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The Moral Life in a Therapeutic Age Feb 24, 2025

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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. Related Links The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self 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. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. With me today are my guests, William G. Batchelder IV, and Michael P. Harding. They are co-editors of a new edited volume titled The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self. It’s just come out on Bloomsbury Press and we’ll be talking at length about why we should take an interest in Rieff and what insights he has to contemporary life. Drs. Batchelder and Harding, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. William Batchelder: Thank you, James. Michael Harding: Thank you. James Patterson: I should mention that we are all very good friends and know each other from many meetings of the Ciceronian Society. So if things get a little informal, it’s because of my lack of self-restraint. Drs. Harding and Batchelder, who was Philip Rieff? Michael Harding: I’ll let you take it, Bill. William Batchelder: All right. Philip Rieff was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. That was his highest professional attainment. He was born, I think, in 1922 and died in 2006. As a young man, before he’d even finished his doctoral dissertation, he was teaching at the University of Chicago, where he met his first wife, the young Susan Sontag. He was actually married to, of course, one of America’s leading cultural critics. It was a short and tumultuous marriage. They were divorced, I think … Was it eight years later, Michael? Six years later? Michael Harding: It was relatively a short order, yeah. William Batchelder: And he was the author … He arrived on the scene intellectually with the publication of his first two books. The first was Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. And the second was The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. The first of those was published, Michael, 58? Michael Harding: I think so, yeah. William Batchelder: Then, in the early ’60s for The Triumph of the Therapeutic. It was those two books that first made his name as an expositor of Freud. The second was an exposition of Freud, but also a departure from Freud in a couple important ways as he limbed other intellectuals who had departed from Freud, focused most particularly on Wilhelm Reich, on Carl Jung, and to a lesser extent on Adler and some other people who found Freud to be unsatisfying in the deliverance he could offer the afflicted in one way or the other. We can get into what that was to him. He turned his guns as it were on the academy in a work called Fellow Teachers, which I think is, Michael, 1973? Michael Harding: 72, maybe 74. William Batchelder: And after Fellow Teachers he had a poet who admired him, called his great silence. It wasn’t really silent because there were three major articles that he published and a book review that somehow was half of My Life Among the Deathworks. He really did not … He had been on top of the world academically. He’s at Ivy and an endowed chair with two major publications, and a lot of people regarded Fellow Teachers as deliberate professional suicide. He didn’t divide it into chapters. He certainly didn’t divide it into subheadings or subchapters. As one of his essayists wrote about him, “He hid most of the important arguments in the footnotes.” Why did he deliberately do this to himself? There are a lot of different arguments about why he did this, but at any rate, save three or four important articles. He was silent until the year of his death in 2006, when the first volume of what we call the Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy came out. That first volume is My Life Among the Deathworks. It’s hard to sum up one thing that My Life Among the Deathworks is about, but we can talk about Deathworks. Then, after he passed away, they published as the second volume, The Crisis of the Officer Class. The third volume, The Jew of Culture, came out the year following, and around the same time, posthumously, his students, bless them, put together and edited and put out the work that he had been doing apparently on and off for decades on Charisma, where he goes after Weber in one of Weber’s most important concepts, and revisits the idea and demands a correction in our conception of Charisma. And this came out shortly after his death as well. We had this great silence, and at the end, really, what Sacred Order/Social Order is doing is offering his fully developed theory of culture. I think it’s fair to say that was the purpose of those books, particularly the first two volumes. Particularly Deathworks and Crisis of the Officer Class. Michael, would you add anything to that? Michael Harding: All right, I would add one little thing to it, yeah. In Crisis, chapter six, toward the fourth culture, he does make a comment that seems to apply to the entirety of his … At least his later work. He says, “These reading exercises have been an experiment in preparing the way for the teaching and symbolic institutions of a fourth culture.” One hesitates to call it a practical intent, but there is this … I guess we will call it a practical intent behind it or political intent, right? He’s not just saying, “Well, here’s my theory of culture.” He’s trying to actively shape the future to some degree, albeit with a lot less optimism about the possibility of doing it than somebody like Nietzsche. James Patterson: This is an interesting account because I suspect most of the listeners are only somewhat dimly aware, if at all, of Rieff. Did Rieff have any major students? Why is it that maybe he’s become more obscure? And why bring him back the way that this volume intends to do? William Batchelder: My favorite way to illustrate this, if students ask me about it, is to go to the third edition of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. The third edition was published on the 20th anniversary of the original publication of his first book. It was 1978. And in the third edition of Mind of the Moralist, you have the original forward to the book and then you have a second forward and an epilogue that he wrote on the occasion of the release of this 20th anniversary edition. And it reads like it’s written by a different person. He adopted a style of prose which can charitably be described as impenetrable. And if you look at Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic, you’re dealing with a very erudite person wrestling with very difficult concepts, but it’s traditional academic writing. When you look at beginning with Fellow Teachers, but then especially everything after that, he deliberately adopts a prose style, which is absolutely forbidding. Both his publishing pattern and the manner in which he was writing suggest that he is deliberately being off-putting, that he is deliberately shunned. The popular success that his ex-wife had, Susan Sontag. Michael, would you add anything? Michael Harding: Yeah, the obscurity partly, I think. You’ve already addressed it. The man did make a deliberate choice to commit what Zondervan refers to as academic suicide with Fellow Teachers. From an academic perspective, it is a somewhat bizarre book. Then there is the difficulty of his work. And then I think there … I’m tempted to say he really did need to think more than he needed to write. I think that his turning away from the academic industrial complex activities that a lot of us are compelled to do, I think for him that was necessary for formulating this theory of culture. The manuscript history of Deathworks, I want to say, traces back to the ’80s. Parts of it were written in the ’80s, and there are, I guess, multiple different versions of it that were found in his files, if I remember correctly. In his papers. James Patterson: Oh wow. The prominence of psychoanalysis of Freud, something that seems very hard to recapture, but it was such a major phenomenon in the twentieth century. What is it that he had to say about Freud: Mind of the Moralists? Also, the nature of the therapeutic as it began to transform the culture? Michael Harding: I’ll leave that to you, Bill. You know the Freud element. William Batchelder: Well, in essence in our book, The Philosophy of Philip Rieff, one of the things that we say is that the reason that Rieff is interesting is he is a Freudian who has developed some serious problems with Freud. I think we used the word descents seriously from aspects of Freud and that he’s a modern who comes to regard modernity as a catastrophe. This is one of the things that’s so rich about his thinking. In the case of Freud, he accepts the Freudian economy of the soul. The idea that you have an ego, which is the self that you experience as yourself. You have these deep-seated drives that are part of you since birth, right? The id. Then when these desires run into the demands of family and community, you develop the super ego. And the superego is the cop inside your head. And remember, a lot of people confuse superego for conscience. But, of course, in Freud, the superego is irrational and persecutory and reactive. It’s not a conscience in the sense that you want to activate a conscience by going to a Catholic confessor. Any rationality you have is in the ego. It’s not in the superego. Rieff accepts that economy of the soul. He accepts the importance of repression … He ratifies the importance of repression in works early in weight. He believes in the process as Freud understands it. In that sense, we have someone who’s Freudian and, who, a lot of his terminology harkens back to Freud. However, very often the most interesting thing about Rieff is how he will simultaneously honor a thinker while dissenting from him. Or learning from a thinker and then … the most distinctive things about Rieff are very often the places he departs from his most important influence. In the case of Rieff and Freud … there are different places that you could say he departs. For example, one of the places that Rieff, along with other critics of Freud, seems to depart from Freud is that Freud is very much the therapist and the patient are a negative community. And if things go well, the patient can resume being a more or less rational individual with no need of the therapist, right? The point is that you don’t need even the therapist anymore. And obviously you have transferences, it’s complicated, but what Rieff believed was, in fact, that your community, that your social group is actually really important to your well-being. That’s one place very different from Freud, but I think the most important place is that Freud said, “Every renunciation of instinct becomes a dynamic source of conscience.” Let me say that again. Every renunciation of instinct becomes a dynamic source of conscience. And you might say, “Well, that sounds almost Christian.” Right? But, of course, what Freud believed was that when you renounce the instinct conscience, which he does not regard as moral or rational, but as persecutory, increases your suffering. That’s where your neurosis comes from. It’s a bad thing. Freud believed that it was going to be necessary to relax the requirements that society, that the group has of the individual, in order to ease that individual’s suffering. Rieff agreed that’s probably where suffering comes from. But he thought it was a good thing, not a bad thing. That is to say when you suffer because of renunciation, you aren’t necessarily contributing to neurosis. Instead, you may very well be contributing particularly in a culture which is functioning correctly. You may very well be contributing to the strengthening of your own character. Sometimes he calls this inwardness. In other places he calls it soul-making. And this departure from Freud, there’s a deeper one. Freud believed that the primary process in the psyche is the drives, is the desires. Zondervan’s book, which is just outstanding, and everyone who’s interested in Rieff should read Zondervan’s book, and I endorse it wholeheartedly. Zondervan actually corresponded with Rieff about this because Rieff never made it super clear in his own work. But what Rieff argues is, “No, the primary process can’t be the drives because the drives are not only irrational, they’re utterly disordered. If you want to know how conscience is ordered, you can’t start with chaos.” What he believed is that conscience is ordered by what he calls a primary cultural process. That the culture which is around you, when it’s functioning, when it’s working correctly, sinks deep into you and orders your conscience rightly, and conforming to this right order strengthens your character and makes you a more graven person, that he called the idea of being carved into stone. That your character is developed precisely because you come up against the desires of the id and don’t give into them. It doesn’t necessarily make you sick. If you’ve got a functioning culture, you don’t get neurosis from that, you get character. He’s sort of departing from Freud in thinking about what is most fundamental about the ordering of our own psyche. From this departure then, if he’s going to think that culture is primary … First of all, he obviously doesn’t mean being able to recite Lord Byron and go to the opera. That is high culture. Sure, that’s a form of culture, but that’s not what he means. What he means by culture is the morally restrictive demands of the group sunk into you early and reinforced by what’s around you, and then you reinforce it yourself by obeying. The technical term he used for this no is interdicts. And the culture which functioned best, clearly in his view though he never puts it that bluntly, is the Jewish and Christian culture. He said that when the Jews met God, the first thing they had to learn is what they were not allowed to do to each other. That culture is conveyed by this sacred no. What’s interesting is while he accepts … Much of Freud’s economy … I shouldn’t say economy of the soul, because Freud doesn’t believe in one, economy of the person. He accepts much of Freud’s economy of the person on really fundamental grounds. He turns it upside down. And the relationship to Freud is one of both acceptance and rejection. James Patterson: This is heavy stuff. This is a redeployment of Freudian concepts in a way that returns to a more traditional anthropology. And maybe this explains partly why his own colleagues, especially people who worked in the same sort of study as him, didn’t like him. Right? In many cases what they see Freud as partially or entirely dismantling, he’s part of the big three with Nietzsche and Marx, right? The three moderns that will undo modern life. What accounts for the rise of the therapeutic and Rieffs concern for its displacement of a more traditional religious culture? William Batchelder: Well, I think what’s happening with the rise of the therapeutic, and you and I get into this some, James, in our article about Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael for the book, and Chris Anadale does a beautiful job in the book where he talks about Self-Knowledge after Rieff. He has a chapter called Self-Knowledge After Rieff, and he really gets into this in a way, fr…

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Religion and the Republic Feb 05, 2025

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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 Links American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order “Challenging the American Creed” – Mark Noll 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. 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 positi…

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The Disgrace of Legal Ed Jan 20, 2025

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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 Links Books by Ilya Shapiro:Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s ElitesSupreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court 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, 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…

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A Voice in the Modern Wilderness Jan 06, 2025

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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 Links John Wilsey, “Peter Viereck’s Unadjusted Conservatism,” Law & LibertyPeter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Winston ChurchillPeter Viereck, Conservatism RevisitedPeter Viereck, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment John Wilsey, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (pre-order)Claes Ryn, “Peter Viereck: Traditionalist Libertarian?” Law & LibertyRobert Lacey, Pragmatic Conservatism 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. 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 r…

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Debt Politics Dec 18, 2024

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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 t…

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Optimism for the Western Project Dec 18, 2024

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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 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. 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…

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Keeping it Real Dec 17, 2024

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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.” 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: The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen)The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah SobierajIrony 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) 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, 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…

Full show notes at the publisher

A Higher-Ed Renaissance? Oct 28, 2024

Show notes

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. 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. 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,…

Full show notes at the publisher

Defending the Electoral College Oct 11, 2024

Show notes

This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Dr. Gary Gregg, author of Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College, on the foundations of the Electoral College, its connection with the Founders’ concept of deliberative democracy and the formation of reasonable majorities, and the federalism and separation of powers purposes it serves in our presidential system.

Additional Law and Liberty Resources:

Derek Muller reviews Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College.

Conservative Fusion Oct 08, 2024

Show notes

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.

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