slate. We don't know who we are, what we're supposed to do. Alistair McIntyre says, I don't know what to do unless I understand the stories of which I'm a part. So without a narrative, I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. And so when people are said, "Okay, you're completely free. Free of tradition, free of family, free of social roles, free of any obligations to your children or your elders, or anybody. Go for it, whatever you want to be, you be that thing." That's a kind of disorienting and terrifying and inhuman state to live in, because we are relational.
We are social animals. And people start to feel anxiety, and they start to feel disoriented and dislocated, and it makes perfect sense that people will want to cling to community, to roles. And this kind of tribalism that we're seeing reflected in identity politics, as you just pointed out, it could very well be a reaction to that. The other thing that people have observed is that when you are expressive individualism, the dislocation, the kind of nakedness of the expressive individualism makes people susceptible to tyranny. It makes them easier to dominate. It makes them easier to fold into tribes and to organize and to mobilize, precisely because humans have that need to be part of something, to understand themselves in a larger narrative. The problem for identity politics, it seems to me, is it doesn't have the resources to actually defend membership in-group if membership is simply a matter of what I choose to identify myself as.
Richard Reinsch (23:52):
I think the membership is formed by the ability to hurl accusations against the transgressor.
Carter Snead (23:59):
Right, certainly, that's the way to distract people.
Richard Reinsch (24:01):
Yeah, in this case right now it's the white, male, heterosexual, but some sort of scapegoat. So that's the unity which unites a lot of these different identities together. You look around too, there's nothing really inside me worth value, but there are these dominant opinions that I can attach myself to. And identity politics tells you who's wrong, who's right, what the future can mean if we have power, and what we should do with it. And say, like Ibram Kendi, the goal was totally equitable racial outcomes, which is sort of its own element of perfection that we can never achieve, but we're always striving for it, but a lot of people will suffer along the way. So yeah, as I thought about that, it seems to me this, and it's radically identified with people in their 20s, or seem to. These are clearly highly educated white college students, and I've thought as I was reading your book, maybe they just know that this is over.
Carter Snead (24:53):
Right. Yeah, no. It's interesting. I mean, it's an unstable haven, though, it seems to me, because the rules for identity politics and who's in and who's out seem to be constantly shifting. And as a strategy, if you're genuinely not a member of a discrete and insular minority that has a history of abuse and mistreatment and you're simply an ally, you're never quite stable. The only way that you can secure your place is to be a constant critic of others. You see this on college campuses. I used to know kids when I finished high school and a lot of my friends... I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, which is a weird little college, and it was blessedly free of politics. People had no idea what was going on, people didn't read newspapers or watch TV. It was just it was kind of a weird little bubble, which was great. But we grew up in Birmingham, went to public school. My friends who went to places like Wesleyan, Smith College and Amherst and those kinds of places, Cornell, Vassar, they came back at Christmas break-
Richard Reinsch (25:49):
Different.
Carter Snead (25:49):
Like they were intoxicated by all the new information, all the identity, all this stuff. And the current moment in American politics feels like we're being governed by the RAs and the hall staff of Wesleyan College. Feels like the same kind of intensity and anxiety that accompanies that setting, has made it to... And maybe just because people have grown up and now they're in charge, but my friends would, first of all be intoxicated by all the new ideas, but then there was this extraordinary anxiety of how do I situate myself in this narrative of oppressor or oppressed, where I'm not the enemy? And it was a constant struggle to figure out how to define themselves within that narrative, to where they're on the right side of history, they're on the right side of the conflict. And a lot of them had nervous breakdowns, a lot of them just became completely freaked out. People would vandalize their own dorm room doors with epithets that they could then claim victimhood status. These are mostly wealthy white kids in Birmingham, Alabama. And that kind of anxiety is something that I feel like... I mean, again, Twitter is not real life, but if you go on to Twitter, it doesn't feel that different to me.
Richard Reinsch (26:52):
Thanks for indulging me on that. It does seem that the way I'm reading the transgender community that that notion of altering your body, surgically altering your body to make yourself into a new gender, that that is right out of expressive individualism and right out of an anthropology that you've defined here.
Carter Snead (27:15):
Yeah, I mean, you see it in the transhumanist community in a very dramatic way also. These are very successful, high tech entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, and it's a religion, I mean, there's no way around it. Being a transhumanist is a religious commitment, and these are folks that want to download their consciousness into some kind of mechanized apparatus, they think of the body as a death sentence, they think of the body as a prison, they want to transcend the body through technology and through psychopharmacology. They really see it as a blank slate, and their mission is to leave the body behind. They really do want to get rid of it. They think of embodiment as a curse, as a general matter. And that is as pure an expression of expressive individualism as you can imagine, but anybody whose will doesn't correspond to their body and wants to change their body to conform to their will, is, again, as you point out, a reflection of a kind of expressive individualism.
Richard Reinsch (28:09):
Yeah, and I think behind that, too, is when I get this new body, I'll be a new person. I think that's also the implicit assumption. I'll be a new person in the sense of I'll have a new lease on happiness, which is also a part of this mindset. Question for you, the embodied disembodiedness, how would that change medical research? Have you thought about that? One critique is medical research moves very slow in this country because of bureaucracy and the development of new drugs, but how would experimentation happen?
Carter Snead (28:39):
There are different levels in which one could think about that question. I mean, if you think about the purposes of medical research, and how that might change if we really took seriously the vulnerability, mutual dependence and natural limits that are necessary entailments of an embodied community and people who are embodied selves, who encounter one another as bodies, you would be focusing more on those kinds of research projects that are aimed at responding to vulnerable others rather than trying to free people from their bodies or to help them to transcend their bodies through, and this is the old therapy versus enhancement, distinction and debate. How do you define... I mean, the purpose of medicine is to be in service of health, right?
And the nettlesome question, of course, which we dealt with in the President's Council on Bioethics, back when I served with general counsel, Leon Kass, is how do we define health? Do we define health according to a baseline of normal flourishing or is health a function of desire? Is health a function of the subjective wishes of the person involved? And medical research is driven by markets obviously, and markets are driven by preferences. And if an entire culture or a segment of the culture that's most wealthy, that are going to drive the revenues for drug companies and medical device companies, are focused on these interventions that are more in service of desire than they are to restoring persons to natural functioning, that could be something that would change if there was a shift in the direction of taking the body seriously.
And defining health in light of bodily flourishing is different than defining health in light of the wills and desires of a subjective individual. As far as research protections go, I think we would be more thoughtful about the principles that we use to craft protections for human subjects of research. I mean, human subjects, for those of you listeners who don't follow these things closely, research involving human subjects is in fact a transaction in which a researcher is intentionally instrumentalizing a human being as an object for purposes of obtaining generalizable knowledge. That sounds like a bad thing. That was one of the initial sort of nesting places from which bioethics emerged.
How do we fix the potential for exploitation of human subjects in this context? Because the purpose of the researcher is not to help the human subject, that's not the point, the point of the exercise is to obtain generalizable knowledge. If I oversee a clinical trial in which people get sick or get injured by the testing of a drug, that's a successful trial. It's not successful in terms of bringing that drug to market, but it's successful in the sense that it's obtained generalizable knowledge. We now know this drug is dangerous. And that's good, it's good that we learned that, unlike the clinical setting, where the doctor and the patient have the exact same purpose, that is to heal the patient or to ameliorate his or her symptoms. The interests of a person who enrolls in A clinical trial as a human subject, is the hope that A, you're not in the control group, you're in the group that gets the drug, and B, that the drug works and that you get some benefit from it. But that's not the point of the protocol. I'm sure the researchers hope the same thing, they hope that the drug works, but that's not their purpose.
So the way we've tried to salvage that circumstance of instrumentalization and potential exploitation is through the principle of informed consent. They say, "Well, we can transform this relationship of instrumentalization into one of collaboration where the subject agrees, makes a knowing, intelligent and voluntary agreement to participate, understanding the risks involved and the possibility they might not even get the drug that's being tested. We try to save the situation that way." But even with able-minded people, there's risks of what's called the therapeutic misconception, where people, because they're so desperate and they want to be benefited by the drug so much that they actually convinced themselves that the researchers are their doctors. And in some cases, the researchers are their doctors, and they're just operating in a different role, which makes it even more risky.
You have people being euthanized because... They don't even have clinical depression, they're just tired of living, so put that to the side. You have kids who have spina bifida and it's treatable, and is not a fatal condition, and in fact, the fact that it's not a fatal condition is treated by the authorities in these countries as an argument in favor of euthanasia, because their metric of suffering, because they're not imminently dying, they're not dying at all, is greater because they're gonna have more years of suffering than a person who is dying in six months.
But forget that situation, imagine a scenario which the crucible from which public bioethics emerged in the first case, where human subjects are of a certain kind that don't have the capacity for consent or they don't have the full capacity for consent, because they're unborn babies, because they are suffering from dementia, because they are intellectually impaired in some way, cognitively impaired in some way. That, if we took the body seriously, we would ask ourselves the question of how do we develop a framework for research ethics and protections that focuses on that population? They're kind of an afterthought in our framework for human subjects protections. We focus on the able-minded people who can sign a consent form. And there are risks involved with those folks, and then we sort of say, "Well, for those other groups, we should act in their best interest and subject them to minimal risks." And there are different concepts that people use, but it feels to me under-theorized. And I think that we could do a better job of reconstructing medical research in a way to think through how do we involve those folks in our research? Which we want to do, because that research benefits those populations without subjecting them to exploitation and abuse.
Richard Reinsch (33:36):
Okay, we'll go to your heart issues here. Controversial questions, death and dying. Embodiedness, I presume, would be counter to the push for euthanasia throughout Europe, where it's legal, where they even have suicide centers in Switzerland, I've read about these places where you go. But you would emphasize, I presume, the care and what comes about through walking with people through the late stages of life without killing them or creating this opportunity for them to kill themselves if they want to.
Carter Snead (34:10):
Yeah, no. That's exactly my position. And my critique of... I focus on the American landscape in the book, although in the European situation it's more advanced and more problematic.
Richard Reinsch (34:19):
But the Belgium situation seems to be it's going beyond just consent, actively killing people.
Carter Snead (34:24):
That's right. I mean, in Europe, we have circumstances where, in the name of compassion, we are seeking to euthanize, directly kill children who are not capable of even participating in an informed consent process. And it's an injustice that these children can't be dispatched, and the amazing thing is, you've got cases where spina bifida... And putting aside the psychological circumstances, you have people being euthanized for autism in certain parts of the world. You have people being euthanized because... They don't even have clinical depression, they're just tired of living, so put that to the side. You have kids who have spina bifida and it's treatable, and is not a fatal condition, and in fact, the fact that it's not a fatal condition is treated by the authorities in these countries as an argument in favor of euthanasia, because their metric of suffering, because they're not imminently dying, they're not dying at all, is greater because they're gonna have more years of suffering than a person who is dying in six months. And it moves very, very quickly.
Once euthanasia is under discussion, talk about directed killing, nobody wants to commit suicide anymore themselves. They want to get an injection from their physician or whomever is going to dispatch them. And as you point out, we're not just talking about voluntary euthanasia, we're talking about non-voluntary euthanasia, meaning no request on behalf of the person who's being euthanized to euthanize that person. And there are even reports of involuntary euthanasia, that is euthanasia over someone's objections, or over the objections of someone's parents. There's the most famous example from a nun who said that she didn't want to be euthanized, and I think this was in the Netherlands, it was written up in Herbert Hendin's book, and I think Neil Gorsuch covered it in his book too, who said, "I don't want to be euthanized." But she was euthanized over her objections on the grounds that because she was religious, her grounds for opposing euthanasia were not rational.
Richard Reinsch (36:11):
That's incredible.
Carter Snead (36:12):
That's a sobering thing, but here in the United States, we're not quite as advanced down that pathway. But the fundamental critique that I make is that both in the context of the law of end-of-life decision making, where we're talking about the decision to discontinue life-sustaining measures, as well as assisted suicide in those 10, 11, 12 jurisdictions of the United States and allow assisted suicide. The problem again, is an anthropological problem, because in crafting the law of assisted suicide, and even to a certain extent crafting some of the laws connected to discontinuing life-sustaining measures, the underlying assumption about personhood and flourishing is this expressive individualism concept that human beings flourish when they are free, autonomous choosers, radically individuated and atomized, and the highest flourishing is the assertion of their unencumbered selves.
But that is not an accurate description, because of embodiment, and because of the impact embodiment has on a person as they're dying, or even when they're just very ill, or depressed, or what have you. That's not an accurate sociological description of what it means to be sick. When a person is sick, and when a person is dependent upon life-sustaining measures, especially a person who has lost the capacity for cognitive decision-making, and that's the example I talk about in the book regarding discontinuation of life-sustaining measures, people who are not capable of participating in decisions about their own care in the moment, because they've lost the capacity for making those choices. And in terms of assisted suicide, that's not a fair description of who commits suicide and what a person needs under those circumstances.
The social science evidence is very clear, the vast majority of people who have suicidal ideation are suffering from treatable depression. That's not an autonomous person, that's not a person who's operating at the height of their powers. A person who is unconscious and can't make decisions on their own behalf is not an autonomous person, so why would you look to the anthropology of expressive individualism to craft remedies, the right to be left alone, the right to kill yourself, as the legal response to that human context? It's a category mistake. Just take a generic case of a person going to the doctor because they're sick. You don't go to the doctor to assert your unencumbered will. You go to the doctor because you're sick and you don't know what to do and you want someone who has your best interest at heart to take care of you.
Richard Reinsch (38:26):
Yeah, I suppose too, here, it's why does euthanasia moves so fast once it settles in, in law? And then, from what I've read, it's they have this garden variety case. It's your 90-year-old, terminally ill patient who doesn't want to suffer anymore, and that's kind of what we're told. But it rapidly moves beyond that context to now, like the Netherlands children. I think I've read teenagers. It's sort of this underlying dynamic we've been discussing that the expressive individual can't really make sense of these lives, and why want to live them.
Carter Snead (38:55):
And quality of life, which becomes the grounds for euthanasia, a life that is dependent and diminished has no quality through the lens of expressive individualism. The greatest thing you can do when you're faced with a life of dependency and decline is to author the conclusion of your own story by the assertion of your unencumbered will to choose self-annihilation. Again, that's not a fully human account of those circumstances. That's not what those patients want or need in most instances. Now, there may be occasions, there may be instances in which a person of wholly sound mind is facing a painful terminal illness, refractory pain, and they want to commit suicide there or they want to decline life-sustaining measures.
And I'm sure there are circumstances like that, but when we construct law and public policy, we don't just think about those exceptional cases, we ask the question of what happens to those vulnerable communities who are subject to fraud, abuse, duress and mistake? Those elderly communities, the disabled communities, those minority communities who are already vulnerable. And now we open up the laws, you say, to allow this pathway for assisted suicide or even euthanasia. And all of a sudden, you've endangered an entire population of vulnerable people for the benefit of some very privileged folks who are a small sliver of the community that wants this legal change. And I'm sympathetic to those folks who want to change the law in that way in some respects, but we can't change the law when doing so is going to endanger those people on the margins of our communities because of their disability, their age or even their racial status.
Which is why, interestingly, in the debates in America over things like Terri Schiavo, you may remember. And Terri Schiavo in 2005, the dispute over life-sustaining measures for a woman in persistent vegetative state in Florida. There was a massive expression of support on the part of the African American community and the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress. Jesse Jackson and others went down to Florida to argue against the doctors discontinuing her life-sustaining measures, joining Ralph Nader, by the way, Joe Lieberman, Tom Harkin, disability rights advocates. People forget that, they think it's like a right wing, left wing, religious/secular thing. It's not. There are actually communities, the disability rights community, even the American Medical Association, to their great credit, oppose assisted suicide, because they see system-wide consequences of opening that up as a pathway. And that's, by the way, a huge distinction between the United States and Europe. In Europe, the physician professional societies support assisted suicide and euthanasia. In the United States, they don't, and that's the reason we have not gone, I think.
The main reason we haven't gone in the direction, and you see in those states like California, where the local chapters of the AMA, like the California Medical Association, what they do is they declare a position of neutrality towards the state law proposed on assisted suicide, and then it passes. But in states like Massachusetts, in 2012, when they had the referendum, the Massachusetts Medical Association said, "No, this is not medicine. This is not the role of a doctor." Ezekiel Emanuel wrote an op-ed to that effect.
Richard Reinsch (41:52):
Yeah. Assisted reproduction, how would embodiment interact here?
Carter Snead (41:57):
The framing of the legal question, the anthropology that animates the law, operates at the level of framing and then at the level of execution. So in the book, I provide a couple of quotes to give you a sense... So ART is interesting, because unlike abortion, which has been basically constitutionalized by the Supreme Court, any major changes in the law of abortion in the United States would require the Supreme Court to depart from, change direction from the trajectory established by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey. Assisted reproductive technology not been constitutionalized, and so there is room for the political branches to legislate, but the reality is they haven't done it. It's basically a wide open wild west in the United States in this area, and other than the restrictions of licensure and certification for physicians and the law of medical malpractice, there's basically no oversight of assisted reproductive technologies.
And so you what you end up seeing is, no limits on the number of embryos that can be conceived and transferred. You have multiple gestations and multiple pregnancies, although that number is going down, thankfully. You have routine practice of sex selection in IVF clinics, they call it family balancing, but that's an overwhelmingly widely practiced technique, an adjunct to IVF. You've got growing industries of people that want to screen embryos before implantation, that is in-vitro embryos, for non-medical traits, traits that relate to height, or IQ, or eye color, or skin tone, or hair. This is a growth industry, and the law at the moment says nothing about that. And again, I'm not making a comment on the attitudes of people who seek fertility treatment at all, I don't think that those people are seeking to express their unencumbered wills. I think those people just want to be parents, and they want help from reproductive endocrinologists and fertility care doctors to help them realize the dream of becoming parents. But the law isn't animated by that impulse, because if it was, the law would be shaped in a way that would take seriously the category of parenthood.
It would take seriously the notion that you can't be a parent without a child, and that every stage of the process, the goal should be conception and birth of a child who is welcomed and loved unconditionally by her parents. The law is constructed rather, without any guardrails, which reflects the views of John Robertson, who was a recently deceased law professor from University of Texas who was instrumental in crafting the legal landscape in the United States, both in his role as a law professor, but also in his role on the many advisory committees on which he served over his long and illustrious career. And his role as the head of the Ethics Committee for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which is the most powerful lobbying organization in the country.
And I begin chapter four on assisted reproduction with the quote that says, "Reproductive technologies are means to achieve or avoid the reproductive experiences that are central to personal conceptions of meaning and identity." That's the vision of human identity and flourishing that animates the total absence and vacuum of law in the United States regarding assisted reproductive technologies. And we had a guy named Dr. Gerry Schatten, who at the time was a very prominent scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm not sure where he is now, but he was very prominent, heavily involved in reproductive technologies, and especially genetic screening of in-vitro embryos. And we asked them, we said, "Come give us a talk, come give us some testimony before the President's Council on bioethics. We're focusing on assisted reproduction, and tell us in one or two sentences what you think the purposes of reproductive medicine are. What is the point of this exercise?" And he had six weeks to think about it. And he came back, and he gave us this quote, and it's really quite arresting. December 13th 2002. He said, "Reproductive medicine is helping prospective parents to realize their own dreams for a disease-free legacy."
Now, both of those quotes are clear that they are privileging and prioritizing the desires and the will of individuals who are seeking a very deep form of expression that is realized through participation in these reproductive technologies. The word that's missing from both of those quotes, is the word child, is the word son or daughter. And that, to me, is a kind of evidence for the proposition that the anthropology that underlies that ideology, the anthropology that then animates the complete vacuum of law in the United States, is one of expressive individualism. It's the idea that the whole point of this is to find your truth, to express your truth, whether that means being a parent or not being a parent, and it utterly misses the human context of how human beings come into the world. They come into the world situated in relationship to other people, relationships, biological relationships, and those relationships have unearned privileges and unchosen obligations, and that's completely invisible. The word child doesn't even appear in those quotes.
Richard Reinsch (46:54):
And that would largely seem, to my mind, to kind of come out of the jurisprudence of abortion in America.
Carter Snead (47:01):
You're right, and the jurisprudence of abortion in America has influenced every other aspect of public bioethics, not just because of the politics of abortion, although that's a hugely important piece of the puzzle. I remember very clearly back in the early 2000s, going with the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics to meet a prominent senator, a man of the left, who had previously authored consumer protection laws relating to assisted reproduction. And we asked him directly, said, "well, are you willing to augment those laws to provide additional protections for patients, additional protections focused on the health of children who are conceived with IVF, and focusing on the women who go through this process?" And he was very blunt. He said, "I can't join a coalition that includes Sam Brownback, who was a prominent pro-life advocate. He's like, "That's too politically risky for me, I can't do it." I was surprised by how blunt and candid he was in that meeting. And so there's obviously a brute political reality, but the deeper issue is that the concepts of privacy and liberty and now, equality, if you think about the sense of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the partial birth abortion cases as the normative rationale for abortion, those rationales are in fact themselves rooted in expressive individualism. And those rationales are invoked, because of that, in the context of assisted suicide, embryo research, and elsewhere.
So you had this thing called The Philosopher's Brief. And Washington v. Glucksberg, and Vacco v. Quill, which were the two assisted suicide cases before the Supreme Court in the mid '90s. When people argued, and unsuccessfully, in a 9-0 rebuke, the court held that there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide, either in the due process clause or in the equal protection clause. And there was a famous brief, called The Philosopher's Brief that was filed by some of the most famous philosophers living at the time, John Rawls, Nozick, Scanlon, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ronald Dworkin, they all... And people who disagree with each other on important questions, all signed a brief saying, "If you take Planned Parenthood versus Casey seriously, and if you take the mystery of life passage from Anthony Kennedy, and you think seriously about the autonomy, freedom and self-determination that the court has enshrined and entrenched in that decision, then this is an easy case. Obviously, you have the right to assisted suicide, if that rendering of liberty is the legally operative rendering of liberty. And it was humiliating for those brilliant philosophers who published their brief in the New York Review of Books also, because that view was rejected nine to nothing by the US Supreme Court, but it nevertheless shows how potent and durable and widespread this anthropology of expressive individualism is across public bioethical contexts.
Richard Reinsch (49:37):
I think that's an interesting way to wrap up, Carter. I think that really ties all this into a nice bow, as we think about public bioethics. Carter Snead, thank you so much for discussing with us, your new book, What it Means to Be Human.
Carter Snead (49:53):
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Steven Teles discusses his excellent study of the Never Trump movement, its players, and how they left the fold of their party.
This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Mitchel Sollenberger and Mark Rozell on the use of ‘czars’ by American Presidents. Sollenberger and Rozell are authors of The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution. The conversation places this twentieth century presidential phenomenon in constitutional, political, and historical context. We focus on […]
Arnold Kling on the opportunities and challenges that are ahead for America's post-COVID 19 economy.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Arnold Kling about the post-COVID economy. Arnold Kling is an economist. He's a scholar and he's a writer, frequent public commentator on policy issues, which he approaches from an economics perspective. He writes frequently for EconLog, a sister website to Law & Liberty. He also contributes to Law & Liberty from time to time, usually on issues related to macroeconomics. He's the author of numerous books, including The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across The Political Divides, Specialization and Trade: A Re-Introduction Economics and also Unchecked and Unbalanced. Arnold, this essay that we're going to discuss, and I'm glad to have you on Liberty Law Talk, this essay appeared in the summer edition of National Affairs and is a sort of an exploration of our economy during this COVID-19 pandemic and how the government is trying to interact with it. Maybe talk more about the themes you explore there.
Arnold Kling (01:22):
One theme is that I feel that the general macroeconomic paradigm has been breaking down for a while and it's particularly not useful for this situation. There's a ton of confusion out there about what's going on. We can get into sort of what that paradigm is.
Richard Reinsch (01:40):
Before that though, so we got a number back yesterday, 33% GDP growth in the third quarter. Second quarter GDP had declined by, I've got 31.4%. What do you make of those numbers?
Arnold Kling (01:56):
Not much, actually. Either one, because GDP is most reliable when the nature of the economy is pretty stable and the economy is very different in this COVID environment. So if you're trying to measure output, what you're trying to do is add together sort of apples and oranges. And if the relative value of apples and oranges changes, then that addition process doesn't really work so well. And that's what's happened, is that a lot of the so-called lost output, that means the decline in GDP, is stuff that all of a sudden people decide they don't want. Like they don't want to take their airplane vacations, stay in hotels. They don't want to go to conferences. They don't want to go to big sporting events. So to value that output at yesterday's prices and say, well, it's lost, I think it isn't correct. And the output that's regained, kind of a different story, that may be more or less valuable depending on the nature of that. So anyway, GDP is a tough measure. Like you're trying to add together the value of healthcare services and manufacturing of nails and pins. It's a difficult measure. So what I prefer to track, see how well the economy is doing overall is employment. And year over year from September to September employment is down by 10 million or about six or 7%. So that to me is an indicator of sort of how off the economy is and that's pretty far off. That's a major year over year decline. So rather than try to figure out what's going on with the GDP numbers, I would use the employment numbers. I would say that the economy has really been thrown off. We have 6%, 7% fewer people working than you did a year ago.
Richard Reinsch (04:07):
And that kind of gets into your essay. One you talk about macroeconomic dominant paradigm. Right now you don't think is very useful. And this can be a way to think about how the economy will evolve after the pandemic. So maybe talk more about that.
Arnold Kling (04:25):
Yeah. So the dominant view is to treat the whole Academy as if it were a single factory, I call it the GDP factory where everyone's producing the same thing and all of a sudden demand falls off for what our single factory produces. And then the factory hires fewer workers. That's greatly intuitive. It's a very intuitive picture, but it's wrong. It's just wrong. But the challenge with the economy isn't getting enough demand for what the factory produces. The challenge is to allocate people properly. So you can think of a situation where you have a thousand people and you don't know really what they're good at and who's best at things and which things are valued. How would you allocate them? How you decide who becomes a garbage collector, who becomes an entertainer, who becomes a farmer. The economy challenge is to figure that out. And when the economy is unstable for a while, people mostly have that figured out. Millions of people actually change jobs every month because the economy is constantly reconfiguring in response to changes in technology, other factors. So my view of what happens in a downturn is that in concept, the economy gets confused, it gets mixed up. I think of it as a Rubik's cube where the pieces have been really shuffled and it's going take a long time to get them back into the place.
Richard Reinsch (06:00):
What kind of a crisis do you think COVID poses to the economy, comparative to say the 2008 financial crisis, so to speak?
Arnold Kling (06:07):
The 2008 financial crisis, first of all, it's very concentrated in the financial sector. And the economy, I think, is still in the situation where everyone is trying to run with minimal cash reserves as possible. So people wanted to buy a house with no money down, firms were heavily indebted and so you have this very fragile financial situation and then a relatively minor crisis in the broad scheme of things and the real estate industry just cascaded through because people shouldn't have, not so much people, but businesses and especially banks didn't have the kind of cash reserves to get through a crisis. So that's a very different situation. People were not caught so much short of financial reserves. Although businesses, especially small businesses, could have been in better shape. But there was just a change in what people wanted to do. People did not want to be eating in restaurants next to people who might be sick. They didn't want to go and undertake business travel. They didn't want to go into the office. And if they didn't go into the office, they didn't go out to lunch near the office. So all these activities had to change. So it's like the Rubik's cube got really messed up and it's going to take a long time and a lot of turns of the cube to get it back in shape. And another complication is that you don't know how much of that is short-term and how much that is long-term. And then if the fears of the virus went away tomorrow, a lot of these activities would come back. But even if the fears of the virus went away tomorrow, people have learned to do a lot of things differently. I think most people who have the luxury of working from home would not want to go back to commuting five days a week. Maybe two days a week, maybe three, people have learned to do, I bet there will never be as many business conferences as there were a year ago. It'll just be, "Oh, we don't really need to have this conference."
Richard Reinsch (08:21):
What do you make of habitation patterns? I mean, you've read a number of sort of anecdotal pieces. I've had read in The Wall Street Journal of people leaving high cost locales like San Francisco and decamping to Utah and they're still working there. Their company is still based in Silicon Valley, but they're now working from Utah, much lower cost of living, et cetera. Do you see that as really a huge change to the urban landscape in America?
Arnold Kling (08:47):
Potentially yes. But we don't know how much that will be. I mean, people are arguing back and forth. Some business executives say working remotely doesn't work well. Other people say it does. I think the typical worker is probably pretty happy to not be commuting and so on. Not have to deal with that. So some of these changes could be changes that would have happened anyway, that have just celebrated by... I mean, everyone just, they're building what I call remote work capital. People learning to use Zoom and those kinds of tools. There's a combination of short-term changes and long-term changes. And so we talked about the GDP number which showed a sharp decline that included a lot of short-term changes. And then the bounce back with some of the reversals of those severe short-term changes. But there's still a lot of long-term changes that are going to be worked through. I mean, do we think that higher education is going to revert back to what it was a year ago? I suspect not.
Richard Reinsch (09:53):
Yeah. I was just going to say, you in the National Affairs essay, you talk about the way unemployment, just lingered at pretty high levels after the financial crisis in 2008 and didn't really come down until maybe seven or eight years later. And that's sort of maybe a way to think about the patterns of specialization that you discuss. But then do you see something like that happening with sort of the post-COVID economy that unemployment remains at seven, 8% as we figured out this stuff?
Arnold Kling (10:22):
The question is, how do we understand what's going on? I think it was misunderstood in 2008 and even more misunderstood. Now with this old paradigm of the GDP factory. If we just somehow put enough money in people's pockets, they'll go to the factory and everything will be fine. Whereas it's a really a problem of figuring out where people fit in, in reconfiguring the economy. In a way it's odd that it took so long to reconfigure the economy in 2008, or is it that things got so bad. But I think again, it was because banks and businesses were operating on very thin margins. And so a lot of people went under that wouldn't have had to if they'd had more reserves. And also the policies that were followed were again, based on the assumption of GDP factory, if anything, what you need, in my opinion, when the economies get shaken up in this way, there's a lot of entrepreneurial activity because people need to start new businesses and figure out new projects that employ people. What's the best use for the people who are not working. Are there 10 million people who were working a year ago who are not working today? I mean, it's actually, there are many different people, many people got in jobs who didn't have them before many people lost jobs, but did have them, but on net 10 million people not working. That's an entrepreneurial opportunity to find something useful for them to do. But that means you have to encourage entrepreneurship. And under the Obama administration, you had discouraging entrepreneurship because they kept piling on regulation. And one of the quiet things that the Trump administration has done is to loosen those regulations so that entrepreneurs could work more quickly. But the current situation is so extreme in terms of the reconfigurations that are needed, that you need just an awful lot of entrepreneurial activity, and it's going to take a long time for entrepreneurs to figure out how to use these extra 10 million or so people.
Richard Reinsch (12:27):
You write about that, the government in 2008 responded with a lot of stimulus and also the Federal Reserve engaged in quantitative easing, trying to take on productive assets off of financial balance sheets and putting it on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. And then now in this crisis, a much larger stimulus package was passed over 3 trillion. And the Federal Reserve, to a lot of people's thinking, has sort of crossed a new line and is now lending directly to businesses. Talk about that. How does that relate to sort of this macro economic thinking.
Arnold Kling (13:02):
It's really odd. It's based on this old paradigm. In the GDP factory paradigm has something called a supply shock where the factory has to shut down because it can't get new parts or a machine breaks down or something. And even a conventional macro economist would look at what's going on and saying that has elements of a supply shock in it. That the economy isn't supplying the stuff that people want in the current environment. And the cost of supplying things has gone up. You could see that in terms of like schools having to reconfigure themselves and come up with new equipment to open. So there's a supply shock, but the way the policymakers respond is entirely trying to boost demand, which is really strange. If you think about it, the government shoving money at people and then saying, but don't go to restaurants, we're going to close them down. Don't go to small business, we're going to close them down. It's really kind of feudal. What needs to happen is there needs to be some reconfiguration. Again, if fears of the virus decline, which is probably the best thing the government could do is sort of take steps to reduce people's fears of the virus. Then some of the other activities will come back, but then a lot of activities left to be reconfigured. Maybe people have been projecting for a long time, that education could be reconfigured, sort of some different combination of in-person and remote learning. The value of putting a thousand kids in a lecture hall it just can't be there compared to giving that same information online. There may be other things that are much more valuable in person, but time for higher education to figure that out. Things like business conferences, again, will be reconfigured. So the longterm changes, they're not affected by stimulus measures, they're affected by people in business and in these institutions figuring out how best to do things.
Richard Reinsch (15:14):
How would you advise, I mean, to me the stimulus was sort of this democratic process where something had to be done, something large had to be done. Because the government had shut down so many businesses, state governments, local governments. The government had to act in some way to compensate people for those losses. But how would you prescribe, if we could follow what you're saying, what would be measures to take?
Arnold Kling (15:39):
Okay. The first thing that comes to mind is some kind of employment subsidy. So you're giving employers reason to hire people. You could just have a one year or two year moratorium on the payroll tax, for example, would give employers more reason to hire people, that would be one.
Richard Reinsch (16:03):
Make business startups easier. Make it easier to form and start new businesses.
Arnold Kling (16:09):
Yeah. And any kind of deregulation on those lines and things like clearly reducing business liability for people getting COVID when they go to work or go to an event. And as long as the business isn't sort of unreasonable and forcing people in close quarters or whatever.
Richard Reinsch (16:33):
We are likely though to just continue to bail out these different parts of our economy, hotels, airlines. One can see higher ed getting a bailout. We haven't even touched a lot of the states that are way over their heads here. I see that as a possibility.
Arnold Kling (16:51):
And that's something where you wish that there were some thought going into it, as opposed to just who's got political power. But if you think about it, the political power will be, people have businesses in every congressional district. So if the real estate industry were in trouble, which is not, you would get a big bailout. But it did in 2008, things like auto dealers will probably get whatever they ask for and higher education will get whatever they ask for, you've got institutions everywhere. And it's a very powerful lobby. A real challenge is what to do with small businesses. What I proposed months ago was to have a general line of credit available to small businesses that's sort of equal, proportional to the revenues that they were getting prior to the crisis. But the longer this goes on and the longer the small businesses are down, the more unreliable they are, even if they were given very low interest loan. Again, the best subsidy there is somehow reduce the fears of virus.
Richard Reinsch (18:06):
If I were doing the exact opposite. At least the reporting that I see every time there's a spike in cases that we're told and this is of its own an alarming fact. Do you fear, I ask a question about the Federal Reserve, my understanding is that lending facility they were given by the first stimulus, they have not even remotely exhausted. Do you fear that there's a new Federal Reserve coming into being, in relationship to businesses and the economy?
Arnold Kling (18:33):
Yeah. There's the potential really for almost the end of capitalism, as we know it, and that the Fed basically has so much power over particular businesses, whether they live or die. Even if they didn't use that politically, which they probably won't do that as they're not going to all of a sudden saying, well, every business owner who supports a particular political party gets credit and the other ones don't, I don't think they'll go that far. But they don't have the wisdom to make the decision that local banks do about which businesses are likely to survive and which are not. And they will be under pressure to give credit to the airlines or whatever. Even if airlines have a low probability of survival, which means there's less credit for other businesses. But it's very disturbing that to centralize the decision-making about credit to that extent. And what I think the Fed ends up doing is kind of re-decentralizing it in a way, but in a weird way, by hiring companies like BlackRock or whatever, to tell them what to do. So it's the opposite of the bank with the local knowledge, making a decision, large firms at the behest of the Fed.
Richard Reinsch (19:56):
Elite driven financial system, truly.
Arnold Kling (19:59):
More like a Chinese system where you want to centralize financials.
Richard Reinsch (20:05):
I know there's a monitor limit on what the Fed can do. But is there a time limit? I mean, does it just sort of keep on until they've exhausted that supply or?
Arnold Kling (20:13):
I don't know legally, but I don't think the history shows any instance of the Fed ever losing a power that it gained. The history is it just gets more and more power. And Congress is talking about giving it more and more mandates. A mandate to worry about climate change, for example, mandate to worry about economic inequality. And the more mandates it gets, the more power it will hold on to.
Richard Reinsch (20:41):
Systemic racism was one I've heard, also at least the Fed should be concerned about systemic racism. It springs the obvious thought here, or maybe not obvious. You've got those in control with power, making very top-down decisions, as opposed to a more market process of people interacting based on what they know about their discrete situation in the market. And that should inform lending. And that leads to this sort of waste of capital or not the most efficient deployment of capital. And so you get a very different kind of economy too.
Arnold Kling (21:14):
Capitalism is an evolutionary system. There's a lot of trial and error. I mean, that's how we're going to get these 10 million people employed. And there are a lot of businesses are going to start. At least half of them will fail. And over time, people will settle into jobs that are productive. When you have this centralized allocation of resources, you don't get that evolution, you mostly get attempts to prop up what's existing businesses. There's a little bit of value in propping up to think that their problems are temporary. So again, if it's a business has a problem because the fear of the virus is very high now, but the problem will go away very quickly if the fear goes away, fine. But what you're going to get is long-term propping up of institutions and businesses that really have lost their viability for a long time. And that takes you to a bad place.
Richard Reinsch (22:12):
You write, towards the end of the essay, about debt. Household debt and also public debt. In the midst of this crisis, you've got this large stimulus, there's a call for even more stimulus. We don't seem really to be constrained that much by thinking about what we're doing to our debt and already very high debt. And then we've got, of course, these sort of structural debts and forms of entitlements that are going to be coming to over the next few decades, which it seems we can't even begin really to pay off. Why did we stop worrying about debt? Both the debt households carry and also public debt?
Arnold Kling (22:52):
Well, I haven't stopped worrying about it.
Richard Reinsch (22:54):
We seem to be the only ones.
Arnold Kling (22:56):
Yeah. I think the reason is that we've survived so far. It's sort of like the guy who jumps out of a 10-story window and halfway down says well, it's fine so far. Government debt is a weird thing. And that as long as people are confident that the government can repay it, that the interest rate will be low and it will just be able to keep rolling over debt. Once people lose confidence, then they won't supply credit to the government anymore. The interest rate goes up and it becomes a self-fulfilling thing where it hits the debt crisis. So my point is you don't gradually notice a debt crisis. You can either be in one of two states. You can either be trying to borrow or in a crisis. There's no kind of simple warning, gradual onset. It comes suddenly or not at all. And I guess that's a weird thing for people to get their minds around. So what's happening now is we're creating a situation where a crisis will be harder and harder to resolve. That's what having all this high debt GDP at high amount of unfunded future liabilities means. Is that if and when a crisis occurs, it won't be much more severe than it would have been had we been more prudent. So it's not that we're gradually bringing on more of a crisis it's that we are sort of making a bigger bomb to go off when the crisis occurs. There will be much worse devastation when a crisis occurs
Richard Reinsch (24:46):
You think about the debt situation America was in after World War II, which is understandable. But a younger country, a country that was about to embark upon a tremendous productive surge in its capacity. And a country that was really the one of the few countries standing at the end of the war. That was a totally different picture than where we are. Now we just seem incapable of paying this debt off.
Arnold Kling (25:08):
There are two main differences. One is we actually did for a little while and payed our way out of some of the debts. The second is that we really ran government surpluses for most of the years following. At the time we had two budgets, we had the official budget and we had Social Security, which was running big surpluses at the time because the Social Security system was very new. They weren't paying out very much to people and a lot more people were paying in than paying out. But the social security surplus was not counted as part of the budget until the late 1960s. So all through the 1940s and 50s, people were looking at the budget and saying, "It's about balance." It's actually a big surplus. So we actually ran surpluses for about 15 years and that paid off the debt. Like if you pay down your credit card bill, you pay down your debt. The government was doing exactly that. We're not close to that. Now we're including Social Security, but Social Security actually, there's more money being paid out than coming in. There's nothing like that where we've been running bigger and bigger deficits in good times and bad. Trump ran a bigger deficit even in the pre COVID economy. So yeah. No, you're right. It's just not at all like World War II.
Richard Reinsch (26:37):
We are accustomed to deficits year over year, we're accustomed to debts and it's been a part of American government for four decades. The speech that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave in the early 1980s, calling attention to this fact that this had become an American way of life and how odd that was. And I think now we just sort of, we just accept this. There's no real debate going on.
Arnold Kling (27:00):
And part of the problem is that those of us who've been warning about deficits and debt have been warning about it for a long time. And it's easy to say, well, you made the same argument 20 years ago for 20 years, we've run bigger deficits and nothing's happened. It's like, again, you've jumped off the 10th story, you've made it all the way down to the second floor now, still nothing wrong, so you just extrapolate from that.
Richard Reinsch (27:28):
So the bomb going off could be inflation likely that doesn't seem to be a fear at all either. You've written about inflation for Law & Liberty, but I think it relates to the situation.
Arnold Kling (27:40):
And even that doesn't necessarily get you completely out of the crisis because things like Social Security and Medicare, these unfunded liabilities. They go up in inflation. So my view of it is it will cause tremendous political conflict that, basically the way we resolve political conflict in recent years is just spend money. Give people wealth, now you're going to have to take it away. You're going to have to tell somebody that they're not going to get paid. You're going to have to tell a bond investor, sorry, you're not going to get your money. Or you're going to have to tell a Social Security recipient, you're not going to get your money or something.
Richard Reinsch (28:21):
And the government would do that through inflation, would be one way?
Arnold Kling (28:25):
Yeah. Again, that may or may not work. But the point is the politics will be very very rough and there'll be a lot of strife. So you want to simplify the costs and say, Oh, your children will be poor or something. That's not really what happened. What will happen is that the government that claimed that it can satisfy everybody will now be in a situation where it's got obligations to lots of people, but it cannot satisfy. And there's fight over who bears the pain. It's a big cost.
Richard Reinsch (29:04):
Yeah, it seems to me, it's just thinking about this, the financial crisis of 2018 to reveal that we couldn't keep doing what we were doing in a lot of ways, both financially our financial system, our government debt payoff system, we didn't really restructure to take account of that. COVID seems to be revealing also these kinds of same problem, but we don't want to heed them in any sort of accountable, responsible way.
Arnold Kling (29:31):
I think that there's kind of a trade-off between running a business or an economy at high efficiency and running it in a way that's robust. So for example, if you have a really complex supply chain, it may be very efficient, but if one little part of it breaks, then trouble. And financially, if nobody's got any reserves, if the typical consumer run into any financial difficulty at all can't function, or if a small business that loses revenue for a month and has to default on its loan, it's not a robust system. That's a very fragile system. And I think that's the way we've kind of run. And after 2008, the claim was, "Oh, we're not going to do that again. We're not going to have this kind of fragile financial system." So when we came right back to it, come right back to a situation where a lot of financial institutions and a lot of corporations could only operate if there was no adversity at all. So running an economy that's not fragile, it's a real challenge, I guess, politically, but it would mean changing the ways the laws treat debt versus equity. For example, people to run less fragile businesses with sort of lower returns on equity, but more ability to withstand the shot.
Richard Reinsch (31:05):
Yeah. There's no political will to do that. Arnold Kling, thank you so much for talking with us about economics post COVID. We appreciate your time.
Arnold Kling (31:14):
Okay, thanks.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org.
Today we're talking with Joshua Mitchell about his latest book, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. It's my honor to welcome Josh Mitchell to the program. He's one of our best thinkers and writers about politics. In the academic discipline of political theory, he's the author of a number of books and numerous essays and reviews, including Tocqueville in Arabia, which I reviewed at Law & Liberty, which was an account Mitchell provided of his teaching of Tocqueville's democracy in America to students largely from the Middle East when he was at Georgetown's campus, I think it was in Doha. Josh, we're glad to welcome you to the program and to discuss American Awakening.
Joshua Mitchell (01:04):
My pleasure. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
Richard Reinsch (01:08):
A basic question here at the beginning, what has woken up in America?
Joshua Mitchell (01:12):
Periodically, America has religious renewals, Tocquesville observed this, we know this from history. What has happened is that the left has decided that we have to have a different kind of accounting system. What we need to measure is transgression and innocence and there's a whole scale that you can use to assess who you are. I think one of the big mistakes that people make is they say, "Oh, identity. I have an identity. Identity is just this kind or that kind." Lebanese or French, whatever it happens to be, black or white. Identity politics is about the kind that you are.
When we say I have an identity these days, we mean something more than time. We mean the group of which we're a member that has a certain status in the great continuum of innocence and transgression.
What I'm suggesting is that's a colloquial use, but it's not an adequate use. What identity politics is trying to do is to measure relationships between groups, not a person, groups that individuals are instances of that have a certain victim score, or transgressor score. There's a whole hierarchy here. They're literally trying to build a world where we look at each other in terms of our identity score, whether we're a transgressor or whether we're a member of the innocent group. That's a profound taxology. What I do in the book is I set up what I call becoming identity politics of innocence, versus what I call the liberal politics of competence.
Richard Reinsch (02:40):
When you say identity, can we talk more about that? What does it mean to say I have an identity, in your account?
Joshua Mitchell (02:49):
Most people will say of course we have an identity, but I'm old enough to remember when we didn't even use the word. This is the latest intellectual fashion. When I was growing up I would say I'm an American, I'm a man, but we would never use the word identity. Somehow, I think starting in the '90s, maybe a little earlier, I don't want to nitpick on dates here, some time along in the last 30 years we started saying things like, "I have an American identity. My identity is this. My identity is that." It's very curious, surely on the basis of intellectual history, why would we need to add the thing when we used to say, "I'm an American." That's the kind I am. I'm an American, I'm French, whatever it happens to be. I think identity doesn't mean just kind, I think people are invoking it to signal something. I make very clear in the book that I think we have to stop using the term virtue signaling. Virtue is a Greek thing. Innocence is a biblical thing. I think because we're involved in a pseudo religious awakening, people who want to call this out have to start using the term innocence signaling.
When we say I have an identity these days, we mean something more than time. We mean the group of which we're a member that has a certain status in the great continuum of innocence and transgression. As I say in the book, the prime transgressor who is blamed for everything and all that he does is the White, heterosexual male. I said, to be clear right at the outset, I have no interest whatsoever in defending White nationalism or whatever you want to call it. My point is that the White heterosexual man now has a kind of symbolic standing as the cause of all the transgressions in the world. As I say in the book, every single major party platform idea in the Democratic Party can be linked to this idea that the things that White heterosexual men have brought a problem. Capitalism, burning fossil fuels, the nation state, the heteronormative family, Christian religion, every single one of these things is traceable to the idea that there is a stain in the world and that is the White, heterosexual male and, in order for us, the innocent to be liberated, he must be purged. That is a profound distortion, in my view, of Christianity.
Richard Reinsch (05:18):
Now your book is an exploration of identity politics as a spiritual, religious manifestation into our politics that has taken over our politics, but maybe we can get into it this way more specifically. You use this term towards the beginning of the book, you talk about the "invisible economy of man." What is that? Why does that matter for identity politics?
Joshua Mitchell (05:45):
I would give the left some credit on this. I think the deepest theological insight we have from the Hebrews and from Christians is that there is in fact two economies. I make mention of a couple of these things in the preface to the book. I note, for example, one of the gospels, the opening passage, or one of the opening passages, Joseph and Mary had to go back to their place of birth because all the world was to be taxed. The way I characterize this is one of the gospels opens up with the idea that there is this thing called a world of payment, dollars and cents and taxes. Everything gets accounted for in the ledger book. Everything visible can be accounted for in the ledger book. The gospel is very clear, they don't stay at the inn, they stay in probably a cave, Jesus is put into an animal feed trough, it's completely off the ledger books of the world of visible payment. I think that's what the gospel writer is trying to say. Christ came into the world not to address the visible world of payment, but the invisible economy of transgression and stain and to offer redemption in that way.
Then I think the more glaring example of this, the most beautiful example of this is Judas. It's very clear that Judas, he praised Christ because he is thinking of this visible economy. Oil is poured down onto his head, think of the money that was worth. He feels like Christ is not being the revolutionary in the visible economy to help the poor. Christ says the poor will always be with us and it means any number of things, but among other things, it means that there's something deeper going on here in the world than just this visible economy. He comes to offer relief from the transgression that no world of payment can understand. This is the deepest Christian insight, it's a profound insight. I give the left credit for that, or the identity politics credit for that. It's announcing, saying a more profound economy than the world of payment. I'm not saying it's one that has to be replaced, we have to live with both economies, this is the problem. We have to pay our taxes and yet there's something deeper going on in the human soul than just the payment of taxes. That's the credit I give to identity politics.
The problem is that it wants to think that problem through now, think that issue through now in the world of politics and replace the world of payment, capitalism, et cetera, with this new economy that's concerned only with innocence. That's why, by the way, AOC and others can offer a new green deal and they don't care if it costs 50 trillion dollars, because the more important economy is the invisible economy. I'm saying the invisible economy is more important, but we can't live without the visible economy and the place where this invisible economy has to be wrestled through is in the churches and the synagogues, this is where we have to wrestle through this. It's not an accident, in my view, that the collapse of the mainline churches in the aftermath of the Vietnam war didn't put an end to the category of transgression and stain. It shifted. The Pew Charitable Trust poll indicates that a larger and larger number of Americans are among this group called the none, they have no religious affiliation. I'm saying that's not true, they have a profound religious affiliation. They are addressing the problem of transgression and stain, but they're just not doing it in the churches, because they have a new place and a new way to do it and it's called identity politics.
We're still desperately looking for atonement, this is a human thing, but when you only have the longing for atonement but no longer have the old mechanism for doing so, you'll come up with all sorts of new modes of atonement that you think will solve your problem of guilt
Richard Reinsch (09:21):
Your account of the invisible economy of AOC, or of the woke and conflating that or trying to infuse that into the world, another manifestation would be defund the police, I think.
Joshua Mitchell (09:35):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Richard Reinsch (09:37):
The quarterback, the woke quarterback, although he's not really playing anymore, Colin Kaepernick called recently, I think over the weekend, to abolish prisons in America. You mentioned the Green New Deal. I mean it was basically a draft proposal someone had dashed off that they released to the public. I mean everything from flights to killing the cows in America was contemplated as a level of control there. I guess an older idiom of thinking about this, also somewhat spiritual, would be Voegelin's idea, well-known idea of immanentizing the eschaton. That is the perfectionist impulse of the woke and trying to make that our politics. Your account is sort of like that, sort of different.
Joshua Mitchell (10:21):
Yeah. I do think it's embedded to Christian categories. I mean I do agree with most of Voegelin on this. It's embedded to Christian categories, but it's a kind of ... well, it's an end of history scenario. We're going to finally get away with all the filth in the world, get rid of dirty, fossil fuels, we're going to get rid of all the dirty things. There's going to be an accounting at the end of ... we are at the end of history, this is the most important thing, we are at the end of history. We have the task of all that came before us that's implicated and stained and, to use the passage from Isaiah that I think is most apt, the lion has to now lay down with the lamb. We're at the end of history in toto. The only thing left is that there has to be a complete accounting of all the stains and transgressions that history has provided for us. In Europe, I'm very worried about what's happening in Europe, you've got a post-Christian Christian region where ... what I mean by that is people aren't going to church, but they're still haunted, haunted by the transgression of history, notably two world wars and colonialism.
The deal that the European elite are cutting here, you are indelibly stained because of your history, especially the Germans. There is no theological mechanism for you to atone and to begin anew, because God's forgiveness doesn't give us a way forward to have a new day, because we're always haunted by guilt we can never expunge. The deal that the left is offering, and in America, the only way that you can disburden yourself from your guilt is to renounce your history and to renounce your nation. That is now the reason why the European Union is pushing back against the very idea of nations. It's a religious attempt to find relief from stain and impurity, but without the religious mechanism of doing so. That's why in Eastern Europe, where you still have a strong Catholic church, people don't fall for this.
Yeah, sure, bad things have happened, but we know where stain is gotten rid of, it's called at the altar before Christ in the churches. In Eastern Europe, terrible things have happened there, but they're not going to fall for what Western Europe is falling for, namely that there's no Church left, so the only way that we can atone is by renouncing those sites, mainly the family, the nation state with rule of law, the nation state itself, that's the deal that you have to cut. We're still desperately looking for atonement, this is a human thing, but when you only have the longing for atonement but no longer have the old mechanism for doing so, you'll come up with all sorts of new modes of atonement that you think will solve your problem of guilt, well nothing will solve your problem of guilt outside the Church, but you're going to try everything. You're going to purge the White people, you're going to get rid of the nation. It's a desperate and sick attempt to find a way towards cleanliness. That's what's happening here at the end of time. The immanentization of the eschaton in the sense it's the end of time, but we're looking for atonement, it's a deep, personal thing too. That's the crisis of our moment.
Richard Reinsch (13:40):
You have in the book a line that wokism introduces ... well, it doesn't introduce, it changes the meaning of the traditional Protestant, or I'll say Christian theological concept of original sin. There's no original sin in wokism, but there's an original sinner. Also you express this idea that there's also no forgiveness. Ultimately there's no possibility of atonement. Those who are the transgressor, right now the transgressor is the White, heterosexual male, and of course we can talk about and I'd like a discussion of how a parade of transgressors will follow but kind of beg for sufferance from those he has oppressed. I think a number of us have seen this, certainly these videos and displays throughout the summer of people, particularly Whites in these protests kneeling down in front of minorities. I've seen kissing the boots, things like this, to try to show an attempt to atone or seek absolution for the crimes of their race or gender overall.
Joshua Mitchell (14:42):
Yeah. I think we have to make an important distinction. I think, as Americans, we have collective responsibility to heal wounds, but not collective fault. I mean my family, at least a large half of it came over in the 1890s from what's now Lebanon. How am I implicated in slavery? There's a desperate attempt to find atonement. My point about original sin is that what it means is that deeper than your lineage, deeper than the fact that I might be part Lebanese and part Welsh, deeper than that is something that is always already there. It's original to the human condition. The absolutely profound insight that Christianity gives us is that you can't solve the stain that's always already there by looking for a mortal solution to it. You can't look at that other group and say, "If I can just scapegoat them and purge them, then everything's going to be fine." The problem is deeper than any inheritance you have or they have. This is so unbelievably profound. Rousseau saw this. Rousseau's a nut, but he saw some amazing things, he understands some amazing things. He said this is what changes when you move from Pagan politics to Christian politics, because in Paganism you really did think that by purging that other nation with other Gods through cathartic rage that you could purify yourself. The Christian claim was no, the problem of stain is so deep it goes back to Adam and your inheritance, whether you're Lebanese or French or whatever and that other person with some other inheritance, you can't solve your problem of stain by purging another group. The problem is original. It's always already there.
We're always ... I mean I'm haunted by Genesis four through seven, Adam and Eve sinned, there's a transgression there and Eve says, "The serpent made me do it," and Adam says, "The woman who you gave me, it's your fault, God." We're always looking ... that statement right there, it's this astounding statement about human nature. We have fault internal to us and we're always looking out there, external to us, to find a way to hide, to find a fig leaf to hide from our transgression. That's what identity politics is. It's saying we recognize fault, we recognize there's an invisible economy and the way we're going to solve it is the Pagan way. We're going to purge groups. We live in this really strange time where we still have some Christian understanding that we really probably shouldn't do that, there's a thing called the rule of law and every group, every member of every group is supposed to have a standing independent of the group. This itself is a remarkable achievement of Christianity, but we stand on the cusp of returning to that Pagan idea of purgation.
The Christian claim, and I come back to Rousseau's politics, that's not going to work. That's why Augustine comes up with the Just War doctrine. What it means is we can't just go to war expending cathartic rage on the enemy. That's not what war can be about anymore. This is a profound breakthrough. I understand that the question of original sin is involved in all sorts of huge debates between Protestants and Catholics, I'm actually trying to go back and move beyond that debate and say, "What does it mean for us today in light of identity politics?" My point is, if it's original, then we can't solve the problem of stain and impurity by purging another group, which is exactly what identity politics is trying to do. The Christian claim is, the only way out is to recognize that all of us are broken, whatever we may have done to each other as groups or individuals, all of us are broken and there is a divine innocent one. There's no mortal innocence. What identity politics does, and here we return to Voegelin, is it immanetizes the innocent one. That would be my difference with Voegelin. He says it immanetizes the eschaton, I say it immanetizes the innocent one.
Richard Reinsch (19:09):
The innocent one by definition doesn't sin, they are only sinned against, which unleashes tremendous-
Joshua Mitchell (19:18):
Yes, exactly.
Richard Reinsch (19:18):
... arrogance and hubris which we've seen on display throughout the past four months in this country. You can do no wrong, but wrong can be done to you. What I ask, something that I keyed in on in the book and it resonated with me because I grew up in the '80s in a small town in Tennessee. What I remember learning in the public schools about Martin Luther King Junior, he was called Reverend and I distinctly remember that. Also I attended a Methodist Church growing up. Reverend Martin Luther King I heard about.
the only group that can stop this identity politics madness are Black Americans who will say, "Wait a second. This is not what Martin Luther King signed up for."
You talk about, and only a few people have noticed this, the transition. It happened some time I think in the '90s from Reverend to Doctor. You talk about the meaning of that and how that helps us think about identity politics. That resonated with me because I understood as a kid in some way that the Reverend meant not only did he defeat segregation at law, he understood what it was really about and how to defeat it spiritually, but you go on to talk about that.
Joshua Mitchell (20:18):
This is, I think, something people who are concerned with the real legacy of Martin Luther King need to constantly talk about. He was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. What that meant was he understood exactly this theological formulation that I gave and advanced it. It would be impossible for Martin Luther King as a theologian to advance identity politics, because identity politics makes the grievous error of presuming that there are innocent and guilty ones here in the world of time and that we can find a solution to the problem of transgression by scapegoating other people. Martin Luther King, I remember on occasion said, "Look, the problem is not White people, the problem is evil, the problem is principalities and powers. That's what we have to fight against and the ally we have in that fight is Christ."
As we know, you read the gospel, he's exorcizing the demon, so only Christ has power over evil itself. Of course sensible people can't talk about evil and sensible people don't believe in incarnation, but sensible liberals ... remember there was something about transgression and innocence in the 1960s, so now we're going to do this without the theological accoutrements altogether. You have the categories without the profound theological insights, so you have to separate the world now between the innocent and the stained. Before all the world was stained and God alone was the innocent one. You see the innocent voice as victim, but that category now is taken up by particular identity groups. This is, again, a profound distortion of Christianity. I say that, through the indication of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we actually have a way to begin to wrestle with this problem of innocence and transgression. Through the indication of a Doctor Martin Luther King, which is the way the identity politics people now do it, the only thing you have is one group aggrieved against another and never ending cathartic rage, anger and resentment and then defensive postures, which never allows us to build a world together. That's where we are today.
Richard Reinsch (22:28):
That is also a way of thinking of the Black experience in America. You talk about this in the book. You quote Robert Woodson, who was a community activist, rightly understood, I would argue, who was trying to rebuild civil society and Black neighborhoods in America. He talks about this idea now, the part of the Black experience in America that was heroic in an age of real oppression and very real segregation forming mutual self insurance societies, fraternal societies I should say, building their businesses, churches and how that worked. That's sort of forgotten and there's the plantation and there's oppression and there's the Democratic Party doing an activist thing and that's it. It's like you've whitewashed even the history, you've taken that out. Woodson says it's like Blacks are another identity group and their experience is this ever growing fund that new minority groups draw on to vindicate their claims.
Joshua Mitchell (23:34):
A couple of things on that count. Bob and I have become good friends. We're actually working together very closely on something called the 1776 Unites project, which is in response to the 1619 project. We're on a weekly call with a dozen or two dozen people, largely Black, who are pushing back against this idea of systemic racism. Bob's claim ... two things. First, I think Bob and other serious Black intellectuals are realizing that their movement has been co-opted. I say this in the book, making reference in a sly way to Rosa Parks. I mean Black America is now asked to sit at the back of the Democratic bus. Black America was what I call the template of innocence that feminists, gays and transgenders now have adopted. The argument is, of course, as civil rights go, so goes women's rights, gay rights and transgender rights. You look at Martin Luther King and what he understood was Black Americans survived slavery because of family and Church. What a paradox now.
The left starts with the template of innocence of Black America and now it's gotten to the point where the group it's defending want to undo the family and the Church. Something has gone seriously wrong here. Bob knows and he and I have talked at length about this, his view and mine is that the only group that can stop this identity politics madness are Black Americans who will say, "Wait a second. This is not what Martin Luther King signed up for." The expectation is that Blacks are just going to go sit in the back of the bus while new groups keep taking on the crown of thorns using the template of innocence of Black America. My sense of this, I don't know if it's this election or the next or who knows when, but it cannot be the case that, in order to be inclusive now, to use that leftist word, we have to oppose heteronormativity, we can't be cisgender, we can't believe in the Church because it's really homophobic and we can't live that way. Most importantly, and this is Woodson's point, belief among us absolutely needs those institutions. That's the first thing.
The second thing is, Bob is upset because he says there is a grand history of Black achievement against incredible odds. He and I are trying to set up something called the Center for the Study of Resilience. We're trying to find a university where we can do this. What we want to do is simply chronicle, either in video or a written form, the extraordinary exemplars in the African American community, but it can't be only them, it's immigrant communities, it's the American story against all odds to build families, to build communities, because our young people, rich and poor, desperately need some evidence that there's human agency and there's hope in the world of time. The real objection to the 1619 Project is, yeah, it's bad history, that's fine, but look, forget the history, what is at stake is the politics of this. The politics of systemic racism is this, the problem of racism is so deep that your families can't help you, your Churches can't help you and your neighbors can't help you.
Only the state can help you. What that teaches is there's no human agency and there's no hope. The real message of the 1619 Project, the real message of those who claim systemic racism is that you can't do it on your own. Nobody's saying you do it on your own, our view is a Tocquevillian view, which is we build a world together in our families, in our Churches, in our neighborhoods, in our local communities, in our towns. That's how we do it. My favorite line of Democracy in America is feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, the mind expanded only by the reciprocal actions of men, one upon another. It's one of the most beautiful lines in Democracy in America. He's saying that everything in the modern world conspires to isolate us, conspires to let the state step in because you and I find forming human relations difficult and that will produce the kinder and gentler tyranny at the end of history.
Bob's addition to this is, the people who are first hurt by this are the least among us. They're the ones that most need the mediating institution in order to pull themself up. Bob is a profound Tocquevillian. I've been a Tocqueville scholar all my life and when I met Bob two years ago I think, oh my God, here's Tocqueville in action. He is, as you say, he's the right kind of activist, meaning someone who is really interested in empowering local people. You find the people who've been able to make their communities work and you help them. Bob tells a wonderful story. First he says, "80% of my friends are exes, ex-cons, ex-prostitutes," and he finds the broken among us. He says, "When I go into a town, I go to the barber shop and I say, "Who do you go to when things are bad?" We're not saying go down the welfare agency, but who is the person you go to? They'll invariably, after talking to 10 or 12 people, there'll be two or three people that you identify and he goes and meets them. He says, "What's your secret?" He hears these incredible stories, oftentimes of regeneration from alcoholism or prison or whatever, it completely transformed their life, they become the pillars of the community.
Bob's answer to the problem of racism in America is a really straightforward one. It's a Joseph/Pharaoh model in Exodus where you find the Joseph of the community who has prevailed against all odds and has immense respect and you say, "How can we help?" That's how you address racist America. It's a profoundly Tocquevillian understanding of what we are to do. I'm so hopeful that the kind of thing Bob is doing can start to resonate. What we're finding is that Conservative donors are beginning to realize that there is a way to talk about race in America that doesn't require that we capitulate to the left, it says, "Well okay, there's a problem of racist America, that's why we have to have more state programs." That was the model for 40 or 50 years. The right, not wanting to grow government, decided they didn't want to talk about race. That's wrong. We have to talk about race in America. There's a really constructive profoundly Tocquevillian way to do so and Woodson, he's 83 years old now, he's been showing the way for half his life and we have to get behind this man who's a national treasure. I cite him a number of times in the book.
Richard Reinsch (30:06):
This book, there's identity politics, there's also a discussion about bipolarity and addictions and also substitutes and shortcuts as well. Could you talk about those parts of your book? I mean I was going to talk and maybe we can, I think you've been giving us a really nice understanding of the liberal politics of competence versus the identity politics, I think you've done that well, but the bipolarity and addictions, what do you mean by that?
Joshua Mitchell (30:34):
I have been fascinated in my readings of history and political thought to observe this idea that human beings ... I'll be brazen, naturally oscillate back and forth between highs and lows. I see this as early as Plato's Republic book nine when he's talking about the tyrannical soul. It's in Saint Augustine, the Confessions. Yes, it's a beautiful account of the cosmos and the journey to God, put if you look at Saint Augustine, he himself, he shows, he tells in his confessions about how he has these moments of tremendous highs and tremendous lows. His answer of course is there is no rest until I rest in peace, until I rest in the presence of God.
I can show this in the writings of Hobbes, I can show this in the writings of Rousseau and absolutely in the writings of Tocqueville. The most troubling thing is that this phenomena that has been known about since people began to think seriously about the human soul, has been rendered as a biological problem with the brain and this is a tragedy. This is in a way the fuller development of Huxley's work in Brave New World where he says all these deep longings, all these deep anxieties, which should point at the human freedom, will be medicalized away. That was the dystopia that Huxley's raising and laying out in Brave New World. I dare to suggest to a world that can only see this problem as a medical problem that in fact, in Tocqueville's language, it's a problem of human association. Tocqueville says, at the end of Democracy in America line two, which I think is the deeper line, he says, "In the distant future I can imagine a time where we will think of ourselves as greater than kings and less than men."
What he means by this is we will become so socially isolated that we will have no other people who check us, so, to use my language, will become selfie man, completely isolated. We've got our Facebook pages and our social media platforms and we de-friend anyone who raises the slightest question about the things, the crazy things that we believe. We produce selfie man on the one hand, this is the I feel greater than kings, I'm the sovereign of my universe, but it's precisely those conditions of social isolation that lead us to profound loneliness and emptiness and feelings of impotence. When Tocqueville says I foresee a day when we will sense ourselves to be greater than kings and less than men, he's saying the full consequence of a world where all of the links have been broken is bipolarity. He's literally saying that. I say that the problem of bipolarity is a problem of human association on the Tocqueville I'm reading. Now I'm not going to step in and say well therefore go off your medicines. I think medicines can be supplements and we're really interested in that section, they can be supplements that can help us return to health, but they can't be substitutes for that health.
In Tocqueville's reading, until we build a world of rich human association, we're going to oscillate back and forth. He says in one passage, he says yes, in Europe there's going to be suicide, but in America there will be madness. There will be all sorts of mental instability. He thinks it's because we're going to become increasingly lonely and isolated. It's only by building a world together that we can ameliorate, not solve, but ameliorate that problem. That's again why that passage, feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, the mind expanded only by the reciprocal actions of men, one upon another is so important. He's saying if we don't do that, we're in deep trouble. To come to what I take to be the important insight of the new national conservative movement, is, I think, completely on board on this, the biggest project that we have is to rebuild the mediating institution. Yes, it's important who's the president, but if we're just looking up then we're not putting energy into all these mediating institutions that we so desperately need in order to build a life together. That's what Tocqueville saw.
Richard Reinsch (34:58):
Just listening to your analysis, it should not surprise us that identity politics, anti racism, systemic racism has come full bloom in this time of COVID isolation, of job loss, of all the things people are experiencing. You talked about ... it was before the podcast, what you think some of your students are going through and then this movement erupts because of George Floyd, although the more I think about it, I mean it's just the cause and effect is just ridiculous. It's horrible what happened to George Floyd. How that though has justified the last four months, or could justify it is just ... it makes me scratch my head every time I think about it. I think arguments have been made, we haven't realized it, I haven't realized it, how deep they had gotten and then they met this crisis and opportunity with the COVID restrictions.
Joshua Mitchell (35:58):
First on my students, I'm teaching at Georgetown now all through Zoom and my experience at Georgetown is not unique, so it's not a Georgetown problem precisely, but I'm starting to get emails from my students saying, "Listen, I can't get that test in, I'm really suffering from serious anxiety." Actually the first thing I wrote after the COVID outbreak was on social distancing and how what we're doing is really doubling down on exactly the pathology that Tocqueville thought would happen and the consequences will be untold. We're always looking at how many deaths from COVID, well let's talk about the grave collateral damage, the number of suicides that are going to happen. As I drive out here to the eastern shore I see a big billboard for opioid addicts saying you are not alone. Guess what? You are alone. You can't go meet people. The people who are addicted, they know this. I have friends who are in Alcoholic's Anonymous. They can't have real meetings. When you meet face-to-face, to come to your second point, we have all the correctives we need. A great Christian insight is that the imagination can really cause all sorts of trouble. God sent the floods because they became vain in their imagination. This is very important. Tocqueville sees this problem by the way.
The more and more isolated you become, the more you have a demonic imagining of who the other person is. The only antidote to that, the only way to diminish our assessment of the demonic-ness of other people is this never ending face-to-face association. We know this, because we're all involved in groups where we might not like someone and we've got to work with them. You go into the meeting and you've been imagining all sorts of terrible things about that person and then you go into the meeting and you have to work out some solution, all of you have to come up with an answer to a problem and you do. You make compromises and you walk out of the meeting and you say, well maybe that person isn't as bad. They still might be bad, but they're not as bad. You attenuate our demonic imaginings of the other only through face-to-face associations.
Okay, so now let's run the clock. We're supposed to have a two week lockdown and we're now six or seven months into it, what do you think is going to happen to people's imaginations? That's the first thing. Then the second thing, you mentioned the George Floyd riots. I wrote something about this for First Things. It is a curiosity that these people who insisted on social distancing, on locking down, instantly went out and protested and rioted. This calls out for an account. My account is it's a deeply distorted Christian understanding. Let me explain why, background. Plato, the opening lines of the Republic are about going down to the Piraeus and they're worshiping at a festival with Bendis where death is ever near.
The central problem of the Republic is death and how to avoid it. It's only through the philosophical practice of death that you can see the light of eternity. Philosophers are concerned with overcoming death with noetic knowledge. That's the brief format. Christian's don't think that's right. Death is the second problem. Death is the consequent problem because of the first problem. It's because Adam and Eve sinned that death came into the world. Now plug that in to what happened with COVID and George Floyd. Everyone says death is the problem, death is the problem, we have to isolate from one another, but if sin is a deeper problem than death, then people are going to give up on the death thing as soon as sin becomes the real problem, or the perceived sin becomes a real problem.
That's why people who mask on the left who are scared to death of death, ultimately they still have this Christian sensibility. This is what I'm trying to say, it's a deeply distorted Christianity. That's the bad news and the good news. At least it's a distorted Christianity, but that's why people went out on riots, because the problem of sin is deeper than the problem of death in the Christian world. I'm saying that people went out to riot is a perverse confirmation that understanding is still the deepest one in the psyche of the west.
I'm thankful for that, but if I may, here I would like to invoke Nietzsche, by the way it's his birthday today, what Nietzsche saw was that the west had purportedly renounced it's Christianity, this is in the 1880s, but that it was still trapped by many of it's categories. The fateful question was whether it could fully renounce the questions and move on. This, by the way is the alt-right, because to move on is to forget. It's to not be oriented by guilt and sin and stain. The language of stain and purity, the language of the innocent victim, these are all Christian terms.
He wanted to completely jettison it and move on to the new/old aristocracy, which would be a return to the aristocracy of cruelty, where the only categories were weakness and strength, not innocence and transgression. I think that's really the fateful question that we have in front of us right now, because I think Nietzsche got this diagnosis right. I'm a Tocqueville scholar, I love Tocqueville, but Nietzsche adds something to the picture that we really need to pay attention to. We're living in a world of Christian categories without the Christian architecture. The question is whether we're going to go forward with the Nietzsche product and the alt-right is doing this in Europe and in America, we're just simply going to forget, we don't care about slavery, we don't care about colonialism, we don't care about 60 million people dying in World War I and World War II, we don't care.
My whole project here is I want the categories of transgression and innocence. I don't think we've achieved human responsibility. I don't think we've achieved the depth of soul without being constantly attentive to the categories of identity and transgression. Within the Christian context, which allows us to go forward with self consciousness about fault, but with the understanding that we can build a world tomorrow on hope notwithstanding that, that's the good news of Christianity, so I'm frightened to death by the current moment. I mean on the one hand I should be thankful we're still invoking the Christian categories, but without the Christian architecture, it just reminds people that they have a guilt they can't get rid of and then people are going to say, "Well maybe Nietzsche's right. Maybe the only way to go forward is to forget and to go back to the old cruelty."
That's the moment I think we are in in the west as a whole. We can talk about the collapse of the mainline churches in America and how that contributes to identity politics. I think that's true, but I think the deeper issue is the historical moment in which we find ourselves, which is not secular. I mean if identity politics doesn't prove that we're not living in a secular age, I don't know what will. We're using all these theological categories. This is not a secular world. This is a world where we're searching for answers to the problem of transgression and innocence without God and forgiveness. That's the American awakening right now. We have really two choices. We can go back and put these categories back in their proper theological context, or we can go forward to the alt right and to the new cruelty. Those are our existential choices.
Richard Reinsch (42:59):
It's interesting in this regard thinking about your discussion of addictions and the place of addictions in America now and how it encompasses so many things that we do. As I finished your book I thought the ultimate addiction will be identity politics, precisely because of these categories-
Joshua Mitchell (43:19):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (43:20):
... you've been discussing and the ability to find a transgressor and place everything on that person. Also, as you discuss, though very nicely put about the 1619 Project, the power of the state, that itself becomes it's own deity that can call forth our worship because of what it can offer us if we get it right and getting it right also means finding who's getting it wrong. Why is there an unending series of transgressors in your account? The White heterosexual male will be displaced at some point and a new, probably White females will enter that place and so on and so forth, why is there a need for constant transgressors?
Joshua Mitchell (44:03):
Identity politics is a theodicy. It's an account of how there is evil in the world. The way I ... well, I have to return to what I said at the outset, which is that it's a relationship. The Christian theological formulation, the Son is eternally present as the innocent one and we are eternally present as the transgressors, by virtue of our inheritance from Adam. That's the Christian theology. The identity politics theodicy is an eminent theodicy of good and evil. Here's the problem, now we dumped everything on the toxic male, toxic masculinity. Of course toxicity is a medical term and so is purgation. We're using these medical terms to indicate that we have to expunge something from the body social. Let's imagine that we do, let's imagine that we socially avoid our natural desire to be protective and to go to battle for noble causes, it's okay, we'll send them into the video universe. They're going to stay there. They know where they belong, they'll just play their games, we'll let them do that. Let's imagine we purge the White male. You have a theodicy problem. People are still experiencing this sense of guilt and stain, so they need to find a new person who can bear the burden for this, because the problem is clearly not within them. The Christian claims it's within you, because you're all inherited with Adam, but no, it can't be. But wait, we've gotten rid of the White heterosexual male. You need a new scapegoat. You always have to have a scapegoat. The great Christian insight is there's a divine scapegoat, stop looking at other people. If you get rid of that divine scapegoat, then you're going to have to find a new scapegoat group. My argument is the next group will be White women. Maybe, I don't know, maybe ... it's very interesting to look at the tension between Nancy Pelosi and the squad.
Richard Reinsch (46:03):
Yeah, yeah.
Joshua Mitchell (46:04):
One way of looking at that is that, in point of fact, this is the beginning of the purging of the White women. Look, Joe Biden is kind of an impotent man, that's the only reason he's allowed to be the candidate. He proves everything that identity politics says about the White man. He's impotent, he's a buffoon, he's perfect. We get rid of him, Biden's the last of the White men and then, look at Pelosi and, I put this in quotes, women of color who want to take over the Democratic Party. The White woman is next, she's clearly next. Then my point is it's the Black heterosexual male who believes in the family and goes to church, he is the next guy. He's Martin Luther King. He's the next guy, because if you have a theodicy and it's based on eminent groups, then once you get rid of the transgressor, you need to find another one and it will go on and on and on and on.
You need to have the high, to come back to your point about addiction, you need to have the high of saying, "That's the person." If we can just purge him, if we can just shame him and humiliate him and call him a leper by declaring he's a fascist homophobe, I'm going through my list, hater, denier, Nazi, what are the other ones? Transphobe, Islamophobe, I mean these are all equivalent terms. They basically mean you are the scapegoat on whom I'm going to vent my cathartic rage in order to get high. That's identity politics. It can never end. It can never end. At the end, as I say, I speculate hundreds of years into the future, I say at some point, after hundreds of years of cruelty to one group after another, it may occur to someone that maybe the guilt that never goes away can't be expunged by looking outwards. Maybe it has to look inwards and maybe we have to recognize that there's only a divine solution to this guilt that's always eternally within us. That's the agony. It can't work is what I'm saying. It can't work, but people are continuing to try.
Richard Reinsch (48:15):
Now you and I would like to avoid that fate of hundreds of years of agony, of the sclerosis that would result from this kind of politics. You know this, being in higher education in our elite sectors of our society, journalism, education, politics, entertainment, law, more and more institutions, it's not that just that they've been overtaken, I mean they've just willingly given in, surrendered and now wear this stuff. That was sort of the story as the sporting season's got underway. There's willingness to take this on and to flaunt this. The question is renewal, I think your answer would be the liberal politics of competence, but we have really only one political party, some of it's people understand what's going on. Your prospects though for renewal here are, what?
Joshua Mitchell (49:10):
I said one thing which is Black Americans. The beginning of the end of identity politics will take two forms. One, when Black Americans say, "No, this is not what the Reverend Martin Luther King had in mind." No, you cannot trade on what happened in slavery, I'm very precise about what I mean here. You can say women have been oppressed, gays have been oppressed, fine, you can say all that and it's true. In a society that's concerned with generation, women and people outside the generative mode are going to have a second place standing. If we're not concerned with generation then all bets are off, but it can't be the case that those groups can say, "Our problems are like what happened in slavery." What happened in slavery was the destruction of the family, this is what we have to get. Every feminist I know had a mother and a father. Every gay person I know can at least say they had a mother and family that wasn't ripped apart by law. That's the difference. That's why the family, the so-called heteronormative family, sorry, you don't touch it. You don't touch it for the reason that the least among us need it. Full stop.
Now a plural society, and here's perhaps where I differ from some Conservatives, whatever your religious convictions may be, a plural society will be one which does not demand that everybody do the same thing, but it does demand that generation has to come first. I'm perfectly fine being tolerant, but I'm not prepared if the tolerance means that I am guilty of a thought crime called heteronormativity. Sorry, that cannot work. That's not liberal. Liberal is there are things that a society must do and it must do them first. If there's room for other things, those are political decisions that we can make and you have to live with the political decisions. In that sense I'm not quite in the Conservative camp on this matter. But where I think we must push back is we have to say, "Look, a society has to regenerate itself and you can't tell the people who are doing that, especially, as it were, the least among us who are struggling, you can't say that the very institution through which you can find stability to do that is guilty of a thought crime." It can't work. I think the first hopeful sign is that Black Americans are beginning to wake up. I hear from Bob Woodson through his network there is a slow awakening here. There's something seriously wrong with the left right now that claims to have the backs of Black American. They do, by the way, just before every four year election and then you forget about them. I think that's exactly what Black Americans are seeing.
The other place of renewal, and I don't see it right now but it's going to be necessary, are the churches and the synagogues, because they're the only place where this can be set right. I don't think there's a political solution to this problem, because the problem is that the category of transgression and innocence has just drifted out of religion into politics. Only when it returns to religion will we be able to return to a liberal politics of competence. That's a very tall order and I don't see it happening really in the divinity schools. I think the Martin Luther King idea of what a Church is supposed to be is still alive and well in some portions of Black communities, although identity politics has penetrated there too. The so-called White churches, they're the worst of it. They're practicing, as you say, White people going out and kissing the feet of the innocent ones, this is really twisted. Do we have a legacy that must be fixed? Absolutely. There's a wounded America that we have to pay attention to. I'm not saying it's unimportant, it is tremendously important, but we have to get it right. We have a collective responsibility, but not collective guilt. I mean, look, most of us can't trace ancestors back who had slaves. Even if we could, are we to bear the burden of things that happened generations ago? Or is there a promise of redemption? That's the great question. The churches themselves have betrayed their charge.
Richard Reinsch (53:04):
Well Joshua Mitchell, on that, why don't we bring this conversation to an end? This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. Josh Mitchell discussing his book, American Awakening.
Joshua Mitchell (53:16):
My pleasure.
Richard Reinsch (00:18): Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Professor Todd Zywicki, welcoming him back to Liberty Law Talk, a frequent guest, to discuss recent calls for reforms to the Senate in particular and to the Congress and what might restore that body to more vigor and greater political-institutional health. Todd Zywicki, a frequent guest on Liberty Law Talk, when last he was on we discussed the cartel of higher education in conjunction with a book Todd had just written with Neal McCluskey. Todd is an expert in bankruptcy law and consumer credit, among other specialties. He's also an economist, he teaches, I mentioned at the Scalia Law School. And he's also a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. Todd, you are also a star, I noted, at the Social Science Research Network. You are in the top 10% of most downloaded scholars on the Social Science Research Network, so congratulations.
Todd Zywicki (01:17):
Thank you.
Richard Reinsch (01:18):
Nice to have your work sought after. I was thinking about, Ben Sasse had this op-ed "Make The Senate Great Again," that was in The Wall Street Journal earlier in September. And he listed a number of reforms to make the Senate work better. Sasse himself a scholar, PhD in history, I think from Yale. His first speech in the Senate was about the sort of underwhelming nature of Congress in its current operations. And he listed a number of reforms, some of which I thought were ho-hum, some seemed interesting. One, take cameras out of the Senate, out of committee hearings, abolish standing committees, I would actually argue the committee should be strengthened if you want to restore the vigor of the body. Pack the floor, meaning require attendance at debates so there's a full house. Live together in dorms, and also sunset all agencies and departments. Give them a year left to operate and force the Senate to begin making laws again. So he understands the administrative branch dynamic there. Then also, and you've written on this, several law review pieces and debates and shorter pieces, "repeal the 17th Amendment" would be key. And he makes the point that it would allow the states to reenter national debate as states again. And that would sort of diffuse maybe the ongoing just ideology that percolates through the Senate. So what do you make of any of those proposals and then we'll also focus on the 17th Amendment?
Todd Zywicki (02:47):
Well, more generally, all of them raise the same question, Richard, which is one of the things that Sasse is basically [inaudible 00:02:54] at with a lot of these things is that the process of electioneering has come to dominate the process of governing with respect to the Senate. And the great irony of that is that the original Senate was elected by state legislatures, and that was changed in 1913 with the 17th Amendment that moved to direct election of Senators. And I know we're going to talk about this in detail, but in many ways what Sasse in coming back to rests on that foundation which is that the framers clearly had a design in mind for the Senate, which it would be fundamentally different from the House.
They hoped, and thought, it would be a body that would not be driven by electioneering. It would be driven by basically governing. Which is that the House was seen as the place where politicians would posture and do the things that politicians do in order to get votes and scramble for votes. But that the Senate, due to its longer term and the manner in which is was elected, would be different. And a lot of these things he talks about, like cameras in the room, the way in which the committee system is used to basically deliver benefits to special interests, all those sorts of things, in many ways are by-product of that same fundamental dynamic which is the adoption of direct election of Senators by the people in partisan elections is fundamentally incompatible, fundamentally contradicts, the idea that the framers had in mind for the Senate. And I think, in many ways, that's what all these things are is a manifestation of that problem. And it's not clear... We'll talk about sort of what went awry and that sort of thing, but I think he's right with a lot of that. And in many ways he's trying to treat the symptoms of that and not just the causes.
Richard Reinsch (04:51):
Yeah. He also calls for extending the term to twelve years from six years, and prohibiting any political fund raising while the Senate is in session. So I think that fits your analysis, more treating symptoms. The thinking here, too, it seems to me that a fundamental problem as well, and James Buckley has a book on this, that he wants to amend the Constitution to prohibit the Congress from being able to just make sort of general grants to states. That it would have to be constitutionally tied. Appropriations would have to be a part of the delegated powers. And so it seems like he's trying to limit, effectively, what they could do, another way of going at this. Thinking about the 17th Amendment, so you mentioned 1913. It was ratified, it provided for direct election of Senators. What's the significance of that. I mean many people I think would say... Obviously there's a democratic point there, but why would you argue that that remade the senatorial body?
Todd Zywicki (05:58):
Well, 1913 is, in many ways, the pivotal moment in American Constitutional history, in sort of the dawning of the Progressive Era and everything we've seen since. Which is, two things happened in 1913, which was not just the ratification of the 17th Amendment, but also the ratification of the 16th Amendment, providing for the income tax. So in many ways what we saw with those two back to back was that the 16th Amendment unleashed the taxing power of the government. And the 17th Amendment unleashed the spending power of the government and, in particular, the ability of the national government to easily provide to take those new funds and redistribute them to special interest groups in particular. And so if you look at it from that lens, essentially at that point the New Deal, which comes along obviously 25 or so years later, as kind of a mop-up operation, once you've basically set that structure in place for a more robust national government in terms of taxing and spending power.
one thing that's often forgotten when we talk about the original Senate, was the idea of bicameralism. And the idea of having two bodies composed by different groups of constituents was designed to limit the power of interest groups.
We can go, and I think we will go into detail about the specific impact of the 17th Amendment, but what I think is significant and relates to Buckley's comments that you noted, was that when it comes to Federalism specifically, the framers saw the election of senators by state legislature to essentially both be necessary and sufficient condition for preserving constitutional federalism. And the magic expression here is Federalist 51, which is where everything comes back to Federalist 51. Which is Madison's view that in order to preserve the Constitution, the interests of the man must be aligned with the Constitutional rights of the place. The interests of the man must be aligned with the Constitutional rights of the place. Which is to say that if you want federalism to be preserved as a Constitutional value, the view of the framers was you have to make the self interest, the political self interest of the representative be aligned with promoting that Constitutional value. What Senators care about is being Senators.
And being a politician is a competitive business. And so, what you have to do is basically make sure that if you're a Senator that you're responding to your constituents. And if your constituents are state legislatures and state legislators, that's a very different constituency from the general public. And that's what the framers understood and that's what the framers were trying to do. Which, to some extent, was done imperfectly, because, as we all know, some kind of mechanisms of direct election arose during the nineteenth century. But I still think it had an impact, even with some of the mechanisms of direct election that arose. I think, when I look at the historical record, it looked like a lot of these things we talk about, unfunded mandates and a lot of the real incursions of the federal government on the states, just don't seem to be there. And I don't think they would be there to the same extent even if the prior 17th Amendment Senate was an imperfect vessel for preserving federalism.
Richard Reinsch (09:17):
Auxiliary precautions in Federalist 51. That's a phrase that I think sticks with me as I think about problems in our current federal government. So the House, obviously, two years directly tied to the people. The Senate would have been tied, was tied, to state legislatures appointing the two senators to represent their state. And the auxiliary precaution meaning two different bodies elect those two branches. And that being crucial because it's not just a majoritarian, two bodies representing majoritarian interests. Could you talk more about that, what was the significance there?
Todd Zywicki (10:00):
Yeah. And the framers, obviously it was kind of a genius structure, right? Which is, two houses elected by different constituencies for different terms. We also have a president who's going to be indirectly elected. That didn't last very long. We still have the vestige of the electoral college, but we do not actually have electors. And we had judges who would basically be appointed for life, right? And the idea was, was this machine in which these different hubs selecting the members of the federal government by different mechanisms would bring certain incentives to what they were doing in that the system as a whole would be more than just the individual pieces.
If you look at the Senate specifically, there were two basic goals here. Which the first was kind of recreate a House of Lords. Which is, as I mentioned, the idea was the House would be the place in which people did politics, retail politics. The qualifications were younger, the terms were shorter, and they expected that there would be direct accountability on the House. The Senate was obviously modeled, to some extent, after the House of Lords in Britain. And the idea was that the Senate would be the place for people who are accomplished in life. Qualifications were that they had to be older, 30 rather than 25. And the idea would be that very distinguished people would be selected to serve in the Senate. Not only career politicians, is what's ended up happening, but accomplished lawyers, business people, military heroes, people of stature, who were turned off by the idea of House and all the electioneering in the House. And they would be chosen for character, judgment, and prudence, and that sort of thing. Which is I think also one of the reasons why they gave to the Senate special responsibilities like with respect to treaties and the like that they didn't give to the House.
That idea of the Senate as a House of Lords was, to some extent, true. Because it did allow people like Daniel Webster to move in and out of the government. A lot of those people we know during the 19th century would kind of rotate in and out of the government, kind of returning when they were needed. Whereas one of the big things that's happened is now the Senate is basically just full of career politicians. Which has changed the dynamics, I think, of the Senate itself. The second important thing about the Senate that you allude to is the structural piece. Which is, it's supposed to be two things. One, preserve federalism, as we talked about a little bit. But the second one is to bring this notion of bicameralism that you mentioned.
And bicameralism is the idea of having two houses that are designed to pass laws in different way. So as to, as the framers clearly understood, mitigate the power of faction, what we would call special interests today. And the idea is that through bicameralism interest groups would have more difficulty influencing the government, and the public interest would prevail by having two bodies selected by different groups. And that's one thing that's often forgotten when we talk about the original Senate, was the idea of bicameralism. And the idea of having two bodies composed by different groups of constituents was designed to limit the power of interest groups. And now, when you make the two bodies more or less identical, it eliminates some of those brakes and some of those checks on interest group factionalism as Madison called it.
Richard Reinsch (13:22):
Now I know, just thinking through all this right now, it's been a part of center right conservative thinking in this country. And it's now at a fever pitch with anger at elites or distrust of elites. Thinking about this system where state legislatures would appoint people to represent their state in the original design, couldn't that also lead, though, to a system of elites bargaining with elites and distributing spoils? As opposed to say a more popular check that we currently have? I mean, I guess, I'm sort of thinking how would it work now that the ideology is really switched? Of course, progressive thinking has switched where states now very much want to be a part of receiving rents from the federal government. I think what, I would say most states, 20% of their... What they receive from the federal government probably equals 20% of their annual budget, if not more. What do you think about that?
Todd Zywicki (14:16):
That's exactly the criticism that's been expressed. And it's not just from conservatives now. That was exactly the argument that was made beginning in the late 19th century when people started beating the drums for direct election, the muckraking newspapers, the populist newspapers, deeming the Senate of the late 19th century and early 20th century, the millionaire's club. And, of course, if you go back and read the Federalist Papers the Senate was one of the things that the anti-Federalist's found most obnoxious for precisely this reason.
Was that what the framers saw as a feature, this sort of House of Lords, the anti-Federalists saw as a bug, right? And they genuinely were concerned about this notion that the long terms and lack of political accountability would make the Senate into this elite group. But again, if we go back to Federalist 51, what does Madison say is the challenge? If angels were to govern men, no government would be necessary. But if we've got men running the government we have this trade off. In the first place the government must be powerful enough to control the governed.
And in second place it must be obliged to control itself. Which is, there's this tension inherent in our Constitution between limiting the power of faction and limiting the power of democracy. Which is the point about the government being able to control the governed, which is why they thought in terms of an indirect elected president, an indirect elected Senate for long terms, and, of course, an independent judiciary that would be protected from the accountability of the democratic process and all that. But at the same time, the concern about elitism, which is to say that if you create independence to resist factionalism you run the risk that the governors become the faction unto themselves and basically end up running the government for themselves. And, of course, the exact same criticism you hear about the Senate is what conservatives say about the judiciary. Which is that the unaccountable, unelected judiciary basically imposes their own views on society without any direct accountability.
The framers answer was that we want to have all of that, right? That's why they thought of all of those four groups, four different bodies, interacting in some way that would bring different perspectives and that sort of thing. But you raise exactly the right point, which is a concern, it's a concern that was present... And I have to say one funny story was a few years ago after I wrote my article in the National Review on the 17th Amendment. A blogger for the American Constitution Society said, "Well, Zywicki just hates democracy, and he wants to get rid of democracy." And so I wrote back, and I said, "Oh, so you're in favor of direct election of judges?" And that was the end of the debate, he never responded, right? Which is the last..., But it's the same logic. Either you're for direct, you're for election of judges or you're against it, right? But basically that's the argument the framers were putting on the table.
Richard Reinsch (17:30):
When I asked that question, too, and I was thinking of Michael Greve's The Upside-Down Constitution, which is an interesting book for a number of reasons. One of which is the way he talks about competitive federalism as opposed, to say, the sharing of power. But the ways in which Federalism is supposed to create this baseline and the states have to compete against it. and that's been endlessly corrupted in the 20th century where states now use the federal government as a way to prevent competition amongst themselves. But they haven't totally, they haven't been completely successful yet. Greve describes other systems, Argentina, talks about the German system, whereby elites are able to use federalism to just endlessly divide spoils.
And he says in our systems that hasn't happened in that way yet because of this, the representational principle of the federal government can actually touch individuals and represent individuals. I guess that's why I thought about that. And it seems what's ultimately being preserved by the U.S. Senate, and this is why Progressives hate it as a body. And many times we hear this common refrain, why should Wyoming cancel California? There's 200,000 people in Wyoming or something, and California has millions. And also California is just way more culturally important so far than Wyoming. But the point being though, the Senate, each state is still equal in the Senate. And to me I would argue that's ultimately what matters. What do you say to that?
Todd Zywicki (19:00):
It does seem to matter, but whether it's what ultimately matters I'm not sure. I mean, obviously, that has some effect, and in many ways that tradition lives on in terms of that decentralization effect. Let me say first, I think that Greve's book is pretty much the most brilliant book I've ever read on the Constitution.
urban machines in the cities wanted direct election because they knew that they could influence elections more, as opposed to having to go through state legislators, which were tilted before redistricting in favor of rural interests, before Baker v. Carr and those cases.
Richard Reinsch (19:18):
It really is.
Todd Zywicki (19:19):
Most of us, by the time we reach 40 or so we rarely fundamentally change our minds about things. Greve's book fundamentally changed the way I think about the Constitution, from sort of a more pure state's rights view to a more inter-state view, and sort of understanding the balance between the federal and state governments. So I think it's really important. And what I will say is I think that the way in which the Senate originally operated, or operates throughout the 19th century, was in many ways more consistent with Greve's view, right? Which is to say that when you look at the history of the 19th century what you see is, by and large, the federal government did what the federal government was supposed to do, and the state government did what the state government was supposed to do. Which is, the states provided most of the services as was expected.
And the federal government did the things that they're basically expected to do. Which is they did interstate improvements, they made it possible to create networks, preserving the interstate common market. And in times of crisis, the government would expand to pass a bankruptcy law when they needed bankruptcy law, to wage war when they needed war. But what also happened is during the 19th century we don't really see this ratchet effect that Robert Higgs points out, where the federal government expands to meet a crisis, it would then to retrench to back where it was. The first time we really see a ratchet effect in American history is after World War I. And maybe it was an ideological view, maybe it was inevitable. But I find it hard to believe that it was purely a coincidence that the ratchet effect first appears during World War I.
And then during that exact same period, in the teens and into the twenties, which where we first start to see the first real expansion of the national government in terms of delivering rent seeking type legislation and redistributing wealth to discreet groups. Which in the government, and, of course, that time, blows the lid off as you move into the New Deal. And a lot of what the growth of the federal government has been since that period is primarily in wealth redistribution systems. For entitlements, subsidies, and rent seeking type things, using the tax code as a vehicle for redistributing wealth. Which, now may have just been inevitable, because of technology and ideological change.
But I think that changing the manner in which the Senate was composed created more of the conditions for this cartel federalism that Greve talks about than was otherwise the case. Maybe it hasn't gone all the way for the reasons you talk about, about each state having equal representation, but I think it did increase the propensity for that to happen. The growth of the federal government, in particular the growth of the federal government in terms of providing rent seeking or special interest type legislation.
Richard Reinsch (22:20):
When you look, and you know the history very well leading up to the ratification, so you know the debates and everything that were going on, a question that I have, why would the states give up that power? That, to me, is an interesting question.
Todd Zywicki (22:33):
Yeah, that's always the interesting question. And there's some fascinating history here that my former colleague David Schleicher has gone into, that has really made me rethink a lot of this. Which is to say that I think that the way in which the structure of the Congress, Article I, was originally designed, with an indirectly elected Senate, still has a lot of virtues and had a lot of virtues. But my enthusiasm for that particular mechanism has been tempered a bit over time by reading David's work. Which is, what David says, is that during the 19th century, especially under the influence of Jackson, that earlier in American history than might be appreciate, parties basically overwhelmed the Madisonian structure. And we see that now, right?
We see that in things like the farcical impeachment processes we've seen both for Trump and Clinton, which turned out to be partisan in their voting. I won't say they were equally partisan in their initiation. But that process, and a lot of these processes, are received during the Noel Canning case where the Democrats in the Senate actually endorse the power of the President to call that, to basically declare them as being in recess, right? Which you've kind of reached the Madisonian nightmare of being overwhelmed in many ways by partisan political influences. And what Schleicher says is that happened during the 19th century more than I, at least, necessarily appreciated. Which is that parties overwhelmed the structural influences, and that over time, the Senate elections placed a pretty strong influence over state legislative elections. That state legislative elections more and more became a proxy for Senate elections. So his argument is that, to some extent, state legislatures may have been frustrated by the fact that the national elections, rather than being indirect they basically became vehicles, right, electors for their senator. And so I think that probably explains some of it, which is that this separation didn't necessarily work that well.
I think some of it also deals with the fact that interest groups, national interest groups, a lot of interest groups wanted the 17th Amendment. They wanted direct election. National interest groups who wanted more regulation of interstate commerce in order to cartelize their industries, like the railroads. Labor unions wanted it. Urban machines were strong components, ironically, right? Because people claimed that the Progressives were against urban machines.
But urban machines in the cities wanted direct election because they knew that they could influence elections more, as opposed to having to go through state legislators, which were tilted before redistricting in favor of rural interests, before Baker v. Carr and those cases. So I think it was probably a combination of interest group influences pushing for direct election to be able to influence the power of the federal government to give them rents. And perhaps some of this frustration that Schleicher points out among the state politicians at having their futures tied, to some extent, to senators who they didn't control. Or they couldn't control their election very well.
Richard Reinsch (25:55):
It's funny, I was thinking, you mentioned Baker v. Carr. I was thinking even state legislatures, in a sense, kind of had a feature like the Senate, in the sense of rural interests were able to counterbalance large cities. If you think about Illinois, if you walk into the Illinois legislature the Chicago delegation must surely overwhelm everything that goes on there.
Todd Zywicki (26:16):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (26:17):
Maybe to the detriment of the state. I certainly noticed that when I worked in the state legislature before going to law school.
Todd Zywicki (26:23):
Sure.
Richard Reinsch (26:24):
There's also a call now, even to abolish the Senate. Not a call, but you see people, they'll make these, or to change it's composition in some form. Or to add states. And, of course, that gets back into partisan politics as well. That point of the parties overwhelming the process is well taken. And it does make it seem as if separation of powers can't do its full work. Thinking about this question, the original role of the Senate and it being lost, how many states were actually holding popular, or at least allowing sort of a popular canvas to exist, and then the legislature would actually have to choose from that, or would commit to choose from that?
Todd Zywicki (27:14):
Yeah, by the time of the 17th amendment, I think a majority of states had some degree of popular election. Which is that they would either have candidate chosen, been party primaries, and then the state legislature would choose their senators. Or, what they have is something called the Oregon plan, which was a system in which people running for state legislatures could have a statement appear on the ballot where they'd be required for a statement to appear on a ballot. Where they would say, yes, I will endorse the people's vote, or, no, I will not endorse the people's vote. And essentially what they then would havewhat would be legally a straw poll of voters. Where they would not create a binding vote for one candidate or the other, but that they would create basically a non-binding vote that state legislators would agree to endorse. And I think some states may have just required the state legislatures to do that.
One bogus criticism of the Senate prior to the 17th Amendment was the argument, which the facts are true but the causal relationship is false, which prior to the 17th Amendment there were periods in which states had vacancies in the Senate, that they failed to select a Senator. And this would often be the case in which the two legislatures of the state were controlled by different parties or by different factions, right? So think about, during that period, the Western states in which you had essentially a three party system. Where you had Populist Republicans as well as traditional Republicans and Democrats.
So it was the case that some states sometimes would fail to select a senator. I think that's a largely a sideshow for two reasons. Which is the first reason in that most states did that once, or maybe twice, and didn't do it anymore. So most states learned their lesson and they fixed the process. The more important reason I think was that there was a federal law passed, I think it was in the 1860's, that required state legislators to select senators by a majority vote. They were not allowed to select by a plurality vote. And, as we know now, a lot of Senate elections, the person who's chosen is selected by a plurality vote. Pretty much any time you have a robust third party you have somebody selected who gets less than 50% of the vote. So that deadlocks problem could have been eliminated simply by eliminating that federal law. And so that's something that's often criticized about the 17th Amendment, which is beside the point.
Richard Reinsch (29:57):
The corruption point is made as well. That seems interesting, and you point that out in one of your pieces. Or you make that point several times, that corruption was the allegation, wide spread in state legislatures, over who would they pick potentially. But, of course, you increase dramatically money in politics, political partisanship, when you go to the direct elections. And I guess, in a way, the corruption point blends into a progressive point. Which was this idea of getting a clean politics in a sense of there is, politics is politics, and wherever you try to eliminate it, it just goes somewhere else.
Todd Zywicki (30:34):
Yeah, that's right. This is one, I laughed when you were saying it. Because I was just having a little kind of back and forth on Facebook the other day with a very prominent conservative person who was talking about, oh, the corrupt Senate prior to the 17th Amendment, criticizing Sasse's view. And the great irony here is well, first, corruption wasn't that common. There were certainly cases of corruption then, there are cases of corruption now. But you put your finger exactly on the point, Richard, which is it's kind of comical for somebody to say that they passed the 17th Amendment to get rid of special interests influence over the Senate. As if we don't have any special interests influences over the Senate nowadays when they have to raise tens of millions of dollars in order to run an election.
Maybe it doesn't involve just repealing the 17th Amendment. Maybe it's trying to bring back a lot of the virtues that the original Senate was trying to bring. Which is to create a more deliberative, more insulated body, that's more responsive to structural concerns of states, strengthen the process of bicameralism and the like.
So I think that's kind of a sideshow or sort of a unicorns and fairies approach to politics to say that we've gotten rid of special interest influence in this fashion. We've probably changed the types of interest groups. As I said, for example, the current system has probably made urban machines more powerful but also changes the composition of the interest groups that tend to be able to have economies of scale to lobby directly to the federal government. It's probably increased the influence of urban oriented interest groups relative to rural groups, or even, we talked about earlier. But it's kind of silly I think to say the 17th Amendment eliminated special interest influence in government.
Richard Reinsch (32:06):
Yeah. Thinking here, also, just the notion, the Progressive notion, this is a Progressive amendment, is another point made about this as well, the Progressive ideology being... But of course other Progressive ideas didn't make it into the Constitution through Amendment, like having referendums or a recall or things like that. And part of a lot of state constitutions now feature those devices. So we get the direct election of senators being a Progressive advance, direct election I guess being the point over all they wanted to make there. Has that resulted, though, in better state representation? Or it seems as we've been discussing, what it's resulted in is something like more ideology or party polarization in many ways.
Todd Zywicki (32:52):
That's why I take an interest in this Richard. I think we're kidding ourselves, or I'm kidding myself, if thinking that somehow or another we're going to actually repeal the 17th Amendment. Democracy seems to be democracy, which is to say that once you give people the power it's unlikely that they're going to give it back. Why I think that it's so useful to talk about and think about the 17th Amendment in the original Senate for this reason of... And this is where I put my professor hat on. Which is what I want people to think about and talk about is what is the Constitution, what should it look like, and what were they trying to accomplish?
The framers, as Franklin famously said, created a Republic if you can keep it. They did not create a democracy. They created a system where the purpose of government was preserve individual liberty and to restrict the power of factions. Meaning the power of organized interest groups to commandeer the power of the government to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public. Those were the goals. It wasn't to create a democracy. Which I think the lesson we can learn from the history of the Senate and the history of the 17th Amendment is why does structure matter?
Why does it matter, the incentives we create for various political actors in this trade off between independence and accountability to do their job? How does different aspects of the government get together? And I think this kind of, in many ways, bring us back full circle to where we started with Ben Sasse's proposition. And your point a moment ago, where we talk about people wanting to abolish the Senate. And I think what Sasse is really asking us to think about is what is the Senate's value proposition? If all the Senate is, is a smaller number of people than the House of Representatives, but has the same degree of partisan conflict and sort of goofiness that we see in the House, why have a Senate? And I think what Sasse is basically saying to his fellow senators as much as anybody is, look guys, our days are numbered. If we're going to basically just be like the House then our days are numbered. We're not proving our value here to the people, we're just a more elite version of the House.
And I think what he's trying to push at with all these other reforms, of making the body more deliberative, making the body less partisan, making the body less responsive to special interests, is I think what he's basically trying to say. Let's think about what, and maybe also then trying to increase the influence of the states. And I think what his real point is, is let's think about, if we're going to have a Senate, what should its functions be? And maybe it doesn't involve just repealing the 17th Amendment. Maybe it's trying to bring back a lot of the virtues that the original Senate was trying to bring. Which is to create a more deliberative, more insulated body, that's more responsive to structural concerns of states, strengthen the process of bicameralism and the like. And I think that's maybe the bigger picture here is what studying this and thinking about this history can tell us about Constitutional structure and what is necessary to preserve individual liberty and restrict the power of interest groups and factions.
Richard Reinsch (36:16):
Just think about being a Senator. And you know that your origination point is your state legislature and could also be your ending point. And how would you act if that were true, versus, how do you act now? Are you this sort of hyper political animal who wants to not be shaped by the institution but to take Yuval Levin's arguments here. You're not going to be shaped by the institution, you're going to stand on top of the institution, and use it to promote your interests or your ideology or whatever your agenda might be. You're probably more likely to work within the system. I mean I would think, because you're appealing back to people who themselves have a certain stature in their states and are watching you.
Todd Zywicki (36:59):
It's a great point. And Vikram Amar wrote an article many years ago that's related to your point, Richard. And I alluded to this earlier, which is one of the big changes since the 17th Amendment is that the Senate has, in fact, become a body for career politicians. Which is that, prior to the 17th Amendment, where states, they couldn't recall senators, but it was quite common that there would be more rotation in office. Senators might rotate through the Executive Branch, or rotate in and out of the private sector over time. And that perspective has been lost, right?
The Senate now is a body of career politicians, and he documents this fact that there is less rotation in office. And there's something important in that. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. But it definitely changes what you do, I think, if, as you said, maybe you go back to being a state politician after two terms. Maybe you go back to being a private citizen after two terms. Or maybe you rotate through the Executive Branch and then you go back to the Senate. That gives you another perspective, right? Where nowadays, as for example, we just learned in Alabama from Senator and Attorney General Sessions. Nowadays basically if you leave the Senate there's a good chance you're done, right? If you join the Executive Branch you're pretty much done at that point and you're not likely to go back into elected politics basically because some other incumbent will have taken your seat. And maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but it's definitely a change from what the normal is during a period of indirect election.
Richard Reinsch (38:32):
And maybe we can end on this. It's where we started, in thinking about the composition of the government. If you think about, say, you had said the House of Lords. Or maybe thinking France, the old, the three estates before the revolution. They all had represented, distinct groups, within their countries. And, of course, the problem in America is there is no elite, landed elite. There's no established interest in that capacity. There's no established church. So what are you, in fact, representing? That's sort of, I think, a question. And so when you're putting together the government you've got to think about who it's representing, how it's representing them, what it's going to be? In addition to what it's going to be doing, how it's going to be limited? And answering that questions I think is the House, the people, Senate, the states. The President is not going to be elected by a majority vote, but is supposed, the original idea being a deliberation in the Electoral College. And those are the key points, it seems to me, that we've occluded, or attempted to bury, in the current arrangement.
Todd Zywicki (39:36):
I think that's right. And this is the suggested, that the framers had the right idea in my view, when they originally structured the Senate. Which is, what they understood that they were trying to do is create a body that would provide a bicameral check that would be slower moving, that would be less accountable to the people, and would be a vehicle for representing the states as states. And I think what we ended up learning during the 19th century was even though that was the ends that they had in mind, the means that they chose were imperfect. And in particular, a general question that we all remember from our high school civics class, which is the framers did not count on the rise of parties, and the way in which parties would change this whole dynamic. And, in many ways, change the dynamic involving the Senate.
And so I think one of the lessons we can learn from this is, and when you look at the debates on the 17th Amendment, it's pretty clear at the time, in my view, they did not believe that they were essentially killing Federalism. They essentially thought that Federalism was so woven into the fabric of American life that they could tinker with this one system of accountability in the way in which Senators were selected and Senators would keep on going the same way. And I think what they found out was that they forgot the lesson of the framers. So I think one of the things I take away from this is I think the way the Senate was originally chosen turned out to be an imperfect vehicle for what the framers were trying to accomplish.
But what that leads me to think is well, if Federalism is still a value, if bicameralism is still a value, what other changes should we have? For example, should the courts be more aggressive in enforcing Federalism? And this is a point that Scalia, among others, basically said. Was that the framers did not build in a lot of other ways enforcing Federalism because they assumed the Senate would protect Federalism. But if we rip that means out, that notion of the Senate as a vehicle for protecting Federalism, for reasons unrelated to wanting to change the fundamental division of power between the federal and state governments. Maybe this idea the courts have largely deferred to the political process with respect to Federalism, maybe we need to reconsider that as well, right? Maybe we need to consider other types of proposals that people have talked about. Like easier ways for states to be able to propose things to Congress, for example. Or ways for states to over-rule, as a group, incursions by the federal government, a lot of these sorts of things that were automatically done when states could elect their state legislatures, but now are not really vehicles for them to protect themselves within the overall structure.
Richard Reinsch (42:20):
Well, Todd, thank you so much for discussing your scholarship and thinking on the original intent of the Senate, and now the 17th Amendment. Appreciate it so much.
Todd Zywicki (42:31):
Well, thank you Richard, and thanks for this stimulating discussion.
John McGinnis discusses what newly appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett will mean for the Supreme Court, originalism, and Chief Justice John Roberts.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Stanley Kurtz, about a new book he has authored called the Lost History of Western Civilization. Stanley Kurtz is senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's a well known commentator on education, higher education, urban suburban policies. He's also a student of the American left. He's authored two books on Barack Obama, Radical-in-Chief and Spreading the Wealth, how Obama is robbing the suburbs to pay for the cities. We're glad to have him on the program today to discuss something that seems evident to us now, particularly in over the past couple of months, this lost history of Western civilization. Stanley, welcome and what's going on in this book?
Stanley Kurtz (01:09):
Well, Richard, thanks so much for having me. And yes, I put out a book called The Lost History of Western Civilization. It came out in January. It's a little bit unconventional, it's actually available as a free downloadable PDF from the National Association of Scholars. It's sort of a book length report for the National Association of Scholars, so readers can actually get it just by clicking on the free PDF. And I put it out in January, and the book has a couple of themes, but one turns out to be surprisingly relevant to the turmoil the country is going through now. The first half of the book largely focuses on the destruction of the academic tradition of teaching Western civilization. And some of the intellectual critique that were used to justify pushing Western civilization required courses aside in our colleges and universities.
Stanley Kurtz (02:16):
For a long time, if you went to college, you likely took a course on Western civilization, and of course on American history, by the way. Those were very often required. And that was all pushed aside amidst great national controversy around 1987 and 1988. And the controversy was focused on Stanford University, there was a famous or infamous demonstration chant by the student protesters, "Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western culture's got to go." And once that chant was publicized, it really galvanized the national controversy. And one thing I do in the book is to dive in to the argument which was probably most important for America's scholars regarding this conflict. It wasn't nearly as well known to the general public, but scholars, what are called deconstructionist historians and academics who were receptive to this skeptical form of post modernism that we call deconstruction of history.
Stanley Kurtz (03:28):
Those sorts of historians argued that the very idea of Western civilization was a kind of bogus, late invention, rather than Western civilization being a great long-standing, continuous cultural tradition coming down to us, from the Athens or Pericles, and from the biblical period, running through Ancient Greece and Rome and then the medieval era, and on into the enlightenment and modernity. These deconstructionist historians suggested that instead, the very idea of Western civilization was a kind of propaganda device, an invention created during the First World War to essentially hoodwink young American soldiers into thinking that they shared enough with Europe to make it worth their while to put their lives on the line in the trenches of the First World War.
Stanley Kurtz (04:29):
So this is a great example of what we mean by deconstruction of skeptical history. And then in the second half of the book, I somehow segue from all that into a reflection on the ways in which this dispute over Western civ, and which gave rise to what came to be called political correctness and multiculturalism actually set the template for our politics today and to the constant accusations of racism and bigotry that we see today. Somehow these things are in fact linked. So that's broadly speaking what the book tries to do.
Richard Reinsch (05:06):
A question just apart from the ideas. Why Stanford University? Why was it ground zero for this attempt to remove Western civilization courses from higher education in America?
Stanley Kurtz (05:17):
Well, that's a great question, and the likely reason is that the demographics of Stanford in 1987 and 1988 were somewhat different from the demographics of colleges in most of the rest of the country. Stanford being in California had a relatively large percentage of minorities of various sorts, there were South Asian, East Asians, there were blacks, there were Hispanics in fairly large percentages. And these groups allied with strongly left leaning white students to form what they called a rainbow coalition. And they were taking their lead from Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns at the time. They were somewhat quixotic presidential campaigns, but they were a foreshadowing of what came later in the Obama years.
Stanley Kurtz (06:16):
They were a foreshadowing of we what we think of as campus intersectionality. And this was the coalition that chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho Western culture has got to go", on a day when Jesse Jackson was actually visiting the school to help rally students in support of what would become his second presidential campaign in 1988. So Stanford in a way prefigured the rising diverse population that we see in our colleges and universities, and the ideology carried by that group.
Richard Reinsch (06:54):
Thinking about Stanford at that time as well, specifically, it seems to my mind, what objections would you raise to learning about Western civilization? And you talk a lot about a certain scholar making this argument that it was put together during World War I to give the soldiers a fighting faith, to give the citizens of fighting faith, etcetera, something like that. But even then I thought, "Okay, maybe that's the case." You prove conclusively that it was not the case. But even if we assume that this person is right, one should still learn about aspects of your civilization, the fundamental ideas and history behind your civilization. Why would you not want to, and what were the arguments that they made?
Stanley Kurtz (07:43):
Well, that is a really very interesting issue. And one of the things that I argue in the book is that the opponents gave an argument to the effect that Western civilization and the great books that belong to it are racist, that the study of it is racist. It's racist in the sense that the West was a colonial power that oppressed people of color across the world. It's racist in the sense that by focusing on so many authors who are "famously dead white males", it's racist. But what I argued in the book was that that wasn't entirely the full truth of the objection. I think the real reason for the objection to Western Civ was that it was powerful that it did teach us about ourselves, that it was a popular course, that students loved the great books. Because whether they agree with a given great book, author or not, the great books as a whole brought students into confrontation with the fundamental questions they would be facing in life, philosophical questions, questions about what they wanted to devote their lives to.
Stanley Kurtz (09:01):
And these courses were extremely popular. They were in fact the most popular courses in the school. Now, if you have a very, very popular course that is all about Western civilization, and if students there feel as though that is not really their heritage, they're coming from outside, from Asia, or as far as I'm concerned, a black American is part of Western civilization and has every legitimate reason to be proud of that. But many black students in Stanford at the time felt as though they were identifying with Africa and their African heritage. So if you don't feel as though you're part of the Western tradition in the first place, and the Western tradition turns out to be tremendously popular and appealing, you actually experience that as an affront.
Richard Reinsch (09:53):
This is though at some level, and by the way, and we were talking about this before the call. I took a great book seminar on Western civilization. I have a very distinct memory of the last day of class of the students in unison, applauding. The last day, the professor, I think, in recognition of how excellent the course had been, and how much we had all learned. Things that we had no clue before. But that was my freshman year, it was the first time I had read T.S. Eliot. So I think that's exactly right on and what those courses were able to do and are able to do, where they're still taught, which makes what happens in my mind, just insidious and dastardly.
Richard Reinsch (10:35):
Question though, this is also our university's rejection of the educational enterprise of the liberal arts enterprise. Hearing that, and you say that in the book that, "Well, this isn't me." Or, "These courses don't reflect my heritage or my background." But that's the very idea of education, that it takes you out of that. One could also take courses in African history or something like that, but this in itself is to misunderstand what education is, it's to turn it into an ideological enterprise.
Stanley Kurtz (11:06):
Well, I think that's true. And I think you can also put it another way, going back to the point I made about American blacks actually very much being a part of Western civilization. And in the book, I say that the same thing applies, say, to Hispanic students, and to almost any student who gets into, say, an elite college has already very likely, in almost every case, become deeply a part of Western civilization. And in the last part of the book, I look into some of the controversies playing out on our campuses. And I argue that in fact, they are very Western controversies, controversies about say whether you should use the word Latinx, instead of Latino. In other words, controversies over whether we should think of ourselves as part of a larger family, and part of a tradition about the family, or whether we should be such free individuals that we can almost create our own language, a language that completely respects and preserves the rights and independence of every individual with respect to their sexuality.
Stanley Kurtz (12:18):
That is a very Western sort of controversy. And the students who attack the West don't fully realize that the cultural politics that they carry is a descendant of the individualism and the great tradition of liberty of the West. Now, it may be, and I personally think it is the case that they're taking this tradition to a dangerously radical extreme, and in that sense misusing it. But whether you think they're going in precisely the right direction or not, I don't think you can understand campus politics today in a deep way, without actually reading the great books of the West. And these students, even students who are of different races and ethnicities, are profoundly Western and could gain self knowledge by truly reading and learning to understand the great books of the West.
Richard Reinsch (13:23):
Thinking about, and you make a nice point towards the end of the book, that those making these claims about gender identity would have to confront more... Okay, well, what about the claims now of community, or the accumulation of knowledge and tradition within a community and how one balances that out with individualism? All sorts of examples of intellectual challenges that would be good for them to have but which they aren't having. Thinking about, so Stanford, you argue, and you've alluded to that sort of the epicenter of the higher education battles over the last 40 years. I mean, they sort of crystallize there. And there's also, you talk about intersectionality. The term used before intersectionality, I hadn't thought of this, was multiculturalism, and you argue intersectionality actually is a far better term, given what they're arguing. Could you talk more about that?
Stanley Kurtz (14:15):
Absolutely. One of the themes of the book is that the current standpoint of the left, although it is sometimes called multiculturalism, actually has very little to do with culture. I argue in the book that you probably could better call it anticulturalism than multiculturalism. If you actually look at the multicultural, or better the intersectional coalition as it operates on campus, a coalition that generally unites gay students with Latino students and black students and Muslim students. If you actually look at the traditional culture of some of those groups and contrast them, what you actually would have there was a group of people who would probably have a lot of clashing views and clashing perspectives. And so in order to hold a coalition, what you actually have to do is downplay the content of your culture, because that's what differentiates you. And instead, you have to play up race.
Stanley Kurtz (15:21):
That is why the phrase people of color has become so predominant nowadays. The idea of people of color creates a unification between these groups. And the other thing that unifies them, is the sense that they're all being oppressed, oppressed by some kind of traditionalist Western, and from their point of view, white majority. And so the idea of finding oppression, finds the intersexual coalition together, and plays down their cultural differences. So we saw, for example, that recently at Stanford, you had a leftist coalition, an intersectional coalition. And they started to demand that the courses which would count towards the distribution requirements, as far as diversity goes, that those courses should only include courses that teach about oppression. And they should not necessarily include courses that teach about, say, the history of Chinese culture, or something like that.
Stanley Kurtz (16:27):
So culture is really not at the forefront of what's going on here. Culture is actually being hollowed out. And many of the students who come to school to begin with, as I've already noted, are actually fairly assimilated, and are not deeply steeped in their heritage cultures. And so what we're seeing here are people who don't actually have much of a culture, and their only sense of collective belonging comes from claiming to be oppressed. And that creates a tendency to want to balloon any tiny incident or issue that could be interpreted as oppressive into a massive, massive problem. Let's say there's a statue there you don't like, that's not nearly as much of a problem as the entire system of segregation was in the south in the 1940s and '50s. But a statue becomes a kind of signal that, "Yes, I am oppressed, and we can all unite around that." It's pretty thin gruel, but it's all we've got left to form a basis for identities in the current environment.
Richard Reinsch (17:40):
A couple of questions come to mind. So you say courses on impression as opposed to say positive courses on aspects of other cultures? Going back to 1987, what did those chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture has got to go." What did they want to replace Western civilization with in terms of courses?
Stanley Kurtz (17:59):
Well, that in a way is the heart of the matter, they didn't really have a very good sense of what they wanted to replace it with. And of course, we know that the problem of the left in general from the '60s on, is that they have a much more enthusiastic sense of what it is they want to get rid of than what they want to replace it with. And we saw this playing out at Stanford, because when the traditional Western Civ requirement was swept away, first of all, very few of the junior faculty members who had pushed for that change actually proposed to teach a course in the new mode. It was supposed to be called culture ideas and values. It was supposed to essentially be a course about multiculturalism. And few teachers even made a proposal to do it.
Stanley Kurtz (18:50):
And the few courses that were actually taught along those lines, turned out to be confusing, incoherent, and ultimately very unpopular with the students. So the requirements collapsed. And Stanford has been lurching ever since they got rid of their very popular Western Civ and Western culture requirements. They have been lurching from one set of required humanities courses to another, and none of them really had any kind of defining center, and they didn't inspire the students in the way that the old courses did. And one of the things I argue in the book is that this stands for something larger, the people who are critiquing America today and the American tradition in the name of something, multiculturalism, intersectionality, whatever you call it, don't really have a significant alternative.
Stanley Kurtz (19:48):
It's not as though there is a society in waiting that has its own coherence and its own ability to unite us as a people that they are waiting to put in place of what we have now. It's much more the case that what they have is chaos. We saw this in a miniature level on the campuses, and I'm afraid we're facing this on the macro level today.
Richard Reinsch (20:13):
You argue this incident at Stanford really illustrates the first use or very expanded use of the charge of racism. Obviously, a very powerful term. But you go back and you look at arguments that were being made against the western civilization course, by arguing that it itself was racist, even though there was no intention, nothing in the course that was meant to be racist. But because of the way it made someone feel potentially or challenged them, that that was racist. And of course, we see that now writ large all the time in the sense of well just American constitutionalism is racist, or capitalism is racist. And the Jews argue that that's where it started, in that instance.
Stanley Kurtz (20:58):
Exactly Richard. Right now, we actually see that in some ways the presidential race is turning around this idea of systemic racism. We see that Vice President Biden and Kamala Harris, both fairly straightforward and enthusiastic, and they're used to the term systemic racism. And we saw this with most of the Democratic presidential candidates, and then President Trump has opposed this, and he's ordered the federal government to stop teaching critical race theory. So we can almost at this point, if you're young enough, take for granted the fact that an accusation of racism is something very broad, that it can be brought into almost any ordinary political policy difference. But in fact, this is not the usual, and it's not what racism originally meant. Originally, of course, it had more to do with people who believed in the genetic inferiority of a race and the fact that that was in their view, their bigoted view, have necessitated a kind of systematic segregation of the races.
Stanley Kurtz (22:01):
And so how did we get from the one point to the other? And I do think Stanford was a turning point. When the accusation is made that just teaching Plato and Aristotle is racist, and creates racist, then you're beginning to get the first glimmers of a major public national argument, where the claim is made that something that doesn't have anything to do with a direct intention of racism is in fact racist. And what we saw at the time, if you actually go back to this period of the Stanford dispute in 1987, in 1988, we see that traditionalists who supported Western civilization courses were completely shocked by these accusations of racism applying to the great books, and Plato and Aristotle. And they called it McCarthyism. They called it a kind of McCarthyism.
Stanley Kurtz (22:55):
And they said, "This is an academic setting. We're supposed to have a debate on the merits of how we construct a course here. And you're using these high powered accusations when we've already said that we're very happy to add books, by say, Simone de Beauvoir and Frederick Douglass, we're very open to that. And yet, somehow you're calling this course racist, and you're calling us racist. And this is a smear on the order of a McCarthyite smear, and not something that has a place in the academic setting." And I think the irony is that now, that is probably the main thing that happens in an academic setting. That there are a whole academic disciplines now or sub disciplines dedicated to finding subtle forms of systemic or institutional racism in almost everything and everywhere. This has actually become the central stuff of academia, and it's become perhaps the central dividing line in our politics.
Stanley Kurtz (24:00):
And so that is a very problematic thing. But again, as I argue in the book, it is ultimately a way of giving us a kind of substitute for the communal and religious meanings that we seem to have lost. It's a way to give us a kind of collective cause to cling to, but it results in a lot of inaccurate global unfair accusation.
Richard Reinsch (24:26):
Yeah, the systemic racism, it's funny just before we got on, I was reading a story, the student life director at Berry College in Georgia was dismissed yesterday for denying that systemic racism exist. So it's a very powerful term. And I wonder though, when people are saying this, is it to say that the very structures of America are racist. So therefore, at one level, obviously, there's been a lot of racism in America. On another level, we've done a lot to eliminate any institutional ability to oppress people, particularly through government. But it's almost as if when I say systemic racism, it's because of this past racism therefore everything is systemic, or something like that.
Stanley Kurtz (25:13):
Right. I think one problem with the whole charge of systemic racism is that it's difficult to define. And one of the things I say in the book is that this was true as well of the term multiculturalism. In fact, I find some multiculturalists actually acknowledging that the term doesn't have a fixed meaning, that it is in fact, in effect, a term that can be deployed by interest groups on behalf of whatever they want for contradictory goals depending on their political interest at a given moment. So at one moment you might get accused of being a racist for not acknowledging a cultural, racial or ethnic difference. And that the next moment someone might turn around and say the fact that you have highlighted a difference by race or ethnicity or culture means that you are a bigot. And you never know what's going to hit you.
Stanley Kurtz (26:11):
I think some people who are saying systemic racism, what they really mean is, "We're socialists, and we don't like the system." And by slapping the word racism on it, they find a convenient way to scare people into not talking back to them. And if anyone dares talk back, that just the fact that they're rejecting the racism accusation is a way of saying, "Well, then you must be racist." So that's one way it works, I think. And in another sense, people often look at any disproportion at all in economic situation, or any other kinds of benefits that can be observed statistically between different races, ethnicities, people of different national origins, it can be attributed to systemic racism.
Stanley Kurtz (26:58):
It may on the contrary be that because of complex historical forces, and because of current cultural views, let's say the collapse of the family which has particularly been strong in the black community, that might explain some of the differences in educational achievement, rather than racism per se. But if you say it's all because any disproportion in statistics is because of systemic racism, you have a way of deflecting attention from the strengths and weaknesses of the cultures of different communities. And so it's sometimes a way of just dismissing the claim that there is a cultural component to why some communities do better educationally than others.
Richard Reinsch (27:42):
But in listening to you say that, and thinking about your discussion of the regimes of truth, it brings up some interesting questions too. So one way of dismissing say the teaching of Western civilization was to employ the post modernism, the deconstructionism, there is no such thing as culture. What could possibly be a civilization? you're just sort of inventing things on the fly to justify what you want in this sort of business. And of course, in a way and now people argue, well, the problem is relativism on the left. They actually have a lot of moral certainty and objectivity about what they believe in. But it is the case it seems that though, and you make this point and thinking about it, there is sort of like a relativism always there that enables them to sort of justify as you try and puzzle through systemic racism. I was thinking, and just like the arguments we get for gender identity, it's either hardwired or now we're increasingly told it's a choice. But in any event, it's all good. And maybe you could tease that out a bit.
Stanley Kurtz (28:49):
Absolutely, that is indeed another theme of the book that there is a kind of incoherence built into the postmodern critique, which simultaneously exhibits radical skepticism and at the same time, utter moral certainty. So for example, the work of Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist who is tremendously influential on our college campuses today, suffers from this incoherence. On the one hand, Foucault wants to argue that there is actually no such thing as truth, that what you call truth... Let's say that your truth is that there is something called Western civilization, and that that is a great tradition and needs to be studied and understood. And he's saying actually, no, that is not... He's not saying it's false, so much as that he's saying, "That is your truth and your way of speaking, and that way is actually a technique to give you power and control." So what you're really looking to do by speaking of Western civilization, is to get control and power over people who you call uncivilized. So I'm not even going to bother, I Foucault, about proving you right or wrong as to whether there is a Western civilization and what it consists of. Instead I'm going to analyze all of the subtle ways in which your talk of civilization is really a way of dismissing and demeaning others and giving you power over them."
Stanley Kurtz (30:33):
But then you turn around and see that Foucault who has thrown out the whole enterprise of trying to find what is true, is himself making a truth claim. He's making a claim that people's arguments about truth are really a way of grabbing for power. And that is a kind of moral certainty at the base of his way of thinking. And if you tease it out, as I tried to do in the book, you'll find that that is actually coming from the great intellectual tradition of Western civilization. The Foucault in an implicit way, depends for his effect on our outrage at the idea that someone would be trying to grab for power over a weaker and oppressed group. And that touches on our basic, classically liberal belief in liberty and equality-
Richard Reinsch (31:29):
Justice.
Stanley Kurtz (31:29):
... and all of the ideas that Americans hold dear, but that Foucault says are a bunch of nonsense. So he simultaneously is exhibiting a very Western way of looking at things at the very moment that he is trying to say that it's all nonsense.
Richard Reinsch (31:44):
Yeah, I was thinking as well the relativism [inaudible 00:31:48] clears the ground, and okay, so there's nothing left. And yet man needs meaning, man needs purpose, some sort of direction. And that racism sort of was still there. Still one thing that a lot of people agree on as wrong. And that sort of fills a power void, an existential power void in people's lives, particularly on campus, and becomes sort of this guiding ethos for how to organize campus. And I was thinking recently, Glenn Lowry has been very strong in the past few months in speaking out against a lot of these claims. And he opposed his own Brown University where he teaches, issued a letter basically signing the university off on a social justice mission. And he argued that this is completely at odds with the ethos at the university. But then you kind of argue with this, there's all sort of flows from it's the relativism dialectic turning into certainty around this one thing of race.
Stanley Kurtz (32:47):
Absolutely. One of the things I argue is that morality in general, used to turn around the idea of personal sacrifice on behalf of a community that was larger than yourself. So you will sacrifice on behalf of the family, of the neighborhood, of your religious community, of your nation, or of your civilization. And in the current mode, many of those communities have broken down, and we've become much more atomized as individuals. And that stands behind this comprehensive sense of skepticism about larger narratives of history and community. It really is the energy that feeds all of the skepticism. But as an atomized individual, one of the few things that you have left to believe in, is your individual freedom. You may no longer connect that freedom to this great Western tradition and this great American tradition flowing from the declaration and the Constitution. You now find those unbelievable and unpersuasive, and yet somehow, as an individual, you simultaneously and in a contradictory way, feel outrage about anyone trying to step on your rights or to oppress you and take away your freedom.
Stanley Kurtz (34:19):
And so the one thing that can bring you into unity with others, into some kind of at least temporary community is a crusade to fight against oppression. And that means that the only way to find larger meaning in your life is to find oppression everywhere. If there is no crisis of oppression, then you are an isolated atomized individual who no longer even believes in your own country or civilization. But if you can find oppression somewhere, even if it's only coming from an inert statue, then all of a sudden you can galvanize a protest group and have meaning and excitement in your life.
Richard Reinsch (35:04):
As I read your diagnosis there, which I largely agree with, I read your book, I finished it yesterday. And it filled me with great sadness, and almost pessimism because that those underlying problems are only getting worse. And sort of the people separated from community, from family, from their history. I mean, obviously, we haven't really taught our young people much history. And so if that's true, then those underlying factors get worse than the turn towards the anti racism continues to grow and metastasize.
Stanley Kurtz (35:35):
Well, that's right. And I'll give you a pessimistic and an optimistic take.
Richard Reinsch (35:40):
Okay.
Stanley Kurtz (35:40):
The pessimistic take is, and we touched on it already in this conversation, that what divides us is not belief in two coherent alternatives, which could somehow be compromised, or even with the triumph of the new way could somehow build a new and coherent society. Really, we're dealing with a contrast between the traditional American sense of citizenship on the one hand, and a critical perspective that has no real coherent social or cultural alternative to provide. And without that, one has to be very pessimistic about the future.
Stanley Kurtz (36:23):
At the same time, on a more optimistic view, I have argued that although it's contradictory and incoherent, there is still something profoundly Western about the critics of our traditional American system, about the people who have fallen away from it. And that it's possible that they might be able to recognize this and understand their kinship to the various traditions that they have rejected. And if that begins to dawn on people, I think it creates a basis for some kind of reconciliation. Because the truth is we are all still very Western and American. And it wouldn't be that difficult, if we wanted to recognize that our founding principles, and the great tradition of liberty developed in the West is actually something that unites us. That we're fighting over conflicting interpretations of concepts that we still hold in common. And that I think, is the possibility that just might save us.
Richard Reinsch (37:29):
In this regard too, it's been interesting talking to another of academics teaching Frederick Douglass, or Martin Luther King, and being told by students that this is sort of ridiculous. That in a way they were playing right into the white power structure with their arguments, and why would we even need to learn this? And I guess that also fills me with pessimism, because if there are bridges to bring these two perspectives into conversation with one another, surely it's someone like Frederick Douglas and his background and experiences and then appealing back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to try and show the goodness of America. And that course just being rejected outright, that also a bad sign, to put it mildly.
Stanley Kurtz (38:18):
Well, that's true, but I will say this is not an entirely optimistic reply, but it is a reply of sorts. Remember that the '60s at their height had a kind of collapse. There was a collapse there. Eventually, the hippie communes broke up, and the druggies sort of overdosed and snapped out of it. There was no real place to go from the '60s. Yes, it seeped into our culture since then. But the '60s was never able to build a coherent alternative. Similarly, the French Revolution collapsed. Now, there was a lot of struggle and strife in France for a long time after that, before they came back to a stable resolution, but I don't think the current situation is going to lead to a stable alternative. It's going to collapse of its own extremism. We've already actually seen perhaps a glimmer of that.
Stanley Kurtz (39:14):
When you see the unprovoked murder of these police officers, and then demonstrators trying to block the hospital saying, "I hope you die." This is the sort of thing that is already I think, probably beginning to snap people out of it. Where you look at Minneapolis, where now they're beginning to worry. They started to say they were going to [inaudible 00:39:34] their police, and now people are complaining-
Richard Reinsch (39:36):
Where are the police?
Stanley Kurtz (39:36):
... there are no police. There's nowhere to go from this perspective, and they're going to hit the wall, and then people are going to rethink.
Richard Reinsch (39:45):
Yeah. That was sort of my next question, is what sort of community can one build within an ideology like intersectionality. Some of it is made of these dynamics that we saw say in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, where the most radical group wins. But what was actually won, and what could they actually build?
Stanley Kurtz (40:08):
I think that's true. Although now to switch on to the pessimistic side, I think that's true but when you look over Russia, you see that they were able to sustain this unsustainable for 70 years, and they haven't done very well for themselves since then, either. So I do think America has deeper resources culturally than that. We have a larger bank of cultural capital, so to speak. So I don't think we're necessarily quite as badly off as Russia was. But you never know when will you have one of these unsustainably radical perspectives knocking down what has been built with such care, you could have a situation as say in the '60s where things turned around, and we actually got in response to the '60s, a period of relative conservatism, at least on the political level if not the cultural.
Stanley Kurtz (40:58):
You could have a relatively quick turnaround, because America has good cultural resources, but sometimes you can have a long period of an essentially untenable situation, which only collapses of its own weight after a long time. And it's tough to say what the future holds. As Yogi Berra said, "Predicting is hard, especially the future."
Richard Reinsch (41:20):
The future takes a long time.
Stanley Kurtz (41:22):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (41:23):
Final question for you is just higher education, the future of it? And I think, particularly in the light of the last few years, is there a future for humanities in higher education in an authentic sense? To my mind, it's, if there is it would require pretty extensive federal government action to bring it to bear and actually return it to what it was or what it could be.
Stanley Kurtz (41:51):
I think there's a place for federal action, particularly cutting money, and maybe some other things as well such as campus free speech legislation. But I make an argument in an essay that came out a couple months ago. In the American mind, I kind of lay out a broad strategy for how to take back the academy. And I actually think the largest task falls back on ourselves. There is actually, I would argue, a majority of Americans at this moment who are unhappy with the academy. This includes not only Republicans, but many independents, and many moderate Democrats. The problem is that they aren't organized. This is a classic case where a particular interest group, the people within the academy itself, and they have a very large and powerful lobbying arm, exercise disproportionate power, because the general public is not activated and organized.
Stanley Kurtz (42:44):
What if there was a lobby group, like the NRA on the right, or NARO on the left? What if there was a lobby group in favor of reforming the academy? If there was such a group, and millions of people signed up and gave in their membership fees, and then the leaders of that lobby could walk into state legislators and Congress with those legislators knowing that whether they go the way that this person favors or doesn't favor, means letters going back to a very large national membership, saying that this person is in favor of shutting down free debate on college campuses, or this person is trying to help us, then I think that the dial could move. And we haven't even tried to do that, haven't even realized that we need to do that. So I lay out a number of ideas like that in this article. I think it's possible to win, but we've got to get a better strategy and I try to lay one out.
Richard Reinsch (43:46):
Well it's interesting. I look forward to reading that. Stanley Kurtz, thank you so much for joining us. We've been talking with the author of the Lost History of Western Civilization. Thank you.
Stanley Kurtz (43:56):
Richard. Thanks so much.
Richard Reinsch (43:58):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal, Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Hello. Welcome Liberty Law Talk. Today, we're talking with Dan Mahoney, one of the principal founders of Liberty and Justice for All, a new statement and declaration of the right kind of unity about American citizenship and education and constitutionalism. We're going to let Dan tell us more about that. Dan is a frequent guest of Liberty Law Talk, and we're glad to have him on. He's the Augustine Chair of Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College. He's the author of a number of books, including The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. He's also the author of The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order and The Other Solzhenitsyn. Dan, glad to have you on.
Dan Mahoney (01:05):
Delighted to be back, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (01:07):
So last time we were talking about CHAZ which then became CHOP, Capitol Hill Organized Protest in Seattle. We were discussing how the city government of Seattle could allow, in effect, 10 blocks or so of its city to be taken over by Antifa, various thugs, left-wing protestors, who we now know worked a great deal of damage. And so we know this was a microcosm effort of a lot of problems and unrest and unsettlement in our country. And we talked a lot about that. You've now become a part of an effort which I'm also a part of called "Liberty and Justice for All". Maybe tell us about that.
Dan Mahoney (01:51):
Yes. We published an open letter with 173 signatories. The founders of the effort were myself, Mark Mitchell at Patrick Henry College, Jeremy Beer publisher of The American Conservative, and Joshua Mitchell the Tocqueville scholar at Georgetown, who has a book coming out from Encounter this fall called American Awakening which is actually about the tyranny of despotism. We all consulted after I had published my essay on "The Culture of Hate" at RealClearPolitics around the 4th of July. My colleagues contacted me and said, "We need a concerted effort to speak up in defense of American principles and institutions and against this nihilistic violence and mayhem." We were all I think, stunned by the fact that this open assault on our history, on our institutions, on the symbols of the American Republic, on our Western inheritance was being met by so little resistance. The Republican Party was acting as if this was just business as usual, this too shall pass. Trump was really the only one speaking up most notably in his very powerful Mount Rushmore address, which was uniformly attacked by mass media. So we put our efforts together and we decided our best approach was to write an open letter to our fellow Americans laying out in bold, but spirited, but nonetheless thoughtful, to weigh exactly what is at stake if those who are committed to the destruction of the American heritage win. And that's what we did.
We laid down the fact that this movement is destructive and not constructive. That it's not dedicated to reformation which depends on conservation, but is instead dedicated to a full scale assault on America. We also, I think were particularly concerned by the way in which admirable aspirations and principles were being used, especially facile and ideological appeals to justice and inequality. And I should add we were deeply concerned by the iconoclasm the tearing down of statues, the efforts to cancel Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Junipero Serra, the great saint in California, the ignorance of the mob as they tore down abolitionists and anti slavery people. And we were, I think, deeply concerned about la trahison des clercs, the betrayal of the intellectuals, either at worst endorsing and vigorously endorsing this madness and nihilism and at best simply excusing it, so that was the genesis of our effort.
As I said, we had 173 signatories, many very distinguished people, including yourself from a wide range of backgrounds, many conservative, some liberals, many among what I call the unclassifiable people who are not easily ideologically classified. And since the publication of the letter, in RealClearPolitics about 10 or 11 days ago, we've had 1,000 people sign on and about another 1,000 who can't sign for one reason or another, given the power and intimidation of the cancel culture, but who want to be on our mailing list and implicitly, I think endorse our aim. We want this to be an ongoing effort. We've followed up with a series of op-eds by Dr. Mitchell, myself, Mark Mitchell, you in a few days, Roger Kimball you'll have a piece on The Nature of Despotism. Roger Kimball has a piece on The Subversion of American Education. So we want this to be an ongoing effort as you said, in defense of constitutionalism over the rule of law and of the fundamental nobility of the principles that underlie the American proposition.
Richard Reinsch (06:25):
Where can people listening right now, where can they find this, the statement and sign up and make their-
Dan Mahoney (06:31):
Yeah, you can sign up and don't be concerned if your signature doesn't show up right away. We have to verify to make sure there's not spam and that kind of thing. You know, people can write anything down. So it's not an automatic process, but if you sign it and you're committed to it, your name will appear once everything is verified, you can go to the Real Clear Foundation, do a Google search, Liberty and Justice, open letter Liberty and Justice For All.
Richard Reinsch (07:29):
Realclearfoundation.org, I think is the website. That's certainly where I found it. So thinking about future goals, building something of a movement, what are future plans, things you want to do?
Dan Mahoney (07:41):
Well, right now, we're concentrating on the series of op-eds that develop and clarify and move forward the ideas and inspiration of the letter. I think that will continue for a while. We also envision putting together a series of conversations, perhaps where the signatories of other letters that take a different tack opposing the cancel culture and the new liberalism but I think I know of one such effort that concentrates in higher education. Of course there's the corporate letter, I'm not sure if their signatories will want to talk to us but we want to talk to them. We have one common signatory, the admirable, independent, black linguist, and intellectual, John McWhorter.
I should add, we've also partnered, this was this letter was co-sponsored by 1776 Unites. One of our organizers and initiators, Joshua Mitchell is on the board of 1776 Unites. He's very close to Robert Woodson. 1776 Unites is a group of mainly African-American intellectuals. Robert is a bit of a community organizer in the best sense of the term, but who are committed to American principles to the constructive, and salutary, and truthful role of religion and to the hope inherent in the black experience, and then the American Republic, the American proposition. A wonderful group of people, John McWhorter, Wilfred Reilly, Carol Swain, John Ward, people around Robert who really challenged this narrative that American principles offer nothing for black men and women, or that Lincoln is a dreaded racist who needs to be canceled, or that there is no hope and that blacks are simply victims without agency, and that the majority population in this country are simply white supremacists and oppressors who are beyond redemption. So I think that a prominent crew of both very gifted and serious African-American intellectuals are working to unite the American people to see how the principles of '76, should bring all of us together to be a source of constructive engagement, moving toward a more dignified future while building on what's noble in our principles and in our past, while being fully cognizant of the injustices that mar the American experience. So that collaboration with 1776 Unites is very important to us. I believe our letter is also available on the 1776 Unites website.
Richard Reinsch (10:36):
You mentioned in the letter the signatories' concerns about free speech being eliminated largely through cancel culture. It occurs to me the First Amendment could be nullified without it being repealed if cancel culture continues because of just the self-censorship that will occur. Representative government, you mentioned that, being sort of undermined as debate becomes difficult, and as these very drastic measures are constantly asserted to be the only way certain institutions like city councils can deal with difficult issues like police reform as in defund the police. And then also you mentioned federalism, market commerce, education, family, and religion.
I want to talk briefly on market commerce, just because of the centrality that that's played as you know, in conservative thought throughout or since the post World War II period. And then the incredible weight that it had after the Cold War. You mentioned two problems in this which will be well-known to our listeners. The threat of crony capitalism, where those who are entrenched in power can use that power to make more money for themselves but foreclose opportunities to others. But you also mentioned woke capitalism, and I thought that was apt and correct, but we've got these two problems here, woke capitalism and crony capitalism. What does that mean? Or how should conservatives think about the market in light of the challenge whereby corporations whom we've always largely been friendly towards now seem to be actively working against not only conservatism and the causes that they support, but even perhaps the country itself, eating away at their own foundations, it seems to me.
Dan Mahoney (12:29):
Yeah, I'm a great admirer and I think you are of the writings of Irving Kristol and to a lesser extent, Wilhelm Roepke. And there's this conservative, liberal defense of the market that both men articulated in the '40 and '50s for Roepke for '60, '70s, and '80s with Kristol. It made the point that the market economy is not self subsisting. It depends upon the bourgeois virtues. It needs to be instantiated in a political order if the political order which is a commercial republic, it depends on virtues that it sometimes undermine. So this why Kristol famously in 1978 book called for Two Cheers For Capitalism. Not because he thought the market mechanism was inefficacious or should be replaced, but because market efficiency when liberated from the larger republican order that grounds it and forms it can be self-destructive, and I think we see that with both crony capitalism, which is really something in a different language and somewhat different form, something that Adam Smith warned against in the Wealth of Nations.
Richard Reinsch (13:46):
Yes.
Dan Mahoney (13:47):
That he was never too nervous about what his merchants were conspiring against the public courts. And woke capitalism, I think is a phenomenon that is tied to the corporate capitalism as Irving Kristol pointed out has always been a problem it's not that it doesn't serve productivity and economic efficiency. And I think you're right that classical liberals and conservatives in America have defended the corporation against demagogues and criticisms, and we were right to do so.
But on the other hand, when corporate capitalism simply ignores all the other goods that inform patriotism, the family tradition, that inform what's dirty and serious liberal republican order, when corporate capitalists try to buy off socialist collective as demagogues, or also promoting other moral dissolution of civil society I think these people have to be active with the votes. This is an old phenomenon, many an anti-totalitarian has quoted Lenin's famous line about the capitalist giving us the rope to hang them with. There's a long line of history of how Wall Street and corporate capitalists appeased or tried to do business with the Soviet Union after Germany and this kind of thing.
I think we see it today with the People's Republic of China, we see it with the NBA in China. So our manifesto, our open letter is unequivocally in favor of the principles of the commercial republic, of the viable right of private property, of the indispensability of the market to both liberty and the prosperity of the American people. But yes, we do see the capitalist class complicit of the moral and economics divergence of the American Republic through both woke capitalism, but also crony capitalism. A desire in a way to do an end runaround the market, through the politicization of economic life. So I think when we wrote this letter, we were very careful to add those two because we're putting together a coalition of independent minded people, none of whom are committed to, or naive about socialism or Marxism, and many of whom see these problems with not so much, I would say the economic order as the culture that has come to replace the old bourgeois values and virtues. So it was important for us to say that, I think.
I think a defense simply in private property in the market against socialism would not have satisfied the majority of our signers because our moral situation today is quite complex. And I think a fulsome defense of the market and the commercial Republic has to take into account these real problems.
Richard Reinsch (16:59):
I wanted to ask you just briefly before we got on today, I was reading and my friend Phil Magnus pointed out and he's been following the 1619 Project that The New York Times, and he's caught them red-handed with screenshots, evidence that they've surreptitiously been editing the 1619 Project. To take away some of the more strident claims, false claims that they made at the beginning of trying to move away from saying that 1619 was the beginning of our country, which was their first claim. And also moving away from this idea that America separated itself from great Britain in order to bolster the institution of slavery.
Dan Mahoney (17:46):
Not only an absurd claim...
Richard Reinsch (17:47):
Not only an absurd claim but they... So we've got The New York Times, the paper of record, editing its own website without telling anyone, which is to the extent that there are ethics around online journalism, if you make any substantive edits, you're supposed to draw attention to it, they did not. And then we've got the Black Lives Matter movement on their website, basically taking down their claims that they wanted to abolish the nuclear family, as well as Marxist-inspired language about business, etc. removing those from its website. And I thought to myself, is that an indication already of some good news for us, for those of us who are trying to repel this movement that they're editing themselves, surreptitiously taking off this factual errors and ideological claims that most people think are bogus already, an indication that they've overshot the mark?
Dan Mahoney (18:40):
Well, they did overshoot because they engaged in what the political theorist, Gerhart Niemeyer once called a total critique of the West and a total critique of America. And total critiques are always tied to totalitarianism because total critiques, demand negation and destruction. So they did overshoot and people have begun to notice. Now, I don't for a second believe Nikole Hannah-Jones and the ideologues as the participants in the grievance industry around her have changed their minds at all. It's just that they are worried that their project will be less the source of a new orthodoxy if the more egregious ideological claims remain. But look, when Charles Kesler early on during this revolution published a piece in the New York Post called "The 1619 Riots," Nikole Hannah-Jones, tweeted that she was proud of that. In other words, this the same woman who said when we destroy property we're not committing violence.
We know the amount of property damage and the violence that accompanies that, it is a form of violence but other even more incendiary forms of violence accompany. They are stepping back a bit I mean again, the trained Marxists the idealogues who inspired and lead BLM are still trained Marxists, are still committed to the deconstruction of the family, still hate capitalism, still believe in an ideological Manichaeism where blacks and LGBTQ people are all innocent by definition and forever, and where whites and others I suppose Jews are forever guilty. So nothing has changed. But I think after four months of audacity, violence, mayhem, and the utter silence of the political class and of the Democratic party, a good part of the country is waking up. You could see it in the declining support down from 66 to 44, I think for BLM, people are now making distinctions we made four months ago between an affirmation that all black lives matter and all lives matter, and the claims of the BLM movement.
So I think we're in a better place now, even than when I wrote my "Culture of Hate" piece in July or late July I felt very alone and I really was stunned by the whole silence of the conservative political class, even more so the Republican party. And I think people are beginning to see, and they're beginning to see in part, because the idealogues push so hard so quickly, so boldly, so nihilistically that it's almost impossible not to see despite the censorship by the mainstream media. You know, if you just watch MSNBC and CNN, you would not know that our city was on fire. you simply wouldn't know.
Richard Reinsch (21:54):
Though the mendacity there, they're lying and they're covering up as many people have noted, you'll have news anchors with fires raging in the background, where they are reporting insisting that this is a peaceful protest or a largely peaceful protest.
Dan Mahoney (22:08):
By the way, I think that term mostly peaceful protest has become-
Richard Reinsch (22:12):
It's ridiculous.
Dan Mahoney (22:13):
I think people know that mostly peaceful protests include a lot of willful destruction and people have died. Many people have died and many black people have died as a result of this. That's the dirty little secret about BLM and of course Antifa, they don't care about black lives. They care about useful black lives who they can appropriate, whose deaths they can appropriate to promote revolution a revolutionary situation but for the people who are killed by black on black crime or by ideological thugs, or this man who was just driven to suicide after being charged for defending himself against the mob. They don't care about any of these lines. I think people are catching on that we're dealing with the term and radical revolutionary nihilistic movements and not movement for justice. And that took a long time for much of the country to discover.
Richard Reinsch (23:20):
I wanted to ask you, you know a lot of people listening to us are younger academics, certainly we have journalists, people working in Washington. Some of our biggest cohorts of listeners are in larger cities, New York, LA, Chicago... Say people concerned about this, but at the same time feeling in the environment that they're in pretty alone and voicing it. What would be your counsel to them to at some level push against this identity politics, faith, real bad faith and its attempt to remake institutions, including institutions they may be in. Whereas we see though there's not a lot of concrete demands right now coming out of identity politics, other than the sort of these things like defund the police. But it also there's this claim I think as you know, within these institutions, that institutions themselves are corrupt, even though no one is actively racist inside of them.
Dan Mahoney (24:23):
Yes. I mean, look, I don't want to go so far to say as I've given up all hope for our university, but I think the situation in the vast majority of our universities and colleges with a few notable exceptions is beyond lamentable. I think the culture of political correctness is on the present. I think that administrators are foolishly taking new initiatives that whose practical effect is to ratify and instantiate something like critical race theory as a powerful ingredient to the self-understanding of these colleges and universities. I know at my college, the president after George Floyd died decided to have a conversation with recent graduates and present students in a group of radicals highlighted my department, the department of political science, which I think is the only department at the college that teaches and reflects on the civic grounds of human dignity.
And yet, because we taught Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and etc. and defended the American founding against calumnious charge that it was a racist or that it was a Republic only for white people that we were singled out for teaching the wrong thing for not being on board with racial and social justice, sort of vague accusation of fascism. I had a student in my class I taught last semester on politics and literature. I did the Russians Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky and I was accused of not being balanced in my treatment of revolutionary terrorism and totalitarianism. They can't make this stuff up. So I have deep sympathy for younger faculty, their internal world, where even the freedoms, and civility, and bright progatives that I could appeal to are in the process of either being abolished or disregarded. So I think the project of the future has to be to do an add on to existing institutions. I'm not sure mainstream journalism is reformable, I'm not sure the university is reformable. I think we have to think seriously about a new model of the university that plays by different rules that is committed to liberal education and not ideology, which is not accredited by the existing accreditation agencies.
It's going to be a long-term effort, but it's got to begin now because otherwise, I mean, look in 15 or 20 years, people might like myself and in three years won't have a place in the university. We'd never be hired and we'd never be tolerated. I mean, this situation is just that grave. So with the younger people look, I think we have reached an existential moment where one has to decide whether or not you will live by lies in the famous words of Solzhenitsyn, something Rod Dreher writes about in his new book doesn't mean you have to scream the truth out at every meeting, or you have to make yourself a martyr, but just like in the Soviet Union, even under Brezhnev. Do not sign statements you don't agree with, do not endorse critical race theory. Do not lie about the American founding for the sake of survival. Do not pretend to be enthusiastic about thuggish, ideological moves. Show some backbone.
Richard Reinsch (27:54):
I think that's really a crucial distinction. You know, listening to someone blather on is one thing and thinking about how one opposes them. But I think that's the crucial move is, do you sign things or admit to things you know are a lie in order to survive? And I think those listening have to make that decision because once you admit to that lie, you lose your witness.
Dan Mahoney (28:16):
You lose yourself.
Richard Reinsch (28:17):
Yeah exactly.
Dan Mahoney (28:18):
And you lose your self respect which is a part of losing yourself. I mean Solzhenitsyn in his great manifesto "Live Not By Lies" 1974, he says, "Let the lie come into the world, but not through me." At the end of it he quotes Pushkin. He says, "Look, if we're not capable of this elemental step of not being a vehicle for a lie..." Then he says, "We're no better than sheep. We're no better than cattle who are made for servitude." So we're not facing full-fledged totalitarianism, although this is more than Tocqueville's soft despotism. It's harder than that, but it's going to demand civic courage. It's going to demand people who hallow the arch of prudence, do what you have to do so you can remain a presence in the Academy, but do not become a vehicle for the perpetuation of organized mendacity.
Richard Reinsch (29:24):
Exactly. Well, Dan, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us today about Liberty and Justice For All available at realclearfoundation.org, where people can read the statement of principles that you've put forward and decide if they want to sign or indeed send contact information to become part of, of what you guys are doing.
Dan Mahoney (29:46):
Can I just add if any listener, intellectual, professor writer, politician is interested, feels committed to these ideas but has some ideas about how we can move forward in constructive intellectual ways, do not hesitate to contact me at Assumption College or the other organizers because we welcome ideas and ideas for new initiatives, ideas for carrying this forward.
Richard Reinsch (30:16):
Thank you, Dan. All right.
Dan Mahoney (30:16):
Thanks so much, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (30:18):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk available at lawliberty.org.
Richard Reinsch (00:18):
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Richard Brookhiser about George Washington and our present troubles. Richard Brookhiser, we're glad to welcome him back to Liberty Law Talk. The last time he was on, we discussed the book he wrote on John Marshall, and he's the author of numerous books on central figures in American history, on Marshall, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, George Washington, among many others. Many of you will know him as a senior editor and writer for National Review, where I learned he's been writing since 1977 when he graduated from Yale. He authors the column City Desk and Country Life. He's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and of a National Medal of the Humanities. Richard Brookhiser, thank you so much for joining us.
Richard Brookhiser (01:06):
Thank you, Richard, for having me again. Always a pleasure to talk about George Washington.
Richard Reinsch (01:11):
Great. Thank you. I was thinking about our podcast and it's not just George Washington. Many figures, Ulysses S. Grant, one that comes to mind. Also figures who are abolitionists.
Richard Brookhiser (01:24):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (01:24):
Who you would not think their statues would be torn down or desecrated in various ways. The famous commemoration of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Black regiment, was also; their memorial was desecrated in Boston recently. So a lot of this is happening and we can talk more about that. But it occurred to me, as we as conservatives, as unabashed patriots of America, have no problem defending these figures and we're sort of puzzled as to why this is happening. Or I think we know why it's happening, but it still puzzles us. Of course, this also presents trying to have a conversation with people who don't want to have a conversation, obviously. But it occurs to me, maybe the emphasis is on the wrong foot, and we keep thinking about Washington and all of his contributions. But maybe from the standpoint of who we are in our present condition as Americans, are we worthy of a man like George Washington?
Richard Brookhiser (02:23):
Well, that depends on us, right?
Richard Reinsch (02:26):
Yes.
Richard Brookhiser (02:26):
And that always has to be figured out in every generation. I think Washington did an awful lot, and we can go over the record. But he died in 1799, and he can't live our lives for us. He could help make structures and precedents that will be helpful to us, and I believe he did that, but we have to make use of them or not. It's up to us. History never gives guarantees.
Richard Reinsch (03:03):
When you hear the senator from Illinois, Tammy Duckworth, say now she's open to a conversation of removing statues of George Washington from federal properties whenever other statues have been toppled, what comes to your mind there? Is there anything beyond just rage at America, or is there something specific about what George Washington represents regarding the founding?
Richard Brookhiser (03:30):
Well, Tammy Duckworth was injured in service to America, so rage against America is clearly not her only motive if it is one of her motives. The short, tart answer to her would be George Washington is the reason you have your job. It's the reason that the senator from Illinois is you or some other elected person and not the illegitimate son of the Earl of whatever or the Oxford chum of the First Lord of Treasury. The reason we have representative government and elections and self-rule is because of this Revolutionary generation. The most prominent figure in that generation was George Washington. So in a sense, he's Tammy Duckworth's employer, or at least he opened the door for Senator Duckworth and all the other 99 senators and every other elected person in America. Now, we the voters can put whoever we like in those slots and sometimes we put bad people, sometimes we put stupid people, sometimes we put people who don't know as much as they should know about history. But the reason that we have that option, that we have that choice, is because of this Revolutionary generation. And it was a revolution not just for this country; it was a revolution for the world. You can look at the history of the world for the last almost 250 years and see it as a struggle for self-rule. This encompasses a lot. This encompasses political revolution. This includes de-colonization, the end of the imperial empire rule from Europe. It includes the fall of Communism. It includes the successful resistance to Nazism and fascism. You could even see it as the resistance to racism, because racism is a rebellion against stereotypes that are imposed and then structured, that are imposed on people because of their race. And it's an assertion of the right to self-rule. That you have as much right to self-rule as someone with a different skin color or a different ethnic background or a different religion and so on. The gunpowder charge that set off all of these struggles for the last 200-plus years was lit in the 13 colonies at the end of the 18th century by our Revolutionary generation.
Richard Reinsch (06:28):
Thinking about, you say self-rule, self-government, and that, of course, is bound up inherently with moral rule and character and one's ability to govern oneself. Can we talk about maybe Washington's character some? How should we think about it? And did the character, was it something that forged an American character?
Richard Brookhiser (06:54):
Well, I should say that self-rule had better be bound up with character or it gets in a lot of trouble very soon. Many of these revolutions in this era that I talked about ended very badly. The first two that followed our revolution, it was the French Revolution, which began in 1789, and that was really a convulsion that lasted for a quarter of a century. One direct consequence of the French Revolution was the revolution in Haiti, called Santo Domingo before the revolution happened. But then Haiti became the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere and the first Black-ruled country in the world. Those two Revolutions had a lot of problems. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of extravagant shedding of blood, a lot of tyranny, new tyranny that was generated in place of the old forms of tyranny. So yeah, a revolution is not a simple thing to pull off, and one of the things you have to have is good character, meaning you have to have control over your own passions and your own ambition. I think this was the quality of George Washington that maybe most impressed his contemporaries. I mean, there were lots of things about him that were impressive and start with his physical stature. He's over six feet tall; he carries himself very well. He's described by Thomas Jefferson, who was a very good horseman himself, as the greatest horseman of his age. Soldiers in the Continental Army always knew when there was a party of officers riding at a distance. They could pick out which one was the commander in chief. It was just obvious, so physically he stands out. Politically, he is very shrewd. This is something that's kind of hard to pick up in biographies because a lot of it he does behind the scenes. He takes very little open part in the struggle to ratify the Constitution, for instance, but it is clear that this is a document that he has endorsed. He's working for it behind the scenes, and his presence hovers over the whole debate whether or not we should have a new Constitution being debated in 1787 and 1788. He's also impressive militarily. He's not a flashy commander. He's not like Napoleon, who will be a younger contemporary. But he figures out through trial and error what his strategy for coping with the British has to be. He finds the right strategy. He sticks to it. He works well with our French allies. And he achieves the victory, so that's impressive. But I think the most impressive thing and the thing that most impressed the people around him observing him, working with him, was a sense of his control over his own passions and his own ambition. I mean, this is a man who becomes the most famous man in America, the most famous American in the world, and he goes home twice in his career. He goes home at the end of the war, and he goes home after two terms as president. How many other Revolutionary leaders, how many political leaders, do that so willingly? Now, the list is rather short. But he does it and he does it not just once. He does it twice. I have to tell this story because it's just so great who says it. When he announces in his farewell address, which was not a delivered speech. It was a published speech that was published in the newspapers. He never spoke it out loud. But he announces at the end of his second term that he's not going to stand for office a third time. When the news of this comes to England, George III has a conversation with his favorite painter, a man named Benjamin West who was born in America but moved to England early in his life to perfect his art, and he eventually becomes the favorite painter of the king. So George III and West are talking about this, and George III says that Washington's retirement from the presidency, he says, "This completes the whole. This makes him the most impressive man, the greatest man now living." So that's the tribute to George Washington from the other George, George III. I think it's to George III's credit that he could say that, but it's also a very important observation to make, that Washington completes his career not only by doing what he does, but by not doing what he doesn't do.
Richard Reinsch (12:13):
On that, this control of character and humility, there's this Rules of Civility that Washington copies out by hand I think as a teenager, and it was over 100 rules of social etiquette, manners, mores, grace. Interesting, I mean, a interesting thing for a teenage boy to do now. I'm not sure then. But talk about that because that seems to me something that indicates he aspires to something more. He wants to learn some of these hard rules of how to interact with people who are better than him or higher-born or advanced. He wants to try and impress them. One of the things he thinks is, "Well, I've got to learn the rules of how to interact, and I need to commit them to memory."
Richard Brookhiser (13:04):
Right. Absolutely. We have to remember that when he starts off in his life, I mean, he's certainly fortunate in the sense that his father belongs to the gentry in colonial Virginia. This was not a poor background or even a middle-class background, but this was in the gentry class, the class of the people who would participate in ruling the colonies. But Washington's father, Augustine Washington, was at the lower level of that class. He was coming up in the world, and then he died. He dies suddenly, which was common in Virginia. There was a lot of disease, a lot of early death. So Washington is left fatherless when he is a boy. His father had two marriages. The first wife dies and he married again. Washington was the eldest son of the second marriage. His older half-brothers were both sent to England for some education, not college but pre-college schooling, and probably George would also have been sent there if his father had lived. His father didn't live, so he doesn't get to go. As far as we know, he might've had some one-room schooling in Virginia. He might also have had a teacher, a tutor, rather. There's passing references to this and correspondence, but so far as we know, his formal education was very slight. Maybe only Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln have less, of all our presidents. So here he is. He's got one foot in the door, so to speak. Maybe a couple of toes, but he's not all the way inside. So how do you get inside? How do you get up in the world? His older half-brother has married into a very wealthy and fancy family, the Fairfaxes. The head of the family, who's an English lord, he owns a chunk of Virginia which is the size of the colony of New Jersey.
Richard Reinsch (15:07):
Okay.
Richard Brookhiser (15:07):
This is the state of New Jersey. That's the Fairfax grant. One job that young George gets through his family connection is to help survey this huge tract of land, which stretches over into the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains beyond. This takes him away from the Tidewater when he's a young man. It's one of his first experiences of the West. Unlike a lot of other American leaders, he's always looking west. He's not a merchant dealing with England looking east. He's looking west into the back country. But anyway, here he is and what's he going to do with his life? So this little book, the Rules of Civility, that we've been talking about, someone at some point gave him this. Maybe it was penmanship: "Here, George. Copy these out. Now, there's a hundred ton of these things. You rewrite them yourself." We can tell from his copy that this is at least in part a penmanship exercise because the capital letters are very elaborate and it's like a kid saying, "Oh, look. I can really do a nice capital P. Look at this." But these rules, you have to say he's paying attention to what the rules say. They're called the Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. So this is how do you behave with other people. The first rule explains all the other ones; it sets the tone for all the others to follow. It says, "Every action done in company or conversation should be done with some sign of respect to those who are present." In other words, here you are in the world, all these other people. You're going to know some of them. Some of them are complete strangers; you'll only meet them once. Some of them are your superiors; some of them are inferiors. But everything you do or say in their presence, you have to be aware of them, and you have to give them their proper respect. What's interesting, this even includes condemned criminals. Because one of the rules says, "If you see a man punished for a crime, though you may be glad, always show pity to the suffering offender."
Richard Reinsch (17:33):
Mmm.
Richard Brookhiser (17:35):
So that's even a counsel of a little hypocrisy. You may think, "Ah, he got his just desserts. Good. Keep him in the stock." But no, you don't show him that. You give him a nod: "Sorry. Sorry to see this," something. Always show pity to the suffering offender. So even a condemned criminal is worth a little bit of your attention and a mite of your respect. So these rules are a lesson in awareness, in awareness of other people and also awareness of yourself, how you're behaving among other people. Obviously, there's a practical point to this. This helps you in society. It helps you in social gatherings. It tells you how to behave to Lord So-and-so, who may be or maybe not giving you some sort of position that you want. But it is also at the same time shaping your character. Because if you're thinking about this, if you think about this consistently, you're going to alter your own behavior. It's like working from the outside in.
Richard Reinsch (18:45):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (18:46):
You control the way you walk, control the way you talk, control the way you dress, how you interact with people. This is like acting. This is like you are preparing the role of yourself as a person in society. You're training yourself to act a certain way in society. That's what the rules are supposed to do and that's what they did for Washington.
Richard Reinsch (19:11):
Now, this just sounds horribly wrong to us, I think. Aren't you supposed to be yourself?
Richard Brookhiser (19:19):
Right. No, that's right. That's right. Just some decades later, we're going to get authenticity.
Richard Reinsch (19:24):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (19:25):
That's going to come in. That comes in kind of end of the 18th century and then early 19th century big-time: what is yourself.
Richard Reinsch (19:33):
Transcendentalists, yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (19:35):
Well, Transcendentalists, Romanticists, it takes many forms. But it's a whole wave of that. And Washington is a little bit before that. We also have to say, Washington needs these rules because there's some skills he doesn't have. I mean, he's not a storyteller. He's not a joke teller. He's not like Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin, somebody who has a million stories and can just entertain and distract with company. Though Washington apparently liked good stores. He liked to hear other people's jokes, but he was not a teller of jokes himself. So there's some deficiencies he has, some things he has to compensate for. This training begun with the Rules of Civility helps him overcome that.
Richard Reinsch (20:25):
He struggles with anger for most of his life, I've always read.
Richard Brookhiser (20:29):
Well, yes, he had a temper.
Richard Reinsch (20:31):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (20:31):
He had a temper. We forget this because you look at Mount Rushmore and you look at the quarter in your pocket and you look at the dollar bill in your wallet and these are not angry faces. These are kind of marble visages. But he did have a temper. People who worked closely with him knew that. And the interesting story about that is how rarely he let it loose. I mean, there was one occasion in the Revolution at the Battle of Monmouth. This was in summer of 1778. It was after the Valley Forge winter, which had been this terrible winter. The American Army was cooped up outside of Philadelphia, which the British had conquered. Lousy supply, poor food, terrible deficiencies and uniform clothing and all the rest of it. But during this winter, they'd drill and they trained. This is when Baron von Steuben shows up, and he institutes a drill for these American soldiers so that they can maneuver in the field and respond to commands and fight more effectively. The Army learns this. They become proud of themselves for their new knowledge. Then when the British leave Philadelphia because France has entered the war and they have to reconstitute their forces, reconcentrate them. So they're marching from Philadelphia back to New York. We're following. We catch up with them at a place called Monmouth Court House in central New Jersey and there's a battle. Well, the man in charge of the attack, it was supposed to be an attack on the British rearguard, was a general named Charles Lee. He and Washington had hit it off at the beginning of the War. Lee was very charming, very amusing, very eccentric. He was an English officer who'd moved to America and sided with us. He had a lot of professional experience. He knew a lot. He impressed Washington early on, but he was just a loose cannon. As time passed, it became clear that that's who he was. When you got beneath the surface, what you had was a loose cannon. At the beginning of this encounter, he comes upon the British rearguard, but then it turns out, "Oh, it's not the rearguard. It's the whole Army." So he's disconcerted. And Washington brings up the bulk of the American Army, and he sees the battle is just not going well. It's all confused. And he loses it. He chews Lee out. One American general said, "He swore till the leaves shook on the trees. He swore like an angel from heaven. I have never in my life heard such wonderful swearing." Well, now, this general who claims to have heard this was a mile away at the time, so he didn't hear any swearing. But what he's reflecting is what everybody who was there heard, their impression of this encounter. That Washington just, he uncorked it for once and just let Lee have it. Then he took over the battle himself and got a pretty good resolution from it. But so that was an occasion where his temper exploded. But what's noteworthy about that is that's it. For in public, that is the only time that anyone can remember for eight and a half years of the Revolution and eight years of being president. Now, also when he's president in his cabinet meetings, occasionally he loses his temper there. Cabinet meetings then, remember, are very small. There's only the secretary of state, treasury secretary, secretary of war and there's an attorney general. So there are only four guys plus you, the president. It's a little group. And Thomas Jefferson, who kept notes, he has some notes of occasion when Washington did lose his temper in these small meetings. But again, he would cork himself back up, get back to the business at hand, not let his decision be distracted by whatever it was that had irritated him, and that this was all happening in private. I mean, this is not happening in public. I think the most interesting comment on this, and it was made years after Washington had died by his vice president, John Adams, who becomes the second president after he steps down. But John Adams is an old man, old, old man. He's writing another old patriot, Benjamin Rush, and they have a long exchange of letters. A couple of letters they're writing about Washington. Who was he? What made him tick? Why was he so great? There's one letter where Adams says, "Okay. I'm going to give you the reasons why Washington was great," and he has, like, 10 of them. They're kind of cranky. John Adams was a feisty guy and some of these are a little envious. He says, "Well, Washington was rich. I mean, he married a rich woman. He had a big fortune. Everybody likes rich people." Another reason, he says, "Well, he's a Virginian and in Virginia, all geese are swans."
Richard Reinsch (25:50):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (25:50):
So that's the New England Yankee getting that little dig in. But one of the things he says is Washington had the gift of silence. Adams says, "I esteem that as one of the greatest talents, the gift of silence." That is that Washington could just keep his feelings to himself. He was not putting them all out there. He would not be on Twitter.
Richard Reinsch (26:19):
That's wise. Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (26:21):
No way would he be on Twitter. Or if he would be tweeting, "Had a nice meeting this morning."
Richard Reinsch (26:28):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (26:29):
"Very good presentation in Philadelphia. Excellent relations with friends." That would be his Twitter feed. He had the gift of silence.
Richard Reinsch (26:41):
He knew his limits.
Richard Brookhiser (26:44):
Well, he knew his limits, and also, look, he's the first president and he's the most famous man in America. Anything he says people are going to run with it.
Richard Reinsch (26:53):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (26:54):
And so unless he wants to say something, he has to not say anything. If it's not necessary for him to speak, it's necessary for him not to speak because that will just cause chatter and back and forth and "What does he mean?" and "Let's do this," and "Let's react this way." So he possesses the gift of silence.
Richard Reinsch (27:17):
I want to get more into Washington as general and Washington as statesman. Before we do that, I want to ... because I think this also feeds directly into the troubles that we're in and the framing of Washington. You mentioned at Mount Vernon and I've read about his devotion to agriculture and to being the most modern practitioner he could be of that. But it also brings to mind the slaves that he owned and those of Martha Washington and just a sense of this, the way it's presented. I was recently in Barnes & Noble with my eight-year-old daughter. We were in the children's section and there's two racks of books in the history part of that. And there's a book on Ona Judge, a slave of Martha's, I think.
Richard Brookhiser (28:11):
Yeah.
Richard Reinsch (28:11):
Who ran away and was pursued by Martha. She had people pursue her. The way the book was presenting it is there was something very wrong with this or she was running away for freedom. But, of course, what I've read is Martha Washington actually thought she had been abducted or seduced by someone, an older slave, and was trying to track her down for her own protection. But I ... That and just Washington as a whole with regard to the slaves that he owned. I thought maybe we would talk about that some and also his Last Will and Testament, which I think has an interesting first sentence. But on the Ona Judge situation, your thoughts.
Richard Brookhiser (28:56):
Well, Ona Judge was one of Martha's slaves and she escaped. She went to New Hampshire with a Frenchman.
Richard Reinsch (29:04):
Okay.
Richard Brookhiser (29:05):
And Martha wanted her back, and Washington inquired with the customs official in whatever town it was. I think it might've been Portsmouth. "Is there any way to get her back?" And the customs collector said, "Not without an uproar," because I think by this time, New Hampshire had either ended slavery or-
Richard Reinsch (29:29):
I think that's right.
Richard Brookhiser (29:30):
... it had certainly begun the process of ending slavery.
Richard Reinsch (29:32):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (29:34):
So Washington dropped it because he didn't ... An uproar was something he didn't want. Now, did he pursued her in the first place? Well, it was his wife's slave. People who are married can think over that. We don't know all of the dynamics of what went on, but one can imagine. But another thing we know is what Washington finally does with his own slaves, which is only a few years after this. Ona Judge goes to New Hampshire when Washington is president. So Washington steps down March of 1797, and then he dies in December of 1799. So two years after he leaves the White House, some time during 1799, in the fall of '99, he writes his Final Will and Testament. In that he spends a lot of time saying that all the slaves that he owns shall be free after the death of his wife. He specifies that none of his slaves may be taken out of the state on any pretext whatever. In other words, you can't take them to Kentucky beforehand. They all have to be free. He says that slaves that are too old to support themselves or too young should continue to be maintained by the estate, and he's made provision for this. Slaves that are young should be trained for some useful occupation and be freed by the time they're 25. And he gives immediate freedom to his personal servant slave, William Lee, and he says "for his services to me during the Revolution." So it's interesting. William Lee is the third person who is named in the will. Washington is the first: "I, George Washington ... " That's how it begins. Martha's the second one named. William Lee is the third, and he links him with the Revolution. I mean, William Lee was his slave servant for a long time. He could've linked him with all kinds of things or not linked him to anything at all. But he said, "for his services to me in the Revolution." So he's noting in his will, "This man was involved in the Revolution. I was the commander in chief, but he was there. He was there at my side this whole time." So he gets his immediate freedom if that's what he wants. If he wants to stay enslaved, he can have that too if he likes because he's old and crippled by this point. And he gives him an annuity. He should have $20 a year. Doesn't sound like a lot. I mean, it wasn't a huge amount. It was more than $20 then. There were also at Mount Vernon, and this is over 150 people we're talking about, this is a large manumission. There'd been a bigger one in Virginia. There was a man named Robert Carter III who owned like 500 slaves who he was freeing. He was a religious convert; he became a Baptist, and then he became a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg and he freed 500 slaves. But Washington's 150-plus is a lot of people. Now, there's an equal number at Mount Vernon who are not freed because they belong to the Custis family estate. We call them Martha's slaves, but she only has a life interest in them because they were the property of her late first husband, the man she married before she married George. They will become the property of her children, who have all predeceased her, so therefore of her grandchildren. They end up being the property of George Washington Parke Custis, who is her grandson, and Washington has no power to free those slaves. They belong to the Custis family estate. So they stay in bondage and actually they're not freed until just before the Emancipation Proclamation because the grandson frees them in his will, and it goes through the Virginia courts and then finally they're freed at the end of 1863 by the Confederacy.
Richard Reinsch (34:24):
Wow.
Richard Brookhiser (34:25):
Because that's the terms of this man's will. But so Washington's slaves are freed, and I've actually, I've met some descendants of them. Some of the descendants still live in Alexandria, Virginia where Mount Vernon is. Some live in Maryland. Some live in the Philadelphia area, and I'm sure they're scattered across country. But these are the main concentrations, and they have a reunion every year. They've been doing this for, oh, gee, it must be close to 85 years now. It's called the Quander Family Reunion because their ancestress was one of the slaves named Nancy Quander. Because Washington, in his will he attached a list of all of these people who were to be freed, a list of all their names. So Nancy Quander is the one whose descendants are still around. So why did Washington do that?
Richard Reinsch (35:21):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (35:22):
He does that, I think, because he knows he has to do that. His life has been dedicated to liberation, liberty in America, to American self-rule, and how can that life be complete if he dies an owner of slaves? It can't be. He has to fix this. This is the last thing he has to do. Now, I noticed there's a columnist for the New York Times, Charles Blow, who's written about this in a very [inaudible 00:35:57] spirit and he said, "Yeah, well, Washington only freed his slaves when he had no more use for them. It's in his will. He had no more use for them."
Richard Reinsch (36:06):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (36:08):
I thought, "Well, gee. When people die, we can't just go in their houses and take everything because they have no more use for it." Right?
Richard Reinsch (36:18):
Right.
Richard Brookhiser (36:19):
I mean, people leave wills. They do have use for things after they die. I mean, we can say it's vanity and all the rest of it, and of course they're dead; they're not actually here. But people make provisions for it all the time. I mean, bequests to charities, to colleges. They do inheritances. I mean, they direct the disposition of their possessions after their death. So it's not like, "Oh, yeah. Washington had no more use for them. So if he died, they could all have just walked away? Right?" Well, no, they couldn't. They would've been the property of somebody, some of his heirs. But they weren't because he said they should be freed. That would be my answer to Mr. Blow.
Richard Reinsch (37:11):
What do you make in the Last Will and Testament? He refers to himself as both citizen and president in this private act of the disposition of his property.
Richard Brookhiser (37:21):
Well, yeah, but he knows it's going to be public.
Richard Reinsch (37:23):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (37:25):
I mean, this is not going to be a secret will. This is also going to be a public statement, and that's how it's taken. There was a sermon given in the first Black-owned, Black-run church in Philadelphia shortly after Washington died. The minister said that "He has removed the last possible blot on his reputation because the bread of oppression was hateful to him." This is the Black leader of this congregation.
Richard Reinsch (37:53):
Yeah. Well, I was contrasting that with, in my mind too, Thomas Jefferson's Last Will and Testament, which I don't think makes any reference or recognition to his public status.
Richard Brookhiser (38:05):
Well, he couldn't. He was broke.
Richard Reinsch (38:10):
Yeah, he was indebted.
Richard Brookhiser (38:10):
The only reason Washington is able to do this is because he's an acquisitive man. I mean, he's wanted to earn money all his life, and he has. He's succeeded in it, and he's managed it wisely and he hasn't overspent it. He's managed this even though the soil at Mount Vernon has run out. I mean, it's been leached away by years of tobacco growing, which is very punishing to the soil. That's why he switches from tobacco to wheat, and then he has all these properties and he buys land in Pennsylvania and what becomes Ohio and what becomes West Virginia. I mean, he's a great big landowner. That's his fortune. Mount Vernon is a white elephant. I mean, it's beautiful; the house is lovely. But the property, if that's all he had, he would've been in debt too. But so Jefferson, who knows what Jefferson would've wanted to do if he had a free hand. But he didn't have a free hand; he was in hock up to his eyeballs. And after he dies, everything gets sold off: the house, his slaves, the whole thing. That's true of a lot of the great Virginians. I mean, it happened to Madison's estate after he died. And Monroe had to leave Virginia while he was still alive. He had to move to New York and live with his daughter in New York. Washington plays his hand better and then therefore is able to do what he does. I mean, who does Jefferson free in his will? He frees the Hemings, very likely his own children. Madison freed nobody. Monroe freed his coachman, Peter Mark. And Washington frees over 150 people; that's the record. Also one other thing before we leave this. Washington is the last America to command integrated units until the Korean War.
Richard Reinsch (40:04):
Oh, wow.
Richard Brookhiser (40:05):
In the Revolution. Now, this is not what he was thinking when he first becomes commander in chief. When he's first picked by Congress and sent up to manage the siege of Boston and he discovers that some of the Massachusetts units there have Black soldiers, he doesn't like it. He's surprised by this and he says, "Eh, can we get rid of these guys?" But the officers tell him, "Well, no, we can't. We need the men and they're good men and is what we do up here." Then Washington accepts that. I mean, this is an interesting comment on his style of leadership. He's willing to learn, he's willing to listen, he's willing to grow. By the time of, we mentioned the Battle of Monmouth, which is 1778, at that battle he's commanding, he had 12,000 men at that battle. 800 of them are Black or Native American. I've seen a list of their names. Some New Jersey historical society published all the names of the men of color on the American side at the Battle of Monmouth. I remember one was Oliver Cromwell. One was Artillo Freeman. One was Cash Africa. I mean, these are names that the people themselves picked or perhaps had been picked for them when they were enslaved and then they retained them. No, I don't know. We don't have biographies of these men. We just have a list of their names. I'm sure everybody has seen the picture of Washington crossing the Delaware that was done in the 1850s. I mean, we've all seen it a million times. One of the oarsmen in that boat looks Black. I mean, he looks like a person of color. And that's historically accurate because the unit that ferried those boats back and forth across the Delaware River before the Battle of Trenton was the 14th Massachusetts. They were sailors from Marblehead and there were Black and Native Americans who were sailors who lived in Marblehead and they were in this unit. That was the historically accurate detail that the artist, who was a 19th century German, put in the painting. Then the militia and the army become all white during Washington's presidency, actually. There's a Militia bill which defines the Militia as white men over 21. But during the Revolution, that was not the case.
Richard Reinsch (42:51):
I never knew that before. Thank you for sharing that. Washington as statesman, as the first president, what was most essential in his view to accomplish?
Richard Brookhiser (43:01):
Probably three things. One was to keep America afloat during a world that was sliding into a world war. Washington is inaugurated in April, 1789. That's when he takes the oath in New York City for the first time, and the Bastille falls in July. So he's got like three months of peace and then boom; French Revolution begins. It becomes a world war. It's going to last long after he dies. It won't end until the Battle of Waterloo. And we're a little country on the edge of all this, and the contending powers surround us, by the way. Because the British are still in Canada. Spain still owns Florida and the whole Gulf Coast. They own the Louisiana Territory. They control New Orleans and the Mississippi River. France is still in the Caribbean. We are surrounded by colonial empires in a world that's entering a world war, which is both a world war and it's an ideological conflict. We have to just stay afloat during all this, so that's problem number one. Problem number two, we're broke.
Richard Reinsch (44:22):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (44:22):
Our debt is trading on the European money market at a quarter to a third of its value. It's practically junk. American paper is just like junk. And why is that? It's because we have been unable to pay off the debts that we ran up fighting the American Revolution. These are debts to American creditors, also to European creditors who loaned us money. We also have not been able to pay the soldiers who we thanked them for their service and sent them home and said, "Well, you'll get half pay one of these days. Hold on to your certificate. We'll pay it off one day." So there's that. That's problem number two. And Washington assigns that problem to his treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who has been on his staff during the War. Washington could be his own secretary of war or his own secretary of state. He could've done both of those jobs himself. He couldn't have been his own treasury secretary. But he knew who could be his treasury secretary, and he lets him take the lead and backs him up. That's a very important quality of leadership: You know what you can do and you know what you can't do, and when you know what you can't do, you have to find someone who can do it. And then you have to trust them and back them up and that's what Washington does. Problem number three, which he is unable to solve, is how to deal with Native Americans. And here he's working with his secretary of war, Henry Knox, and they hope that they can sign treaties with Native American tribe nations that still are living in the old southwest, what's now Alabama and Mississippi and parts of western Georgia. There are tribes there that have sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. They can send a lot of warriors into the field. We don't want them to be your permanent enemy. We want to find some way of living alongside them. Knox and Washington, their hope is that they can make treaties with these nations and have them have a kind of semi-independent existence within the boundaries of America. And this doesn't work. This fails because there are just too many white people too eager to move west.
Richard Reinsch (46:58):
Yeah.
Richard Brookhiser (46:59):
The federal government can't keep them out. Impossible to hold the tide back. So this is something he wants to do that fails; it doesn't work. But I would say that those are the three problems that he had to focus on.
Richard Reinsch (47:14):
You referenced earlier, I think, Washington's lack of formal education. Certainly, his education compared to his contemporary statesmen would've been much deficient to theirs. Can we sketch out, though, from correspondence, from speeches, actions, a coherent political philosophical approach on Washington's part?
Richard Brookhiser (47:38):
Yes, I think we can. There are times when he does that. He issues a circular to the states in 1783 as he's getting ready to leave the job of commander in chief. In his mind, this is his farewell address. Now, he didn't know that he'd come back and have to be president of the United States and then give another farewell address, which we call by that name. But there was a first one in 1783 and then there's the famous one in December, 1796. In there he lays out some policy goals. He says that America should pay its debts. He says that America should have an independent standing in the world. It should not have permanent alliances or permanent antipathies with any nation. He says anyone who has either of those is a slave; they are a slave to their affections or to their dislikes. That's a very loaded word to use in a country with a lot of slave owners, including you yourself. Also unity, national union. I mean, he tells in the second farewell address when he's leaving the presidency, he says, "The name of American has become precious to you." He tries to explain that every part of the country benefits from this union. The North makes manufactured goods that the South needs to use. The South produces agricultural products that the North needs. Similarly with the East and the West. It is not at all clear to Washington's generation that this country will hang together. Now, we think of the North/South split as the one that finally does split. But also East/West, I mean, that looked like a potential dividing line because the Appalachians were hard to cross in those days. If you're a farmer and you live in Kentucky or the Ohio Valley, the easiest way for you to export a crop is to stick it on the Ohio River and send it down the Mississippi and hope the Spaniards let it go out in New Orleans. I mean, are you going to send it over the mountains to Philadelphia? That's hugely slow and expensive. No, you don't do it. You use the river route. So does that mean that the whole thing is going to split apart across that mountain chain? This is a real worry and Washington worries about it. One thing he does is he tries to imagine: Maybe we an dig canals across the mountains. Maybe we can connect the Potomac to the Ohio. This is a kind of a fantasy that he and other Virginians have. It never really works, but the canal that works will be the Erie Canal across New York State, which is much flatter. But Washington, it's the same problem. Washington is trying to think of it: How do we keep this country together East and West? So union is another thing that is on his mind and very important to him.
Richard Reinsch (50:47):
That was excellent. Richard Brookhiser, thank you so much for discussing George Washington's life, biography, example for us. We really appreciate it.
Richard Brookhiser (50:58):
Okay. Thank you, Richard.
Richard Reinsch (51:00):
This is Richard Reinsch. You've been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk available at lawliberty.org.
John Yoo joins Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest, Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power.
What Steven Hayward learned from getting canceled at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.
Richard Reinsch:
Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal, Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Well, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with Steven Hayward about travails in American higher education made possible through cancel culture and Steven Hayward's particular experiences at the University of California Berkeley. With this unsettling development, Steven Hayward, we're glad to welcome you back to Liberty Law Talk. When you were last on, we discussed your book, Patriotism is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments That Redefined American Conservatism. You're also the author of a multi-volume history, The Age of Reagan, and numerous other essays and reviews and studies. You're currently resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Of course, many will know you from your almost daily blogging at www.powerlineblog.com. We're glad to have you.
Steven Hayward:
Well, thank you, Richard. It's great to be back.
Richard Reinsch:
I want to talk about your particular experiences at UC Berkeley with some rather unhinged attempts to remove you from campus there by students and less than heroic deans responding to those students. But in general, I'd be interested to get your opinion on this, I think what we're in now in regard to American higher education is sort of the mop up phase of the Marxist Gramsci's famous call for a long march through the institutions by the left. I think they've marched through and they've captured all of them basically. Now they're in a position of such dominance that there's really very little pretense that they need to talk to anyone other than themselves or deal fairly and equitably with anyone other than themselves with regard to education and other cultural journalistic enterprises in America.
Steven Hayward:
I think that's right. I mean for a long time I thought, like a lot of people did, that maybe I was too accepting of it. That the worst of the radicalism on campus was confined to women's studies and English departments and language departments. Oddly enough, geography as a discipline went way left quite a long time ago. But that the other disciplines, the main social sciences, political science, sociology, history, although liberal for the most part and they have been for decades, they hadn't completely succumbed to craziness. Well, that's mostly wrong. Some of the older disciplines are still okay in a relative sense, but you're seeing that the administrations have certainly thrown in with what you might say the new woke culture that we live in and still be on the college campuses as we saw with what happened with James Damore at Google out in Silicon Valley. You may remember and listeners may remember when Sam Abrams at Sarah Lawrence, I think is where he is, published that article in The New York Times two years ago saying the problem now in universities is the administration has gone in on this. Of course, he had ferocious blow back over that. One of the controversies at Berkeley right now and at several other places is essentially the demand that all faculty sign a diversity loyalty oath and that diversity will now be used as a criteria for hiring. Well, this is simply back to the McCarthy era. There is some blow back against this even at Berkeley and other UC campuses, but it's all been put on the back burner because we've shut down for the virus.
Richard Reinsch:
I graduated from my undergraduate institution in 2001 and from law school in 2004. I remember in both institutions, one of which was a very progressive institution, we got a lot of mileage out of just pointing out the lack of representation of conservative, classical liberal voices on the campus. We seemed to find our voice that way. There was an implied tolerance and willingness to hear us out, an acknowledgement that, "Well, we basically own most of the campus, so we need to do this." It seems to me that doesn't even really exist anymore. What really does exist is the use of the university itself as Glenn Loury pointed out recently with Brown University's statement, its anti-racism statement that the university itself becomes a social justice vehicle or becomes essentially an ideological enterprise. Of course, it's been going on now for many years at UCLA where the professors have to write a statement, I think it's every year, of how they're furthering diversity with their teaching. You think of the McCarthy era, but this is something of a religious oath or test that is being required.
Steven Hayward:
That's exactly right. I don't know. I see no sign of anybody in administrations at universities recognize that this is a problem for them. I will say this about Berkeley, it's sort of odd that I got there in the first place, and long further back, we can go into it a little bit if you want. A lot of people I've talked to in the political science department where I've spent some time and taught some classes and also some people in the administration say, "We know we have a problem with not enough conservatives on the faculty." I have to give credit to the Berkeley administration. They have tried to be accommodating to the College Republicans who are not always as prudent as they might be. They invited Milo, right?
Richard Reinsch:
I remember that.
Steven Hayward:
Often referred to as the Milo riot. However, they don't know what to do about it. They simply rubber stamp any of the most radical ideas that come along. This goes back at least 50 years to the '60s when you had the SDS and other student radicals at the time saying universities should become a node of political activism. It's not a place for learning anymore. Yeah, I think you're right. You mentioned graduating, what, 30 years... wait, 20 years ago now. Sorry, you're a young guy. I had a friend of mine who had a daughter, actually it's my writing partner at Power Line, John Hinderaker. He has two daughters, 10 years apart. They both went to St. Olaf. One graduated 10 years ago, and one graduated just this last year. The two daughters got together and compared notes. The second daughter just graduated said... or the first daughter reflecting on her experience, a little bit like yours, just in the last 10 years things have gotten so much worse at that same little bucolic campus there in Minnesota.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, St. Olaf. You mentioned the administrators, and I think that's something people don't understand. You and I understand that this incredible explosion of these people with these jobs on campus has always happened roughly in that same time span, in the last 10 to 20 years, outpacing faculty hiring and part of... I mean a public choice analysis would be they've got to find something to do, something to make themselves worthwhile. But there's also an ideological component here, too, and these are these equity, diversity, inclusion administrators have really found their measure in appealing to students for greater fairness or greater representational fairness on the basis of gender or race or various status. That becomes a way in which a campus is constantly in upheaval, but also this totalitarian mentality where you really do get into forcing people to think in certain ways, speak in certain ways in the name of fairness and equity. I think that's sort of also what's been happening or it has been happening on campus. Have you seen that? You also taught at the University of Colorado Boulder, itself no shrinking progressive violet.
Steven Hayward:
Right. Well, thinking about administrators, every institution now has a dean of diversity and inclusion and usually a large staff. It's amazing how large the staff can be at the larger universities like a Berkeley or Michigan.
Richard Reinsch:
Six figure positions, right?
Steven Hayward:
Yes, exactly. Again, one of the more significant moments in the whole story with the Oberlin College libel suit brought by the bakery that was judged by a jury, what, a year ago, whatever it was, was a $25 million judgment. What they found was the dean of Diversity and Inclusion had been participating with the students and organizing protests against the bakery. Well, I looked up the dean. I forget her name now. Where'd she come from? Well, she came from women's studies. You look at her publications and it's all the deeply left-wing politicized radical woke stuff. You're now going to make that person an administrator? I think you'll find that kind of profile at a lot of these administrative positions at colleges around the country. Not as true at Berkeley. I don't think Berkeley, for instance, has a bias incident response team like Michigan had or may still have, and I'm not sure whether it's the dean or provost, but the person who does diversity and inclusion at Berkeley right now is from the sciences. I think he's a biologist. I've met him. I'm sure he's a liberal, but he doesn't seem to be quite as far gone into the fever swamp as you find in so many places.
Richard Reinsch:
What's a bias response team?
Steven Hayward:
Well, bias incident response team is where students or faculty, but it's usually students, can report instances of racism or sexism or transphobia. Whether it's something you said or written or said in class even and they'll come and investigate this. Of course, we know how these investigations go. It's leading to increasing amounts of self-censorship by students and faculty.
Richard Reinsch:
It was a sign also things were going wrong, Trump wins in 2016, and various universities providing safe spaces on campus for the students to talk about this. One of the activities was to color or to express your feelings with color. I thought it was hilarious. In general, it seems to me something in the background here, though, is really it's a Supreme Court opinion, Bakke v. Regents of University of California system 1978, where there's this mention by, what is Justice Powell that diversity could be a rationale on the basis that they bring their perspective. That becomes in itself a good. But of course, that doesn't really gel with affirmative action which was about remediation. Diversity becomes an ever-springing justification for this sort of thinking that you're going to tie an ideology to a gender or to a race. It seems this has just... whatever Powell intended, and it's not just higher education, it's now corporations, it's now journalism, this has gone beyond this. It's become, I guess, in a way just fundamentally liberal in its consequences.
Steven Hayward:
It's probably worth reminding listeners a little bit about both affirmative action, how it began, and then the Bakke case. If you go back to the original executive orders from first actually John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson and then the initial programs that were adopted in the private sector and universities, the idea was outreach. Let's find minorities who, for whatever reason, bad schools or whatever, have the ability and who should be recruited into the employment pool and then hired on merit equally with anybody else. Well, that didn't last very long. It became de facto quotas pretty fast. In the Bakke case in the '70s, you have the University of California Medical School at Davis reserved, I think, 21 spots out of 100 for the medical school for minorities no matter what your MCAT scores were and grades and so forth. Allan Bakke sued. He had very high scores but had been turned down twice. Meanwhile all 21 of the students admitted on the quota had test scores and grades not even a little bit below his but way below his. So the courts said, "NO, you can't do that. You can't have a numerical quota." But the whole opinion of the court was a mess because you had all these different concurrences and dissents. So Justice Powell, as you said, was the swing vote saying, "Bakke wins. You can't have a quota, but diversity should be a factor." Now, I've come to the heretical views just recently that maybe that case was wrongly decided. Maybe we would have been better off, I think, on principle according to a rightful understanding of equality and individual rights, but maybe politically, socially, we would have been better off if the court had said, Fine. You can have quotas. Go ahead. Make my day." I think it could have been open what was going on. I think it would have been like busing was in the '60s and '70s, hugely unpopular including even with minorities. I think it would have all collapsed from its own weight. Instead, everybody said, "Ah, diversity. There's a perfect thing to dodge behind." Now it's become this huge ideology. I know you follow this closely. It reminds me a little bit of the unintended consequences or perverse results of the Chevron case. We talk a lot about the Chevron doctrine. That was a case the Reagan administration won in court. It's become a nightmare for the bureaucracy, and now it's the thing we most want to get rid of. Well, I think the Bakke case is similar.
Richard Reinsch:
It seems to me also a part of this diversity unfolding or unintended consequences, perhaps, the University of California system recently voting to eliminate use of SAT and ACT in admissions requirements, I think, after this year. Of course, more institutions will follow suit. You've got the University of California Los Angeles, UC Berkeley. These are high-performing institutions that will not use this basic meritocratic criteria. I think it gives the administrators free rein to shape this campus in the way they want.
Steven Hayward:
Yes. By the way, I should be very specific about this. The faculty at Berkeley, and I think maybe UCLA but I know at Berkeley, faculty Senate actually voted against the idea.
Richard Reinsch:
That's right. I read that.
Steven Hayward:
I think that's quite significant. So your liberal faculty said, "No, wait a minute. We want to keep the SAT." Why is that? Well, I can tell you. Berkeley students, for the most part, are really good. It's a hard school to get into, and I think the faculty respect this. They want the smart students and they understand... What's really going on here is, and I picked this up four years when I first showed up there, that the idea of meritocracy is under attack from the left. It has to be because in California the real reason is the Asian kids, a large Asian population. They get super high test scores. So the first thing that the universities diversicrats want to do is they want to get rid of our Prop 209 that banned affirmative action admissions for our public universities. Then they want to be able to shape the demographic of the student body explicitly according to race, and you have to overthrow the idea of meritocracy to do that. So the SAT is just step one, and grades don't mean much anymore because of grade inflation. So at that point we are going to get back to essentially having quotas, and no one will admit that that's what they're doing.
Richard Reinsch:
It's absolutely amazing. It's absolutely amazing that it happens as America increasingly becomes this multiracial society.
Steven Hayward:
Yeah, yeah.
Richard Reinsch:
I mean it's amazing to me. Let's talk about, you go to Berkeley as a visiting professor. You're a conservative. You teach, if I remember... You talk about this, by the way, in a really nice, entertaining, well-written essay in the current edition of Commentary. Your piece there is "How I Ran Afoul of Campus Cancel Culture." You go to Berkeley to teach, what, a couple of classes in the undergrad department. You have a good experience for the first couple of years, so much so that you wonder if you're not doing it right.
Steven Hayward:
Yeah, right. I kept thinking, why is there not protests? The student newspaper wrote a nasty article about me when I arrived, but that's par for the course. Nobody paid any attention to it in the administration or in any of the departments.
Richard Reinsch:
Well, you said they wrote a mean piece about you in the student newspaper, but it actually helped your student enrollment.
Steven Hayward:
Well, this is the funny thing is that I suddenly... I was teaching a large lecture class on the Constitution actually in political science that no one had been teaching for a while. I had a long waiting list to get in even with a room that held 150 people. I had a couple of students, one kid actually... I really liked this kid. He was very progressive, a big Bernie Sanders supporter. He spotted me one day walking across Sproul Plaza. I hadn't met him yet. This was before class. He walked up to me because he looked me up, I guess, and says, "You're Professor Hayward." I said, "Yes, I am." He goes, "I'm taking your class. I want to argue with you." I said, "Great!" By the way, he was great in class. He was very smart, very left but sat right in the front row and bring things up and made the class a lot better. That's the thing I think a lot of left-leaning people on campuses don't understand is they're impoverishing their own campuses. He wasn't the only one. I had another kid take three classes from me. It wasn't till the third class, I was like, "Gosh, Mr. Howard, you're a real glutton for punishment." I get talking to him one day. I find out he's a big liberal Democrat and close personal friends with Nancy Pelosi. But he said, "You're the only conservative I've ever been exposed to." It's interesting. It's challenging for me. The style of the class is different. I think that's maybe a longer subject another day. Many conservatives teach differently than leftists do. Students understand this now.
Richard Reinsch:
Talk about that for a minute. That's an interesting thread.
Steven Hayward:
Well, I think most conservatives whether their libertarians or your traditionalists or Straussians or whoever, they tend to take the text more seriously. They tend to teach from original texts rather than textbooks. Above all, I think I'll say this as a collective statement, we tend to be anti-historicists. We take ideas seriously. We read Edmund Burke not out of antiquarian fascination but because we think he might be right about things. He might be right today. You average liberal doesn't think that way. They think ideas change with the times. They're all basically Hegelians. If you tell a student that actually what Burke or Tocqueville or somebody thought doesn't really matter, it's not relevant today, then why would you take it seriously? Why would you work very hard reading it?
Richard Reinsch:
What year did you start teaching at Berkeley?
Steven Hayward:
Well, back in 2017 I was a fellow and the fall of 2016, so I was there for the election. And you're right. They had a collective freak out on the campus when Trump won.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, I remember reading it. You start teaching in 2017, and things go pretty well. How did you engage with...? How did cancel culture land on you?
Steven Hayward:
Well, I should go back up a step. It happened that the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley, which is, by the U.S. News ranking, the number one public policy program in the country. Actually ironically, it was the dean of the school there, Henry Brady, a very distinguished political scientist, who had initially contacted me, I don't know, five, six years ago when I was teaching at Pepperdine saying, "We'd like to get some visiting conservatives come to the Goldman School. Would you be interested?" I said, "Maybe." I went up and met him and met a bunch of faculty, and they really wanted me to come. Then what happened is competition. It's a good thing. Some people who know me, I didn't know them, but who know me in the political science department got wind of it and then John Yoo at the law school also. They said, "Yeah, the Goldman School's great, but why don't you come and spend time with us at public policy and the law school. By the way, we'll keep you for two or three years if you wanted." I thought, "Well, that sounds like fun. I go in for that." So that's what happened. But Dean Brady kept after me. So this year I said, "Okay, I'll come teach for the Goldman School this year." Then what happened is that some students looked me up and had a freak out and started a Twitter storm and wrote long memos, heavily footnoted to all the woke literature about what a threat I was to them because of my racism and sexism and homophobia. The dean, unfortunately, folded on the spot which I think was unfortunate. I think he actually regrets it in hindsight. To make a long story short, the fuss didn't end with me. There were a bunch of students considering demanding that the dean resign. One of their memos was about all of his years of macro and microaggressions and harming minorities at the Goldman School that would last for years, which not many things deans do last for years but there you go.
Richard Reinsch:
I want to get to that in a minute. One thing you note in the article is, which I thought that was pretty funny, you had two course descriptions that they objected to and that caused them upset. One you had "History of Conservative Thought from Burke to Bannon", as in Trump's Bannon, which at first thought, I said to myself if I was teaching that I probably wouldn't have called it that. But it's actually kind of a smart thing to do particularly in that environment in terms of getting students. In any event, Bannon is something of a thinker. I'm not saying he's right, but he does have some ideas and arguments. He's read some texts closely. So it's not exactly beyond the pale that you would read him particularly now. And they couldn't handle that.
Steven Hayward:
Yeah, that was funny. That was the course title I used in the political science department. Yeah, you're right. If you talk to faculty these days especially at big universities and they say, "Course titles are very important. It's a marketing tool like anything else." I taught the course, one political science and had a pretty big class, again, with a full spectrum of ideological views and a lively discussion. So I said, "Oh, why don't I teach that class at the Goldman School?" They said, "The class sounds fine, but the title is way too outrageous for our very liberal students." So they suggested this very anodyne title. I forget what it was now, but it was very bland and background... Anyway, I taught the course. It was a much smaller class at the Goldman School and very little discussion. I had to argue with myself half the time because I couldn't get students to... By the way, I tell students right off the bat nowadays that I'm conservative but you're more likely to be rewarded in class if you argue with me than simply nod your head or stay silent. I want argument. I don't ever tell the students they're wrong. I believe a dialectical, almost like a seminar process, that went, I think, way off crazy, I'll say, "Well, blah, blah this, blah, blah that." Then if we go on for a while and say, "Okay, we'll just leave there." Then we move on to other people and other things. Anyway, I'm pretty easy going in the classroom. But still, the class was a huge contrast to the political science classes I've had.
Richard Reinsch:
In class, and you quote an administrator at another school, at American University, saying that students seem reluctant to engage in difficult questions and debates. None of that surprises me. Did you find that to be the case in this course and/or something else that students themselves don't trust their own reasoning? They don't actually think words and arguments can really touch anything in a true way.
Steven Hayward:
I don't know how many of them really thought it through to even one or two levels of philosophical tail as you suggest, at least not in the departments I've been in. I mean one reason why this was such a shocking episode is that it's in a public policy program, which is otherwise very quantitatively oriented even if liberal. It's not critical theory and some of these really insane disciplines that exist out on the... well, not on the fringes anymore. That's what made it so startling.
Richard Reinsch:
It's interesting you're saying about the public policy school, too, I supposed their thinking is, "We're not going to interact in our own careers. We have to put up with the politics of, but we're not going to really interact with conservatives or libertarians or classical liberals" at the level of wherever they're going to end up: high bureaucratic positions in the federal government, foundation positions, whatever they're going to go on and do. This is they have the answers before them so, "Why are you trying to have us read primary texts even? I wonder if that was the public policy attitude.
Steven Hayward:
Well, it could be. Here's where having criticized Dean Brady I should give him some praise. He's a liberal. He's not a leftist, but he's an old liberal. He said, "Look, I think it is important for students to know about Edmund Burke's argument and Hayek. He says, "There's a great value in reading Hayek. Students should know about Hayek." Dean Brady says, "I think Hayek's critique of central planning is correct, and students need to know that." By the way, he was a big fan of James Q. Wilson. Didn't agree with him about everything. What he really wanted from someone like me at the Goldman School was to be something like James Q. Wilson. Well, what was James Q. Wilson interested in his last decade of his life? Moral questions, questions of character. I don't think that would fly right now.
Richard Reinsch:
Marriage. He wrote a book on marriage, right?
Steven Hayward:
Marriage, exactly, right. But think about it for a minute, I think there's always been uncertainty... just to get off a little bit into the short weeds anyway. There's political science that tries to understand political life, and public policy is sort of the practical offshoot of it, I think. A lot of people there, they're going to become, I guess, I don't necessarily want to say technocrats the way that word's usually meant, but they're there... Maybe actually I'll borrow from Marx. Political science students want to understand the world. Public policy students want to change it. Even though a lot of political science graduate students are pretty left, some very left, although there's also some conservatives among the political science graduate students at Berkeley... Public policy, I don't think there are any conservative graduate students. I think the number is zero. They're there to want to change the world. I think you're right. I think when you're in the big bubble of the university, you don't think... Well, I mean you know the general public narrative is that Republicans have only won elections by cheating, by deceiving people, etc., etc. They don't take the argument seriously.
Richard Reinsch:
This is not an original observation, but you said number one public policy school in America, which aspires to be, I assume, not merely a national school but an international school and the positions its graduate students aspire to. Yet, you're the only conservative faculty member. Maybe there's some moderate progressives, but you're the only one, and the students almost uniformly left. To me, that's just indicative of just an intellectual failure going on. When that's the case, it's not merely what texts are you reading. It's what questions do you not even know to ask. Which leads to, this is in the article, you're denounced by student groups called Equity in Public Policy who form a consortium to attack you, Students of Color in Public Policy and Black Students in Public Policy. They said that Steven Hayward was, quote, "a climate denier who actively promotes ideas that harm communities of color and other marginalized groups and for your, quote, 'repeated racist, misogynist and transphobic statements.'" Steven Hayward, how do you plead to this?
Steven Hayward:
Well, I got a whole bunch of new readers from my post on the Power Line blog which can be pretty polemical. Of course, what am I usually doing? I'm usually citing Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes. I think maybe I've written only two things ever about same sex marriage, and usually it was analytical things. I remember writing an article once about my conversations with Jonathan Rauch about same sex marriage. I've written a couple of things about what, I guess, we'd call... Is transgenderism actually a formal ideology?
Richard Reinsch:
I think so.
Steven Hayward:
But I've written a couple things about the identity question and as a very skeptical thing but not hostile because I talked about transgender people I know and what they say and say, "Here are things to think about." But the point is if you're not... It's a very narrow orthodoxy I think this is what we all know. It was a shock to read it. The climate thing is completely wrong. Of course, that is true for a long time that you're either a true believer or you're the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. You're not allowed to be a lukewarmer, which there's a lot of people who fit in that category like Matt Ridley, for example, and lots of others and including, by the way, some Berkeley faculty in the physics department. But that's where we are. All these talks of tolerance turn out to be pretty particular and narrow.
Richard Reinsch:
I talk a little bit about this. You also had this very negative response from a course you taught. I think this actually ties into what you just said about public policy students. You were going to teach a course on approaches to environmentalism outside of the mainstream. I think a part of the course description is free market environmentalism, and you were going to teach the book, which I've read and actually used in conferences, called Free Market Environmentalism by Terry Anderson and, was it, Donald Leal, which is largely seen as the book that launched free market environmentalism. I think it came out in the early 1980s. This was triggering and hateful and unsettling. I thought, "Oh my gosh, we can't even have a conversation about that in a public policy school."
Steven Hayward:
That was always amazing. I should fill in a little bit. Unless somebody knows this field, they won't necessarily get it from the description that I printed in full in Commentary. It was going to be Free-Market Environmentalism, Ecomodernism, Degrowth, and, I forget, Other Heterodox. So I was going to do... Degrowth is sort of a revival of Malthusianism. We've got a couple of prominent faculty at Berkeley who were behind this. Plus I have a couple of people I know who are sort of on the fringes of that. I was going to invite them to class as guest speakers to represent the point of view and disagree with me. Then one of the other key books I was going to use was Elinor Ostrom's Managing the Common. Elinor Ostrom was, until last fall, one of the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize in economics, and near as I can tell she totally unknown by anybody at the Goldman School. Her work is in a nether world in between old control and command regulation and pure markets and property rights. As such you get a whole... ecomodernism or the aggressive environmentalists who have broken with the old Malthusian and want to talk about the importance of economic growth and technology as solutions to environmental problems. So it was going to be a whole spectrum of things. I know some of the ecomodernists in the Bay Area and was going to have them in to talk. I wasn't even going to talk about climate because I think climate change is wrecking the environmental movement. It's just swallowing the whole thing up alive. I thought this would be something different. But it didn't matter. Just the fact that I had dissented from the party line in the past and that I was wholly unacceptable. I think just using the phrase "free market environmentalism" was like raising a red flag for a bull. Everybody freaked out. Because my course in the fall totally went off without a hitch. There was no fuss. It was, as I say, a bit of a disappointment in the classroom dynamic. It wasn't until my spring graduate seminar was announced and was listed, within 72 hours all hell broke loose.
Richard Reinsch:
It's interesting. Going back to something you said, free market environmentalism requires a bit of policy work. It requires a pretty deep understanding of economic concepts and then applying that to problems in environmental policy use and how various companies engage with the environment and getting them to engage with it in a pro environmental way but using market ideas to do so, not regulation. Now maybe they weren't even at that their level in their objection to you. But it's sort of like a recognition that this doesn't involve us as much. This would not be for the public policy students to engage in really. It's pro business or something like that. I wondered if maybe that was their thinking, but that may have been too deep.
Steven Hayward:
I think you're probably right about that. I know Larry Alexander at the University of San Diego Law School used to teach a course on the environment from a contrarian point of view. He said it was known among the law students as the polluters' perspective. Of course, if you know the free market and the environmental literature especially the thread of it that talks about common law remedy, and it often comes as a surprise to environmentalists when I explain to them the fact that the regulatory state they like so much actually has foreclosed a bunch of common law remedies that ordinary people can use against corporations, against the government. Interestingly, the people understand this clearly are the whole market historians, like I'm thinking of the guy who wrote The Transformation of American Law at Harvard years ago, I'm blanking on his name right now or Gabriel Kolko whose famous The Triumph of Conservatism. For public policy students who otherwise are pretty quantitative, I mean the Goldman School and most other elite programs require a lot of quantitative analysis classes and statistics, you would think that it would fit in well, how would they structure markets, incentives and tradable permits, and so on and so forth, work out as a superior remedy or let's add another rule making from the EPA. But there's no imagination for that at all right now. Obviously, as we see, not much open to even to considering the question.
Richard Reinsch:
That would be my understanding. The thing about the public policy school dean who had invited you to come teach and wanted your perspective, so when he gets attacked, he folds like a cheap suit. He says, I'll just read it to you, it's in the article, "I owe an apology to all of you. I take full responsibility as it was my sole decision to invite Steven Hayward to the Goldman School of Public Policy to teach two courses, one in the fall and spring. I took the fact that he was already affiliated with IGS, Institute for Governmental Studies, and teaching at Berkeley Law as indicators that he would be a thoughtful person, but that is not the case. I was not aware of his statements that belittle others and undermine our shared goals of ensuring a just and inclusive society. It's one thing to disagree with someone. It's another to demean them." In a way he realized he was on the wrong side of the mod and sought to join them, not unlike, say, Mayor Ted Wheeler.
Steven Hayward:
By the way, I met Ted Wheeler once a few years ago before he was mayor.
Richard Reinsch:
He seems like a perfectly nice man.
Steven Hayward:
He has an MBA from Stanford or Yale, I forget where, and was treasurer of the state of Oregon. Yeah, I thought in the ordinary sense he seemed quite able. Anyway, now he's just awful. If he hadn't been mayor, he would have become a dean, it seems. Anyway, that's getting us off track. I don't know if the dean actually read any of the statements that the students were talking about or if he read... Look, I'd known him for a while. He had come to some events that I had done. I did a conference a couple years ago I organized through IGS on intellectual diversity. I had Harvey Mansfield out from Harvard as the keynote speaker and Josh Dunn from Colorado and Steven Teles from John Hopkins. Dean Brady came to several of the sessions. The guy knows me. It wasn't like he plucked me out of the phone book and was suddenly surprised. When we talked first five years ago he was totally aware of my climate work in places like the Weekly Standard and The Public Interest
Richard Reinsch:
Wow.
Steven Hayward:
So I think it's one thing he's embarrassed about. As I say, the students were after him. By the way, the students backed off demanding his resignation. Instead saying, "You need to start planning your succession right away." I think the idea is they want a much more radical dean than him. I think there's some chance that will happen. Dean Brady's been very successful in the useful role of raising money and raising the profile of the school. He's very good that way, so we'll see about that. As I just mentioned, that's why I wrote the second half of the article about Aaron Wildavsky, the great political scientist at Berkeley. He founded the Goldman School back in the early '70s. I just quoted a few things he said. I could have gone on a long time about Aaron who I knew a little bit before he died. They couldn't hire him today because my views are about the same as his views on identity politics, on environment and so forth.
Richard Reinsch:
One thing I did want to say, it seems to me... We were talking about the administrators earlier in the interview and how the administrators goad the students on. Well, it's like the feedback loop. The students have now realized the way to get change on campus or to get their way is to hurl these accusations. It's not that Brady is an evil guy, but he's been open to evil things. He's allowed them to happen. He hasn't been nearly as aggressive as he needs to be. This now means we need a change or something like that. This inability to have any sort of conversation or debate on campus, and the fact that that is damning, that he would turn you out before even talking to you as an equal, as an academic equal, that's shocking. It undermined the entire idea of an academic enterprise.
Steven Hayward:
Yeah, and it's spreading rapidly. As we're talking, I just read a story yesterday or the day before about Tulane University where-
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, I saw that.
Steven Hayward:
... some group was... Right, you should know the story, . I forget whether it was a class or a student group or whatever. They were going to host an author who'd written a self-critical book about the legacy of his grandparents or great-grandparents in the Klan. In other words, it's a anti-racist book very much in the vein of not revisionist history but highlighting really ugly aspects of American history. Students complained that this was hurtful. So they canceled the event. Where are the adults in the room to say, "You people are complaining about this. You need to grow up"? That's what needs to happen, and there's nobody doing that any place.
Richard Reinsch:
It is. It's the complete evacuation of any moral authority it seems to me, or confidence in what we are actually here to do in the academy, which isn't to carry on just political conversations, and if we do have them, we have them in a different way. What I took from your Aaron Wildavsky discussion, which I thought was really well stated, Wildavsky was a traditional liberal, a New Deal liberal, confidence in government, confidence in the administrative state to achieve good outcomes but he becomes skeptical over time about some of those aims and some of the loftier objectives being voiced, and also within academia would have been a conservative because he did believe in the idea, debate, dialectic process itself. So he wouldn't have understood this, and also, as you quote him, incredibly skeptical of climate change, global warming in the early '90s.
Steven Hayward:
Yeah, that's right. I don't think he would have changed his mind if he had lived on. He died in 1993, I think, of lung cancer unfortunately. He had been a lifelong smoker. But I don't think he would have changed his mind at all because he wrote a lot about environment issues, not just climate but risk assessment of all kinds is one of his greatest strengths. I will say just in passing the political science department at Berkeley, it's very large. It's also very highly ranked. But it actually has a few conservatives lurking around but not outspoken like Mansfield or somebody. We have a lot of old sensible liberals teaching there, so there's actually more diversity, in the right sense of the word, of thought there than we now see at the Goldman School, which I think is a pretty stark thing.
Richard Reinsch:
Very stark. Overall, you're still going to teach in the law school, I think you told me.
Steven Hayward:
Here, that's another... I've taught a class and I'm going to teach again this spring with Judge Janice Rogers Brown who's also-
Richard Reinsch:
Oh, wow.
Steven Hayward:
... a fellow at the law school. We teach a class on natural law jurisprudence . It's just a small seminar, but we get some liberal students in there. Again, it's the same experience. We actually read some Cicero. We read some Aristotle. Most of the students really have never read any of these old texts at all and are completely unfamiliar with them, and they like it. It's the most highly ranked course I've taught at Berkeley in the student evaluation.
Richard Reinsch:
Oh wow. John Yoo who also teaches at Berkeley, he told me in his course, "Constitutional Law," when he gets to the 14th Amendment, they read about Reconstruction and the period of Reconstruction. None of the students, he told me, have very little knowledge of what that is. At the same time they're very sure what the 14th Amendment means. It's interesting to me right way about what students actually know, don't know, and what they're claiming is absolutely true.
Steven Hayward:
Right. I remember Robert Bork who I knew quite a bit when we overlapped at AEI years ago, he used to talk about, and it turns out to be literally true, most constitutional law curriculum at law schools, and maybe it was where you went, begins with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. That's kind of the whole Constitution now. The historical context of it is not taught at all. You go straight to the case law. I found to my surprise, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but a couple times in various classes I bring up the question of social justice and I've included Hayek's famous essay on the mirage of social justice a couple of times, but then I'll talk about... how does this compare to some of the old classical categories of social justice like you find in Aristotle, commutative justice, distributed justice? What I realized with the look on students' faces and also they come up to me after the classes, they've never heard of those before. The whole lineage of that was just not in their education any place. So then I end up teaching Aristotle, too. I joke a lot, and this is what John's point is, an awful lot of what conservatives do in higher education is remedial education, willy-nilly. I end up telling people what Plato's Republic is about or certain parts of it because that's not read anymore. I sneak in Tocqueville. I think, again, why conservatives teach differently is it's not uniform but a lot of us are actually teaching Western Civilization in a clandestine way because it's not taught. Even liberal students kind of want to know it.
Richard Reinsch:
Yes. I think that's right. In the summertime I teach various courses for conservative organization students. These students are remarkably open to that and prefer that, and many of them attend institutions or take classes where that's the case. I haven't had the general experience of what you're describing. Steven Hayward, so you go on. You've not been canceled. You obviously have a lot of places to write and publish, and you'll still be at the law school, so we look forward to continue to hear from you.
Steven Hayward:
Well, thanks, Richard. This has been fun, as always.
Richard Reinsch:
Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with David Goldman about his new book, You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-form the World. David Goldman is the author of the widely read Spengler column for the Asia Times. He's an award-winning Wall Street strategist. He's worked for Credit Suisse. He was the head of global trading research for Bank of America. And he was an investment banker for a Hong Kong boutique called Reorient, which was purchased by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba. He also is widely read and published in foreign policy and national security. He's advised the US National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and institutional investors globally. He's the author of a number books, including most recently, How Civilizations Die. David Goldman, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.
David Goldman:
Thank you so much for inviting me, Richard.
Richard Reinsch:
David, on your book, two items from China everyone is discussing, and I know that they in some way feature into what you've written. First, China's move to encroach upon, if not eliminate, the semi-autonomous zone of freedom given to Hong Kong. Recently, the British government has offered to every Hong Kong citizen, I've read, a passport or some sort of regularized status in the United Kingdom. Your thoughts on what China is doing there?
David Goldman:
Hong Kong has never been a Chinese city. It was a British city. It was founded by the British at the beginning of the opium trade. The majority of its population never wanted to be Chinese. So I think the biggest mistake Margaret Thatcher made in her glorious career was to cede Hong Kong and Kowloon to China when she didn't have to. Most of the Chinese population hasn't liked this. There is a significant independence movement in Hong Kong. From the Chinese standpoint, China's like a Roach Motel. Once you go in, you don't get out. The Chinese are always terrified that if one rebel province can secede, they'll all secede. So they will use whatever measures they need to prevent that. Their solution to this long term is going to be a population tragedy. A lot of the Hong Kongers who don't like living under Chinese rule will leave. They'll go to Taiwan, Britain, Canada, some to the United States. More and more people will migrate to Hong Kong from the mainland, and eventually it will become a Chinese city.
Richard Reinsch:
So your thinking there, what China stands to gain is really consolidation. They're worried about the sinner pulling away from the country in some way, or people seeing Hong Kong be successful, operate on its own, without Chinese authority or control.
David Goldman:
Well, it's worried about secession. There is a significant secession movement. And the most important thing that's happened with the new national security law is that it has become illegal, seditious to talk about secession. So a lot of the pro-Taiwan, anti-Beijing protestors have simply left the island and will never come back. Remember, China is not a country. We tend to think of it as a country. It is a heterogeneous empire with 200 languages spoken in 90 major ethnic groups, and always at risk of falling apart. The Chinese Empire, whoever runs it, whether it's called an Imperial Dynasty or a Communist Party, lives in terror of a rebel province that will encourage other rebel provinces. So that's why China will go to war over Taiwan. It will never allow Taiwan independence without a real fight. It has a good deal to do with why China is being so aggressive in the South China Sea. Xi Jinping told this to Barack Obama during the APEC summit in 2015. There's an old Chinese proverb: kill the chicken while the monkey watches. Well, the South China Sea is the chicken, and Taiwan is the monkey here. China is saying, "We're willing to go to war over a bunch of empty atolls based on some glorious old map. Think of what we'll do with Taiwan. Think of what we'll do with Hong Kong." So that's China's method of governance going back thousands of years. Sadly, there's a continuity between what was always a very heterogeneous set of men who has a very cruel empire and what the Chinese are doing today. This is based on traditional Chinese governance. It's not per se a function of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Richard Reinsch:
On another front, something else people are discussing widely right now is a video purporting to show Uighur Muslims, who have been persecuted by the Chinese government for years, being loaded onto train cars to be sent to concentration camps. That's widely believed. There was a fascinating segment the other night on BBC, where the BBC commentator presented this video to the Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, who was literally speechless and had nothing to say. I mean, it was sort of a fascinating interview. What's going on here from the Chinese standpoint, and what they're doing to this population?
David Goldman:
Every Chinese I've talked to, ranging from senior officials of the Foreign Ministry to taxi drivers, when asked, "What are you going to do about the Uighur problem," has said, "We're going to kill them all." China has had a policy of exterminating what it considers unruly barbarians on its borders for a very long time. Their attitude towards the Uighurs is that they don't want to assimilate into China. You get the traditional Chinese choice, which is column A, you become Chinese, column B, we kill you all, and there isn't anything on the menu. I don't have detailed information about what's happening in Xinjiang Province to the Uighurs. It's impossible to get reporters in. Their Asia Times is not able to send correspondents in like the rest of the world press. However, the suppression of the Uighurs through forced sterilization, forced use of birth control, cultural suppression amounts to a slow motion ethnocide. In other words, an attempt to extirpate this culture entirely. So putting Uighurs in concentration camps would not surprise me. They've already put between one and two million Uighur through reeducation camps. From a Western standpoint, this is repugnant and brutal. From the standpoint of the vast majority of Chinese, it's business as usual.
Richard Reinsch:
That's incredible. You write about the transformation, the economic transformation that has happened in China. I welcome you to talk more about that. The way they've brought hundreds of millions of people from the rural countryside into their cities, the tremendous growth of Chinese cities, and their economy, their technological transformation. Why did American policymakers for so long underestimate China?
David Goldman:
The West has underestimated Asians for the past century and change. The Russians underestimated the Japanese during the 1905 war. The British underestimated the Japanese at Singapore. The French underestimated the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. And I think we can say fairly that the American military in the '60s underestimated the North Vietnamese Army. We simply have difficulty believing that a culture so different from ours, and one that was so impoverished and humiliated for such a long period of time could come back so quickly. But you look at the economic miracle of South Korea, you look at the transformation of Japan from a rural society in the 1860s to a major industrial power by the beginning of the 20th century. China's rise is not at all without precedent. We saw the same kind of thing in Japan and Korea before. The difference is that China has 1.4 billion people. As you mentioned, they've moved in the past 35 years nearly 600 million people from countryside to city. That's the equivalent of the whole of Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine building a new Glasgow, a new Rome, a new Lisbon, a new Helsinki. Build every city in Europe to accommodate that many people. That's the biggest economic transformation in history. I don't know if it's the fastest. But I calculate that per capita household consumption in China has risen nine times, 900% in the past 30 years. That's one generation. When you talk to Chinese, they'll tell you, "Well, I grew up with a dirt floor and an outhouse and an outside pump. Now, my kids have indoor plumbing and centra heating and a car." It's a completely different kind of world. So however brutal and repugnant the Communist Party of China has been, the economic accomplishments of China are real. Walk around Chinese cities. I urge people to just go onto YouTube and look at tours of Chinese cities that you've never heard of: Chengdu, Chongqing, Hefei. Names that you don't know. These are cities of 30 million people that look like science fiction movie sets that were third-world backwaters just 20 years ago. This is an incredible transformation, and the energy and intelligence of the Chinese people is impressive. I am not a panda hugger. I'm not a Sinophile. I don't like Chinese culture. I find it brutal, and from a Western standpoint, in many ways repugnant. But it's nonetheless impressive, and underestimating it would be a terrible error.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah. So if we think about the standard post-Cold War view of our elites, bipartisan, that has this middle class forum which you've just described, as the wealth grew, there would be this just natural desire for democracy or some sort of civil society rule of law to form. That hasn't formed. It's evident, as you know, that we're moving from that post-Cold War view. Help us think more about ... Help us understand China. Help us understand maybe their thinking about who the human person is. Because that seems to me interesting alone in how this has not produced any sort of desire for more freedom.
David Goldman:
Well, there are three things to understand about China, what makes China China, that go back literally 5,000 years. One is its enormous wealth and population are based on fertilized river valleys which could produce eight times the caloric content per acre with rice that Western European or Middle Eastern cultures could produce with wheat. So enormous wealth, but also enormous susceptibility to flooding and famine. So massive infrastructure to control floods has been the foundation of the Chinese Empire. When we look at things like the $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative where China proposed to build infrastructure all across the Eurasian continent and basically lock it in to the Chinese Empire, that is the old Chinese imperial model extended into an external policy. The second thing to understand about China is imperial bureaucracy. For thousands of years, the smartest kids in the provinces that sat and taken an examination to become government officials, used to be called the mandarin system. You can see pictures from over 2,000 years ago of young Chinese sitting in an examination hold taking the mandarin exam. This is now the university entrance exam, the Gaokao, which is taken by nearly 10 million Chinese every year. About six out of 10 of whom get to go to university. If you look at the math questions on that, I doubt one in 500 American high school seniors could answer them. I know a little math, and they made me sweat. The third thing to understand is family. Chinese society is based on the extended family. It's hierarchical. The emperor is like the big pater familias of the nation, and he has smaller pater familiases under him. The foundation of the Chinese economy has always been an extended family farm led by one pater familias. So you've never had a civil society where people have peers. No Chinese has ever sat on a school board or a little league committee. Everything's always come top down. There's no sense of rights and obligations as we have under Roman law, no sense of the divine spark of the individual as we have under ancient Hebrew law. What you have is a set of loyalties to hierarchy. That, in a thumbnail, is what Confucianism is about. So the Chinese have no experience of self-governance. In place of democratic governance, you have a selection of supposedly the smartest people, or at least the best exam takers in the country. Imagine if the United States were ruled by a committee of National Merit Scholars, that was a self-perpetuating elite run by exams. They're awfully smart. The system is in many ways awfully inefficient. But they're not stupid, and they're incredibly ambitious. They've never liked their emperor. The emperor in China is just the capo di tutti i capi. He's the guy who's there to prevent the underbosses from killing each other. That's exactly what they do when there isn't a strong emperor. So the Chinese tend to like having a strong emperor because in their experience, when you don't have one you have civil war, war widows, and you lose 10 or 20% of the population.
Richard Reinsch:
You said something in the book that stuck with me, and I wonder if you can elaborate on it. You're touching on it here. The Chinese don't have friends.
David Goldman:
Well, they don't have friends in Aristotle's sense of political friendship where you have a peer group that governs a city, and you have to form friendships in order to solve governance problems and advance policies. Everything in China comes from the top, so the Chinese tend to kiss up and kick down. You don't question the order that comes down from the top because it's bad for your health. You could become a kidney donor real fast. And the people below you, you simply tell them what to do. You're the pater familias. They owe you loyalty. You're supposed to be benevolent under Confucian philosophy. But in fact, you have absolute control. As I've said, there is no subsidiarity. There is no civil society structure. Everything is up and down as opposed to parallel. So the Western concept of political friendship, which was first enunciated by Aristotle, is something which the Chinese simply have never experienced. It's also a winner-take-all system. There are only a certain number of places. So you have to look to your left and right when you're in second grade, and decide who you're going to step over to get ahead.
Richard Reinsch:
So listening to you describe China, it's almost as if our foreign policy consensus in the post-Cold War period was at odds with reality, at odds with their cultural, economic, political. I mean, it sounds absurd that we thought this.
David Goldman:
Richard, I agree with you. The whole idea that China was going to evolve into a Western style democracy simply because they got more prosperous ignores the fact that this is a culture that's been around for 5,000 years, which operated radically differently from Judeo-Christian cultures. This is the purest form of paganism.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, it's incredible.
David Goldman:
It is. Well, the Chinese are probably the least spiritual people in the world. They believe in fate and themselves. When you say, "Well, what's Chinese religion?" Well, you can say that there's Buddhism, there's some Daoism, there's some household gods. But the Chinese really are down-to-earth pragmatic. How do I advance my family? How do I get rich?
Richard Reinsch:
On this point, in the book you say China has no desire for war or military confrontation with America. It does desire global economic domination in many respects, and I want to talk about that specifically. One point you make is their technological prowess matches ours, if not surpassing us in quantum computing now. Their ability to deploy the coming generation of 5G technology surpasses America's, or anything a Western corporation could offer. How did that tech superiority or equality emerge so fast?
David Goldman:
Well, we got very complacent after we won the Cold War. We decided we were so powerful that we could rest on laurels and coast. We could, under the Clinton administration, turn NATO into a responsibility to protect kind of social work organization. Or the George W. Bush, we could go out to support democracy to the world. I think that was a big mistake. I very much agree with President Trump in his criticism of that kind of policy. In the case with the Chinese, they watched what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They saw the United States created technological miracles that no one could have imagined. We created the digital age, the fast microchip, optical networks, plasma displays, the internet, graphic user interface. Everything that goes into modern economy came from America's commitment for superiority over the Soviet Union, Defense Department funding of public-private partnerships with US corporations. Chinese watched this, and they learned. So China is attempting to emulate what the United States did in the 70s and 80s as it won the Cold War. It has a vast budget for public support for advanced technologies. China's idea is that there's going to be a fourth industrial revolution. That industrial revolution is going to be based on artificial intelligence. And whoever controls the porting and storage and processing of data is going to run the world, because that's going to allow you to have industrial robots talk to each other and automatically program themselves in flexible manufacturing. It's going to allow artificial applications to medical diagnoses based on analysis of billions of people's digitized medical records, DNA, and daily upload of vital signs into the computer cloud. It'll be based on autonomous driving vehicles, detailed analysis of consumer behavior. And 5G internet is kind of like the railroad in the 19th century, which was the carrier for all these other technologies that made them possible. They want to dominate that, and they want to dominate the industrial applications. They saw the United States dominate the third industrial revolution, the computation revolution. They want to dominate the artificial intelligence revolution.
Richard Reinsch:
The Chinese government invested a lot of money in this technology itself with the idea that the spinoffs, the entrepreneurial creativity and how those would be deployed in various ways would come, but they wanted to beat us in this technology front. You argue they've largely succeeded.
David Goldman:
The Chinese People's Congress, at the end of May, just approved a $2.2 trillion five-year technology budget for any number of things. I mean, 5G itself, the Chinese are spending, according to a study by Deloitte, three times what we spend per capita on 5G. They'll have the fastest rollout. They also are the biggest market for robotics in the world. The last I saw, their robotic purchases have gone up 25% year on year. And the chief technology officer of Huawei, whom I interview in the book You Will Be Assimilated, explained to me that with 5G and artificial intelligence, you can get a bunch of industrial robots in a factory floor, give them an assignment, and they will work out autonomously a production process that human engineers wouldn't come up with, in a tiny fraction of the time. So the implications for manufacturing productivity are just staggering. You add that to medical diagnosis. I mean, let's say you've got hundreds of millions of digitized medical records and DNA, and you have a smart phone that takes your blood oxygen content, your temperature, your blood pressure, and so forth with attachments. And with these hundreds of millions of people, in real time, uploading their vital signs into artificial intelligence services run by servers run by Huawei. What's already happening, Richard, is that every pharmaceutical company in the world is setting up shop in China because the data the Chinese have is a vast mine for researching new drugs, interactions, genetic defects, and so forth. The Chinese computer scientists aren't any smarter than Google. I think Google's probably the best computation company in the world. But if you think of artificial intelligence as the engine, data is the fuel. And China, where there's no guarantee of personal data protection, has the biggest trove of data for medical research in the world.
Richard Reinsch:
On the question of Huawei, which you write about compellingly in the book, and in this interview you've mentioned. Their position versus, say, Silicon Valley. Because we always think Silicon Valley has the best technology, the best creativity. Capital is flowing to the best opportunities, those with the best ideas. And there's Huawei out here which seems to be in position to supply all of Europe with 5G, if not many other countries around the world. Where are we on this? I take it we have the technology. It's just what? The ability to deploy it or implement it?
David Goldman:
Well, starting about 20 years ago, American technology companies decided that they were much better off in terms of share price by letting the Asians do the manufacturing. Not just China, but also Korea and Japan and Taiwan. Now, to some extent, Vietnam. Let the Asians do the dirty work, and we do the software. Software, if you're successful, has incredibly high return on equity, because the marginal cost of adding a customer is zero. They just download the software from the internet and pay you. So a company like Cisco, which used to dominate the hardware for internet routers has basically gotten out of the manufacturing business entirely. There was a report in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. It mentioned that the US government, specifically Larry Kudlow, the head of the President's Economic Council, had gone to Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, and said, "Well, why don't you go and buy another big telecommunications equipment manufacturer? Go buy Ericsson so we would have a national champion to compete with Huawei." And Robbins told him, "Cisco's not in the business of buying low-margin companies." In fact, Ericsson's return on equity is a fraction of that of Cisco. So if they did that, Cisco's stock price might go down. The problem is not so much that we don't have smart people. It's that the US tech sector made a conscious decision to become dependent on China for the production of hardware. And of course, the Chinese, who excluded Google and other US companies from the Chinese market, has spent vast amounts of money developing their own software, their own computation, and are now in position to compete with us in the software field, as well. I think this was terribly short-sighted. But I don't want to entirely put the blame on the tech companies because in Asia, capital-intensive businesses are subsidized the way we subsidize sports stadiums. We don't have that kind of subsidy in the United States. So to some extent, we are running according to an industrial policy which steers people into that kind of choice. The problems is it's not our policy. It's China's industrial policy which is guiding our investment decisions.
Richard Reinsch:
So just thinking about that, I mean, you and I are both students of free market economics, understand those arguments well. Let's just play this out, though. Is it not the case though, that in subsidizing these things and having incredible government directed investment, that the technology over time is deficient? Or that resources themselves aren't being well-utilized and, say, the Silicon Valley sector should over time find the highest and best uses, not only for capital but technology itself?
David Goldman:
I think China's system is extremely vulnerable because any kind of top-down system tends to make very bad choices, but there are certain kinds of subsidies which stood us in good stead in the past. I think the right division of labor is the key. For example, under Reagan we spent about 1-1/4% of our gross domestic product on federal support for R&D. What that meant is that RCA Labs and GE Labs and IBM Labs would get a research grant from DARPA, and they'd do basic research. Bell Labs, their people won Nobel Prizes doing things there. That produced things like the semiconductor laser, which made optical networks like cable television possible. Produced fast and light computer chips, which made look-down radar in F-15s possible. The US government did not build enterprises. It subsidized the basic R&D, but it let the private sector take the risk of commercialization. Now, to some extent, the Chinese have tried to emulate that. If you look at the National People's Congress, the entity which just passed this $2.2 trillion technology investment budget the end of May. In that People's Congress, there are 100 billionaires. The different between the Chinese and the Russians is the Russians said, "You're a good engineer. Have a good invention. We'll give you the Order of Lenin and maybe a dacha." The Chinese say, "You're a good engineer. Produce a good invention. We'll let you do an IPO in the Shanghai Market and become a billionaire." So to some extent, the Chinese have combined that kind of incentive into their system, and let a lot of people take private sector risk. It's sort of a mixed thing. Now, I believe that American ingenuity and the American system, if it's unleashed, can do a lot better than China. I saw this in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a very young man. In the late 1970s, everybody thought Russia would win the Cold War. The Russian economy was doing wonderfully, and the United States was a declining power. Reagan came in. By 1982, it was clear that the United States would win a conventional war, and the Russians weren't too sure they wanted to fight a nuclear war. That was the beginning of the end for communism. We turned them around in a very short period of time.
Richard Reinsch:
You used the word unleashed. What's leashing, say, America's tech firms now?
David Goldman:
If you look at what our kids are doing, we graduate, I think, about 40,000 mechanical engineers a year. That's not half what Germany does. A tiny fraction of China. The smartest kids aren't going into manufacturing because the smartest companies aren't investing in manufacturing. Really ambitious kids at US universities want to either go with a software or a Goldman Sachs, so they study mathematical finance or computer science. The danger is we end up being, if you pardon the expression, geeks in a new Roman Empire. I think we need a very strong signal from the government, including very strong tax incentives and, in rare cases, subsidies for manufacturing investment. We have to get our best talent thinking about manufacturing, particularly the kind of artificial intelligence, computer-driven manufacturing, which the Chinese call the fourth industrial revolution. We need to restore the level of federal support for R&D that we had under Reagan and under Kennedy. We need to get US corporations to understand that their future depends on the future of the United States, and they have to put the kind of effort into R&D that they did back when Bell Labs was the wonder of the world. Nobody knows what happened to Bell Labs. Well, it still exists, because Nokia bought the assets of Lucent. It's now called Shanghai Bell. It's sitting in Shanghai, and Nokia employs 16,000 Chinese scientists and engineers in China doing research there. That's our problem.
Richard Reinsch:
It's interesting. You're saying this is a national security exception to markets and we just need to draw that line, and the government has to step in in various ways to push things forward because the market itself isn't, or American companies operating in the market aren't recognizing this problem.
David Goldman:
There are always things government does for the general welfare, and promoting science and engineering research, basic research, is something the government legitimately can do. I don't like the idea of the government picking winners. That always lead to corruption and cronyism and inefficiency. Entrepreneurs will take risks, but it's hard to get entrepreneurs to take risks on the unknown unknowns, when you're talking about something where the science isn't yet established. When we talk about Bell Labs in the past producing Nobel Prize winners, it's because they did basic science. Texas Instruments in 1958 invented the integrated circuit. That was basic science, and that happened because you had federal support for that. So I think there's a legitimate basis for that, but there is a real world out there. We've got competitors. So to the extent that the Chinese have tilted the pool table by producing massive subsidies for capital-intensive industries ... Not just the Chinese. Koreans and Japanese, as well. That's the Asian model. We have no choice but to respond in kind in some cases. As much as I'm an old supply sider or old free marketer, our economy is being guided, as I said, to a great extent by somebody else's industrial policy. We have an industrial policy like, "They're not the problem. It's not ours. It's China's."
Richard Reinsch:
It seems to me also in this regard, and I don't know what your thoughts are. Marco Rubio favors an industrial policy. This seem to be much more about bringing manufacturing jobs to America, and that's a key element of it. I guess my fear is that actually doesn't do what you want to do, which is advance science and research in order to push technological bounds with likely commercial applications. It seems to me this is more of a, "Well, we just want to bring the past back."
David Goldman:
Richard, I share your views. I wrote a response to Senator Rubio's paper, which I thought was a good contribution to the debate, on the website of Claremont, The American Mind. I said you have to treat these problems as different. If you want to make a case for promoting industrial employment because it's a good thing for American workers, make that case separate. But we also have a national security issue, which has to be pursued on its own merits. If you lump these two things together in an overall industrial policy, you tend to get into a pinata grab for funding by people. Congressmen who want money for their district, and industries who want subsidies. We have to distinguish very carefully what the policy objectives are. Clearly, it can't bring the past back. And in fact, the best kind of manufacturing, the kind that really could reshore efficiently American production is going to be very capital intensive. It won't involve a whole lot of workers. If you look at the pinnacle of manufacturing today, that's chip production. That involves 10 different processes, each of which is incredibly complex and involves massive amounts of investment. A new chip foundry costs about $20 billion and employs a few hundred workers. So what we have to figure, is that if we have a massive increase in productivity, that's going to lead to all kinds of spinoff. Take the optical network. One result of that is we created hundreds of thousands of jobs in building out the cable TV industry. Building out cable created a massive surge in employment, and well-paid employment. There weren't a lot of people employed produced in the lasers that went into the optical networks, but the secondary effects created a vast number of jobs.
Richard Reinsch:
Okay. Yeah, well said. Thinking here, you're aware of this as well. I just want to go through, because there's also a counter argument or counter thinking to your position on China, that the country may be more brittle than we might think. I want to get your response to those. Thinking about the Belt and Road Initiative, you've written a lot about that. What's China doing there? But then also, is it not just sort of massively overextending itself and eventually creating a lot of debt problems? Basically, it's just not going to recoup the gains that it's invested.
David Goldman:
China has some serious problems. The Belt and Road Initiative has been very poorly done. Chinese really don't have the expertise in dealing with a lot of countries where they've thrown a lot of money around and created a lot of white elephant projects and a lot of bad debt. They do have $3 trillion worth of foreign exchange reserves, and they do have a current account surplus. With that kind of starting position, you can afford a number of mistakes. But I think the Belt and Road has been, in many ways, a disappointment in some ways, in other ways it hasn't. If you look at Southeast Asia for example, that's 600 million people. China's imports from Southeast Asia have just exploded. Southeast Asia has become a source of not just cheap raw materials, but cheap manufactured goods for China. As the cost of labor has gone up in China, they have substituted cheaper labor in Southeast Asia. And as the Chinese labor force has ceased to grow, the Chinese population is stagnant, they've managed to integrate into the Chinese economy the labor of hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia. So it's a very mixed picture. In terms of China's debt profile, China's debt to GDP is about the same as the United States. The difference is that government debt is much lower and corporate debt is much higher. Look at the corporate debt levels. They're staggering. A lot of people have said, "Gee, aren't they all going to go bankrupt?" Well, we did a study of this at Asia Times. The thing about China is that infrastructure has been the key to Chinese productivity growth, and the cost of that infrastructure was placed on the balance sheet of state-owned companies. So the majority of corporate debt is related to building railroads, building oil refineries, building airports, building roads, harbors, and so forth. That shows up as corporate debt simply because you have state-owned companies doing that instead of having a municipal corporation that issues municipal bonds and builds the infrastructure. It'll go onto the balance sheet of Shanghai Pudong Development Corporation, which does ports, or China Petroleum, or China Tower, which builds towers. So a lot of that debt is infrastructure related. Although it looks like a lot, it's fairly sound. Now, where the Chinese have a serious problem is in the housing market. In the United States, the average cost of a house is four or fives the annual income. In China, 10 to 20 times the annual income, depending on the part of the country. Now, Hong Kong is 50 times. That's because the savings of the Chinese people have gone overwhelmingly into houses, because they've never trusted the stock market. That's viewed as a casino. So housing prices are excessive. If they go up much further, people won't be able to buy a house. If they go down, you wipe out the savings. So very carefully, the Chinese government is trying to shift household assets away from housing into the stock market, and make it better regulated and less a casino-like entity. That's a significant problem. They're trying to address it. That could lead to a major issue for them. Now, typically, countries that have current account surpluses ... In other words, they're not dependent on borrowing money from overseas. They're not lenders to overseas ... and very high savings rates and have economic growth don't have unmanageable crisis. They have adjustments they can deal with. China has a current account surplus, a 44% national savings rate as opposed to about 18% in the United States.
Richard Reinsch:
I'm surprised it's that high.
David Goldman:
Vast savings rate. High. That's households, corporations, government. Very high savers. And it has economic growth. So the idea that China is going to have an unmanageable financial crisis as opposed to some painful adjustments here and there is, in my view, highly improbable. There's simply no record of a country that has those three criteria getting into really crippling financial problems.
Richard Reinsch:
Talk about how is capital deployed in China? I mean, is there this idea of a market of winners and losers, and it happens apart from state direction or state funding or financing. I mean, describe that process for us.
David Goldman:
Well, for most of the past 30 years, 40 years, capital in China has come from state-owned banks. A state-owned bank is basically a bureaucrat with a shovel standing next to a barrel of cash, waiting for a state-owned company to come along with a bucket, and he shovels some cash into the bucket. So even though you have this clever mandarin caste composed of the top exam scores in the country directing the investments, and they're not stupid people, massive inefficiencies have cropped up in that. Increasingly, China is trying to use equity markets as source of financing. For example, Semiconductor International Corporation, SMIC, China's biggest chip foundry, just did an IPO for tens of billions of dollars at a value that's now tripled in the mainland markets. Ant Financial, which is the biggest consumer payments company in the world with 900 million customers. That's Jack Ma's big company. Ant Financial is going to come to market and do an IPO for, I think, $40 billion, which would make it the biggest IPO in history. So there is a significant amount of money which is being channeled into new enterprises, new technologies through equity markets. That's what China is trying to do. Now, of course when you allow the markets to make decisions, that is a certain kind of democracy. That gives the public a certain kind of veto on government policy. Because if they don't like your policy, they don't have to buy securities. Same with bonds. So that does mean a certain kind of concession of power away from the center to the public on the part of the Communist Party, and they're trying to make that concession very carefully and very gradually. By the way, one of the reasons they've invited American financial companies into China is to help them do that. Companies like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley now have wholly owned subsidiaries in China. The banks that are expected to manage this Ant Financial IPO, biggest IPO in history, are I believe Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan. So America's financial sector is being given a huge incentive to help the Chinese government accomplish exactly this transition, and they're very eager to do that.
Richard Reinsch:
Interesting. Thinking about other observations. One, you've mentioned the aging workforce, but also birthrates, demographics. How do you see China trying to surmount those problems that it presents long term?
David Goldman:
China traditionally had a high birth rate. Children were the most valued possession. China imposed, 40 years ago, a one-child policy, which is the cruelest demographic policy since King Herod or Pharaoh. It forced people to have only one child. Of course, the result is that China's population growth is old. Its workforce has stopped growing. And it's said, "Well, now you can go ahead and have two children." It doesn't appear that the population is responding very quickly to this incentive, partly because China created a set of winner-take-all incentives in which the average family will spend the equivalent of a year's income in tutoring fees so their one child can get ahead in the university system, can get the brass ring. So whether the Chinese population will get out of this hole or not, is not clear. As I mentioned, a great deal of the motivation for the one belt, one road policy is for China to lock in the available pools of usable labor around the world, of which the biggest is the 600 million people in Southeast Asia. They're not necessarily the biggest pool of labor. There are more people in Africa. But if you want to find people who will show up to work on time, follow instructions, and be able to read the users manual, that's Southeast Asia. So to some extent, that will buffet. For the next 20 or 30 years, which will be the critical years for us, I don't believe China's demographic problems are going to hold them back massively. However, if China doesn't fix them, China will go into a decline towards the end of the 21st century. That, however, will not be soon enough to bail us out. So although it's something to watch carefully, I don't think we can count on China going into a demographic winter that's going to cripple them as a strategic rival in the kind of time horizon that we really care about.
Richard Reinsch:
We should see them as a rival. Not as an enemy, not as an ally, but as a rival.
David Goldman:
It's like meeting a tiger in the jungle. A tiger isn't wicked. It doesn't hate you. It just looks at you and thinks protein source.
China is the old pagan world. The concepts of good and evil don't exist in the same way they exist in the Judeo-Christian worlds. Loyalty and obligation substitute for good and evil. So we will never be friends with China. It'll take a very long time, if ever, for China to decide that the Judeo-Christian concept of human society is superior to theirs. They've been around for thousands of years, and they change very slowly. Our system is better. I believe in the sanctity of the individual as the highest good in society, and that's entirely absent from the Chinese system. But the Chinese idea of, "Let's have a meritocracy of the cleverest people who run everything from the top," occasionally does better than the messy brawl of democracy, and unfortunately.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, and I've been mentioning China's weaknesses. We need a whole other podcast to mention our weaknesses, which are glaring and evident to all right now. In many ways, to even take seriously what you're proposing requires a great effort on our part.
David Goldman:
Well, we did this before. We worked miracles when we beat the Russians in the Cold War, when we beat them in the Space Race, when we beat the Axis powers with the arsenal of democracy. America's capacity, for a generation, has astonished the world before. But I really think we have to understand that this is a lot more serious than we've been telling ourselves, and we need to say goodbye to a lot of self-consoling illusions about where we stand in the world. This is the biggest challenge we've ever faced.
Richard Reinsch:
Wow. David Goldman, well said. We've been talking with the author of You Will Be Assimilated: China's Plan to Sino-form the World. Thank you so much.
David Goldman:
Thank you so much for the conversation, Richard. It's always a pleasure.
Richard Reinsch:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk I'm Richard Reinsch. Today we're talking with two wonderful scholars of the life and thought of Thomas More, about a new volume they've edited called The Essential Works of Thomas More. We're visited today by Gerard Wegemer of the University of Dallas and Stephen Smith of Hillsdale College. I'll introduce to you first Gerard Wegemer. He is professor of English and Director of the Center for Thomas More studies at the University of Dallas. He is the author by my account of at least six books on Thomas More and a number of other essays and reviews on this thinker. And he has taught at the University of Dallas for a number of years. Gerard we're glad to have you. Next, Stephen Smith who is Dean of the Faculty and the Temple Family Chair in English literature at Hillsdale College along with being the co-editor with Gerard of The Essential Works of Thomas More. He's also the author of The Fire of Life: Wonder and Education in Late Shakespeare. Welcome gentlemen. Both of you.
Gerard Wegemer:
Thank you.
Stephen Smith:
Happy to be here.
Richard Reinsch:
Excellent. So thinking about this book. The Essential Works of Thomas More, many of our listeners will know Thomas More through A Man For All Seasons which many say is an incomplete account or a maybe not actually true account of Thomas More, but very entertaining and dramatic. Sketch for us, Gerard. Who was Thomas More?
Gerard Wegemer:
So Thomas More is most famous for The Utopia and for holding the highest office in England under Henry the VIII. He was a poet, philosopher, historian, lawyer, judge, and a statesman who died for the rule of law and conscience and the proper autonomy of church and state. He was also, as a lawyer, a turning point in the history of liberty.
Richard Reinsch:
Talk about that.
Gerard Wegemer:
Well, More understood as a lawyer and a judge, a very experienced lawyer and judge, that liberty was justice through the rule of law ordered towards the good of the people. He as a young man learned Greek so he could understand these issues of jurisprudence from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine and Aquinus. He studied these in the original language so he could understand all the elements and the complexity of it achieving some measure of justice in an imperfect world.
Richard Reinsch:
I want to come back to that later, particularly his humanist learning and his scholarship in that regard. This volume is absolutely enormous and as I was saying to both of you before we started, I thought I understood Thomas More fairly well. I realized there's a lot that I don't, that I need to learn. Stephen, what does this volume reveal to us about the thought of Thomas More?
Stephen Smith:
I share your experience of the book as one of the makers of it, with Gerry, I think I speak for both of us in saying the labor of making this, bringing this book into published form, challenged us at every turn, that More was more comprehensive, more challenging, addressed more subjects and wrote in more forms. It's hard to put into words what the experience of making a book like this is. The reader encountering it would encounter the versatile and challenging and comprehensive wit of this genius, Thomas More. The book has all of his essential Latin and English writings, he wrote in both Latin and English. It has both his poetry and his prose. A lot of people don't know that More wrote poetry and wrote at a very high level. It has as many of his letters as we could fit in it. It has complete chronologies and timelines, appendices giving the earliest biographical writings on More from the 16th century. Really if listeners out there want to get a kind of turbo and great view of the book, they should just go to www.essentialmore.org, the supporting website, which is a beautiful supporting website and probably the best introduction to the book that I could recommend. But really when we made the book, Richard, what we were doing was aiming at a single service, providing the readers with everything they need to encounter and study the comprehensive Thomas More. I think your experience of More is like many, which is we know of him through A Man for All Seasons, we know something of the historic and legal drama, but my goodness look at all these writings, to the tune of 1500 double spaces, double columned pages in all these different forms, on literature, on philosophy, on law, theology, poetry. It's an extraordinary achievement and he's the first major writer of the English Renaissance and we want everyone to know that.
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking more specifically, I want to come to you Gerry, on just the legal question that Thomas More confronted, and indeed much greater than a legal question, I think probably a regime question. What specifically is he confronted with and what does he do in response just for the clarity of our listeners?
Gerard Wegemer:
Well that's where the entire career of More is important and necessary, to see how even as a young man he was grappling with the issues that deeply affect the life of peace and justice in England. So England is just come out of a civil war when More is seven years old. They are threatened to go into another civil war periodically.
Richard Reinsch:
Would this have been the War of the Roses?
Gerard Wegemer:
That's correct. That's correct. In fact he will write a history of Richard III, which is about the end of that tremendous war. He's immersed as a historian in the cultural and the historical issues that face every leader of government. This is where he feels himself inadequate as a young man, and goes back to study the classics and to study medieval history and to study law. He lectures on law twice at two different law schools before he becomes a judge and a lawyer for the city of London, and then eventually under certain conditions, accepts, after a conversation about conscience with Henry VIII, to be an advisor to him, which he does very successfully for 12 years until tensions arise about constitutional issues of church and state.
Richard Reinsch:
So you're saying because of the tumult he experienced in England as a young man, this drives him in to scholarship. This drives him into humanist learning.
Gerard Wegemer:
Yes. He's a person who deeply is immersed in the life of London, but he's also immersed in the best way as an intellectual in the fundamental issues that any lawyer or judge has to deal with. It's why in our tradition, lawyers and judges have received the highest and best education available in each of their countries. Because justice is a very fraught issue with dangers and limitations and requires extraordinary prudence to know, "What can we do under these actual circumstances?"
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking about, just for a minute, More is confronted with Henry VIII who declares himself head of the church of England, which he reforms, reshapes, according to his will, and More must give his assent to that, and he refuses to and therefor is executed. Is that sort of a simple understanding of what's happened?
Gerard Wegemer:
Yes, and along the way, clear manipulation of Parliament under Cromwell's strategic genius. But also manipulation of convocation, the church's legislative bodies. Two people remembered that Warham, who's the head of the church, completely dissociates himself publicly and confronts Henry VIII in Parliament. From everything that they passed under his pressure, Henry visits Parliament personally three times and asks for a division of house. So he knows who's on his side and who's not, and Cromwell is going to bash into Parliament that is going to do the will of himself and the king. That's why More, his trial and the execution, prays that God give Henry good council and refers to the Parliament such as it is.
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking about this time in England, there isn't much resistance from my understanding, Thomas More, there's a bishop, John Fisher, those are the only ones I can find. Is this the sort of natural human tendency towards weakness in the face of overwhelming power and fear for one's own security and future? Or is there a lot of other things going on?
Gerard Wegemer:
That's where there's a lot of research that has yet to be done, and records that need to be looked at again. But what you recounted is the usual story. But there was considerable resistance and there was an anticipation that what was promised would actually be fulfilled. This is where More's life is a drama. This is where Chesterton would talk about More as being the turning point in the history of liberty. Liberty is very hard to achieve and it requires citizens who are educated and prepared, not just intellectually, but also as citizens equipped to confront the difficulties that people who want to achieve power and money at any price will always exert. There are certain perennial issues in everyone's life.
Richard Reinsch:
Stephen, just sort of switching gears here, you noted the collection of poetry in the volume earlier. What does the poetry reveal about More's mind and what he loves and presents in the poetry?
Stephen Smith:
To mention before, most people don't think of More as the poet, but not only was he a poet, but was scoffingly referred to one. But his poetry is in English and in Latin and Dr. Samuel Johnson who did that great dictionary of the English language, he gave a large sample of Thomas More's work as poetry and some of his other writings because they were considered models of pure and elegant style. He was known for his eloquence.
In the poetry in particular he wrote a poem called "The Pageant of Life," which imagined human life from birth to eternity, and he wrote poems on fortune and poverty. Late in the Tower of London he wrote a poem called "Lewis the Lost Lover," which is a little ditty about this guy Lewis who rejects eye flattering fortune when it comes to him offering him help. He has all these really wonderful English poems, but perhaps with the most interest and the least well known, his Latin poetry, his epigrams. Two great critics of these poems wrote that they display More's logical energy, muscular realism, and penetrating intelligence. These Latin poems were paired and published with Utopia. When you go and you pick up a copy of Utopia at the book store, at the library, you don't ever see all of these Latin poems with it. One of the things we hope to do eventually is to put an edition out that puts them back together again because the Latin poetry really sheds light on Utopia in a number of startling ways. Just to give you a sense of what the Latin poetry addresses, it addresses human friendship, it addresses comedy, but a lot of the poetry on political life and political philosophy is maybe the most interesting.
He has a poem called "What's the Best Form of Government?" Is it rule by one, or rule by a senate? He has a poem entitled "The Consent of the People" both bestows and withdraws sovereignty. He has poems about good kings, poems about tyranny, so this poetry is an important part of his legacy that's really not well known and not studied enough, and these epigrams in particular show as much of his mind as anything he wrote. His humor as well. One of my favorite ones is kind of silly, but it's just a short poem that goes like this: "If an untrimmed beard makes a philosopher, why could not a bearded goat be a Plato?" This is the humor of More is very, he was so serious about Henry VIII and tyranny and decapitation but this is a soul who is famous for his good humor and his good cheer and his wit. It comes out in this poetry as well.
Richard Reinsch:
It seems just as I read the poetry, he seemed to be concerned with the end state of man and with sort of a robust soul in approaching the problems of life, the difficulties of life. In my mind, help me understand the type of soul he was, and the largest question he would confront at the end of his life.
Stephen Smith:
I think he's searching for a perspective on human life. For that "Pageant of Life" one of the hardest things to come by is a reliable and clear and trustworthy perspective on our human drama. We so often elude that altogether and can't see it all. That's why in the history of Richard III, More cries out against the blindness of our human nature.
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking along these lines about human nature, how did his thinking about human nature shape what he thought about politics? Do we have him preferring, from The Utopia, a republican form of government, and sort of a begrudging acceptance of monarchy? That makes him a very interesting thinker within England, to say the least.
Stephen Smith:
That poem, "What is the Best For of Government?" It does contrast a sure council with blind fortune when comparing an elected senate and hereditary monarch. In a similar way, Utopia introduces to England the vocabulary of Cicero in terms of the elements of republican self government. This is the dimension that is rarely referred to in that important book. On the other hand, More is extraordinarily discreet. After all, the chief spokesman in Utopia is called Raphael Hythloday, speaker of nonsense. More is not proposing any of this. It's Raphael who's pointing out all the serious difficulties of hereditary monarchy. Also the poverty that occurs when you don't think about the good of the people. More never uses the word subject in his literary writings. It is always citizens and the people. He has a deep, deep assessment of England's whole history. In Richard III, for instance, he points out in the Latin edition that it's Parliament that has the absolute political authority in England, not the king. Now he doesn't say, "Not the king," but More is clearly writing for ages and part of the way of overcoming poverty and civil war is to have more mature and robust political institutions. More's the first person to write a speech in Parliament as Speaker of the House defending the need for free speech and he makes this address to Henry himself. In the 1523 Parliament Henry grants free speech because of More, although he will never do it again.
Richard Reinsch:
So More as a young man confronts the King of England and was briefly thrown into jail, isn't he?
Stephen Smith:
This is where More goes back to the sources. He even writes in his letter to Oxford, in some of these humanist writings, that it's necessary to learn these original languages because translations are so inept. These are complex issues and we need subtle writers and subtle minds. Another aspect of his poetry is you see that even from his teens how serious and committed he is to improving his writing and his thinking. Over 100 of his 300 poems are translations and imitations of Greek poems. He's trying to understand from within the many arts that a lawyer and judge need and one of them is the art of language and being able to speak to a people in a way that is persuasive and moving to that particular group of people.
Richard Reinsch:
Talk about, Stephen if you would, I just want to switch gears here for a minute, because I want to keep on covering, I want to keep this legal track, law track, but also with a humanist track. Thomas More and Erasmus, their friendship and what does it mean?
Stephen Smith:
This is an incredible relationship that lasted much of More's professional life. We actually have a letter that survived from Erasmus that described his friend Thomas More in detail and it's one of the best introductions you could have, I think, to Thomas More and to Erasmus and to what they valued as humanists. I won't get bogged down in all the details of the letter but one of the famous things Erasmus says is that Thomas More was born for friendship and that if you needed a perfect example of friendship and action, you could see it in More. That letter identifies so many things that are important to More but the friendship that is the emphasis there. Both Erasmus's adages begins with friends share all things in common. In general the subject of human friendship is at the heart of More's project, that the human being needs friends. He has epigrams about this, a statesman exercises something like civic friendship, there should be civic friendship between citizens, but that emphasis on friendship is crystal clear and it's really the key to this relationship.
Stephen Smith:
After More died, there's a beautiful line from Erasmus in August, More died in July, so in August Erasmus wrote someone and said, "When More died, I seem to have died myself. We were a single soul." This close relationship between these two great humanists. The key thing I think for us is their common commitment to an understanding of friendship and for listeners, some of the great sources on friendship that More knew and that we can return to ourselves, are Aristotle's ethics, Cicero on friendship, and there are scriptural texts on friendship. Aquinas has written on friendship. It's one of the most important parts of his legacy. When he was A Man for All Seasons, he had these different titles, but I really like that, "born for friendship." I'm sure Gerry has more to say about Erasmus.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, please do Gerry.
Gerard Wegemer:
One of the things we included in this book was the play written in Queen Elizabeth's time called Sir Thomas More. It's by five different playwrights, we have five different hands which we have the manuscript. Of course it was never performed. The first time that More is introduced in this play to Erasmus, the noble and poet Surrey says this about More: "This little island holds not a truer friend unto the arts, nor doth his greatness add a fainted flourish to his worthy parts. He is great in study, that's the statesman's grace, that gains more reverence than the outward place. That study is the general watch of England and it the Prince's safety and the peace that shines upon our commonwealth are forged by loyal industry." Now the words that the playwright uses are fascinating. "Friend," "Statesman," "Study," as a way of achieving commonwealth, the common good and peace. But it's forged by loyal industry. That's another term that is associated by anyone who knows More well. It's part of his mystery. Here is a genius who works harder than anybody else.
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking about Humanism, we keep using that term, cover of Humanism is, or the Humanist are about the study of classical literature, philosophy, politics, poetry, to the displacement, or ignoring the Christian contribution and Christian tradition. But that wasn't More and Erasmus. How do they understand their Humanism?
Stephen Smith:
Well they shared that common Renaissance spirit of wanting to return to the sources, to those great sources of wisdom in Latin and Greek writings, but they certainly didn't see those as, or didn't put their Christianity aside when they did so. These things can go two ways, you can look at the integration that they achieved between Christianity and the best of classical wisdom, but you can also look at it in terms of that spirit of going back to these key sources, ad fontes. In famous letters that we include from More to Oxford University in which he actually addresses secular learning on the one hand and the liberal arts and theology on the other. He says in this letter to Oxford University, which I would probably put on the short list for listeners to look up, he says, "Secular learning prepares the soul for virtue, and it fosters prudence in human affairs, a thing that's not useless to theologians."
Richard Reinsch:
That's very true.
Stephen Smith:
I thought that, to me, a real important sentence. They understood learning as having this preparatory role, preparing the soul for virtue, and in particular, histories and literature fostering prudence in human affairs. It's not so much an either or, in terms of the classical Christian or Humanism but the both and that's the one sentence that comes to mind from that letter to Oxford University.
Gerard Wegemer:
Another letter to put on the short list is the letter to Gunnell, that's the tutor to More's children, and in that he insists that if we put virtue in the first place and learning in the second-now he had a daughter who's a genius like himself, but he clearly understood Aristotle's point that as a person is, so does the person judge. The character makes an enormous difference on what you see, and if you're able to see what is actually there. This is where harmony that was traditionally understood between the classical and the Christian became so important for More and Erasmus. When Erasmus goes to England, there he's actually convinced by More in the circle to take up and master Greek himself. He will spend the next several years doing that and that's where More challenges him to dispute translated content and More chooses a classical author that's not usually on people's short list. That comic philosopher Lucian. More tells us why he chooses Lucian and he says that Lucian has this capacity because of his humor to probe more deeply that anyone else without upsetting the readers' equanimity, calmness of soul. Lucian can get people to think without stirring up those emotions that impede thinking. This is a worldly wisdom that can be lost. This is what Erasmus and More were trying to recapture. This is the fullness of human life in which there is no opposition between their best nature and of revelation.
Richard Reinsch:
How would he have related revelation and nature to one another, Thomas More?
Gerard Wegemer:
I think most by his example. As a young man, he quotes, and he quotes this throughout his life, the biblical passage that God loves a cheerful giver. This explains, for instance, but scandalizes people at his death, when More mocks his own death, making jokes on the scaffold and on his way up. How could a person mock at his own death? Well, God loves a cheerful giver. We see this in More at the very end.
Richard Reinsch:
So he would understand himself, he is giving his life for the truth and he should do so cheerfully.
Gerard Wegemer:
And also for the country. That here again he gives his life for the rule of law, liberty, and the common good. You actually have an example of an extraordinarily free person, even in prison, even going to his death. This is what makes his death so shocking to those who are trying to intimidate and to bend him to their will. They had no power over this person. Here was a person with true liberty.
Richard Reinsch:
True freedom. Talk about the theme then, of tyranny and Thomas More's writings. Either one of you, maybe we'll start with Gerry and then move with you Stephen.
Gerard Wegemer:
It's surprising that More's very first published work, which no one knows about, you can find anybody wanting to do the full span of More's writing, is on the nature of journey and the grave problems that republic faces when a tyrant takes over. That is included in his book of translations on Lucian that he proposes to Erasmus. They both address this topic. Then of course, his most famous book on tyranny is Richard III. But he has at least 10 poems on this topic which he appends to The Utopia. Of course, Richard III is the work that profoundly influences Shakespeare, and Shakespeare bases his first four places on More's Richard III.
Richard Reinsch:
So Stephen, you thinking about, your thoughts on tyranny and More's writings and what he thinks is the depth of tyranny.
Stephen Smith:
You know in that letter I mentioned that Erasmus wrote on Thomas More, he not only said he was born for friendship, but he told us what his friend loved and hated. He loved equality, actually, and he hated tyranny in particular. One of the things that comes out of that letter is not just born for friendship, but this particular interest in tyranny. To Gerry's point about his first published writing being on tyrannicide and then history of Richard III addressing Richard's rise, how it happened, how England failed to prevent his tyranny, and in the poem what you have is a kind of glimpse into something that's at the core of More's understanding that this is a possibility in politics and if we're going to be educating citizens and educating leaders, we need them to understand this phenomenon, understand this possibility. How does a tyrant come into being? What is a tyrant? And then of course, why do cultures fail to resist them? How do they take root? How do they maintain themselves, how do they succeed? This interest in tyranny links More back to, of course, earlier thinkers like Cicero and Aristotle and Plato on the subject. So much of his early writing is revealing and educating on this crucial subject. One of the poems, for example, says, it's kind of a funny poem about death and tyrants. More presents death as the only tyrannicide when you really get down to it, that tyrants can't live forever. Shucks. Death ends up conquering them. But then Richard III, this spectacular, incredible English and Latin text on Richard's rise. Why did England fail? They were of course dominated by fear. The narrator points out several times, they also didn't have enough wit to resist tyranny. They didn't understand what a tyrant was willing to do to secure his rule. It's a powerful text and Gerry mentioned a Shakespeare connection as well. Shakespeare's breakthrough tragedy is History of Richard III and More is his major source. I like to think of the young Shakespeare who is so keenly interested in England, so much aware of the problem with civil war in that country and culture. I imagine that young man, that young brilliant dramatist, sitting at the foot of Thomas More and reading his history. Wow. The things that happen in that play and afterwards in Shakespeare are legendary.
Gerard Wegemer:
I think he's his best student, frankly.
Stephen Smith:
And tyranny also has a personal dimension. So yes, well understand political tyranny, but many of More's epigrams and poems show how ridiculous each person is by being a tyrant to those around them. We all can by tyrants. This is where, again, More's comprehensiveness as a thinker that you need citizen education if you're going to have a free country. You need human beings who aren't slaves to their own passions, who are slaves to ideologies that they haven't thought about and made their own and we find through conversation with good friends. The tyranny issue, one of the most important things in classical literature, Xenophon's famous book on tyranny, one couldn't be a liberally educated person unless one understood the perennial possibility of tyranny in a country and tyranny in oneself.
Richard Reinsch:
That should lead us to shudder then about our own country's fate, given the overall lack of civic education and the overall lack of awareness of how passions destroy freedom and how ideologies destroy freedom. Thinking here, Brad Birzer recently said on Law & Liberty that those who love the liberal arts the most suffer the most. He referenced several figures, Socrates, Cicero, but also Thomas More. As I'm listening to you two gentleman describe his thought and his humanism, it's almost as if were he not to have done what he did in regard to Henry VIII, he would have repudiated his entire life and what he had been about.
Gerard Wegemer:
One thing, again, More is convinced that there is such a thing as providence. This is one reason why one has to reflect on his own calm of mind even in the Tower. Also on the short list of things to read to get to know More as More would be his two Tower writings. One is the Dialogue on Comfort. It is a Socratic dialogue, which deals with how to overcome a passion that's taken control of the soul. The passion of course is fear at this point and it's a really depth study of how difficult it is to rule oneself. It's a conversation between and old person on his deathbed who's gone through terrors throughout his life and the young person who's just about to face the worst terrors possible and imaginable, is overcome by fears of what's going to happen. We wouldn't have that conversation, we wouldn't have that book if More were not imprisoned. The second is his Sadness of Christ, which is his last work, and it's probably his most accessible work. It's short, he has to write it in a hurry. He knows he's only got a few weeks to live. But it gives his last lessons on what one must do to be a free person.
Richard Reinsch:
Which is?
Gerard Wegemer:
Understand your soul and have a good friend to help you see your own self contradictions. Also to form what he calls a right imagination, not one dominated by fears and false imaginings. It actually shows the importance of Socratic conversation, that is, Socrates is most famous for raising questions about the nature of virtue and getting people to come to know themselves at least in a beginning way. Self knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, but you can't really know yourself unless you've been put in dire situations you don't expect. You might be surprised at how fearful or imprudent or rash or cowardly you can actually be. But once you know that, well then this is where one becomes open to put virtue in the first place and learning in the second. This is part of the interest of More's writings on education, but the masterpiece is going to be his Dialogue on Comfort. It's a book longer than The Republic, but is a book that is designed to be over nature of the soul and how one can train oneself to overcome fears. It's interesting if you read the prison letters, More confesses to his daughter that he'd always considered himself a fearful person. Now that's not the persona anyone sees, but he had overcome that. He says in one of his letters that he scandalizes himself before being imprisoned about his fear.
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking about More though, his conscience, he would have had clearly this conception of conscience being a window of his soul that God spoke to. I've read both of those that you referenced and clear to me that his courage, conviction, strength, comes through his belief that he's participating in God's will.
Gerard Wegemer:
That's very well put. This is where the playwrights are so perceptive by singling out More's commitment to study. Finding out the truth and then habituating themself to live in the truth. More does talk about the duty of integrity and the duty of protecting one's integrity. Of the harmony between what one says and thinks and what one does, and that is the greatest challenge to every human being.
Richard Reinsch:
Did More ever comment on through the overall political condition of England at this time as he reflected on what had happened and how it had come to pass that basically, something like a complete change in its laws and constitution was worked by the king, Henry VIII?
Gerard Wegemer:
Stephen can comment on this also, but two elements come right to mind for me is his comment just before going into the Tower and his last work he's writing on before going into the Tower where institutionally, kings had changed the process of selecting bishops. Where they had done it sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for favor, and sometimes for money too. Institutionally this is the great problem that England faced. Half of House of Lords were habits and bishops whose work often was more for the king than for any spiritual project. More clearly identifies that as an institutional problem but no surprise, Beckett, the long centuries controversy of what the church-state role is going to be in terms of what are actually tremendously powerful cultural courses. Emperors wanted the church on their side because the church serves the people and good people in the church know the people. That's one, and the second is that the bishops themselves, that's on the side of the state, the bishops themselves did not reform themselves. They had the laws on the books. They knew what they should do. But they didn't do it.
Richard Reinsch:
Stephen, your thoughts on this?
Stephen Smith:
I think that on that last point, in The Sadness of Christ, this is a nice link between Sadness of Christ and Utopia, More describes how there is a shameful ship captain, a cowardly captain, who relinquishes the ship in the storm and hides away in some cranny in the ships hold and just sort of consigns the ship to the waves. That does seem to be a critique like you're suggesting, Gerard, where it's like in The History of Richard III as well where we can never underestimate the failure of will, of sheer fortitude, and courage. In that famous passage in Sadness of Christ, which links back to the text in Utopia about never giving up the ship in a storm, there was a storm of the first order in these years and I think what More indicates in that last writing is many, many, gave up the ship in the storm and hid away in the ship’s hold out of fear, out of the desire to preserve their life, to their own benefit. Any number of motives like that, but it was really a failure of captains.
Richard Reinsch:
What becomes of Thomas More's place in English life after this? How is he regarded? He loses and of course England will become a protestant empire after that. Is there sort of a look back within English intellectual life at his greatness or is he sort of, they don't know what to do with him?
Stephen Smith:
Well he's very good at inspiring wonder in onlookers. Gerry mentioned the historian Paul who said, "I don't know whether to call him a wise foolish man, or a foolish wise man when I consider how he went to his death." In the 16th century at least, the answer is mixed verdict, but there does seem to be an admiration, even wonder over his wit and then either happiness that he stood with the church or lament that in that matter he just went the wrong way, depending on the historian or the writer. That capacity to inspire wonder in people is really at the heart of Thomas More. Who was he, how did he prepare himself and educate himself, how did he play the part he played on the English stage unto death? It's really wonder inspiring and it makes you want to learn and to study him. Later in the 16th century he's still known in London as the best friend that the poor ever had, for example, so you had this whole complicated legacy. I know one reason we wanted to put this book out there, to gather these works together, to make them available, is to not only help people wonder over Thomas More again but really to study him and to learn from his life and writings.
Richard Reinsch:
Gerry, your thoughts here?
Gerard Wegemer:
Well the 16th century play Sir Thomas More is completely favorable to Thomas More and despite five London playwrights who had completely different religious and political convictions, they're the most unusual group you would expect to be together. But even for A Man for All Seasons, when that came out in '66, it was immediately translated into 10 languages. It became part of the reading list for English prep schools for the next 20 years. This model of conscience is something the world needs.
Richard Reinsch:
That's very true. Thinking maybe we can end with this, and you both take this on, Gerry I'll start with you, Thomas More, because you started talking at the beginning of our interview, More and his regard for liberty under law. How did he approach the duties of being a lawyer?
Gerard Wegemer:
Wit and good cheer. For 10 years he was elected every year as under sheriff, under 10 different sheriffs of London. This meant that he was the presiding legal officer at the court of the sheriff of London that heard all kinds of cases. More became famous for befriending the city, being someone who would give a fair hearing to everyone and often needed the money and recommend that they not pursue this because it wouldn't work or that it would be less expensive not to go through the law courts. But he was seen as a person who would give honest council and who was genuinely committed to the good of the whole city. That's where, again, you can see the benefits of his learning. He knew Cicero's On Duty very, very well and two of the principles that Cicero gives on core justice is that you have to think in terms of the good of the whole of the body of politics. You can't favor one part. This More understood clearly. So his book called Utopia, the actual title in Latin is De Rei Publicae Statu Respublica. Republic. Commonwealth. Good of the people. That horizon people need in terms of thinking about justice. That's where he's particularly important in our own time where we've become so divisive and uncivil and the lack of the sense of look we are all in this body of politic together, let's do the best we can together.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah. Stephen your thoughts on Thomas More as a lawyer?
Stephen Smith:
You know, on that short list reading, the letter to Gunnell, the one that's addressed to his children's teacher says, "I prefer virtue joined with learning to all the treasures of kings." He also says, "The whole fruit of learning is a right conscience." A rightly working conscience. I think that's really at the heart of his legal success is that he indeed enjoyed the fruit of that particular fruit of learning. He not only understood his education as forming his conscience to work rightly, and to set up a lasting friend throughout the whole of life. He brought his education, his formation, his commitment to virtue, his right conscience into his work. He had the courage to follow the judgements of conscience right to that scaffold. To me, Thomas More, the lawyer Thomas More professional, it's really Thomas More the man and I would direct the attention to that conscience that is the whole fruit of learning according to More. If you at the end of your education don't have a rightly functioning conscience, and if you haven't learned the need for the courage to follow, you've gained the whole world but you've gained nothing. That right conscience is what stands out in my mind and answer to your question. The lawyer is a man of conscience.
Gerard Wegemer:
And we see that in More's very last words, he says "I die the king's good servant and God's first." When he said those words, he was reminding Henry VIII of the two most important conversations they ever had, and they were both about conscience. Before he agreed to work for him as a councilor, and before he agreed to become Lord Chancellor of England. Henry said to him on both occasions, "Look first to God and your conscience and then to your king." This is where for More, there's no conflict between good law and conscience. Probably the most famous line of Man for All Seasons, the letter that Roper, his lawyer son in law writes about More, is that he would give even the devil his right with God's being good, and he would follow the law, because law is the work of good reason and conscience is the judgment of good reason. That's where you need lawyers and judges who actually do have a command of both-of the law and of the principles that undergird the law.
Richard Reinsch:
I think that's very well said and I think that's a wonderful way for us to end. Gerard Wegemer and Stephen Smith, thank you so much for discussing this volume you've edited for Yale University Press, The Essential Works of Thomas More.
Gerard Wegemer:
Thank you Richard.
Stephen Smith:
Thank you Richard.
Colleen Sheehan, author and editor of numerous book on the American founding, including, most recently, The Cambridge Companion to the Federalist, joins us to discuss Publius's Constitution.
Steven Teles joins us to discuss his new book, coauthored with Robert Saldin, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites.
Daniel Mahoney discusses his tough-minded liberal response to the riots, "defund the police," and the calls for "structurally racist" America to disown its founding principles.
Fr. Robert Sirico on the challenges to ordered liberty in America from the illiberal Left and Right.
An interview with Fr. Robert Sirico about racism in America, the George Floyd protests, and the turn against constitutional liberty, Left and Right.
John Marini unmasks the century-long effort to undermine the Constitution's distribution of power.
**Richard Reinsch**:
Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I'm your host Richard Reinsch. Today, we're talking with a special guest who's returning to Liberty Law Talk, Robert Reilly. Robert Reilly is a man of many talents, many interests, he's done a lot of wonderful things. He's served in government for over two decades, special assistant to the President, and director of the Voice of America. He was senior advisor for information strategy to the Secretary of Defense, and he's taught at the National Defense University. He's the author of a number of books and essays, including the award-winning book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. He is also a Viennese Waltzer. And, he told me one time in his earlier life, he was a stage actor. Was it a Shakespearean stage actor, I think?
So Robert, we are glad to welcome you. Last time, we discussed the end of ISIS. Now, we will talk about your new book, *America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding*. Welcome.
**Robert Reilly:**
Great, Richard. Thank you for doing this.
**Richard Reinsch**:
So Robert, thinking about the title of this book, America on Trial. America has been on trial throughout it's history, it's particularly been on trial the last 50 years with the new left, rejecting its claims, and recently with the 1619 Project, insisting that all of America is just a footnote to slavery, so this has been going on for quite a while.
Why, specifically, did you write this book? What are the charges you see being leveled against the American founding?
**Robert Reilly:**
Well, I wrote this book because the very people who should be defending the principles of the American founding are attacking it. And some of those people might be known as conservative Christians, Catholics, and so forth, who should be the new Michael Novaks, who should be praising the principles of the American founding within the context of Judaeo-Christian civilization, Greek philosophy, and its noble lineage.
I believe it's the dimensions of the catastrophe today that lead people, almost desperately, in search of a cause of it. Who did this to us, who's responsible for it? They've arrived at this peculiar notion that the American founding did it to us, that it was a poison pill with a time release formula.
They're not doing that, and the reason I think they're not is because they need to answer the question, whose responsible? Who put us in the degraded moral condition in which the United States exists today, with widespread pornography, a flood of drugs, the disillusion of the family, so-called same sex marriage. Now, the transgender nonsense. But, where has this come from, and why have we so largely succumbed to it? To the point that we've had Supreme Court decisions saying some of these things are guaranteed by the Constitution?
**Richard Reinsch**:
Guaranteed by the word liberty, in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, specifically.
**Robert Reilly:**
Well, and of course, by what Justice Anthony Kennedy called the autonomy of the individual, which is not something that is found in any of our founding documents, but fabricated by him both in his abortion decisions, and his decision legalizing sodomy. And then, of course for the legalization of same sex so-called marriages.
Now, the critics of the American founding on the Christian right are, basically, agreeing with Justice Kennedy, saying he's right, the American founding was the product of a radical enlightenment thinking about the autonomy of the individual, and the perfectibility of the human being. Both of which notions are inimical to Christianity as it was practiced at that time, in the 18th Century, and indeed, is inimical to it today.
I believe it's the dimensions of the catastrophe today that lead people, almost desperately, in search of a cause of it. Who did this to us, who's responsible for it? They've arrived at this peculiar notion that the American founding did it to us, that it was a poison pill with a time release formula. And, as we become less and less a Christian country, we conform more and more to these principles of radical enlightenment ideology.
**Richard Reinsch**:
What specifically is their claim, that in the American founding there are these principles of an unencumbered individualism? What do they cite, what do they list for that evidence?
**Robert Reilly**:
Well, that's one of the interesting things. When I read their arguments in order to rebut them, they have very little to offer in textual evidence from the founding. The way they read the Declaration of Independence, and the way they read parts of the Federalist Papers are, I tried to show, completely wrongheaded. They misunderstand these texts, they get it wrong.
**Robert Reilly**:
Now, why do they do that so consistently? It's because they're looking through the wrong prism, and therefore they see the wrong thing. The prism is, basically, Hobbes, it's a Hobbesian founding, and it is in this way. They take John Locke to be the primary influence on the founding, and of course, Locke was a big influence, and was mentioned from the pulpit in the state legislatures with frequency, he was broadly read. Now, they contend that John Locke was simply Thomas Hobbes with a smiley face. He was just a nicer version of Hobbes, with the same Hobbesian principles obtained in him, and therefore, leeched into the American founding through John Locke, and that's why we are approximating a Hobbesian state today.
**Richard Reinsch**:
When you say Hobbes with a smiley face, can you describe that more for us?
**Robert Reilly**:
Well, it's that they would say the idea of a contract to which man consents in the foundation of a similar political order is based on nothing other than his will.
**Richard Reinsch**:
Okay.
**Robert Reilly**:
That it makes the will primary in political order, and it is not geared to any natural law or natural right. Even though those terms are used, they're evacuated of their meaning. If you just strip those away, you see what's really there, which is the Primacy of the Will.
What I try to show in my book is that those statements of Locke are grounded in a great tradition. The first tradition in which it's grounded most immediately is the thought of Thomas Hooker, and his laws of ecclesiastical policy. Hooker, as you know, was a powerful 16th Century thinker, he was a priest, and he was the first theologian of the Anglican church. What Hooker was facing was the radical Puritan thought at the time, which was against human laws, thought that the laws on England should be abolished, and we should be ruled only by the Bible.
By the way, when you translate the Primacy of the Will politically, you ineluctably get Hobbes' Leviathan. That's what Hobbes does, he shows us what that means in a political order of absolute power of the Leviathan. But, that's not what you get from Locke, you get an entirely different kind of democratic Constitutional order, based on the equality of all men, representation, the requirement of consent, and the right to revolution, the right to tyrannicide. All of these things, of course, aren't present in Hobbes.
**Richard Reinsch**:
You also make the point in the book … I mean, I can find certain disturbing passages in Locke, that I think are nominalist, or seem to be admitting of, let's say, certain individualistic tendencies. But, you make the point, which I think is well taken, that the founders read and used Locke as statesmen, themselves. They used him in a political constitutional sense of independence and limited government, not in a full anthropological, theological, epistemological manner that is alleged by thinkers like Michael Hanby or Patrick Deneen.
**Robert Reilly:**
That's right. This was not an adoption of Locke's epistemology and his letter on human understanding, it's his second discourse on government. They took from Locke his very powerful arguments against the divine right of kings, and the absolute state.
What I try to show in my book is that those statements of Locke are grounded in a great tradition. The first tradition in which it's grounded most immediately is the thought of Thomas Hooker, and his laws of ecclesiastical policy. Hooker, as you know, was a powerful 16th Century thinker, he was a priest, and he was the first theologian of the Anglican church. What Hooker was facing was the radical Puritan thought at the time, which was against human laws, thought that the laws on England should be abolished, and we should be ruled only by the Bible. Everything else was superfluous
He wrote against this, quite powerfully, and did so by resuscitating both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, particularly the Medieval articulation of the limits of political power, and the equality of men has a right to consent in representation, et cetera., and the respective spiritual and political realms, which are not coterminous. It's hearkening back to the two swords teaching, that you give to feast the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's, which had been instantiated so completely in the Middle Ages. So, Hooker saved those things, let's say he saved the reformation from itself by using Aristotle and Aquinas against the radical Puritan thinking. Locke quoted Hooker more often than anyone, regarding these basic things.
**Richard Reinsch**:
I just wanted to say, you note in the book, too, you said on this constitutional thinking, saying constitutional in a capacious sense, across the centuries of unwritten tradition that forms the American founding. You situate Locke, Hooker, Robert Bellarmine, 16th Century Jesuit, Francisco Suarez, another 16th Century Jesuit. These are thinkers who are, in many ways, in touch with a tradition that stretches across the centuries, urging the King is under law, basic notions of political consent, ideas of right of revolution, potentially. You show that this actually forms, or is recovered by, the American founding. The American founding is not, as you say, Hobbes with a smiley face, or individualism run amok, it's a part of a grand tradition.
**Robert Reilly**:
Yes, absolutely. You will find articulations of these basic principles in those thinkers, that they come right out of the American founding.
**Richard Reinsch**:
You listed them. You have pages where you list parts of the Declaration, and how they mirror things in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and how they mirror what Bellarmine, and Suarez, and Hooker were saying earlier. I mean, I thought that was incredible.
**Robert Reilly**:
Yes. They sound like paraphrases of each other, don't they?
**Richard Reinsch**:
Yes, definitely.
**Robert Reilly**:
Then, also let's not forget Algernon Sidney, and his discourses on government. He, too, relied on Hooker a great deal, but he also acknowledged Suarez and Bellarmine. The reason he, more or less, had to do that is that the book defending the divine right of kings, written by Robert Filmer called Patriarcha, was basically addressed to the arguments made by Bellarmine and Suarez, and it was an attempt at refutation of them. Filmer was an honest enough writer that he would take large chunks out of Bellarmine and say, "Here's what the schoolmen say, the scholastics. And, here's what I say, and here's what Suarez says." He quotes Bellarmine the most, Suarez the second.
When Sydney's writing his refutation of Patriarcha, he grudgingly acknowledges Bellarmine, a hard thing for a Protestant to say, "This Catholic Cardinal's got it right." And he says, "But Bellarmine really is doing nothing but expressing the commonsense of mankind." Which is no slight on Bellarmine, because that's what Bellarmine himself says he's doing. Because they're all appealing to the same tradition of natural law as against the supremacy, the absolute supremacy of the state, whether it's articulated in a totally secular way, as it was with Locke, or in the Divine Right of Kings way, as it was by James the First, or Robert Filmer.
The thing is, the absolute state as it appeared in the 17th Century, was something new. It was totally alien to the entire Medieval mindset, as it denied all the basic constitutional principles which had been developed at that time. As you just mentioned a little earlier, Richard, indeed my book makes the case that the American founding is a return to those principles, it's a restoration of them. So, you can't see it just simply as a creature of the radical enlightenment, when it is grounded in this great tradition.
What are the ideas that make the American founding conceivable, and from where did they come? What ideas do you need to have to conceive of such a thing, a political enterprise such as the American founding? That's what I tried to trace. It, of course, predates Locke by millennia.
**Richard Reinsch**:
You know, a lot of people, I think, would say you seem to be switching categories, or switching received wisdom here. Isn't it the Medieval period that's the problem, and the enlightenment is a solution? When we say there's a recovery here, of Medieval principles, what are specifically … maybe we can talk a bit about those Medieval principles. And, are we talking about England, primarily?
**Robert Reilly**:
Well, England, no, no we're not except later on.
**Richard Reinsch**:
But, that's what's going to be most important, immediately.
**Robert Reilly**:
Yeah, but England withstood some of the absolute trends and tendencies that took over on the continent, which were under Roman law, and England chose not to go with Roman law which is one reason why freedom was preserved there, to a greater extent.
Let me just give a little larger perspective of the book, Richard
The question the book asks is, what are the ideas that make the American founding conceivable, and from where did they come? What ideas do you need to have to conceive of such a thing, a political enterprise such as the American founding? That's what I tried to trace. It, of course, predates Locke by millennia.
As you know, I start in pre-philosophic man, to show what that looked like, and we go through the significance of the discovery of Greek philosophy, of universal truths and principles, the revolutionary revelation of Israel, of monotheism, of a transcendent God who creates ex nihilo, and makes man in his own image and likeness, extraordinary in the sea of polytheism that the Jewish people adhered to, this teaching that there is only one God. The significance of that, with Greek philosophy, as both came to be assimilated in Christianity, is extraordinary.
And, as I talked about Greek philosophy, as you know, including the pre-Socractics, they wondered … First of all, we observed that there is an order in creation, there's an order in nature. It's a rational order, and with our reason we seem able to apprehend it. Now, where did this rational order come from? The speculation is there must be a divine intelligence behind it, it must be a manifestation of a divine intelligence.
**Richard Reinsch:**
Plato reaches that verdict.
**Robert Reilly:**
Plato reaches that, but before him, Heraclitus does, too. Because I believe it's Heraclitus or Anaximander who first uses the word logos to describe this divine intelligence that is responsible for the rational order in creation and for man's reason. Logos, of course, as you know, the Greek word for reason, or speech. Or, that's the way they spoke of it, which makes intelligible the gospel of Saint John, when he says, "In the beginning, was logos. In the beginning was the word, and the logos was with God, and the word was God, and all things are made through Him as logos." Which means that now we know why we have a rational creation, because the creator is, Himself, this reason logos. With the added astonishment, can you imagine if Heraclitus, having speculated on logos, met Him coming through the door? Then, indeed is Christ, entering his creation.
But, this logos is not simply logos, the mystery of man, who we know is made in the image and likeness of God, the mystery of man is revealed in the infinite love of Christ. I would say our civilization is based on Genesis, that man is made in the image and likeness of God. That is the source of our conception of human rights
**Richard Reinsch:**
Yeah. It's difficult to argue how one would come to a conclusion of the equality of man as man, if there is nothing higher. When you think about Tocqueville's statement, "that to understand equality it took God to come to Earth in the form of man."
But, this also, as you point out, this revolution in thinking about who man is has incredible implications for law, and for government, and for how he would govern himself.
**Robert Reilly:**
Well, it does particularly when, through Christ, this revelation of God is love, and God's redemptive love for each person. This exploded the ancient world, that man did not have access, as an individual person, to the divine. The only person who had such access was the divine, or semi-divine ruler. Your religious obligations were your civic obligations, the divine was only accessible through your polis, or your empire with the Pharaoh. Get as near to the Pharaoh as you can, because he's the divine person through whom your supplications might be heard. But, you certainly, as a person, have no such access to the divine, and therefore, your religious duties are your civic duties. If anyone said there's some kind of separation between religion and state in the ancient world, they'd have no idea what you were talking about.
The Christian revelation explodes that. Through man's individual relationship with God, his eternal destiny and that transcendent God is reached, outside the state.
**Richard Reinsch:**
So, the state is now limited? The state does not reach to the highest ends of the soul, yeah.
**Robert Reilly:**
The state is not the vehicle for his salvation. This, of course, is the origin, then, of the separation of church and state, and rooted in Christ's famous statement of giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
**Richard Reinsch:
I** suppose, Aristotle had the idea, Plato's . . . The highest idea, or the highest form of existence for the human person would be contemplation of the divine, but that was a pretty limited conception just to the philosopher, as a rare being, a rare creature.
**Robert Reilly:**
Yeah, it was a conundrum. Aristotle, who said, "Nature always acts for a purpose, for an end." The end of man that Aristotle saw was, as you point at, at it's highest, his contemplation of the divine, to become as much like the divine as man could. Only his contemplation of the divine-
**Richard Reinsch:**
Only contemplation.
**Robert Reilly:**
Could do that, but the condition, the condition for doing that was twofold, virtue and leisure. Therefore, Aristotle said, "Few, if any, can achieve this." How can that be, if this is the end of man, and man is incapable of reaching it? Except for the very exceptional person. Well, Christianity had the answer for that, how the non-philosopher also reaches the transcendent through God's grace and mercy, and will share in divine life as God offers it to him, so that everyone has access to this through grace.
**Richard Reinsch:**
And this begins, also, moving forward in the book, one's existence can't be defined by the government, so you start to see separate spheres of activity emerge, new categories of law recognized by the state, perhaps, but not defined exclusively by the state. You start to have associations emerge. Out of the canon law itself, new forms of law emerge.
**Robert Reilly:**
Yeah, it demotes the state forever. But, as you just pointed out, it's one thing to say you've got these two spheres, or they're called, in the Middle Ages, the two swords. The ecclesiastical, spiritual sword, and the secular sword of the political ruler. But, how do you instantiate that, how do you order a society around that? Because what it pre-supposes is dual sovereignty over the same persons, the spiritual sovereignty exercised by the church, and the political sovereignty by the ruler.
The Middle Ages is working out that problem, how the individual can live under this dual sovereignty, and it was a highly developed articulation of that. Of course, these two sovereign ties kept bumping into each other, it wasn't always a peaceful association, but it generally worked out. Both sides recognized that these two spheres did exist. What this gave man, more freedom, he enjoyed a … What can we say? There was a larger amplitude for him to exercise his freedom because neither sovereignty could claim the whole man
Well, let me just jump ahead to the development of canon law, because it was through canon law that all of the constitutional principles I have mentioned were developed. There was a lot of thinking about law and political order, occasioned by the rediscovery of the Justinian Code. The canonists began examining it, and they extracted certain Roman legal principles, used them but changed them dramatically. One of the most important of these, that became central to the Middle Ages, and the order of both in the church and the state, so much so that it continued to influence political order to the time of the American founding. The principle is "quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari. What touches all, must be approved by all." It sounds like an early articulation of no taxation without representation, and indeed, that's what it was.
**Richard Reinsch:**
That would have emerged in church corporations, monasteries, governing bodies in the church, and then migrated into government?
**Robert Reilly:**
That's exactly how it happened. That there was, first of all, the principle of equality was broadly recognized in both spheres, the equality of all men who are rational, and therefore their consent in their rule is required. As you say, this took place in the Dominican order, other orders in church councils. In order for this to function, they had to have the right for representation, so various church chapters could send a representative to a council, and that representative spoke for that chapter, and what was decided would be binding, and so forth.
So, the requirement of consent, popular sovereignty, equality, representation, and the Dominicans had quite an impact in England, as it was observed how they rule themselves according to these principles. The canon didn't simply work in ecclesiastical circles, they were also in the courts. I mean, the royal courts.
So, these principles leached from the church into the civic and political realm, and there you have the development of the early parliaments. Which, quoted again, that same quote on this tangent principle, what affects all must be agreed to, approved by all. So, the shires were able to select a representative to be sent to the Parliament when the King wanted new taxes, and they could approve it or not approve it. One thing that was clear through all of this, the Abbott or the King was not above the law. It had to adhere to the law, as did all others. The King was made a king by the law, he was not above the law, so he made the law with the approval of those who were ruled by it. This was the norm in the Middle Ages, it was the norm throughout Europe and in England.
**Richard Reinsch:**
So, what happens? How is that gift, we'll say, how is it upheld, or not upheld as you argue in the book, as we move into modernity? Specifically in the 16th Century, you talk about some thinkers, one we've discussed, Hobbes. Machiavelli, also Luther as well, thinkers who seem to be articulating, reflecting ideas reverting back to the primacy of will, and more towards and unlimited notion of sovereignty.
But, as you also note throughout the book, I guess the theme in your book, too, is the primacy of reason versus the primacy of will, and how that unlocks a new anthropology thinking about man as a being of will, whose reason is shaped by his will or by his passions. Then, that unlocks, in turn, a different way of thinking about government.
**Robert Reilly:**
That's exactly right. This change started taking place in the late Middle Ages. William of Ockham is one of the most prominent thinkers who proposed this nominalist and voluntarist way of thinking, that was the obverse of Thomas Aquinas, and the synthesis of faith and reason that he had achieved in his magnificent work.
The key to this is theological. As Aquinas said, it's God's divine is primary to the divine will. It's the intellect that conceives, or knows, and it is the will that executes. The reason logos is primary, because it is reason in God's essence, and will secondary or instrumental, is because it obeys the intellect.
Now, what William of Ockham does is he flips that relationship, he makes God's will his primary, and the divine intellect his secondary. It is the will that decides, and there is nothing constraining the will, it can decide anything. The intellect is, then, just an executor, finding the best way for the will to reach its end, its decision, and it is unconstrained. William of Ockham was upset that this Pagan philosopher, Aristotle, who had infected Thomas Aquinas, was constraining the omnipotent God. And that Ockham was going to set Him free, you see, by removing these restraints. But, he had to do so at the price of reason and nature. Now that the will is primary and God can do anything, what happens to the essences of things
In other words, things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that lets us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn't? What is good, and what is bad? Are things we know through our knowledge of the thing's nature, of man's nature? Ockham says that we can't know any of this, because there are no essences anymore.
**Richard Reinsch:**
It's a divine will, that's how you know what you should do?
**Robert Reilly:**
All of these things are the object of God's will, and the words you use for things, this is phenomenalism, the nomine, the Latin for name, they don't relate to anything out there. There's no correlation between the name you give things and what they are because you can't really know what they are. There's no order in nature, because there's no nature. This is a terribly radical teaching, and you can see how it has this ontology of the will unmoors everything. God can do anything. As Ockham scandalously said, "God can make us hate Him, and there's no gainsaying Him." There is nothing right or wrong in itself, other than God says it's right. He may change His mind tomorrow and say it's wrong, and we have to follow Him.
So, all that we can know regarding morality, and morality is defined by whatever God wills, and He can will anything, we know only through revelation, we can't know any of this stuff through reason. So, this is an enormous demotion of reason, and it is picked up, he influenced Martin Luther profoundly, because, Martin Luther also bifurcated.
**Richard Reinsch:**
I was going to say, you pick up with Luther on how this really shaped the way he thought about government, and also how this would reflect law, its command, and our obligations under it.
**Robert Reilly:**
That's right, and you see in Luther, under Ockham's influence, he explicitly denies popular sovereignty. The Medievals all thought no ruler rules by divine right, he's just another human being. All authority comes from God, but God doesn't …
**Richard Reinsch:**
Pass through the people, yeah.
**Robert Reilly:**
It's mediated through the people who are sovereign. Luther explicitly denies popular sovereignty, he explicitly denies the requirement of consent representation, and he explicitly denies the right to revolution. So, this new theology of a voluntarist God, a God of pure will and power who, of course, is incomprehensible, such a God is not accessible to reason, you can't know anything about His essence when that's will, and it's a will that is not under the control of anything and through anything, at any time.
The voluntarism in theology is reflected in voluntarism in man. The primacy of will, when you get down to the level of man, is reflected, then, in the absolute ruler.
James Wilson, who was probably the most profound natural law thinker in the American founding, quoting "quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari. What touches all must be approved by all." So, he was a natural law thinker, quoted Cicero, Aristotle. Of course, he quoted Richard Hooker quite a bit, he admired him a great deal. So, they were returning to these natural law, natural life principles, all of which had been denied by both forms of state absolutism.
**Richard Reinsch:**
Which emerges in the 16th Century, and you quote Lord Acton.
**Robert Reilly:**
Yeah, 17th Century.
**Richard Reinsch:**
How did we steward these gifts? Not very well. And, you see the emergence of Divine Right of Kings. As you note, absolutism. Divine right of kings, as I read your book, that teaching is a very anti-political teaching. Things are not debated, compromised in the pursuit of a political good for a constituted people, things are handed down by a king, willfully.
**Robert Reilly:**
The king is above the law.
**Richard Reinsch:**
The king is above the law, so we can see how that is definitely a part of how that become part of modern political thinking in other forms as well, and king democracy as some would say. So, you talk about that, that absolutism rising. You argue that the Colonists see their part as a restoration, a reaction against that unbound thinking.
**Robert Reilly:**
You see a founder like James Wilson, who was probably the most profound natural law thinker in the American founding, quoting "quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari. What touches all must be approved by all." So, he was a natural law thinker, quoted Cicero, Aristotle. Of course, he quoted Richard Hooker quite a bit, he admired him a great deal. So, they were returning to these natural law, natural life principles, all of which had been denied by both forms of state absolutism. The secular absolutism, offered by Thomas Hobbes, and the divine right absolutism, offered by Filmer and James the First.
John Adams "They, the Revolutionaries, begin by reminding the people of the elevated rank they hold in the universe as men, that all men by nature are equal, that kings are but the ministers of the people. That their authority is delegated to them by the people, for their good, and that they have a right to resume it, and place it in other hands, or keep it themselves, whenever it is made use of to oppress them. These are what are called revolution principles. They are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke, the principles of nature and eternal reason, the principles on which the whole government over us now stands."
You've got that opposition to them coming from the natural law tradition within the catholic church, with people like Suarez and Bellarmine, and you have the opposition coming from the Anglican, like Algernon Sidney, who has kept that same natural right tradition through Richard Hooker. And, through Aristotle, and the others.
Now, Sidney, as you know, was a hero in the American colonies, he was considered a martyr to Republicanism. His book, Discourses on Government, was considered a Bible in the American colonies. It was Thomas Jefferson who said, "This is the book to which we should all turn, and all the young of America should be educated on the principles of Republican government by Sidney's book." Of course, we have Hampton Sidney College, here in Virginia, which was …
Named after Sidney, that was created at the time of the American Revolution. So, you see the influence here of this lineage of these ideas, is very direct through Sidney.
**Richard Reinsch:**
On this, I wanted to read. You quote John Adams, and I think this really nicely encapsulates your point.
This is Adams, "They, the Revolutionaries, begin by reminding the people of the elevated rank they hold in the universe as men, that all men by nature are equal, that kings are but the ministers of the people. That their authority is delegated to them by the people, for their good, and that they have a right to resume it, and place it in other hands, or keep it themselves, whenever it is made use of to oppress them. These are what are called revolution principles. They are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke, the principles of nature and eternal reason, the principles on which the whole government over us now stands."
**Robert Reilly:**
There it is.
**Richard Reinsch:**
There it is.
**Robert Reilly:**
You can find that being said multiple times by multiple people in the Middle Ages. As we just talked about, Richard, there was not a straight line development of those principles in more refined constitutional forms directly to the American founding, because of the interruption of that, the break off of the absolutist forms.
**Richard Reinsch**:
But, this tradition, that Adams quotation, impressive list of thinkers, philosophers, contained there, that full tradition we've been trying to describe, trying, in some way, to give justice in 45 minutes, to this unbroken, unwritten tradition of thinking that the American founding stands on. You mentioned in the beginning, the book, you're addressing is to certain thinkers, Catholic thinkers, some Protestants, turning against the American founding.
John Courtney Murray, in the middle of the 20th Century, thought that if we lost this natural law tradition, that the American proposition, as he termed it, would be eviscerated at one stroke. He always thought, though, that if people did turn against it, it would be those thinkers within the natural law tradition, primarily he thought Catholic theologians, and philosophers, and lawyers, who would uphold it. Yet now, many of them, turn against it. And, in many ways, mock it. I don't know how else to read … You quote Patrick Deneen on four separate occasions, misquoting Publius and Federalist No. 10 to support his theory of an atomistic founding. I don't know what else to make of it, other than a willful refusal to reject evidence in favor of some post-Liberal project.
**Robert Reilly:**
Well, as you know, I also quote Patrick Deneen in a passage in which he says that Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia did not seek a reformed form of communism, but the end of it. In other words, the end of this law, there wasn't a better form of this law. He made that statement in parallel of what he thinks of the American founding.
**Richard Reinsch:**
That it's also a lie?
**Robert Reilly:**
It is a lie, and there's no better form of it, there's no reformation of it. It must be replaced, and that's what he calls for, he wants a different founding. He never exactly says what, it would be very interesting for him to articulate that.
As you know, I argue somewhat passionately, Richard, that this is a very damaging teaching, because it cuts off the source of recovery. The case I make is the dire moral straits in which we find ourselves today is not a result of the founding, but a denial of its principles. And, our path to recovery must include a return to those principles.
Now, to say that those principles themselves are corrupt, that we have nothing to return to, leaves us exactly where?
**Richard Reinsch:**
Nowhere.
**Robert Reilly:**
I wanted to tell you, my oldest son is a Marine Corp Officer, of rather recent vintage, but in his political philosophy course at a Catholic university, the professor taught something very along the lines of Patrick Deneen. So, he didn't use Deneen's writings, and he didn't present it as one of a variety of views of the American founding, but he convinced the class that the founding was morally compromised, it was corrupt.
My son struggled back against this, but the majority of the students bought it. So, at the end, they said, "Okay Professor, you've convinced us, we agree the founding was corrupt. Well, what are we supposed to do now?"
**Richard Reinsch:**
I think this is why your book is so important. I think a lot of people aren't even aware, really, of the history, philosophy, and legal history that you present in the book. I think they don't understand that, and they really are cut off from the full tradition, that would not have been possible generations prior for educated political thinkers in America. You know, progressivism goes back over a century, and they're willfully rejecting something, but they know they're rejecting it.
I've often wondered, too, it's just there's moral disquiet, there's a sense that things are wrong. And oh, plunk, here's a reason why. I think your book could really strike a chord, in that regard.
**Robert Reilly:**
You know, if I could say, Richard, we're probably near the end of our time here, but when people ask, okay, how did we change, or what happened here? In the book, I do quote one passage from President Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, in which he says, "Implicit in the Constitution's structure, and the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth. In fallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or ism, in any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course." In other words, the truth does not set you free, the truth enslaves you.
**Richard Reinsch:**
Yes.
**Robert Reilly:**
He, here, rejects the fact that the American founding was based upon truths that are transcendent, through everywhere and at all times, for everyone.
Now, if that is so, we have something of immeasurable value that we need to rescue. If not, if Obama is right, then indeed, killing unborn children, taking drugs, pornography, same sex so-called marriage, it all fits within it, because there is no transcendent truth.
**Richard Reinsch:**
It also unlocks the door to authoritarianism. It unlocks the door, because there's nothing really worth fighting for, at that point.
**Robert Reilly:**
It makes despotism dispositive.
**Richard Reinsch:**
Acceptable even.
**Robert Reilly:**
It leads to despotism, it leads to Leviathan. I would say, Thomas Hobbes is winning right now. But, we have the resources to fight back, but that requires a return to our founding principles, just as for our founders it required a return to the articulation of natural law and natural right principles, that were very ancient lineage. And, on which they based this great thing that they did.
**Richard Reinsch:**
I think that's eloquently said, and a point we can end on, thank you so much. We've been talking with Robert Reilly, author of the new book, just published, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. Thank you so much.
Richard Reinsch:
Today we're talking with Brad Watson about his new book, Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea. Brad is a professor of politics at St. Vincent College. He's the author and editor of many books. I'll mention one that I've read. It came out in 2009, Living Constitution, Dying Faith. Brad is also a reformed Canadian patriot. He told me about some quality time he spent this past summer at the US/Canadian border. Not because of Trump's fascist America but, I think, of incompetence of border officials. Brad's also the Sage of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. It's not Arnold Palmer, it's Brad. Welcome to the program.
Brad Watson:
Well, thank you, Richard, for that introduction and thank you for having me.
Richard Reinsch:
So, thinking about progressivism and maybe, just for the benefit of our listeners, maybe catch us up to speed a bit on progressivism. Give us a working definition of what it is and what it aims to do.
Brad Watson:
The definition that I use in this book, just to kind of set the table for what I'm talking about, which is how historians over the course of the 20th century systematically distorted the idea of progressivism. Progressivism, as I define it, is the idea that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers has to be overturned and replaced by an organic evolutionary model of the Constitution that facilitates the authority of experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere, the expansion of political control and especially at the national level.
Liberalism has never really had an honest conversation with itself about this because the liberal historians who define the progressive narratives in the 20th century didn't really come clean.
The progressives in the late part of the 19th century, early part of the 20th century, were very suspicious of the Founders' Constitution as limiting the power of the state, all the things that progressives want to do. So the story of my book is really the story of the academic biases and blind spots of professional academics, especially historians, who simply do not tell this story either honestly or completely. They make this what I claim is a radical progressive idea, hostility to the Founders' Constitution.
They try to domesticate it, to make it non-threatening and therefore, I think, forward to this book, friend Charles Kesler said liberalism has never really had an honest conversation with itself about this because the liberal historians who define the progressive narratives in the 20th century didn't really come clean. Sometimes I think they were willfully blind to these things and sometimes inadvertently blind.
Richard Reinsch:
What composes progressivism? The critique you present, I think, is well known or that they are at odds with the American Founders with the limited Constitution. But what are they drawing from? Where are they getting this?
Brad Watson:
Yeah. The progressives in the early going drew from a number of intellectual currents that were floating around, really, in America, and in Europe to a certain extent almost immediately after the age of Lincoln. So I trace the origins of progressivism to two or three distinct strains of thoughts but sort of related strains of thought. One is social Darwinism. With the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, Darwinian concepts were just in the water, as it were, among the intellectual classes. Darwinism, of course, insists that evolution, change, growth, is always and everywhere good, a sign of strength. And stasis, or fixity, including the fixity of the Founders' natural rights Constitution will get in the way of necessarily organic evolutionary growth.
Overlaid on top of that, where it was the philosophy of pragmatism, which was really a distinctly American philosophy, if there is a philosophy that owes its origins to Americans, it's probably pragmatism. Which suggests that experimental methods and means are likely to prove the situation, anything that gets in the way of constant experimentation, again, and the fixed Constitution does that to a certain degree of political sphere.
Anything that gets in the way of that kind of experimentation is dangerous. And then, finally, some American progressives are influenced by categories of German idealism, a kind of worship of the state, the confidence that history is moving toward a concentrated, rational state and we shouldn't get in the way of that inexorable political movement. All of these things cut against the old Founders' Constitution view that certain things are fixed. The Constitution fixes the leaps and bounds of our common life together. And the way we effect change is through the consent of a republican people.
The progressives always want to displace the consent of the informed people with reported expertise, the people who understand the dynamic of history, the people in the tweed jackets who sit around academic offices and government offices, really understand where history is going. So social Darwinism, pragmatism, and German ideals put together form a potent intellectual cocktail which morphs into, by the early 20th century, into what we have come to see as intellectual progressivism and eventually that, of course, the father of modern liberalism, New Deal Liberalism, Great Society Liberalism.
Richard Reinsch:
Thinking about progressivism, I want to get more into your book on how the historians and other academics have told the history of progressivism. But you would be a part of the notion that progressivism is a foreign import to these shores, Germany being a primary place where it starts. And American academics go to German universities and learn things and those ideas are then brought back to America universities, most notably John Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin.
Brad Watson:
Right. Hopkins, Wisconsin. I talk about these places a little bit in my book, and some of the people who were there. In terms of it being a foreign import to American shores, yes and no. There are certainly strains of, as I say, there's this German idealism among some of the progressives. But others I would say are picking up on more what I would characterize as indigenously American intellectual phenomena, such as pragmatism, social Darwinism. In some ways, social Darwinism had its most prominent adherence in the late 19th century in the United States. So you can't simply ascribe it to a kind of foreign virus infecting America or something like that.
Richard Reinsch:
The German invasion.
Brad Watson:
The German invasion, right. I don't want to overstate the German invasion. I know some people broadly on my side of things want to attribute all of this progressive phenomenon to the German invasion but there's a good deal of, I think, indigenous roots to this, too.
Richard Reinsch:
On this point of the German invasion, I guess I ask that question because I agree with you. I think there's an indigenous part of this. There's also Americans writing much sooner than the later, than the last quarter of the 19th century. One that sticks out in my mind is Orestes Brownson, who was a major public figure, writer, in the 19th century in America who, in the 1820s, in the 1830s, is sort of channeling a lot of liberation theology, a lot of humanism. He's a disciple of Kant at one point in his career and, I know, broadly articulates a progressive approach, a very muscular, progressive approach to government and sort of a rejection, in his writings, of how American government is understood at that time and the way he interprets the Declaration of Independence as being not necessarily about natural rights but about some sort of broad humanitarian emancipation.
Richard Reinsch:
So I agree with you there. I'm thinking the ideas do seem to come together in a very powerful way, though, with academic learning from Germans. So here's my question. Why have they been... Or I don't know if you agree with this. They seem to have been very successful in the academy, in American universities in the 20th century, and very successful politically. Not yet having remade our Constitution into their image but, at times it seems, getting closer and closer and closer.
Brad Watson:
Yes. The academy, I think we all know, has long been dominated by what many of us would call liberals or even radicals, in some cases. But, really, the origins of modern American academic disciplines, I'm thinking now about political science. I'm a political scientist. I'm thinking also about history, and in this book I'm dealing mostly with historians. I like to say I'm not a historian but I play one for the purposes of this book. I'm really dissecting and deconstructing the peripheral or progressive historian's approach to things.
These disciplines were really founded, invented, the Modern American Political Science Association, the American Historical Association. These were founded in the late 19th or early 20th century as adjuncts of ways of channeling progressive ideologies, specifically into the American academies. So in a way it's not accidental. The progressives were there at the foundation of modern American academic disciplines. The disciplines, primarily among the academic disciplines that really try to transmit the American story, history political science. So in a way it's not something accidental that so many liberals inhabit these disciplines because the disciplines were set up precisely to channel progressive ideology, at least in the United States.
In Teddy Roosevelt you see this interesting mixture of progressive elements with, to a certain extent, the old language of American politics.
Richard Reinsch:
On the point of just the success of progressivism politically, one thought that I've had, and I'm interested to hear your thoughts, it arises in the, politically, as we've been discussing, turn of the 20th century, later part of the 19th, and then sort of explodes. Teddy Roosevelt referred to it as Hegel on horseback. Woodrow Wilson. And then we have the 1920s where the brakes get put on. Is there something quintessentially American about progressivism in the sense of a people who settle a continent, who set up commerce throughout the continent, who build railroads, who settle it, who have experienced amazing gains in wealth in industry and technology and the whole American settlement story?
Is it not then the case that you would then take, "And we can do this in government," or, "We can improve government. We can make it stronger, more precise. We can make it do more." What do you think of that?
Brad Watson:
Yeah. Well, I'll say something about Teddy Roosevelt. It's not quite as poetic as Hegel on horseback, but he's really more of a kind of social Darwinist/pragmatist on horseback, I think, than Hegel. Now, Woodrow Wilson is a progressive successor. He's more influenced by Hegel, I think. But in Teddy Roosevelt you see this interesting mixture of progressive elements with, to a certain extent, the old language of American politics, which I think you're alluding to, which is a kind of sense of the possibilities, the fluidity of American society and the openness of the frontier, the striving that defines Americans.
So the question really becomes if these old categories are close or not to the new progressive categories. And I don't think they are that close because progressivism as it comes down to us really embodies not just good old fashioned American striving or desire for economic improvement, advancement, the settlement of the frontier, whatever. But, really, a philosophy of history. A belief that history is unfolding inexorably and inevitably in a certain direction and it requires expert superintendents in order to get it there.
The older language of American politics had, I think, a more bottom-up flavor, a self-governing people striving for greatness, as it we're, whereas the progressive vision is bound up with this philosophy of history and this top-down model. TR is interesting because he's kind of a transitional figure between these two worlds, the old language of American politics and the new, whereas Woodrow Wilson is more explicitly the new language of the enlightened administration.
Richard Reinsch:
On the enlightened administration point, do we still believe in that? We have the sort of inertia of massive bureaucracy and administration and we have, as I ask you that question, no small amount of ink is spilled on, including in Law & Liberty, on the decline of self government, the decline of Congress. And yet do Americans really believe in rule by experts or the best and the brightest? Isn't that a point of mockery now? Is that aspect of progressivism still alive?
Brad Watson:
Yeah. This is interesting. Functionally, of course, we're stuck with this legacy of progressivism. But one of the interesting things about the United States, I think, compared to, frankly, most other advanced liberal democracies, which you're aware I'm originally a native of Canada, as you mentioned. It seems to me there is less resistance among the people in most advanced liberal democracies to this idea of expert rule, top-down rule. They're more complacent. But the Americans are less complacent. So that raises the question, what accounts for our, at least residual, distrust of expertise? I think, at least relative to other countries.
And I think part of the answer to that is simply the enduring power of the American Founders' Constitution, the enduring power of republican ideas, the enduring power of American imagery linked to the Founders' notions of a self-governing people who take responsibility for their own affairs. I think whether America has become a fully progressive nation, it kind of depends I think on where you're coming from. When I first moved to the United States I used to say to some of my lamenting conservative friends who always think the American cup is half empty. Coming from Canada, I think it's half full.
Americans are not quite as comfortable with this model of top-down government that some other people are. So there's a battle for the American soul, I think, still going on. In broad terms you can describe it as the Founders' America versus progressive America. We've moved a lot in the direction of progressive America, toward a vision of expert rule, but we're not fully there yet. There's a lot of Americans who still resent it or are still willing to fight against it. To some extent I think the Trump phenomenon is a reflection of this, right?
The peasants are out and they have their pitchforks. They're as mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore, even if it's a little bit inchoate in some instances. It's there. It runs through and through, I think, American politics and always has. Although recently we're told by our betters that we have to behave ourselves and, in some respect, our betters are now on the Supreme Court and we just have to accept whatever these experts hand down to us. A lot of Americans still don't buy it, so it's a complicated question.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, I know. And a part of that, too, I think is the institutions progressives have built increasingly don't look so lovely and don't seem to have-
Brad Watson:
Exactly. They're not working.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, they're not working very well. They don't seem to have, I don't know, inspiration, imagination, a hold on people. Particularly higher education, I think a lot about you're obviously invested in greatly.
And even if we think about the most progressive states in this country, the moving van test, which way are the moving vans pointed. They're pointed towards the benighted conservative red states. There's where most economic growth and population growth is happening in this country, including for our left-wing millennials. They're moving to these states, also, to find a job. So I think that all should be said. Now, tell the story or help us understand how academics wrote about the progressive emergence.
Brad Watson:
Yeah. I'm looking, as I said, mostly at historians in this book. Historians became, some of the big-wig historians that many people would be at least passingly familiar with, the Richard Hofstadters, the Arthur Schlesingers, people like that, big-wig historians of the 20th century, but many lesser lights, too, how they told the story of American progressivism. And pretty much systematically I conclude, after going through them all in this book, they downplay the hostility to the Founders' Constitution, that the early progressives exhibited, or the Constitution is simply absent in some cases in their story. It seemed to be a quaintly irrelevant anachronism. They also downplay the kind of fervid, secular millenarianism, if you will, of some progressives. Some of the early progressives were actually Christians but they pointed Christianity towards-
Richard Reinsch:
Social justice.
Brad Watson:
... the social justice, as we would now call it, sort of immediate economic concerns. And to the extent that, in some of the early progressive theologians on the Protestant side, people like Walter Rauschenbusch, who I'm going to talk about on campus sites. People like Father John Ryan.
Richard Reinsch:
John Ryan.
Brad Watson:
It's almost as if traditional Christianity, or Christianity concerned with individual sin and salvation, is replaced entirely by social Christians. That is to say, a Christian who is concerned about economic policy, in this case. The historians don't tell this story. They don't tell the story of the hostility of the progressives to the Founders' Constitution or this, I like to think of it as a kind of secular millenarianism that goes along with modern progressivism. Modern progressives who've lost all connection to their Christian roots, nonetheless still have this sort of self-righteous edge to them, which I think in some ways they derive from the earlier more explicitly Christian fore bearers.
But the historians don't tell this story at all. Progressivism is kind of hollowed out. It's told as the phenomenon that is somehow organically compatible with American political categories. And, for some of the reasons that we've already discussed. America, they're telling at least, has always been a kind of progressive nation. There's nothing to see here. Move along. The progressives just tried some social reforms. Some of them succeeded. Some of them failed.
So progressivism comes across as a warm and fuzzy social movement to improve whatever labor laws, factory conditions, things the progressives were concerned about. What it doesn't come across as is a coherent intellectual movement that is so fundamentally hostile to the notion of a fixed Constitution, fundamentally hostile to the Founders' Constitution. And you can read book after book after book, somebody defining history of the 20th century, and believe me, I did this in writing this book, and is some cases see nary a mention of the Constitution or what the progressives themselves agreed on. I'm not trying to be polemical in this book, at all.
Richard Reinsch:
Do you attribute that to the discipline of history and how they understand what they're doing? Do you attribute that to they themselves, many of these historians, didn't take the American founding that seriously as its own coherent set of ideas and principles and/or, and maybe these are all running together, these guys are themselves progressives and, of course, don't see anything there?
Brad Watson:
Yeah. A little bit of both. I open the book with the notion of confirmation bias, as I call it. That is the tendency of investigators to seek and elevate those things which confirm their pre-existing hypotheses. In modern psychology this is a real thing and I suggest that professional academics, especially historians, were nominally dedicated to objectivity, having to prove immune to confirmation bias or professional deformation, if you will, in their attempt to transmit the progressive idea. They are themselves progressives. They share some of the progressive assumptions about the inevitability of historical progress, the desirability of expert rule, suspicion of the peasants with pitchforks, the ordinary people for America.
So when they're looking at and purporting to describe as professional historians, progressive phenomenon, they just see it as American as apple pie. They think so. So it's partly the fact they are progressives. It's also partly, as I suggested earlier, baked into the cake of the American historical profession. The formative orthodoxy of the early historians with the formation of professional associations, the AHA, was this belief in scientific history. That is to say, what evolutionary categories, Darwinian categories, the suspicion of transcendental principles of, with a suspicion on fixed truth. And I'm talking about discipline-wide now, with the foundation of the modern historical profession. Faith in progress.
Richard Reinsch:
That ideas are epiphenomenal to-
Brad Watson:
... historical forces.
Richard Reinsch:
Right. And you see in ideas are also relative or fixed to their time and place, to specific groups and people. So they really aren't ideas.
Brad Watson:
Absolutely. And the historians and... historical profession, it tends to, like most of the intellectual classes of their day, emphasize the utility of statism, the chimerical status of natural rights in the face of what? Well, Darwinian and pragmatic criticisms, especially. The anachronistic nature of the Constitution that is rooted in natural rights, rights that don't change with time. So both the historical profession and individual historians are thoroughly infected with these ideas. So when they look at the progressive phenomenon, they see themselves reflected. They see nothing hostile to the American constitutional order.
Richard Reinsch:
Do you see this primarily mid-century academics, and one can also see they themselves, Richard Hofstadter, which you open the book with a long quotation from him, where he basically calls himself a man of the progressive wing, writing about progressives. So they themselves certainly don't want to highlight and just don't see any dramatic change here between their ideas and the founding and all of that.
Does that hold true, though, with the new left scholars? Does that hold true as we move into getting into the beginning of the 21st century, to the extent their scholarship, progressivism. It seems to me they now want to play it up. And maybe a popular indication of that was Hillary Clinton saying, "I'm not a liberal. I'm a progressive," and progressivism now being something worth building an intellectual defense around.
Brad Watson:
Right. That's a good question. I move chronologically in this book, sort of following the historical accountings of progressivism from the 1940s through the 1950s, then through the '60s and '70s. And the original new left scholars, those who were originally associated with that term, came on the scene in the 1960s. And they were operating in neo or fuzzy Marxist categories. And, like the more consensus historians, like Hofstadter, Schlesinger, they also claimed that progressivism was of a piece with the American historical tradition. Their sort of more Marxist analysis simply said that progressives were only trying to grease the wheels of capitalism, basically.
Again, there was nothing to see here but from a hard-left point of view, as it were, there's nothing to see here. Everyone, including the progressive reformers, is trying to further economic expansionism, et cetera. Some of these more contemporary progressive, or new new-left, if you will, thinkers of the current century, they do try to reinvigorate the label of progressivism and hold it up as something to be proud of. Hillary Clinton certainly tried to do that.
Brad Watson:
And their understanding, though, I think, is, again, that progressivism essentially is America. The Constitution has always been, of necessity, must be a living constitution and the early progressives understood this, and later progressives like the Fells, merely make clear this truth against the fuddy-duddy conservative right that they hold up as straw men who want to make us live like we lived in the 18th century and all these nonsensical notions of what a fixed constitution is.
So the contemporary, there is some effort to revivify the label of progressive to make it useful to contemporary liberals. Liberalism fell out of fashion and Hillary Clinton I think got the idea that she'd call herself a progressive. That would be better than liberal somehow. But, really, contemporary liberalism is the natural outgrowth of early 20th century progressivism. Contemporary liberals believe that we must live under a living constitution but, of course, to live under a living constitution, which lives and breathes and grows and changes with the winds of progressive elites, is to live under no constitution at all. The very nature of a living constitution is to fix things, put certain things beyond the bounds of ordinary political change.
Richard Reinsch:
Let me go in a different direction a little bit but still kind of staying with the academy and the intellectuals. You think about progressivism, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and then moving up to LBJ and the great society, and then the new left. I guess I want to try and see or think about the connections there, and also academic connections because clearly that will remake the American academy in a major way. It takes a generation to do it. But the connections, though, have to be with the earlier progressivism. How do you see that happening?
Brad Watson:
Yeah. As we were discussing earlier, in many of the most important disciplines in humanities and social sciences in American universities you see the disciplines themselves orient towards the progressive project from the get-go. Obviously hiring over the last, oh, my gosh, I'm tempted to say 100 years in the American academy, but at least over the last 50 years, has been very much hiring from the left, by people in the disciplines that I'm most interested in, like political science, history-
Richard Reinsch:
Sociology.
Brad Watson:
... law, and sociology. Yeah. Believers in what? Growth, change, often evolutionary growth, pragmatic experimentation. The rejection of transcendent truths. And, in this sense, there is a broad compatibility of the direction of the contemporary American academy with progressive early 20th century progressive premises. The idea that, for example, within political science, that would want to teach the Constitution as a fixed document embodying truths, nature and nature is God, is really, really weird in most places. And I teach at a fairly traditional liberal arts college.
But when you get students out of high school, it is simply the belief that the Constitution, changes evolve over time. It's like mother's milk. Everybody, to the extent they've thought about it at all, believes this is obviously the case. You have to kind of spend some time explaining what the Constitution is, what a written constitution is and isn't and if we're going to have changes, obviously we are, then we should have the through consensual public mechanisms, legislation, not through pretending the Constitution guarantees every fashionable preference of the day.
But now this is everywhere. It's in the high schools, it's in higher education. You can blame a lot of this, I think frankly, on the progressives, on early 20th century progressivism. There are a million people to blame here but certainly the progressive intellectual movement has played a big role in defining the academic disciplines which, in turn, defined what high school teachers have been taught, what people through and through education circles have been taught. So that's a great story to be told.
Richard Reinsch:
You made an interesting observation in the introduction that the rise of progressivism, paradoxically, even though they are always claiming to be exalting the individual, diminishes the realm of the private and diminishes the conscience. I wanted to talk about that and you spend a lot of time talking about religion. Mainly what has come to be called mainline Protestantism, but also Catholicism to a certain extent, as in a way, and I don't know if this holds true with Catholicism in the period, but definitely with Protestantism, a falling away or I think it starts in the seminaries, a dismissal of what would be thought of as orthodox doctrines of Christianity.
Dismissing those, that's not really the point of Christianity. It becomes something else. More immanent, more involved with things of the city, of equity, of distribution of wealth, things like that. But that filters out. It goes in the seminary. It then goes with those students as they go out in the pulpits. You've got the leading voices of Protestantism saying this. And then you get this great split in Protestantism in the early 20th century in America where you have more conservative churches form and they're much smaller and they don't have nearly the cultural influence.
Just sort of drawing a line with that observation, the diminishment of the realm of conscience. It's almost like the evacuation that there's any ground or metaphysical substance or good to freedom or to human action. Americans don't articulate it like that, but I guess more and more I tend to think it's what happens in Protestantism in the 19th century in America that really starts to shape the American mind. And now we have the complete loss of mainline Protestantism in America, basically, certainly as a contributor to public discussion. And then anything about what's left and you have a diminished Christianity. I was just going to make that observation to see what you make of it.
Brad Watson:
Yeah. I think the early Christian progressives, Rauschenbusch, Father John Ryan, as I mentioned, they really lay the groundwork for the kind of nowadays explicitly secular but, frankly, very self-righteous elite progressivism of the day, which speaks in moralistic terms, minus God. So, as I look to say, the early Christian progressives seem to believe when the fullness of time was come, God sent the administrative state.
Progressive theorists embraced this notion that you get material and spiritual fulfillment through the good graces of the state, essentially. So the idea of an organic political whole which makes us whole, which solves all human problems in the here and now.
Richard Reinsch:
Yeah, yeah. That was a great line. And you quote Teddy Roosevelt. I had not seen that quote in quite a while "Let us battle for the Lord, as in the day of Armageddon." Something like that. That's powerful.
Brad Watson:
Yeah. And that religious language ran everyone through progressive political gatherings.
Richard Reinsch:
It's inverted, though. The symbols of Christianity are being inverted, yeah.
Brad Watson:
Let me address your question this way. When you start to think as the early Christian progressives do, and now the later secular ones do certainly, that all aspects of the state really should be understood to be the means to human welfare and, frankly, all aspects of moral and theological thought direct themselves to the immediacies of the here and now. The early progressives thought you could cleave to essentially the good judgment of Christian rulers. Vast amounts of discretion as to what constitutes the public welfare.
The main thing you have to overcome, whether it's people's attachments to the right to property and things like that that talk about the social good, the purposes of government come to be seen in very broad terms. The furtherance of general welfare in the light of God's purposes. So what happens? Well, any notion of natural rights or fixed rights, including property rights, have to be done away with. Natural rights are seen as less natural, less fixed. Less protective of the irreducible spheres of human thought and activity, certainly than would have been acceptable to America's founders.
Progressive theorists embraced this notion that you get material and spiritual fulfillment through the good graces of the state, essentially. So the idea of an organic political whole which makes us whole, which solves all human problems in the here and now. So you get some extraordinary statements from these early Christian progressives about how Jesus was misinterpreted when he said the Kingdom was not of this world. The Kingdom really is of this world. You actually find Walter Rauschenbusch saying, he writes socialized love, as he calls it, is necessary in this world.
So what becomes important? Well, the idea of the realm of the private, even the realm of conscience is diminished because the only things that are measurable and manipulable by the experts are things that the state controls. So economic data start to replace theological teachings. During his teaching time at St. Paul seminary, Father John Ryan, for example, I discovered some interesting little things like this. He devoted more than a quarter of his course on moral theology to what? Economic history and political economy. That is moral theology for the early Christian progressives.
So the realm of conscience is diminished because the only things that are important are the things that are manipulable and controllable by the state. And we see the ramifications of this today in mandates on religious institutions. The only things that are of importance. I think these are all kind of outgrowth of this early millenarian progressivism which was rooted in progressive Christianity but has become secularized over the last 100 years. And, again, the historians forget about that, telling the story. They just don't do it. They don't see it.
Richard Reinsch:
Well, and the way in which, if you kind of diminish the idea, or do away with the idea, of their being natural rights or a pre-political aspect that the government should recognize and protect, you quickly then get to the view, well, whatever you have you don't have it without the state.
Brad Watson:
Exactly.
Richard Reinsch:
You then reintroduce almost like a feudalistic notion of being a subject, of course, famously expressed by Barack Obama. "You didn't build that." That's a core progressive notion that your wealth was made possible by the state, building the roads, educating your workers, all this, and refusing to see any value add from capital or entrepreneurialism or skill or daring or courage of someone starting a business. That doesn't really matter.
So, yeah, you can see it even in that expression, as well. The diminishment of conscience also, everything is evolving obviously. Nothing's fixed. You've kind of talked about that. So I guess my question for you now, thinking about progressivism in 2020. In many respects, we're sort of dealing with a metastasizing program. We kind of said Americans no longer believe in rule by experts.
But the goals, I think, for the descendants of progressivism are now to completely wipe away any veneration for the founding, any notion of a core American nation culture. Samuel Huntington sort of touched on this in his... sort of did in his last book, Who Are We? That, in a sense, the promotion now is to sort of destabilize America as having any sort of coherent identity and goodness.
Brad Watson:
Yeah. I think that's right. And there's a parallelism between the early progressives and contemporary progressives or post-modern liberals, whatever you want to call them. The early progressives saw the Founders' Constitution and the older notion of Christianity as standing in the way of what? Economic reform and political reform. So you have to overcome these things to move history to the next stage. Which was largely understood in economic policy terms. The contemporary progressives, or the post-modern progressives, are doing the same thing.
The Founders' Constitution, and certainly the older notion of Christianity, stood in the way of what? Culture reform. Culture reformation. So economic radicalism, or economic growth, has now been replaced with culture radicalism or cultural growth and evolution toward the next stage. But it's interesting how progressives of 100 years ago and progressives today, both see the Founders' Constitution as getting in the way of this, which is why so much effort is expended by contemporary, liberal especially, in the academy trying to destabilize, trying to undermine people's confidence in their political institutions, trying simply to dismiss the Founders'-
Richard Reinsch:
The 1619 Project.
Brad Watson:
The 1619 Project. The proximate goals, you might say, are different. One, to affect economic and political change, the other to affect radical cultural change. But both groups see, from a spread 100 years apart from each other, both groups see that the Founders' Constitution gets in the way of this. The American Founders' political philosophy gets in the way of this. Old fashioned Christianity gets in the way of these transformations. So you have to reconfigure these things.
And now, of course, it's liberal Christianity, progressive Christianity, says you have to reconfigure old Christian categories, else be deemed a racist or a sexist or a homophobe. The same way early progressives said you have to reconfigure Christian categories or you're mired in the past in terms of economic and social policies. But they see the same enemies, even though their objects have shifted. Which shows, again, the power of these things, I think. That is to say, the importance, the defining character of the Founders' Constitution despite all the assaults against it. All the progressives understand it stands in the way of their radical project.
Richard Reinsch:
Brad, as you think about the American academy, which we've talked about on this interview, being so decisively shaped by progressivism and its ideas for how the state should regulate higher education, as you look ahead, as you look forward, how do you see things shaping up? Do you see any reform efforts happening? Or is, as I think, the best that could be done would be immediate deregulation and trying to return something like a market to higher education, apart from any thinking about curriculum or all that stuff.
Brad Watson:
Yeah. It's very difficult to know what should be done. One of the things that is being undertaken, of course, people are forming, developing, promoting enclaves within the existing academic structure. Certainly we've done that at my institution, whether it's a center for political thought or a politics program, and a number of places within the college where we're trying to reinvigorate the study of what? The serious book. The great book of Western civilization, the great writings of American political tradition.
And these things now exist at all kinds of institutions large and small. So people are working within the existing framework. But, I think it's important, as you suggest, to think outside the existing framework, how to create a market in higher education, given the stranglehold, even if we agree that's a good thing, given the stranglehold of regulatory agencies, especially accrediting agencies which operate under the color of right, the Federal Department of Education, things like this.
It's bureaucratically almost impossible under the current conditions to imagine a real market for American higher education. So the first thing we do politically, I think, and republicans have talked about it for a long time, but we've got to destroy the Department of Education in its current configuration and the ridiculous bureaucratic accrediting agencies, which hand down increasing numbers of mandates that get imposed so forth and really prevent entry into anything like a real market for higher education. But this is a political problem. Ultimately it's a problem of federal control of education, or largely a problem, at least the federal control of education. Which, in turn, is a progressive goal. Let the feds control everything, right?
Richard Reinsch:
Brad Watson, thank you so much for your time today. We've been talking with the author of Progressivism: the Strange History of a Radical Idea, published by Notre Dame Press. Thank you so much.
Brad Watson:
Richard, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
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