Stephen F. Knott joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent book, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. James Patterson: Hello. You are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is April 10th, 2023, and my name is James M. Patterson. I’m a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, and at the Institute for Human Ecology, and president of the Ciceronian Society. My guest today is Dr. Stephen F. Knott. Until his recent retirement, Dr. Knott was a professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Prior to that, Dr. Knott was co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, where I met him and worked for him for a little while. His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post, Time, Politico, The Hill, oh my goodness, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, I’m exhausted. He is author and editor of ten books dealing with the American presidency, the early republic, and American foreign policy. His most recent book, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy, was published by the University Press of Kansas in October 2022, and it will be the subject of today’s interview. Dr. Knott, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Stephen Knott: Well, thank you, James. It’s always great to reconnect with you, and I’m looking forward to our discussion. James Patterson: Listeners don’t know this, but I promised to interview Dr. Knott maybe a little while ago. And so if he throws any barbs my way, understand that they’re all very earned on my part. So for those who haven’t read the book yet, one of the things that might surprise the reader is that Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy has a very strong personal component to it in a way that other scholarly works of yours have avoided. So what is it about Kennedy that makes the subject so personal? Stephen Knott: So, James, I grew up in a Kennedy-worshiping family in Massachusetts. And I use that term worshiping with some precision. As far as my mother was concerned, she was of Irish Catholic descent. When John F. Kennedy broke that glass ceiling that had kept Catholic or any non-Protestant out of the White House, from that point on, he could do no wrong. So my earliest memory, believe it or not, is of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So in addition to growing up in a kind of worshipful Kennedy environment, my earliest memories, two of my earliest memories, one is the missile crisis and seeing the fear on my parent’s faces as they listened to President Kennedy in October 1962 talk about the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba. And then shortly after that, my father came home with plans for a bomb shelter in our backyard. That’s my first memory. My second earliest memory is of the assassination, and my mother sitting in front of this grainy black and white television watching the news from Dallas that President Kennedy had been murdered. So both in terms of my memories and also just in terms of the environment that I grew up in was a rock-solid, New Deal, new frontier family. And my editor suggested, along with some friends that, that personal angle might set this Kennedy book apart from the other 40,000 titles that have been written about President Kennedy. James Patterson: Right. It’s a very moving sort of introduction about the context in which you grew up. And I know a lot of … I’m at a Catholic university, and I know a lot of people of a certain age that had that very similar experience. Another thing that I had wondered that made this book a little bit more personal was your previous book to this one, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, 2019, University of Kansas, or the University Press of Kansas, I always get that wrong. So you had a pretty strongly critical tone of the modern presidency. And so maybe developments in recent history had made you reconsider the legacy of Kennedy after growing up maybe a little bit more critical of him as you describe at the early part of the book. Stephen Knott: That’s absolutely right, James. My previous book was critical, is critical of a number of the modern presidents, including President Kennedy, to some extent. And I actually wondered at times if perhaps I was a bit too critical. And I started thinking that way, particularly in light of the Trump presidency, which I viewed as quite destructive. And looking back at least at Kennedy’s rhetoric, one can see a president I think who generally appealed to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, who viewed the United States as the last best hope, and belatedly, but nonetheless somewhat firmly tried to move his fellow white citizens in the direction of fulfilling the promises of the Declaration of Independence. So I still remain somewhat critical of Kennedy in terms of his embrace of this progressive notion of a kind of boundless presidency, where the president can be as big a man as he wants to be. I find that’s still very problematic, but I also think that some of Kennedy’s rhetoric did appeal to the best in us. And I thought it was time, after 60-plus years on this planet, for me to revisit my earlier beliefs about President Kennedy, and perhaps come away with a more nuanced understanding of this president and this man. James Patterson: As a subject, Kennedy really is a fascinating moment in American politics. It’s at a critical turning point in the Democratic Party. Its coalition is shifting. And Kennedy himself is an Irish Catholic, we talked about that, at a moment when American Catholic culture was really beginning to experience its most popular moment of Notre Dame football, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day. So what is it about this moment that Kennedy is capturing that is part of what makes him so successful in winning the nomination and then just barely successful enough to defeat Richard Nixon? Stephen Knott: Yeah. I think Kennedy is very much sort of a personification of mid-20th century Catholicism for better or for worse. Again, Kennedy breaks that glass ceiling and makes a very firm commitment to the American people and to his fellow Catholics that he is going to take his guidance from the American Constitution and not from Rome. Now I know there are some folks who believe that Kennedy set far too high a wall of separation between church and state. And to this day, he remains a controversial figure in the minds of a lot of conservative Catholics. But I do see him as a kind of Catholic Irish immigrant success story that a lot of fellow Catholic immigrants really glommed onto, so to speak. And again, in the minds of so many of these folks, he could do no wrong after that point. One of the reasons, James, that I wrote this book is I do see a kind of cultish aspect to the support for John F. Kennedy, and that I find somewhat disturbing in a republic, whether it’s a cultish support for Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, or John F. Kennedy, there’s something troubling about that. But I did witness it up close and personal, and again, particularly for somebody like my mother who had to fight for the establishment of a Catholic Church in a very small New England town dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. She fought that fight in the late 1940s, and then 10 or 15 years later, there’s a fellow Irish Catholic sitting in the White House. It’s just important for your listeners to understand just how important that was to people of my parent’s generation who were Catholic. James Patterson: My mother was at a Catholic school, and I want to say this was when she was in Washington, although it was when she may have been in Hawaii. She was the daughter of a man in the Army, he was a sergeant, and was the only Nixon supporter in her entire Catholic school and received very, very bad marks when writing an essay in favor of Richard Nixon. But the family, my mom’s side of the family is very old Republican, so this of course unpopular at her Catholic school. So let’s get into the meat of the book, which is about the presidency. It’s not a long presidency for very tragic reasons well-known to our audience. But one of the subjects you open with is on the civil rights movement. And I was very excited to read this section because I wanted to know what you had to say, especially because I have read a considerably long book on the same subject by Steven Levingston called Kennedy and King. And I think your reading of Kennedy is much friendlier and sympathetic, given that Kennedy was facing a number of trials at the same time. Stephen Knott: That’s absolutely true, James. I do think there’s been a tendency on the part of both the book that you just referred to and many other scholars to be highly critical of Kennedy for what, as one author refers to him as a bystander when it comes to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There’s definitely an element of truth in that accusation. Kennedy was very cautious at first in terms of his actions as president dealing with civil rights. But I think sometimes folks forget, first of all, just what a narrow victory Kennedy had over Richard Nixon in 1960. And that victory was based in part on carrying some key Southern states, the state of Georgia, for instance, gave Kennedy his second-highest popular vote, just behind Rhode Island. And this is a man who just squeaks into the White House. There’s kind of a cloud surrounding that election, to begin with. And then he’s confronted with powerful barons in Congress from these Southern states, who are rock-solid Democrats, but also rock-solid segregationists. So he does tread very carefully, there’s no question about it. He promised in the 1960 campaign that with the stroke of a pen, he could end discrimination and federally funded housing, and he waits until well over a year and a half to finally do that. But I do think, James, by his third year in office, or by 1963, excuse me, he puts the full weight of his White House behind what will become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And I would strongly recommend to your listeners that they go onto YouTube and just watch Kennedy’s speech from June of ’63, which was an address to the American public, where he puts civil rights as his top domestic priority, and he cites the Declaration of Independence. He cites the American Constitution. He cites our Judeo-Christian heritage in favor of a vigorous federal effort to finally break down the walls of segregation. And he’ll spend the last four or five months of his presidency lobbying for that civil rights bill. And there’s a reason why he’s in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. He’s in trouble in the South. He has alienated a significant portion of the Democratic Party’s base by identifying himself with Dr. King, with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And I think he deserves credit for belatedly, absolutely true, but belatedly putting the full pressure, if you will, of the White House behind a significant piece of civil rights legislation. James Patterson: Yeah, that’s right. He does embrace this language of Judeo-Christianity in precisely the way that Dr. King had, and that element to his speech is picked up and continued through the passage of the ’64 act, in fact. So I was very taken by the treatment you gave of the speech he gives. It was a really good balance, really a correction to a lot of the anti-Kennedy stuff out there, which I have to admit I probably in my own work have been too readily accepting because of my own biases against Kennedy, obviously that I’ve inherited. Another subject that comes up in the book and really gets a finesse treatment given your foreign policy background is a little issue that came up during the Kennedy administration called the Cuban Missile Crisis. What exactly was going on with the Kennedy White House? And why was it that they decided to deal with Cuba, the missile crisis, as well as attempting to stage a coup the way that they did? Stephen Knott: Well, James, Kennedy had campaigned in 1960. He took a very hard line on Communism. He’s one of the few mid to late-20th-century Democrats who actually outflanks his Republican opponent on national security. In other words, he comes off as more hawkish than Richard Nixon. And he accuses the Eisenhower Nixon administration of having lost Cuba just as Nixon and some of the Republicans had accused Harry Truman of losing China. So Kennedy beats up his Republican opponents on this issue of Castro coming to power in 1959 during the Eisenhower years. And he suggests that he’s not going to tolerate that. And, of course, you end up with the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961. Now he had inherited a plan from the Eisenhower administration to try to topple the Castro government. We could talk for hours about the differences or the changes that Kennedy made to Eisenhower’s plan. But the bottom line, that thing was just a total disaster. He took full responsibility for it, but he also continued to try to topple that government. And you end up with something called Operation Mongoose, which was a campaign of economic sabotage, but also a campaign involving trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. So this is the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That administration–the Kennedy Administration–had been trying to kill Castro for quite a few months prior to that. And, of course, the Soviets and the Cubans were well aware of this. When Khrushchev decides to gamble and put these offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba, I think he thought, Khrushchev thought, that Kennedy was somewhat weak, somewhat vacillating. He had canceled any air strikes for the Bay of Pigs operation. He had stood by while the Berlin Wall went up. And there may have been a calculation on Khrushchev’s part that Kennedy would not respond in a firm manner regarding the missiles in Cuba. Now Kennedy does respond in a firm manner in terms of authorizing a blockade, or a quarantine, I should say, of Cuba. But what we didn’t know at the time was that Kennedy also made some pretty significant concessions to Khrushchev in order to get the Russians to pull those missiles out. And so we secretly agreed to remove the missiles that we have on the Soviet border in Turkey, and also, we agreed to not invade Cuba again like we did in the Bay of Pigs. Those things were kept very quiet, very hush, hush. And one of the interesting things that comes out of the missile crisis, and the reason I can say this with certainty, is we have tape recordings of everything that was said in almost every meeting about the missile crisis. And John F. Kennedy was consistently the most dovish, for lack of a better word, the most determined to avoid a military conflict with the Soviet Union, while demanding the removal of these missiles at the same time. So I give Kennedy considerable credit for a very effective management of that crisis, which was the worst of the Cold War that could’ve easily degenerated into a nuclear conflict between the two superpowers. I do think it’s due to Kennedy’s willingness to put himself in Khrushchev’s shoes, to make some concessions, to demand the removal of the Soviet missiles, but also to allow Khrushchev to save face. And I think we averted World War III by Kennedy so doing. James Patterson: Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the discussion on the issue of Cuba was that we focus a lot on the relationship that Kennedy had with Khrushchev. Normally, his presentation is one getting kind of yelled at by Khrushchev hammering his fists and/or footwear on various objects at the United Nations. But really, the part that I was most interested in was how slowly but surely, there’s this sort of emergence of a three-way relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev and Castro. And Khrushchev’s relationship with Castro eventually helps with the thawing of the relationship with Kennedy because of what Khrushchev’s got with this guy and Cuba, and what he’s demanding Khrushchev do with the missiles. So if you could tell any bit of that story just to tease it up for your future book buyers, I would be very grateful because it’s one of my favorite parts of the book. Stephen Knott: Well, thanks, James. I have to say it, I’m glad you sort of highlighted this. I do think there’s a tendency to put almost all of the blame on JFK for the missile crisis. The fact was this was an incredibly reckless gamble on Khrushchev’s part. But more importantly, what emerges from a close examination of the missile crisis is just how zealous, how I would say, dangerous Fidel Castro was. He was furious at Khrushchev and at the Kremlin for the decision to pull those missiles out. Castro wanted this thing to go to the mat. He was itching for a conflict. And some of the statements that Castro made, both publicly and privately, to folks in the Russian hierarchy, really bone-chilling. I mean, look, saying things to the effect, if they want to take us down, we’re going to take them down with us. He didn’t particularly care if the whole world got embroiled in this conflict. So there’s a recklessness about Castro that I think a lot of Western observers to this day still ignore. If you don’t believe me, you can look at the accounts written by Khrushchev’s son, Sergei Khrushchev, in which he talks about some of these really dangerous, irresponsible statements made by Castro at the height of the missile crisis, to the point where it really turned Khrushchev and the Politburo off. They became very concerned about Castro’s stability. And I think that’s a part of the Cuban Missile Crisis that just doesn’t get enough attention. James Patterson: In my version of the text, it’s this great part of the book, and pleading for a first strike in the event of an American invasion, Castro told Khrushchev that this was an opportunity to eliminate the chance for the Americans to strike first against the Soviet Union, quote, “An American invasion would be the moment to eliminate such danger,” Castro told the Kremlin, this quote, “Harsh and terrible solution was the only solution, for there is no other.” In Moscow, Khrushchev, the man who once promised to bury the capitalist West, and who had flaunted the possibility of nuclear war during the summit with Kennedy in Vienna of 1961, was astounded by Castro’s proposed final solution, quote, “This is insane. Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him.” Stephen Knott: Absolutely true. And again, not to beat a dead horse, but I’ve often felt that Fidel Castro to this day gets something of a pass from a lot of Western observers who sort of admire the fact that he stood up to the big bully to the north. But there’s an element of Castro’s zealotry to the cause and to his hatred of the United States that is particularly … It’s disturbing in an era of nuclear weapons. And I think he had a kind of cavalier attitude about those weapons that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev had, thank God. James Patterson: It’s sort of like, “Well, if they start a nuclear war with each other, maybe they’ll forget all about me down here.” So this is something of a silly question, but it came to mind when I was reading that quotation. But is it true that Kennedy before imposing the embargo, picked up a bunch of Cuban cigars to keep for himself at the White House? Stephen Knott: I believe that is true, James, if my memory serves correctly. I don’t know if I talk about this in the book or not. But I know I’ve come across references to, I believe, somebody in Pierre Salinger’s staff. Salinger was Kennedy’s press secretary, was somehow able to get ahold of these Cubans. Kennedy did like a good cigar, and I think that story is absolutely true. James Patterson: Well, I do like a good cigar as well, but I would never violate the embargo. That would be wrong. So Kennedy had an experience of war, and you mentioned earlier that he was dovish on nuclear war. To what extent did his experience serving in the Pacific theater influence his position on conflicts with the Soviet Union or other powers, especially given that this is a period when we’re starting to see the emergence of the problems in Vietnam? Stephen Knott: Wow, terrific question, James. I mean, Kennedy’s hatred of war, I think is, an aspect of his persona that is another one of these somewhat unexamined or underappreciated areas. His letters home while he served in the South Pacific during the second world war are filled with anti-war references. Now look, he wanted to defeat the Japanese. I mean, he was a patriot. He wanted the United States to succeed in that war. But he really developed a firm hatred of war. Two of his crew members were killed during that PT-109 incident of August 1943, where Kennedy was the skipper of a PT boat. Two of these young men were killed. One of those young men had talked to Kennedy about having had a dream in which he was killed in the war. And Kennedy notes that this young sailor was sort of obsessed with the idea that he was not going to make it home. Sure enough, he did not make it home. And Kennedy writes in one of his letters his regret that his efforts to get this guy transferred off his boat did not succeed. Now look, there may be a lot of aspects of John F. Kennedy’s character that none of us can find particularly admirable, but in this case, it does strike me that Kennedy had a principled, a deep and abiding objection to war, he had seen it up close and personal. And when he’s president a mere 20 years later, by the way, these are not particularly distant memories. PT-109 was in 1943. He’s in the White House less than 20 years later. And his hatred of war leads him both in the Berlin crisis in the fall of ’61, I would even say at the Bay of Pigs in April of ’61, the missile crisis in ’62. And I would also apply this to Vietnam. I just don’t think John F. Kennedy would’ve gone to the lengths that Lyndon Johnson did in terms of committing over half a million American soldiers to Vietnam. This was a man who hated war, who had seen it up close and personal, who had lost his oldest brother in the war less than a year after the PT-109 incident. So again, this is an aspect of Kennedy’s beliefs that I don’t think is appreciated. And yes, you’re absolutely right, James, it does guide his foreign policy and his national security decisions. And by the way, I would just add to this, there’s a reason why some of the hawks in the defense department at that time, I’m thinking particularly of General Curtis Lemay, who was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, thought that Kennedy was soft, thought that Kennedy was an appeaser like his father, as a lot of folks liked to say. And you know what, they were onto something. Kennedy hated war, and that guided his decision-making process in the national security arena. James Patterson: Reading here in the chapter on Vietnam, Kennedy added that the United States was prepared to consist them, but I don’t think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort. And in my opinion, the last two months, the government has gotten out of touch with the people. Here are the people, I think you mean the Vietnamese people. Kennedy hoped that it would become increasingly obvious to the government that they will take steps to try to bring back popular support for this very essential struggle. He was cautiously optimistic that the South Vietnamese would regain the support of the people with changes in policy and personnel. Absent those changes, the chances of winning would not be very good. Do you think that with the way Kennedy was approaching Vietnam, had he lived, we would’ve had a different experience there? Stephen Knott: I do think so, James. And let me start off by saying I’ve gone 180 degrees on this. I used to be firmly in the camp that John F. Kennedy would’ve followed the same course of action or a similar course of action as Lyndon Johnson. I mean, it was Kennedy’s best and the brightest, McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Rusk, et cetera, who guided Lyndon Johnson into that war. But, after writing this book, after listening to White House tape recordings, and after combing through countless documents, it’s very clear to me that Kennedy was a skeptic about America’s role in Vietnam. Now he broadened it, no question. The number of advisors that went from Eisenhower to Kennedy was pretty striking, I think 700 or 800 perhaps when Eisenhower leaves office, to 17,000 by November of ’63. So that piece of evidence will tend to suggest that Kennedy would’ve escalated. But I think it ignores the fact that throughout the major meetings on the course of the war in Vietnam, Kennedy is one of the most skeptical voices in the room who was constantly pushing back against those folks who were arguing for a greater American role. And let me add this: Kennedy spent a considerable amount of time in so-called French Indochina in the early ’50s as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And it had quite an impact on him. One of the things I admire about John F. Kennedy, whether as a president or a member of Congress, is he had a tendency to go outside of official channels to gather information. And when he’s in French Indochina, he’s meeting with mid-level officials who aren’t giving him the sort of State Department official diplomatic line. And they are expressing to him their concern that we are moving towards sort of picking up the slack of this French Colonial regime, and that would be a disaster. So he remembered those conversations from 10 years prior when he was a junior member of the House, and again, throughout his presidency, you see repeated skepticism about these optimistic assessments that are coming out of Vietnam. So I’m part of that school of thought that speculates, and I grant you it’s speculation, that had he been reelected in ’64, he somehow would’ve tried to pull off a negotiated settlement in Vietnam, similar to what he and Khrushchev had done in nearby Laos. James Patterson: Kennedy’s presidency really is a dramatic test of America’s replacing basically the British Empire as a kind of preserver of trade access on the open seas, and ensuring, at least in most cases, some level of peace among nations. And so you can see how Vietnam, especially with its connections to Communism, would be such a difficult knot to untie. This sort of aspect to governing with Kennedy is very tough to parse out. So I wanted to move to something that’s actually at the beginning of the book. Maybe I should’ve started here, which is that Kennedy’s got this very famous advertiser, at least among political scientists, it’s famous, in which the song is (singing). Do you know what I’m talking about? Stephen Knott: I know what you’re talking about. James Patterson: Listeners who don’t know, I won’t torture you with my atonal singing. It’s on YouTube. You can listen to it. It’s one of the most vacuous modern advertising ads there is. Stephen Knott: No question about it, James. Look, part of the reason why Kennedy manages to win the White House in 1960, even though at the beginning of 1960, he’s still somewhat of an unknown entity, he was not the favorite of party leaders in January 1960. They were looking at Lyndon Johnson. They were looking at perennial candidate Adlai Stevenson. They were looking at Senator Hubert Humphrey or Senator Stuart Symington. Kennedy and his father, who of course had experience in Hollywood, understood the power of public relations, and they took advantage of this new medium of television, which was really catching on by 1960. And you end up with some vacuous things like that ad that you just cited. And of course, you also end up, and this has to be acknowledged, Kennedy and those famous four debates with Vice President Nixon, he just looked good. He came off well on television. Nixon looked kind of pale and sweaty and shifty-eyed. Kennedy had worked on his tan for the previous days leading up to the first debate. Kennedy wore the correct color suit. He knew the importance of imagery. And I understand that as a criticism of JFK. However, where I differ, I think some folks take that a little too far. He was not just good looks, good hair, I’m jealous of the hair, good teeth. There was substance to the man. He had an interest in history. He particularly enjoyed historical biography. He had a very inquisitive mind. He had an ability to think, as we say today, outside of the box. And so where I differ with some of his critics who say that he would be long forgotten were it not for Lee Harvey Oswald, I think that’s patently false, and it’s unfair. This was a man of some substance, in addition to being perfectly suited for this new technology of television. James Patterson: Yeah. To that point, there’s a great discussion you have of the experience the Soviets and the Americans have in the testing of a nuclear warhead called Big Ivan, which was terrifying to read. And you conclude when discussing how Kennedy responded to its detonation, such a speech, the speech that he gives in response today would flummox many Americans. And you say this because of the level of detail and attention that Kennedy gives on the subject of nuclear weapons. I wanted to ask you about this because: Do you think that Kennedy was lifting people up and addressing them seriously as the Americans who would be affected by his policies? Or do you think that today people talk down to constituents so that they’re no longer required to think hard about policy decisions? Stephen Knott: That’s a really terrific and tough question, James. I mean, I’m inclined to say that Kennedy liked or preferred to talk up. And I’m glad you did cite that passage. And by the way, there are other speeches as well, which I think would probably not work today, simply because they are aimed too high. That is an element of Kennedy that I do admire, he and his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen. They were wordsmiths of a sort, and they were good writing team. And I do think Kennedy’s rhetoric is some of the more impressive rhetoric in the history of the United States presidency. But yeah, I think today a lot of that speech you mentioned, where in response to the Soviets resuming atmospheric testing, even his missile crisis speech from October ’62. I’m not sure that would work today. We have gone backward I think in terms of the kind of rhetoric that the American people seem to respond to, even reading the transcripts of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. They’re actually fairly highly pitched and they’re quite impressive in that sense. And it’s one of the sad things to see that today in this era of soundbites and social media, the constant back and forth on social media, where people insult one another, part of the reason I wrote that book was to show the American people that there is an alternative, and it’s not that far removed from the present day. James Patterson: One of the striking passages towards the end of the book on the subject of Kennedy’s assassination is much of the blame for the proliferation of Kennedy conspiracy theories rests with Lyndon Johnson and his creation of the Warren Commission, which surprised me. Although, I later learned what you meant by that. But Johnson normally gets a lot of credit for using the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination for pushing through a lot of great domestic agenda reforms, like the Civil Rights Act, but also going to great excess with Vietnam. I had not heard this, although I’m not a great Kennedy scholar, not heard this discussion of Johnson being the person responsible for the conspiracy theory. So why don’t you explain that while I put my tinfoil hat on? Stephen Knott: Sure. Let me say right off the bat, James, I’m not a conspiracy … I’m not somebody who’s into these conspiracy theories. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy and most likely acted alone. But what I meant by that statement was that Vice President Johnson, who in some ways as you mentioned, did handle the transition quite skillfully, did put pressure in a sense on what became known as the Warren Commission to point the finger at Lee Harvey Oswald and to remove any speculation that the Soviets, or the Cubans, or both were somehow behind the murder of President Kennedy. Johnson’s concern was that if that was the conclusion, that could spiral out of control, God knows even end up with World War III. Keep in mind, November 22nd is barely a year after, just slightly a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so things were still quite tense between the United States and the Soviet Union. And Johnson wants to make sure that this commission comes out, quote, unquote, with the right conclusion. And the right conclusion, according to Johnson was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Now I happen to believe they got it right. But the fact that there was and we now know there was this pressure to come to that conclusion casts a shadow over the verdict in a sense of the Warren Commission. James Patterson: I took it off, so no one can hear the foil crinkling. It was just not good for broadcast. But was Kennedy a conservative? Stephen Knott: Yeah, that’s a good question. I have made the case to a number of my liberal friends that I don’t think you see a great society with a two-term presidency of John F. Kennedy. Again, it’s speculation, I could be wrong, but I’d like to think it’s informed speculation. I think Kennedy being the son of a businessman, and also not quite the new dealer that Lyndon Johnson was. Lyndon Johnson saw himself as completing the New Deal. That’s not what John F. Kennedy was about. And again, I don’t see the kind of massive great society proposals coming out of a second Kennedy term. Again, partly due to this little bit of a distance between the Kennedy family and the Roosevelt family due to bad blood going back to the second world war, Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s father, being Roosevelt’s ambassador to England, and then being recalled in somewhat negative circumstances, to say the least. But also again, just the Kennedy coming out of a very different milieu if you will, and he’s not the new dealer, he’s not the worshiper of FDR that Lyndon Johnson was, and I just don’t see the same sort of gut reaction or the gut sympathy for the kind of massive programs that will come to characterize the great society. Let me add to this, by the way of course, conservatives like to point this out, Kennedy’s proposal for a tax cut in 1962, I believe, which does become law, and would later be cited by President Reagan as an example of kind of supply-side economics. Now Reagan may be a little bit off the mark there, but that’s a gesture that I don’t see … It’s not a gesture. That’s a policy that I don’t see Lyndon Johnson pursuing. James Patterson: I think I wanted to end this with these broader questions. I shouldn’t have launched you into such a difficult question without any warning. What did Kennedy do to the presidency? I mean, you’re a great scholar of the American presidency, a student of it for many years. What do you see as Kennedy’s legacy? He was not in office that long, but he died very tragically and at a critical moment. Stephen Knott: Yeah. He was only president for two years, 10 months, and two days, so that’s a mere blip in the history of this country. But by the way, this goes back to your previous question. I do see John F. Kennedy along with Ronald Reagan, and this again maybe plays into this notion of Kennedy being somewhat conservative. Both of those presidents I think believe in American exceptionalism, which I know is a controversial doctrine these days. But I think of the entire Cold War presidency, those two presidents, Kennedy and Reagan, made the most compelling case for the superiority of the Western world over the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. And I see Kennedy’s rhetoric, his inaugural address, his American University speech in June of ’63, his civil rights address in June of ’63, and his speech at the Berlin Wall in June of ’63 as some of the most powerful rhetoric in the history of this country, in the history of this presidency, and again, I see all of those speeches as appealing to the better angels of our nature. And in that sense, I see John F. Kennedy as a very positive force, somebody urging his fellow citizens to give something back to their country, to engage in service before self. That’s very positive. The negative side of the equation, the negative impact on the presidency is he is very much a part of this 20th-century progressive view in the president being as big a man as he wants to be. Going back to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, and of course, Franklin Roosevelt, this kind of unbounded presidency that sort of promised the world to the American people. And I think what that did is set up both the presidency and the federal government writ large for pretty dramatic fall, if you will. It’s simply impossible to deliver on the promises of the 20th-century activist presidency. And Kennedy is very much a part of that, and I acknowledge that forthrightly in the book, and I see that as the most egregious legacy of his when it comes to the American presidency. It’s simply an unsustainable conception of executive power. James Patterson: The myth of Camelot that was the sort of way of dealing with the publicity of the Kennedy family as a kind of happy family, and behind the scenes, of course things were not so happy. And Kennedy also had some pretty serious medical problems. But the myth of Camelot after his assassination really did dominate the way that people interpreted Kennedy, as well as the … You mentioned the wordsmiths like Sorensen, very captivating kind of writing style for an audience that wanted to hear lot of the conclusions they were reaching. Feel like that whole world has really come to an end. And it seems like this is a good opportunity to be writing such a book about Kennedy because you no longer have to tussle with the Kennedy industrial complex sort of raining down their official line on anyone who wants to make serious inquiries. Is this a change that you’ve noticed? Am I off-base with this? Stephen Knott: Well, you’re very much on target, James. Part of the reason I had drifted away considerably as a younger man, my admiration for John F. Kennedy really began to wane, I even reached the point where I considered myself a Reagan Democrat, and maybe even adopted that belief that he was sort of just good looks, good hair, good teeth, et cetera, telegenic. That’s gone. But you’re right, Camelot is gone. That was a creation of Jacqueline Kenned. Less than a week after her husband was killed, she told the most prominent journalist in the United States that her time in the White House with the president was similar to sort of the hit play, hit musical of the era of Camelot. It lasted for maybe 20 years. It’s long gone. And I say thank God it’s long gone because one of the things I saw when I worked at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston was this kind of manipulation of history that was very much a part of the family’s attempt to control the image of John F. Kennedy and the entire family. And as much as I was a Kennedy devotee at that time, I was also a devotee of history. And I really disliked the fact that decades after the fact, you have family members exerting veto power over particular authors gaining access to presidential papers at the John F. Kennedy Library. It was very disturbing to see. But that’s gone. Camelot is gone. The family efforts to control history, to control of shape, manipulate President Kennedy’s reputation is gone. And thank God for that. It took far too long, but I think we finally are at the point where we have a more nuanced understanding of this presidency. And hopefully my book will serve to contribute to that deeper understanding. James Patterson: It certainly did for me. And that was one of the things that I came away from the book really feeling, which is why I wanted to ask you that before we came to a close because it felt like a kind of post-Camelot book, both because it was a sympathetic reading by a more conservative scholar and not the kind of reading you would expect. So it was a pretty remarkable conclusion to reach by the end. Just as a final question, does Kennedy have anything to teach us today? Is there something about Kennedy’s example? And here I mean in a positive as well as in a negative. Kennedy kind of gets a lot of criticism because of his personal problems. But of course, we had a president recently and is now running again who deals with the same kind of issues. Is there anything about Kennedy’s experience that should teach us as people voting for presidents what to expect, or how to handle their decision? Stephen Knott: Well, I would like to think that the Kennedy example provides all Americans, and what I tried to convey in this book is this journey that I’ve been on. I would like to think that after reading this book, that perhaps American citizens will undertake a similar journey. We are kind of locked into our own ideological cocoons, unwilling to sort of look or read about individuals from the past or the present who may disagree with us. John F. Kennedy I think in many ways was one of the least ideological presidents we’ve ever had. Now that doesn’t mean he didn’t have principles. I think he actually did. But he was not an ideologue. He did not view politics as a blood sport. And I think all of us should stop viewing politics as a blood sport. One of Kennedy’s, they weren’t close friends, but they got along tremendously well, was Barry Goldwater. Kennedy and Goldwater talked about going around the country in 1964 and debating each other without any sort of media panel, just the two of them sort of going on a road trip, talking about the issues of the day. John F. Kennedy did not view the opposition as traitors. He did not view, as I keep saying, politics as a blood sport. And hopefully, if we could get back … Not that this was a golden age, not that this was Camelot, it wasn’t by any stretch. But there is I think some lessons to be learned from a more civil type of politics, where people across the aisle could talk to one another in an intelligent fashion and not personalize it, not turning it into some sort of mud-slinging event. We all have something to learn from that lesson, I believe. James Patterson: I’m reeling here at the idea of a Kennedy Goldwater traveling band. Stephen Knott: Yeah, they talked about it, James. James Patterson: Oh, man, what they took from us. Anyway, thank you so much, Dr. Knott, for coming on here, especially for your patience with me. This was a really enlightening book and I hope everyone listening decides to go pick up a copy and read it for themselves. Stephen Knott: Thank you very much, James. I really appreciate the discussion we’ve had today. And I look forward to us getting together again. Maybe we can have a cigar, maybe even a Cuban cigar. James Patterson: Well, we don’t want to break any rules. I’ll take you up on that. Bye now. Stephen Knott: Bye-bye. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or however you get your podcasts.

Will Inboden joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama, a collection of documents related to the 2008–2009 presidential transition. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. And thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Welcome and hello to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m the contributing editor with Law & Liberty, a visiting fellow with Independent Women’s Forum, and a few other things. And joining me today is Will Inboden, who is the executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, and an assistant professor at the LBJ Policy School, both of which are at the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome, Will, to Liberty Law Talk. Will Inboden: Thank you, Rebecca. It’s great to be with you. Rebecca Burgess: Well, I am very excited to talk about a book, which I’m not sure is on many people’s radar. Because everyone is so excited about your recent Reagan book, they haven’t realized that you have recently put out another edited volume, very large in fact, which is called Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. Just came out at the very end of February, and Brookings Institution Press published it. I have to say, I was recently at a conference, I had the tome with me on the table, and several people picked it up and passed it around, and they were so excited. Because this book is really novel. It represents about 30 or so different transition memos that the George W. Bush team wrote to the incoming Obama team in 2007/2008, as the new president was getting his team ready to take up the reins of government. And something like this, as far as I know, has never happened. Would you give us a little bit of the story, the summary of what this book is? Will Inboden: Yeah. Thanks, Rebecca. And I do think that, at the risk of immodesty, it is a very unique book. I don’t know of any other book there’s ever been like this particular one. If that sounds too grandiose for listeners, I’m not saying it’s the most wonderful book ever, listeners can judge if it’s good or bad. But just the type of book it is. I’ll emphasize what I mean by that. First, that has all of these declassified transition memos. And to give our listeners some context, these memos, when they were first written at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, most of them were classified top secret, others secret. So high classification levels. And according to standard American government practice, they would not have been declassified for at least 30 years or maybe longer. And so just the fact that we were able to get them declassified after just 15 years, which again, is a while, but not near as long as it normally would’ve been, that is very unusual. Second thing that we did, which I don’t know if another book that is done, is in addition to taking these declassified memos so that readers can see what did the world look like to outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration in 2008/09, is we had quite a few of the people who had originally written these memos, now write retrospective essays on them. So these are former Bush National Security Council staff, who now 15 years later, looking back saying, “All right, what do we think we got? What do we think we got wrong?” So it’s a little bit of grading your own report card, right? It’s a self-evaluation. But still, a good chance to take some of our own internal thoughts and reflections and put them down on paper. Then the third thing is we also commissioned some outside scholars, Mel Leffler of University of Virginia, Martha Kumar, one of the most eminent scholars of presidential transitions, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins SAIS. And it had them write their own evaluation essays saying what do they scholars think the Bush administration got and got wrong on national security, on the transition, and so forth. And so to have all of those documents between the covers of just one volume, like I said, I don’t know of any other volume there’s been like this. And so there’s any number of angles from which people can look at it and digest it. Rebecca Burgess: I love that it doesn’t leave to future scholars. It’s almost living history, it seems like. Maybe not quite, but that it’s a certain transparency about it of showing the inner workings of government. And I should mention, because I didn’t previously, who the other editors are that are involved in this volume, and the fact that you have a very nice forward from President George W. Bush himself and a note from Condoleezza Rice. But Stephen Hadley, who had served four years as assistant to the president for National Security Affairs is kind of the main editor. And then assistant editors are Peter Fever, who under Bush, served as the special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff. Yourself, who at the time you were senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff, and you also worked in the state department’s policy planning staff, correct? Will Inboden: That’s right, yes. Yeah, and the Bush- Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. Will Inboden: Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: And then Meghan O’Sullivan, who was special assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. So very well-placed individuals there at the top who were in the middle of all of these things at the time. And I would love to ask in a question, maybe a step back, why does this book happen now? What was the thoughts that you all had that clearly at some point there was conversation, maybe it was over whiskey, maybe it wasn’t. Where you said, “You know what we need to do, is declassify or see if we can declassify some of these transition memos and put it together in a book.” And not just put them together in a book, but also write these postscripts, these kind of evaluations on them. Where does that process come from and what is it trying to do? Will Inboden: Yeah. So the process was started, and all credit here, by Steve Hadley himself, who had been the National Security Advisor at the time and had overseen the original drafting of these memos. And also overseen the transition process when Bush is leaving office and the Obama team is coming in, and Hadley advanced that. We’ll want to talk a little bit more about just how important but little understood that process is. Steve came to me about four or five years ago with the idea for doing this project. And wanting to know if I and Peter and Meghan would be interested in helping him out. One reason Steve originally approached me is I sit on the advisory committee for CIA and another advisory committee for State Department on expediting the declassification of old documents and getting them in the hands of scholars. And so I was already doing this kind of work for the Reagan administration, the Bush 41 administration, the previous administrations, so was able to help Steve with some of the mechanics of getting these documents declassified. And it’s an interesting thing about American law, even though President Bush, as president at the time had complete authority over the classification of these documents. Once he’s out of office, these documents are the property of the United States government, not President Bush himself. And so he could not, now as ex-president just wave a wand and say they’re all declassified. They had to go through a very rigorous process that current National Security Council officials oversaw, which took about a year and a half to two years. So that was the original genesis of Steve Hadley wanted to do it. And there were two reasons why he wanted it done. The first is transparency and informing the American people of this is how national security is handled during a presidential transition, including a transition from a Republican to a Democrat, and an outgoing two term one, to an incoming one. Where there were real differences over policy, but at same time, I think I shared sense of duty to serve the country and protect the country. And the second reason is Steve Hadley wanted to produce a pretty extensive record of what was Bush administration foreign policy. We’re recording this as we’re… this week is the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. Obviously, one of the most controversial aspects of Bush foreign policy. And there’s a big section in here on Iraq. But as a way of reminding people, reminding scholars, reminding ordinary citizens that there were a lot of other things that went on during the Bush administration. A lot of other policies that we worked on, some things we got right, some things we got wrong. And putting these documents out there so that people can make up their own minds, but a part of the, I think trying to provide as full of accounting as possible of the Bush administration legacy. Your listeners will know, I’m hardly objective on this. Right? I served this administration for five years, so I don’t want to pretend to scholarly objectivity. I’m very proud of a lot of what we accomplished. And will also tell you, I think we got a number of things wrong as well. But whatever you think of the Bush administration foreign policy over those eight years, everyone will agree that it was consequential. Right? That some very important things happened, some of the good, some of them bad. And so I think to at least understand that, it helps to have these documents and these essays evaluating them. US President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack Obama depart the North Portico of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2009, for Obama’s inauguration. (Larry Downing/Reuters/Alamy.com) Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely agree. And I think just as a little side note, as you were saying that you’re hardly an objective observer. Sometimes maybe I think we downplay the importance of having people who have been involved actually give their own thoughts and feelings about it. Because at the end of the day, we’re not automatons. Even those who work in government are not automatons, they’re individual human beings who are also using their emotions and their intellect to evaluate. And maybe we can get into this in a little bit, but in writing these memorandum, assessing situations, it’s very much intelligence gathering type of an operation, even though we don’t think about it in those specific terms. And of course, what parameters were you using to make those evaluations are very much based on our personal involvement and with them often. So I was wondering actually if we can step also back a little bit and talk about transitions, because you were mentioning this, and what goes into a transition between two presidents. That’s one level. The second is between two different parties, Republican and Democrat, as you mentioned. The third with this particular, is there’s war going on. But then also just this basic fact that no president starts with a clean slate. No one gets to come in with an absolutely fresh new virgin landscape of domestic or foreign policy. And foreign policy, it seems to me this is where this really comes into play. The rest of the world is still doing its things. And a new president has to step in. And how does the country, the United States of America preserve a certain continuity with all those countries when there are different presidents? Is this the role of the agencies? There are so many agencies. I don’t think most Americans could name which agencies are involved in foreign policy, that there’s not just state and the National Security Council, there’s USAID, there’s multiple other of these things. How do you coordinate those activities and how do we start to think about it? And is this where the practice of writing transition memos in a sense starts coming from? Is this what President Bush in 2007 is thinking about? Maybe just walk us through a little bit of some of these things. Will Inboden: Yeah, there’s a lot there, and you tee up some really great questions and I have some really good thoughts there. I think the first thing to say is this, is that there is a two and a half month period roughly, for a presidential transition. Right? Between election day, the first Tuesday of November, and then inauguration day, which is almost always January 20th. So it’s about that two-and-a-half-month window. And during that time, you still have one president. Okay, so the outgoing president stays president up until 11:59 AM on inauguration day. However, during that true two-and-a-half month time, the outgoing president is the lame duck, and the incoming president is putting together his, maybe eventually her team has some ideas on the policies they’re going to want to pursue. And so it’s a very complicated and delicate time. And the bad guys in the world, the threats, the potential terrorist attacks, the great power rivals, Russia and China, the rogue state actors, North Korea and Iran, they do not stop wishing harm on the United States during that transition. They’re not going to pause their activities and their threats. Likewise, at any given time, the United States has hundreds, thousands of sensitive national security endeavors underway around the world. I mean, I’ll just give a bunch of examples. Right? So we have troops deployed around the world. We have troops based in dozens, maybe even close to a hundred countries. During this 2008 time, we had two hot wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, those don’t stop during presidential transition. A lot of other smaller-scale operations going on. We have a vast array of sensitive intelligence collection endeavors underway of covert actions that are underway, that again, that the CIA usually is carrying out. You have lots of diplomatic negotiations underway that the state department is leading. Many of them out of the public limelight. You have the development endeavors underway, the different projects that USAID is funding and implementing. I could go on. Those things don’t stop during a presidential transition. And as the outgoing president is on the way out, he is handing over a responsibility for those to the incoming team. The incoming president will then, as commander-in-chief, as diplomat-in-chief, and so on, have authority to maybe change or revisit a number of those operations. But about 90% of them will continue, even with a new president of a new party. And so it’s a very complicated question, how do you keep some continuity going? Those things all, just as the threats to our country don’t stop, those operations and endeavors are not going to stop either. And the National Security Council, as the president’s main advisory and coordinating body for everything related to national security is the nerve center for keeping those going, and thus ensuring a smooth transition. A peaceful transition of power and the continuity of all of these different operations and endeavors. And so that is the backdrop for that very important, but sensitive and complex time, those two and a half months. And so what we had done with these memos originally is think all right, in addition to the different operations going on, we, I say we as both an American but also the Bush administration official, we had a responsibility to hand over as much of our institutional knowledge, our memory, our evaluations of policies to the incoming Obama team as we could. Again, it was going to be up to them to decide what they wanted to do with this or not, but we owed it to them to at least give them as much information as possible. And there wasn’t real partisanship involved in this. I mean, we knew that they had run their campaign in a lot of ways, very critical of Bush administration foreign policy. We thought some of those criticisms were unfair and some of them were fair. We knew ourselves about a number of things that we had had messed up, but also thought we had some good things going that we would encourage them to continue. And so we owed it to them to give them as much of this information as possible, and then they could decide what they will do with it. And part of this came from previous presidential transitions had been a little more messy on the foreign policy. The Carter to Reagan transition, which I treat a little bit in my other book, which you mentioned, was a pretty messy one, that was a pretty acrimonious one. The Clinton to Bush 43 transition, which Steve Hadley had been a part of as incoming one, had been fairly messy. Of course there’d been the disputed Florida recount efforts and things like that. And so President Bush had decided early on in his second term that when it came time for him to do a transition, not even knowing yet that it was going to be Obama, not even knowing who the next one was going to be, that he owed it to his successor to make this as smooth as possible. Rebecca Burgess: Well, I think now all the experts who studied presidential transitions look to the Bush 43 transition to Obama as a kind of textbook handoff. And I’m glad you mentioned the Clinton to Bush because, so I’m in maybe grade school or maybe high school at the point when that happens, and I ended up having to spend a lot of time in doctor’s offices. And I looked at a lot of Newsweeks and Time magazines. And I remember the political cartoons of the things that the Bush administration stepped into, everything from missing Ws on keyboards and things like that. And that what’s in my head, and that’s one of the first questions I remember when I saw this book being published was, does that effort, does President Bush is a slight impulsion to do it better because of how messy it was, at least on the outside, when he came into office. And how much of several steps back that can put an administration, if you’re trying to just get up to speed on something, you’re not quite ready to handle certain things. And I do believe, I think at some point, one of the authors of the book mentions this in regards to September 11th that there’s a, I don’t want to say a reason why, but part of the reason is that wasn’t a lot of a good transition of information going on there. And so September 11th happens because things fall in the crack. Anyway, just maybe some of your thoughts on that. Will Inboden: I do think certainly a part of President Bush’s commitment to doing a smooth and nonpartisan a transition as possible, did stem from his perception that his own earlier transition eight years earlier, the handover from Clinton to him had not gone so well. And again, it had been a disputed election. And there were some other factors too. I was finishing up graduate school at the time and was making some plans to eventually join the Bush administration, but I was not there firsthand for that 2000/2001 one. I think I read some of the same Newsweek articles you did. I will say, on the 9/11 attacks, and again, this is before I officially joined the administration, there probably is something to the messiness of the transition nine months earlier. That said, as you’ll see in here, Bush administration veterans would also admit that they… we, I guess I should say, had not fully appreciated or taken the terrorist threat as seriously as it needed to be. And then you did have someone like Richard Clark, Dick Clark a who had been on the Clinton NSC staff, then continued on the Bush NSC staff, who had been raising the alarms about this as a more serious threat. And he was frustrated that he wasn’t listened to as much. So there may be something to it, but I wouldn’t want to go too far and blame the Clinton administration for the messy transition on how 9/11 came about. There was also, as we know, poor information sharing between the FBI and CIA, and a whole host of other factors, which we learned very painfully. Rebecca Burgess: Once again, the multiple factors and agencies involved doing foreign policy national security complicate things all the time. Will Inboden: Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: In moderation of course, in assigning blame is always good. And generous and humility are good things. And so maybe a way to get into some of the content of the memos and the thoughts about them, I was thinking it would be helpful to just remind ourselves or situate ourselves in that kind of 2000 moment when Bush becomes president, and think through some of the big national security forum policy things that happened. And I remember, so September 11th happens, it’s my first day as a senior in high school. And then decisions to go to war to Iraq, this happens freshman year of college. My career ends up now here in Washington, DC. But for 20 years I’m kind of becoming an adult growing into what this world is that America’s dealing with and partly creating and responding to. And while you’re living through it, you’re aware of it, but you’re also not aware. And I remember a few years ago I was with my then colleague from AI, Gary Schmidt, and we were at the George W. Bush Presidential Library for going to work on some veterans military families issues. And we’re just going through that exhibit. And it was a revelation to our own selves about all the different things and the decisions and the course, I don’t want to say corrections, but pivots that happened, that Bush did not run his elections on. And so I did a quick little list here just to help remind ourselves. So the whole recount issue, Bush actually becomes inaugurated in January of 2000. Almost immediately there is the spy plane issue that happens over China. Will Inboden: April of 2001, yeah. Rebecca Burgess: Which causes great consternation and tensions and hackles to be raised. And very quickly after that, it’s not April. Oh, it is April, I think. Somewhere around April. Bush actually backs Taiwan over China, saying publicly that if China does ever attack Taiwan, America will go to Taiwan’s aid. So that’s very interesting to remember now considering what our current discussions are. But that’s just a few months into his presidency. And then we have September 11th, and then we have in October, of course, the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We have the anthrax scare in October, later in October. We have the withdrawal, I think this is also important to remember, in the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty that happens. Will Inboden: Yeah. Of the US and Russia. Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Which eventually allows us to start testing anti-ballistic defenses. Well, that we have the creation of another agency, Homeland Security. After this, we have the authorization. Then in October 2002, of the use of force against Iraq. Though, of course, it takes until March for us to actually decide to go in. We have February 2003, a CA director tells us that North Korea possesses a nuclear ballistic missile that’s capable of hitting the US. Then, as I already mentioned, we go to Iraq. 2004, we’re already in another presidential debate cycle with Kerry, and there’s all of that. We have the bird flu scare in 2006. And then we are attacking Al-Qaeda in Somalia in 2007. And then now we’re in 2008. And meanwhile there are all these color revolutions going on and Ukraine and Georgia and Kazakhstan. Is it Kazakhstan? Kyrgyzstan. Will Inboden: Kyrgyzstan. Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: Kyrgyzstan. So there are multiple things going on throughout those years, and trying to remind ourselves almost. But because there are so many things, it’s helpful I think to step back and to ask what is Bush and the world? And it seems like the volume is slightly organized around that principle. And starting with the soul of it and then the operationalizing of it, and then the stabilization. So what is the soul? What is the soul of the Bush, either foreign policy or Bush’s approach to the world that comes to the fore? Will Inboden: Yeah. And I’ll say, I got exhausted just listening to that litany, but let alone having lived them. And I come back very much to your question about the soul of Bush foreign policy. But let me just mention a few others too. Also, in February of 2003, you’ve got Bush announces PEPFAR. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ends up being this… We just celebrated our 20th anniversary of that too. But one of the most massive humanitarian assistance programs in history now saves some estimates, 25 million lives, like a $100 billion spent. August of 2008, Russia invades Georgia. We had another war breaking out under Bush’s watch, which we can now look back and see was a foreshadowing of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Then September of 2008, you have the global financial crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. So a lot of things were going on. Okay. So the soul of Bush foreign policy. There’s a number of directions I could take that, but I will say it is best found in the first substantive chapter of this volume, the one on the Freedom Agenda. And this was Bush’s desire or conviction, if you will, that freedom should be a universal right, available to all people. It comes from in part from his Christian faith, his belief in universal human dignity. And also more pragmatic or realist reasons of he just realized that America’s best allies and partners are almost always democracies, and America’s adversaries are almost always are dictatorships or authoritarian powers. These weren’t strong convictions he held on inauguration day when he is first sworn in. It’s something that he’d rather develops over the next couple of years. Largely in response to 9/11. Right? The 9/11 attacks, when he starts asking what are some of the root causes of terrorism? Why is it that these Islamic radicals are bent on murdering thousands of innocents? Where do they get these beliefs? Where do they come from? And realizing that some of it at least stems from growing up in authoritarian sclerotic societies without opportunity. Some of this also comes from his just reading of history, seeing those color revolutions breaking out to 2003, 2004, 2005. Rose Revolution in Georgia, Orange Revolution in Ukraine. We could go through those. And it’s most robust expression you can find in his second inaugural address from January of 2005. Much criticized in some circles, I think much misunderstood. But that is certainly, I think the disbelief in universal human dignity and liberty is certainly an animating spirit or a through line for Bush foreign policy. A couple of other things I could mention are more specifically on Bush dooctrine on counterterrorism, is not distinguishing between the terrorists themselves and the state sponsors, by holding them accountable. Another one is not allowing problems to fester, but trying to take early action to address them before they become even more significant threats. He was always encouraging us, “Think big. Let’s think big, let’s think forward. We don’t want to hand over a ton of lingering problems to my successor, we want to address as many as we can now.” And I think there’s a certain nobility and sense of responsibility to those aspirations. But as we experienced, and as your listeners may be thinking, those can also lead you, as Steve Hadley has put it before, to our reach exceeding our grasp. Right? To take it on too many things. To maybe being a little more reckless when some of these things would’ve been better to let festering. Quite a few problems in international politics can’t necessarily be solved. But they shouldn’t be ignored either, sometimes they just need to be managed. But those would be a few of the features I would put to the animating spirit, as you had asked about Bush foreign policy. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah, so could you maybe talk a little bit more about the Freedom Agenda. A little bit more in depth, but what that means for Bush. Will Inboden: And I do encourage our listeners to, if you can, take a look at the book and read this chapter. The retrospective chapter in the book as co-authored by the late Mike Gerson. Mike just died I think just a couple months ago. And then Pete Wehner, who had both been Bush speech writers and played a key in role in this. But the Freedom Agenda, another one of its antecedents, which is less appreciated, is actually the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as Bush was taking a fresh look at that conflict and asking if there’s any possibilities for negotiations, he realized that a core problem there was Yasser Arafat, who was a dictator ruling the Palestinian people, was not democratically elected, and was a terrorist. Right? And he just decided that there is no possibility or no prospect or no hope for a permanent stable settlement between the two sides if the Palestinians don’t have some voice in their own government, some voice in their own future. And so he develops kind of a grand bargain. He becomes the first president to officially call for a Palestinian state, a two-state solution. But he ties that very much to, “You Palestinians, you got to get rid of Arafat. Because that guy is not a responsible leader and there’s no possibility for peace while he’s there.” So it starts with that strategic calculation, if you will, about the right and wrong conditions for a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. But out of that becomes that broader strategic logic of realizing many of the security threats the United States faces, North Korea, Syria, Iran, China, now Russia. Also happened to be authoritarian or dictatorships of some sort. Meanwhile, more positively, as Bush was looking at what we might call successful or well-functioning countries and societies, almost all them have some form of democracies, some form of self-government, of self-rule. And they usually are going to have healthier economies. They’ll be less prone to going to war against each other or engaging in destabilizing behavior. And so as a combination of these principled and practical reasons, why he decides he doesn’t just want to be managing the downstream bad fruits of these dictatorships and terrorist groups and others, but rather how can we go after some of the root causes and how can we support the possibility of a better life for those people, many of the people living under these. I should also say that Bush here was shaped quite a bit I think by recent history. Because again, as we’re talking about this now in the year 2023, as you and I both know, democracy globally has not had a great run. The last 15, 16 years, it’s been on a steady decline. You see this in the Freedom House Index and other indices. And I think many Americans have grown rather skeptical or less enthusiastic about the possibility of promoting it. But from the vantage point of the year 2001 or 2002, when Bush is first developing these ideas, look at what the previous 15, 20 years of world history had looked like you know, the 1980s and 1990s. Those had been a golden era for democracy. Right? There had previously been a notion in, “Oh, those Catholic countries, they can never be democratic.” Because they’re, I’m being a little crude here, but they’re loyal to the Pope and they don’t think for themselves. And again, listeners, I don’t believe this, but this is what some of the caricature was. But then you had seen a wave of democratization in prominently Catholic countries, Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, Philippines, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, others in the 1980s. And realization, “Okay, so we shouldn’t have made that exception for Catholic countries.” Then there’d been a belief, well, those Asian countries, they can’t have democracy because they’re Confucian, they’re hierarchical, they don’t believe in empowerment to the individual. But again, in the 1980s and 1990s, you had Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, all democratized. I could go on. But then of course, you’d also had the, and I will go on, you had the peaceful end of the Cold War. Right? Where all of sudden these countries, Central and Eastern Europe, who had all lived under communist dictatorship for four or five decades, undergo peaceful transitions to democracy. And so if you were watching world events or reading the tides of history in the early 2000s, and then you’re seeing these new color revolutions of more democracies, it does seem like that is the tide of history. And better for the United States to be supporting and encouraging that, rather than necessarily resisting it. One final important point on this, is the first real strong statement you hear from Bush on democracy is in November of 2003, he gives a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on the net, on one of their big anniversaries. And this is when he comes out and says, “For several decades the United States has pursued a policy in the Middle East of supporting dictatorships and monarchies there, thinking that it would give us stability.” But he said, “We’ve learned since 9/11 that trying to purchase stability at the price of liberty will give you neither stability or liberty.” Now we look at the world today, we can see the Middle East still is a pretty troubled place without very many at all models of functioning democracies. But he was correct, I think, in his diagnosis. And that in a lot of ways, seven years before the Arab Spring breaks out, predicted this current model of these dictatorships and autocracies is pretty brittle. Right? The people are not very happy there. It’s not giving them a good life economically. It’s not giving them opportunity and freedom of expression that they want. And it’s something of a breeding ground for jihadist terrorism too. So that was an important part of his diagnosis as well. I’m sure no one wanted a winded answer. Rebecca Burgess: No. No, it was great. I mean, you could have gone on. I’m sure you have an entire semester in fact, that’s probably about all of these things. Because you could. But I think it’s both helpful and actually quite powerful to give that grounding. Because once again, presidential decisions, statesman’s decisions, matters of foreign policy don’t come out of the blue. Or very, very rarely are they these abstract things that just happen in a person’s brain and then they say them. They’re influenced and shaped by observing how things have happened. And as you were speaking, I was even wondering to what extent the entire experience of 9/11 happening so early and thinking, we have these people who are warning us, and we didn’t pay enough attention how much that experience alone just shaped then the responses that happened with other individuals in other countries and other situations. And saying, we need to just take care of this right now, because otherwise we’re going to have, as we often heard, another 9/11 on our hands. And that was something that was simply couldn’t happen and no one wanted to happen. I mean, in a way I’m almost, I feel like I need 10 minutes to just recoup my thoughts about all of that in a way. So I’m just kind of following the breakdown in the book itself of how it’s organized in these parts. And we have, as you said, the soul of the Freedom Agenda, but then also we have the things that everyone is going to be looking to this book for. Of course, Al-Qaeda, the fight against Al-Qaeda, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, even Pakistan. And then of course I was like, “Oh, there’s one on Columbia. Oh, that’s right, many things are going on in Columbia, are going on in Columbia.” But you also have a chapter of the war of ideas. And I was wondering if you would mention what this is. How you differentiate this within the Freedom Agenda, within the more boots-on-the-ground things that are also happening. Will Inboden: Yeah. So war of ideas, this goes back to this core question that Bush had of the root causes of terrorism. And some of this comes out in the first year or so after 9/11. The United States has some pretty robust initial successes in counter-terrorism, right? We kill or capture quite a few of the other architects of the 9/11 attacks. We’ve got the Jihadists on the back heels. We also realize new jihadists are being created. New generations of young Muslims in some sectors are becoming radicalized and wanted to take up violence against innocent civilians. And that’s where Bush wanted to be clear that we see this as not just the problem of one organization, Al-Qaeda, or a few isolated individuals, but rather there’s this whole ideology behind it. Right? The nihilism, the neo-fascism, if you will, of jihadist ideology. And also taking the enemy’s ideas seriously that the Jihadists did have a certain vision of what they wanted, this rather militant intolerant, universal caliphate. And he decided right there, I think that we need to counter this idea rather than just trying to kill or capture our way out of this problem. And so how do we actually defeat this idea? There’s another important insight here, which is that he decided rightly very early on, this cannot be seen as a war on Islam. Right? We’re not going to go to war against 1 billion people in the world, with the world’s largest religion, spanning every continent. Especially because most Muslims do not support the Jihadists, and so they don’t speak for our faith. And so as part of enlisting a broader coalition against the jihadist, he wanted to support and encourage and empower peaceful Muslims who believed more in pluralism, intolerance, and didn’t believe in that more militant and violent version of their faith. So that was behind the framing of the battle of ideas. And asking, what can we do to de-legitimize and counter and neutralize jihadist ideology, and in turn, going back to our Freedom Agenda discussion, how can we support a positive alternative of free societies? So that was behind the framing of the battle of ideas. Rebecca Burgess: And then this becomes a kind of put into practice with some of the development and aid that becomes part of the agenda. So what were some of the… I mean you mentioned PEPFAR, but there was some other big initiatives which you cover in the book as well. Will Inboden: Yeah. And this was all done under the rubric of what we called smart development. Right? So Bush, again, comes into office, I think, rightly skeptical of some of the, if you will, more traditional or twentieth-century development models of large bureaucratic organizations doing state-to-state transfers or big handouts. Right? And you looked and see, all right, over the last few decades, United States had spent time, I don’t know, maybe something like a trillion dollars on economic aid to poor, impoverished and developing countries around the world. And there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to show for it. Okay? Many of these countries were still corrupt and impoverished. But he didn’t want to walk away from the problem entirely, especially after 9/11, again, where he realizes that some of these same impoverished countries are also breeding grounds for terrorism. And so that’s why he develops a whole suite of new development initiatives under this rubric of smart development, that were designed around principles like accountability, transparency, positive incentives, citizen empowerment. Again, these may sound like just happy talker platitudes, but I’ll give a few examples of what they look like. So he creates the Millennium Challenge Corporation. It’s trying to incentivize other countries to get their governance in order so that they can then receive additional economic aid from the United States. So it’s say, all right, you first have to meet certain benchmarks on anti-corruption, on transparency, on good governance, before you’ll then be eligible for these economic aid grants. So tying it much more to accountability and good governance there. Where PEPFAR, as we’ve mentioned, again, a whole suite of activities, but not designed to support economic growth or other state bureaucracies, but rather just to save lives. Realizing that these countries primarily in Africa are not going to have much hope of economic growth and development if their most young and vulnerable are dying or given a death sentence from being born with HIV/AIDS or if their young, most productive members of society are again being given this death sentence. And so designed to do these health interventions, all right, if we can save lives, then these people can be productive economic actors and help put their countries on a better path. So those were a couple of features of this broader smart development agenda. A lot of which continues today. So I think that is certainly one of the positive features of the Bush legacy. Rebecca Burgess: Well, once again, so much there to think about and to delve into. But I wanted to ask one very pointed question, and then one that hopefully ties into… You end the book on emerging challenges and great power competition and a lot of things that we now are hearing every day and multiple times a day. But before we get there, I just wanted to ask, as you and the team, your fellow editors were going through these memos and thinking about them, at any point did you step back and ask yourself one of the biggest elements of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and something we talk about in the civil military relations community a lot is this, the military went to war and America went to the mall. And that was a product of a very conscious decision on Bush’s and the Bush administration’s part, at least as far as I understand, of trying to encourage Americans to not stop their lives and to continue living and involving themselves in the economy, strengthening our economy and our democracy in those ways, those economic ways. Was that the right decision to make kind of that dichotomy? And was there ever, even in 2008, as you all are writing these memos, is there already a thought of maybe we should have nuanced that in a better way or not made that distinction? So that’s my pointed question. Will Inboden: Yeah. No, it’s a very good one. And it’s hard to think back to… And by the way, just to clarify, I left administration at the end of 2007, so I wasn’t there for the actual production of these memos. But I’ll answer your question more directly. So I’ll say that decision early on after 9/11, to encourage people to go about their daily lives. I will say it was understandable at the time, and I’ll explain why. And then I’ll also say that in hindsight it is one that I regret. Absolutely. So I hope that can be an honest answer for your listeners. But first, on why it was… I will say it was understandable at the time, really two reasons. One is you had mentioned being in high school when 9/11 happened. I had moved back to DC a week before. I was actually at AI the day it happened, with our mutual friend, Gary Schmidt, among others. It’s a few blocks from the White House. I had passed right by the Pentagon an hour before the first plane hit. So this is very vivid. I bring that up because the months after 9/11, the sense of terror did not go away. All of us in DC believed that it was not a matter of if we get hit again, it is when will we get hit again. Right? And you’re just in this constant state of siege. And what Bush wanted to do was find a way for the country to have a very robust and vigorous counter-terrorism response to go kill those bad guys who had hurt us and to stop others from doing it again. But also for the country itself, the 300 million plus Americans, whatever our population was at the time, to not live the next several decades in a constant state of terror and siege. Right? And that is the worst part of terrorism. It’s not just the material costs or the people it kills, is the way it plays with your mind. The way that it takes away the possibility of even living a free life, and instead you are in a constant state of quite literally terror. Okay? So that was one goal he had. Then the other more practical one was, after the 9/11 attacks, the economy goes into recession, the stock market plunges, we are in really, really bad shape. And you realize, look, if everyone stops working and stops producing and stops shopping and stops consuming, our economy will never recover. And so there’s a very practical… And a political leader’s responsibility is to help maintain confidence in markets and confidence in economic activity. And so those were the two, I think understandable reasons why the encouragement to go back to your daily lives and go back to your shopping and your working, they were part of this broader principle of we can’t let the terrorists defeat us, we’ve got to still be living as Americans. But, as you rightly point out, what over time becomes the effect of that, it’s that a tiny minority of the American population, almost exclusively those serving in active duty military, to this I would also add a number of intelligence officers who spent vast amounts of time overseas, a number of diplomats, other national security professionals, that less than 1% of the country carries the vast majority of the burden, the actual burden of the fighting. Whether it’s the literal kinetic fighting or the overseas deployments or the stresses of all the different counter-terrorism problems. And over time, I think that relieved too many of the rest of us Americans of our own responsibilities for some sense of sacrifice, even if it’s not necessarily putting on the uniform and deploying down range. But yeah, so over time I do think that became a pretty corrosive effect. Rebecca Burgess: Just to that point about the sense of terror that didn’t go away. I mean, October of 2001, there’s the DC shooter. There were, what, the two different planes that failed over New York, Manhattan, or that area, and people thought it was another attack. I mean, this all- Will Inboden: The impact that you mentioned, yeah, it was literally a terrifying time for the next year. Rebecca Burgess: And that movie, The Pitch, I’m pretty sure it’s called The Pitch, about Bush going out to Yankee Stadium and delivering the first pitch, which he gives a strike and he’s wearing body armor. And so one, I think it’s a beautiful little film, but it helps remind you about all of those different things. And how powerful and unifying that one moment was when President of the United States without fear walks onto baseballs, and everyone is back in the stadium and saying… So the larger question I had is maybe a little more complicated or not. So about two years ago, the twentieth anniversary of September 11th, Law & Liberty that hosts this podcast, they do these things called forums every month. And they have one big essay, and then they invite people to respond. And they had a historian, William, I’m going to get his name wrong, William Anthony Hay, wrote the lead essay. And it was essentially saying that our decision to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq afterwards is the one reason why America isn’t prepared to deal with everything from China to Russia to all these things. So essentially it was a mistake. In my response I said, “I don’t believe that’s true. I think it showed for us once that we had to start taking foreign policy, national security things seriously again. That we had real enemies. That deterrence, by responding militarily, is a real thing, amongst these things.” But I do have to ask and I do have to wonder, reading through this book and realizing where it ends and where we are today with China and Russia and things that seem to have been constantly in the subterranean ground, I guess, of post-Cold War. Simply we’re not taking care of or not paid attention to. Or maybe that’s our perception. Maybe they were, and maybe that’s what we can find in these transition memos. Is there a way while you’re working within an administration on these of-the-moment questions, like war, to also pay attention to these longer-term festers so that we don’t end up in 2023 with a near war, potentially on our hands with China and Russia, and Russia and Ukraine again? Or is it just simply that, as you mentioned, we can’t solve all foreign policy problems, sometimes we can just manage them and sometimes we don’t pay attention to them? Will Inboden: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I will try to give a balanced answer and I’ll try to keep it somewhat succinct so , we can go on for several more hours on this one. But I will say a few top-line points. First, after 9/11, Bush was absolutely correct to make stopping another terrorist attack his overriding priority, and everything else becomes secondary to that. It had to be that way. And we can be lulled into something of a false sense of security, and frankly, a false sense of history. If we look back, now almost 22 years later, as we’re here in 2023 and say, “Oh, well since there hasn’t been another large scale terrorist attack in the United States, therefore it wasn’t much of a threat.” No, that gets it completely wrong. A fundamental reason why there hasn’t been another large-scale terrorist attack in the United States is because of these strategies and doctrines and policies that Bush developed to stop one. Right? And I’ll continue it out and give credit to the Obama administration or the Trump administration, now even the Biden administration. Every administration since then that has continued to do its part for counterterrorism. There are thousands of jihadist bad guys out there, who for the last 22 years up to now, would love nothing more than to pull off an even larger terrorist attack on the United States than 9/11. Right? So let us not be lulled into, again, like I said, a distorted sense of the threat or history, because we haven’t been attacked again. Second point is during Bush’s first eight, nine months in office, so throughout most of 2001, before 9/11, it is not that Russia and China were significant threats to the United States at the time, and he started focusing on them, than 9/11 happens and he looked away from them. Rather, he inherited from the previous decade a very different set of challenges and strategic framework for both Russia and China. We’ll start with Russia first. The Russia problem that Bush inherited was not a strong, aggressive Russia, it was a weak Russia that we worried was essentially a Somalia with nukes. Right? I mean, was a weak and failing state that still had this large nuclear arsenal, but otherwise was on the potential verge of state collapse. And so the challenge for American policy then was how can we help stabilize Russia. And then, in turn, not treat Russia like an enemy. Because if you treat them like an enemy, they’ll certainly become an enemy, but rather help integrate them into the international system and pursue a more constructive relationship with them. Similarly with China. China wasn’t worried about it being a failed state at the time, but China was still much weaker and was still rising as an economy. And the hope and strategy was, all right, again, let’s treat them more as a friend and hope that they’ll act like a friend, and let’s support this integration of them into the international economic system and so on. So that’s the strategy that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration. And that’s largely the framework he continued. He was a little more raucous towards China than Clinton had been. You mentioned his promised to defend Taiwan, the tensions over the Hainan Island’s spy plane. He called China more of a competitor than a cooperative relationship, things like that. And then of course, 9/11 happens. So those are the two parts where I’ll defend the Bush administration legacy. Here’s where I’ll be more critical. And you can see this in some of the book as well. And hope our listeners haven’t given up on me yet. Right? I do think that by the second term, when I’m on the National Security Council staff, there is becoming more of what you might say, an internal debate within the administration about, “Huh, is China on a good path? Is Russia on a good path?” We still see some ways that the engagement strategy may be working, but we’re also seeing some worrisome signs. We’re seeing that China has becoming richer, but not more free. And that it’s putting a lot more money into its military. And that its military seems to be orienting towards the United States as its main threats, even though we didn’t want to be a threat to them. With Russia, we are seeing that Putin was poisoning dissidents and cracking down on free press. And in 2007 in Munich, he makes some very over-the-top and deranged threats against the West. In 2008, he invades Georgia. And so by the second term, we start to see some initial signs that these two countries are potentially going on in a bad path, a more menacing one towards the United States and our allies. Bush did some things to hedge. This is a big part of why we launched the strategic partnership with India, which I think is still paying dividends today, is to help balance or hedge against a rise in China that becomes more assertive. But I do think that, this is where I’ll be a little more self-critical of our legacy in the Bush administration, that we, two things, one did not become alert soon enough to just what bad paths Russia and China were going on. And second, even for those within the administration who did become more alert to those and were sounding some of the alarms, in 2007 and 2008, we were so focused on trying to salvage things in Iraq with a surge and seeing conditions deteriorate in Afghanistan, that that’s where significant resources and attention were being paid. And so I think we bear some responsibility there for being overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and less equipped, even if we realized Russia and China were starting to become more menacing to do more about it. Rebecca Burgess: I would say that was probably the most tantalizing way of telling our listeners that they need to buy this book and to read the individual memos. That they can come to some of these insights themselves. So once again, that is Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. That’s Brookings Institution Press. And I would just say on a final, final note that your last remarks reminded me of the passage in Hobbes’ Leviathan, where he’s talking about the state of nature. And he does make a note that international relations or foreign policy as an arena, is an arena of the state of nature all the time. And that it’s a little bit like, the best way to understand it is in terms of weather. It’s not that it is a rainy day, it’s a rainy climate. And there are showers and water droplets all the time in which you respond to or how big your umbrella is, is the question of statesmanship. That even in a democratic system, presidents who don’t have all the lovers of power in their hands, yet they still set the tone in so many ways for exactly how administration does that. So this was a wonderful reminder of the complexities of foreign policy, in and of itself, but in democracies. And we are so privileged to have you, Will Inboden, who is the executive director of the Clement Center for National Security, join us on Liberty Law Talk today. Thank you for listening. Will Inboden: All right. Thank you very much. Brian A. Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.

This podcast explores the life of Wilhelm Röpke, a German economist who warned against the Nazis in 1933. It delves into the rise of Naziism, the erasure of individuals in Nazi and Bolshevik politics, and the lessons we can learn from Röpke's speech. The dangers of populism, grounding liberal institutions, and the risks of viewing people as threats are also discussed.

Georgetown Professor of Political Science Joshua Mitchell joins host Brian Smith to discuss his book, Tocqueville in Arabia, newly available in paperback, and offer Tocquevillian insights into the malaise of modernity. Brian Smith: My name is Brian Smith. With me today is Joshua Mitchell, professor of government at Georgetown University and the author of five books, including American Awakening, which we covered extensively on Law & Liberty, and the subject of today’s discussion, the recently released in paperback, Tocqueville in Arabia. Thanks for speaking with us Josh. Joshua Mitchell: My pleasure, Brian. Good to see you. Brian Smith: Good to see you. So I wanted to open with a fairly general question. Which is, what led you to write this book? And now that it’s being re-released, what lessons do you think it is most poignantly offering today? Joshua Mitchell: Well, what had happened in the early twenty-tens, and really even before that, was I had become saturated with academic political theory. I thought that the discipline itself had lost its way. And by that I mean, it had lost sight of its original insight, which was there in Strauss and Arendt, notwithstanding their differences. And that insight was, look we have to return to the great texts of the Western tradition, in order to understand the contemporary moment. And so what Strauss and Arendt did, was they juxtaposed the crisis of modernity in the aftermath of the Second World War, and notably the Holocaust, with Plato, Aristotle and the rest, and effectively invented a field. These books were studied in philosophy departments and probably in literature departments to some extent too. But the unique development that they inaugurated was the conjunction, the bringing together of contemporary events and the great ideas of history, of Western political philosophy. And the problem was that insight, which inaugurated the discipline, was slowly being lost. 1989 came and went, 2001, 2007, 2008, economic crisis. And political theorists were busy exploring secondary and tertiary literature. And it struck me that we had lost our way. And so I left Georgetown. I had been the chair, I had left to go off to the Middle East to help found the Doha campus of Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and then also left Georgetown entirely for two years and went off to Iraq and helped develop the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. But all the time I was thinking about Tocqueville, who is always one of the … he’s the central guy really. I mean, I think of Augustine and Plato a lot too, but Tocqueville is always the central figure for me. And so it occurred to me very early on, really as early as 2001, even before I left for the startup team, that I would write a book about Tocqueville in the Middle East. Because Tocqueville has this grand claim that we’re moving from the aristocratic age to the democratic age. It’s not a claim about Europe alone, it’s a claim about the very movement of history. And so what I concluded was that if his thesis is right, then one could talk about the Middle East as being an aristocratic society engaging in modernity, just as Europe in the 19th century began to become modern. And so I thought I should write a book using Tocqueville’s framework about the crisis of the Middle East. And to come back to your original point, I did that because I thought the only way that these great books are properly studied, is if we juxtapose them with contemporary events. Brian Smith: I think that’s an absolutely accurate depiction of where political theory is at. We have lost this sort of sense of how to juxtapose what’s going on in our world right now, with great and profound insights of all of the authors you mentioned, and the rest of the canon besides. But so what I think hooked me as a reader of this book originally, and a lot of my students over the years who I shared this anecdote with, you open your prologue with this striking conversation you had with a Saudi man in a cafe, on your way to Doha. And you recount what he said about the effects of the 1960s in America, in Europe, and in the Arab world. So I’d like you to talk a little bit about the differences this gentleman was trying to get at. Why you use them as this interesting framing moment in the book, that opens up the field of conversation you want to raise? And what they mean today? Joshua Mitchell: So it’s a great question. I did write a new preface for the paperback, but I did not include references to that conversation, and I wish I had. The reason I opened the book that way, is because as Tocqueville indicated, and is confirmed by our students’ sentiments and prejudices, what’s going on in the West is not universal. And while in the West we’re largely moving toward, let’s say the Anglo world, we seem to be fixated on notions of universalism that may have emerged out of the sixties in America, but there were other 1960s movements. And so I was trying to give the reader a sense really of the plurality of the world. That our account was not the only account. And I think as a device so to speak, that was an important way of getting readers to realize that the whole world is not like us. And what I had said in that introduction was that the 1960s in America, yeah it meant social revolution, but it also gave us Silicon Valley and huge advances in technology. And what I was trying to indicate there, was that Americans are fundamentally a practical people. And while I think that’s true, and I’ll come back to this in a minute, I think the American, what I described as a kind of forward edge of the 1960s, has become deeply pernicious. We can come back to that. But while the Americans are practical people, Europeans are still working out the catastrophe of 1945. And I don’t simply mean the Holocaust and the wars, I mean the utter inability to deal with the problem of guilt. Which we have in America, with respect to the slavery question. But Europe has lost its Christianity, and yet still retained the Christian category of guilt, which was Nietzsche’s prediction. But the catastrophe of that in my view, has been the development of the European Union. And while I did not put it in this way in the book, I put it this way now. The EU purports to be more than an economic union. I doubt it will be ultimately a political union, I think that’s where it will falter. But I think ultimately it’s more than either of those things. It is a public atonement for what nations did in the 20th century. Which is why elite Europeans are not disposed to go back to the national model. They believe that the only way that they can atone for their guilt is to repudiate their nations. And that’s why nationalist movements in Europe are so interesting, because they’re not ultimately going to succeed, unless they’re able to somehow address the problem of guilt in a post-Christian age. In the Middle East, as my friend said at that cafe, they were wrestling with the question of how their fathers had betrayed them. And I mean by this, that many of the leaders, not just political leaders, but thought leaders, had halfway embraced the West. And halfway embraces are always dangerous, because they produce monstrous things, as Hobbes said a long time ago. And so you had a generation of young men who were trying to think beyond the perceived material of their fathers, and so turned to a hypothetical and imagined Islam that would be a comprehensive way of life. And this is Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And for the time it has died down, but I do not believe that we’ve seen the end of this. And the reason, which I believe I indicated very delicately in Tocqueville in Arabia, was that what’s happening in the Middle East, at least in some regions, is you’re moving to a kind of hyper-modernity, which is largely to be seen in the Gulf. And you cannot build a world on hyper-modernity, where everything is disconnected. You have all the accoutrements of life, but nothing is really linked together. And what I saw in the lives of my students was this vicious oscillation back and forth, between embracing autonomy, far more even than our students in America do, one moment. And literally the next moment, dreaming of an enchanted Islamic world from the 12th century. And so I think this movement back and forth between hyper-modernity and re-enchantment is going to be a feature in the Middle East for a long time. It’s died down now, but it will re-emerge. And we need to understand it as a re-enchantment movement. I think the term Islamic fundamentalism is utterly unhelpful. Fundamentalism as we know, emerges in the United States as a category. It’s a term [coined in] 1917 with the publication of the books in Los Angeles called The Fundamentals. So we’re using Western religious understandings, to comprehend what’s going on in Islam. And the crisis is the Tocquevillian crisis. Because what Tocqueville saw, even in the author’s introduction to Democracy in America, was that while one could speculate about how the easy transition would occur from aristocracy to democracy, in fact aristocratic societies do not forget their past. “And so they look backward at the ruins,” to use his exact words, and they dream of an enchanted past. And that’s what I saw in the Middle East. I think again, while it’s died down now, it’s still very much a living option in the future. And then to pose your question, so where do we stand now? And I do say something about this in the new preface. So I think the American sixties generation has largely gone woke. While we’re supposed to be a practical people, what I argued in American Awakening is we’ve moved away from what I, in the latest book called a politics of competence, which would be American practicality. We’ve moved away from that, and we’ve turned toward a politics of innocence and transgression. We’ve gone woke, to use that kind of language. So while in the book I indicated that America was probably the better off of the three groups, the three sixties movements, it’s not clear to me that we are now. I would say that what I said about the Europeans continues to work itself out. They are still profoundly guilty about the 20th century. And so the EU project is their mode of atonement. It is their penance, EU is their penance. And then in the Middle East as I just indicated, I think for the moment it’s died down. It’s going to be very interesting to watch Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, and the other Gulfs, Saudi Arabia, negotiate their way into modernity. My sense is they know it can’t be hyper-modernity. But it’s not clear to me that they have a stable way of proceeding, without encouraging attempts to re-enchant the world. So I think the problem still remains there. Brian Smith: Well and that strikes me, that the enchanted dream that Sayyid Qutb, offers in The Shade of the Quran, to use his title. I mean, you can’t say that that’s not going to be an option on the table for people, especially because he’s explicitly framing what he presents in this dream against the United States. Against his visit to the 1950s in Colorado, and all of this sort of Western decadence that he saw there. And that comparison I think is still going to be lively for the next decade, two decades, unless something … I don’t know what would change about us, that would make that comparison not seem lively to them? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. I think that’s right. But I also want to defend the messiness of, I’ll say America, but I mean something larger than that. I mean the Democratic Age, as Tocqueville understood it. So Tocqueville knew that there would be a temptation to re-enchant the world. And why did he know it? He said because, the current moment, the Democratic Age, has all sorts of discontinuities incoherencies. And it’s not easy to figure out how one should be. So family tells us one thing, economics tells us another, politics tells us another. There are all these domains of life that are running across purposes. And he does ask the question at one point, you might remember it’s in volume two, near the beginning. He asks the question, “So how does religion bear on this incoherence, this difficulty?” Remember, he writes the book and he says, “This entire book has been written under a kind of religious dread.” By which he means, that nothing fits. We’re in God’s world, but God’s world doesn’t fit. And so he asked the question later on, “So what kind of religion do you need in this circumstance?” He says, “Look, there’s two kinds of religion.” We can talk about Islam, and Christianity, and Judaism, and Roman Catholics, and Protestants, but that’s not how he ultimately divides it. He divides it into those religions which offer a comprehensive way of life. Which promise to bring utter coherence to human experience. And I will tell you, he doesn’t believe that can work, and we have to understand why. Because he thinks we’ve been thrown into a moment of history which is incoherent. Where we don’t really know what the future is going to bring. We can’t fully rely on the past, we can’t retrieve it, because we’ve been thrown to this new moment. So he literally thinks that religions which offer a comprehensive way of life are tempting, but literally don’t comport with human experience. So then the question becomes, okay, so what kind of religion would comport with this human experience of disintegration? And he says, “Here Christianity is probably going to serve us better. Why? Not because it’s a comprehensive way of life.” Now, this is a huge question. Does it offer a comprehensive way of life, or not? But his reading is that it doesn’t, it offers hope. And what that means, I think in his estimation, is the world is broken. There’s a promise that it will be healed at the end of time, and the disunities will all be unified. And so what hope allows you to do, is to endure a world which can’t be put together by us now. So that kind of religion can help us endure the fractionalizing that occurs in the democratic age. But a comprehensive way of life attempts to give an alternative, but can’t deliver because life isn’t that way. And he does, we should be clear, he does have criticisms of Islam on the basis of this distinction. That Islam does offer a comprehensive way of life. That’s why he does think, this is again, long before Israel became the thorn in the side of the Arab world. The problem in the Middle East is not precisely Israel. The problem in the Middle East goes way back before that. Namely, modernity is coming everywhere, and Islam professes to offer a comprehensive doctrine. Now, having said that, we also know that there are many Muslim scholars, often in Europe, in England, in the United States, who are trying to provide an understanding of Islam that does precisely what Tocqueville thinks a good religion would do. Which is not to be utterly comprehensive. To somehow accommodate the strange twists and turns of the modern world, without Islam losing its soul. So there is a battle within Islam over this very question. Is it a comprehensive doctrine, or can it work within a world where one cannot find reconciliation? Brian Smith: So one other thing I wanted to draw back to before I go to the next question I actually had planned, which is with respect to what you said about Europe and the sort of repudiation of the nation-state, the European ambivalence toward it, I wonder how much that, how would I put it? Disordered, sort of uneasy sensibility, explains the European ambivalence to how on earth to deal with Ukraine right now? That they’re unwilling to sort of wholeheartedly say, for us nationhood. Now they can be all for Ukraine, but I don’t know how you embark upon this sort of military action, and support, and things like that, with half your heart? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Well so Ukraine, it’s very interesting you raised this. Ukraine has been a difficult question, not only for Europeans, but for conservatives on the right, as you well know. So in the case of Europe, so you’re defending a nation-state, is that what you’re doing? And you’re defending it with a transnational organization called NATO. This is very peculiar. So Ukraine has emboldened both groups. It’s emboldened the nationalists, and it’s emboldened the EU, or of philic types who say “No, the age of nations has passed. And what we’ll do then, is absorb Ukraine into this larger European project.” I mean, this is one of the difficulties that the EU is faced with. It purports to be universal, so where is the boundary of this? Does it march straight through into Eastern Europe? Oh, what about Turkey? Well, it seems a bit disingenuous there, because it seems to me that the real reason Turkey wasn’t included, was the obvious fact that it’s an Islamic country and not a Christian country. So the charter of the EU indicates that Europe has a Christian past, a Christian pedigree, but does not say that it is Christian. But the point is, if you’ve got a Universalist society, it’s very unclear where the boundaries end for that. So Europe is, people are scratching their heads. Those who believe in the nation and the universal project. And then, among members of the right, you know this as well as I do. Ukraine has been a difficult issue. Because on the one hand, many people, and I am affiliated with the NatCon movement. I mean, I’m one of their early members and Yoram and I are good friends. And I think he’s fundamentally right that we have to return to the age of nations. And in that sense, we should be supporting Ukraine. Except the problem is, that the support that goes in that direction, does not look to be oriented by national sovereignty, but by a kind of globalist impulse that encourages, or that includes, all sorts of, let’s say social teachings that are probably anathema to most of the people who want to save Ukraine as a nation, or most eastern Europeans for example. So the project to save Ukraine as a nation seems to be more about the globalist empire of pushing back against any particularism, Russia being the particularist nation. And so the difficulty is whether Russia is a nation trying to defend its own rights, or whether Russia is an imperial power destroying the nations. And I think that’s the way a lot of conservatives who come out of the NatCon movement and are defending our involvement in the Ukraine war, they’re saying, “No no, Russia is an imperial power, trying to push back against a nation called Ukraine. And that’s why we have to defend.” Anyway, it’s going to be very interesting to see how the Republican candidates respond to this. Europe, as we indicated, both of us, there’s a huge question on the forehead of all the Europeans about this. Because it seems to be moving in both directions at once, national and transnational. Brian Smith: Right. And I don’t have a lot to say about it, other than that it certainly worries me, because I’ve read way too much about Russian, previously Soviet and now Russian, nuclear use doctrine and know that they view them as tools, not as this sort of abstract threat. And whatever we say or do about this, however it’s resolved, has to respect, I think … And then this gets to your central insight, the age of nations is not passed. And if we don’t recognize that, and we view, however illegitimate we see some of Russia’s claims, whoever the people who are on Ukraine’s side fully in this, I think need to recognize that Russia has claims as a nation. That if you ignore them, they’re going to continue to feel like they cannot see peace. They cannot embrace peace. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah, I think one of the things that most irked Putin, was when Kerry and Obama, a long time ago, said something like, “Don’t you know, this is the 21st century? And we’re past wars, we’re past the age of nations.” And this is the horrible hubris of the Universalists. And it’s ironic as well, because in order to get to that condition of cosmopolitan universalism, they are using the instrument of the state to achieve that. And I think that’s really the question here. Are these elites going to be able to use the instrument of the state to destroy the state? And I think that’s one of the great questions of the 2024 election. Are we going to continue to elect leaders who are not fixing on the United States? I don’t like mantras like America First, et cetera. But it does seem to me that elites who are elected by their own people ought to be concerned first and foremost with the wellbeing of their own citizens. Brian Smith: Their particularity, their way of life, is what their elected to defend. So use a phrase, which I of course heard you say a great deal in the classroom, but that I think might be usefully teased out here. You talk about people who are possessed by the fable of liberalism quite a bit, in your writing. And one of the things that occurs to me as we’ve been talking, is we’re often talked about right now, as being in a post-liberal Moment. That liberalism is being shown as the illusion. Or to use our former colleague’s phrase, “It succeeded and therefore it failed.” Which I don’t think I agree with, at least not in Pat’s terms. But I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, before we move on to the aristocratic versus the democratic age question that I have planned? Because I think this one might be useful for helping think through this question, particularly on the American right. On the side of these debates, to help us understand where the fault line really might be. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. So I invoked the term, fable of liberalism, not to indicate that it’s a lie. But it’s strikes me that every political argument, every political position, has a story that underwrites it. Mythos precedes logos if you want to use that kind of language. And there is a story, there is a fable that is the preamble to the liberal frame of mind. And that story emerges out of the religious wars hundreds of years ago. And you can see this in Voltaire, for example. Not known necessarily as a liberal, but his famous saying, “I go to the English stock market. I see Jew, Christian and Muslim. They don’t care about each other’s religion, as long as their money is good.” And the liberal fable is that once there was an age of war, and by setting our sights lower on commerce, then we can bring about peace. And what is interesting is that both left and right largely hold to this fable. So we’re in a mess with China now. Why? Because we gave them WTO, Most Favored Nation status. Why did we do that? On the left, why did the Clinton administration do that? Because it believed in the fable of liberalism. So let us lower our sights. Let’s not look at the metaphysical differences between China and the West, which are considerable. Let us lower our sights and engage in commerce, and that will bring peace. And then on the right, this happened as well. In the aftermath of 2001, George Bush without wincing, thought, “Well, the reason why there is terrorism, is because these people have not yet entered …” I used that phrase in quotes, of course. “Have not yet entered into the age of commerce. Let’s get actively involved. Let’s help them develop commerce.” This is the fable of liberalism, both on the left and the right. And the problem is, it is true that it unfolded that way in Europe for a time. I mean, it didn’t put an end to religious conflict. But the general supposition of the liberal, and here I don’t mean the Toquevillian liberal, but most liberals. Because I think Tocqueville actually, he saw the theory and the move past it, and we can talk about that. But the general supposition is, let’s just bring commerce and everything’s going to be fine. This shows up, by the way, even in our domestic policy. So Jack Kemp says, “The problem of the inner city.” Which is a euphemism for the Black underclass. “Can be solved by enterprise zones.” So it’s both a domestic and a foreign policy disposition of mind, that goes very far back. It’s 1720s with Voltaire, where gets worked out through Montesquieu, it’s lurking in Hobbes. It’s there in Tocqueville and any number of other figures. So it’s a deep, deep idea. It’s a deep, deep fable that we have, that continues to inform foreign policy. But it does not recognize that people are not simply driven by their preferences, there are deeper things at work. And this has been my great apprehension, with respect to say, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Because now what they’re using to figure out US foreign policy, is gaming simulations based on this rational actor economic model of man theory. Which is idiotic, because the rest of the world doesn’t behave the way the models behave. And I’ve got a piece coming out soon with the American Conservative, that talks about the Iraq War. I mean, we are not, let us submit and agree that America is a preeminent power, limited imperial power, whose task it is to make sure the sea lanes are open. I’m prepared to live with that. But the difficulty there, is that if we have destroyed, and we have done that. We have destroyed the vast reservoir of knowledge that was accumulated after World War II, by the area studies experts, which were then destroyed. You saw this at Georgetown, were then destroyed. Brian Smith: Absolutely. Joshua Mitchell: After 1989, when area studies became comparative politics and adopted rational choice theory, to try to understand the whole of the world. This was utterly idiotic. It was in a way purely American, because we wanted to simplify everything, and not understand the richness of these cultures, and the motives that the citizens have. So it let us submit that we have a responsibility. That empire has passed to us in a modest way, of keeping the sea lanes open. We don’t have the capacity to understand peoples around the globe, because we have accepted the crude prejudice of the fable of liberalism. That somehow commerce, by destroying the rich understandings of human life, and reducing them all to commerce, we can somehow bring peace. So we’re in a terrible position, in terms of our preparation, to understand the world. And yet we have this massive military, and a group of thinkers at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, who are utterly impoverished in their thinking. Brian Smith: And the irony here I think is, if you actually talk to people who lead soldiers, sailors, marines, they’ll understand on an intuitive level how people are actually motivated. Their subordinates are motivated by that whole range of interests that people from Thucydides, and honor in the classical tradition of IR would talk about. Isn’t just interest, it’s fear, it’s honor, it’s principle. And without pulling all of those in, the way that Tocqueville … I think here of some of Dan Mahoney’s more recent stuff on statecraft. Joshua Mitchell: Yes. Where he talks about the way that all of these great statesmen actually encompass that whole of the human experience, in the way they make their decisions, and attempt to persuade their people, and engage with other leaders. If we don’t bring that whole mix of things, I think everything that you’re saying about the disaster that’s looming before us, and that’s already upon us in many respects, will just keep on reaping horrible dividends. But let me add something here. So one of the things I’m thinking through these days, is the transformation that is underway at the moment. So let’s just pause at three moments here. I’m thinking out loud, but I think this is right. So we had that moment after World War II when the GI Bill guys saw a horrendous world out there and said, “We don’t want that to happen again.” First they went and got PhDs, and then they became our ambassadors. So they were really, really smart people. Brian Smith: John Rawls? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah, right. Yeah. So my dad, as you probably might know, was a member of this group. I mean, he wrote the first book on the Muslim Brotherhood. But all of his friends went on to be ambassadors. Jim Aikens, Bill Crawford, all became ambassadors in the Middle East. And they would have ongoing conversations. So our ambassadors were studied men. And after 1989, we thought the Cold War was over. We’ve reached the post-war period. And so for lots of reasons, we gave up on all that, bad reasons. And turned to the second moment, which was kind of a rational choice model of human agency. And so we do gaming to figure out whether we should go to Iraq or not. And you hear today, “Gaming simulations have indicated that we can beat China in the South China Sea.” Please. There’s no gaming simulation that can tell us anything about what’s really going to happen. So that would be the second Moment. We turned from deep knowledge, to a kind of superficial social science knowledge, which professes to understand the whole, but is so superficial that it can’t really make any predictions. And this is what you always have to ask social scientists. Give me a non-trivial prediction, based on your so-called science. And they cannot do it. And we’ve been doing this for well over a hundred years now. But I think we’ve entered into a third moment, and this will dovetail with what I said in American Awakening. The third moment is that we are no longer using these extensive training grounds, called universities and colleges, to produce expert competence. Even if it’s rational choice, social science expert competence. No no, that’s not what we’re doing now. What we’re doing is, we’re teaching our students fear and guilt. We are teaching them where they stand in the moral hierarchy of purity and stain. And you can be somebody who’s deeply stained, but you’re a useful idiot as long as you keep announcing that you are permanently guilty, and that you have privilege. And that seems to be what our university elites are now teaching, and we’re going to have a generation of people who think that way. And we already have. And I do think the Biden administration represents a watershed. So as much as the rational choice theory does damage, because it does not accord with the multivalence of human persons in societies, this might be even worse, this next phase. Because the only criteria we use is moral purity and stain. So the military now is not concerned with winning wars, it’s concerned with going green, and making sure that the innocent victim groups get the surgeries they need. I mean, this is really a new phase, and we have to recognize in itself. And the reason I say this at this moment, is because I think conservatives really need to upgrade their language. This is not progressivism. Progressivism was concerned with expert competence, and at least it believed in competence. The founder’s vision believed in citizen competence, and that’s why you could have small government. And conservatives keep talking about the importance of small government. None of this works, and here I draw directly from Tocqueville, unless you’ve got citizen competence that runs very deep, so that you can have a minimal government. So at least the second moment of American history, the progressive moment, believed in competence. This third moment that we’re now stepping into, the age of the new regime change. And it is a regime change, which is concerned not with either kind of competence, citizen or expert. Now our universities are training people in fear and guilt. And as long as they, I don’t call it virtue signaling, I call it innocent signaling, because it is a biblical category. As long as they signaled the right things, then they get a pass. So it’s a new phase, and it already has drastically affected our foreign policy. We will see nothing but incompetence and disasters, so long as we step away from what I call the liberal politics of competence, and move toward the politics of innocence and transgression. Which is the project of identity politics. Brian Smith: Right. And right now it’s already upon us. You can find on Twitter entire accounts dedicated to photographing the Sovietization of the US Navy. And when you talk to sort of expert logistics people who have recently gotten out of the Navy, which I’ve done. I mean, one of the things I point to is, it’s the slow creep of incompetence, in the face of this guilt catechesis. When you have, say a missile cruiser that goes out, and 10% of the crew is on leave for training academies or pregnancies. And another 10 or 20% are being sent to ever more required, check the box, mandatory education schools. And some of them are for learning nuclear engineering or whatever the next thing they’ve got to learn is, to get promoted. But 10% of it now is DEI training. Which if you don’t get certified, check the box to do that, you don’t get promoted. And so lots of sailors get out. And the captains and NCOs on these ships are forced to say, “Well what critical maintenance can we defer or cut, just so we can keep the ship running?” Joshua Mitchell: And so American ships are coming to port covered in rust on a regular basis, which they never would’ve been in the Cold War. Or even up until fairly recently, simply because there’s not enough hours of the day to stretch the human beings who are still competent, over the time remaining. Let me add something to this which nobody’s talking about, but I think we really need to think about. So let’s talk the Navy ships crashing into atolls and one another. So yes, we’ve moved away from what we’re calling here a politics of competence. We have to ask the question, what has allowed us to do that? And I think one of the things that nobody’s paying attention to, is that increasingly, as the world is operated by algorithms, then you seem not to need competence. And so you’ve got this interesting moment, where I think we’re living in right now, where increasingly we’re moving away from, or we’re trying to render competence as computer algorithms. So we’re going to have an algorithm to steer the ship. But if that goes wrong, then you’ve got a terrible problem. But if it goes right, you can carry on and push forward, away from competence, toward this politics of innocence and transgression, because you’ve got algorithms that are going to actually steer the ship. So this is going to only blow up when it becomes clear that either we need new algorithms, and there’s nobody to write them, because there’s nobody competent to write them. But I think ultimately what this is pointing to, is the need to recover competence. Another way I put this in the book is, there’s real analog competent knowledge. And then digitization is a substitute for it. So algorithmic substitution, supplementary is possible, but ultimately it all hangs together through competence. But we’ve made a bet that we don’t need to have this competence, we can turn toward algorithms. And then we can populate the workforce, not with competent people, but with woke people. So we’ve got to bring the algorithm part in here too, ’cause that’s really important. It’s not just on ships, it’s everywhere. It’s airplanes, everything. Brian Smith: Absolutely. And this actually does really relate back to Tocqueville in Arabia, I think in an important way. In that this is only thinkable under the pursuit of equality. Because you deny and you kick competence down the road when you don’t believe that experts can, or should be trusted. Or to set aside the highly credentialed expert thing, you don’t have that relationship with the mechanic, or with the teacher. That you defer to their competence anymore. You trust in the algorithm for the answer, but no longer have the judgment of when to use the darn thing. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah, great point. And let’s go back to the mechanic. So if a mechanic has competence, you’re going to trust him, and you’re going to build a relationship with him. And I remember this. I mean, we knew our mechanic personally. But if increasingly, cars don’t require the competence of a mechanic, but just computer automation. And everybody is taking their cars to the big city to get them tuned up once every couple of years, you don’t have this personal relationship. These algorithms, the proliferation of these algorithms, the effect of them is to destroy the local face-to-face associations that we really need. So the more we have these computer-generated algorithms that take care of everything, customer service for example, the more we’re going to be frustrated. The less and less we’re going to have any need for our neighbor. So this problem of algorithm substitution for actual competence, it is the great experiment we’re running right now. And my view is, because there is an actual by nature, proper relationship between supplements and substitutes, and algorithms can supplement but not substitutes for human competence, I believe the whole thing will blow up at some point. Because ultimately, we cannot turn supplements into substitutes. This is an ancient insight which is there in Plato, it’s there in Rousseau. I think it’s even there in Tocqueville, it’s lurking. But his formulation would be, the state can be a supplement to the mediating institutions in which we develop competence, but it cannot be a substitute for it. Brian Smith: And without the linked men, as opposed to the de-linked men who are necessary to make civil society run in the Tocquevillian understanding, we’re going to get that government stepping in. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Brian Smith: We’re going to get that trust in the algorithm that promises we could do it. I mean, as you were speaking, in my head I went back to conversations we once had about Leviathan and Hobbes. That the Leviathan has become this not immortal God, but the sort of invisible one floating in ones and zeros on the web around us. Which we turn to, to humble the prideful. To select who should be selected for various things, as if there wasn’t a person or a thing, sort of actively making choices that inform that algorithm. But I wonder if part of the backlash, and maybe this will drag us back to Tocqueville a bit more is, do you think maybe this backlash will be felt most keenly among the vestiges of aristocracy, and the horror of the de-linked people that they have, that you talk about quite a bit in Tocqueville in Arabia? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. And so this is my hope. And I should also point out, it’s Tocqueville’s. I think what Tocqueville understood, and you just said it, was that aristocratic peoples understand that Universalist aspirations are not ones that we can build a world around. I mean, I think for example of Burke’s distinction between the excellence of simplicity, and the excellence of composition, in the writings on the French Revolution. It’s a remarkable insight, because the democratic soul operates with a frame of mind called the excellence of simplicity. I’ll give you an example. Covid is here. Everything must be shut down, the only problem we have is Covid, and the state has to step in. With the excellence of composition, which is an aristocratic way of thinking, everything is connected. Well, if we shut down the economy to save people from getting Covid, there’s going to be all sorts of collateral damage. Maybe we need to think about seven or eight things at once, rather than one thing by itself? And of course, Marx is the perfect example of this excellence of simplicity. Class is the key to everything. One thing is the key to everything. Or identity politics, it’s all about identity, that’s the only thing that matters. This is another example of the excellence of simplicity. But the question is then, where does one learn, or how does one learn, this excellence of composition? And while Burke doesn’t really lay this out, Tocqueville does. I mean, where do we learn that life is constant trade-offs? We only learn this in face-to-face associations. Rich connections, where we discover that the family is … well, we have to do this in the family, but we also have to do this. And then if we’re in a family, what do we do with our neighborhood? And all these rich questions, which don’t admit of a kind of Universalist single key answer. And so I think, well I know what Tocqueville says is … And you know this Brian, it’s what saves democracy from itself, are these mediating institutions. Where do these media institutions come from? They come from the aristocratic age. They are the survivals, the church, the family, the municipal institution, the legal system based on precedent. These are survivals of the aristocratic age. And of course, now you stumbled upon the central paradox in Tocqueville, which is the very institutions that we need, these aristocratic institutions, are undone by this democratic frame of mind, that there’s only one answer. So for the aristocrat we’ll say, well men are men, and women are women. And we’re going to partly understand each other, but it’s a real distinction. No, the democratic soul is completely incensed by a real distinction that says, “No no, we’re all the same.” Which is of course, the project to destroy sex differences in the democratic age. So aristocratic souls are the ones who grasp this in their bones. And what Tocqueville had hoped, was that since there are no longer nobles around, there would be a substitute for them that would occupy the mediational space. Well, you know the rest of the argument. It’s our families, it’s our churches, et cetera. And so it’s only by engaging in those rich associations and all the complexities associated with them, that we come to develop this excellence of composition, which allows us to make proper judgments about the complexity of the world. Unlike the democratic soul that says, national security state, Covid, bring democracy to the free world, or the whole world. These single key measures which purport to solve all of our problems. It’s idiocy, but it’s only possible when you destroy those rich associations, through which we can be confirmed in our understanding that no, there’s no single answer here. Brian Smith: Well, and trying, as we both have for, I don’t know how many years? And you combine the two of us when we’ve taught, together would be, it’s a lot. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Brian Smith: One of the things I continually found, and I know you continually remarked onto me, as we were talking about, well what does it mean to be a professor, and moving on. Was just, you can’t suddenly take kids who have, to take the phrase you use in Tocqueville in Arabia, that don’t have any hermeneutic of deference, and suddenly give it to them. And suddenly develop that in them. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Brian Smith: It’s the work of years. And it’s remedial work for most American, and as you encountered, world college students. But I don’t think it’s impossible. And don’t think you’ve seen that it’s impossible. So maybe we could talk a bit about what is still possible, with bringing students along in an encounter with texts to develop this? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Brian Smith: Totally new to them, kind of judgment. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah, it’s a great question. Here again, Tocqueville is so helpful. So his scheme of course is, there’s the aristocratic age and the democratic age. And there’s a number of characteristics you can identify with each of them, and they map onto each other, so in opposite ways. So in the aristocratic age, you’re looking to the past. You’re looking to the fathers literally, but also figuratively. In the democratic age, you’re looking to the future. Therefore, the aristocratic age is concerned with imitation, and the democratic age is concerned with innovation. So how does this play out in terms of the way we think about knowledge in these two distinct moments of history? Well, in the aristocratic age, there’s a hermeneutics of deference. By which we mean, we pick up a book, we read it, we have reverence for it because it came before us. Because it’s been handed down to us. Because by virtue of it being ancient and reverential, it exceeds our immediate understanding, and therefore we defer to it. And while I am, as you know, my relationship to Strauss is very mixed. But one thing I think we eternally owe a debt of gratitude to him about, is this hermeneutics of deference. I mean, he would tell his American students, “Listen, you don’t understand this book. You think you do, but what you need to do is to approach this book and pose your questions, but immediately say to yourself, the author has an answer to my question, which I don’t even understand. And so before I decide to offer my critique of him, you need to defer.” So there’s two hermeneutics, the hermeneutics of deference, and the hermeneutics of critique. And of course, this is critical thinking. And so our American students are taught to criticize. And of course we can see how this plays out in identity politics. “Well, this person has this kind of identity, therefore we have to dismiss them and purge them.” No effort whatsoever to engage another mind. This is deeply, deeply pernicious. And I do not say that we have to substitute the hermeneutics of deference for the hermeneutics of critique. I say in point of fact, what we have to do is both. We have to engage the author. We have to recognize that his answers exceed our capacity to know them. But nevertheless, to pose questions. It is morally easy, as I probably said in the book, to be engaged fully in the hermeneutics of deference, of the hermeneutics of critique. Because in both case, your soul is unmoved. You either bow down to the text, or you do nothing because you’re just ripping the book apart. That’s the hermeneutics of critique. The really difficult challenge for education is to do both. And I think what we have to do is teach our young people that their hermeneutics of deference matters. In this respect, at least when I got to the Middle East early on, the hermeneutics of deference was well in place. I will report, and I intimate this in the book. The book was written in 2013, but I’m teaching now a course, for the same group that I was at Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Doha. And the first papers I got back were very much hermeneutic of critique. It was, this is why Plato’s wrong. He doesn’t understand things political. And I would pose to my students the following question, “Well, so why is your understanding of the political, better than his understanding of the political? Maybe instead of you using your understanding of the political to critique him, maybe we ought to use his understanding of the political to critique what you believe?” So this hermeneutics of critique has penetrated into the minds of many of my students. I have very mixed views, after many, many years of involvement in American universities overseas, about what American higher education in the Middle East can do. I think at its best, it can help students who are wrestling in their own cultures, with the very problem Tocqueville thought was going to prevail in all cultures, namely the democratization of man. By which I mean the de-linking of persons. It can perhaps give those students a language to begin to understand the individuation and its perils, which they would not otherwise get in their homegrown institutions, they would simply get critiques of the West. Which they don’t believe, because they themselves are half hyper-modern anyway. So at its best, American higher education can expose them to questions which we have been wrestling with for a hundred years. Namely, what does it mean to be a citizen of the democratic age? Does it mean we’re just all Ayn Randians, running around being self-interested? Or does it mean as Tocqueville thought, that we can build a world together in face-to-face relations? Now that’s something the Middle Easterners, my students, they can appreciate, because they have rich networks of family. But what’s happening in these American higher education institutions often, not always, but I would say often. And here I’m just protecting myself in a way. What’s happening is that you’re getting faculty members who cannot get jobs in the United States. Or themselves are troubled enough, that they need to be utterly supported by huge sums of money that come their way, if they come to teach in the Middle East. You get people who hate the United States, who have one or another scheme of re-enchantment or purgation to peddle. And so our American universities in the Middle East are in a way becoming worse than the American universities in the United States. Deeply, deeply poisoned. So whereas they could have done some great good, but not to brainwash, but to indicate to the students that the feelings that they have of loneliness and isolation are not just their own. The whole crisis of modernity is this. And oh, by the way, here are some books that wrestle with this in constructive ways. Tocqueville being probably the most important. That’s what should have happened. But what is happening in fact, is you’re getting the most vehement anti-American faculty members you can possibly imagine going out there and hating on America. And thinking by the way, that that’s what those students want. Now, some of them do, some of them are fiercely anti-Western. But if you ask them what their alternative is, they will sometimes say something like, “Well, Islam.” And then you ask them to describe the Islam they have in mind. And you yourself, because you’ve studied Rousseau and all the anti-modernist marks, Heidegger and Nietzsche, you say, “Hmm, that’s curious. That doesn’t sound like Islam to me. It sounds like there’s been a vast exportation of European anti-modern thought to your region of the globe, which is now intermixed with what you call Islam. And so you’ve been poisoned by this mixture that’s neither Islam nor the West.” And that is my view on what purports to be a lot of anti-Western thought, or Islamic thought. It’s now, because of colonialism, so intermixed with European anti-modern thinking. Which is again, one thing we ought to be cognizant of, if we’re setting up universities in the Middle East. But in point of fact, we’re bringing over those who believe in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, to teach students who are desperately trying to find their way. And what they’re given really is, I hate the West, and that’s going to give you meaning. And that is no way to build a university. Brian Smith: And entirely destructive of souls. So I wonder, so this is a thought that occurs to me as you were talking, that something dovetails here in my thinking about this. That we have this polar, either hermeneutic of suspicion, or of deference, when living in between actually requires suffering. It requires that you open your mind and heart, up to questions that are deeply, deeply unsettling. That are triggering, quote/unquote, to use this contemporary parlance. And I wonder if you could talk about what you think the connection is between our societies, running screaming from suffering, in the West in particular. And a sort of the decline of religious faith, which would help us understand ourselves as living in a trial, living with suffering. And the challenges we’re facing right now. ‘Cause it seems like these are all deeply interlinked to me. And one of my experiences teaching, that was always so difficult, was to get students to recognize, that to be able to cope with the life that we are thrust into, you have to ask these questions about yourself, and come to grips with what you really believe about God, about our relationship to one another. And then if you don’t, you are just going to be sort of at the mercy of these outside forces entirely, and see yourself as a passive recipient of everything. And never be able to live in that active voice, so to speak. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Well, so just a quick, seemingly long way of getting into this. I’ve taught at Georgetown since 1993, and when I first started teaching St. Augustine, it was fairly easy, because my students had a kind of theological fluency. Now I find it easier to teach St. Augustine on the Doha campus to Muslims than I do to Georgetown students. Because theological fluency has largely disappeared in my students. And by that, I don’t simply mean catechisms and things like that. I mean, what Christianity I think, should I say it’s most important contribution. I’ll say it with a full understanding, there’s no such thing as the most important contribution. But what Christianity does, and it’s right there in the Book of Genesis, is that it indicates to the reader, who might be wrestling with the darkness in the world, it indicates right there in those passages in Genesis 3, that the preeminent disposition of the human heart is to blame someone else. So Adam and Eve sinned, they sinned. There’s a transgression against God, they rebelled against God. And what they do is, instead of looking within and taking some responsibility for that. Saying, “We should repent, please forgive me.” It’s not what they do. What they do is they say, “Well, the serpent made me do it.” Or, my favorite line in Genesis, “The woman you gave me.” Brian Smith: “The woman you gave me made me do it.” Joshua Mitchell: Hilarious. God does have a sense of humor. So the way this plays out now, to bring us back to the issue of suffering. We’re all Adam and Eve, by which I mean, not simply that we suffer from original sin, but that our response to that thing that is original, and always already in us, is to say, “No no, the problem’s not here, it’s out there.” And identity politics is profoundly pernicious, because it does this. So the Christian understanding is that there’s a vertical relationship. We are rebels, transgressors against God. That we are so errant from him, there’s nothing we could do to come back to God. And so God had to send himself. So all human beings, I’ll use identity politics language, are guilty of irredeemable stain. We’re all irredeemables, we are all irredeemables. And in fact, the only way out for the Christian is a vertical one, where we recognize that Christ is the only innocent victim. There’s none among us who are innocent victims. And he is the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world. Well, you’ve seen the three words here. The scapegoat, irredeemable stain, and innocent victim. And what I note in the chapter on religion in Tocqueville in Arabia, written in 2013, is that this understanding has dissipated. This is back in 2013. And then in American Awakening what I said was, I took it a step further and I said, “Well, it didn’t completely disappear. It got moved.” Because if the Genesis story is right, then the most primordial experience that is in all of us, because it’s really the first thing that appears, is the experience of sin, and transgression, and rebellion. Now, none of us are going to admit it. We’re going to say, “Not me, I’m not.” We’re going to do exactly what Adam and Eve did. And identity politics is this. It takes the Christian vertical understanding of staying an innocent victim, and it turns it 90 degrees and makes it a horizontal one. By which I mean, it establishes a moral economy intersectionality. According to which you rank yourself, on a scale from pure to irredeemable. And of course you can innocent signal and hide the stain under the wing of your … remember the Christian reference, “Christ hides our sin under his wing.” Well, you can hide it under the wing of a Black Lives Matter sign in your front yard, or we believe in Ukraine. However noble, rightly understood those things might be, it’s a way to raise your sin score, so to speak. So identity politics is perfectly understandable, because the churches abandoned the idea of the God of judgment. All the churches, Catholic, Protestant, even within Judaism, there were calls by Rabbi Soloveitchik, the original in the 1950s. They’re on YouTube. To return to an understanding of sin. So you had farsighted thinkers, Fulton Sheen, Soloveitchik, Reinhold Niebuhr, as you know. Brian Smith: Reinhold Niebuhr, yeah. Joshua Mitchell: All of them could see in the mid-20th century, that we had lost the fundamental insight. Which was, man is indicted, and somehow has to get right with God. But what’s happened is, that all the religious institutions have jettisoned that, but it didn’t go away. And it didn’t go away because this experience of guilt is the deepest one in the human heart. And so identity politics comes along and finds a way for us to be Adam and Eve in the Garden. Which is say, to blame someone else, so it’s white privilege. And I find this laughable, because what has to happen in identity politics is, once you purge one scapegoat, once you purge toxic masculinity, once all the men are hooked on pornography and drugs, and the young one are increasingly moving in that direction. They’re disappearing, as they’re supposed to. You need another scapegoat. And it’ll be the Karens, and then it’ll be Black men who believe that the traditional church, and the traditional family matter. And the transgenders are already going after them. So it’s just one scapegoat after another. It’s a deeply pernicious, it’s a Christian heresy, is what I’m actually calling it now. And that’s what we have to call it. Brian Smith: Right, that’s a Christian heresy, where you never know. Yeah, you never know. I mean, to sort of pull the analogy in a slightly different direction, you never know, in a stable way, whether you are a Jacobin or a Girondin. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Brian Smith: You never know, because tomorrow’s Jacobins are the next Girondins, and so on and so forth, and it keeps on spinning. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. I tell my students who are quite clear that they understand the moral economy, I say to them, “I notice you’re drinking out of a plastic water bottle. When we discover in 20 years that microplastics are destroying the ecosystem far more than carbon dioxide, do you really want to be judged as a parasite, and as somebody worthy of purging and scapegoating, because you drank water out of a water bottle?” It never ends. You will always be discovered sooner or later. But to come back to what drove this, which was how do you teach this? I think the first thing we have to do, is to propose to our students the question, “How’s that working for you?” I mean, you think that by picking out a group to be purged, then the world would be made pure. Or you think by getting rid of fossil fuels and having a quote, green economy, which there’s no such thing as a green economy. We’re going to poison the atmosphere, and the land and the water in different ways, with rare earth minerals. But I think the way this ends, is that people discover that no matter how much they’ve purged somebody, they wake up the next morning still feeling bad. And I think that’s part of the reason why the left kept keeps moving. So they thought once they could get feminists on equal footing with men, everything would be fine. And yet they woke up and still they found there was guilt. Well then, let’s go to gays and lesbians, and now transgendered. And we’re going to one innocent victim after another, around which they can wrap their hearts, in the hope of attaining purity by supporting them. Eventually this, we discovered that this doesn’t work. And at that point, I think people can listen. So you might remember in The Republic, the boys are quite confident in Book One, that they understand justice, and you have several definitions of justice. And the conversation of The Republic does not get started until Book Two, at which point Lachan says, “Well, I’m just confused. Can you help us, Socrates?” So as long as we’ve got this hermeneutic critique, where people are absolutely self-satisfied with their own answers, there can be no real education. So I think the way you get people to begin to say, to begin realize that there might be something they need to listen to, is you get them to see that what they’re doing isn’t working. Which is the way Plato does this. Brian Smith: Yeah. And I think that was exactly my experience in the classroom. And it’s the only route available to us. But there are signs of hope though, in the sense that, you think of the places that actually are generative in our life right now. Churches that have held to an orthodoxy of sin and repentance, and synagogues that have done this are growing, and continue to. And have not had the birth dearth that so much of our society is plagued with at this point. And so there are readouts to where someone who has raised this question, or who has come to the end of themself, can come looking for respite, and an answer that is not just, “Well, who’s next?” Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Brian Smith: So I wanted to conclude by bringing you to the Tocqueville in Arabia‘s new preface, and just get your reaction on a quote from you. “The fateful struggle today, is between those who wish for embodiment, and those who wish to flee from it.” Can you say just a bit more about that, and how it relates to the things we’ve been talking about? Joshua Mitchell: Well, it’s an ancient struggle within Christianity, which we should not be surprised, is appearing in what purports to be a post-Christian world. And the ancient struggle is between an incarnate view of human life, where the spirit descends into the flesh and suffers. And a Gnostic view, which is one according to which the purpose of the way one finds liberation, is to free oneself from the chains of embodiment. And that kind of Gnosticism today takes the form of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. And I think it’s driven really by the inability to resolve the crisis of guilt. So every embodied form, every nation, every local community, every family, is impure. The world is broken. And what this means is, we have to find a way to live with it. And one of the difficulties for the modern mind, is that it’s unable to live with stain and impurity. And I say this not only of the left, which wishes to indict America, I think of the 1619 project, by virtus systemic racism. But also of the right. Because the counterargument to the 1619 project was, “No, America is pure.” But the supposition of both groups was that something is worthy, only if it’s pure. And I think that’s not Christian. I think the Christian view is the world is broken, and yet hope triumphs the brokenness. This is an astounding insight. And you can be an Augustinian or Nietzschian, and recognize that this is what gave a vibrancy to Western civilization. That human suffering is not the end of the story. Bob Woodson and I wrote an essay for Martin Luther King Day, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal two years ago. And we said, “Isn’t it interesting that if you look at the history of African American political thought, up until very recently, while it was deeply divided, the underlying supposition was that Black Americans were capable of acting. Whether it meant going back to Africa, or pushing back, or getting involved, Booker T. Washington, there was a universal understanding that human action mattered. What characterizes the Black Lives Matter movement is fatalism. And I think, when you have an inability to understand how one deals with guilt, then, and Nietzsche saw this. Then the burden of guilt builds up more, and more, and more. And because you don’t have the church, the holy house’s mechanisms of repentance, atonement, above all forgiveness and confession of sin. That when you don’t have those available, the only way that you can lift the burden of sin … Well there’s two related. One is to announce, and the other is to forget. And so our young people today who are unable to deal with the guilt they have internally, which then takes the form of a projected external guilt, namely the history, the constant attempt to find deeper and deeper perversions of America in history, this is really a projection outward I think. Ultimately of an internal wrestling match with guilt which can’t be discharged, so they externalize it. And think that, “well, here’s how I gain atonement. We’ll destroy the monuments. We’ll eliminate the family which is guilty of patriarchy. We’ll eliminate the church which is homophobic. And when we do that, then the burden of our guilt is ultimately discharged.” This is not, I mean minimally it’s not a Christian way of understanding the problem. And I will say, and I’ve said this, and people get sort of horrified. Identity politics is not far off. I mean, I don’t want to fully indict it, because what it gets, which conservatives don’t understand, is that there’s a problem of debt here that is deeper than economic debt, the free market types. And deeper than the debt we owe to our fathers, the traditionalists. It’s a spiritual debt that goes right to the core of who we are. And while I think identity politics completely botches it, in terms of how it thinks it ought to think through this matter, it at least understands that there’s a deeper debt than economics and tradition. And of course, those are the twin pillars of conservatism. So I think I would say of those who are now enthralled by identity politics, come home. You’ve heard my phrase before, Brian. “You’re you’re feasting on crumbs.” Microaggressions, unconscious bias, this is a laughable, cheap imitation of original sin. Because the problem we have isn’t microaggressions toward people of other races. No, no, no. That’s hopelessly superficial. By virtue of human pride, every single morning we get up and we pray that we’re not going to botch things up, in small ways and a big ways. And yet we do, which is why we go back and pray in the evening. So I say it to the identity politics people, you’re not entirely wrong, it’s a Christian heresy. Which means that if you want to be fed, you need to go back to the source. And this is where the churches must intervene. The conservative movement as a political movement, can do nothing to this. Because while, with all due respect to Yoram, who’s a dear friend, I think it is true that the center of gravity of the conservative movement has now shifted from free market types, to traditionalists. From one kind of debt, to the debt we owe our fathers and our countries. I think that’s important, but it still doesn’t answer the identity politics challenge. Which is why every institution in America has been co-opted so quickly in the last few years, by identity politics. Because guilt is the fundamental question, and conservatives have no way to talk about this. So my view is that only the reawakened churches can do this. The churches have to bring back guilt, and transgression, and the god of judgment. And the problem is almost all of them, except for a remnant, a proper theological category here, almost all of them have bought into identity politics, because it is a cheapened Christianity. So we have to have a religious renewal. And then people say, “Well, so are you a Christian Nationalist?” And my answer to this is, we have an established church right now in America. It’s called the Church of Identity Politics. It’s an established church. I do not want an established church. My view is that the only way you can return to a politics of competence in America, is if we have a way of solving the problem of staying toxicity, and the crisis of the innocent victim. You have to have a way of solving the scapegoat problem. Because as the last few years have demonstrated, you’re not going to turn to competence, until you can solve the scapegoat problem. The reason why America was a successful liberal enterprise, was because it had solved the scapegoat problem through the churches, and largely through the Protestant churches. And when the scapegoat problem, when we no longer can solve the problem of the scapegoat in the churches, then we will no longer have a republic committed to competence. And this is, I’ve said this, I’ve hinted at this, now I’m saying it boldly. That the reason why the politics of competence works, is that you have solved the problem of the scapegoat, prior to, and outside of the realm of politics. And Tocqueville in a way saw this. He said, “The moral imagination was bound, so that political freedom could work its way.” Now, he didn’t quite put it in terms of the scapegoat. I am putting it in terms of the scapegoat. And so the precondition for liberal tolerance, and for liberal competence, is having solved the problem of the scapegoat, through the churches. Because if not, we’re not going to look at each other as compatriots in the project of building a competent world together. We’re going to look at each other as possible, electric lightning rods, for the problem of scapegoat, and there’ll be no confidence. Brian Smith: And with that, I think we should conclude. Thank you for that tremendous challenge for us. I mean, it highlights, I think the work that anyone who cares about liberty needs to undertake, in their communities, their lives, and anything they do with the public. If you want to know more about Josh Mitchell’s writings, you can reference many of them, which I’ve linked above, on Law & Liberty. His books, American Awakening most recently, and Tocqueville in Arabia, are both available from Encounter Books, anywhere books are sold. And thanks for being on the show. Joshua Mitchell: My pleasure, Brian. Good to be with you. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.

Matti Friedman joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Israeli culture and identity, immigration trends, religious and linguistic divisions, and his latest book, Who by Fire. Rebecca Burgess: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m a contributing editor with Law & Liberty, and joining me today is Canadian Israeli journalist Matti Friedman. His work graces the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Mosaic, several other organizations. He’s also a prolific author of a rich diversity of topics and books from everything about spies to the Dead Sea Scrolls to, most recently, Leonard Cohen’s concert tour to the front lines during the Yom Kippur War. That’s Who by Fire. And I’m sure, Matti, you had a lot of fun listening to a lot of music while you were writing that book. Matti Friedman: I sure did, although Leonard Cohen’s music, if you know it, can be a bit of a downer. So if you listen to five hours straight of Cohen, it doesn’t mean that your mood is going to be great necessarily. But I did have a good time. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. Well thank you so much for joining us today, coming from Israel. Matti Friedman: It’s a real pleasure to be here. Rebecca Burgess: Great. So Israel is frequently in the news for about three things: Gaza, violence, and rocket barrages. Most recently, of course, it’s been in the news for questions about its judiciary and its politics, in particular its election travails: five elections in four years, and at the end of it we have Netanyahu back in power. But I’m hoping that today we can talk about something that you focus on in your longer-form essays, which is the social, cultural, and demographic change of Israel that helps us understand what is actually going on in the country as a country beyond or above those headlines. And most recently you had a wonderful essay in which you noticed that there are many French in Jerusalem now and that there is a almost war of baguette shops. So what are the French restaurant wars in Jerusalem? Tell us about what’s happening in terms of the population shifts. Matti Friedman: It’s rare when you can see a social shift manifest itself physically just in store signs when you walk down the street. But over the past couple of years in my neighborhood and elsewhere in Jerusalem, you just can’t avoid realizing that there are more and more French people in Jerusalem. You can go to a bakery downtown called Gagou de Paris, and if you don’t like their croissants you can go across the street to another one called L’Artisan. And there are other options these days in Jerusalem. French is just one of the languages you hear. And there are other cities in Israel where it’s even more prevalent, particularly one called Netanya, which is a city on the coast with a particularly large French population. So clearly something is going on in France. One of the interesting things about Israel is that it ends up being a barometer for the situation of Jews in other countries. So we’ve had an influx of people from Ukraine and Russia recently. So even if you knew nothing about the war in Ukraine or what was going on in Russia, just by looking at the new arrivals around my neighborhood you would understand that something is clearly going on there because we’re hearing more and more Russian and Ukrainian in the street. And in the case of the French, it’s not a wave of immigration exactly. It’s not millions of people moving, but tens of thousands have moved in the past decade and more than 100,000 Jews have come from France to Israel since the early seventies, and about half of them have come in the past decade. So clearly there’s something going on. People are being drawn to Israel, people are feeling a bit uncomfortable at home in France, and that’s manifesting itself in the superior quality of our pastries here in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Rebecca Burgess: Is it, do you think, related at all to some of the violence that has been perpetuated against Jews in France? So there were of course several famous [incidents], the Bataclan Theater, Charlie Hebdo and others, and it would seem natural if in the wake of those types of violent occurrences in France that there would be a sudden influx in Israel. Is it that that’s driving it, or is there this other, and it’s almost a third rail I know to talk about when you’re talking about France, but the influx of Arab immigration within France, which seems to be driving others out of France. Matti Friedman: So there are pull factors and push factors as in any immigration wave. So the pull factor is the draw of the Jewish state, which for a certain number of Jews in every country is enough of a pull without any push factor: the desire to live in a place where your culture is the culture of the majority. And for some people it’s a religious impulse to return to the land of Israel, which some interpret as a biblical commandment. So that’s going on. But of course there are also push factors, and the violence that you mentioned is certainly one of the push factors. And you can see that after spectacular instances of violence against Jews, and unfortunately there have been several, there’s a spike of immigration. So there was a big one after the murder of a young Jewish guy, he was 23, named Ilan Halimi in 2006, and he was murdered by a group of Muslim French citizens. They called themselves the Gang of Barbarians, and they kidnapped him and then tortured him to death. Immigration went up after that and then kind of subsided. And then there was an attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. Another French Muslim murdered a few kids. And that was also a shock to the community, and there was another wave of immigration. So yes, there’s something going on in France. There’s something kind of bubbling under the surface and the Jews are feeling it, and that is triggering immigration. Although, again, it’s not like all the Jews in France are leaving in panic, but that is driving the numbers up. And every time there’s an instance like that, you see the graph go up and then, if things get quiet again in France, the graph kind of subsides. But the trend is toward increased immigration from France. And part of it is definitely that many Jews in France feel less and less comfortable at home. Rebecca Burgess: Is there also that aspect of the secularism in France in which it is a hot point of wearing religious clothing and religious symbolisms in France? And in the public school system this is a huge fight. My sister is in fact a Dominican nun, and it’s a French congregation, and they have, every day almost, to struggle with some of these questions, especially themselves. They’re wearing a habit which doesn’t look that unlike how some Middle Eastern women cover themselves. Is it some of the more orthodox or observant Jews who are tending to go to Israel from France, or does that seem to be not really part of the equation? Matti Friedman: I think it is part of the equation. I’d actually love to hear more about your sister. That sounds fascinating. Often Americans have a bit of trouble understanding the French system, which is different than the system in the United States. In America, there’s separation of church and state and you’re allowed to do whatever you want. In France, the culture is kind of aggressively secular or at least the official culture. And they have an idea called laïcité which basically is a kind of antagonism toward expressions of religious observance in the public sphere or open expressions of religious observance. And that could cause problems for a Muslim woman who wants to cover her hair with a hijab, or a Jewish man who wants to wear a kippah, or even openly displayed crosses in some cases. Many French people interpret that as a violation of laïcité, the idea that the public’s sphere must be secular. For observant Jews that can be a problem. And I spoke to one young French woman who’s actually now in Israel, who’s interviewed in this story that we’re talking about, which came out in Tablet, who remembers that in her childhood they served kosher food at public school. And then that was considered to be a violation of laïcité, so you can no longer get kosher food at the public schools. They used to give Jewish students exemptions or postponements of exams if the exams fell on Jewish holidays, and now that’s also a bit tense because that’s also considered to be special pleading if you ask to have your exam administered on a different day. So that makes life a bit fraught for people of religious observance, not just Jews but for everyone. And certainly Jews do feel it. And if you look at the profile of the average immigrant to Israel in the past decade, you’ll see that it tends to be people who are traditional in their observance. It tends to be people who are of North African descent. So there’s a huge Jewish population in North Africa up to the forties and fifties, mainly in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And after the independence movements in these countries succeed and the French colonists are kicked out, the Jewish population either moves to Israel or goes to France. So most of the Jews in France are actually not the original French Jewish population, which was European in origin, but North African in origin. And it’s those Jews who tend to be moving to Israel. So they often find Israel quite familiar, I think in many ways because they’re coming two or three generations back from Mediterranean Jewish societies in places like Morocco and Tunisia and then ending up in Israel, which is also a Mediterranean Jewish society. So the social leap for many of these people is not as dramatic and difficult as it would be for an American Jew moving to Israel, for example. Rebecca Burgess: I think I was reading that about a third are single young people coming, and a third are about young families, and then a third are retirees. So it almost makes me think about, and I know this is really probably not the best analogy, but in the States right now, we’re seeing a lot of people leave from blue states and go towards red states where they feel that they are more free or less hampered in types of schooling choices and other ways of living. I don’t know if that’s in any way similar, but that tradition of going where you feel more welcome and feel like you have some roots and some familiarity with a system. Matti Friedman: No, it’s an interesting analogy and definitely people want to feel at home. And part of being a minority and part of being Jewish is always a sense that you’re not quite at home, that you’re dependent on the acceptance of others, that you need to play an identity game where you’re open to the mainstream and capable of playing ball with the mainstream, but also maintaining your own personal traditions and keeping your own identity, which makes you different from the mainstream and which the mainstream, in some cases, does not like and is hostile to. So for many people, going to Israel is a way of solving that problem. It creates numerous other problems, as I found having moved to Israel myself, of course, from Canada when I was 17. So it doesn’t make your life problem-free, but it does replace that problem of being a minority. It replaces that problem with other problems. And yes, I think people want to feel at home and they would like to be surrounded by people who, they might not be exactly like them, but who are at least open and welcoming to who they are. Rebecca Burgess: Have their croissants. Matti Friedman: And also they can move to Israel without any compromise on the quality of the baguettes. Although I guess I shouldn’t say that in their name. They might think that the Israeli baguettes are not quite up to par. But definitely these days you can get excellent food in Israel. It certainly wasn’t the case when I moved here in 1995. I don’t think it was really even the case 10 years ago, but definitely the French have brought many good things and cuisine is one of them. Rebecca Burgess: The summer when I was there on a national security trip, sponsored by Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where I met you, I had that privilege, I was rather blown away by the wonderful extent of Israeli cuisine. And thinking about adding French on top of that, I thought that’s just not fair. Matti Friedman: We have the best food in the world, in my opinion. And I’ve been around the Israeli cuisine. Because it’s made up of so many different groups that have come over many, many years, it is spectacular. Rebecca Burgess: So it seemed like you started noticing the French immigration wave to Israel through the proliferation almost of the restaurants, the French restaurants. But also I thought that your observation about the bookstores was interesting, that some of these French bookstores, they’re not what you might think they are, they’re not all super orthodox or religious in content. Many of them are just simply French bookstores, which kind of show that shift towards those who are moving to Israel. It’s not necessarily a religious only question, but maybe more broadly cultural. The North Africa element reminded me that several years ago you had this very fascinating article in which you asked whether Israel is eastern or whether it’s European, meaning is it Middle Eastern or is it western? And in the West, in America, we tend to tell the Israel story as though it is a byproduct of the West only. But that in fact, if you look at the population, the current population of Israel, it’s very much a Middle Eastern story. And that to me was the first time, in reading your articles, that I had ever thought about that and what that might mean and the differences. And that article, I think you’d called it Mizrahi Nation, where you invited us to think about all the different ramifications of Israel being a Middle Eastern state and country, population. Matti Friedman: So I think that is the key to understanding Israel. And I, like many other people who grew up in North American Jewish communities, always learned about a very European country with Herzl, and the kibbutz, and the Holocaust, and the Jews from the Middle East were very much on the margins of what I knew about Israel. But if you look at the Israeli Jewish population, we have a one-fifth Arab Muslim minority. So if we just set them aside for a second and look at that 80% Jewish majority, at least half of the Jews in Israel do not come from Europe. They come from the Islamic world, they come from places like Morocco, they come from Syria, they come from Yemen, Kurdistan, Iran. And you can’t understand the country without understanding that. And even the Jews who came here from Eastern Europe, over three or four generations in Israel they’ve been Middle Easternized. And that expresses itself in the cuisine and expresses itself in the kind of music people listen to. And it expresses itself in our politics, which are incomprehensible without understanding the ethnic origins of Israeli voters, because often issues that we describe or arguments that we describe as being about policies are actually about identity. And that often has to do with whether your family came from the Christian world or from the Muslim world. So this is all very important to an understanding of the country, and yet it remains kind of marginal. People don’t really think about it, they don’t think it’s central, but it is the central fact of Israel. I wrote a book trying to explain it, which is a book called Spies of No Country, which ostensibly is a book about Israel’s first spies, the guys who created the Mossad in many ways. But Israel’s first spies were the only people in the country who could walk across the street into the Arab world and disappear, and those people were Jews who’d come from the Arab world. A year or two before they were natives of the Arab world, they were native Arabic speakers. And if we understand that at least half of the Jews in Israel are the children or grandchildren of those people, then we understand something really important about the country that is otherwise missed. Rebecca Burgess: Is that reflected in any of the public education, in terms of the languages that students are being encouraged to learn? Matti Friedman: I wish I could say yes, because it would be amazing if Israeli kids could actually speak Arabic, not only to interact with our Arab surroundings. There are 6 million Jews here and 300 million people in the Arab world. So it would be nice to have more people speaking fluent Arabic, but also Arabic is a Jewish language. Jews always spoke Arabic, and there are great works of Jewish thought that were written in Arabic. A good example is the philosophical writings of Moses Maimonides, who’s an incredibly important philosopher from Cairo about a thousand years ago. His philosophical words are written in Arabic. So Arabic is really a Jewish language and many of the people who came to Israel after the state was founded spoke Arabic. That was their language. But what happened was that there was a real attempt to create an Israeli identity in which people spoke Hebrew. And for that to happen, the diaspora languages had to be killed basically. And that meant no Yiddish and no Polish and no Russian, and it definitely meant no Arabic. So within one generation the Arabic speakers were gone and their kids were Israelis, which was a success for the Zionist movement but a loss, maybe, for the culture of this country. Definitely a loss for the intelligence services who could really use native Arabic speakers, but that’s what happened. The linguistic treasures that came here in the first years of the state, where you had all these people speaking Persian and speaking Kurdish and speaking 80 different languages or whatever it was, that was really eliminated by this drive to create an Israeli population. And that has its upsides, of course. We all speak the same language and that’s good, but a lot was lost. I wish we could recover some of it, but it’s hard two or three generations later to get any of it back. Rebecca Burgess: It’s kind of a longer unformed question, though, about language and how language creates a national identity. At the beginning, when you are so small and you’re starting out, it makes sense to tamper down on one common language, if you will. But, seven decades later, is it possible to loosen up a little bit, or is it the case that because the pressures from outside have only multiplied in that time? I don’t think anyone would say that the pressures surrounding Israel have lessened. Has it entrenched the idea of having this one language to help the cultural identity have a type of centrality to it, and that’s what will continue through the next decades? Matti Friedman: Yes. This society is so fractured and kind of at odds with itself that it certainly helps to have one language. And if you look at the country 50 or 60 years ago, many of the ultra-orthodox Israelis wouldn’t speak Hebrew. And many of the people were immigrants, even the leaders of the country were immigrants, and they spoke kind of immigrant Hebrew, very heavily accented. And the fact that most people in the country today, including our Arab citizens, speak Hebrew very well is definitely good for communication. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to make us more unified or well-disposed to each other. So it does raise a question of whether a common language is actually helpful or not. But retrieving those old languages that were lost with our grandparents or great-grandparents is very difficult. So there are attempts to bring back Arabic, and people are much more interested in the culture of the Jews of the Middle East and in the music, and there are attempts to revive it. And people are more interested in Yiddish. And people are more open to the experience of the diaspora, which was really radioactive in the early years of the state. One, Israelis were supposed to hate the diaspora and forget about it and be ashamed of it and never mention it. That has really passed. So people are interested in their roots. You can’t just wake up one morning speaking Arabic. And we’re not our grandparents. We might like our grandparents’ culture, but this generation is Israeli. And the search for different cultures or for different cultural roots, that search is Israeli. It’s not quite the same thing as being from Morocco or being from Poland. Rebecca Burgess: Well that’s interesting, because I would say in America today… And not to make everything a comparison with America, but America is what I know. When we talk about the current generation, one of the questions that comes up a lot is a sense of rootlessness amongst the current population and whether that drives some of this whole culture of depths of despair, the depression, some of these more medical-driven problems, you could say, of our society, and whether that’s rooted in questions about us losing our sense of identity or our central identity. I’m just wondering in Israel how younger generations feel or if, as you mentioned, they’re being Middle Easternized, that’s giving them a different type of rootedness instead of rootlessness and they’re kind of making it their own thing. And I know that you also recently wrote about a pop star. And I was a little intrigued by this. Is it a pop star? Is he Palestinian? He was the most popular in Israel. Matti Friedman: Do you mean Nasrin, the article I wrote for The New York Times? Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Matti Friedman: So I like to look at our cultural questions by looking at music, rather than looking at heavy things like academic research or anthropological study. So the dominant pop form in Israel is a kind of music called Mizrahi, which literally means eastern. And what it is is Middle Eastern pop music sung in Hebrew, often with Greek influences and western influences. But that is really the most popular pop genre in Israel, which is kind of proof that the country is basically a Middle Eastern country. So I thought an interesting window into all of this would be one pop star whose name is Nasrin Kadri. This was two or three years ago when I wrote the story. She was really the hottest name in the Mizrahi pop scene, and she’s really a diva. She’s got a phenomenal voice, and she happens to be a Muslim woman from Haifa who converted to Judaism which is very, very, very rare. But it was a great way of looking at this mix of western and eastern and the Middle Eastern style in Judaism. So Nasrin is originally Muslim, but her fans are Jews, many of them of Middle Eastern background themselves. So she’s kind of an Arab diva for Jews affiliated with the Arab world. But she sings in Hebrew most of the time, although she also sings in Arabic. And all of that is just so interesting and confusing to anyone who wants to see this as a European country. So I thought a profile of Nasrin as kind of a pop goddess of the moment would be a fun way into one of the most important cultural questions here, which is: what kind of country is this? And if we’re a Middle Eastern country, what does that mean? So that’s what I was trying to do with that story. And there I really did enjoy listening to the music, and I got to hang out with Nasrin and then go to a concert. And I had a great time doing that one. Rebecca Burgess: Hopefully you had great seats, too. Matti Friedman: I did. I had excellent press seats close to the bottom. I could almost reach out and touch her knee-high glittery boots. Rebecca Burgess: That’s so not the image that we have of Israel today. So the contrast, it’s good for the senses to wake us up, like spicy food makes us reevaluate our assumptions. Matti Friedman: There was a bit of Beyonce in the concert and there was, of course, some Arabic and there was one point in the concert where she was posing against these screens which had satanic flames on them. And there were two guitarists on either side of her, and they were wailing like Slash from Guns and Roses. So there was just a lot going on at that concert, culturally. Rebecca Burgess: A lot of imagery. Matti Friedman: A lot of imagery. There was nothing about it that was purist. It wasn’t meant to be like pure Middle Eastern music or anything like that. It was totally commercial and very crass, and totally fun. Rebecca Burgess: So also looking at pop culture, you’ve noticed that there’s been an influx from China within the cultural moment. And I’m talking here about Chinese, and I’ll say his name wrong, Itzik. Is it the Chinese Itzik? This incredibly popular YouTuber who sells China, almost, to Israel. And I found this quite fascinating. One, how did you come across this? Is it just because it’s so prevalent? And the story that you found of China’s influence operations, if you will, within Israel through this one lens of this YouTube star? Matti Friedman: So I’m always looking for an interesting way of telling an important story. So Itzik, or Chinese Itzik as he’s known here, seems to be a good way of doing it. He’s a YouTube personality who works for a Chinese government media operation and he speaks phenomenal Hebrew, just almost native Hebrew. And he’s an incredibly smart and charming guy. So he does videos from Israel about being a Chinese person in Israel, and he also does videos from China explaining China to Israelis. But that’s his job, presenting a good face of China to Israel and serving as a cultural communicator between Israel and China, or the Chinese government. And I got to speak to him, and he’s a fascinating character. And he really gets Israel in a very interesting way. And he’s spent time here, and he’s picked up the language in a very remarkable way. The article looks at him as a way of trying to understand what China’s up to in Israel, because of course the Chinese are on the move across the Middle East. They’re building installations. They’re taking infrastructure projects. They’re very much in evidence here in infrastructure. They’re building a big part of our new light rail system in Tel Aviv. A Chinese company now owns our biggest dairy products company, which is called Tnuva. A very important tunnel project a couple of years ago under Mount Carmel was handled by the Chinese. And they’re building us a hydro plant, at least one. But the biggest Chinese installation, or the most important one that has opened in recent years, is a port. Israel has always had two ports, one in the city of Haifa and one in the city of Ashdod. And because the country’s grown and because the economy has boomed, those ports are insufficient and we needed another port. And a Chinese company won the tender for the port. And it’s the company that operates the port in Shanghai, which is called SIPG. So they won the contract and built an absolutely beautiful port that I got to visit. It’s a kind of shining, brand-new port open last year. These red cranes with huge Chinese letters on them, and you go into the command room and the workers are Israelis actually, but the executives are Chinese, and they’re running Chinese software, and the whole operation is Chinese. And it’s really, really striking because you can read all you want about the expansion of Chinese influence, but when you’re standing in a Chinese port facility in Israel and the corner offices are populated by Chinese executives, you realize that something’s going on. Things are really changing. And the calculus of economic interest, and maybe even security interest, in the Middle East is shifting as the Chinese make themselves felt more and more and as the American presence seems to fade. So that article, which was also for Tablet, looks at those two elements: the port, and Chinese Itzik. That’s really what he calls himself, Chinese Itzik, Itzik HaSini in Hebrew. His real name is Xi Xiaoqi, and he’s from Beijing. That’s what I tried to do with that story, to try to take something really complicated and make it as simple as possible and a bit entertaining. Rebecca Burgess: So this summer I remember standing at the old Haifa port and looking across and being told about this new Chinese one and thinking, from the national security standpoint, the American Sixth Fleet gets refueled right there, right across from the Chinese. And of course, in America we have a heightened security sense around China. But it did have that sense. And it did make me wonder a lot about how regular Israelis feel about the increasing presence of Chinese industry, Chinese companies within their country operating what I would call sensitive infrastructure. We also went to Tel Aviv. That has been my first time in Israel, and it suddenly struck me that, oh, Israel is also a Mediterranean country. It’s right there on the Mediterranean, and I hadn’t really thought about Israel being a Mediterranean country. And later on I was in Trieste, which the Chinese are also heavily influential in. That was the historic port of the Austria-Hungarian empire. It’s still very, very important to Italy, and the Chinese are there and in presence everywhere around the city in very tangible ways because that’s something that they’re supposedly using for their Belt and Road Initiative into Europe. And it drew together kind of that sense, I don’t want to say of foreboding necessarily. I didn’t necessarily have foreboding in Haifa this summer, but it felt unnerving the extent of seeing that in person. And I thought if I was a citizen living here, would I not notice it just because it’s something that happens over time or would I notice it and worry about it? And whether you had insight into how kind of everyday Israelis feel about that? Matti Friedman: So Israelis have always had many enemies, of course. And we’ve fought wars, unfortunately, against many states in the Arab world. And our most potent enemy at the moment is Iran, of course. And a country that has never been a problem for us is China. They’ve never been an enemy. So Israelis are not worried about them. And you can look at polling information which shows that Israelis are, for the most part, just not concerned about China. They don’t see China as a competitor, they don’t see China as a threat. They understand that the Chinese antagonize the Americans. And there’ve been two big defense deals that have been torpedoed by American protest because America was unhappy about Israel selling certain things to the Chinese, quite rightly. And so there’s an understanding that that’s sensitive, but there’s no kind of gut suspicion of the Chinese or feeling that we need to be worried about this. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily true. I’m just saying that Israelis have always had a sense of who their enemies are, and the Chinese seem to be making really good offers on infrastructure contracts. And they come in on time, and they come in below budget and great as far as Israelis are concerned. And we also tend to play a very short-term game. There’s very little long-term planning here. So if you have a port that needs to be built and the port company from Shanghai comes in and gives you a good deal, you’ll take it. And you might not necessarily think about what that’s going to look like 30 years down the road, 50 years down the road. We put out fires. That’s the Israeli way of doing things. And there’s very little long-term thinking, not like the Chinese, of course, who have very careful long-term imperial considerations. So that’s also a difference between the Chinese and the Americans. When I was at the port, the obvious question is what… The Sixth Fleet is across the bay, I think. I don’t know, it’s less than a mile. And they said, “Well, what do you want from us?” When the tender was open for the port, because it was a public contract. It was open to any bidders. The number of American companies who bid was zero. No American companies bid on the contract. And so the Chinese got the contract. And that’s also something that’s going on. The Americans just aren’t there. The Chinese are hustling. They’re making good deals, both because they’re out to make some money and because they’re considerations are imperial as well as the profit motive. So an American company looking at a project like the Haifa port would’ve to say, “Okay, am I going to make my investment back within 20, 30 years?” And there would be all kinds of graphs showing yes, no. The Chinese have other considerations. So they want to make their investment back, of course, but they’re playing a much bigger game. And that game is visible in Trieste, and it’s visible in Greece, and it’s visible across Africa, and it’s visible in Iran, and now it’s visible in Haifa. And the considerations are imperial considerations, ones that would’ve been familiar to the British a hundred years ago, which unfortunately are not that familiar to Americans, I think, who are also playing a shorter game than the Chinese are in Israel. Israel’s a very small player. We’re kind of caught between the two big powers. Of course, we have our affinity with the United States. There’s no cultural affinity to China. There’s no attempt by China to export Chinese culture to Israel. So Israelis are consumers of American culture, and everyone watches Netflix and loves the NBA. And there’s no danger of Chinese competition in that regard, but things are definitely changing. Rebecca Burgess: Yes, Americans do have not just shorter attention spans, but I would say our reaction isn’t necessarily ‘put out a fire’ as in ‘put a bandaid over it for now and move on and leave it for someone else to deal with down the road,’ which is a very unfortunate and very disastrous tendency, I think. But slightly along those lines, in our remaining minutes, I was wondering if… It reminded me of the larger framework of the whole Israeli and media discussion and how you in particular have drawn our attention in the West to how, and in America, how we get it wrong so often because we impose a framework that simply isn’t there for Israel. So we tend to see everything happening within Israel, not only, as we mentioned earlier, from this very western, it’s a byproduct of the West and Europe, but also in America from a very kind of race and equality type of a discussion when in fact that’s not what it is, and how that kind of blinds us or hinders us from understanding what actually is in play within the state. And maybe that’s a little pivot for you to remind us again of why that just simply isn’t true, and especially in terms of this increasing Middle Easternization as you were mentioning, how that maybe is the key to tell us or remind Americans why it is not about this race and equality narrative. Matti Friedman: I think Americans often see things through an American lens, which I guess makes sense. And there’s a tendency to take American problems and then view other countries through the lens of those problems. And I understand why race is the demon that stalks the United States, and that’s clear to anyone who’s lived in the United States as I have very briefly, and anyone who knows anything about American history. But the problems here are different. I’m not even saying they’re necessarily better, but they’re completely different. The Jewish problem was never a problem of color. So my grandmother’s family, she had a bunch of brothers and sisters and her parents, they were all shot in the forest outside this village where they lived in Poland by people who looked exactly like them. There was no color difference between them. It wasn’t about color, it was about some other kind of difference. And Jews had these incredible problems living in societies where they were a minority, and ended up in Israel. And now there’s an attempt to portray Jews in Israel as a kind of stand-in for white Americans or stand-in for maybe European colonialists. There’s a lot of guilt bouncing around the West and a lot of desire for stories that can help channel that guilt. And Israel is used, in many different ways, as a blank screen onto which to project characteristics that people don’t like. So you’ll see it described as a colonialist power, or racist, or militarist, or nationalist, and mostly it’s projection. It’s not that we don’t suffer from those problems necessarily, but mainly it’s projection. The Jewish population here is about 6 million people, and we live in the midst of the Arab world which is 300 million people, and in the midst of the Islamic world, which is one and a half billion people, maybe 2 billion. There’s some argument about the numbers. So Israelis don’t feel like an empowered majority. They’re not analogous to white Americans. Palestinians are minority among Israelis of course, but they’re part of the regional majority that outnumbers Jews by a very wide margin. So one of the tragic aspects of this conflict is that both the Palestinians and the Israelis feel like an embattled minority, and both are right. There’s a lot of truth to those claims on both sides. It’s impossible to understand that dynamic if you’re just projecting the American sentiments or American problems. And there are American politicians who’ve begun doing this. And we heard people say in Congress things like, “What they’re doing to us in Palestine is what they’re doing to us in Ferguson,” in an attempt to really draw that line between Black Americans and Palestinians, who have nothing to do with each other. The predicament is completely different, and it’s better to understand another country completely on its own terms rather than to bring in a lot of American baggage and then reach the wrong conclusions about what the solution might be. Because if you’re imagining that the solution here is civil rights struggle along the lines of Martin Luther King, you just will not be able to solve any of the actual problems that exist. So I think Americans sometimes get into trouble with things like that. And they’ve walked into some trouble in Iraq by making some incorrect assumptions about who Iraqis were, and what they wanted, and how similar Iraq was or could be to the United States. There’s a sense that Iraq was kind of an America in waiting if only it could be free to be America. And the cost of that error was extremely high, and you know more about that than I do. An earlier mistake was in Vietnam, kind of a similar assumption. So it is a problem that America seem to run into a lot, and it’s one that’s best avoided. Rebecca Burgess: Well, you’re mentioning some wars and conflicts, so I almost have to end on this note, but before I end on the note about conflict and war and veterans, since you had mentioned Maimonides earlier, as a student of political theory myself, with Maimonides and Al-Farabi, their western counterparts, Aristotle, Aquinas, the hardest thing it seems is to actually know what is, versus what you think you are seeing and describing and getting from opinion to knowledge is… Well, I know what you’re doing every day in journalism, but also what we are hoping to do on this podcast is uncover the things that we think we know and show all the rich complexity underneath it. And part of that complexity, going back to war and conflict and knowing your enemy, but knowing who you are, is Israel is this fascinating culture, or nation now, of veterans. And since I study veterans, I’m often looking for the clues between how a society understands citizenship in itself and leadership and statesmanship in terms of what risk they have done for their country. And I often wonder if that does color their politics, and their political discourse, and their political understanding of themselves and their role in the world, or if that just doesn’t color it because it’s more common, if that makes sense. Matti Friedman: I think that the mandatory military service here does have an effect on the way people think. I think you’re less likely to embark on a military adventure if you are likely to be affected by it very personally. And of course, I served in the military. I’ve got two boys who are almost 16, and they’ll be serving in the military within a few years. It does change the way you think about what the army is. You know the military a lot better than most Americans do, so you’re much less likely to buy the kind of bullshit that the military likes to sell civilians. And you can really see that in our parliament, where I think it’s much easier to bullshit American politicians than Israeli politicians just because people have been in the army and they kind of have a realistic sense of what is and what isn’t possible and what the needs are or are not. And that’s all very important, but the numbers serving here have gone down percentage-wise. So the numbers are still over 50%, but a lot of Israelis don’t serve. The ultra-orthodox, for example, don’t serve. Arab Israelis don’t serve. Many mainstream Israelis get out of it in different ways. And so the society’s changing. It’s becoming a more individualistic society, less that highly-mobilized, socialist society that we might remember 30 or 40 years ago. The place is changing. The military is still very powerful and it’s still, I think, our most trusted institution. I haven’t checked the polls recently, but I do believe that is the case. And it is a kind of unifying institution, but in this day and age, as you know it’s true in Israel and it’s true in the States, the idea of unifying institutions is very much under fire and everything is becoming divisive and binary. And it raises real questions about how we’re supposed to live in a democracy if you can’t agree on the institutions, if you don’t agree who won the election, if you don’t agree about the judiciary, if you don’t agree about the military, about the people making decisions about the life and death of your children. So it’s a fraught moment here in that regard. That’s really what people are arguing about in Israel. There are protestors out on the street mainly because of this idea that the institutions are threatened, that the institutions are threatened by our fellow citizens who seem to be a threat to us, and we seem to be a threat to them. And it’s this strange, dark social media moment that’s raising real questions, I think, about how we’re supposed to maintain democracy and democratic institutions. And I know we’re all dealing with that, not just us here in Israel. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Well, to not end on a depressed, dark note has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you. I know we could have gone so much further into each one of the topics, but on a lighter note, to end, I was wondering if you could share with us maybe one of your favorite stories or anecdotes from the research you did for your latest book, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen. And this is a beautiful wrap up moment, right? We were just talking about war, we talked about music earlier and culture and how these things kind of show us what’s actually going on, illuminates more difficult political kind of questions. So you wrote this book about Leonard Cohen going to the front lines in the Yom Kippur War and his music there, and you got special access, I’m pretty sure, if I remember right, to some of his notes, or a diary, or a manuscript that he had written. Was there one moment or little anecdote that stuck in your head as just either lovely, precious, or just hilarious? Matti Friedman: There were so many. I had such a great time researching the book, not only diving into the Cohen material. Cohen is, of course, this great kind of poetic, bohemian figure from the sixties who shows up here and gives one of the weirdest and maybe greatest concert tours of all time. And I got to meet these, I think of them as soldiers even though now they’re in their seventies and they’re all grandparents, some are men and some are women, people who encountered Leonard Cohen in Sinai in the middle of this war. And I remember meeting one woman whose name was Orley, who remembered that Cohen showed up at their base. This was a base at the very tip of Sinai, and these very young women had just been through a horrific experience where their radar station was rocketed by the Egyptians and five of their friends had been killed. And they’d just gone through this, and then suddenly Leonard Cohen was at the base and someone told her that he needed a place to sleep. He needed a bed. And Orley, who loved Leonard Cohen, very quickly volunteered her bed and showed Leonard Cohen into the barracks and kind of put him in her bed and still remembered it. And she was so touched by it. And she said, “I wasn’t in the bed with him, but he slept in my bed.” And this still meant something to her, all these years later. It was something that they shared, and it was a very human moment amidst kind of inhuman events in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Rebecca Burgess: The little human moments that actually keep things going. Thank you so much for sharing that, and thanks for your time. Again, that was Matti Friedman, journalist, and author. And I’m Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks so much for listening.

Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith. I am the editor of Law and Liberty. With me today, I am very pleased to have Gordon Wood, who is the Alva O. Way University professor, and professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. The author of 10 books, including most recently, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, as well as the National Humanities Medal. Gordon, thank you for joining me. Gordon Wood: My pleasure. Brian Smith: So, I wanted to have you on the podcast today, specifically to talk about Power and Liberty, which as I understand it began as a lecture you gave at Northwestern’s Law School. So, I wanted to ask, how did the themes of that lecture inspire the book? And what was your aim in writing it? Gordon Wood: Actually, it was a series of lectures, a half dozen lectures that I gave at a school, I think, in the fall of 2019. And as we got into the COVID period, I had these lectures, and I thought maybe I should try to publish them. And so, that’s what led to the publication. I hadn’t really thought about that when I was giving the lectures, but it worked out nicely. Brian Smith: So, what was your goal in presenting a condensed version of your entire sweep of scholarship about constitutionalism? What were the key things that you thought needed recapitulation right now, that you were aiming to give your audience? Gordon Wood: Well, although the lectures pretty much summed up my thinking over the past half century on the constitutional issues, I hadn’t actually put them into this form, in print, at least. So, I thought that this was a good way of conveying my thinking, starting with the imperial crisis, going on to the constitution making at the state level, which is what they aim for. The United States, literally was 13 states at the outset in 1776, and each of those states wrote its own constitution. And then, having to explain the origins of the federal constitution, which [inaudible 00:02:39] granted, but they certainly hadn’t anticipated. I ended with the issue of private versus public, which helps explain the beginnings of the corporation. And then, I had a final epilogue on Rhode Island, my own home state, which suggested the middle class world that emerged following the revolution. So, all of that fit together, and it was what I wanted to say coming up my career. Brian Smith: So, I really specifically wanted to ask you about Rhode Island. It was a very striking epilogue, and I think a very surprising one. So, what was really special about Rhode Island at the founding? What made them stand out and can you say more about that analog between their middle class world and ours? Gordon Wood: That’s exactly right. They were a middle class society that probably of all the states, certainly the most middle class, that is to say they had the weakest aristocracy. And right from the beginning, they never were able to establish even a semblance of an aristocracy in their state. And as a consequence, they were very entrepreneurial minded, go looking for the fast money. And they were involved, of course, in slave trade, drum making, and all of that. But I think it’s the middle class nature of the society that… And of course, they were involved in paper money, which is, they had 11 issues, I think, of paper money as a colony. And this was far in excessive what any other colony did. And that paper money was capital, if you will. And they continued that after the revolution. They were the only state that refused to attend the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. So for a host of reasons, Rhode Island was interesting. James Madison, in his small little essay that he wrote, a working paper for his ideas about the new Federal Constitution, isolated only one state that he complained about. And that, of course, was Rhode Island, mainly for its issuing of paper money which created inflation and hurt creditors. And Madison’s whole structure was designed to protect minorities from majority overreach, or majority tyranny. And Rhode Island was the example that he used of this democracy run wild. So, for a host of reasons, Rhode Island was interesting. And, of course, Rhode Island went on in the nineteenth century to become an economic powerhouse. By the end of the century, they had five leading manufacturing firms in the world, were located in this tiny little state. So, there’s a host of reasons why they picked Rhode Island as an example of the middle class society that really came to dominate the north. Brian Smith: Yeah, it was a fascinating example of how banking and credit have these long-tailed effects that you- Gordon Wood: And, of course, it was not at all anticipated by the founders. Brian Smith: Exactly. And as you say, none of them really understood how complex and rich that network of commercial exchanges really were, or how they depended upon the relatively easy money that paper notes allowed. Gordon Wood: None of the founders really, except for Hamilton, understood what a bank was anyhow. Adams never did. Jefferson never did. But Hamilton knew what a bank was, but he was unusual. But what Madison wanted in constitution was a veto given to the Congress over all state legislation. That’s so impractical. Can you imagine if they had stayed in all bills that the states wanted to pass would have to be sent to Washington, and having hearings, and the Congress would have to approve them? Well, that was Madison’s proposal. He was so frightened at what the states were doing. Well, that was so impractical that they mentioned, threw it out, and had substituted Article one Section 10 of the Constitution, which lists a number of prohibitions on what the states can do. Namely, they cannot print paper money. Well, if that had been enforced rigidly, it would’ve stifled the antebellum economy. States get around that by chartering banks, which in turn issued the paper money. And, of course, there were probably hundreds of banks. And by the eve of the Civil War there were 10,000, probably 10,000 different paper currencies. It was just chaos. And of course the Civil War ended all that. The federal government shoot its own greenbacks, as we do today, and taxed the state banks out of business. But up to that time there was just these state banks issuing currency, and it must have been intolerable as a businessman to deal with this. You’re in Providence, in Rhode Island, and you get a bank note from the first Bank of Nashville, Tennessee. What do you do? Well, probably if you wanted to take it, you’d probably discount it because it’s so far away. The bank note would say, “We, the Bank of Nashville promise to pay the bearer $100 in gold or silver,” but you’re not going to go to Nashville. So you take the note, discount it, give the person $90 worth of goods, and then hope you can pass it on to somebody else. That’s the way it worked. It must have been very chaotic. Brian Smith: So, I wonder if we can rewind a bit though. I jumped the gun a bit, just out of excitement because I wanted to hear more about Rhode Island. But I wonder if we could go back to the beginning, and talk a bit about sovereignty. So, you say that defining who was sovereign was the issue that finally broke up the empire in the… Can you explain that a bit? Gordon Wood: Yes. Well, the imperial debate started over an issue of representation, where the parliament issued a stamp tax. Parliament said, “You can’t tax us. We didn’t give consent to that.” And the British responded by saying, “Oh yes, you were. You were virtually represented in the House of Commons.” And the Americans said, “We don’t like this virtual representation, we’ll have none of it.” But the issue then moved to the issue of sovereignty, which was something that the English and Blackstone, the great legal jurist had worked out. Although he didn’t invent it, he put it into his book published in 1765, that there must be in every state, one final supreme lawmaking authority. And in the British constitution, that authority rests in parliament, and there can be no deviation from that. There has to be that final authority. And the Americans kept saying, “Well, no, we want to divide authority. You have some authority over us, yes, for trade purposes and so on, but we don’t want you to have the right to access.” And the British responded in the following fashion. They said, “If you deny parliament’s authority in one aspect, you have to deny it entirely. You have to accept parliament’s authority, it’s final authority.” And when confronted with that choice, by the end of the 1760s, 1770, the columnist responded to say, “Well, if that’s the case, we’re independent of parliament, and we’re tied only to the king.” And they worked out in a series of pamphlets written by all of the major founders, Jeff Adams, all wrote pamphlets saying, creating what I would currently called the Commonwealth theory of the Empire, similar to the modern Commonwealth, that is to say Canada, Australia, New Zealand, are tied to the British nation by the Crown only. And each of their parliaments are independent. Something worked out in the twentieth century, 1931. So, that’s the position the colonists are forced into by the early 70s, that they are tied only to the Crown. And of course by English standards, this was just, because we, Americans, can’t fully appreciate it. But Parliament represented such a liberty loving, it was the source of English liberty. It was the bastion of freedom against the Crown. The Crown was the source of tyranny. And through history, especially from the seventeenth century on, parliament had come to the side, or to rescue the people from the tyranny of the Crown. So, for the colonists to take on parliament, was to create a confusing situation for the British. They thought the Americans must be Tories. That is to say not good wigs. Wigs being the people who support parliament and support liberty, support all of the things that parliament did, especially the glorious revolution of 1608. So, the Americans are forced into a very peculiar position, in terms of fish culture, where they’re opposing the bastion freedom that is parliament, and are tying themselves to the Crown, which is the source of purity. And from the British point of view, it was totally confusing. North said, “They’re just a bunch of Tories, these Americans, what are they doing?” Brian Smith: But at some point though, in this narrative, a concept of sovereignty resting in the people emerges to replace the sovereignty of the king. When did that happen? Gordon Wood: Well, you see, when we get to the Federal Constitution, there’s opposition from the anti-federalists, and large opposition. The country was really divided. In fact, if they’d been a poll taken, the Constitution needed. It was an unusual situation. This was an unanticipated creation, this federal government. And the anti-federalists raised the issue of sovereignty. They said, “Look, sovereignty says, the doctrine says, there must be in every state, one final supreme lawmaking authority. And we can look at this constitution and its supremacy clause, that’s going to be the Federal Congress, and our states, which will be reduced to nothing, to measuring the height of fence posts and laying out roads. And that’s all states will have to do. This is intolerable for us.” And it was a very embarrassing argument for the Federalists, which is the name that the supporters of the Constitution took. They were awkward. They said, “Well no, we’re going to divide power. Some power’s going to be given to the federal government, some powers will remain with the states.” But the anti-federalists, just the way the British had, just came back over and over again, so there must be in every state. And they invoked this doctrine of sovereignty. And it’s James Wilson, who is, I think, relatively unrecognized founder, very smart Scotsman, who had immigrated to the colonies as a young man. He was a graduate of St. Andrews in Scotland. He comes up with a solution. He says, “We’re going to relocate sovereignty in the people.” Now, this isn’t just meaning that powers all derive from the people. And all good wigs in England believe that, saying that this actual law making authority, final supreme power, rests in the people. And they’re doling out bits and pieces of it to the different agents, some to the federal government agents, and some to the states. And once that idea, he did it in a lecture he gave out of doors, and then also repeated it in the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention. And once Madison and others heard this, they said, “Ah, that’s all we need. That solves all of our problems, all of our intellectual problems, this doctrine of sovereignty resting in the people.” And so, that’s the origins of it. Brian Smith: So, that’s really interesting. But prior to this, you say that one of the other great innovations in the Americas, is the move to written constitutionalism. And while these don’t exactly evolve in parallel, it is this very unprecedented move, which you’re right to point out. What do you think drove this desire to move away from the unwritten English Constitution and into a written series of documents that we could use to understand our political process and its parameters? Gordon Wood: Well, it’s true. The English did not have a written constitution, and still don’t have. It’s very unusual. I guess Israel’s the only other state with England that doesn’t have a… But England did have a lot of written documents, and starting with Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, and all the way up through the Bill for Habeas Corpus, and then of course the Bill of Rights of 1688, ’89, those were all written documents. You write things down when you’re not sure that when you want to make them clear, and assert their strength by writing them down. That’s why we have written contracts. And so, that’s what they thought they were doing. And of course, England briefly had a written constitution in the middle with the Cromwell, and the little experiment in Republicanism that England had. But there was nothing like what took place in 1776. Each of those states wrote its constitution. And it’s hard for us to understand, but the states were independent. They had a significance for each [inaudible 00:18:29], the people who lived in the states, that’s difficult for us to appreciate. We think of the states more as ministry of units. But think back, Massachusetts had a hundred and some years, 50 years of history. Virginia had the same thing. So, when Jefferson said, “My country,” he didn’t think of the United States as his country. It was Virginia. And when John Adams said, “My country,” he meant Massachusetts. So, you have to think of the articles of consideration, which is the first treaty that holds these states together, like the EU today. We know there’s an EU, but how much do people think of themselves as Europeans? Frenchmen think of themselves as French, and the Germans say, “Well, we’re Germans.” But there is this thing called the EU, and to some extent they are aware of a Europeanness, and that’s a best way of understanding how Americans thought of themselves. They did talk about themselves as Americans, but they also knew that they were the citizens of Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, or Virginia. And so that first tree, like the EU, the articles were based on a treaty of these 13 states coming together. And each of them had its own constitution. So, moving to the Federal Constitution 10 years later, was something nobody anticipated, 1776, not a single person even raised the idea of such a strong federal or national government in 1776. Brian Smith: No, you do a really interesting presentation in the book of how surprised everyone was that it didn’t come out of imminent crisis, that we built this new constitution. It wasn’t quite accidental the way you presented, but it acquired a force of its own. Can you say more about some of the peculiarities in that moment of- Gordon Wood: There were some federal problems, that is national problems that they worried about. This new federal government that they created, the articles of Confederation. The Congress that was created had no power to tax or to regulate international trade. Essentially, you have to think of the first Congress that was created with the articles, as giving the power of the Crown. It was a substitute for the Crown. And since the Crown couldn’t tax, and the Crown by itself could not regulate trade, neither could this new Congress. And everyone by I think by the mid 1780s, was ready to give the Congress the powers to tax at least a 5% impost, or tax on imports and the power to regulate international trade because it was getting confusing. Massachusetts was passing its own navigation acts that were hurting Connecticut or Rhode Island, and it just didn’t make sense to have each state having its own navigation system, national trade. So, people are ready to give those powers to this Congress. But there is a larger problem, a much more potent problem that Madison put his fingers on. And of course, he’s not alone in this. That the state legislatures were running amuck. They had been given such power in the state constitutions, especially the lower houses, the Houses of Representatives, and they were passing all kinds bills, multiple… As Madison said in his working paper, “The Vices of the Political System of the United States.” It’s a very important document. Madison worked it out in April, or in the early spring of 1787, in preparation for the convention. And he lists the problems that the states are. He said, “The multiplicity, the mutability, that is the changeability, and the injustice of all these state laws.” The mutability laws were being passed by annually elected legislatures with turnover of 50%.And so, every legislature had new laws to pass. And it was just getting confusing. Judges didn’t know what the law was. The multiplicity, there were more laws passed with Madison, in the 10 years since the Declaration of Independence, than in the entire colonial period. So he said, “We’ve got to do something about that.” But more important, these laws were unjust, and he focused on the paper money laws that were being passed, that hurt creditors. And I tried to explain why that was so harmful to the elite. And any ways, those are the forces that are building up. And when the convention is called, most people assume they’re just going to add a couple of powers to the… That is the power to tax, and the power to regulate international trade, to give those powers to the Congress. But instead, Madison comes to the convention, and he’s backed of course by the Virginia delegation, and lots of other elite members of the society with a whole new proposal, the Virginia plan. He’s not going to amend the articles, he’s going to scrap them and substitute something entirely different. And this is a shock to many people when they find out it’s not the articles revised. It’s an entirely new constitution, giving an immense amount of power to the Congress and the President. So, that’s the background to what happened in 1787. Brian Smith: So, it seems like part of the realization that the members of the Constitutional convention had, was this sense that we need a higher law to reign in all of these challenges. But you also say, elsewhere in the book, that democracy itself is a problem under the articles. To what degree was this? Were these ideas like the Virginia plan, an attempt to reassert a republicanism against democracy? Gordon Wood: Well, that’s one way of putting it. The things that Madison complained about, which he calls the excesses of democracy, are in some sense things that we’ve come to take for granted. The idea that the politicians should be concerned about what their constituents think, and the horse trading, the things that… He served for a short time in the Virginia legislature. He was appalled at what was happening. And yet, the things that he complained about were, we considered the stuff of democracy. He had an idealized notion, and some of them… And the others did as well, an idealized notion of democracy. Now, we must be clear about this, the revolution was conducted not to create democracy, but to preserve liberty. That’s what they talked about. They never said in the serial crisis, we’re trying to create a democratic society. They thought that a democratic House of Representatives, which is where the democracy resided, that is the lower house, is important to preserve liberty, because the people would look after their liberty, but they didn’t think that was the goal of the revolution. That’s just a means towards the goal, which is the preservation of liberty. Liberty is being threatened by democracy. The democratic behavior of these lower houses in the decade following 1776, they suggest all kinds of solutions. First they say, “Well, maybe we could make the Senate more stronger, or the judges could use their authority to curb the lower houses.” But in the end they feel that that would not be satisfactory. And so, they go to this new federal government that’s going to be a way of curbing state legislatures. Democracy starts as a technical term of political science, referring only to, it means ruled by the people, and the people are confined to the lower house. That’s why it’s called the House of Representatives. The Senates were not democratic bodies. They’re supposed to be Republican counterpart to the House of Lords. They represent the wisdom of the society, and if you will, the aristocracy of the society. And then the governors, and of course this is John Adams who has a tremendous influence on the state constitution make. The governors represent the sort of monarchical element. They go back to Greek philosophy. Aristotle talked about the monarchical, the aristocratical, and the democratical parts of government. And you try to get a balance among these three powers. That’s what’s the thinking that goes into the original state constitution. The House of Representatives is the only body which is democratic, because the thinking of democracy is a technical term of political science. 10 years later, by the time you get to the Federal Constitution, democracy is already emerging in the way we think of it as the whole system, as a set of values that goes way beyond the organization of government. And we’re left with this awkward terminology when we talk about the House of Representatives. What do we mean by that? Is that the only body that’s representative? Are the Senate’s not representative? So, we have to think about how these parties emerged. And by the time you get to the federal government, the Federalists are arguing that all parts of the government are representative of the people. And so, that the House of Representatives has no monopoly of representation. These are fantastic changes in a relatively short time, that get us into more or less the way we think about it today. And they’re already talking in terms that we would about democracy being the values of the whole system. And the people are everywhere in the system. So, in 10 years time, there’s a radical transformation of language and of meaning, that gets us into a world that we are very familiar with, it’s our world, in a 10 years time. Brian Smith: So, one of the most provocative things you say at the very beginning of the book, is that one of the very special things that happens in this time period is the forging of an identity through these documents. Because we’re not a blood and soil people. We’re not a people of one ethnic origin. We don’t have a singular tradition that’s handed down to us, but we do have these documents. So, can you say a touch about how out of this messy set of compromises, and this coalescing of understanding, which you just summarized for me, how do you think this notion of documents like the Constitution and the Declaration as a basis of identity, started to be formed in the early republic? Gordon Wood: Well, because they were quite aware that they will not single people. Even by 1790 when the first census, the English were of course the largest ethnic party, but they were Scots, they were Irish, they were French, and there were lots of Germans, some Swedes. They recognized immediately that they were diverse people. And John Adams wrote about it. He says, “We’re a hodgepodge. How can we ever hold together?” He was kind of pessimistic about it. There were 19 different religions, and there were just as many different ethnicities. And he says, “This is not a nation.” So, there’s some awareness of the diversity, nothing like what we have today, of course, where the whole world is in the United States. But even then it was diverse. And so, they actually clinged to the documents as the adhesive force. And the person of course who cements that in our history is Lincoln. He comes to really, [inaudible 00:32:01] the Declaration of Independence. That that is the thing that pulls us together. But there was an awareness even back at in 1780s and 90s, that constitution, especially after the Federal Constitution, the constitution becomes the king, so to speak, and the thing holding us, this very diverse people, together. And I think that’s still true today. Brian Smith: Since you brought up the challenge of ever-increasing diversity, I wanted to talk a bit about slavery. And in particular, the way in which it’s become this central focusing project for the understanding of American history in recent years, both through the new history, histories of capital and the 1619 Project. Can you talk a little bit about how you think we ought to think in terms of slavery? And then, maybe we can talk more about where these movements are taking history in general. Gordon Wood: Well, slavery has existed in many states. Probably every culture at some time or another had slaves for thousands of years. And it was existing, especially in the new world, in Latin America, and in the United States at the time of the American Revolution. And it still exists in some parts of Africa and the Middle East, [inaudible 00:33:35] slavery. But there wasn’t anything quite like the plantation slavery that existed in Latin America and in the South. But the recent argument about the 1619 Project, that the protection of slavery was the source of the American Revolution. The data they used, the evidence they used is Lord Dunmore’s proclamation of November, 1775. Lord Dunmore was the Royal Governor of Virginia. He’s sitting in his ship, his British ship in Chesapeake Bay, in a desperate situation militarily. So, he issues a proclamation offering all of the slaves in Virginia, come to the Crown side and they’ll be free. About 300 slaves respond at that time. And this is the argument that underlies the claim by the 1619 Project, that slavery was the source of the American Revolution. That the fear of losing slaves was the source of revolution. It’s just not true. Virginia was already in a revolutionary situation. The rebels were in complete control of the government, which is why the governor is sitting out on his ship in Chesapeake Bay. He’s been ousted, and the rebels are in control. There was no fear of their slaves being taken away by the British that led to their revolution. Their revolution was based on they wanted to control their own destiny in Virginia. But the other side of it is, of course, in 1776, the Northern states launched the first, and perhaps in modern times, the only effort at legalizing or abolition, that is the abolition of slavery. This is the first instance history of the world, of the modern world at least, in which a system of government which legalized slavery did away with it. Now, there’s not great numbers, about 50,000 slaves held in the northern states, but it is a momentous time. It’s a monumental event to have the first abolition movement in the world. And it had a great impact on the new world. You can imagine what the Southerners who weren’t prepared to free their slaves, and the Latin American observers of this felt. This was an ominous sign. If the northern states, still country, the United States could abolish slavery, then it could be abolished anywhere. And so, from that moment on, the defenders of slavery thrown onto the defensive. Slavery essentially had never been tackled in this way before. There had been isolated instances of people opposing slavery, [inaudible 00:36:41] Samuel Sewall in 1700 wrote something against slavery, and Quakers had spoken out against it. But where slavery had been previously legitimate, no state had ever abolished it. So in that sense, the American Revolution was a momentous attack on slavery, and it divided the country. The Virginians were caught in the middle. There were lots of people in Virginia who were eager to abolish slavery, Jefferson being the most important. But it was too overwhelming for them. They had a population of about, it was about 40% of the population of Virginia, which was by far the largest state, 200,000 slaves in the state. It was just too much for them. But if they could have gotten over that, it would’ve been incredible. But Virginians were eager to move against slavery, at least in 1776. It all changed later, especially with the Saint-Domingue, the Haitian rebellion in 90s, that frightened Virginians and frightened Southerners in general. But what’s interesting and never mentioned by the 1619 Project, is that in 1791, the College of William and Mary, the trustees, were all slave holders. Wealthy men, give an honorary degree to Grandville Sharp who was the leading British abolitionist at the time. Now, why would they do that if they were frightened of abolition? Why would they board an honorary degree to a British abolitionist? Many Virginians were eager to try to move against slavery, and Washington was confident that slavery would die. They had been growing tobacco. Tobacco is a very soil exhausting crop. And so as a consequence, many of them, including Washington, were moving to the growing of wheat grain, and grain and wheat do not need the labor that tobacco did. And so, they had excess amount of slaves. Washington was renting his slaves out to people in Norfolk and in Richmond. And that’s the first step in their minds towards waged labor. If you’re renting your slaves out, then somehow or other they got the thinking that slavery is on its last legs, and is going to die a natural death. Now, they couldn’t have been more wrong. They live with the illusion that slavery was slowly going to end itself. It compete with free labor, and they live with that illusion. And there are dozens of people saying the same thing around the time of the federal constitution, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. They live with the illusions. Of course, we live with illusions too. We just don’t know what they are. So, that’s the context. And so, it’s a very mixed thing. And certainly the 1619 Projects has got it backwards. What’s important is that the American Revolution makes abolition legitimate for the first time in history. The abolition of slavery by those northern states, eight northern states, is extraordinary. Even if the numbers are small, there are only 50,000 involved. It nonetheless is a momentous time to have that movement. And so, I think the American Revolution has to be seen as the beginning of anti-slavery. We are the first state to move against the slave trade when the United States moves against it. And we have this abolition movement in all of the northern states. Now of course, the southern states don’t, and that’s the problem. And of course, the division of the sections led to the Civil War. Brian Smith: So I wonder, do you think that one of the great problems that the 1619 Project brings to light, is the degree to which the American history discipline has just been derailed into thinking in terms of contemporary politics? Is that the central problem that we’re facing right now? Gordon Wood: I think it’s bigger than that. I think we’re in the midst of a monumental period in our history. And this is elite driven, but we’re trying to atone for the 400 years of both slavery and segregation, that blacks in our society have suffered. And there’s just no doubt of it. The story is bad enough, the true story is bad enough, and there’s no reason to have to invent things the way Hannah Jones and the New York Times have invented, because the true story is bad enough. There’s just no doubt that slavery existed for several centuries. And then even with the north freeing of the slaves, the northern whites were unable to give equality to the blacks. And blacks had their rights taken away. Not immediately, but slowly. And by 1840, no new state that was brought into the union after 1840 gave blacks any rights of citizenship. And it’s really not until the 1960s that blacks have achieved any civic equality. So, that bitterness and that guilt felt by white elites is driving these… So, the 1619 Projects is just an aspect. In some sense, one small aspect of this larger thing that’s running through our society, and will have to run its course. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but we are going through an immensely important and monumental period in our history. Brian Smith: So, how do you think the history profession or other branches of the humanities or social sciences, can helpfully address this in a way that doesn’t rend the society apart? Gordon Wood: It’s gotten politicized and that’s not healthy. Well, all I can say is, I think the humanities are hurting. They’ve lost their confidence. I just give you a statistic. Over the last 10 years, Harvard, 10 years ago, 30% of the graduating class majored in the humanities. Now that’s down to 10%. And if that continues, if that tendency continues, first of all, a lot of colleges will begin abolishing the humanities. They won’t have the students. The students are looking for subjects that have monetary returns, finance or something in computer science. There are more computer science majors at Harvard than majored in all of the humanities put together. So, these are the tendencies of our time. And small colleges are either going out of business, or they’re being forced to abolish the humanities courses, because there’s no student in. So, there’s a really larger problem going on, that’s bigger than just the 1619 Project. And there’s no doubt that American history and history in general is hurting, and it’s become politicized. Of course, it’s always been to some extent the problems. When Charles Beard wrote his book in 1913, it created sensation, and there was a lot of… Going through a very important period in our history. Can be depressing, but a 100 years ago, if you remember, there was an equal crisis in some sense with the new immigrants coming in. People really frightened of all these Eastern Europeans polls, and then the Italians and Jews all coming in. And it looked like the society could not absorb these people. They were too different from the previous immigrants. And there was a crisis. And remember what John Dos Passos, the novelists said, in light of the Sacco & Vanzetti trial, “All right then, we are two nations.” And it looked bad. We were a nation of native one and… Of 13%, about the same percentage of foreign born as we have today in 1920. But we weren’t two nations then. But we were able to assimilate. And by 50 years later, intermarriage became the secret, and that crisis was averted. We didn’t remain two nations. And you remember AV’s Irish Rose, and the whole series of intermarriage. And that I think is the secret to our problem right now. I read somewhere that black-white intermarriage is up to 17%. Jews and non-Jews are marrying almost close to 50%. Asians and non-Asians are marrying 50%. That will ease the problems we worry about. But anyway, we are in a midst of a tremendous crisis. And I think it’s said by the guilt and the realization that blacks have suffered, and they’re not fully assimilated in some sense. It’s almost like new immigrants. They came in the 1960s, so to speak, even though they’ve been here from the very beginning. So, it’s a very difficult time for us, and we have to have hope or the patience to see it through. Brian Smith: Well, thank you for your time. I think this is an excellent place to end. Gordon Wood’s book, Power and Liberty, is available anywhere books are sold. And thank you for your time. Gordon Wood: Thank you. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.

Spencer Klavan joins Brian A. Smith to discuss his new book, How to Save the West. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith and I am the editor of Law & Liberty. With me today is Spencer Klavan, a prominent podcaster who has a new show with DailyWire+ forthcoming, classicist, magazine editor for the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of the new book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises. And I’m very glad to have Spencer on the show. Spencer Klavan: It’s a delight to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Brian. Brian Smith: So I have a confession to make, which is that when I first saw the title of the book, I thought to myself, “Not another defense of the canon, this just cannot work.” But read the book, refreshingly, and as I got to know you at a conference recently, I realized that can’t be the book, it won’t be the book. And you say so right away in it. Just so we take anyone who has this apprehension and sort of diffuse this so that they go and buy your book, I wanted you to talk about what led you to write it and what makes you and this book different from the rest of the defending the Western canon genre that we’ve seen so many entries in recently. Spencer Klavan: Yeah, I really appreciate your asking that question actually, because it’s sort of like that poem, I too, dislike it. I too, dislike poetry. I too, dislike defenses of the cannon or rather I’m sort of bored with them. And I do say upfront in the book that this is not a defense of the canon, full stop. The other thing I say it’s not is it’s not a survey. It’s not the five books you need to read to get a grasp on the whole of Western literature, it’s not a reading list. There are other good books that deal more comprehensively and at greater length with that sort of issue. I mentioned a couple, Jack Rosen, Harold Bloom. Go read those guys if that’s what you want. But what I would say, this book isn’t a survey, it’s not a defense, it’s an offering. And that comes out of the podcast, Young Heretics, which was sort of my first foray into podcasting. And I kind of began that podcast because it occurred to me that on the right, in the conservative movement, even among well-intentioned liberals who believe in the value of the Western canon, we do a lot of fighting and speaking in defense of the Western canon. “We ought to be teaching Homer. We shouldn’t be scrubbing them from the curriculum. They’re not all just dead white men. Here’s the relevance,” and so forth. And something that I noticed is we spend so much time defending our right to read Homer that we don’t spend all that much time actually reading Homer. It occurred to me the number of people who pound their fists on the table and say, “Oh, the greats of the West, we’ve got to keep them in schools,” I sometimes wonder whether those people are cracking the spines themselves. I mean the point of preserving this stuff is for it to change you, to shape you. Even if it isn’t erased from the internet, even if it isn’t taken out of the school curriculums, none of that will matter if you personally, wherever you’re with your family, in your home, and your community and you aren’t exposing your soul to the forming influence of these great works. I think that’s what they’re for, I think that’s why they endure. They don’t endure because they’re complicated or fancy or elevated. They don’t endure because they furnish material for PhD thesis. They endure because somewhere in them is wisdom about how to be good at being human. And the reason the subtitle of the book is Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises is I think that the moment we’re in, especially the moment that has been kind of accelerated by digital technology as I discuss a lot in the book, is dredging up and presenting us with a lot of fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being and just what is this universe in which we live? And there’s an irony, as I say in the introduction, that the great works of the canon, the intellectual inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem is being most maligned precisely when it’s most needed. This is what these resources exist for. Brian Smith: And by people who should know better. By people who should know the best. Spencer Klavan: In fact, I think in some cases by people who know exactly what they’re doing because of course depriving people of the resources to take a certain degree of ownership over their own spiritual, psychological, political formation is a really good way to present yourself as the savior of the world, right? Brian Smith: Absolutely. Spencer Klavan: And so the reason it’s a how-to, despite the kind of ostensible grandeur of that title, the ambitions of the book are actually much smaller than you might expect upon cracking the spine. People who open this book expecting some political program to “Fix all Problems,” capital F, capital P, right, those people are going to be disappointed because what you’re going to be finding instead is a selection and offering, as I said, of ways of thinking about these fundamental questions, “Who are we? What are we made out of? Where are we going?” That are time tested, rich and for you. And that’s what I’m offering here. Brian Smith: So one thing that really strikes me in what you just said is, maybe giving it to you as an anecdote, so in graduate school, I feel like anytime you’re in graduate school for great books like both of us were, I did political theory, you did classics- Spencer Klavan: Right. Brian Smith: There’s a sense in which you’re surrounded by technicians often. Now I was very fortunate in that I had professors that were not technicians, Patrick Deneen, Josh Mitchell, others, but there’s very much a sense of as you professionalize, you’re going to read these books to understand the discourse around these books and what falls out of that kind of training and education I think quite often is the very thing you’re pointing us toward, which is: How do these books form our souls? How do these books offer that guide to life? How might they simply show us, “Don’t go down that door, that’s the Nietzschean door, [that’s a] bad door,” or things like that. So is there a sense in which any of your graduate school experience or your exposure to the academy before you ran screaming informs this book? I mean you don’t explicitly say this, but I had the suspicion that some of this has to do with the reaction to how academia does things. Spencer Klavan: Yeah. That’s well put. I’m like you in that I had a lucky grad school experience. And I always feel really responsible to say this when I launched my critique of the academy, which is severe and structural because I do believe that in America especially, but in Europe as well, the academy is suffering a real kind of identity crisis and in some ways a kind of an implosion self-destruction. And so I always feel like I need to put the caveat on there that I too had wonderful instructors who didn’t view these texts as kind of objects of power to wield or certain brand mystique that they could attach to their own person, all these ways that you see people misusing, I think, the great works, but that matter of technicity that you identified is so important. And one reason why I did not end up pursuing a career in academia is I feared that the technicity would become the point. For people like you and me who devote lives to the life of the mind, the pleasure of that technical expertise is very great. And indeed the temptation to pride in it is also very great. It becomes very easy to forget, especially if you seal yourself off hermetically in a world of technicians, that all techne, all kind of practices of doing something well and with craft are in service of something. They are handmaidens. They’re not goals. And one thing that immediately became clear to me as I started the podcast and also as I wrote this book, is I got a lot of people who come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re really smart. I’m not that smart.” And by that they didn’t actually mean what they were saying. What they meant is, “You’ve got all these tools in your tool belt.” And that’s actually true. I don’t want to deny that it takes some doing to kind of unpack a paragraph of Aristotle. But if you’re doing that and if you’re devoting your life and investing the kind of human capital that you’ve been given by God as a person, then you ought to be doing it for someone and for something. Brian Smith: Exactly. Spencer Klavan: And that’s what I think is lost in our approach to these books a lot of the time. And in some ways, it’s a way of neutralizing them and diffusing them because what they have to say is so explosive and in some ways so contradictory to the going conventional wisdom of just our modern gurus that if we look at Aristotle as simply a kind of animal in a jar or a bacteria in a Petri dish that we can isolate and study, then we never have to risk exposure to his claim, for instance, that man is a political animal. Imagine if you actually had to consider that as a truth claim that could or could not be true of you, what would that do? Brian Smith: Yes. Well, it becomes news in that regard of sense. Spencer Klavan: Totally. Brian Smith: These are not just sort of scientific claims. The news has arrived and you’ve got to decide how to live with it. Spencer Klavan: Right. Brian Smith: So sometime in graduate school, I remember stumbling on the statistic, it was reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that something north of 60 or 70%, depending on the field, of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences would suffer severe depression during the course of their studies. Spencer Klavan: Geez. Yeah. Brian Smith: And at a certain point, just in a PhD program in politics, I started to notice that my colleagues were sort of divided selves fairly often. They wanted to apply these theories in a very tactical way to other people and yet it couldn’t help but infiltrate their life. Spencer Klavan: Yes. Brian Smith: So I’m reminded of this passage in one of J. Budziszewski’s books where he says, “I set out to prove all morality was essentially arbitrary and that our choices were equally arbitrary and that all of our emotional states were equally meaningless. And yet I loved my wife and I loved my children, but this theory couldn’t help but bleed back in to the way in which I treated my wife and my children.” He said that the despair from that was actually the moment that he turned and went in search of something that was better, that he could actually wager his life on. Spencer Klavan: Two passages come to mind, one that you and I just recently shared when we were at that conference on Brothers K. Dostoevsky in that novel has a wonderful moment between Alyosha, the kind of hero, and not his beloved mentor, Father Zosima, but actually a more severe kind of almost administrator in the monastery, Father Paisi, who he thinks doesn’t really like him very much, but he pulls him aside and he says, “Men think that by isolating the technicity of the world, the science of the world, they’ve reduced an objective truth about morality, they’ve reduced virtue to mere fantasy. But the people bear witness to the impossibility of that view and their own hearts bear witness also.” I mean I think this is something very much in evidence and really important, especially in an era where one’s convictions, one’s gut reactions to things, one’s subjective “experiences” of things are written off as totally without worth or merit. You take the true claim, which is that your first impressions of something might need revision, they might need you to step back and consider them and understand them and we’ve advanced that to the claim that actually your loves, your aspirations, your virtue, your attachments, these are illusions. They’re after effects, they’re byproducts of what’s “really going on,” which is matter bouncing off of matter essentially. And since it’s impossible to live that way, you do end up in a situation where your own life kind of bears witness against your philosophy, which is a profoundly neurotic place to be. Brian Smith: Exactly. And you said two passages. Spencer Klavan: Oh you are right. I’m sorry, I got so wrapped up in the Dostoevsky. The other one in C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, which is the conclusion of his Space Trilogy, by far my favorite fiction that Lewis ever wrote. I know people know Narnia and love Narnia, but that third installment of the Space Trilogy for me is his master work. It’s basically an artistic enactment of the abolition of man. It’s deals with a lot of these questions of scientism and materialism. But there’s a moment at the end, very small spoiler alert, that one of the guys whose whole project has been to reduce human life to determinism, it’s all kind of neurons firing in the brain and fate just kind of carries us where it will because we’re a machine, he finds himself overtaken at the last moment like one of the denizens of a fairytale city who’s turned to stone by a curse that actually was all real all along. The things he was playing with in his kind of neat syllogisms were deadly serious. I think that’s a situation we find ourselves in a lot as well. Brian Smith: Yes. No, I think those are very apt quotes for this problem and your book is filled with many others, but I want to drag us back to that because we could talk about other stuff like this all day long. Spencer Klavan: Yes. Let’s talk about the book. Brian Smith: So you list five crises and given that you sort of start and end the book by circling around this, I wanted to focus on what I take to be the most foundational one, which is over our sense of reality. What is this crisis? Why do you think it matters? Spencer Klavan: Yeah, one thing I do in the book throughout is you sort of start with a news cycle moment that everybody’s familiar with or remembers from the last couple years. And then I unravel that into, “Well, here’s 10 other news cycle moments you probably forgot about from the last 20 years that all kind of point in this direction. And here in fact is this long history of dealing with this very problem.” And the one that the book starts off with is the Metaverse, virtual reality essentially, immersion into virtual reality, and this way that a lot of our elites have of talking as if the distinction between my actual daily experience of life, which I would think of as reality, and a computer generated simulation that stimulates the brain in such and such a way, that distinction is really quaint and kind of outmoded and superstitious. And so it’s really not to get down on Mark Zuckerberg or on Meta or whatever, Facebook and so forth. It’s rather to use these statements and these product launches as ways of uncovering a real philosophical conviction. Once you see it, it’s like putting on the green glasses, you see the Emerald City, you can see this everywhere. And I think that this speaks to a conviction that some things are very, very true. We have still in our society, because it’s impossible to live any other way, a desire to claim to reality and to truth and also a total lack of grounding of where do we root that. Is reality the images that my neurons cough up on the screen of my eyes? In which case the metaverse is just fine as a substitute for reality. It’s not even a substitute, it’s just an equivalent alternative that I happen to find more pleasurable. Or is reality some other thing? And if it’s some other thing, is it the idea of the good? Is it my physical experience of the world, right? Before even asking the questions, I mean the first section of the book, I don’t even begin to ask the question, “Well, is reality abstract truth or is it emotional truth?” Or whatever, get into that much later. As you say, this question is threaded throughout the whole book, but really the first question and the fundamental question with which western philosophy proper begins is, “Do you believe that somewhere in some realm of experience there are things that are true no matter who says so or who says otherwise, things that you can’t by feeling differently about them, things that you can’t wish or imagine into existence and that you will never be free of even if you blind themselves to them?” You take Plato’s Cave. I say in the book, “It’s the original metaverse,” the idea that you are already in some sense being blinded by the sophists that run your culture and by your own presuppositions. The point of that story is our third person view. The reason it’s a revealing story is because it draws back the camera so we are looking from the outside right into the cave and we’re able to see that even though for the people shackled to the walls of Plato’s Cave there is no reality other than this, there is in fact an external, truer reality outside of that kind of fantasy. And that matters even for the people who believe in the fantasy. Just as we were talking about earlier, if you invent a world where your emotions are part fictive and where your moral convictions are arbitrary, you can construct that world in speech all you want, but the reality of actual moral truths is going to come crashing down on you one way or another. And that’s where we start to see the very tight and intimate connection between these kind of dismissals of absolute truth, of final reality and violence. Because if there is no absolute truth, you think you’re kind of being let free into some glorious future where everything is whatever you want it to be and nothing is either good or bad, thinking makes it so. But of course the only way then to determine what’s going to happen is through an exertion of power, through the Thrasymachus’s claim, that the power is basically the determiner of justice. Brian Smith: But to be even more dark within that, I think there’s an element of, “I can prove I’m really real by killing.” Spencer Klavan: Right. Brian Smith: Which becomes a theme in Russian literature like we’ve just read. It becomes a reality in ideology in the 20th century. But there’s also this other element which you draw on throughout the book, which I think is very interesting, this idea that there’s an explanation for why the dramas that we watch even have gotten so vacuous. In our denial that there is a reality and consequence, this multiverse theory where we can reinvent characters’ histories in a completely arbitrary way and we can take what’s seemingly were meaningful moments, Thanos snapping his fingers, half of everybody dying, and just undo it in a heartbeat and then nothing has any weight. How does this relate to Plato’s Cave? Say more about that because I want to hear that connection drawn a little bit more tightly. Spencer Klavan: So this is where you do have to start to ask the question, “Well, okay, if you intuitively feel that in fact there is such a thing as the real and it’s not purely arbitrary or purely capable of being constructed at will, then where does it live?” And I think the most readily available answer for most people to what is real is stuff, physical objects. They are real. And there’s an appeal to that answer of course, because as Aristotle observes our sensory experience of physical things is the most vivid and immediate experience that we have. And it takes some doing… What is purest and realest in actual fact is in some sense the last thing that we make our way toward if we ever get to contemplating, “Okay, I see a brown table and a brown cow. What is brown?” And as you reach those levels of abstraction, Aristotle thinks, you also begin to hone in on things that have more integrity as entities than just the physical objects you see in front of you. And yet crucially, reality only ever comes to us mediated through our senses. So it’s very easy to make this mistake that, “Well, there’s only matter, right? Matter is what is real.” And basically my argument about the multiverse is that as an artistic failure, it is kind of the final breakdown of materialism as a philosophy. And I think everybody’s looking for the grand victory that’s going to stop people from thinking that the world is just atoms, you’re going to be able to prove such and such a thing. And one thing I argue a lot in the book is that these aren’t the kinds of questions that subject themselves to scientific proof. If you believe that matter and scientific questions are the only things that exist, you’re going to trap yourself in a little tightly sealed box with no opening because there then will be no mode of accepting any kind of truth that is other than the one that you’ve already determined for yourself. And I think the emptiness of our art as it becomes more and more inspired by a kind of neo-epicurean philosophy of pure matter, of atoms bouncing off one another, is itself not a proof, but evidence, an indication that science is basically trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. Plato’s claim is that the effort to extract truth from your day-to-day experiences is already a difficult enough task, is already something that requires long years of study and effort and perhaps even divine intervention. And the multiverse claim is essentially that, “No, in fact the things that you can see and touch are basically the realest possible thing, the only thing really that we can count as real at all. And other than that, it’s basically just shadows on the wall. It’s just fantasies that’s just throwing these up.” Those fantasies are empty. If, in fact, you believe that that’s what you’re doing when you’re telling stories, you’re just pressing certain buttons in the brain, you’re just confecting certain shadows on the wall, then you are going to end up with stories that don’t mean anything because they don’t refer to anything outside of themselves. Brian Smith: Right. And I do also wonder whether there isn’t an implicit link here between the people who find these stories compelling and the people who, having embraced the idea that matter is everything, begin to doubt their own loves, their own affections toward people, places, things, institutions. And so this is a society for whom all the solid things melt into air. And yet I also think that there’s some hope in the sense that the shows and the forms of art that rebel against this, that say, “Reality is not just the evidence of your senses,” the ones that don’t try to beat you over the head with this fact seem to be the most successful ones. I think of a show like Yellowstone for instance. This is a show about very intense affections and deep historical sort of ties that people are not willing to break and to assert something real beyond the senses. Spencer Klavan: Another show that comes to my mind is White Lotus and- Brian Smith: Oh yeah. Spencer Klavan: There’s this dark comedy. It’s really about sexual relations and power relations in an era of woke morays. And what I love about this show, although it’s kind of viewer discretion advised in a big way, what I love about it is that rather than perform a little morality play where all the people with the wrong ideas get theirs, the show creators have simply depicted the problems and consequences of woke sexual ethics as in fact they are. And there’s no grand scene of repentance where somebody makes a big speech about, “This is my philosophy,” but there is a sense that ideas have consequences, philosophies have consequences. And if we’re going to show these things on screen, to be fully honest about them, we can’t just depict the fact of their existence. I mean this is something that I think both conservatives and liberals get wrong about the culture wars, which I talk about also in the book. We think of this as some sort of debate about, “Is art going to just show anything goes? Are we just going to be totally free to put anything on screen or are we going to side with those nasty conservatives who don’t want you to be able to show certain things, want the Hays Code back and so forth?” And what we don’t realize I think is there’s no such thing as art that is anything goes. Art inherently contains a moral outlook on the world because the reality of moral truth is actually inescapable. It’s impossible for us to think without it, the very forms, the shape of our mind. Brian Smith: We need rules. Spencer Klavan: We need rules. Yes. Brian Smith: It reminds me of an essay you once wrote for us on video games. Spencer Klavan: That’s right. Yeah, rules and the good. We need ideals, we need objectives, we need the telos. And so really what we’re in is a fight over whose rules, whose vision of reality is going to be publicly honored and awarded and more regularly produced in these big movie houses. And the ones that are most on offer are kind of epicurean nihilism. There’s million universes, nothing you do matters except that we be kind of peaceful and pleasurable amongst ourselves. And then there is this new strain, you’re right, of art that is not preachy, it’s not a conservative tractate and in fact many of the people that are making it are not traditionally speaking conservatives, but that simply recognizes the total inadequacy. I mean look, I just went to see Avatar, Way of Water, Part Two, This Time It’s Wet. And here’s James Cameron, a guy who’s made movies that I really like. I think Terminator 1 is one of the great movies, a great pop art of the last few decades. But this guy spent 10 years on basically a roller coaster ride. And what has he got to say? I mean this is just this kind of wonder of science, earth mother Gaia, “It’s all energy bouncing off of atoms, man,” is so played out that even when it makes money at the box office, people kind of know they’re being served thin gruel. And that’s kind of the hope I think you’re talking about. We are still in a situation economically where people feel incentivized to slap another cut of raw meat on the table for the Lumpenproletariat to consume. And yet everybody knows this stuff is inadequate, that in fact shows White Lotus, shows like Yellowstone, shows that kind of put the moral universe out in front of your eyes as if it had urgent reality are becoming more popular for exactly this reason. They feed the soul better. Brian Smith: So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about one of your best phrases. I mean the book has a lot of great phrases and sort of pithy encapsulations of really complex thoughts. My favorite, the aptest, I think is something you call Soul Dysphoria and in that section you explain a bunch of things, but you link body positivity, this whole movement and the phenomena of Insta photoshopping perfection. And you say that they have a common outlook and I guess my question is, so what’s common to them? Why are they popular? What do they tell us about who we are right now? Spencer Klavan: So near the beginning of that chapter… First of all, I’m really glad you noticed soul dysphoria because I thought, “Oh, that’s just a subhead.” Brian Smith: I circled it. Spencer Klavan: Nice. Well, okay, so let me try to work into this. Near the beginning of that chapter, I say the kind of pop wisdom, pop psychology is that the soul is kind of extraneous, that it’s kind of an appendage, that it’s a holdover from certain kind of unclear evolutionary accidents that cause us to feel things like love and emotion, but really all we’re really doing is just surviving physically. So given the fact that we have these bodies, why do we need to have thoughts and souls and consciousness at all? But in fact, since as we’ve been discussing now at some length, in fact since love and desire and the soul truths are realer in some sense and more urgently real than the kind of physical facts that follow upon them, the real question that everybody has always struggled with and that secretly we’re still struggling with now is not, “Why do I need a soul?” It’s, “Why do I need a body? If I am this being that is capable of making contact with abstracts truths and with love and with all the high, noble things that you and I have just been talking about and have talked a lot about off mic as well, then what’s the point of this meat sack that’s hanging off of my divine spark?” One of the things that pulling back the camera on that does is it helps to have a little bit of charity and empathy for this problem. This is an old problem. It goes back not necessarily, I don’t think actually to Plato himself, but to some of Plato’s interpreters inside and outside the early Christian Church. Plotinus is somebody that I mention a lot in the book in this context. And if that’s true, if the body is kind of an imposition or a fall or a descent, then it follows that the best thing we can do with it is just mold it to our desires and to conform with our souls, our divine spark, our essence, our identity, whatever word you want to call that, to mold it as directly to conform with our desires as possible. And that is the connection which is a very central and old human impulse between the internet avatar, the airbrushed, photoshopped picture, and the body positivity movement. They’re all efforts to reconfigure the world of the body so that it matches people’s aspirations, the way they think they ought to be, the thing that they think they somehow are secretly. And the great Christian and pagan truth, the height of Athenian and Jerusalemite wisdom on this topic is that you are not actually going to float away from your body into the true, the good, and the beautiful. You have a body because it is the medium in which the true, the good, and the beautiful is best expressed. And that’s the mind flip I think that the great texts can give us on this one. Brian Smith: Well, and without this insight, I think it is relatively easy to yearn for a technological solution to the frailties or the dysmorphias that we have with our own form. I mean this yearning, which I think is expressed in science fiction, for uploading into a place where we can just define our own avatar, on the one hand, anyone who’s played a role playing game or played a computer game where you create an avatar of some kind I think can sympathize with this. “Wouldn’t I wish to be a thing I am not?” Spencer Klavan: I want to look like my LensAI profile picture. It looks better than I do in real life. It doesn’t have the aches and pains that I have. Yeah, totally. Brian Smith: Right. And people who hit the gym, who lift weights, we’re struggling against the limitations of our bodies with the weight we can’t get rid of. But in a way there’s something I think which you get at, that it’s more human to embrace the intersection of body and spirit and live with those struggles and find things that give us traction for understanding that, as in great books, as in deep conversation with friends who share similar struggles. Without those touchpoints, it makes sense that some of the weirdness we’re inhabiting right now… I do kind of wonder, in the world of no Covid ever happened, shutdowns never happened, would the extreme anti-body sort of movements that we have right now have quite as much traction, if people had not been cut off from one another, had been left in the face-to-face encounters that you cannot avoid as a teenage person? And you think of the biggest number of these people are, it’s teenagers who have been most isolated and found these online communities. Spencer Klavan: Well, there is a moment in the history of this problem, this question in modernity that I found really striking and that was a piece by Andrea Long Chu in the New York Times. This is a male to female transgender person, making the argument that the point of bottom surgery wasn’t happiness and that it wouldn’t actually necessarily cure the depression or the discomfort, “Because desire and happiness are unrelated agents.” This is the line from the piece. And to me, that is really the heart of where this is actually going. That’s at least a level of honesty about what actually happens if you disembody yourself or if you make your body into a plaything to kind of respond to your whims. The terrible bind that we’re in… I mean it’s a fallen world, no question about it. But the problem is if the material world including your own self is just kind of raw material to be dominated, then you’re not actually in a relationship with anything, including yourself and you’ve in fact destroyed the possibility of aa relationship. So you will just be a bunch of diodes just kind of beeping at will haphazardly in the end, right? That’s basically what we are without bodies and our pushing up against something physical as you describe in the gym, which is a great example. There’s a reason that people go to the gym now as a kind of reaction against this trend. It’s precisely because making contact or having driven home to you that there is kind of a hard surface against which you’re pushing up against. Lets you know you’re not alone. Otherwise, it’s lonely being a divine spark. There’s really no to go with it. Brian Smith: What you just said makes me think this entire movement that we’re talking about, it’s the rejection of that Augustinian understanding that we are intentional desiring creatures and by severing that understanding, we’re casting ourselves off, we’re adrift. Because if you understand yourself as, “I am a sinful creature,” or maybe you don’t even understand yourself as that to get this point? If you understand yourself as defined by the things you are attracted to and love, that at least opens the door to certain kinds of understanding through the body that the denial of that, that chosen severing of desiring from happiness. Once you make that leap, it becomes very hard to reach this sort of person even through art, I fear. Historically, I feel like novels and poems and film and music can hit us where we don’t expect it, not because they’re attempting to crush our intellect, our intellectual defenses, but because they open us to a kind of experience in our hearts and in our longings that maybe we didn’t see that way before. Spencer Klavan: Wow. Yeah, that’s very beautifully put. Brian Smith: Thank you. Spencer Klavan: Something I read after finishing the book that has been a little mantra with me lately is this Simone Weil observation, and I’ll probably butcher it because it’s one of those things I’ve repeated in my head so many times that I feel like I probably have my own personal version of it that I don’t want to lay that on Weil, but she says something to the effect of, “Love is a form of attention and attention is a form of prayer.” And somebody that really affected me deeply this year is Thomas Traherne, this English mystic, undiscovered for hundreds of years, and then resurrected in the early 20th century, I think, whose whole thing is about the beatific vision and the question for Weil and Traherne both I think is your actions imply a highest good. They imply a love even if you don’t… And we have this kind of ridiculous, cheapened idea about the word love that it means butterflies in your stomach. Those are beautiful things. It’s beautiful to have a crush on somebody, but if what you think is that you are not loving if you’re not experiencing those things, then you don’t understand yourself. Beatrice says to Dante, “Never creator, nor creation was ever without love.” And everything that we do, every action that we perform by its inherent logic implies some goal, some good. And pursuing that goal, paying attention to that goal, devoting yourself, giving of yourself to it is love. And when you are mindlessly scrolling, I’ll pick my drug of choice, Twitter, it could be Instagram, whatever, when you are lying in bed for the third straight hour, that you hit snooze on your alarm, whatever, you’re not not loving, you’re not in a neutral space of, “I don’t worship…” And people think they don’t worship anything, they think whatever. No, you’re just giving yourself over to another kind of worship, another kind of love that you have less control over and self-awareness about and really the reason that this body problem is so pernicious is because it holds out this fantasy that you can choose the structure of your loves or have no loves at all. You can just be kind of a free floating entity that’s not tied to or pulled toward anything and that ain’t going to happen. We exist in states of love at all times. Brian Smith: We may not like those loves. Spencer Klavan: No. Brian Smith: We may not be quite aware of them as you say, but they’re really there. So I want to shift gears again. We’ve talked a bit about scientism already. I mean I don’t even remember you using the word scientism anywhere in the book, but there is this pervasive notion you talk about, of science outstripping its proper boundaries in our imaginations. Quick quote from you, “We call upon science now to explain not just how the physical world works, but how everything, everything works and why.” So I’d just like you to riff a bit on how you think this vision of science as a sort of ideology has added to the distortions we’re experiencing and this phenomena we’ve been talking about. Spencer Klavan: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m recording the audiobook now and I’m trying to remember if I’ve said the word scientism at all because it’s a word that I use all the time. I’m a podcaster and so forth, and in so far as it goes, I think it’s a very good descriptor of what we’re dealing with when we talk about this sort of thing. But no, I didn’t use it in this book because I wanted people step by step to really see what we’re dealing with. It’s like one of those things where the two young fish are swimming by and the old fish says, “How’s the water, boys?” And the young fish turns to his friend and says, “What’s water?” I mean this is what we’re up against when we talk about something like scientism. It’s so pervasive and really what it is is the swelling up of what the ancients would’ve called natural philosophy to swallow every other discipline, branch of knowledge, way of doing things. And of course natural philosophy is an ancient good and noble way of studying the world. It has to do with the things that behave according to phusis, which is the Greek word for the things that happen spontaneously or according to fixed rules that are inherent in the things themselves. So it is in the nature of a stone. It is in the phusis of a stone to fall to the ground when dropped because objects with mass attract one another, right? These are things that even in describing them, you can freely and happily blend language from Aristotelian metaphysics with kind of Newtonian mechanics and even on into quantum physics. This is a seamless tradition in that respect. Of course, there are many profound revolutions in science, but as a practice, as a human practice, it retains, I think, its noble character. What happens really to cause the neurosis that we’re struggling with is the development of the idea that that form of knowledge, knowledge about spontaneous, rule-based behaviors in the natural world is the only form of knowledge and this is where the reality thing becomes important again. This is the only kind of truth. This is the only way that we can know things is through experiment and verification and therefore the things that exist are physical things and that’s that. There’s nothing else to them. And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that even if this is not what people believe in their conscious minds, we all breathe this in like oxygen. Brian Smith: Oh absolutely. Spencer Klavan: Yeah. We all know that. We all feel in our bones that that must be true. And one of the things I try to show in the book is that was never proven. That was not a thing that happened because somebody advanced some brilliant argument, that science is the only kind of truth. It’s actually something that happened as a matter of circumstances. The church lost its claim on authority and as truths began to come to light that science could reveal that theological speculation, suddenly we became very addicted to this kind of knowledge because it’s powerful and it’s reliable. You can always get it if you do it right and you can do things with it that make you very strong. And this has now become our idolatry, our way of thinking about everything, the whole world, and it is not strong enough to sustain that weight. This thing where we now say, “Trust the science,” where Dr. Fauci becomes the defacto governor of every state in America for two plus years, this is obviously a disordered way of living and of governing ourselves and it arises directly out of this unsustainable effort to reduce all forms of truth to scientific truth because some things don’t have a scientific answer, some very important things like moral questions, right? “Okay, the virus is this contagious. Should we therefore shut the country down?” And what we’re doing now is we’re trying to find some way of rooting our answers to that question in science, as if we could empirically prove what the right answer is because that’s the only way that we think we can know anything. And really in this respect, demoting science will be the best thing that ever happened to it out of Covid. Brian Smith: Right. Well, because the only logic that science can lend itself to in terms of an ethical theory strikes me as something like a kind of crass utilitarianism, that you’re struck with okay, so if our postulates are health and bodily integrity are the goods we’re aiming, at least a sort of way understanding of that, then you can kind of understand how you get to these judgments like we’re seeing again now of, “Oh yes, we need masks again because of the triple threat of viruses and the flu and Covid version X,” I don’t even know what we’re at right now there. And so there is this oddity going on. You knew it was going to happen, there’s a line from Walker Percy about this. Spencer Klavan: Oh, here we go. Good. Brian Smith: Yes, here we here, right? You had to expect it. Spencer Klavan: Somebody should play a drinking game at home with this podcast, how many times- Brian Smith: Exactly. But he had this notion that what is happening with scientism is this seeding of our sovereignty to they, the experts and that something is lost in that. When we allow this notion that scientific expertise can claim sovereignty over the moral choices that define who we are and that our insanity around this shows up in various ways, that people in their yearning to have that certainty, which we might find in the gospel, we might find it in the way we let our faith shape our lives, if you don’t have that, it’s really easy to sort of say, “Well, trust the science. The experts are telling us this is the right way to live. And so we just have to do is we’re told.” Spencer Klavan: Yes, it’s very easy to find this argument made explicitly in the works of Wilsonian progressives. Brian Smith: Yes. Spencer Klavan: Since the era of the progressive, this has not stopped being an express argument, that democracy basically is inefficient, that it doesn’t work, and that the best thing to do is to do that outsourcing that Percy’s talking about. Let me give an example that may seem a little bit out of left field, but that I think is really telling and that is this respect for Marriage Act that just passed. Irrespective of the side that one may be on about gay marriage itself, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole thing now where everybody wants to codify certain Supreme Court decisions, and it all happened after Dobbs because it turned out that you could actually overturn a Supreme Court decision, right? Brian Smith: Shocking, right? Spencer Klavan: I mean it’s funny, but my colleague and boss, Charles Kesler, who edits the Claremont Review of Books, made this point that the problem with Dobbs was not just how sacrosanct abortion was in the leftist project, it was also that court constructed, substantive due process rights are the whole architecture of the progressive universe. And if one of those planks can be just taken out, then any one of them is vulnerable. That’s why Clarence Thomas’s concurrence was so scary, even though he was the only person to say, “Now we need to revisit all these other decisions.” Brian Smith: He said the quiet part out loud. Spencer Klavan: Exactly. But it’s true. If substantive due process is a fiction, which I think it is, then all of these things are vulnerable and they’re vulnerable even more fundamentally because the courts aren’t supposed to be making these sorts of decisions, which is maybe another way to say the same thing. Anyway, this funny thing then happened where Democrats were like, “Well, what we really need to do now is write laws in Congress that codify these decisions and these principles and then they’ll be safe,” to which I thought, “I have news for you about Congress. We vote in new people and they also can write new laws and can overturn these.” And it’s like everybody wants a final answer to these culture war issues. That is one side definitely won, and that’s that. But a lot of these issues, that’s not our form of government. We debate these things together, face-to-face, and we come up with compromises that we enact locally and people, they would rather have, in many cases, I think the definitive pronunciation of the experts. Brian Smith: And I think there’s something tempting but ultimately flawed about this. And not just about politics, but even more broadly speaking. I stop myself all the time… This is another way that scientism creeps into your head. I try not to talk about human things as problems that can be availed by solutions. Spencer Klavan: Right. Brian Smith: Because almost nothing in human life that isn’t a medical condition is actually a problem in that way of, “I can find a technical answer that will fix this.” I mean, yes, you can set an alarm to get yourself out of bed, to use your example earlier. You can set five alarms, you could do the Jocko thing and just stagger them on top of one another, but you still have to make the conscious choice of will to get up and go lift heavy things if that’s how you’re ordering your day and how you have aspired to order your day. Spencer Klavan: You can wake up and turn off the five alarms just as easily you turn them on. Brian Smith: Right. And yet all the time we use this problem-solution pairing, and to get back to the political thing, as if we are not tomorrow going to find another challenge that our hypothetical final solution to this great problem has caused. So the things we do to ameliorate the challenges that are in front of us tend to create a new set of challenges. And this is human life. It is an unending series of this sort of thesis-antithesis cycle. Then you talk about the Polybius regime cycle in the book for a little bit, and there’s a very similar version of this sort of dynamic. Spencer Klavan: Yeah. And I’m so glad you mentioned medical problems because the danger, the thing that I am trying to train myself out of now is medicalizing regular phenomena, and that’s in terms of language of psychiatry or the language of actual physical ailment. You do this all the time, right? “Oh, I had trauma.” “I struggle with or suffer from depression, suicidality.” I mean these are not diseases. They are spiritual struggles and we should talk about them that way. Brian Smith: Yes, absolutely. Spencer Klavan: Yeah. Brian Smith: So maybe this is a good way to draw us toward the ending I had in mind, which is I wanted to end by talking about love, which is to the degree there’s a “solution,” I put it in air quotes, present in your book, you talk about love, you talk about the ordering principle, and I just want you to talk a little bit now about how love points us back to the real. How does it help us out of the fixes that we perpetually find ourselves? Spencer Klavan: Yeah. It’s interesting that just kind of naturally, we’ve been edging up upon this very thing as we start to talk about it’s going to be a daily grind. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to have to make the decision to get up in time to make breakfast for your kids, to go to church, to read for 30 minutes a day, whatever. You’re going to have to make these decisions afresh each time. And that’s because love is love of the particular, and by the end of the book, I even say even something as noble as Save the West is a kind of unhelpful aspiration if it’s not embodied in the here and now, in the fullness of the here and now, not just this kind of reductive what’s the physical reality around you, but the whole experience that you wake up every day and are immersed in. Yeah, this is my answer, this is my solution. How do you save the west? Love. But you have to write a whole book about it because you have to earn your way to it. You have to earn your way to an understanding of love that isn’t just going to boil down into nice, fuzzy feelings. And what begins somewhat slightly perhaps at the very beginning of the book, I drop in this Iris Murdoch quote, she’s one of the great disciples of Plato in the 20th century, and she says, “Love, and so art and morality, is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Brian Smith: It’s a great quote. Spencer Klavan: It’s a beautiful line. When you come down to politics, people feel immobilized by the fact that there are all these sort of structural crises going on at the level of our national government and indeed the world. And those narratives, those crises are in some sense designed to immobilize you. You are not going to muscle the cycle of regimes back into place, right? Brian Smith: Absolutely not. Spencer Klavan: No. And it may be that you have some role to play in ameliorating those big problems, but you’ll find them in the particulars of your human sized life because that is where you are capable of doing love as a verb. This is where if a man says he loves God but love’s not his brother, he is a liar. Why is that? Well, because we’re very easily swayed into making God into the kind of amorphous jelly of our particular preferred abstractions. God is love, God is goodness. All these things that God actually is, but there’s a reason he took on flesh, right? There’s a reason that Christmas happened. There’s a reason the cross happens, and that’s because we are actually more complete, more noble, more elevated at the size that we are at. Man is made in the image of God and this is where goodness and joy take place, on our earth, in our creation. They take place in the daily political and personal struggles that people wake up and choose to do out of love of the good and embodiment of the good, and the realization that someone other than oneself is real. Brian Smith: And that I think particularly, as we are recording right before Christmas- Spencer Klavan: Yes. Brian Smith: But our audience won’t hear this till after, but I think it’s a good place to stop. Thank you so much for joining me for this hour and talking about all these great things. Spencer’s book will be out at the time we put this podcast up and it can be bought anywhere you buy books, so please go out, get yourself a copy of How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan. I’m Brian Smith, and this has been another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.

Paul Edgar joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss the picture of statesmanship we can glean from an extended ancient inscription on a statue of Idrimi of Alalakh, discovered in 1939. Edgar has written on the Idrimi inscription for Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy. Brian A. Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Statue of Idrimi (British Museum) Rebecca Burgess: Hello and welcome on this Groundhog Day to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law and liberty. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m a Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty, Acting Director of the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy Project, visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, and a few other professional odds and ends. I mentioned Groundhog Day for its iconic Bill Murray movie reference, because when it comes to questions of statesmanship and international relations, the more we today want to describe everything as unprecedented, the more we find things are in fact very much precedented. On that theme, joining me today and highlighting the point, by talking about the Idrimi statue inscription, one of our most ancient accounts of statesmanship in near Eastern history, perhaps the earliest complete biography of a political figure that has been discovered to date, is Paul Edgar of the Clement Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. Welcome, Paul. Paul Edgar: Hi, Rebecca. Thanks very much for having me here, and thanks for your work on a number of things. We’ve had the opportunity, fortunate opportunity to work together on essays, and I’ve read your public writing frequently over the past several years, so thank you. Rebecca Burgess: Oh. Well, thank you. Well, I need to tell our listeners a bit about your honors and glories, Paul, on theme with our subject, and I promise I won’t be chiseling this in stone while we’re speaking. Paul is an Associate Director of the Clement Center, and he holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern languages and Cultures from the University of Texas. He’s also a philologist of several ancient languages and has studied, notably at Tel Aviv University. But even more intriguing, before entering academia. Paul served more than 22 years as an Infantry Officer in the US Army, beginning as a platoon leader in Korea, and eventually finding his way to slightly sunnier pastures perhaps in Italy, hotter pastures in North Africa, and more recently serving in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, also in Afghanistan with his final assignment being in Jerusalem. Is that correct? I have that all right? Paul Edgar: Correct. Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: Perfect. So when I say that on today’s podcast we have a traveler from an antique land in the east, it is the truth. And Paul, I was wondering if you would mind if I did some personal indulgence and quoted Shelly’s poem that is on theme? Paul Edgar: Sure. No, no. That’s a great idea. Rebecca Burgess: Oh, great… So, “I met a traveler from an antique land, who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read. Which yet survived, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing besides remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sand stretch far away.” So of course, as you know Paul, that’s Shelly talking about Ozymandias, the Pharaoh. But speaking of words on pedestals, I wonder if you can start us off by telling us about how important these old statues and inscriptions are, how they keep on ending up in British museums and us finding them in British museums and studying them there, how Shelly was responding that too in his day, but today, why relatively recently we’ve only come to the history and the knowledge of this statue? Paul Edgar: Well, I find these things interesting. And I think they’re academically important. I think they can certainly enrich what we already understand classically and practically about politics, politics broadly. Most of what I’ll talk about today is international politics, but international diplomacy. So I don’t think they offer anything new, but I think they do offer confirmations of these things that we know more traditionally from the era of Herodotus and Thucydides and forward. I think historically our understanding of history and political history especially begins there, right around the 5th century or 6th century B.C. You could turn, I say, perhaps we could turn to some biblical text, but for the past couple 100 years at least, people have been hesitant to do that, certainly the last 100, 150 years. But our understanding of these things begins with those texts that remained with us from the time they were written all the way through today. And Napoleon, I’m sure many other things involved, but Napoleon’s tour, I think the whole tour was unexpected. He went to Egypt and then got stranded there in Egypt and thus worked his way up the coast of Palestine, Syria. But when he did that, one of the things that occurred, or one of the things that corresponded with it was this sensation in Western Europe with things that are older, things that we would call pre-class, that predate Herodotus and Thucydides. And so, there was a rush of archeological exploration, much of that private, privately funded, or perhaps a kind of a combination, private and state-funded. But there was a whole lot of private involvement, private money involved. And as a consequence, we discovered so much. We discovered Sumerian texts and Acadian texts, thousands of years of these things. Much of that is what we would call accidental. In other words, we may have stumbled upon archives, formal archives, but our discovery of it isn’t complete. We happen to find particular archives for different reasons, perhaps the ones that were easiest to find at the time. And there’s probably still a lot more that we still don’t know about ’cause it’s all been covered up. But anyway, so we discover this material. A lot of it is cuneiform tablets. Most of those tablets would be receipts, but a whole lot of them, our diplomatic texts, they’re diplomatic letters, they’re treaties. And over the last 200, 150, 200 years, academics have had an opportunity to, one, sort of crack the code. ‘Cause most of these languages we didn’t know. We didn’t even know they existed. So we had to decipher the script, decipher the language, and then organize the language and better understand it. And all of that, of course, takes a long time, for a number of reasons. But I think we’re in a position now where we can take a lot of those texts and tell a bigger story, tell a more complete story of the eras that we would consider early iron. So this is much of what is captured in the early part of the Hebrew Bible and Samuel, Kings. But then much earlier than that, and the example today comes from what we call the late Bronze Age, an era from about 1,600 to 1,200 or 1,100 B.C. And the statue that we’re talking about is kind of towards the latter end of that in the 15th century, about 1,450 B.C. Rebecca Burgess: So who would, for context for some of our listeners, who would’ve been the big figures? Egypt comes to mind, of course, lots of people know some of the pharaohs, around which Pharaohs or reign would this might have been? Paul Edgar: So, I’m a little hesitant to… Sometimes I’m hesitant to talk super precisely, but in this case, I think we’re at least fairly safe to say, or we’re certainly safe to say that the prominent Egyptian pharaoh during Idrimi’s rule, again, we’ll introduce Idrimi a little bit more or in more detail here shortly, but during Idrimi’s rule, the two pharaohs that would’ve been in power were probably Thutmose III and Amenhotep II. Both of whom, mainly Thutmose III, but both of them conducted military expeditions up into this area. Now those tended to be short-lived, they didn’t establish, they didn’t colonize, or try to annex anything up there, but there were certainly prominent military expeditions up there. So, they did reach the area of Idrimi and certainly would’ve been known to Idrimi and those that he socialized with. Rebecca Burgess: Got it. So speaking in a mix of both biblical peoples and terms and modern day, we’re talking about, with Idrimi, the area of modern Turkey, Syria- Paul Edgar: Right. Rebecca Burgess: … the Canaanites, right? Am I getting that right? That’s about where it? Paul Edgar: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s more than fair. So, where Idrimi’s statue was found and where Alalakh, his city or city-state was located is in modern Turkey, but it’s barely in modern Turkey. It’s just on the other side of the Orontes River there near Syria. I would still refer to it as Syria. I know that some, depending on how people conceive of these places, some people may disagree with me or even disagree with me sharply. But I consider this northern Syria, not in the sense of the modern state, but geographically. Rebecca Burgess: Got it. Got it. And then, this particular statue was found somewhere around the 1930s, correct? Paul Edgar: Right. So it was a British expedition. Leonard Woolley, who was now, wouldn’t be considered a modern or a high-tech archeologist in our day. Archeology has come a long, long way in the past couple of 100 years. They’re still coming along, they have a long way to, but they’ve come a long way. But for his time, Woolley was very precise about what he was doing. He had certain methodologies of controlling a dig and being very methodological about it, and accounting for where, how things were found, and the state it was found in. He did that as well, or better than anybody who had preceded him. Rebecca Burgess: So I think, when you first brought this topic to my attention, what I was most, maybe arrested by is, speaking as a political theorist, we often get a little caught up in the words in texts and thinking about learning actual political theory in a sense, but politics and diplomacy from a statue and an inscription on a statue, I found absolutely breathtaking, but also fascinating. And the physical statue itself is very intriguing and unique. Could you describe a little bit about it? From my understanding, the writing is actually on parts of the body of the king. And even with a little thought or speech bubble coming out of one side of his mouth. Inscription on the Idrimi statue (British Museum) Paul Edgar: Correct. So the statue, and anybody can look this up, you can look this up on Wikipedia, there’s a really nice picture of Idrimi and the inscription on Wikipedia. The British Museum, of course, has a couple of good photos as well. But actually, those photos are a little bit without context, ’cause they have a black background, and so you think it might be huge. And it’s not, it’s three and a half feet tall, and it’s made of, I may be mispronouncing it, but I think I’m using the right term, magnesite. So this is a light, perhaps a light gray or a white stone, at least two pieces, the throne and then Idrimi, the figure of Idrimi himself are two separate pieces. There may be more than that, but certainly two primary pieces. And then the inscription, which is in cuneiform form, in a language that we normally refer to as peripheral Acadian, is written across the statue and begins in one spot, and they use about all of the, not all, but most of the surface area of the statue to write this inscription, which again, is, in summary, a political biography of Idrimi’s life. Rebecca Burgess: Great. And of course, the king himself could have inscribed this, but we actually know that it was not himself, it was a scribe, correct- Paul Edgar: Right. Rebecca Burgess: … who actually wrote it? Paul Edgar: Yeah. The scribe mentions himself twice in the inscription and mentions one of Idrimi’s sons in the inscription as well. So I think it’s fair to say, unless we learned something else later, I think it’s fair to say that this inscription was written by his family and political colleagues or servants shortly after his death. The end of the inscription is essentially an epitaph that is very, very formulaic, often found on the tombs of royalty at the time. So, while Woolley found this, it was not set, it doesn’t appear to have been set near Idrimi’s tomb, but it may have been set near where he was buried originally, or certainly, it was at the very least sculpted and then inscribed on in order to commemorate his life after he had died. Rebecca Burgess: Got it. Well, maybe we should turn to that life now, and you can tell us a little bit about who this enigmatic and clearly charismatic individual was, I think. And we’ll get to, of course, feel free to actually invoke the inscription, which you have translated in an original translation. But he mentions that, oh, his older brothers didn’t quite get the political situation, but he, the younger brother did. So anyway, he seems like a little bit of a character, so feel free to tell us a little bit about him. Paul Edgar: According to this inscription, his biography, and we imagine that certainly there was a lot more involved, and the biography is also uniformly positive. So there were probably some rough points, and Idrimi probably had some rough points, even if he was a fantastic leader. There were probably some failures, which the inscription does not capture. So with those as maybe some disclaimers, it’s fair to say that a summary of his life, he begins his life, his family lives in Aleppo, so this is Syria proper. There’s no argument. It’s not whether it’s Syria or Southeastern Turkey, but his family is in Aleppo. And for a number of different reasons, we believe that it’s a prominent family. It may have been the most prominent family. His father may have ruled in Aleppo. The inscription hints that he probably did, but something bad happens, and we’re not sure what. I translate it as a calamity. But in short, the word words mean a bad thing happened. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Paul Edgar: So something bad happened to his family in Aleppo, and they fled to Emar, which was just about 50 miles to the east of Aleppo. And Emar is a famous archeological dig today with lots of Akkadian texts. So they lived in Emar, where his mother was from, and it appears that everybody was content. Perhaps they were still disappointed with whatever happened in Aleppo, but they were sufficiently content to stay in Emar, except for Idrimi, who, as he grew older, became more and more incensed at what had happened and thought that it was his job to sort of reestablish the family name and family rule in some sense. And in order to do that, he leaves Emar. He goes south into Canaan, which we would consider probably somewhere near the northeastern border of modern Lebanon with Syria today, somewhere in that area. He runs into a number of refugees from Aleppo that recognized him and knew of his father. He stays there, and just sort of consolidates power or waits for the right moment, sails up the coast with some soldiers, and then sails north, probably about a hundred miles up the coast, probably crosses what would be the mouth of the Orontes River there in the northern Mediterranean. He disembarks and finds more people, apparently, that recognize him, and he sets up in a town that in English we’ll just call Alalah. And as I mentioned, that is right there about a mile away from the current Syrian border on or near the Orontes River, so where Syria, the Orontes, and Turkey sort of meet, right about there. And that’s about 50 miles to the west of Aleppo. So Idrimi did not travel more than about 100 or perhaps at the most, 150 miles from his birthplace of Aleppo. So he successfully sets up in Alalah with what I’m going to call a domestic constituency, but that’s not enough. He needs to also gain support from one of the great powers, and in this case, the correct sort of candidate, the best ally to make amongst the great powers was Mitanni, the kingdom of Mitanni, which Mitanni is roughly analogous to what we might consider today is Kurdistan, right? Rebecca Burgess: Got it. Paul Edgar: If we drew borders for Kurdistan, it would be right about where Mitanni is located. The other great power, so we mentioned Egypt, Mitanni is the second, and the third would be Hatti. The Hittites, I think many people are more familiar with that name, the Hittites, the people of Hatti, which was largely in modern-day Turkey. So those were the three powers that he could have relied on and he chose to try to make peace with Mitanni, is successful, and then he also has to defend against some other local rulers. He is successful and, again, sort of consolidates power after that and seems to have a successful period of rule. Rebecca Burgess: This doesn’t sound at all familiar to more recent events in the Middle East. Regional powers, fights for powers, families, and tribal societies. Paul Edgar: Right. Now, I said that was a summary, but that was probably more than a summary. I apologize. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. No, no, that’s really helpful. I mean, it’s fascinating, and I know you’ll probably read some from your translation, but just the opening, “I am Idrimi, the son of Ilim Ilimma,” if I sang that right, “the servant of the storm god, Hepat and Ishtar, this lady of Aleppo, my lady.” I think it’s fascinating, this kind of chronology that he brings in. But then also this question of the gods and from our Thucydides Herodotus and everyone where we’re so familiar with this question of how do we ground political power and how does a king ground it with his people? Paul Edgar: Right. This is a great question. This is a really great question, and I think sometimes our answers are too narrow. For example, when we look at the Hebrew Bible, if you look at the Hebrew Bible, there’s a lot involved, but on the surface, we tend to summarize it as if Yahweh approves of a leader, then the leader is approved and successful, and well, that would certainly be true. It wouldn’t be the only thing that’s true. There’s a lot of work that goes into political leadership, both good and bad examples of political leadership. There’s more than simply a supernatural stamp of approval. And we see this in Herodotus. One of the things, the first time that I read Herodotus, what really occurred to me is how infrequently he refers to a kind of divine providence or divine approval, right? Rebecca Burgess: Right. Paul Edgar: It comes up here and there, but lots of other things come up as well. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here. We see in one part an appeal to divine authority, but then you see somebody who’s really rolled up his sleeves and done the hard work of leadership as well. And I want to say, I guess I should caveat that a little bit and say, I don’t know whether Idrimi was tyrannical or was magnanimous or what, I don’t know. But either way, the fact is that political leadership is hard work, and he apparently put in that hard work in order to be somewhat successful. Rebecca Burgess: Right. He mentioned seven years where he released birds, and inspected lambs. He is waiting for apparently auspicious signs, but that he also mentions, and then he built ships, and he gathered soldiers and he kind of networked it sounded like, to get more soldiers and to impress his older brothers, so his family or his tribe. And then as often happens in movements, success breeds success, almost. And it seems like the more people come the more successful he is. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but it almost seemed like to actually reestablish his city, he relied mostly on the recognition of the king of Mitanni. Paul Edgar: Right. So let’s do this. I’ll read an excerpt that sort of captures- Rebecca Burgess: Yes, perfect. Paul Edgar: … this, what I’ll call the domestic constituency or part of it. And then we’ll read a part that, this seven years that you referred to, I’ll read that part and we can comment on both of those. So we’ll start with line 27. So this will cover his period in Canaan amongst the Habiru, which, if we have time we can talk about whether or not that is related to the word Hebrew. But it’s an interesting and divisive question. Anyways, this captures his period in Canaan and then his sailing up the coast and establishing his initial rule, at least in Alalah. So lines 27 through 42. And I’m not sure if you decide you want to link the article where I translated this, and I’m not trying to pump up my article, but if it’s helpful for listeners, then they can refer to it. Okay. So “I settled in the company of the Habiru for a long time, for seven years. I released birds, I inspected lambs. Then in seven years’ time, the storm god returned to me, so I built ships.” And let me pause here. So to me, this is really interesting, and I won’t comment on this at length, but those of us that are involved in either studying or actually as a practitioner in some sort of political or military leadership, we are always looking for certainty, right? Rebecca Burgess: Right. Paul Edgar: We want to know that what it is we’re doing is right, whether in a moral sense or practical sense, that this is actually going to work. And while Idrimi’s search or search for certainty, we might consider more rudimentary than ours, he’s inspecting the entrails of lambs or the kidneys of lambs and releasing birds, it’s still the same sort of activity, this quest for certainty in political leadership and decision making. Okay, so picking up again, “I loaded formations of nullu soldiers,” and just as a comment, we don’t know what nullu is. It’s a special type of soldier, but we’re not sure what, but he loaded soldiers onto ships. “I approached the land of the Mukishim by way of the sea,” so he is sailing up the Mediterranean coast, “and I arrived on dry land in front of the Hazi mountains. I went up and my land heard me. They brought goats and sheep before me. And within one day, as one person, the people of the land of Nihi and Amaae and the land of Mukish and the city of Alalakh, my city,” at least subsequently it becomes a city, “they had turned to me.” So I’ll pause there. So there’s an earlier passage that captures an earlier part of his, again, what I’m calling a domestic constituency. And here is part of where it grows and is more formally established, and its legitimacy, at least internally, internal to this particular political body, seems to be firm, seems to be established. Of course, his legitimacy in the eyes of others who are relevant is an open question. So we’ll move on to that next. So the next section I’ll read comes from lines 43 through 60. And this is where Idrimi essentially seeks the approval, the acceptance of the king of Mitanni who here is, whose name is Parattarna. We actually have evidence of Parattarna from other sources. We also have, so your listeners know, we have evidence of Idrimi from other sources as well. So we have a lot of confidence that we’re not talking about Hercules or Aries or anything like that. This was a real person and a real political figure, and so was Parattarna, the king of Mitanni. Now, in the text, it actually refers to him as the king of the armies of the Hurrians. But for our purposes, the king of the armies of the Hurrians and the king of Mitanni are one and the same. Okay. So, “Moreover, for seven years, Parattarna, the strong king, the king of the armies of the Hurrians, made an enemy of me. In the seventh year, I wrote to Parattarna the king, the king of Ummanmanda, and I spoke about the services of my fathers when my fathers found relief before them, the Hurrians, and about our other affairs concerning the kings of the armies of the Hurrians, and it was good. Thus, they established between them a strong oath. Right now, he’s referring to, whether it’s fictive or whether it’s real I don’t know, but a previous relationship between his people, presumably his father, and the people of Mitanni. Rebecca Burgess: Just a slight pause here, if I’m getting it right. He starts out kind of as an enemy, right, of Parrattarna? Paul Edgar: Right. Rebecca Burgess: And something happens where they’re able to establish it’s either a draw, maybe a military draw? Paul Edgar: Well, I doubt it’s a military draw. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah, probably. Paul Edgar: What I anticipate is that, and I’m a hundred percent, this is supposition. I think it’s an educated supposition, of course. But I anticipate that Parrattarna conducted annual military expeditions and that some of them would’ve gone near or through Alalakh. Rebecca Burgess: Got it. Paul Edgar: And perhaps as this new upstart city state or king over a city-state that had existed prior, Parrattarna did not immediately accept his kingship. And perhaps for many reasons, either lack of interest, lack of time, or other priorities, didn’t just smash him. I anticipate that the kingdom of Mitanni would’ve had no problem smashing Alalakh had it wanted to. But in any case, they were at enmity with one another, or at least Parrattarna was towards Idrimi. And after a period of time, it says seven years, and I think that it could be exactly seven years or this could be sort of a trope in that over this arduous complete period of time where I was working to establish relations, finally, my appeal got through to Parrattarna, and he realized the great wisdom of it and accepted me, and then he made me king. I mean, that’s what he says, is that in fact he doesn’t really refer to himself as a king until Parrattarna, the king of Mitanni, accepts him or acknowledges him as king. He refers to this prior relationship, and let’s just sort of take that at face value, is it’s an appeal to history, right? Rebecca Burgess: Right? Paul Edgar: Perhaps it’s true history too, but it’s an appeal to history that, hey, we had great relations before. Now I was in Aleppo, or my family was in Aleppo, not Alalakh, but we had great relations before, so why don’t we pick up where we left off there, and apparently it was convincing. The strong king listens to what I said about the services of my predecessors and the oath that was between them, and he respected the oath, he received my greeting gift for the sake of the matter of the oath, and for the sake of our services, a lost house, in other words, Idrimi’s house, returned to him. Now the domestic constituency is supportive. The great power of the region, or perhaps the most relevant great power of the region, is supportive. You’d think that that would be sufficient, but it’s not. But wait, there’s more. Rebecca Burgess: Never enough, exactly. Yes. Oh, I love that next line. It just says, they piled up my ancestors upon the ground so I piled up theirs upon the ground. In battle, I piled them high. Paul Edgar: Right. So I ended with a lost house returned to him. Right? Rebecca Burgess: Mm-hmm. Paul Edgar: Just two or three sentences later, this actually, he then has to fight in order to defend his kingship from those around him. I spoke to him regarding my case, so he is still talking again about Mitanni, and regarding my loyalty, and then I was king. This is the first time that he pronounces himself as, or mentions himself as, a king. The very next sentence, “The kings to my right and my left rose up against me against Alalakh, for he had made me equal like them.” They attack him because they don’t want another peer. Right? They preferred it when Idrimi was not a king recognized by Mitanni. Somehow this is a threat. Perhaps it’s a threat because they’re allied with somebody else or it’s just a threat because they’re allied with Mitanni and less of Parrattarna’s attention if there’s another vassal king to demand attention and resources or whatever else. This part of my translation I have taken from a former professor of mine, a mentor of mine, Ed Greenstein, the scholar who co-wrote the article with him, and is from the early seventies, this translation, David Marcus. We don’t know what these next lines say. It’s very difficult to translate for a number of reasons. But I thought that Greenstein and Marcus did a really great job of understanding the material of the era, what kind of material literature of the ancient near East would’ve been consistent with this, and essentially cut and paste material actually from the Hebrew Bible that they think captures what these words or what these lines probably say, something along those lines. But I think it does at least capture the intensity of the fight between Alalakh and the kings around them. “Just as they piled up my ancestors upon the ground, so I piled theirs upon the ground, and in battle, I piled them high.” Idrimi Has to defend himself against the small powers around him. Only once he’s done that, so he’s now established a domestic constituency that is stable, he’s established a relationship with a great power that is stable, and then he battles his neighbors until they leave him alone and are convinced that, okay, either we accept him because he is proven himself, or we can’t overcome him, or the cost of overcoming him is too great, and so we’re going to stop here and call it good. And then he can relax a little bit. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Right, where he mentions that he had an estate built. Finally, after all of his enemies are at least neutralized, he had an estate, so he made his throne like the throne of kings and built up his city essentially. I thoroughly enjoy the kind of listing of duties than of what he needs to do as a good king. Or we might imagine him or his scribe saying here’s how and why he was a good king. He settled the inhabitants, he says. In that next part, those lines, 81 and 91, he established the lands. He made my cities equal to those that came before me. Then there’s once again, the establishment of cults of religion, of the gods of Alalakh, and then prayers and offerings. There’s kind of this, as there was at the beginning, a throwback or a recall of tradition and religion and the gods. And then he says he passes it to the hand of his son, so he kind of gives through the narrative of succession. I don’t know, is there anything about that that particularly caught your attention? Paul Edgar: Well, there’s two things, the two big things that stand out to me in these next couple of paragraphs. You’ve mentioned one of them, what we might call the stability of the international system, enables him, provides him the bandwidth to do these domestic, these kinds of necessary domestic tasks of improving the lot of his people. That’s maybe the best way to capture it, improving the lot of his people. He refers to essentially settling those that came with him, settling or improving the prosperity of those who already lived there. And then there’s a kind of an oblique reference to settling those who had not been settled. In other words, if you imagine this may be a little bit of a stretch, okay, so bear with me on this, but if you imagine that the prosperity is so great that of course due to Idrimi’s greatness and great leadership, that even those who were previously homeless suddenly had a home, that they were settled. Think of it in those terms. And then again, that may be a little bit of a stretch, that these people who were not settled could have been either migrants or nomads, people who were intentionally moving from place to place because that just was their way of life. But in some way, people who had not yet settled, settled because of the prosperity and stability that he brought to that region. That stands out. But then another, and this is worth looking at briefly is line 64. “I took an army and I went up against the land of Hatti, and I seized seven cities.” And he named those cities. He seized those cities, and he destroyed other ones, “And the land of Hatti did not assemble or come before me, so I did what I wanted.” I’ll read one more sentence. “I took them captive. I took their property, their goods, their pilferable things. I divided it for the army, my auxiliaries, my brothers, and my friends.” If you are a friend of Mitanni, you’re automatically an enemy of Hatti, and this passage makes him sound very bold. And perhaps he was, perhaps he was. My guess is that these were really, really minor incursions to an area that might be kind of minorly considered Hittite. Because again, if just like Mitanni could have wiped out Alalakh at any minute, any time they wanted, well, Hatti’s relative power right now is sort of a little bit reduced from what it was previously and what it will be in another 50 years or so. Hatti still could have wiped out Alalakh without much of a problem. But essentially, he’s demonstrating his loyalty to Mitanni. This is some bravado here and some bragging about himself, but it also does help place him, again, in what we would call the international system of the era. He’s aligned with one and against another and actually takes military action against the enemy of the king that supports him. Rebecca Burgess: Right, and kind of showing us in, so to speak, real time the balancing and the tensions and the dynamics at play in keeping, you’ve mentioned the three constituencies, but really that larger, kind of we go up another level to look down on the situation of how anytime statesmen, kings, are thinking about keeping their people and their kingdom safe, they have to think about all of the different pressures from outside and how they balance those things. You had mentioned certainty and the great desire for certainty and the real lack of it in the international system and how this is what we see. You know? Yeah. Paul Edgar: Stable does not mean fixed, right? Stable means stable enough, but it’s always changing, and in a sense, it’s always hanging by a thread. Right? Even a stable, strong international system is arguably hanging by a thread, and if that thread breaks, and of course, I’m speaking to you here as a conservative, one who would argue generally for stability rather than rapid change, if that thread of stability breaks, the amount of suffering by everybody, by all classes and all people and all races, the amount of suffering is absolutely immense. Rebecca Burgess: There’s a real role it seems to me in this inscription for agency and understanding how Idrimi himself thought about that and what we can learn from it. I mean, in the essay that we keep on referring to, and I’ll mention it again at the end, which you wrote about this inscription, you mentioned that Idrimi shows that circumstances are not determinative, and neither is geography because Idrimi started out in one situation, he fell from whatever that was to a really bad situation, and somehow managed to be in a better place with supposedly a line of succession after him strong enough that he could curse on his stone anyone who dared to move it, but then also blesses anyone who read it and prayed on his behalf. I think that agency is really interesting, especially when we think of, today, how we look at international relations, foreign policy, and even diplomacy and statesmanship. Paul Edgar: Right. And there are a few things this makes me think of, and I’ll try to riff off that thought. Thinking about Idrimi himself, my dissertation is about this whole era, the political history of this whole era, and so I’ve read tons of treaties and diplomatic letters. Primarily those are between a great power, either Hatti, Mitanni, or Egypt, and a small power, a town or a city-state like Alalakh, or Aleppo or Ugarit which is on the coast of Syria today, within Alawite Syria. And lots of other examples. Jerusalem, right? Jerusalem, pre-Israelite Jerusalem, there are letters from the ruler of Jerusalem to the Pharaoh of the era. So having read all of these things, the agreements and the treaties, those formal treaties and what we might consider informal treaties, just arrangements that are not written, for each of the small powers, there are similarities, of course, there are similarities, but there are also really prominent differences. In other words, there was negotiating room, and there was room to maneuver, politically speaking. And when a great power was breathing down your neck, even breathing down your neck demanding that you become a vassal, when you agreed to that, there was still some negotiating room so that your particular treaty with that great power might be more or less onerous or provide for more or less liberty, for your own rule for your people, et cetera. So there is agency within circumstances, within the systematic forces that compel small powers or great power… Whoever. But usually, we’re referring to small powers. The political forces in action force small powers to do whatever. Usually, it’s something negative or bad. And there’s some truth to that. I don’t want to say that political forces don’t exist. But those political forces, as well as the decisions made by rulers of small powers, are decisions made by human beings. Because of that, this is not a physical tsunami that has no capacity to change course, it is headed for its target, and it’s just going to crush it. Because these are decisions made by human beings, there naturally is room for differences, for negotiation, for agency, for room to do things a little bit differently. I think that does come out, not just in this text, but in the political history of this whole era. Rebecca Burgess: It’s a little irreverent of me to say, but Francis Fukuyama’s end of history would not have quite worked at this point, would it have? So much history before them, right? But on that note, for me, what I found so valuable amongst many things of your scholarship about this is just seeing how this one inscription, this one statue, gives us a snapshot in time of one moment in a protracted regional struggle, or a struggle for regional hegemony in this particular area, in a situation in which you did have three larger powers, Egypt, Hatti, and Mitanni. And how, clearly they’re not robber barons, but littler kings managed and maneuvered within that, and how close that feels to us today, but also how the themes… In reading this inscription, I get a little bit of Machiavelli, what is it that always motivates the sons when their patrimony is taken away? But not everyone is. Idrimi is, but his brothers aren’t. But then you have this question of the gods, which we mentioned, and tradition. The question of what is it that makes a good king and political legitimacy, your own people looking at you or not? But then… And I think you mentioned this at the beginning, and maybe as we end or wrap up, which sadly I guess we have to do, there’s so much to say, is what is the other value of this text? Just as a classic source, you could say, I think there’s something that you’ve mentioned before about it because it’s not Thucydides because it’s before Thucydides and doesn’t have the weight of all the commentary around that, perhaps it helps us clarify some things. But then when we think, say, to today’s practitioners and students, what might be one or two things you would love for them to think about in looking at this text? Paul Edgar: I think there are a number of things, but let me go with this because based on a question someone asked me yesterday, I started thinking about this. Now I don’t want to draw too much of a parallel between Syria then and Syria now, but I think there are some things that we can at least discuss. Somebody asked me yesterday, why President Assad is failing where Idrimi, in the same region, not all of Syria, but in the same region, appears to have been successful. And you don’t pick up a lot of humility from Idrimi from his inscription, but I think reading between the lines, this is somebody who was willing to compromise, willing to recognize that he couldn’t have everything that he wanted. And since he couldn’t have everything… This is Machiavelli, right? Don’t go for the ideal. It’s in that sense, it’s Machiavellian. Don’t pursue the ideal if it doesn’t work. Pursue what will work. And because it works, then in this sense, the state has its own morality. Now, I know some Machiavelli scholars may not like my use of that. I think it’s true, I think it’s part of what he’s saying. He says more than that. But I would say that Idrimi, in his willingness to compromise with Barattarna, knowing that he couldn’t be a king without the recognition of a great power, was willing to give up what might have been his ideal situation to establish something that actually worked. Not just for him, but for those around him. And we could say that Assad is doing exactly not that. Now, Assad certainly has the support of a mediocre power, but he’s not recognizing all of the legitimate political equities within, heck, I’ll say it now, what was really formerly the state of Syria. And if he had at some point… preferably much earlier than today, but if he had at some point recognized that there’s some legitimacy here that others have or legitimate concerns and that if he could imagine that whatever his ideal is is not going to come to fruition, and be willing to explore the space in between and what might be a reasonable settlement… Now I know that’s a lot to claim or demand from him in an area like that, but that’s the leader’s responsibility, right? That’s the leader’s responsibility. That’s the J-O-B. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Paul Edgar: But he’s not willing to do it, and so as a result, he’s impoverished from it, and everybody around him is impoverished from it. And impoverished doesn’t really capture it. Calamity doesn’t capture it, right? It’s many calamities put together. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Paul Edgar: But I think that’s one of those things that we could say that we get a little bit from Machiavelli or we see from Machiavelli in his political theory, but then we could say we see it in practice as well. So this is an example of what I would consider, okay, well this is something that we could point at and say, “This is a classical characteristic of good political leadership or successful political leadership.” Because we don’t just see it because Machiavelli projects it upon our society from the 15th century CE forward, but we see it in a text that predates him, that predates all of the Greek political philosophers and political historians. So it’s a reinforcement, right? It’s not teaching us something new, it’s simply reinforcing things that we ought to know already. Rebecca Burgess: Do you think that it’s in that vein… Really, really wrapping up. Do you think it’s in that vein of teaching and transmitting to future generations these themes of what it takes, what’s at stake, of statesmanship and caring for our people, that Idrimi included that? And I know there are tropes of this, but what’s so fascinating, at the end of his statue he invokes blessings and curses. “Whoever tears down this statue of mine, may his descendants be subdued, may heaven curse his name, may the underworld take his descendants.” It goes on. But then also, “May the gods of heaven and earth cause the scribe who wrote this to live, guard him, be good to him.” And then, “May those who read this and look on this,” the words, “may they pray on my behalf.” And I wonder if this is really early recognition of the importance of transmitting the lessons of kingship and statesmanship. Paul Edgar: I think so. I think there’s certainly some hubris there, right? “Remember me.” But also it’s more than that. It’s more than that. And even there have actually been some scholars that have done a little bit of work on that. Actually, one of the mistakes that scholars sometimes make with this particular text is that they look at it and they pick out one single thing that to them is the most important and say, “This is why Idrimi wrote this,” or, “This is why his political colleagues and family wrote this.” It’s probably for a whole bunch of reasons. But this certainly is one of them, that there would be some kind of continuity. That there would be a going forward and not simply a reversal of political stability. Now again, I don’t want to say whether he was a tyrant or not, because sometimes political stability is worth shattering. But if you shatter it, make sure you know exactly what you’re doing. More often than not, I think it’s this idea of communicating the value of what has been done, what has been established, and not reversing it or not undoing it, because your perspective from things at this moment may be very different than the other side of chaos. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Well, hopefully, this podcast has not been chaos or chaotic for our listeners. But thank you again, Paul, for your insights and scholarship on both statesmanship ancient and relevant to today, but also the Idrimi statue inscription. It’s not something I think many of our listeners or many within political theory know about, and it’s definitely worthwhile as an example of the real physical object speaking both through space and time, more than the Ozymandias statue perhaps. So once again, thank you. That was Paul Edgar, who is the Associate Director of the William P. Clements Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin, and I am Rebecca Burgess, a Contributing Editor at Law and Liberty, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Many thanks to all our listeners. Paul Edgar: Thanks very much. Brian A. Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.

John D. Wilsey discusses his book, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. Brian A. Smith (00:03): Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. James Patterson (00:17): Hello, you are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is January 6th, 2023. My name is James M. Patterson, and I’m a Contributing Editor to Law & Liberty as well as Associate Professor and Chair in the Politics Department at Ave Maria University, a Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, and at the Institute for Human Ecology, and the President of the Ciceronian Society. My guest today is Dr. John D. Wilsey. He is Associate Professor of Church History and Philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and book review editor at the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He is also an ordained pastor and has pastored at several churches in Virginia and North Carolina as well as teaching both at K-12 and university-level positions. 2017 through ’18, he was the William E. Simon visiting fellow in Religion and Public Life with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton Seminary. He has written three books: One Nation Under God: An Evangelical Critique of Christian America, and American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of An Idea. Today, our topic is his third book, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles. I should also mention that Dr. Wilsey is a fellow at CRCD with me, so Dr. Wilsey, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. John Wilsey (01:47): James, thanks so much for having me. I’m glad to be here. James Patterson (01:50): Well, if things get a little informal during this podcast, it’s because John and I go way back and so we’re having a good time today. But a person who did not have the reputation of having a good time was the subject of this book, John Foster Dulles. Was he as stern and cold-blooded and marble-like as his reputation would seem? John Wilsey (02:23): Yes and no. I’ll start with that to frustrate your listeners right off the bat. But before we get into that, I just do want to thank you, James, for having me on this podcast. I love Law & Liberty, avid reader from way back. Had the honor and privilege to contribute some writing pieces to Law & Liberty recently, and just a big fan. A big fan of yours as well, and I’m very grateful for our friendship. It’s approaching 10 years now, I believe. James Patterson (02:58): That’s right. John Wilsey (02:58): So it’s a great honor and a privilege to be with you. Yes, John Foster Dulles definitely has that rep for being sort of a bucket of cold ice water. I can’t remember what year it was, I think it might have been 1956, Time Magazine voted him as the most boring man in America. And maybe most famously of all, a lot of your listeners will be aware of this, that Carol Burnett recorded a very famous parody song about him for the Ed Sullivan Show and for the Jack Parr show, which was the Tonight Show back in those days, and you can go on YouTube and look it up. Just do a search on Carol Burnett, John Foster Dulles, and you can see the recording. I think it’s on the Jack Parr show of her recording of that song. It’s hilarious. If you really want to get deep into that, you can look at some other YouTube videos where she gives some of the backstory to that recording, which is also very funny and very interesting. So he did have that reputation. In public, he was very serious and very staid. He was that way, I think, by conviction. He had aspired to the Office of Secretary of State for all of his life. It was a lifelong dream come true because his grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison and his uncle on his mother’s side, Robert Lansing, was Secretary of State under Wilson and he had portraits of those two men in his office at the State Department during his entire tenure. So he had sort of a sense of destiny about him in that role. And he also had a very, very serious perspective or posture towards American foreign policy and America’s role in the world. It was the beginning of the Cold War. We often think of the Cold War… Many people think of the Cold War in those early years as culminating 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But those years that he was Secretary of State were very serious years. Many, many crises that they didn’t bring the world quite to the brink as 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but they were every bit as dangerous as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m thinking about a couple of Berlin crises occurring in the 1950s. I’m thinking about Quemoy and Matsu, which that was a crisis that occurred in 1953, ’54, again in 1958. Then of course, you had the Dien Bien Phu crisis in 1954 in which the French asked the United States to use nuclear weapons to support them in their conflict with the Viet Minh. So very serious times, very serious times. The world could have gone to nuclear war during those years just as easily as at any other point in American history. And he had definitely an awareness of the seriousness of the times, and he was a serious man. He was a serious man when it came to serious things, which I’ve always respected about him. Richard Nixon told a story about him that I think is very… It helps us to really sort of get a picture of him and his seriousness. In cabinet meetings, when Eisenhower ran his cabinet meetings, he ran them, he modeled those cabinet meetings off of his meetings when he was a five-star general when he was Commander of the Allied forces in Europe. When he would have meetings with the senior staff, he always allowed everybody to speak their mind on their opinion on any issue they were talking about, no matter what their expertise was. And he carried that forth in his meetings as president with the cabinet. So even the postmaster general, if he had an opinion on the economy or if he had an opinion on, say, civil rights or opinion on American diplomacy, his views were just as welcome as anybody else. So Nixon tells this story in the oral history that when Dulles would be asked a question by the president, he would take some time to think carefully about how he was going to respond and answer the question. And he would receive the question and he would look at the ceiling and you could tell that he was formulating his answer, and that he would spend 60 seconds, 90 seconds, just staring at the ceiling. And it was awkward, especially at the beginning, at the beginning of the administration when people didn’t really know him very well. Even Eisenhower didn’t really know him as well. Him staring at the ceiling for several seconds was strange to people. And then he opened his mouth and he would offer a very logical, a very organized, a very comprehensive answer to the question and very impressive answer because he demonstrated himself to be master of the issues that were confronting the United States and the State Department. But on the other hand, he was also a frivolous personality. I always described his sense of humor as kind of zany. With his close family and his close friends, he had a hilarious sense of humor. He was known for having a very loud laugh. He would throw his head back guffawing and laugh really hard. His brother, who was head of CIA, Allen Dulles, once said that he thought Hitler had a guffaw. He said, “I thought Hitler had a laugh like a donkey.” But he said that his brother’s laugh even put Hitler to shame, which is a strange comparison. But Dulles, Allen Dulles, had met Hitler on a few occasions and had been privy to his loud laugh. He compared his brother to Hitler, which was kind of funny. I write about one instance. His daughter talks about this in her oral history interview that he once embarrassed her and her friends. She was about 18 years old, and he posed as a waiter at a dinner party that she was having with her friends, and he stuffed a pillow up his shirt, took a carving knife and split his tummy with his pillow. Feathers went everywhere like in an act of hara-kiri to get a big laugh out of everybody, and she was embarrassed by that. He thought it was hilarious. So in private with his friends and with his close friends and his family, he could be quite zany. But he was deeply introverted, he was a serious man, and he kind of knew when to sort of separate times for seriousness and times for frivolity. James Patterson (10:30): So this is when I ask you to pass the knife check, maybe briefly explain the knife check. John Wilsey (10:41): Yes, yes, and yes. And there were a lot of people that would comment on his laugh and how ready he was to laugh and how he loved a good joke and how he told a lot of jokes. His support staff, his secretaries, loved his laugh. They could hear him laughing in his office with the door closed, so forth, but he didn’t show that personality as much to the public. I’ll say one other thing about his sense of humor that, I mentioned Carol Burnett, she gave that parody song, and she presented it on live television a couple of times during the same week in 1958. The first time that she performed, I think, was on the Ed Sullivan Show, I believe. Somebody from Dulles’ staff called her at home and said, “The Secretary did not have a chance to see the recording of the song. Can you go back on and do it again?” And she, of course, was thrilled because she was just starting out and she was kind of making herself famous off of this. So I think she went on the Jack Parr show, I could have the order backwards, but she went on the Jack Parr show, Tonight Show, did it again, and the secretary saw it. He did not comment anything to her- John Wilsey (12:03): He did not comment anything to her, he didn’t get in touch with her, but she was watching Meet the Press on Sunday morning. She was watching the television. I think she was washing dishes or something at the same time, TV was on. She was watching Meet the Press. Dulles was being interviewed, and when the interview was concluding, the interviewer said, “Well, now Mr. Dulles, we appreciate you being on the program with us. There’s just one last question I have. Can you tell us about this young lady, Carol Burnett, and that song she has about you?” And then his very dry cut away. He didn’t miss a beat. He just grinned a little bit and said, “Well, I don’t like to discuss matters of the heart in public.” So she tells that story. I’ve heard her tell that story on The Diane Rehm Show when she was being interviewed about, oh, 10 years ago or something like that. And she has also a couple of places on YouTube where she has told that story. James Patterson (13:15): So I’m not sure if I should tease the readers on what the knife check is when I asked my question. But of course, this is a detail from the private lives of the children in which Dulles would require all of his kids to have a knife on them. So this is at his titular airport, I don’t think you’re still allowed to do that. John Wilsey (13:39): No, I don’t. I think that’s discouraged. James Patterson (13:43): It’s frowned on. John Wilsey (13:44): I think that is discouraged, frowned on. But yes, he had three children. He had two sons, John and Avery, and he had a daughter whose name is Lillias. And Lillias was the youngest daughter, and Avery was the youngest son. John, of course, was the first son. And he required them each to be carrying a pocket knife on them at all times. And he would make sure that they were carrying their knife when he would demand it. He would say, “Pocket knife.” And if they didn’t have it, they had to pay him a quarter. James Patterson (14:18): So good. So one of the unique features of this book is that it is a biography of faith. And one of the things about biographies of faith is that normally there’s some sort of obvious hook. And the thing about Dulles is that he doesn’t necessarily seem to have an obvious hook. And when you read the book, one of the things you learn is that he’s not necessarily the most devout person, and at least the way that maybe I as a Catholic and you as a Baptist would normally regard it. And one other thing just to shape the question is that it’s odd that you have to tell his story in a way the collapse of the main line has left them unable to tell their own. John Wilsey (15:17): Wow. James Patterson (15:17): So tell us a little bit about the peculiar nature of this latter-day mainline protestant and how this faith functioned. I know this is the heart of the book, so you don’t want to give too much away. John Wilsey (15:30): Yeah. Well, Dulles inherited a faith from the liberal social gospel tradition. His father, Allen Macy Dulles, was a pastor and a theologian. He was the pastor of a church in Detroit before he was born, and then for 17 years from right around the time that John Foster was born, he was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Watertown, New York, in Upstate New York, near Syracuse and near the Ontario Shore. And he was the pastor there for 17 years. He pastored there till 1904. And he left that pastor to take a professorship at Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York. And he served in that role as professor of apologetics and theism at Auburn Seminary until his death in 1931. In fact, literally to his death. He died on a Thursday and I think he was preparing to go to class, to teach class the morning that he died. His father was a liberal. He had studied at the University of Leipzig, so he had studied under the German higher critical method and was a liberal. And so Foster grew up going to church three days a week, listening to sermons, drinking deeply from his father’s faith. Dulles was at the heart of the Presbyterian fundamentalist modernist controversy in the 1920s. He was there at the General Assembly in 1924, ’25, and ’26, and he was very famously the council for Harry Emerson Fosdick, perhaps the most famous liberal protestant of the day. And while he was working on the issues of the controversy, he was being coached by his father. The correspondence between the two of them during those heady days of the fundamentalist modernist controversy in the presbyterian denomination is rich with the two of them just talking about the importance of getting this right for the modernists and for putting the fundamentalists away. And Dulles’ contribution to the controversy was really decisive. It was behind the scenes, but it was a decisive kind of a victory that he represented. In 1937, he was at the center of the ecumenical movement that was taking place there in Oxford, England at the Oxford Conference in 1937, in which he had a turning point, a spiritual turning point. Prior to that time, I mean, he was an elder at his church, he was an elder at Park Avenue Presbyterian Church, which later merged with the Presbyterian Church in New York. But during those years, the 20s and early 30s, he was not really involved in the church, didn’t go to church very often, didn’t take his family to church very often. He enjoyed sailing on Sundays, he enjoyed playing tennis on Sundays, and so he didn’t go to church very much. But then he went to the Oxford Conference and he saw something that he didn’t think was possible. He saw representatives from all over the world, all over the Christian world who were getting together in Oxford to put aside their theological differences, to think about ways for the churches to actually have a hand in solving international problems of the day. So, of course, in 1937, Hitler is rising to power, and the Japanese have already established themselves in Manchuria. Looks like there’s going to be another war coming up. And Dulles became something of a new convert in a way after 1937. He became convinced that the churches definitely had a role to play in international politics, and that it was possible for them to put away their theological differences. That tells you something about Dulles, that he was not interested as much in theology. He was interested in pragmatics. He saw the faith as a pragmatic faith. He didn’t see it as a doctrinal faith. And that’s certainly also very consistent with his liberal upbringing. As a liberal, he didn’t place an emphasis on theology. In fact, he didn’t believe himself in the virgin birth. He didn’t believe in the literal physical resurrection of Christ. He believed in the ethic of the church, the ethic of Jesus, and he thought that’s what the essence of Christianity was. It was an operative pragmatic faith, not a doctrinal or an abstract faith, which means that his expression of his faith was not going to be devotional, it was not going to be like a John Bunyan or a Charles Finney or some kind of a devotional thing. He was not Oswald Chambers. He wasn’t somebody like that. I see a connection between his desire to live the life of an ethical Christian with this very public expression of piety that he offers as a public figure. Some people would look at that and say, “Oh, this is just him being a hypocrite, or he’s not a real Christian because he just uses their faith to advance a public agenda.” That’s liberalism. So I see him as being not a hypocrite at all, but a thoroughgoing consistent liberal in that regard. It’s interesting too that you say that it’s weird that I’m the one that has to be the one to shed light on this. And I think that’s right. I think that as a person who takes the faith seriously, I’m interested in people who thought of themselves as serious Christians, even if I’m not myself a co-signer with that particular vision of the faith. James Patterson (21:58): Yeah. In fact, I have in front of me the dissent of the modernist cartoon, where they’re walking- John Wilsey (22:04): Yes, exactly. James Patterson (22:04): … down the stairs. Judging from the criteria that you offered me just now, I’d say that he’s halfway down the staircase. For those of you who don’t know, there’s this very famous cartoon, a fundamentalist cartoon that was eventually used by Bryant in the Seven Questions in Dispute, and that was Bibles, fallible or infallible, manmade or not made in God’s image, et cetera. So that means, and it’s funny that the person in the middle of the staircase actually looks like Dulles. John Wilsey (22:34): Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I don’t have the cartoon in front of me, but I’ve seen it so many times. James Patterson (22:39): Yeah. John Wilsey (22:40): I know exactly what you’re talking about. James Patterson (22:43): So this sort of liberal Protestantism that’s a little reluctant to take what they might regard as superstitious or outmoded views of Christianity, all the same, still seems to be fundamental to the moral vision that Dulles brings to American political affairs. You show that there’s this tension in Dulles. On the one hand, he sustains this view about natural right or natural law, this idea of a moral law of the universe. Maybe I shouldn’t call it quite natural law, that might be too… It’s smoke of papism for him. But at the same time, there’s a change in policy for him where he’s less of a belligerent in his young life, doesn’t go full pacifist, but he’s still skeptical of it. And then later in life, obviously he’s quite different on this view. And so there’s this continuity in the moral basis, but a discontinuity in its application. And this is probably, at least for me, this was my favorite part of the book, exploring how he has to work all throughout his career trying to sort this issue out. John Wilsey (24:03): Yes. James Patterson (24:03): Let’s sort this issue out. John Wilsey (24:03): Yes. I love the way you put that. There’s another book, another religious biography that was written in 1985 by Mark Toulouse, who was a professor for years at the University of Toronto. I actually got to know him at an academic conference a couple years ago and we had a wonderful dinner together. His critique of Dulles was exactly what you’re saying. I think he’s right about this. I don’t agree with him fully about his assessment, but I do think he’s right about this, that Dulles had a transformation, a transformation from, the way he put it, was from prophet of realism to priest of nationalism, which is, I think, a really interesting way to put it. When Toulouse talks about a transformation, he talks about a radical transformation, and I don’t agree that it’s as radical as he says that it is. I do think that he does go through a change, and I think you just put your finger on it there, but I don’t think it’s as radical. Let me just flesh this out a little bit, if you don’t mind. He talked about the moral law all the time after 1937, when he was at the Federal Council of Churches, when he was help setting up the UN, when he was a member of the Council on Foreign Ministers, and when he was heading up the talks that resulted in the Treaty of San Francisco that ended the war in the Pacific in 1952. And then, as a senator, very brief stint as a senator from New York and as Secretary of State, talked about the moral law all the time. And one question I get a lot from people is, what does he mean? What does he mean by that? You talked about natural law and I had to struggle a little bit when I was writing the book. Do I call this natural law or do I say it’s the moral law? Because it sounds a lot like natural law when he talks about it, but it’s not quite that. James Patterson (26:11): That’s right. Yeah. I had to catch myself, too. John Wilsey (26:13): Yeah. One of my drafts of the manuscript I had to go through and change, I went back and changed, because I was saying natural law for a long time, and I went back and changed all the references I could find to moral law, but I think there is one that I missed. I don’t know if you caught it or not, but I think- James Patterson (26:30): I will tell you, you never go back and read your own work. You never do it. John Wilsey (26:35): Never go back. I’m sure that I found it when I had the finished product in my hands. James Patterson (26:40): That’s right. John Wilsey (26:43): But the moral law, I think that’s a better way because it’s a liberal Protestant’s way to see it, not a Catholic’s way to see it. So that’s the one thing I would say. The first thing I would say is how he defines it. There’s a couple of facets to this, one, that human nature is sinful. Now, he always believed that. He was very persuaded by the Federalist Papers, that Publius’ lack of confidence in human nature. I think he’s definitely echoing that. I think he’s echoing also scripture. He believed human nature is sinful. It was always seek power at the expense of others and evil men will always threaten order. He also believed that change was inevitable. This is something that he latched onto even as far back as his undergraduate days when he was at Princeton. He was Princeton class of 1908. He wrote a senior thesis on change and he believed that change was inevitable and it threatened order, it threatened peace and security. He believed that God created the world in a moral way. He believed that the world was a moral system governed by just law and right and wrong are built into the entire created order. So he was an admirer of Lincoln. Of course, this is something that Lincoln talked about. He saw the Christian ethic as the clearest statement of the moral law, so specifically, Christ’s admonition to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, forgiveness of wrongs will disarm your opponent, the sacrifice of prerogatives that you have for the sake of others, defending the defenseless, the dignity of the human individual, the liberal notion of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, something that he took very seriously. He was someone who held to a very high view of freedom; freedom under just law, freedom over property, and economic and religious freedom were very, very strong commitments that he had all his life that he never changed. He believed that power should be shared, distributed in order to check the ambitions of human beings and that moral law was universal and it was irresistible. And because of that, he believed that, as long as the United States was committed to the moral law and animated by the moral law, that the United States would ultimately win the Cold War because the Soviet Union was atheistic, it was godless, and it was opposed to the moral law. It had set itself up in opposition to the moral law. And if you’re going to do that, you’re already on the losing side. So throughout Dulles’ public life, you read his speeches, read his articles, his books, he has two books that he wrote, one in 1938, one in 1950, the moral law is central to his philosophy of politics and of diplomacy. James Patterson (30:05): So while he was entering into diplomacy, he ran into someone we’ve mentioned before. He had this funny little mustache. And you mentioned at the opening of his book that there is this picture of Dulles with Hitler. And tell me how we get to this, where we get Dulles, who steers his way more into what we might call white-shoe law firm, eventually makes his way into diplomatic life. You mentioned this is part of the family trade, but he does have to take a particular path that ultimately gets him to being the architect of a Cold War response. I’m especially interested in this question because one of the things your book helped me appreciate was how Dulles had to essentially invent an American approach to global affairs because the United States before that hadn’t needed one, except in a very pragmatic trade relation sort of way, because we had counted for so long on the British supremacy of the seas. With that in decline, Dulles has to emerge. There’s this idea of the moral law, but how do we get from a guy who’s hanging out with the chancellor to someone who is as opposed to totalitarianism as anyone in the country? John Wilsey (31:39): That’s great question and it’s a big question, too. James Patterson (31:43): Yeah, sorry. John Wilsey (31:44): No, it’s a great question. He is a member of the Reparations Commission at the Versailles Conference. He was a fairly young man. He was in his early 30s when he was on his way to Versailles in 1919. When World War I broke out in 1914, he had just gotten his job at Sullivan & Cromwell, which was an international law firm in Manhattan, as you say, white-shoe law firm. That’s an interesting story about how he got that job. He got that job through his grandfather, former Secretary of State, Foster. In 1911, he joined that law firm. By 1914, in the onset of war, he was already representing Sullivan & Cromwell with the Government of Panama, as well as Costa Rica. I believe he may have even gone down to Nicaragua, as well, and he made a couple of trips down there to Central America to visit various diplomats from those countries to ensure that, when the war came, that those countries would, in fact, declare war on Germany with the United States, which of course did happen in 1917. The South American country, Central American countries did do that. They were faithful to a promise they kept to John Foster Dulles. He was sent there by his uncle, Robert Lansing, on those missions. So early, early on in his career as a lawyer, he is already representing the State Department, as well as his law firm. When war broke out in 1917, he wanted to be an artillerist. He tried to volunteer for the artillery. He couldn’t get in because his eyesight was so bad. On one of his trips down there to Central America, he contracted malaria and it messed up his eyesight. So he couldn’t be in combat arms in the Army, but he did manage to secure himself a role with the Signal Corps and that turned into a job with the War Trade Board. He was a captain in the Army and worked for the War Trade Board. When the war ended, through his connection with Bernard Baruch, who was an old family friend going back to his childhood, Bernard Baruch had him come to Versailles as his personal assistant. Later on, he got a seat on the Reparations Commission. And he learned a lot of lessons from Versailles. He learned that static treaty commitments would always lead to war. He learned that, if you grind your former opponent’s face in the mud, as it were, humiliate them, the time would come when they would seek revenge and start another war, several other lessons that he learned. Now, those lessons he did not learn until later in the ’30s and the ’40s, but he did come away from Versailles a much wiser man. He came back in late 1919. He started his work back up with his law firm. At the height of his career in the ’20s, he managed over a billion dollars in loans to countries in Europe and in Central America. And in 1933, he took two trips to Germany, one in July, or rather June, I should say, and one in December in 1933, where he was helping to renegotiate the terms of German payments of reparations, which of course, during the 1920s and early ’30s, that was a constant bugaboo that […] was trying to work with. He had the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan and those things. And so in one of those visits, I think it was the one in June, he is photographed with Hitler. It’s a weird photograph. It’s a photograph that I found in the archives there at Princeton. He’s in his … John Wilsey (36:03): Photograph that I found in the archives there at Princeton, is in its own folder all by itself. And there’s no other pictures in there. And all it says on the back is JFD 1933. James Patterson (36:10): I’m so sorry. John Wilsey (36:14): And it’s so weird. James Patterson (36:14): Nothing else interesting about this photograph, except the year. John Wilsey (36:19): It’s so weird. Yeah, it was so strange because there’s nothing at all for commentary, and I’ve never seen any biographer forever mention the picture. I was able to put two and two together and I’ve figured out that’s what he was doing. He was there in Germany. Hitler had come to power as chancellor in January of 1933. And he was negotiating with Hitler on reparations payments and that’s why he was there. It’s a weird picture too, because Hitler is in a tuxedo. James Patterson (36:48): Oh yeah, not what you usually see. John Wilsey (36:51): Not what you usually see Hitler wearing, usually he is in a frumpy suit or a military uniform. Hitler is grinning broadly. It’s a candid sort of a picture taken in a ballroom full of people. And there he is talking to John Foster Dulles. In 1933, nobody knew what Hitler would become. We know now. James Patterson (37:14): Yeah, right. John Wilsey (37:16): But then nobody knew. Was a defender of Hitler all the way up until I think 1937, saying that he was kind of getting a bad rap. And after 1937, I believe he changed his mind about Hitler. But regardless of those things, your broader question about how does he go from being sort of focused on his career as a lawyer and really spending the 1920s just really amassing a massive fortune. Not being all that interested in politics as it were. He is interested in internationalism, he’s interested in war during this time, of course, in the twenties, war is being outlawed by governments all over the world. 1928, the United States Senate passed the Kellogg-Briand [P]act, which was an act that outlawed war, and it passed unanimously in the Senate. James Patterson (38:10): We did it! John Wilsey (38:12): I think it was signed by Coolidge, Herbert Hoover who’d won the election in 1920, was a pacifist. He was a supporter of that act. So that sort of pacifism was in the air. He was going around the country, speaking on internationalism and war. He wrote several articles on the need for the United States to be engaged in the world economy. We think of the United States as being isolationist in the 1920s. Of course, it was to a certain extent, but on economic matters, the United States was not at all isolationist in the 1920s. And I think that’s represented well by Dulles. Dulles was constantly advocating for a very vigorous involvement in the world economy. And the United States was involved in the world economy, the twenties. Initially I think that his concern with politics began in 1935. Hitler’s on the rise, the Japanese are on the rise, and the Soviet Union is certainly a threat. And he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called “The Road to Peace.” And that article that he wrote was really his first foray into serious engagement with diplomacy, international politics, and American involvement. How do you avoid war? He says in the very beginning of that piece, it looks as if the world is moving inexorably again towards war. And he thought that was a crazy process. He’d been at Versailles. He had been there to oversee the war to end all wars. Pacifism had been in the air for so long, and here we are getting ready to have another war. No one could have foreseen this. And yet because of Versailles, because the Treaty of Versailles was failing and because Wilson’s vision of the Fourteen Points was not being taken seriously, war was coming again. So you really do see in 1935 is a sort of keynote year in his career. He really begins to become interested and that sets him on a path. In 1936, he gave a major address at Princeton University that echoed many of the same themes from that 1935 article. And on he went, he was off to the races in international diplomacy after 1935. James Patterson (40:42): Oh, so that’s very good. Okay. I did have a bit of a spicy question to end this, if you don’t mind spicy questions? John Wilsey (40:50): I love spicy questions. You kidding me? James Patterson (40:53): Yeah. So would you characterize this transition after ’35, by the time he is in the Eisenhower White House, emphatically a proponent of the civil religion, this sort of national faith. Would this be an appropriately understood to be a kind of Christian nationalism? And I asked this question because you’ve written for Law & Liberty on the subject, and it’s very much part of a lot of the discourse among conservatives in the United States, especially among American Protestants. And what makes the question so spicy to me is this is a liberal Protestant. John Wilsey (41:37): Yes. Yes. I’m so glad you asked this. And maybe we could do another episode sometime on Christian nationalism- James Patterson (41:44): This is a bit unfair. John Wilsey (41:47): … right there. But you make it- James Patterson (41:47): Give you five minutes to answer this. John Wilsey (41:48): That’s okay. But to make it quick, yes. For most of American history, it’s been, I should say this… Let me characterize it this way. Christian nationalism relies on history. Christian nationalism is always animated by a particular philosophy of history, particular method of history. And for most of American history, Christian nationalism has been articulated through the lens of a progressive view of history. So for most of the time, the nation has been situated in orientation towards the future. America is the land of the future. It’s the nation of the future. Thomas Paine said, “We have it in our power to begin the world anew.” John O’Sullivan, the guy that coined the term “manifest destiny,” said, that we are “the great nation of futurity.” We’re going to turn our back on old Europe. We’re going to turn our back on tradition. We’re going to start over again. Our own motto. You look at your dollar bill, the reverse side of the Great seal of the United States. There’s two mottos. One is, I’m going to butcher the pronunciation to Latin, but Annuit cœptis, I think is the name is the way you say it, which means roughly, God has blessed our undertaking. It’s a quote from Virgil. And then the other one is Novus ordo seclorum, which is translated roughly a new order for the ages. So historically, most of the dominant way that Christian nationalism has been articulated has been to orient the nation to the future. It’s been a progressive historiographical kind of a philosophy. And John Foster Dulles is definitely in that school of thought. He is a Christian nationalist of the early 20th century. He sees America as the nation of the future. He’s optimistic about America’s future. He’s optimistic about the future of the world because he sees America as the indispensable nation in bringing about an optimistic sort of a view. He’s a Wilsonian in that he sees America’s role is messianic. God has chosen America to lead an international order, first through the League of Nations, but then later through the United Nations. It’s going to lead the free world in this Manichean struggle against Soviet communism. And because America is on the side of the moral law and because America is a Christian nation, he says that kind of stuff all the time. That America is destined to win the Cold War. And the Soviet Union will eventually go down with all the other totalitarian regimes that have set themselves opposed to the moral law like the Nazis, like the Fascists in Italy, like the Japanese expansionists. These were all groups and governments and entities that set themselves against God. And hey, the universe is created as a moral order. You cannot beat the system. So the United States being a Christian nation, being a nation committed to the moral law and to a moral order, to peace, to security, to justice, America will triumph. That’s very different from the Christian nationalism we see today, which is the conservative view that orients the nation towards the past. To the founding, the religious nature of the founding to the faith of the founding fathers and so forth and so on. That’s not the kind of Christian nationalist Dulles was. So in our conversations about Christian nationalism, and we do have to be specific and be precise about what historical orientation, historical perspective we’re talking about. James Patterson (46:04): The book is, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles, the author, my good friend and wonderful scholar, Professor John D. Wilsey of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Thank you so much for coming onto Liberty Law Talk. John Wilsey (46:21): Thanks so much for having me, James. It’s a great, great privilege. Brian A. Smith (46:25): Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.

Often underappreciated and understudied by the general reading public, the Jeffersonian era is indispensable for understanding American development. Kevin R.C. Gutzman has now written a definitive account of the period. He joins Liberty Law Talk to discuss. Read along with the transcript below. Brian A. Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. John Grove: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m John Grove, the managing editor of Law & Liberty. From 1800 through 1824, Americans elected and reelected three presidents from the same party, indeed from the same state, something that has never been done since. And for most of their time in office, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe also enjoyed comfortable partisan majorities in Congress. The opposition party as an institution was destroyed, and in these years, America began a period of expansion and development. It struggled to develop a consistent foreign policy, continued to wrestle with fundamental constitutional questions, and saw the emergence of regional fault lines that would plague the rest of the century. This fascinating period of history is the subject of Kevin R.C. Gutzman’s latest book, The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Gutzman is a Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University and is the author of several books, including Thomas Jefferson-Revolutionary, James Madison and The Making of America, and Virginia’s American Revolution. But today we’re going to be talking about his latest published this month, The Jeffersonians. Professor Gutzman, thanks for joining me. Kevin Gutzman: Happy to be here, John. John Grove: All right. So the revolution of 1800, seems we can look back at 1800 as a really pivotal moment in American history. Even at the time, though, people seem to recognize that this was something new, this was a kind of new era dawning. Jefferson, looking back a couple decades afterward, he says that the election of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of ’76, not effected indeed by the sword as that one, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. So to start us off, where did the revolution of 1800 come from? Talk to us a little bit about the 1790s, where did this pivotal election come from, and what were the expectations for this new era? Kevin Gutzman: Well, the 1790s had seen what surprised most observers and most participants, the development of a two-party political system. And this was disappointing to members of both parties. The Jeffersonians in particular had thought that winning the American Revolution, especially Jefferson had thought winning the American Revolution had meant establishing a new kind of society with a new kind of government, one that was going to leave men more or less free to make their own way in the economy, one that would be decentralized so that even the average Joe who couldn’t, of course, be elected to Congress or be a cabinet officer, could still have more or less complete say over the way his own life worked. And yet the Federalists for their part thought apparently that what the American Revolution meant was that now Americans would have their own government, like European governments. And when the revolution of 1800 occurred, Jefferson believed, and more or less said in his first inaugural address that his view of the American Revolution had been vindicated, that the people had, at last, come to agree with him. So he and his two close allies, Madison and Monroe, would over the following six presidential terms, try to implement essentially every element of what had been their partisan position in the 1790s. Much of it was wildly successful while other of it was a complete debacle. And somewhat surprisingly, there is, other than my new book, no account of it that takes it all as of a piece, even though people at the time understood these three consecutive two-term Virginia Republican presidents were all acting on the same platform. So what I hope I’ve done is give a coherent account of Jeffersonianism as implemented by these three presidents and their allies in Congress. John Grove: Wonderful. Yeah, a big part of that, of course, is constitutionalism and their vision of the American Constitution. Obviously, that’s of particular interest to a lot of our listeners and Law & Liberty readers. So I wanted to talk a little bit about, first the general Jeffersonian constitutional vision and ideals, and then a little bit about how some of those battles were fought over those years. And as you note throughout the book, even though a lot of the political battles were being won by the Jeffersonians, they weren’t necessarily winning the constitutional arguments all the time. So really famous line from Jefferson, “Our peculiar security is in possession of a written constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction”. How would you describe the Jeffersonian constitutional vision, at least in its ideal form, not necessarily in the way that it played out in practice? Kevin Gutzman: Well, my immediate preceding book was about Jefferson’s political program. And the chief principal in his political program after Republicanism, which of course was a given, was federalism, which was, as he once put it, that if there were a conflict between the federal government and the states, he would prefer the states. But then within a state, he would prefer counties, and within counties, he would prefer wards. And this gets back to the idea I mentioned earlier, that the average person couldn’t expect to be a cabinet officer or vice president or a senator, but he could hope to convince his neighbors that they had a common understanding of the way life ought to be lived. And so if the government was left largely decentralized, people in Massachusetts and people in Virginia who didn’t agree about political questions could all be happy because they could all be governed by their own neighbors. And this is a principle that Jefferson and his two collaborators, successors took to heart that Jefferson said in his first inaugural address that this was going to be one of the chief alliances of his administration. And they went a long way toward making that central feature of their own constitutional practice. Of course, as you mentioned, it was the case that Jefferson bewailed, the Constitution didn’t allow any means for the voting majority to change the composition of federal courts. And so it was true that while the active government was decentralizing its activity, the federal judiciary was writing into what came to be called constitutional law, principles of centralization that we still live with. So if you study the Constitution in APUSH or as an undergraduate, or in law school, you start with Marbury versus Madison. And the next thing up was McCulloch versus Maryland, both of which of course are decisions from Jefferson’s cousin John Marshall in his court that Jefferson bewailed, he thought they were mistaken. And he also saw that they, in the long run, were going to empower people to act against these principles that he helped so dear. So there is a poignant element to this, and I try to make clear in the book why it was that people like Marshall acted on these principles. That is John Marshall, Chief Justice and fellow Randolph to Jefferson. I try to make clear why he acted on these principles and why people like Jefferson thought they were just completely mistaken, that they meant essentially it was possible that in the future the US government could come to look like the Spanish government, or the Prussian government, or the British government. John Grove: Before we get into some of those specifics, I do want to get into some of the constitutional specifics. But one incident that strikes me as very important in the narrative that I’d say the average reader of American history doesn’t know a whole lot about is the impeachment of Samuel Chase. In fact, you even call this the high watermark of the Jefferson presidency, this attempt to impeach Samuel Chase. Of course, Federalists had been kind of packed into the federal courts all throughout Washington and Adams presidency, but even right at the very end, of course, which gave rise to the Marbury versus Madison case. And so you had the Jeffersonians, the Republicans in the presidency, in Congress, but you had this really just Federalist bastion in the courts. And so one potential approach of the Republicans was to try to pull these people out by impeachment. And you just mentioned a minute ago that the Constitution doesn’t provide any method for the people to change the composition of the court except very, very long term as judges retire and pass away. So impeachment was one method that they tried to do. And so just tell us a little bit about the Samuel Chase impeachment and why that was so important and why you even suggest this was kind of a pivotal turning point in the presidency of Jefferson. Kevin Gutzman: Well, of course, Alexander Hamilton tried to assure people in the Federalists that the idea of giving federal judges good behavior tenure wasn’t that dangerous because the impeachment power would be available. And after Chase, who if he didn’t deserve to be removed from office in his impeachment trial, I can’t really quite imagine how a judge could deserve to be removed from office in an impeachment trial. John Grove: I noticed you were very upfront about that. Do you really think Chase deserved to be removed? Kevin Gutzman: I think he deserved to be removed from office, and actually, it’s come to be a kind of totem to which federal judges bow. So in their history, in the histories of the Supreme Court, both the late Justice Sandra Day and the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, my all-time favorite associate Justice, said that the acquittal of Chase was essential to the establishment of American judicial authority. Well, okay, it was essential to establishing American judicial authority far beyond the policymaking discretion that the people who made the Constitution had in mind, I believe. But anyway, so what happened was this fellow Chase had been a complete partisan. He had acted as a partisan in giving grand jury charges. He essentially made political speeches when impaneling grand juries. And then in one particular criminal case, he told a fellow before the grand jury was even impaneled, that when he got to Richmond, he would impanel the grand jury, the grand jury would indict this fellow, the fellow would be convicted, and then he would give him the sternest available sentence. Then how would you like a judge like that? It makes me think of Judge Roy Bean. And Chase was acquitted, and I show in the book that people gave explanations for their votes for acquittal to the effect that, well, John Randolph, who was the lead house prosecutor, lead impeachment agent from the house, had annoyed people in various other ways. And so they voted for acquittal to get back at Randolph, or in the case of John Quincy Adams, well, here was an old man who had served his country through his whole adult life, and how could you treat him this way? And just their votes for acquittal seemed to have had very little to do with the actual facts of the case, which were that the guy was just a hanging judge. And besides that, he used his position on the bench to make political speeches. So if somebody like that couldn’t be removed from office in an impeachment trial, well, we’ve seen that there hasn’t been another impeachment of the Supreme Court justice since. And when he heard the result, President Jefferson said, well, impeachment is a mere scarecrow. It’s just an idea. It’s not going to be of any use to us at all. Whether Hamilton actually expected that when he was writing the aforementioned essay in The Federalist is an interesting question, but there’s your answer. John Grove: It’s always interesting. And when you teach undergraduates kind of just basic checks and balances, there’s always this question, well, what’s the check on the judicial branch? And there’s not a great answer to that, other than just, well, they’re going to be appointed by the other branches. But that’s a long-term process. And yeah, as you mentioned, impeachment- Kevin Gutzman: Well, later on in the book, we have the correspondence between former President Jefferson and Justice Johnson. And Jefferson says he doesn’t like the fact that the Marshall Court has come, or to concur in a common opinion because there are really only two checks on federal judges. One, he says is impeachment, and the other one is public opinion. And he says, if all the judges join in every majority opinion, or if they all join in a common opinion in every case, which is what had been going on term after term during the Marshall years, then there’s effectively no check on their behavior. You can’t say anything to any of them. They can all disavow support for whatever case you’re criticizing or say, well, we have a kind of ethic on the court that we try to arrive at a common conclusion. So it was clear at the time, it was clear very early on in the history of the federal government that the judges could do more or less whatever they wanted. And we’ve come to be used to the idea that they can do more or less whatever they want. And this Jefferson called by different names from time to time, it made him very unhappy as you can imagine. John Grove: That correspondence was very interesting. I don’t think I’d come across that before. Which Supreme Court Justice was it again that he was of course- Kevin Gutzman: Johnson. John Grove: Johnson. Okay. Kevin Gutzman: William Johnson. Yeah. There’s an excellent book, I believe on the University of South Carolina Press from about 1958 called The Great Dissenter. It’s about Justice Johnson. John Grove: And Jefferson just say, Hey, throw some dissenting or concurring opinions in there. Let’s just get a little bit variety in there. If- Kevin Gutzman: Something amazing. Right. Let us know that there are different personalities on the court so that we can single out the greatest offenders. First, Johnson’s answer was, well, I’m not entirely certain that any of our major opinions have been wrong. Can you tell me which ones are wrong? John Grove: He had answers for that. Kevin Gutzman: And Jefferson was back to him with an endless group of descriptions of past product of the Supreme Court that he hadn’t approved of. And Johnson says, well, okay, I guess in the future I will dissent when I am in entire disagreement. And so he’s called the great dissenter, even though he would dissent once every term or maybe every other term. Nowadays, we expect them to have six opinions in every case. But in those days, it was effectively always just a common opinion, and Chief Justice would read it. John Grove: Yeah. So let’s talk about a few of those decisions that Jefferson thought was wrong. I think we’ll pass over Marbury vs Madison because I think almost all of our listeners will have a pretty good sense of what was going on there, but talk about some of these others. The other big- Kevin Gutzman: Well, just one thing to say about Marbury is nowadays people would agree that the Marshall’s behavior was incorrect, because today the first thing you have to do if you’re a plaintiff in a federal court, the first pleading has to be about jurisdiction. And so the judge would first address jurisdiction. And what made the Republicans so angry in Marbury was he started by giving a sermon about all the other questions in the case. And then he says, well, there’s this jurisdictional problem. John Grove: Right, at the very end. Kevin Gutzman: And finally, of course, the power of judicial review was established by the courts declaring that it didn’t have jurisdiction. In other words, it shouldn’t have gone to all those other questions. And that too seemed to the Republicans just to be a political speech. John Grove: That stood out too, as you get it from Jefferson, you get it from Spencer Rhone who wrote a lot of these essays against the Marshall Court. That big complaint is that the Marshall would regularly go out of his way to find these issues that he didn’t have to address in order to decide the legal question at issue, which did seem to be a characteristic. Yeah. Obviously the question of judicial review itself in Marbury versus Madison. You had the question about the necessary and proper clause, which was of course one of the most contentious issues over the ratification of the Constitution that comes up in McCulloch versus Maryland. You have the more difficult, conceptually difficult matter of the federal appellate jurisdiction. This one’s a little harder to follow for people who aren’t going to be knee-deep in the law of that period. But the Martin versus Hunter’s Lessee, and Cohens versus Virginia, where he had this question of to what extent can the state judicial decisions then be brought over into the federal courts and overturned there? And then you had the commerce clause question in Gibbons versus Ogden. I mean, you can talk about all these, one of these, how did these kind of fit in, or why were these so objectionable to the Jeffersonians of these decisions that the Marshall Court was coming with? Of course, it’s cited on the favor of the federal government and the federal courts every time. Why were these so objectionable to the Jeffersonians? Kevin Gutzman: Well, a lot of them were just running entirely against their basic understanding of the constitution that it was supposed to have established a government with enumerated powers. So for example, take Cohens, Cohens is about Congress is establishing a lottery in the District of Columbia, and then the Cohen brothers were selling lottery tickets in Virginia where it was illegal. So the federal courts end up saying, well, they can do that because Congress established a lottery in the District of Columbia, even though there’s nothing in the Constitution that says Congress can establish a lottery in the District of Columbia. And even if there were, what would that have to do with selling tickets in Virginia? So that’s a kind of typical example of the way that the Federalist judges behaved in those earliest days. Martin is another interesting case. Of course, if you’ve taken common law then you’re familiar with all of these cases, but if you haven’t, it may be news to you, but in Martin versus Hunter’s Lessee, what ended up happening was that the Supreme Court told what is now the Supreme Court of Virginia to send up the record of a particular case, and the chief judge of the Supreme Court of Virginia said, no, we’re not sending it. And they never did. So that was the end of it. So you’d say, well, that sounds kind of like, I don’t know, nullification. That was kind of what it was. But we end up with the case standing for the idea that the Supreme Court could tell the Supreme Court of Virginia what to do, which it certainly didn’t establish. That is the Supreme Court of Virginia never did what it was told. And the reason for this was that the chief judge had persuaded other people on the Virginia Supreme Court to understand the Constitution in Jefferson’s way. This was a perfectly Jeffersonian judge, or one way of understanding that is it might show what kind of a federalism extremist Jefferson was because the two of them are in correspondence about this, and Jefferson is telling him, I agreed with every tittle of your series of newspaper editorials explaining your position against Marshall. And there are other cases, accord… I should say, there are other instances in which Jefferson took very extreme positions on Federalism, including at one point he suggested the death penalty for people who helped to enforce the first bank charter. John Grove: Seems a bit much. Kevin Gutzman: First federal bank charter in Virginia. Yeah. So these were all hot matters because as far as Jefferson was concerned, the American Revolution, first of all had established that Virginia was an independent country, and it had delegated some power to the federal government, but not power to come up with any kind of command it wanted to come up with. And that seemed to be some of these cases amounted to. John Grove: All right. See, it struck me that there were two themes that really divided the Republicans from the Federalists on these questions that came out in your narrative of it was one is the sense of always going back to would the people have ratified the Constitution if this had been understood? And that’s something that Ron went back to, and John Taylor, I think goes back to a few times, and Jefferson probably does that. If the people had thought that McCulloch versus Maryland was going to be decided the way it was, would they have ratified the Constitution with that understanding of the Constitution? And they kind of argued pretty persuasively probably that they probably wouldn’t have. And then the other thing that struck me too is the sense that on the Federalist side, there’s this desire for uniformity that the Jeffersons don’t like. That a lot of the arguments come from these sense of, well, obviously if you want a system of government, you have to have this sort of unify… It has to be unified in a way, you have to have a final authority. And Jefferson did the jurisdiction cases. They’re kind of arguing that we have two separate judicial branches here. We have a state judicial system, we have a federal judicial system, and both of them are perfectly supreme in their own area, which of course doesn’t give you that uniformity. It gives you this multiplicity. And of course, the Federalists didn’t like that, but that seemed like a major theme that came out. Kevin Gutzman: That’s exactly what Ron says in Martin versus Hunter’s Lessee. Yeah. John Grove: Oh, wait, A couple of constitutional issues that come up, not in the Supreme Court, but just as a byproduct of national expansion. One is Jefferson, this is a famous one, of course, Jefferson’s decisions in making the Louisiana Purchase. And of course, foreign policy is a big part of this, the story and the Louisiana purchase, a huge part of Jefferson’s foreign policy. And he and his cabinet had some constitutional qualms about everything they were doing. What were some of the constitutional issues that came up with that question? Kevin Gutzman: Well, I don’t know about his cabinet. I think Jefferson was the only significant Republican who was opposed to the idea that the Louisiana Purchase was clearly constitutional. So essentially, for people who don’t know anything about it, what happened was that Jefferson had the idea, as he put it, that there is one spot on the map, the possessor of which must be an enemy of the United States, and that is New Orleans. So he had a minister, Livingston from New York in France, and then he sent James Monroe, who was a Jefferson lieutenant to join Livingston in France to try to purchase New Orleans. And the story goes that actually before Monroe even arrived, Talleyrand, the foreign minister of France, had said to Livingston, well, how about if I sell you all of Louisiana? And of course you can kind of imagine a diplomat faced with this wanting to keep a straight face and thinking this is beyond comprehension. So he more or less agreed to it before Monroe even showed up. Well, that’s going to be an issue later on in the book when presidential candidate Monroe wants credit for this. But anyway, so that they sent word of the agreement that they had not handed any right to make that they had not been delegated power to make by the president or the Secretary of State and the purchase price, which was beyond the amount of money they’d been told they could spend. And when Secretary of State, Madison saw this communication, he was ecstatic. He thought this was wonderful. And so far as I can tell, the only significant Republican who didn’t think it was wonderful was Jefferson. And Jefferson, as far as I know, was the only significant Republican who thought there was a constitutional problem. Now that later on, John Quincy Adams is going to give evidence that he had thought there was a constitutional problem. But he of course was never actually a Republican. So anyway, the first Jefferson says, well, what we’re going to need to do is we’re going to have to have the states ratify a constitutional amendment, empowering the executive to enter into a purchase of territory like this. And Madison’s position is Article 2 of the Constitution says that the president can make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate. And since it’s not specific, that has to include all common kinds of treaties, which would include treaties of alliance, treaties of peace. Nowadays, it wouldn’t include, but in those days it would include treaties to buy and sell territory, which nowadays are virtually unknown, but in those days, were common. So Madison thinks this is not a problem. And anyway, Jefferson drafts an amendment, Madison scribbles about an amendment, and eventually Madison talks him out of doing this because they get a letter from Livingston. While this debate has just started among Jefferson’s advisors saying, Napoleon is talking about rescinding this agreement, he’s already thinking this was a bad idea, so you better hurry up. Now if we can wonder whether Napoleon really was thinking about doing that, or he just wanted to hurry up and get his money. But in any event, Jefferson finally decided, I’m going to have to do what the executive occasionally will have to do, which is just take advantage of a fleeting opportunity and hope the people forgive me. So that’s what ended up happening it. But Jefferson, I think was never persuaded that it had been exactly kosher, but as I said, I can’t identify any other top Republican even sticklers that Randolph tailored, none of them complained. John Grove: That’s interesting. Yeah. Of course, the expansion. The addition of territory, the creation of new states, obviously would go on to be quite significant constitutional and political issues. Kevin Gutzman: Well, people in New England, apparently Federalists at the time thought what this did was transform the union. And while the states had agreed to enter into the union among the original states, when they had ratified the Constitution, they had not agreed to this. So some of them thought it was unconstitutional. But as I say, the Republicans, as far as I can tell, Jefferson was the only significant one who had any constitutional questions about it. John Grove: All right. Let’s talk a little bit about foreign policy. And of course, the big foreign policy blot in the middle of this timeframe is the war of 1812. So I thought we were talking about that in a little bit in the big picture. One thing that’s interesting is that the Jeffersonian vision, if you can call it that, had some distinct ideas about foreign policy, about how you carry out foreign policy. At one point you even say of Madison, that today almost everybody would take his common sense to the idea that the best way to avoid war is to prepare for it. And you say Jefferson basically rejected that premise. What was his general idea about how foreign policy was going to be carried out? He had a skepticism of standing armies and navies. How did he think America was going to make its way in the world? Kevin Gutzman: Well, as far back as the early 1780s, Madison had the idea that Europeans were dependent upon American food supplies. And so America could use economic coercion to some extent in foreign policy. And I think what happened was that Madison persuaded Jefferson of this. So what we end up with is in the first inaugural address, his countering the general perception that America had a weak government with the famous statement that, no, it’s actually the strongest government in the world. It’s the only one which if endangered the people would fly to the colors to defend. So he had this idea, he let the wish be further to the belief that, well, we don’t have to make any serious preparation for war at all. In fact, when they were thinking about who should be in the cabinet, he chose Albert Gallatin to be treasury secretary, and Gallatin had earned his stripes in Congress by being the chief enemy of Navy spending. And often nowadays, you hear people, especially Libertarians, talk about Andrew Jackson. Well, what can you say that’s positive about Andrew Jackson? He paid off the debt. He paid off the debt on exactly the date that Albert Gallatin’s program called for finally extinguishing the debt. That is during the Jefferson administration they had started the process that culminated in the Jackson administration, and well, was this safe in a world that was at war, in a world in which the two great powers and most of the secondary powers were involved in this gigantic war? Napoleon had a population of 25 million Frenchmen, and 3 million were at arms. That was the most populous country in Europe, and 12% of its population were soldiers. And Jefferson thought, we don’t really need a Navy. So it just was… Well, again, I think the idea originated with Madison and Jefferson of course was a ready audience for most things Madison said, but in this case it went along with his own wishes. So what’s the result? Well, the result is a foreign army burns down the Capitol, and the White House, Treasury Department, State Department, War Department. They saved one office because the French minister in Washington saw that the British were about to burn this office, and he said to the commanding general of the British forces, you should leave this patent office. Don’t burn it. That’s not just for Americans, that’s for the whole world. So today, if you go to Washington, you can ask on a tour of the White House to see the smoke stains. There’s still smoke stains in the building, and you can see the old patent office, but there aren’t any other offices that old because the British destroyed them all. This was a predictable result of the foreign policy of the Republicans, I think. There are other things that played into it too. In other words, there were opportunities to prevent so dire and outcome, but Madison missed those as well. I described that in the book too, and we end up with this just hideous result. John Grove: Do you think coming face-to-face with those sort of geopolitical realities, do you think that altered the ideological trajectory of the Republican Party at all? Kevin Gutzman: Well, when Monroe becomes president, he decides to recapitulate one of the main things Washington had done as president, which was to tour the country and inspect the defenses of the country. So there are these three tours that Monroe undertakes, and there is substantial spending on especially seaside defenses. But part of the reason why Washington ended up being taken by this foreign force was that Madison, first of all, appointed people who were totally unfit to be his war and Navy secretaries. And then when he replaced the war secretary, he got a fellow named Armstrong, who of course had been involved in the revolution with trying to overthrow the civilian government of the United States. And he told him, prepare the approaches, and then he didn’t. Several months later, he told him again, have you prepare the approaches? Have you done anything about that? The guy said, no, don’t worry. The British will never try to come to Washington DC. If they come up to Chesapeake, their target will be Baltimore. So Madison does nothing about that, and eventually, as I say, the foreign army does march into Washington and burn down all the major government buildings. John Grove: There are a few interesting and I think, underappreciated figures that play large roles in the book below the level of presidency, below of course, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. I just wonder if you just say a few words about some of these people and why it’s important to know about their contributions. One, you just mentioned, Albert Gallatin, he strikes me, especially in the first half of the book, really, he’s one of the… There are a couple people that always seem to be, when you need somebody who actually has his head on his shoulders a little bit, go find this guy. And he seemed like one of them. What was Albert Gallatin’s contribution? Kevin Gutzman: Well, Gallatin was a brilliant fellow. He was the one Jeffersonian in the 90s who could argue financial matters against Hamilton, essentially. He was very unusual for a top American politician in that he had been born in Geneva. His family name was actually Gallatin, it was Italian, and his ancestors had been among the founders of Geneva. And then over the previous three centuries, there had been five chief executives of Geneva who were Gallatin’s ancestors. I don’t mean collateral relations, I mean actual ancestors. And then his mother’s maiden name was du Rosey. So on both sides of the family, he was from European nobility. And there’s a famous kind of potted saying among historians, Dukes don’t immigrate, well, Albert Gallatin’s, the exception, he had nobles on both sides. He went to the best schools Switzerland had to offer, and then he got to be a young man, and he decided, this place is boring, I’m going to go to America. And so he got a friend of his, and they came to North America, and he didn’t speak English, and he ended up teaching French at Harvard. And then after he’d been there for a while, he decided, well, this is kind of boring too. And finally, he made his home in western Pennsylvania. I need to think, well, that doesn’t really sound like an antidote to boredom, but in western Pennsylvania, he ended up in the center of the Whiskey Rebellion. And when Hamilton led that army out there, he actually asked people where Gallatin was, because apparently, he intended to hang him, and that didn’t happen. But Gallatin soon found himself in the lower house of Pennsylvania’s legislature and then in the upper house and then in Congress and everywhere he went, people couldn’t avoid the fact that although he was very odd looking, he was extremely bright, and an obvious person for Jefferson to put in his cabinet. Not only given Jefferson’s intention to pay off the debt but just as a general advisor. And Jefferson repeatedly said things like, in eight years we never had a single significant argument in the cabinet. We would talk about whatever the problem was, but nobody got angry. It just worked really well. And Madison was a kind of brilliant but retiring personality, and apparently, Gallatin got along with the two of them that way too. So those three fellows really are the ones I think who ran the Jefferson administration. And he is a very interesting guy. Actually, nowadays, oddly, if you go to Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan to see the monument, Alexander Hamilton over his grave, if you’re standing there looking at it in turn about, I don’t know, about 135 degrees to your right, you’ll see Albert Gallatin’s grave. So they’re buried within about 10 steps of each other. John Grove: Yeah, it’s interesting. For as contentious as our politics is today, there were a lot of incidents of major political figures either threatening or actually killing one another in the early republic. So another figure brings up not so much a friend to the Jeffersonians, at least after the first few years, John Randolph of Roanoke, comes up over and over again. One of these old Republicans who I think it was is either, it’s either Randolph or Taylor that is described as more Jeffersonian than Jefferson. Kevin Gutzman: Well, I think I describe Randolph that way. John Grove: Okay, yeah. Kevin Gutzman: Randolph, just like Gallatin, is amazingly brilliant, but his personality is totally different. So you could be in a room with Gallatin, I guess for hours and not realize he was there. And I don’t think you could be in a room with Randolph for five seconds and not know that he was there. And apparently, he didn’t have control of his mind exactly. It would just produce thoughts, and it would produce positions, and he would just volcano-like emit brilliant statements, and they would float in the air and people would walk out of the room. And he was ultimately dissatisfied with the Jefferson administration because he didn’t think it had been Jeffersonian enough. And he blamed that on Madison, which probably there was a root of accuracy in that. I mean, there was a knob of accuracy in that. John Grove: And it’s always interesting to see that a lot of the old Republicans right around Madison’s election they gravitated around Monroe. But then by the time Monroe actually gets to the presidency, Monroe’s much more like Madison than he is like- Kevin Gutzman: Well, Monroe actually… Of course there’s a story in the book about the evening that Randolph realized that Monroe had betrayed him, and he wrote in his diary, the date, Richmond, Virginia, James Monroe, traitor. John Grove: I remember that. Yeah. Kevin Gutzman: So some people are more principled than practical, and here we’re looking at a continuum. I guess Jefferson is probably the second most principled of the four guys, and Madison’s probably the most practical of those four guys. John Grove: Well, on that theme, really, so a good way to wrap up the conversation is the Democratic Republican Party, the Jeffersonian Party kind of merged in the 1790s as an opposition party. So being an opposition to those in power, of course they’re drawing all sorts of inspiration from English opposition, tradition, but then all of a sudden you’re the opposition in power. So that’s always been a conceptual question about the Jeffersonians. Can an opposition party then take power and govern effectively and still maintain the same identity? Of course, people like Randolph were saying, no, the identity has been lost. I kind of get the sense, the way you end the book, I won’t give away the last line, but the last line is maybe kind of suggestive that by the time they had several years of governing under their belt, they had really evolved and changed into a very different party. Kevin Gutzman: That gets to the question how Jeffersonian were Madison and Monroe. I think that one significant distinction among these people is that Madison didn’t have independent executive experience before he became president. The other guys have been governor, and in Virginia that had real authority. The book, after I’d start with a significantly long consideration of Jefferson’s first inaugural address, which I think again, laid out the program, they were all three going to follow, I describe events around Richmond as the election was impending, and Monroe has to make independent decisions that are going to be very important. Madison really never had that experience until he was president, and it’s not clear, as I was hinting before, I don’t think it’s clear that he really was, I don’t know why that goes so far as to say competent to making executive decisions, but he certainly was not expert at coming to final conclusions. He was more of a debater than an actor, I think. So that’s a distinction among them, but I don’t know how much I would say the party had changed by the time in Monroe was president, he still favored slight spending, concentration of authority in the state governments instead of in the federal government. He didn’t want to have a significant military, although he’d learned the lesson that the Madisonian idea of economic coercion was a flop. So I would say that all three of them were Jeffersonian, really. I think they were. John Grove: What gives way then to John Quincy Adams, which you suggested not a Republican, so- Kevin Gutzman: No, that’s different. He’s a bird of another color. He never- John Grove: A Federalist revived or? Kevin Gutzman: After he quit the Federalist Party, he never said he was a Republican, but he never said he was a Federalist again either, so. In fact, I think he may have said that he was neither. On the other hand, I don’t think his father would’ve been uncomfortable with his program. John Grove: All right. Well, Kevin Gutzman, thanks so much for joining us and talking about this is a really fascinating period of American history. I do sense, I think a lot of people who are well-read in the founding era sometimes the knowledge just kind of drops off at 1800. There’s the big election of 1800, and then a few things happen. But this book really, really fascinating book. It’s thorough, it’s also entertaining. There are lots of little nuggets, some of them very, very funny nuggets. And so it’s out now, highly recommended. Thanks so much for joining us. Kevin Gutzman: You’re welcome. Brian A. Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please visit our journal at lawliberty.org.