Richard Reinsch (00:04): Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m Richard Reinsch. Today, we’re talking with Keith Whittington of our new organization he is the chair of, called the Academic Freedom Alliance. Keith Whittington has been on Liberty Law Talk on a number of occasions. He’s also contributed to Law & Liberty. He is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of politics at Princeton University. His scholarship record is incredibly impressive. He’s the author most recently of Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from Founding to the Present, which won the Thomas Cooley Book Prize. He’s also the author and ties into our podcast I think, of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, and is the author, a co-author, and editor of a number of other publications. Keith, welcome to the program. Keith Whittington (01:05): Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Richard Reinsch (01:06): So this new organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance that you’re the chair of, tell us about it, what its work is, what it’s doing, and what sparked it? Keith Whittington (01:16): Yeah. So at heart, this is a faculty-led organization committed to defending academic freedom and free speech rights of faculty at American universities. Our concern over the last several years has been free speech on campus is under threat from lots of directions that affects lots of members of the campus community, including students and others. I’ve had conversations for some time now about the kinds of problems we’re seeing on college campuses, the growing dispute about whether or not free speech is actually valuable on college campuses and what the scope of it ought to be. It’s partially through that kind of concern and those conversations I wound up wanting to write the book, Speak Freely. Then, more recently, a series of conversations led to thinking about, “Well, what else could we be doing that might help advance these principles and secure them more effectively?” The opportunity rose to try to launch an organization like this. So, it’s essentially committed to, as I said, defending academic freedom principles and doing so in part by intervening in particular disputes that arise between faculty and their employers over things that the faculty member has said. Often, professors that find themselves in the midst of these free speech controversies feel very isolated and alone and don’t really know what they ought to be doing under these circumstances. So, partially we want to emphasize to people that they’re not alone. We want to emphasize to the university administration that the faculty member is not alone, that we want to help inform people of what their rights are and help them navigate that situation, try to bring attention and public pressure when appropriate on universities to actually live up to their commitments on free speech. We want to provide legal assistance to faculty in those situations and so we have funds to provide something of a legal defense fund for individuals who find themselves in these situations. I think it’s crucial when faculty find themselves under investigation, under threat or sanctioned by their university, that they have good legal advice that can help them navigate through often a maze of internal disciplinary proceedings and if necessary, that they be prepared and able to defend themselves in court and vindicate their rights against the university if it turns out the university has behaved badly. Richard Reinsch (03:40): So the Academic Freedom Alliance primarily is going to be working with academics? Keith Whittington (03:44): It is. That’s the primary goal. Richard Reinsch (03:46): So what are academics facing? We know what students go through, I think, fairly well in terms of problems they face. So academics are actually experiencing more censorious conduct as well? Keith Whittington (04:00): Professors are facing it as well, so it is certainly true that a lot of the free speech controversies involving students get a fair amount of attention, that those are real and the problems facing students are quite real. There are some very good organizations, including the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that spend a lot of resources and time trying to defend students who find themselves in these situations and there’s important work that needs to be done there. But it’s also true that professors find themselves in these situations as well. Sometimes those become very public controversies and they do get a fair amount of attention, but a tremendous number of times, they get no attention at all. They’re really local conflicts that don’t attract any media attention, but nonetheless, faculty find themselves facing sanction from their employers for something they said and it can involve a wide range of situations. So we’ve seen lots of examples and they’re often very public examples in some ways. Part of what I think we need to be doing is making sure universities are aware that there are costs to doing that, that the path of least resistance is not necessarily to undermine faculty free speech rights, but instead, sometimes to actually live up to those rights is also the easier thing for universities to be doing, but that requires putting public pressure on universities. It requires making them aware there’s a cost to be paid for not living up to their commitments. We literally see them they are more transparent of a professor saying something controversial in public and then there’s reaction to it that calls on universities to fire those faculty members for saying something controversial. So the rise of social media, because it really made a big difference in this regard, it’s allowed faculty to reach a much broader audience in expressing their views than might, otherwise, have been the case. When you reach a much wider audience, that means there’s a lot more people that can potentially be offended and it’s, unfortunately we’re living in an environment where people, when they are offended or upset, want to organize themselves to try to punish the person that’s offended them or upset them. It means that a lot of people are now exposed to the unfiltered opinions of professors sometimes those are fairly inflammatory and controversial and so we do see public reactions that occur to those kinds of public statements. But there’s also lots of instances of faculty saying something in the classroom, saying something on campus that upsets other members of the campus community, in particular, that leads to complaints against them and then the university’s investigating them. We still see examples of faculty being attacked because of their scholarship and things that they have published. Unfortunately, a lot of those attacks results in things like journals retracting journal articles. I think that’s, unfortunately, not as easily remedied because it’s not as if you have any kind of legal rights normally to those publications. But when employers get involved and universities started threatening employment sanctions on individuals for their scholarship, then that’s a serious issue and one that people do, in fact, generally have rights that prevent universities from doing that. We’re concerned, we’re trying to vindicate those rights. Richard Reinsch (06:39): My understanding on faculty speech is a number of precedents from the early Cold War period where professors who are accused of Communist or accused of traitorous conduct on behalf of the Soviet Union litigated claims and they were, ultimately, vindicated in federal court. So is this just a matter of getting people to sue, getting people to stand up and getting these in the federal courts and you have a really good chance of prevailing? Keith Whittington (07:06): Well, it’s more of a mixed bag of that, but it is true that, in general, I think American academics are fairly well situated in this regard, partially as a consequence of a lot of efforts by professors and their allies in the early 20th century. So the American Association of University Professors was founded in the early days of the 20th century in order to advance the principle of academic freedom in the United States. It was a principle that was really first advanced in Europe and was being brought into the United States in the context in which American universities simply didn’t recognize those kinds of principles. At the same time, they were encouraging universities to adopt a system to tenure, to protect faculty from being fired in the midst of these controversies. It took a lot of effort, but they were very successful in convincing American universities to build into their own governing documents, protections for academic freedom for faculty, as well as adopt tenure systems, although those have generally been eroded over time. So on the one hand, a lot of American universities have fairly robust protections for faculty speech built into their employment contracts, built into their governing documents and the key is to make them live up to those commitments. Then, it’s also true for public universities you have a further backstop of The First Amendment. It is true that the U.S. Supreme court issued some opinions in the mid-20th century, mostly involving Communists and arguments surrounding any Communist efforts in the education environment, in which the court recognized that there were some First Amendment protections for faculty and the kinds of speech they engaged in, in public universities, but the Supreme Court has mostly stepped out of that. A lot of the subsequent cases dealing with those kinds of controversies have been handled in the circuit courts and it is a bit of a mixed bag. The court sent somewhat unclear signals about how to think about those protections, how exactly individual faculty members are protected by the First Amendment and in what context and certain courts, I think, have struggled to some degree with those protections. So in a public university context, there are some First Amendment backstops, but I think even in those contexts, faculty would better off so they have a robust protections for academic freedom built into their employment relations with their universities. That’s also, of course, true in the private university context where the First Amendment generally is not applicable. Richard Reinsch (09:26): Do you see the Academic Freedom Alliance assuming a major public role in its efforts, or is it just going to be their word-of-mouth, people know it’s there and it’s a formal organization with principles and procedures and things it’s going to do, or do you see the organization becoming an advocate as well? Keith Whittington (09:45): I think it would be both. I think part of our hope is to be advocating for these principles in public. I do think that we’re in a situation where people don’t really appreciate the value of academic freedom principles or even understand them very well. I think we’re in a context in which there’s a fair amount of concentration over whether or not we should want those kinds of principles and we ought to continue them to the future. So one reason why I’m very interested in organization like this is precisely because I think we need to be continually reaffirming the importance of these principles, thinking about how they apply in new and evolving contexts. So a certain amount of public advocacy needs to be done on behalf of these values because we live in a world in which these values are not taken for granted and there are people pushing in the other direction. So in the long-term, I think there’s a battle for hearts and minds that has to occur surrounding free speech principles in general and in this specific context. It’s also true that I think you, sometimes, can bring public pressure on universities in ways that will lead them to do the right thing in the midst of these controversies. Often, the way free speech controversies play out now is the people that want somebody fired get a lot of attention. They make a lot of noise. Universities feel under a lot of pressure from one side in these disputes and so the path of least resistance, the universities often just give in to those demands and throw the faculty member under the bus. Part of what I think we need to be doing is making sure universities are aware that there are costs to doing that, that the path of least resistance is not necessarily to undermine faculty free speech rights, but instead, sometimes to actually live up to those rights is also the easier thing for universities to be doing, but that requires putting public pressure on universities. It requires making them aware there’s a cost to be paid for not living up to their commitments. It’s also true I think we’re going to have to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work as well, so especially when these kinds of controversies arise in a way that’s not very public when faculty members find themselves under attack, but this is not drawing media attention. The professors involved would often prefer that it remained quiet. They think it would damage their professional reputation if the controversy became more public. They’d prefer, simply, to have this resolved as quickly and quietly as possible, but they need to help in doing that. So we want to be sensitive to that. We want to help people in the situations they’re in and try to make things better for them. Sometimes that will mean trying to work behind the scenes to help persuade university officials to live up to their own commitments and particular cases. Hopefully, a fair number of those situations can be resolved without having to draw regular public attention to what universities are doing. Richard Reinsch (12:18): Well, I thought as well, the presence in higher education of a large number of non-tenured faculty, of adjuncts, and their situation, obviously, much more delicate than a tenured professor. So I imagine they would be reluctant to press their claims, but it seems to be that’s where the Academic Freedom Alliance and building culture rules and institutions better, the thinking about academic freedom could really help them in a way that they might be reluctant to press a claim on their behalf because they would worry about getting renewed. Keith Whittington (12:50): I think that’s absolutely right. When individuals find themselves in individual controversies, they need help and we want to provide help to them. But often, that’s a worst-case scenario, right? You’re already in trouble at that stage and we’d be far better off, if we can build a better culture, build better institutions, build better rules that are more protective of academic freedom in general, so that we don’t find ourselves having to fight each one of these individual battles and one of those really important institutions, from this perspective, is tenure. So as I noted in the early 20th century, American universities didn’t even have tenure systems. They built them up over the course of decades. Though, we’ve seen over recent years is an erosion of those tenure protections, in some cases, because universities are actively trying to get rid of or undermine tenure protections, but in lots of cases, simply by hiring faculty outside the tenure track and so hiring faculty who were going to be doing teaching and research on the campus, but have no hope of getting protected by tenure rules and that’s just extraordinarily damaging to the intellectual environment on those campuses. In the long run, it’s certainly the case that reversing this trend toward having more contingent faculty who are on these semester- by-semester or class-by-class contracts is really important because one thing that we find in these kinds of controversies involving speech of faculty members is that if somebody has tenure protections, it’s not that they have more academic freedom. All those professors are entitled to academic freedom, whether they’re tenured or not tenured, but those who are tenured have more procedural protections from being disciplined as a consequence of their speech. So it’s easier to force universities to explain themselves as to why they’re taking action against a faculty member and it’s easier to mount a defense of those people when the reason for sanctioning the faculty members are not good ones and can’t be justified under the university’s own rules. In the context of untenured faculty members, as you say, it’s very easy simply not to renew a contract, provide no explanations as to why and as a consequence, it becomes very difficult to defend those individuals and hold universities to account, precisely because the procedural protections for academic freedom are so minimal in those contexts. So we certainly hope that we can help out contingent faculty who are in some of these situations. They are the most vulnerable people who find themselves in these controversies, but in the long run, far better solution is to bring more faculty under the protection of tenure. Richard Reinsch (15:21): Talk about the membership of the Academic Freedom Alliance because I think that’s an interesting story as well. This isn’t just a conservative or libertarian organization. This has wide support, from my review of the website, across academia. Keith Whittington (15:34): Yeah, that was absolutely the goal. I do think this is a common threat for academics across the political spectrum. Unsurprisingly, when you talk to people, you find that both inside of academia and outside of academia, that people have a picture in their head of who is vulnerable, who comes under attack under these circumstances. In our polarized world, they often imagine that one side is particularly vulnerable coming under attack for these things. But if you talk to a range of faculty, what you find is everybody’s very anxious. Everybody feels like they could easily come under attack. Everybody thinks that people like them are under attack and I think that reflects the reality is that it’s not just faculty on the right who are threatened for consequences of their speech; it’s faculty on the left as well. Under those circumstances, there’s an opportunity there to try to build a broad coalition in support of these universal principles of free speech and academic freedom for everybody, but there are also some challenges. There are weary coalitions that have to be built across the political aisle to convince people that even though they may disagree with each other about all kinds of substantive issues, on this issue, they actually have agreement. Moreover on this issue, there’s actually a commitment to defending people across the board. That does mean sometimes you have to hold your nose and defend somebody with which you have very deep disagreements, that you think that they had said things that by your own lights, are in fact offensive or dangerous or wrong-headed are false in various ways. Nonetheless, when they’re acting within their rights, they ought to be defended because that’s beneficial, I think to all of us, so that’s the kind of coalition we built. We very much explained to the faculty who have joined the organization about what our principles are and that we have this broad civil libertarian view and I was very pleased by how many people wanted to sign on. When we first started talking about this kind of organization and what it might do and what it might look like, we initially started thinking, “Well, it might be good to get a few dozen faculty together who would be willing to sign some petitions, for example, on this issue.” Then we started reaching out to people and realized that there was just going to be a lot more interest than we initially figured, that people were eager to join up, that it was easier to reach across the aisle and persuade people on both the left and the right to join an organization like this than we thought. So we wound up, by the time of our public launch, having over 200 founding members who were willing to join up, which was far beyond what we were initially hoping to get. Like I said, I think, on the one hand it’s very encouraging because it’s very good. I think that people see this as a problem and are willing to do something about it. On the other hand, the fact that there is so much eagerness to join up with an organization like this is also reflective of just how nervous everybody is and how much of a problem people think universities are in at the moment. Richard Reinsch (18:28): That was my question, is it increasingly the case that progressive or liberal academics find themselves under strain? This isn’t just a right of center problem, but it’s under, say, critical race theory with your students, with certain deans that saying things that were once normal or considered standard in thinking about race in America no longer are and people find themselves on the wrong side. Keith Whittington (18:53): Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I think sometimes that the source of the attack is different, whether we’re talking about faculty on the left or the right. So it is often true that for more conservative members of faculty that when they come under attack for something that they’ve said or written, it’s an attack that’s coming from inside the house, so to speak. It’s coming from on-campus; it’s students, it’s colleagues, it’s university administrators who were upset and trying to get that faculty member sanctioned in some way. When it’s faculty on the left to come under attack, that is sometimes true too, they find themselves under attack from other members of the campus community, but they often find themselves under attack from people outside the university campus. Political activists to media figures, politicians, donors, and alumni are often disproportionately likely to be criticizing faculty on the left side of the political spectrum. But it is still true that faculty on the left as well are often nervous about people you might think of as being their own ideological and political allies on the left there on the college campus itself. Some of this, I think, is a generational divide and that younger faculty, students are much less supportive and much less appreciative of broad, civil libertarian principles of free speech. And they’re much more willing to attack people that they disagree with and not just argue that they’re wrong and we shouldn’t be persuaded by what they say or that they ought to change their mind, but to argue that they ought to be silenced, suppressed or terminated as a consequence of what they’ve done. Americans, in fact, don’t value free speech, even as an abstract principle let alone in the context of particular controversies. That I think is particularly discouraging and worrisome about where we’re headed in the longer term. I think that’s part of what makes this a very worrisome situation that if we don’t explain why these values are important, I think we will, over the course of the next several years, find ourselves in a much worse situation where the majority of the members of a campus community, students and faculty alike, no longer support ideas of academic freedom and free speech and are perfectly happy to abandon them entirely, which has just be an extraordinary reversal of 100 years of effort to try to get these protections built into the university environment. It would not shock me that if current trends continue 30 years from now, those protections will no longer exist. Richard Reinsch (21:08): Wow. Do you see a litigation opportunity or opportunities for your organization regarding diversity statements that many academics or many on campuses period are required to sign of ways in which they’re going to advance diversity in their teaching or in their job on campus? This seems to be something like compelled speech and it’s almost like a loyalty oath. Have you thought about that? Keith Whittington (21:32): I think that’s why, as an organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance does not have a position on diversity statements. We have not taken up the case. I personally do think they are quite troubling and do represent a real threat to intellectual diversity on campuses and to academic freedom principles, more generally, as you say, that they are very comparable to the kind of loyalty oaths the faculty are required to sign at many public institutions in the mid-20th century, swearing they were not Communists and didn’t believe in Communist principles. These current diversity statements often take the form of a kind of statement that really is trying to filter by people’s political views in order to out conservatives, for the most part, although not entirely. So it has political consequences. I think they’re designed to have political consequences. They are a form of compelled speech, which this court has ruled as unacceptable. I think they are contrary to other university policies in many places, so there are versions of this that I think are probably more acceptable, but there are increasingly versions of diversity statements being adopted on university campuses that really are just requiring compelled political statements from prospective faculty members. I think these things can be very hard to litigate, in part, precisely because they are being included in the job application, so there’s not a requirement that current faculty find these documents. Instead, they’re incorporated into application packages for graduate school, for jobs. As a consequence, then, it becomes much more difficult to determine if a given individual has been excluded from a university, that they’ve been denied to start in their graduate program; they’ve been denied a job because of what they said in the diversity statement or for some other reason. So they will be, I think, complicated to litigate in ways that was less true of the loyalty as where you required faculty or across the board to sign them. But it will not surprise me if we don’t wind up with litigation. It may not be litigation that the Academic Freedom Alliance is involved in, but I’d be very surprised if at some point we don’t get some litigation over these statements because they clearly run afoul. It seems to be some existing constitutional doctrine regarding compelled speech. Richard Reinsch (23:55): On just, in general, the campus environment, I had a sense that things were going to get better maybe 20 years ago, with regard to free speech and that FIRE’s work and other public interest firms, their work generally would improve the tenure on campus. Yet, I think things have gotten worse, particularly, in the last 10 years. Why do you think that is? One part of it, to me, is when I was in college in the late ’90s, if you were offended by something that happened on campus, in particular in the classroom, what we were told is, “That’s probably a good sign you’re learning,” or that you need to do some more reading, some more thinking. But that the professor got your attention, then that’s a good thing and learning, at times, should be hard as things that you’ve held dear maybe take on a different color. Now it’s, “If I’m offended, the person who offended me has violated my constitutional rights,” or, “my human rights,” or something like that. How did that switch take place? Keith Whittington (24:50): Yeah, I think it’s a good question. I do think that you’re right, that we’re in a worse situation now than we were several years ago. On the one hand, I think these are perpetual battles. I don’t think there’s ever been a golden age of free speech in which everybody embraced these principles and were consistent and good about actually implementing them. It’s long been the case that people will endorse the abstract value of free speech, but in particular contexts, they tend to want to carve out exceptions and exclude examples of speech that they find particularly troubling. That’s just a persistent problem that requires a constant vigilance, I think, to try to defend these principles because it just runs against human nature in the midst of particular emotional controversies. But we’ve had cycles of when things were better and when things were worse in this regard and I think we’re certainly on a downturn right now when things are much worse. Some of it is that we actually are seeing a reversal of that basic tendency that’s been true for several decades I just mentioned, which is if you ask people on surveys, for example, “How important is free speech?” That traditionally, the answer Americans gave was, “It’s a very important value,” and then the challenge is to get them to actually live up to that value in the context of specific speech that they find offensive or disturbing. Now, increasingly, and this is a generational issue as well as especially true of younger people, Americans don’t think that anymore. Americans, in fact, don’t value free speech, even as an abstract principle let alone in the context of particular controversies. That I think is particularly discouraging and worrisome about where we’re headed in the longer term. We absolutely need to turn that around and persuade people that free speech itself is valuable once again, and really, in some ways, the starting point for making that defense and providing that explanation has got to be the university campuses because, in part, it is younger faculty. It is students who simply don’t think this is an important value or think it’s not a very important value. It has a consequence. It can easily be trumped by lots of other kinds of concerns. I think it’s also true that this generation, it’s not a single generation, it’s a range of people, but particularly younger people, have come up in a different environment than older generations that as as a compass, their reference points for thinking about free speech controversies and what it means to talk about free speech are just a whole different set of reference points. So if you talk to people, faculty members, for example, who are older than me, their reference points are often things like the Civil Rights Movement, the free speech the anti-war controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s and those kinds of conflicts. For them, those are the exemplars of free speech and why free speech needs to be protected. On the other hand, if you talk to, for example, the current generation of college students, that’s ancient history. It’s off their radar entirely. That’s not their reference point for when they think of free speech controversies. When they think of free speech controversies, they’re much more likely to think about neo-Nazis demanding free speech rights to harass people online or worse, right? So their context in which they hear people waving the flag of free speech is very different than older generations. As a consequence, they often see it being used in a manipulative way, in a hypocritical way, in a way that simply seems to be designed to protect the harassing behavior that doesn’t advance ideas, particularly, or seem to serve any larger value. So that’s what they think of when they think of people who talk about free speech. It’s unsurprising, that they don’t find that a very sympathetic kind of value or something that we ought to care about, particularly. Of course, it’s because a lot of their reference points are online as well, for them, it’s also easy to imagine, “Well, the right thing to do when people are bugging you online is to get them thrown out,” right? You block them. You get them removed from the forum or whatever. So if that works in the online world, then surely, that ought to work in lots of other contexts where you could also block people and remove them from the environment as well. So it’s just we’ve encouraged and, I think, supported a kind of cultural expectation about how these dynamics play out and what free speech looks like that once you export it into this larger context, is just extraordinarily troubling for the future of a free society. Richard Reinsch (29:25): It seems to me, also, and in the last five years, and now it’s spread throughout the general population, I think, is just the idea of I don’t come to these debates or discussions or arguments using reason or logic alone, but I come to it through an identity and that may be the most crucial thing. What you have to think or say about the identity matters above all such that that becomes another way in which I might cancel you because the view is that you’re questioning my existence or something like that and that seems to be the source of the, “Well, I’m offended; therefore, it stands you should have to be escorted out.” Or think about the recent example at the University of Virginia where the medical student questioned microaggressions in a seminar and was escorted off campus, I’m told, by a dean and then removed from the program. I think a federal judge is going to, I don’t know if he’s going to reinstate him, but he’s getting some sort of redress of that. That’s one example of it, and then you’ve got now the diversity, equity and inclusion dean or administrators increasingly being hired. It seems to me this makes it all the more difficult just to think about ideas themselves apart from whatever we attach to them about our personal meaning. Keith Whittington (30:41): Yeah. I think there’s multiple things going on that all lead to very bad outcomes to a libertarian perspective. On the one hand there’s lots of forms of speech and expression of ideas that you can easily wind up leverging the mechanisms of harassment and discrimination and equity policing inside of organizations and inside universities to wind up excluding people who express that speech. So you would hope that when we set rules and procedures in place to deal with harassing behavior, that that will not have significant implications for the ability of people to express opinions and engage in arguments and discussion. It’s certainly possible to leverage those kinds of tools to try to suppress each end and people have. Unfortunately, universities I think, are on the leading edge of being willing to use their policies and allow their policies to be used for the purposes of suppressing speech. So we need to do a much better job of weeding through those procedures and rules and practices so that we can simultaneously address harassing behavior while also protecting a robust speech environment and we just are not doing a very good job of that right now. It’s not enough for the universities just to articulate them; not enough to just have them in the faculty handbook. You’ve got to have institutional rules and practices and procedures and a culture that supports those principles and increasingly universities don’t. So we’ve created a whole administrative structure that is easily exploited to suppress speech, and unfortunately, they are aggressively doing that. It’s also true, though, that I think that we just have a serious problem with a rise of illiberal tendencies on both the left and the right in our culture in general and they get expressed on university campuses, but they can express in lots of other contexts as well, in which people would much rather suppress their opponents than actually have to deal with them. So if you give people with those illiberal tendencies an option, their preference would be to suppress and exclude anyone who disagrees with them to silence them so that they can’t respond. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of desire to do that and we see that play out in lots of contexts. I think the identitarian concern is one aspect of it, although I don’t think it’s exclusively that, but there is also, I think, and unfortunately, a general pessimism about the ability of reason and persuasion to actually make any difference, right? So I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that people don’t think ideas are important, but they have, I think, increasingly lost faith in the idea that conversations about ideas are important. Instead, people, and not everybody, but certainly lots of activists on both the right and the left, have adopted the attitude that what politics is, is a power game. It’s a mobilization of resources and numbers and instruments of power to defeat your opponents and advance your preferences. But it has nothing to do with actually persuading people and it has nothing to do with actually talking to people and coming to some common accommodation. It has nothing to do with negotiation or bargaining or recognizing and reacting to people’s disagreements or different interests. It’s all about gaining the upper hand and then using it and that’s just depressing. That’s not a good situation, certainly, for how universities ought to operate. This is not a good situation for how free society, more generally, ought to operate. If we give up on the idea that you can actually persuade people, you actually have some obligation to talk to people that you disagree with and try to find some common ground in order to make decisions about how we ought to live together, then as a democracy, we’re just at a very bad place. Unfortunately, I think that’s increasingly where we are in the views of an awful lot of people. Richard Reinsch (34:38): As you think about the future as the chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance, short term, medium term goals that you have for the organization to achieve? Keith Whittington (34:47): Well, I think in the short term, certainly, we hope to be successful in trying to defend some individuals who find themselves in these speech controversies. We’ve already been involved in some cases and we have, in fact, been successful in those cases and so that’s encouraging. It’s encouraging that the model might work. I think we are still in this situation where the rules on the books are actually good and favorable for these issues and so it really isn’t a situation where we’re trying to get administrators to live up to the rules rather than trying to have to change the rules. That’s a relatively good position to be in and so we want to take advantage of that. I think we’re still in a situation where sunlight is a good disinfectant, but if you make what’s happening transparent, it can put pressure on university officials to uphold the values of free speech rather than to suppress it. So, and that’s still encouraging about what our current situation is in. I think in the longer term, you hope that these kind of individual offenses become less necessary, that university administrators will behave better on the whole. You hope that you have some deterrent effect that university officials will get the message that they can’t simply railroad faculty members, that they have to actually respect people’s rights and it will be costly for them to try to take advantage of them in that way. So you’ll get fewer of these individual fights and you hope in the long term that you can build a better culture and a better set of practices surrounding these kinds of principles so that these values of academic freedom and free speech are better protected than they are now. But that certainly is a long-term goal, right? That’s a very important cultural battle that has to take place. I think organizations like this are part of that cultural battle and I think it can go either way, I’m cautiously optimistic. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think that there was a chance of success, but things could go very badly, I think, if we aren’t willing to engage these fights and if we can’t successfully persuade people that free speech is actually a good thing and matters and we ought to uphold it. Likewise, I think changing the institutional practices of universities, for example, getting more faculty on a tenured basis will be a very difficult long-term challenge that universities like contingent faculty, not only because it makes it easy to fire problematic or troublesome faculty members, but also, because it gives the university administrators a lot of flexibility. It’s a cost-cutting move. It’s cheaper to have contingent faculty. It’s easier to rearrange faculty, if you don’t want them. It’s easier to run a university where you don’t have permanent tenure track faculty around that can push back against administrators. So there are lots of forces that encourage universities to prefer a contingent faculty to a tenured faculty and it would be a very hard challenge, I think, to try to turn those trends around and get more universities to offer tenure. I think we are increasingly in a situation like we were in the early 20th century where for the bulk of faculty and local people doing teaching and research on college campuses that they don’t have tenure protections and they don’t have any hope of tenure protections and getting that for them, changing the basic practices of universities I think it’s going to be pretty important to really implementing the principles of academic freedom. It’s not enough for the universities just to articulate them; not enough to just have them in the faculty handbook. You’ve got to have institutional rules and practices and procedures and a culture that supports those principles and increasingly universities don’t. It’s going to take time and a lot of effort and not just by us, but by lots of other organizations as well, to try to turn that around. Richard Reinsch (38:25): Keith Whittington, thank you. We’ve been talking with the chair of the new organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance, about their work. Thank you so much. Keith Whittington (38:33): Thank you. I appreciate it.

Richard Reinsch: (00:18)Today, we’re talking with Furman Daniel about his new book, Patton: Battling with History. Furman Daniel is an assistant professor in the College of Security and Intelligence at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He’s the editor of 21st Century Patton and he’s the co-author of The First Space War, which sounds interesting. Furman, glad to have you to talk about Patton. Furman Daniel: (00:50)Richard, it’s great to be here. Richard Reinsch: (00:52)What got you interested in General George S. Patton? Furman Daniel: (01:03)I was lucky to have parents that introduced me to reading and military history and trips to military museums since I was a little, tiny kid. So, some of it is I’ve just been interested in these types of topics for a long time, but kind of like you said, he’s one of these figures that if you’re going to read about World War II or if you’re going to talk to veterans or learn about this kind of stuff, it’s hard to escape him. Because he has this larger than life persona, because he has the 1970 George C. Scott biopic and because he’s always the person that people like to tell stories about, like to talk about, like to read and write books about, it kind of seemed like a natural thing, even as a little kid, to read books about him, read his own works, and the fabulous Martin Blumenson volumes, The Patton Papers. And then when I got a little bit older, when I got to be a professor, actually be privileged to write in books about him. Richard Reinsch: (02:02)And you’ve written extensively about Patton. You confront this early in the book. There’s this Patton that’s been presented maybe in popular culture primarily, but also, sort of part of the mythos even that he wanted to create about himself of the natural warrior, sort of a pagan spiritual warrior who in his soul touched a thread of military greatness perhaps and many Americans certainly know the movie Patton and just think of him as our great general. How do you think about him in relationship to America as a whole? Furman Daniel: (02:35)I think you put your finger on something really important, that separating out the popular George C. Scott mythos from who he actually was is really important. I often say that the biopic with George C. Scott is both a blessing and a curse. It’s largely accurate and it shows lots of his exploits and keeps the memory of that alive. The George C. Scott portrayal is fantastic, with a couple of few small things, but it actually comes at a cost. It obscures the fact that he was a very complex person. He had a much more interesting and developed background than even the three-and-a-half-hour movie had time to go into and unfortunately, because movies are so vibrant, because that kind of popular mythos is so easy to digest and understand and enjoy, often that takes over. I’m reminded about the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the truth becomes legend.” With George Patton, the legend has been printed and put on film and put in popular media in a way that I think now, even 75 years after his death, it’s time to go back and say who was he really? And I think when you do that, when you actually say what was he really like and how was he different from the movie, it actually gives you a more interesting view on the man and a more interesting view on his success. The movie, the one thing it gets very, very, very wrong is the voice. So Patton’s voice basically sounded like Mickey Mouse. It was high and squeaky and nasally and very different from George C. Scott’s gravely, rough, kind of inspiring voice. It’s very interesting when I give talks on Patton. A lot of times, I’ll lead with an audio clip of Patton and it just blows people’s minds because they have this popular view of George C. Scott standing in front of the American flag, big gravely, inspiring voice, “no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” when in fact, George Patton actually kind of sounds like Mickey Mouse. It’s one of many examples of the truth is actually in certain ways more interesting. Richard Reinsch: (04:48)My references here might be kind of weak. Do Americans still revere Patton in that manner of George C. Scott? I was thinking of popular culture references recently. I don’t know if this is recent, I guess these came out about 20 years ago. Band of Brothers in the Bastogne episode, it’s a very derogatory reference to Patton. They didn’t need him to rescue them. They were fine. They just sort of put him down. And then the film Ike, which I guess now is also about 20 years old, which featured Tom Selleck playing Dwight Eisenhower in the planning phase of D-Day and right up to the moment when the troops launch. There’s very derogatory reference that Ike is actually in the film because the justification of why Patton is going to be a decoy for the German Army. Where they positioned him is explained, but it’s explained as sort of a punishment in the film because Patton is a racist, Patton is a hot head, he’s arrogant and foolish. And I’ve wondered has that now become more of the Patton Americans think of? Furman Daniel: (05:49)I think Americans want the sanitized heroic version of Patton. I’ve been giving talks on him for five or six years now and sometimes, when I bring up his less savory side, the fact that he, like you said, was a hot head, that was a racist, an anti-Semite who at times, gambled with the lives with his men and did things that certainly would not fly today and really didn’t even fly then, people push back. When I talk to audiences, they’re like, “No. That can’t be right.” They’re arguing with the historian that has written two books on it, telling me why the movie is right and my book is wrong. At first, I was shocked by that and then the more I’ve thought about it, I think people want that simple narrative. They want the narrative of World War II was the good war, George Patton was this kind of maverick who understood it and understood how to win and was willing to do whatever it took to win and that he rode in on a white horse, defeated the Nazis and then disappeared from the scene. And I think some of that is just people want clean narratives of history, even when history itself is rarely that clean narrative in reality. Some of that, I think, is the popular effect of books like The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw that again tells this sanitized version of history and then again, Movies like George C. Scott. So I wish people would get into historiography. The college professor part of me would love that, but I think people like their history to be a morality tale. They like it to be simple and Patton kind of fits into that nicely in a way. Richard Reinsch: (07:24)Some of the things I was reading in your book I’m now thinking about identity politics and critical race theory on campus, how long until Patton is canceled. It’s something that a lot of figures might fall into that one, too, fall into that role. But I thought Patton, we’ll see how long he holds out. So what’s the truth about Patton? Was he the natural warrior with the soul of a general or was he something else? Furman Daniel: (07:47)The answer is yes, he was a natural warrior and yes, he was something else. So he had a lot of talent, just natural talent. He could shoot a gun. He could ride a horse. He could read and write. He could quickly analyze an unfolding battlefield situation. He was naturally talented at best. But he also worked exceptionally hard to make that natural talent better. I have often used the analogy of nobody gets to the major leagues or the NFL without a fair amount of talent. But they don’t get there either if they don’t work pretty hard. There’s lots of talented people, there’s lots of hard working people. To really excel at that highest level, you have to be both. And as I talk about in the book, he really spent his entire adult and much of his childhood life reading, writing, practicing military art and thinking about how he’d fit into this larger picture. And then once he made history, actually manipulating the historical record so that he appeared even greater than he was. So yes, he was a natural and yes, he also worked very, very hard to build on those natural talents. Richard Reinsch: (09:03)Something that stands out in your book is it seems as a child growing up, his imagination was formed around being a warrior. Furman Daniel: (09:11)Mm-hmm (affirmative). And his parents encouraged that. Richard Reinsch: (09:14)It was part of his ancestral line, as well. Two men died in the Civil War, fighting in the Army of Northern Virginia that were directly related to him. Furman Daniel: (09:22)And his bedtime stories were about his relatives and about the American Civil War and also, about stories from primarily the Old Testament in the Bible. So it’s this odd, I mean actually kind of similar to my childhood, but stories about your relatives, stories about the Civil War, stories from the Old Testament. It was this odd mix of destiny and a morality tale and a you are part of this continuous line going back to King David of brave and virtuous warriors who made a difference. And it worked out for Patton, but in retrospect, it actually seemed kind of odd that at a very young age, you would tell kids this kind of stuff. And kind of anachronistic, as well, particularly the family’s worship of their Confederate ancestors and their glorification of The Lost Cause mythos. But yeah, it’s one of those things he was born into. He was told he was special and different from a very early age. Richard Reinsch: (10:22)The story of he’s attacking on… When he’s turned into an armored wagon, he loses control of the wagon and it kills some of the family’s chickens. They lived on a large ranch in California and he justified himself to his father, I think he said he was on a military attack and it just got out of control. Furman Daniel: (10:40)So the story is, he built a wagon into a war cart and to test out the war cart, he crashed it into his family’s chicken coop, killed a bunch of the chickens. A couple of them also ran off. He got in trouble or at least initially. His parents were about to punish him, but they asked him as good parents do before they punished him, “Why did you do this?” And he said, “Well, I was reenacting John the Blind of Bohemia’s war carts from several hundred years ago.” And they were like, “Okay. How do you know about John the Blind?” And he said, “Well I thought it was John the Blind.” And this is a very young kid, probably 5 or 6 or 7 years old. The sourcing doesn’t say his exact dates, but very young kid. I actually see this as a really interesting example. You can over-interpret it, but the example is he had already been studying military history to know who John the Blind was. He was putting it into practice by building this war cart and crashing it into the chicken coop. He got in trouble and then manipulated the historical record and created this mythical version of who he was and what he was doing to get out of trouble. And I think you see this again and again and again in his career. He worked very hard. He tried very hard. He had this natural talent and then he manipulated the historical record to make himself appear better than he was or to get himself out of trouble. So excellent that you brought that example up. Richard Reinsch: (12:05)It’s interesting. A lot of your book is about Patton the intellectual historian and not an amateur intellectual historian. This is someone who read widely, particularly in military history. You report he reads the Quran on the boat that is taking him to Operation Torch, it was the invasion of North Africa. Because he was going to be dealing with a large Muslim population, he wanted to get a sense of Islam for himself. He published widely in military journals and that’s one question I have for you is was that exceptional to repeatedly publish or was that expected of officers? But he did not do well at West Point. In fact, they held him back a year. He didn’t get into West Point initially. He had to go to the Virginia Military Institute. And you say at one point, a lot of people think he may have been dyslexic. So how does all of that work? Furman Daniel: (12:59)I in the book, like you said, I document his early academic struggle and I address this question of dyslexia. So the real answer is nobody knows. And all of the doctors and people that are credible experts say you can never diagnose somebody, a patient that you haven’t actually seen. So I purposely try to avoid making the diagnosis. My two cents, however, is he probably was not dyslexic. He probably suffered from having inadequate schooling as a child. He bounced around to a bunch of schools in California that were not particularly good. And where he struggled was in issues of foreign language and mathematics, which these school curriculums, some of the historians had gone back and looked at these elementary schools that he went to curriculums say they didn’t really teach. So no wonder he struggled when he went to a US Military Academy, which was at the time primarily an engineering school with also a very heavy requirement for the French language so that he could read Napoleon and Jomini in the original. So I think some of his academic struggles are actually just a lack of preparation. It’s just as valid an example of an explanation of this as dyslexia. So the second par of what you said, though, was he a lifelong reader? Yes. Absolutely. He loved reading. He loved writing and that to me does not seem like somebody who’s a dyslexic. He also like you said, read things like the Quran with an eye for “what’s the practical value?” I’m about to go into North Africa and deal with potentially millions of North African Muslim as the human terrain that I’m about to go into, so I’d better learn something about it. And so he, again, on his own initiative, read the Quran on the boat to North Africa. That was very unusual and the army in the 1910s and ’20s and the inter-war period after World War I and before World War II, was not a particularly intellectual organization. It had some very intellectual people, Patton being one of them, but overall, it was not an organization that rewarded original thought, that rewarded deep study or rewarded publication in journals like Patton did. It rewarded seniority, it rewarded spit and polish, it rewarded marksmanship, lots of other things other than brain power. So Patton was pretty unusual there, as well. Richard Reinsch: (15:35)You write about throughout the book his publications in military journals. But he also seems to take it upon himself at no one’s request, just on his own initiative to write long, we would say memos, about an issue and how he sees it or how he thinks the military should develop on this front based on his experience and his research. That is, to my mind, this is someone actively engaged in what he’s doing and wants to come to terms with it in the written word and then spread that to others. So this is an intellectual man wanting to communicate ideas. Furman Daniel: (16:18)I think that’s exactly right. The one thing I would add to that is there was a self-serving element of it. The self-serving element was “let me bring a solution to the Department of the Army so that they can see how brilliant I am.” I see that as yes, he was genuinely curious and yes, he really thought he would have an opportunity to put it into practice at some future date, absolutely. But he was also trying to show off and basically show how smart he was by solving a problem or bringing forward a solution that nobody was asking about. Patton was interesting in that way because he was practical and romantic at the same time. He loved horses. He was one of the best riders in the United States Military and after World War I, he actually went back to the Horse Cavalry, but at the same time, he loved automobiles and he understood that automobiles and later tanks, gave mobility and in the case of tanks, protection and fire power that was a potentially war-winning weapon. Richard Reinsch: (16:53)There’s always high ground and low ground for him. He serves in the military at times when the American Military is very small, very inconspicuous. Before World War I when we can talk about his trip into Mexico to get Poncho Villa and then he goes… He has World War I. But he remained in the Army in the inter-war years. It was a very small force. Did he communicate how he saw the relationship of the American Military and the warrior ethos in American society as a whole, which was skeptical of large armies and was primarily about business and private life. Furman Daniel: (17:32)Yes. He thought about these types of questions quite a bit. Probably, if you’re looking for one single writing on this topic of how does the professional soldier fit into American society, I would point you toward his 1932 Army War College thesis, which was actually flagged as an honor thesis for the War College at the time, was circulated around the War Department. In this, he talks about this kind of tradition in the broader scope of military history between professional armies and mass armies and the strength and weaknesses of both. And then he tries to apply that to the American experience and says, “The Americans are skeptical of large armies, but they’re not so skeptical of professional armies.” And that the United States needs to overcome this. We need to build a professional cadre in time of peace so that we can use that to train and lead a mass army in times of war. So he’s writing this in 1932, a good nine years or so before America actually had to do that. And I think he puts his finger on this problem. We don’t want a military class in the United States and particularly in the inter-war period, we didn’t have the budget or the political will for a large army. So he’s trying to solve this issue which he sees as this sticky problem for the United States. How do you have the best of both worlds? So he does it, again, kind of on his own initiative. The War College made him write a thesis, but he way exceeded his mandate and wrote a lot more than they wanted and tried to, again, solve problems they weren’t really asking about. But he was so influential that it actually got the attention of people in the war department and again, showed off his intellectual fire power during those lean years in the 1930s. Richard Reinsch: (19:21)And trying to articulate, you said, the reason why America needed a larger army and one better trained, better equipped and it needed to have a strategy, needed to have its mind right about what it’s doing. I don’t know if he was unique in this regard. You say he highlighted the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor well before the attack. Furman Daniel: (19:42)Yes. So he had two different postings to the Hawaiian Islands during the inter-war period and he was the head of Army Intelligence for our forces in Hawaii on a second posting and actually repeatedly warned about the vulnerability of US Naval and Air Forces on the Islands to an attack. He got that exactly right and this is one of the less savory moments that people like to forget about. He actually in the ’20s and ’30s advocated for the interment of Japanese civilians in the event of war. That hasn’t aged well and most people don’t know about it, but he talked about the need to round up Japanese-American civilians so they could be put in a prison. So yeah, he got some stuff right. He’s got some stuff that hasn’t aged, as well. Richard Reinsch: (20:32)Yeah. I’m thinking also… This is something we kind of skipped over in his biography. I did not know until I read your book, he competed in the Olympics in the Pentathlon in 1912. And the Pentathlon in those days was not a track and field event. I didn’t know that, either. It was more broad: Fencing, swimming, shooting, running… I’m missing something. Furman Daniel: (20:55)Horseback. Richard Reinsch: (20:55)Horseback. And got… Was it he got fifth place? No he didn’t get… Did he get fifth? Furman Daniel: (21:00)Fourth place. Richard Reinsch: (21:00)Fourth place. That’s incredible. And you write about… I love this. I read it, the other editors, at the end of the swim, they have to pull him out of the water with a boat hook because they think he’s about to drown. He’s just expended himself. And then the same thing at the end of the run. People thought he might die. Then the fencing, he didn’t know proper defensive techniques, so he just went as hard as he could at the opponent. That to me, that’s Patton. That’s the Patton that I know. Furman Daniel: (21:29)It is. The Olympics were a little bit different back then and the US in particular, most of the Olympic athletes at that period were actually US Army officers. Jim Thorpe was actually kind of the exception. During that period, most of our Olympic athletes are either rich college kids or Army officers because they had to pay their own way to the Olympics and they had to train on their own. This was long before the days of Olympic training centers and stuff like that. But yeah, Patton actually wasn’t selected until a couple of months before the Olympics were going to begin. So his training program was eat raw steak and salad every day. Richard Reinsch: (22:09)Raw steak. That’s incredible. Furman Daniel: (22:12)Raw steak. And quit smoking. And then when he was on the boat over there, he ran laps on the deck and created a pool on the deck where he could swim, suspended on a little mechanical arm that dipped him down into this pool so it would hold him while he swam and keep him from moving in the small pool. But yeah, his athletic career was much like his military career, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack and the consequences, you can worry about later. Richard Reinsch: (22:43)In thinking about his military career, something that emerges in your book beyond a way that is intellectual history reading he brings forward and it seems to allow him to separate himself from his peers in many ways. But he also gets interested early in mechanized warfare and in the defensive measures that he’s a part of under General Pershing in the Mexico after Poncho Villa had raided a town in New Mexico, killed what 20 people? They go back into Mexico in pursuit of him and at one point, Patton leads a raid on what he thinks are part of his, I guess, posse, was using automobiles coming in four different directions, exit the automobiles and start firing. I didn’t know that story, but to me, that was the entry point for him into thinking about mechanized speed warfare. Furman Daniel: (23:36)Yeah. And it’s a wonderful theme because it’s this odd combination of the past of this gun battle with banditos in Mexico. Patton has his revolver and at the same time, using Dodge automobiles to rapidly surprise this safe house for the bad guys, get them and then get out before reinforcements could come. It’s this wonderful inflection point on this is old and new at the same time. It’s familiar and modern at the same time and I think that’s really interesting. Patton was interesting in that way because he was practical and romantic at the same time. He loved horses. He was one of the best riders in the United States Military and after World War I, he actually went back to the Horse Cavalry, but at the same time, he loved automobiles and he understood that automobiles and later tanks, gave mobility and in the case of tanks, protection and fire power that was a potentially war-winning weapon and despite the fact he loved horses, despite the fact he loved history and old-fashioned things, he was flexible enough in his mind to say, “You know what? Maybe the internal combustion engine, maybe armored protection, maybe some of these other things are worth me spending my time on and maybe the United States Military should get on board while we can.” So like I said, an interesting reflection. Richard Reinsch: (24:55)Something I took from the book is this is a man who reads Julius Cesar and reads Napoleon, so he is aware of military marshal virtues, I think, clearly and how battles have been won and yet, to me, he’s only willing to update that with technology or to see okay, how does that fit technology, the rapid, oncoming technology? He understands American business, as well, and what it can do and what it’s going to produce and how that’s going to change warfare. I thought, that sort of ability, that is an aristocratic ability he had, I think, to survey the whole and think about it. Furman Daniel: (25:32)Yeah. And I mention this in the later conclusion section of the book. He was lucky in that he came from an aristocratic background, knew people that were leaders of business, who owned automobiles in the early 1900s when automobiles were kind of a toy for the rich. And he also had this lucky part of his career where he just moved around and saw different parts of the country. So he saw factories in New England and New York. He saw harbors and he saw the stock exchanges in Chicago and things like that. He grew up in California and saw the ability of large farms and ranches out there, the ability to have ports on the West Coast to project power in the Pacific. He saw this and was again broad-minded enough, intellectually curious enough to look at this and see why does it matter that we can ship grain all over the world? Why does it matter that we have finance? Why does it matter that we can produce machines better than any country on Earth? And he, like you said, built that into his way of war and that was very, very, very forward thinking at the time. Richard Reinsch: (26:40)He had an interest in mechanized warfare. World War I, you write he’s there, but he’s dejected because he’s not in the front. He’s not in combat and he thinks that tank warfare to be his way in and a decisive way into the war. Talk about that. Furman Daniel: (26:58)You’re exactly right. He gets over to France very early. He’s actually one of the first American soldiers to go to France. He was on General Pershing’s staff. He had impressed them in the campaign in Mexico a couple years before and he attached himself to Pershing’s staff because he wanted to get over there as quickly as possible. He quickly got bored as a staff member for Pershing going to dinners in Paris, writing and censoring mail for the general, things like that, and he wanted very much to be part of a front-line unit and saw that he’d kind of gotten the golden handcuffs. He got over there quickly, but then wasn’t doing anything. So he was actually in the hospital and as kind of a fortuitous thing, he overheard people talking about the tank corps and then started thinking while he was recovering in the hospital from a bout of jaundice, he started thinking the tanks seem like a new potentially war-winning weapon. They’re looking for volunteers, so this is a new space that I can create for myself and there’s not a lot of competition. And it gets me out of this admin hell I’m in attached to Pershing’s staff. So he did it partly because he saw the value of it, but partly because he was willing to gamble on it. He wanted to do something that he thought was fun. So when he applies to the tank corps, actually they ask for a written resume. So he writes about a 20-page document about why he’s the perfect person to be one of the first officers in the tank corps. He actually mentions the raid. And some of Poncho Villa’s men in Mexico said that he’s the first person in American history to lead an armored assault. A little bit of creative license, but we’ll go with it. And then gets accepted and then takes off. He creates an American tank school. He visits the front line and actually watches British and French tanks in battle. He visits the Renault Factory and sees how French tanks are made and actually recommends new starter motor assembly and an armored bulkhead for the tanks. And again, it’s energy and insight and initiative and pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. During World War I, he really carved out a place for himself as the expert in the United States Military on tanks. Richard Reinsch: (29:16)Thinking about, just moving forward here, World War II. He’s in World War II. What does that reveal? Does that finally reveal him, those experiences, that leadership as a great general? Can we print the legend? Furman Daniel: (29:33)I think in a lot of ways, we can. I think World War II shows that he could do what he always wanted to do, which was be a general, command large units in battle and master large-scale mobile warfare. Mexico proved he was brave and could improvise on the spot. World War I proved he could master a new technology. World War II means he was still brave, he still could use new technology and new methods of warfare, but he could do it on a much, much, much larger level. Richard Reinsch: (30:04)Yeah. Thinking about his role in World War II, this is borne out in the movie, there’s failure in the North African Desert campaign. There’s a pretty decisive defeat and Eisenhower relieves one general and puts Patton in his place. And that’s really where Patton gets his tremendous opportunity and he makes good on it and sort of pushes the German Army back. Furman Daniel: (30:28)The movie, for time’s sake kind of simplifies that, but yes, an American general, Lloyd Fredendall had gotten the frontline combat command before Patton, but in some of the initial engagements with Rommel’s Afrika Korps, most notably the Battle of Kasserine Pass, his soldiers don’t fight very well and he loses control of the battle. There are charges of cowardice on some of Fredendall’s staff against him and Eisenhower says, “Well we need somebody that can come in here quickly, get up to speed, fix this, restore morale and restore the American drive east across North Africa.” And Patton is the logical person to put in charge there. And like you said, he takes charge. He really maximizes that opportunity. Battle of the Bulge, as I depict it in the book, is the cherry on top for Patton’s career. It puts together pretty much everything he had worked for his entire career up to that point. It’s the largest battle he ever fights. It’s the most important battle he ever fights. It’s arguably the most decisive battle he ever fights and he wins it because on the front end, he’s spent decades thinking about these types of problems. Richard Reinsch: (31:15)Yeah. It’s the sort of movement, isn’t it? As I was reading your book, it was the focus on moving which seemed to be, also, part of the Sicilian campaign and this desire to beat other generals to objectives is also a part of what he’s doing, it seems. Furman Daniel: (31:32)So yeah. I think they’re twin things. So Patton really, truly believed that movement was the way to win, that we would dominate our enemy by moving faster. Richard Reinsch: (31:44)It’s interesting, just interjecting here. You wrote he studied extensively the German military manuals prior to World War II. And they clearly, the Panzer movement, that was clearly speed, right? Furman Daniel: (31:54)Right. Richard Reinsch: (31:54)That’s what brings France to its knees in two weeks, so he was clearly onto something. Furman Daniel: (31:59)He had read things like Guderian’s famous quote that the engine of the tank is more important than the guns or the armor and really believed that. Patton’s view of warfare was if you create problems for your opponent and create confusion in your opponent’s mind through speed and movement, you’re constantly making them respond to things you’re doing. You’re maintaining the initiative and even if you’re not perfect in your own action, the fact that you’re putting friction, the fact that you’re putting problems and chaos on your opponent by moving and maintaining the initiative, means that you’ll be successful, even if on small things you mess up. He also was very much influenced by the trench warfare in World War I, where there wasn’t a lot of movement. Where it was bogged down and people were slaughtered for a couple hundred yards of movement. He desperately wanted to avoid that. So how do you avoid that? You keep moving is how you avoid that. The second part of your question, though, did he do this to make himself famous, to beat other generals, to grab more land, to capture cities before other generals did? Yes. Absolutely. It’s hard to fully separate his desire for fame and glory and headlines from his honest and genuine belief that speed kills, that speed keeps your enemies guessing and that’s ultimately the operational tactical solution to victory. Richard Reinsch: (33:28)I was thinking of the Battle of the Bulge, the sort of last-ditch effort of Hitler to use his army to break through allied advances. Patton is involved in this, moving what, 100-something miles very rapidly, rescuing the 101st Airborne which is in Bastogne, which is famously depicted in Band of Brothers, the series. But he’s successful and then moves forward rapidly, advances farther or fastest than the other American armies into Germany. Talk about that and how he’s successful there. Furman Daniel: (34:03)Battle of the Bulge, as I depict it in the book, is the cherry on top for Patton’s career. It puts together pretty much everything he had worked for his entire career up to that point. It’s the largest battle he ever fights. It’s the most important battle he ever fights. It’s arguably the most decisive battle he ever fights and he wins it because on the front end, he’s spent decades thinking about these types of problems. He has studied the German doctrine. He knew the history of German surprise attacks and he thought that bad weather would actually help the Germans, now a winter attack because it would mitigate American air power advantages. So he had thought through this and he had actually planned with his staff before the Germans even attacked, he’d planned his response. So the battle, before it even got fought was something he’d prepared for. He’d prepared his entire life for building this wonderful resume, but he’d prepared the week or so before, thinking this part of the front is vulnerable. He has a lot of post-war difficulties. He desperately wanted to fight in the Pacific theater, but was blocked by MacArthur, who was a brilliant general in his own right, arrogant person, very protective of his own place in history. Patton then kind of asks for a transfer. He wants to go teach. He wants to either be at the war college or the commandant of West Point, but is actually denied those two jobs because technically, he’s too high of rank for those military billets. So he’s denied the jobs he wanted, actually teaching history ironically enough. What would I do if I was the Germans? I would attack here. What would I do if I’m Patton and the Germans do that? I would counter-attack into their flank by pivoting and moving my forces over and that’s exactly what happened. He was able to anticipate what the Germans were going to do. He was able to respond to it and he was able to use his enormous charisma and energy to drive his men forward during awful weather, with low supplies, lack of food and things like that. He was able to inspire them to do wonderful things and ultimately relieved Bastogne. The folks from the Screaming Eagles, the 101, they still to this day don’t like saved, they like relieved. I actually had an editor correct me on that in the book. They said, “Yep. Don’t ever show that to the 101.” But I think it shows his ability to think, act and inspire and then win based on that. And as you said, after the Bulge, a lot of the German resistance collapses and he argues to push into Germany as fast as possible to capture territory and deny it to the Soviet Union, already anticipating yet again, a step or two in the future, what’s the Cold War going to look like? Wouldn’t we be better off if we had more of Europe under our control, the Soviet Union had less of it under theirs? Richard Reinsch: (36:25)Yeah. That’s a crazy thought. Patton, then we get into the post-war difficulties, though. Furman Daniel: (36:31)Yeah. He has a lot of post-war difficulties. He desperately wanted to fight in the Pacific theater, but was blocked by MacArthur, who was a brilliant general in his own right, arrogant person, very protective of his own place in history. In his own right, MacArthur had kind of blocked Patton from going over there. Patton then kind of asks for a transfer. He wants to go teach. He wants to either be at the war college or the commandant of West Point, but is actually denied those two jobs because technically, he’s too high of rank for those military billets. So he’s denied the jobs he wanted, actually teaching history ironically enough. He’s given the job as Military Governor of Bavaria, technical job where he’s Proconsul of Bavaria. So it’s a Roman-sounding job title. He does a mixed job there. He actually does a pretty good job of getting the local economy running. He does a pretty good job of changing Nazi street names, taking down Nazi statues and symbols from public squares and things like that. What he does not do a good job of is controlling the narrative. So there are some German politicians in Bavaria who have Nazi affiliations that Patton refuses to get rid of or get rid of right away. This creates a public relations nightmare for Patton. He makes this public relations nightmare worse, by a series of comments, one of which compared the Nazis to the Democrats and the Republicans, saying, “Well if you want a job in Nazi Germany, kind of like being Postmaster in the United States, you need to ingratiate yourself to the local Democrat or Republican Party boss.” That didn’t go over so well. And then he had some displaced persons, many of whom were Jewish in his zone of control that had pretty abysmal living conditions, so that was kind of a scandal, as well. He ultimately gets relieved by Eisenhower for this combination of seeming to not care about the denazification, making some very ill-considered statements and then having this issue of displaced persons not being properly taken care of in his zone of control. He’s actually then reassigned to a job that’s a pretty good job for him. He’s given command of the US 15th Army. You might ask, “What is the 15th Army?” Great question. It was an army that was originally going to be a combatant command. It was going to be an actual military force, but it wasn’t needed. We won the war in Europe faster than we could really get the 15th Army into combat. So after World War II, they tasked it with collecting information and documenting the lessons learned for the war in Europe. They put Patton in charge of that and for the last three months of his life, he actually goes and does a fantastic job yet again, writing history of World War II and indoctrinating lessons learned. And while he’s doing that, he also writes his own memoir which is published posthumously as War As I Knew It. So interesting last act. One that a lot of people don’t know about, but one that’s actually consistent with his overall approach. Richard Reinsch: (39:43)Yeah. It’s interesting. Of course, there’s West Point and the Virginia Military Institute and there’s those official armies, but this is someone who I don’t know, an overly bureaucratized world army training probably doesn’t emerge it seems to me. You could easily see him being stifled. Yeah. I don’t want to make a facile comparison, but it seems to me this is someone who emerges precisely because of just the dynamism within American life and institutions of the early 20th century. Do similar figures in the military emerge today? Furman Daniel: (40:21)I really don’t know. It’s a question I poke at, but don’t fully answer in the last two or three pages of the book. I’m tempted to say no and I’m tempted to say no, not because the American Military does not attract fantastic talent. We really do attract fantastic talent, but largely for the reasons you said about bureaucracy and limit to what people can do now. I would also add two other things, one that we’ve already discussed quite a bit, which is Patton had a very toxic side of his personality and in an increasingly bureaucratized military, one that’s increasingly worried about the very real problems of abusive leaders, the very real problems of racial and sexual bias and things like that, I think any one of a number of his incidences would have absolutely destroyed his career. The other thing I think and this is a unique thing about the military now, we haven’t given our junior officers and our mid-career officers time and the reason why that is, is we’ve had for the last sum of 20 years ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we’ve given people lots of deployment opportunities, we’ve given them lots of combat experience, but we haven’t given them time to read. We haven’t given them time to think. We haven’t given them time to write. We haven’t given them time to decompress. The mobilization schedule has been so hectic that I really wonder if we develop the intellectual side of our military the way we could or should or would. Richard Reinsch: (41:58)Well yeah. One could argue that this deployment schedule you’re referring to is itself the result of a lot of static thinking. Furman Daniel: (42:04)And it’s worth mentioning, the officers that are seen as the intellectual elite recently in the military because people like David Petraeus who is a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. People like John Nagl, again a Rhodes Scholar, people General Deptula for the Air Force. They came up a decade or so before, right? So they had most of the ’90s. They got their combat done in the early ’90s in Gulf War I and then they had a decade to train. They had a decade to go to school. They had a decade to think and write and go do these types of things. So Petraeus, H.R. McMasters of the world, people like that, maybe are the last kind of generation that has had that time. Richard Reinsch: (42:47)Yeah. Something to think about. Furman, thank you for joining us and for discussing your new book Patton: Battling With History. Furman Daniel: (42:56)Thank you very much for having me, Richard. It was a really fun time. Richard Reinsch: (43:00)This is Richard Reinsch. You’ve been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.

  Richard Reinsch: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today we’re talking with long-time Law & Liberty contributor Graham McAleer about the natural law. He’s the author of a new book, called Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law. We’ll talk about who that thinker is and also postmodern natural law in this discussion. Graham has contributed dozens of pieces to Law & Liberty over the past few years on the ethics of fashion. He’s written on burkinis, he’s written on offshore trusts and family values, the Scottish Enlightenment. He’s explored the nature of classical liberalism, and defended it on the site. And has also written on numerous thinkers that you wouldn’t necessarily think could be conservative or have a classical liberal connection, like Lacan. But Graham’s done it and he’s done it very well. Glad to have you for the first time on Liberty Law Talk. Graham McAleer: Great. Thank you, Richard. Thank you so much. Richard Reinsch: And our listeners, I know many of them have thought about and read about natural law. In the title, as I said, Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law, what is postmodern natural law? Graham McAleer: Well, if we begin with postmodern, so postmodernism more or less grows up in the 1960s. It’s incubating before that, but it’s a reaction to the failing, it’s a very much a European, originally a European movement reacting to the failings of the European ideas. Obviously, not only with Nazis, but with the communists. So many people on left and right, have the sense that not all is well with the world. Not all is well with modernity and, most glaringly, the promise of the Enlightenment, right? The Enlightenment was supposed to make us more calm, more generous, more thoughtful. But the 20th century was a certain kind of repudiation of that idea. So postmodernism begins more or less in the 60s, and is a whole bunch of things, especially in France. They’re trying to work out what went wrong and what the future might look like. But at the same time, they’re not nostalgic. They’re not believers. They don’t want to go back to the middle ages. They’re not Christian, so they want, without a return to God, they want to try to find what is still good about the human being after the atrocities of the 20th century. So postmodernism, it’s a whole bunch of different thinkers. It sometimes gets very complex, sometimes they’re very interested in psychoanalysis, sometimes in the nature of language. But it all sort of boils down to an effort to try to think about how to have good communities, good politics, in the light of what happened in the 20th century. Richard Reinsch: But now postmodern natural law, because it is an interesting idea, I think of another close friend of mine who passed away, Peter Lawler in 2017, who had this idea of postmodern conservatism. Peter’s idea was that postmodernism signaled the end of the modern world and all of its aspirations and hopes of making us at home within the world and that its techniques and concepts had failed, as you’ve articulated. And that conservatism or the ability to look back to the full breadth of the humanistic tradition, including religion in the West, was needed. So your idea of postmodern natural law, I guess let’s talk about how does that alter natural law and maybe we need just a baseline. Natural law itself is very complex and rich. But maybe talk more about that. Graham McAleer: So natural law, it’s primarily associated with St. Thomas Aquinas in the high Middle Ages. He died around 1274, he taught primarily in Paris. So it’s a kind of a culmination. It had been a long time gestating, but it was culminating in the high Middle Ages. The idea of natural law is that the law is in its rudiments trans-political. So it was an effort not to get caught up in national passion. Now, from Thomas Aquinas you can see, of course, he’s a priest, he’s a monk. He, of course, favored the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church, of course, was in a struggle with the Holy Roman Emperor, with national kings. It was all about power, assertions of power. So natural law came to be this idea about how to think about the law in isolation simply from national passion. Then later on, the natural world became very important with the Age of Discovery. When the Europeans started to move out into the world, they encountered radically different kinds of lifestyles, politics, and this really sends through the shock waves. So then it became natural law was a way to have a communication among very different people when important things were at stake. Not only things like property, but things like human sacrifice. So natural law was an effort to think about what is it that humans are obligated to living in common, but also to try to generate a great deal of flexibility. To take seriously the idea of different geographical, cultural, historical dispositions. My own idea of the postmodern, and a little bit maybe like Lawler, was to then try to think about, well, how to update an idea that when most people think of natural law, they think of something very medieval, very old-fashioned. They think of it as very constraining. They think of it as very, to use a word from this guy Przywara that I’m interested in, very univocal. That it’s one size fits all. That’s often the worry in the modern legal academy of natural law is its extremely dogmatic and tending toward some sort of tyranny. But there’s a way, I think, to think about natural law. Natural law concerns our basic appetites and it posits this idea. Aquinas says there are four things basically going on with humans. We want to preserve our existence. We want to continue in existence. We want to have family. We want to enjoy society. And then there is also the problem of God, that there are no civilizations that haven’t grown up in and around the problem of God, the afterlife. If you even look at the most early human burial sites that we have, dating back 35,000- 40,000 years ago, people are buried with grave goods, with beautiful ornamented spears, necklaces. So there’s something weird about us, says Aquinas, right? That there’s always this problem of God that has to be confronted. Those are the basic dynamics of the human being and those need to be articulated more, and they are, if you just think about what is it that legislatures dwell on. Well, they dwell on problems of self-care, how to raise children, how to protect children, what are the conditions for good human community, how to avoid hatred. Of course, but maybe more controversially, the problem of God is always do you exclude God, do you include God? How do you keep God contained in some way or do you become a kind of theocratic Iran? I mean, Aquinas, I think, is quite astute when he thinks about what is it that politics is about. It appears to revolve around these four basic dynamics. Richard Reinsch: Because you said we want to preserve our existence. I’m thinking about the modern West. Is there any country in what we would think is in the modern West that even has a reproduction birth rate above or even with what’s called a stable population rate rather than a declining rate or an increasing population rate? I don’t think there is. What do you think of that? You say in the first chapter that natural law can remedy our failing humanism. Is that evidence of a failing humanism that we need to remedy? Graham McAleer: I mean, as you probably know, there’s certain European states which are offering tax incentives to have children. France, famously is doing this because rates are becoming very low, right? Which if you’re not replicating, you don’t actually have a good, dynamic economy. So you see those arguing about why Japan is so advanced on robotics is that they have one of the worst birth rates on the planet. Indeed there are these, and I’m no expert on Japan, but you see these reports where there’s huge numbers of young adults who have never even been on a date with somebody of the opposite sex, right? There seems to be this weird, almost death spiral fascination that’s going on. But natural law would say, well, look, the law here can be a remedy. So if the law insists that you do need to replicate and even Darwinism would be making this argument, then actually you can do things around the nature of law that’s going to encourage it. Now, because, of course, can nations go off the boil, so to speak? Can they depart? This is kind of what happened with the Age of Discovery, right? The Europeans go out and they discover cultures which seem so very different, so seemingly strange. So the idea was to try to find all of these underlying dynamics that I mean, could one correct a culture? Could one correct a civilization? It’s actually pretty interesting. People like Francisco di Vitoria, who was a Thomist around the 1500s, he was the first person to articulate the idea of regime change on the basis of natural law. He said you could meet a population that was so departed from natural law that for their own good, you could actually change their rulers. This actually is an argument that he had for the Spanish defeating the Aztecs. Now, of course, there’s all sorts of controversies and historical problems with that. But the idea that nations can go off the rails, well, we know their records. We know that’s what happened also in the 20th century. So natural law in this case then, would be a kind of an educational model in some sense, a way to help us get back to what is the highest good of a human being. Richard Reinsch: Thinking about this failing humanism problem. Is the failing humanism that we don’t actually take ourselves seriously as embodied creatures? Or take nature seriously? You have a interesting discussion about metaphysics and decapitation. It makes me wonder, is it the case that late-modern man or post-modern man or however you want to characterize this, that we don’t, in fact, take nature seriously? I mean, we’re all about the environment and nature and all that. I understand. But that we don’t think through the complexity of who we are as human beings, because I think that you think we’re kind of lost in that regard. Maybe that’s a reason why we have birth rates of 1.2, and are, as Pierre Manent would say, post-familial, post-religious, and post-political. Graham McAleer: I would say that we, and I do get from this Jesuit theologian, Erich Przywara, we also struggle between thinking of ourselves as mere bodies and at other times as angels. So it’s extremely common. In fact, one even might say a standard person deeply interested in environmentalism is also somebody who wants a radical assertion of their own autonomy. So on the one hand, the very same person who’s deeply interested in environmental stewardship might also be a big, big fan of trangenderism, which seems to be a contradiction. That a deep respect for the nature that we are gifted with versus then a sort of radical assertion of autonomy and technological transformation. This would be what I call decapitation. Sometimes we think of ourselves as angels. Richard Reinsch: Would another instance of that be the same people will tell you, “I’m an autonomous individual with natural rights, or I have so many rights, rights everywhere. But I’m fully explainable by evolution.” I’m a materialistic being. That’s who I am, a clever animal. That’s it, and then not really thinking through how does that all work. Graham McAleer:  And that’s the other side of it, right? So you hear all the time people say that you shouldn’t go around repressing. What’s the problem with morality? What’s the problem with moral earnestness? Well, it’s just a repression of the powerful desires that you had better let release, otherwise you’ll become perverted and twisted. It’s a kind of a classic argument against the Catholic priesthood, that it’s ignoring this radical vitalism. So sometimes we’re these angel beings and sometimes we’re these thoroughly materialistic beings. The weird thing is, says Przywara, is that we flit rapidly between the two. So we’re not consistently one or the other. This then leads to this idea of mistaking what’s in the middle, this idea that we are bodies that can be articulated through civilization or values. Richard Reinsch: So the body is, I guess, maybe help us understand the unifying aspect there. That would help us make sense of this wild metaphysical … How should we approach that? Graham McAleer: Well, so in a classical, Aristotelian ethics, you have your desires and you need the virtues. You need the virtues to perfect your desires. For example, the problem of fear. Fear is natural enough. But there’s a right time to be fearful and there’s a wrong time to be fearful. You can overly compensate by becoming reckless. This is highly dangerous, both to yourself and to people around you. Or, of course, you can sort of undercook it and you can indeed exhibit a kind of cowardice when, in fact, you need to be strong for others. This is, for example, very frequent, we found, in the problem of parenting. Sometimes you have to be the strong one to say to the family, to a child, “Look, this just is not okay. This is going to be damaging.” A lot a parents, obviously, and especially in a more liberal society, can often evade those responsibilities. So we have this idea, inherited at least from Aristotle and also found in natural law, that we need a rational, virtuous articulation of our appetites and our bodily inclinations. Inclinations for food, safety, security, et cetera. In the book, I talk about this strange idea we find with our relationship to the embryo. On the one hand, the embryo is seen as a source of great medical potential. But on the other hand, it’s seen as something that we can be completely cavalier about. So we have this weird, schizophrenic relationship to early life. Sometimes it’s the most valuable thing in the world, so you think about all the parties celebrating the pregnancy. And sometimes it’s a thing most casually cast off and put into laboratories and spliced and diced. So sometimes the baby is sort of angelic and sometimes it’s a kind of resource. That’s even the way that people often think about their own children. The way they think about the way that sometimes parents will foster a certain kind of attitude in their children, which is that demanding of them is just far too much. We kind of ricochet between these two options of what Przywara calls vitalism on the one hand, connected with the body, and angelism, connected with the mind. But what you need to do is somehow try to hold the two in tension. Richard Reinsch: On that analogy, you have this idea, liturgy of morals and value tones as well. I want to talk about that through this great example you give, which I think our listeners will enjoy, of James Bond. How does James Bond help us understand those concepts and explicate for us post-modern natural law? Graham McAleer: Yeah, so Bond, I think, is an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a huge marketing, economic business. And if we think a little bit about, well, what is James Bond? Well, he’s a kind of powerful human physique wedded to very strong sense of justice, care of the other. Of course, this is then fed through ideas of the British establishment. He is for Queen and country. But this is the thing that I was interested in, was trying to find examples where the body is linked to establishment, where the body is linked to civilizational values. You see this, right? You see this with the way that Bond dresses, his interest in clothes, his interest in sports, his interest in cars, and, of course, his interest in games. So one of the ideas that I had was to try to think about how the natural law is linked to games and the liturgies in games. On the one hand, you hear people say, “Look, cultural relativism goes all the way down. Humans are just radically different from one another by history and by civilization.” This isn’t quite true, because one of the assured things, you go anywhere in the world and you throw a ball and humans will run after it. All culture, bizarrely, have games connected with humans running after a ball. What’s going on there? Well, what’s interesting about that, actually, is that not only do we run after balls, but we generate rituals and we generate rules. And we generate referees and umpires to navigate the rule and to determine when something was out of bounds, when someone stepped over the line. So what you see, actually, is that our moral vocabulary is linked profoundly to the idea of playing games, the idea of a playing field. You can look at all manner of establishment venues and could see this idea. So you’ve got various rules of etiquette at the law court, Parliament and so on. So I was interested in Bond as a figure of someone who is very playful, but who serves the establishment, who serves justice, who serves law. Then to think a little bit about, well, what were the values that he was literally bringing to bear. These have something to do with fashion, style, glamor. This is why I’ve always been interested in the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith and the idea of economics as driven by luxury. It seems to me again not only do humans immediately run after a ball no matter where they are in the world, actually, what we’ve learned over the last 200 years at least, is that we also run after luxury. So I think- Richard Reinsch: It’s expensive shiny objects. We like that. Graham McAleer: Right. So what Adam Smith calls toys of frivolous utility. Actually, the utility goes quite far down. But his point was that our interest in luxury is not primarily about utility. It’s about the playfulness, it’s about the ritual, it’s about these sorts … the ritual. I used to hear this all the time on the internet. So if somebody’s interested in Louis Vuitton bags, like all these videos, especially of women but not just women, unpacking the Louis Vuitton box that came in the post. These boxes, they’re orange and you open up the box and inside they’re in a cloth envelope. You open up the envelope, and then you open up the bag and you show what’s in the bag. So these are rituals around things that are beautiful. What’s going on about those videos is, these YouTube videos, is they get millions of views. So what’s going on there? Something profound about our nature is going on. Richard Reinsch: Help us understand that. This idea, liturgy, morals have to be a liturgy. What do you mean by that? Graham McAleer: Yeah, well, so there’s a lot of moral theories that are, they’re mathematical or extremely austere. So a very mathematical moral theory’s, of course, utilitarianism, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Right? It even sounds like a mathematical composition. Another very popular one is Kantianism and Kant says that you and I must obey the moral law, and we can only obey the moral law if we are extremely pure. If it is purely the moral law that determines our action and not our culture, not our historical condition, not our private appetites, not privilege in certain people, you must obey the austerity of the law. So you have these extremely abstract, almost mathematical, purity kind of moral laws. Another way to think about ethics, which is, I think, through liturgy, through … I say liturgy. I mean it quite boldly. I mean the kind of liturgies that you see at sports games. So sports games, people dress up in the colors of their team. They go to a particular playing field. Some of these playing fields are very sacred, right? There are even playing fields in England around soccer teams where one can be buried under the grass, right? So it becomes sort of a burial ground. You sing songs. There are collective gestures when your side scores a goal. You act one way when you miss the goal. You act another way. So you have these gestures. It seems to me that our ethics can actually be built around these rituals, rather than these more abstract principles of purity. Richard Reinsch: So what we need is, we need more institutions. We just had Yuval Levin on the show. That’s his whole book, we need more institutions. We need more forms. Procedures, things like that. So democratic society from one view tears these things down because we want to be liberated from them. We want to be … I got to be me, is the cry. But what you’re calling for we actually need something like the rules of a courtroom, or of a Parliament, or even a workplace in a way. A workplace has a lot of written and unwritten rules of how you should conduct yourself. Yeah, we need those, is that what you’re saying? To act moral. Graham McAleer: Yeah. On the one hand you’re absolutely correct. There is a certain movement today that we need to get rid of our institutions. Now, of course, then there’s another movement which is oh, no, we need more of them. So we need to go between the two poles, which would be more Erich Przywara, of course, the analogical position. We need the ritual. These rituals are publicly enacted. But again, to go back to sports. The point about sports would be that these sports associations are what Burke would call these middle institutions, where people gather. They gather under their own terms, through their own proclivities, through their own interests. We don’t need them micromanaged by the state. Humans are quite clever at coming together in association that is not only healthy in a way, but actually it enacts rules. So the rules of the golf club, the rules of the tennis court, all of these rules make us more law abiding. One of the things I wanted to argue was that rule of law is actually embedded in our play structures, in our rituals of games. Richard Reinsch:   How about another thing? Related question, I think. Natural law and value tones. Can you talk about that some, because that’s also an interesting idea. Graham McAleer: Yeah, so in the 20th century, but I think you can find this in Adam Smith actually, but in the 20th century, you had what was called “value theory.” It began in Germany. It linked to a philosopher I know you yourself quite like, Aurel Kolnai. Value theory is the idea that there are categories of values and we are extremely alert to them. These values come in a hierarchy, so you have values of utility. We have a cell phone because it enables us to be in communication with the world, so it has utility. There are values of vitality, physical exercise. In keeping with these cell phone idea, we also show vitality in the pictures that we share and videos that we watch. So something like the app TikTok is a good example of this vitality connected with a cell phone. Then there are intellectual and scientific values, which, of course, are linked to all sorts of questions of design. You find this in the iPhone. Then there are values of the person and the divine. The idea of at the top of the value hierarchy is a fundamental regard for personhood. This again, it seems to me, the idea where people think of their cell phones, and especially young people, students that I teach, think of their cell phones as an extension of their personhood. So there is a hierarchy of values and there are thousands of values contained in each and every one of these categories. Let’s just take an example: Perfume. There’s a vast industry. Chanel 5 is a vast industry connected with perfume. Well, what is a perfume? Well, it’s a set of value tone. It’s a set of distinct scent. So somebody could walk up to someone who was wearing a certain kind of a perfume and say, “Oh, I really love this citrus scent in that perfume. What it is? Please can you tell me about?” So you and I actually are extremely good at understanding these value tones and at every level. We’re very good at picking up on what’s useful. We’ve very good at picking up on what is vital, like things that smell good, things that smell bad. We’re very good at picking up on design and scientific ideas. Then, what we hope, of course–this is a hard one in some sense–we hope we’re also very good at affirming human personhood. So this idea of value ethics became very dominant in the 20th century, and it was seen as a corrective of the mathematization of ethics that you found in utilitarianism. Which would link to Jeremy Bentham in England in the late 18th century and with Kantianism in the 19th century. What I wanted to do was then try to link what I saw in Thomas Aquinas about these basic inclinations and value theory. My linkage was really to kind of dwell on this idea of games and plays and rituals. Because I think, again, we see these value tones in the various kinds of games, the way that we dress up for them, the songs that we sing, et cetera. Richard Reinsch: Most people would respond and think, “Well, that’s consumerism. This is a lot of stuff.” I mean, a lot of what they think about the fashion or a lot of things that people purchase in sports itself. Your fascination with sports is some substitute for something you should be doing. Graham McAleer: Well, I think consumerism, critique of consumerism, which one hears all the time. Obviously, with Pope Francis in particular these days when he voices it. But actually, if you think about what’s going on, I mean, the purchase of, say, a Louis Vuitton bag. Actually, what there is there is a deference to the values of craft, the values of inheritance, the values of long tuition, learning how to build something from these materials in a way that is beautiful, supple, also useful. So it seems to me that consumerism, one can look at consumerism rather superficially. But there is, I think, in a fascination with these objects of high design, there is, in fact, a deference to these value tones. That we all understand what’s fascinating about a Lamborghini car. Well, what’s fascinating about that is its industrial complexity. And this is then something that does, in fact … I say consumerism would be an idea, look, this makes people completely superficial, just all about the pleasures. But in fact, it really isn’t. If I may, let me give an example. … I love from Shaftesbury, an Englishman, but he was very important in the Scottish Enlightenment. Shaftesbury gives this example of the man who has a hawk to go hunting with, but the man over time falls in love with the hawk and he puts the hawk on a pedestal and he feeds the hawk and he just sits looking at the hawk. It’s so beautiful. Well, we sort of do this in the way in which those of us who are fascinated by collections, whether collections of handbags, or cars, or pipes. There is a certain kind of value world that encloses itself upon us and helps actually make us better. So people who love, just keeps going on about a Louis Vuitton bag, they also look after it, right? They cherish it in certain ways. They follow certain rules about how to care for it. This is also a bit like the sports idea as well, that we actually do learn about ideas of fair play, not breaking the rules. Although we also, and I point this out in the book, we also have ways that people can play tricks in games, but there are penalties. One accepts the penalty. So we see this both deference to these values, which enclose themselves upon us, these things that are higher than us, they’re structuring us, which is very much like the natural law. It also teaches about ethics and morality. Richard Reinsch: So maybe the signal that you’re overindulging would be you’re running up a high debt to buy all these items. Maybe that’s a signal. Would that be part of the liturgy of morals? Graham McAleer: The overindulging part, you mean? Richard Reinsch: So what would be the sign that you’re overindulging? Yeah, it would be consumer debt, you’re racking up consumer debt. Maybe that’s part of the liturgy of morals here. Graham McAleer: Certainly. There can be fake things there. Right? Because certain people know people have these desires and even though they’re not in a position to actually purchase the real things, they’ll purchase the cheaper version. So abuse. But it’s true of all ethics, right? All ethics has to deal with certain excesses. So I do grant that you can have bad games. Even you see this in James Bond movies, that the baddies play certain kind of bad games, and Bond has to play the game and somehow find a way to reassert the decency and the goodness in the doing of the game. I mean that obviously there is something there, but I still think that game structures are a useful way to think about how to structure our appetites towards community, towards ideas of fair play. Richard Reinsch: As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking of the liturgy of morals and the value tones. Before we got online, you and I were talking about the recent British election, where the conservatives scored a resounding victory that no one predicted. I’m thinking is this part of it? The British public grew tired of watching the rules being flouted, if not interpreted in weird ways to sort of privilege one side. I think in particular of the Speaker of the House, John Bercow, who seemed to be putting his thumb on the rules. And the way the debate was flowing or not flowing and people were tired of it. People wanted the rules. Graham McAleer: I think probably what’s happening over in England in the last few years is a conflict of two different kinds of games, with the games played in Parliament and, of course, with the, as you know, the Prime Minister’s question time. The idea is to turn the opposition into the pantomime villain and they go into jeering and laughing. There’s an extremely strong play structure built inside the procedures of Parliament and Congress. But there’d been another game that had been played, the game of a democratic election. This is also a game. Gamesmanship is part of it. So this is the bit when the politician takes off his or her jacket, rolls up their sleeves and starts holding the babies and kissing the babies, right? There’s a kind of a playfulness in what it means to go on the hustings and to speak in public and the rituals of rhetoric that go with that. For that game, which was somehow perceived in England as a kind of … The election was a kind of a more primordial game in a way, where the whole people had come together and had played a game, the election. And then there was this sense, well, there’s this other kind of a game going on and this other kind of a game seems to want to subvert this more primordial game that we all just engaged in. I think what happened, I mean, one way to explain the astonishing result that happened just before Christmas, was that there was a kind of a deep sensibility in England that the original game that had been played, the election, was the one that absolutely must be respected. So you had people who were wanting to stay in the European Union who nonetheless voted conservative, because they felt, well, we had an election and that needs to be respected and Parliament is sort of playing around, but in a negative sense, right? The negative sense of playing around: They’re playing me for a fool. So it seems to me there was a conflict of two different kinds of games, two different kinds of rituals that had to be resolved there. Richard Reinsch: Things were so bad, as it was in the press, that the Queen was astonished at the dysfunctionality of the British political class, which I assume that somebody wanted that to come out, which is interesting, the sort of underscoring that the rules not being followed or understood. I think I want to end the discussion thinking about law specifically. You said in the introduction that two conceptions of law are both wrong. One is the conception of law in Islam where it’s just divine will. But then also, more familiar to us, in the Enlightenment understanding of law. The Enlightenment perspective, it’s just human will. It’s just we understand it, we can run out its content in human rationality. Talk about why you think, under your conception of natural law, those are both equally wrong in different ways. Graham McAleer: Yeah, so in the Islamic conception, the law comes directly from God. So the ways that humans over the centuries have organized themselves, their customs, their rituals, their games, their forms of worship, the clothes that they wear, all of these things have to be put through a kind of a grinder, the grinder of divine law. So you see this in the most extreme version, of course. Of course this is an extreme version. I’m not saying this is what Islam is. But in the extreme version of ISIS, when they engage in radical cultural destruction, that nothing even of the past may interfere with this deference to the demands of the law of God. Then on the flip side, in the European Enlightenment, American side, we have this idea that the law should just reflect whatever our current passions are. So this idea of the evolving Constitution or of this idea of the evolving natural law. But this idea that our national passions, nothing may stand in the way of those. This is a kind of a presentism. This is about our national passions today. Who we are today will determine the kind of law we have tomorrow. Natural law sets its face against that. Against Islam, natural law says, look, we have all these customary ways that have arisen out of the way that we deal with our basic inclinations. These need to be respected. And in the Christian tradition of natural law, they are respected. Divine law is a very particular, finite part of law, actually of what the law is. There’s also human law connected with institutions and judiciaries and then there’s the natural law, the basic inclinations. But [there’s also] the Enlightenment idea, that the people of today are more enlightened than the people of yesterday, and therefore we don’t need to respect the legacies of the nation. Consider Edmund Burke, who thought that the establishment that we had inherited was to be preserved, precisely because it picked up on an important idea that humans are an historical people. We have our heritage and we will also have a future, so you need reform, but you also have a legacy and this legacy also had deep, abiding value. So natural law is wanting to sort of insist that there a kind of abiding center of moral orientation. But it also wants to be quite supple to take on changes, obviously changes in technology, changes in economic order. But the Enlightenment gets that wrong as well, because it’s far too rational. It thinks we should just think about what was so bad about communism. Well, communism was an idea, a kind of a geometrics of human control in which economic planning would determine the wholesale movement of entire peoples. Richard Reinsch: One particular application of your idea in the Enlightenment would be the, and I don’t think it’s nearly as dominant as it once was in the academy, but John Rawls’ idea. Which is clearly in the America legal academy that the law and the reasons for law must be purely secular and had this ability to build overlapping consensus, which is the insistence on public reason, secular reasons for law. Your conception of natural law would say to him that you’re simplifying law to a great degree and not admitting that there’s a ground for law, I think, that’s not just reason. Or am I wrong? Graham McAleer: No, that’s right. I mean, toward the end of the book I talk about Rawls. And Rawls has this, as some people listening know, this very cool and strange and interesting thought experiment, where you go behind this veil and he says you have to strip yourself down, essentially. He doesn’t say this, but you have to almost think of yourself as an angel, a being without a body. Richard Reinsch: With no interests. Graham McAleer: And you go behind a veil. You’re just this sort of atom with no deep inclinations at all, no preferences at all. You then kind of work out, well, once I come from the veil and I enter the world, what do I want the world to look like? What do I need for the world to be? I think a natural law theorist would think that Rawls’ starting point is extremely strange. Now, you see its heritage, of course, in Kant and the idea of this kind of approach of purity to the law. But, of course, we’re not pure in that sense. We come with inclinations. This is a deep insight of natural law. We come with a set of inclinations and we need to work on those inclinations. So the Rawlsian idea that we could remake ourselves, I think is based upon what Przywara would call an angel or … We can’t totally remake ourselves, because we can’t ignore the fact that we are these very complex animals with a past, with our genetic inheritance. But also we, for whatever reason and as we even see in burial sites, we have this idea of some sort of afterlife, some sort of continuity beyond this world. That’s the theologico-political problem, the problem of the divine, that’s going to have to be resolved somehow inside of politics. So, again, it seems to me, this is what Rawls completely ignores, because he does want things so secular. He’s sort of tied to this idea that the religious is always inherently destabilizing, violent. I mean, I think he’s got a kind of a caricature of what the development of religions has been like. So it seems to me natural laws are really useful ways to take seriously what it means to be a human animal and fundamental appetites that repeat in all cultures. Again, I took the idea of games and values as a way to see that we do seemingly, no matter where we are in a civilization, we do seem to want to play certain kinds of games and we do want to seemingly want to buy certain kinds of products and these engage, I think, in fundamental values and inclinations. Richard Reinsch: Graham McAleer, I think that’s a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much for discussing your book, Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Today we’re talking with Joshua Mitchell about his latest book, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. It’s my honor to welcome Josh Mitchell to the program. He’s one of our best thinkers and writers about politics. In the academic discipline of political theory, he’s the author of a number of books and numerous essays and reviews, including Tocqueville in Arabia, which I reviewed at Law & Liberty, which was an account Mitchell provided of his teaching of Tocqueville’s democracy in America to students largely from the Middle East when he was at Georgetown’s campus, I think it was in Doha. Josh, we’re glad to welcome you to the program and to discuss American Awakening. Joshua Mitchell (01:04): My pleasure. I’m really looking forward to our conversation. Richard Reinsch (01:08): A basic question here at the beginning, what has woken up in America? Joshua Mitchell (01:12): Periodically, America has religious renewals, Tocquesville observed this, we know this from history. What has happened is that the left has decided that we have to have a different kind of accounting system. What we need to measure is transgression and innocence and there’s a whole scale that you can use to assess who you are. I think one of the big mistakes that people make is they say, “Oh, identity. I have an identity. Identity is just this kind or that kind.” Lebanese or French, whatever it happens to be, black or white. Identity politics is about the kind that you are. When we say I have an identity these days, we mean something more than time. We mean the group of which we’re a member that has a certain status in the great continuum of innocence and transgression. What I’m suggesting is that’s a colloquial use, but it’s not an adequate use. What identity politics is trying to do is to measure relationships between groups, not a person, groups that individuals are instances of that have a certain victim score, or transgressor score. There’s a whole hierarchy here. They’re literally trying to build a world where we look at each other in terms of our identity score, whether we’re a transgressor or whether we’re a member of the innocent group. That’s a profound taxology. What I do in the book is I set up what I call becoming identity politics of innocence, versus what I call the liberal politics of competence. Richard Reinsch (02:40): When you say identity, can we talk more about that? What does it mean to say I have an identity, in your account? Joshua Mitchell (02:49): Most people will say of course we have an identity, but I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t even use the word. This is the latest intellectual fashion. When I was growing up I would say I’m an American, I’m a man, but we would never use the word identity. Somehow, I think starting in the ’90s, maybe a little earlier, I don’t want to nitpick on dates here, some time along in the last 30 years we started saying things like, “I have an American identity. My identity is this. My identity is that.” It’s very curious, surely on the basis of intellectual history, why would we need to add the thing when we used to say, “I’m an American.” That’s the kind I am. I’m an American, I’m French, whatever it happens to be. I think identity doesn’t mean just kind, I think people are invoking it to signal something. I make very clear in the book that I think we have to stop using the term virtue signaling. Virtue is a Greek thing. Innocence is a biblical thing. I think because we’re involved in a pseudo religious awakening, people who want to call this out have to start using the term innocence signaling. When we say I have an identity these days, we mean something more than time. We mean the group of which we’re a member that has a certain status in the great continuum of innocence and transgression. As I say in the book, the prime transgressor who is blamed for everything and all that he does is the White, heterosexual male. I said, to be clear right at the outset, I have no interest whatsoever in defending White nationalism or whatever you want to call it. My point is that the White heterosexual man now has a kind of symbolic standing as the cause of all the transgressions in the world. As I say in the book, every single major party platform idea in the Democratic Party can be linked to this idea that the things that White heterosexual men have brought a problem. Capitalism, burning fossil fuels, the nation state, the heteronormative family, Christian religion, every single one of these things is traceable to the idea that there is a stain in the world and that is the White, heterosexual male and, in order for us, the innocent to be liberated, he must be purged. That is a profound distortion, in my view, of Christianity. Richard Reinsch (05:18): Now your book is an exploration of identity politics as a spiritual, religious manifestation into our politics that has taken over our politics, but maybe we can get into it this way more specifically. You use this term towards the beginning of the book, you talk about the “invisible economy of man.” What is that? Why does that matter for identity politics? Joshua Mitchell (05:45): I would give the left some credit on this. I think the deepest theological insight we have from the Hebrews and from Christians is that there is in fact two economies. I make mention of a couple of these things in the preface to the book. I note, for example, one of the gospels, the opening passage, or one of the opening passages, Joseph and Mary had to go back to their place of birth because all the world was to be taxed. The way I characterize this is one of the gospels opens up with the idea that there is this thing called a world of payment, dollars and cents and taxes. Everything gets accounted for in the ledger book. Everything visible can be accounted for in the ledger book. The gospel is very clear, they don’t stay at the inn, they stay in probably a cave, Jesus is put into an animal feed trough, it’s completely off the ledger books of the world of visible payment. I think that’s what the gospel writer is trying to say. Christ came into the world not to address the visible world of payment, but the invisible economy of transgression and stain and to offer redemption in that way. Then I think the more glaring example of this, the most beautiful example of this is Judas. It’s very clear that Judas, he praised Christ because he is thinking of this visible economy. Oil is poured down onto his head, think of the money that was worth. He feels like Christ is not being the revolutionary in the visible economy to help the poor. Christ says the poor will always be with us and it means any number of things, but among other things, it means that there’s something deeper going on here in the world than just this visible economy. He comes to offer relief from the transgression that no world of payment can understand. This is the deepest Christian insight, it’s a profound insight. I give the left credit for that, or the identity politics credit for that. It’s announcing, saying a more profound economy than the world of payment. I’m not saying it’s one that has to be replaced, we have to live with both economies, this is the problem. We have to pay our taxes and yet there’s something deeper going on in the human soul than just the payment of taxes. That’s the credit I give to identity politics. The problem is that it wants to think that problem through now, think that issue through now in the world of politics and replace the world of payment, capitalism, et cetera, with this new economy that’s concerned only with innocence. That’s why, by the way, AOC and others can offer a new green deal and they don’t care if it costs 50 trillion dollars, because the more important economy is the invisible economy. I’m saying the invisible economy is more important, but we can’t live without the visible economy and the place where this invisible economy has to be wrestled through is in the churches and the synagogues, this is where we have to wrestle through this. It’s not an accident, in my view, that the collapse of the mainline churches in the aftermath of the Vietnam war didn’t put an end to the category of transgression and stain. It shifted. The Pew Charitable Trust poll indicates that a larger and larger number of Americans are among this group called the none, they have no religious affiliation. I’m saying that’s not true, they have a profound religious affiliation. They are addressing the problem of transgression and stain, but they’re just not doing it in the churches, because they have a new place and a new way to do it and it’s called identity politics. We’re still desperately looking for atonement, this is a human thing, but when you only have the longing for atonement but no longer have the old mechanism for doing so, you’ll come up with all sorts of new modes of atonement that you think will solve your problem of guilt Richard Reinsch (09:21): Your account of the invisible economy of AOC, or of the woke and conflating that or trying to infuse that into the world, another manifestation would be defund the police, I think. Joshua Mitchell (09:35): Yeah, yeah, exactly. Richard Reinsch (09:37): The quarterback, the woke quarterback, although he’s not really playing anymore, Colin Kaepernick called recently, I think over the weekend, to abolish prisons in America. You mentioned the Green New Deal. I mean it was basically a draft proposal someone had dashed off that they released to the public. I mean everything from flights to killing the cows in America was contemplated as a level of control there. I guess an older idiom of thinking about this, also somewhat spiritual, would be Voegelin’s idea, well-known idea of immanentizing the eschaton. That is the perfectionist impulse of the woke and trying to make that our politics. Your account is sort of like that, sort of different. Joshua Mitchell (10:21): Yeah. I do think it’s embedded to Christian categories. I mean I do agree with most of Voegelin on this. It’s embedded to Christian categories, but it’s a kind of … well, it’s an end of history scenario. We’re going to finally get away with all the filth in the world, get rid of dirty, fossil fuels, we’re going to get rid of all the dirty things. There’s going to be an accounting at the end of … we are at the end of history, this is the most important thing, we are at the end of history. We have the task of all that came before us that’s implicated and stained and, to use the passage from Isaiah that I think is most apt, the lion has to now lay down with the lamb. We’re at the end of history in toto. The only thing left is that there has to be a complete accounting of all the stains and transgressions that history has provided for us. In Europe, I’m very worried about what’s happening in Europe, you’ve got a post-Christian Christian region where … what I mean by that is people aren’t going to church, but they’re still haunted, haunted by the transgression of history, notably two world wars and colonialism. The deal that the European elite are cutting here, you are indelibly stained because of your history, especially the Germans. There is no theological mechanism for you to atone and to begin anew, because God’s forgiveness doesn’t give us a way forward to have a new day, because we’re always haunted by guilt we can never expunge. The deal that the left is offering, and in America, the only way that you can disburden yourself from your guilt is to renounce your history and to renounce your nation. That is now the reason why the European Union is pushing back against the very idea of nations. It’s a religious attempt to find relief from stain and impurity, but without the religious mechanism of doing so. That’s why in Eastern Europe, where you still have a strong Catholic church, people don’t fall for this. Yeah, sure, bad things have happened, but we know where stain is gotten rid of, it’s called at the altar before Christ in the churches. In Eastern Europe, terrible things have happened there, but they’re not going to fall for what Western Europe is falling for, namely that there’s no Church left, so the only way that we can atone is by renouncing those sites, mainly the family, the nation state with rule of law, the nation state itself, that’s the deal that you have to cut. We’re still desperately looking for atonement, this is a human thing, but when you only have the longing for atonement but no longer have the old mechanism for doing so, you’ll come up with all sorts of new modes of atonement that you think will solve your problem of guilt, well nothing will solve your problem of guilt outside the Church, but you’re going to try everything. You’re going to purge the White people, you’re going to get rid of the nation. It’s a desperate and sick attempt to find a way towards cleanliness. That’s what’s happening here at the end of time. The immanentization of the eschaton in the sense it’s the end of time, but we’re looking for atonement, it’s a deep, personal thing too. That’s the crisis of our moment. Richard Reinsch (13:40): You have in the book a line that wokism introduces … well, it doesn’t introduce, it changes the meaning of the traditional Protestant, or I’ll say Christian theological concept of original sin. There’s no original sin in wokism, but there’s an original sinner. Also you express this idea that there’s also no forgiveness. Ultimately there’s no possibility of atonement. Those who are the transgressor, right now the transgressor is the White, heterosexual male, and of course we can talk about and I’d like a discussion of how a parade of transgressors will follow but kind of beg for sufferance from those he has oppressed. I think a number of us have seen this, certainly these videos and displays throughout the summer of people, particularly Whites in these protests kneeling down in front of minorities. I’ve seen kissing the boots, things like this, to try to show an attempt to atone or seek absolution for the crimes of their race or gender overall. Joshua Mitchell (14:42): Yeah. I think we have to make an important distinction. I think, as Americans, we have collective responsibility to heal wounds, but not collective fault. I mean my family, at least a large half of it came over in the 1890s from what’s now Lebanon. How am I implicated in slavery? There’s a desperate attempt to find atonement. My point about original sin is that what it means is that deeper than your lineage, deeper than the fact that I might be part Lebanese and part Welsh, deeper than that is something that is always already there. It’s original to the human condition. The absolutely profound insight that Christianity gives us is that you can’t solve the stain that’s always already there by looking for a mortal solution to it. You can’t look at that other group and say, “If I can just scapegoat them and purge them, then everything’s going to be fine.” The problem is deeper than any inheritance you have or they have. This is so unbelievably profound. Rousseau saw this. Rousseau’s a nut, but he saw some amazing things, he understands some amazing things. He said this is what changes when you move from Pagan politics to Christian politics, because in Paganism you really did think that by purging that other nation with other Gods through cathartic rage that you could purify yourself. The Christian claim was no, the problem of stain is so deep it goes back to Adam and your inheritance, whether you’re Lebanese or French or whatever and that other person with some other inheritance, you can’t solve your problem of stain by purging another group. The problem is original. It’s always already there. We’re always … I mean I’m haunted by Genesis four through seven, Adam and Eve sinned, there’s a transgression there and Eve says, “The serpent made me do it,” and Adam says, “The woman who you gave me, it’s your fault, God.” We’re always looking … that statement right there, it’s this astounding statement about human nature. We have fault internal to us and we’re always looking out there, external to us, to find a way to hide, to find a fig leaf to hide from our transgression. That’s what identity politics is. It’s saying we recognize fault, we recognize there’s an invisible economy and the way we’re going to solve it is the Pagan way. We’re going to purge groups. We live in this really strange time where we still have some Christian understanding that we really probably shouldn’t do that, there’s a thing called the rule of law and every group, every member of every group is supposed to have a standing independent of the group. This itself is a remarkable achievement of Christianity, but we stand on the cusp of returning to that Pagan idea of purgation. The Christian claim, and I come back to Rousseau’s politics, that’s not going to work. That’s why Augustine comes up with the Just War doctrine. What it means is we can’t just go to war expending cathartic rage on the enemy. That’s not what war can be about anymore. This is a profound breakthrough. I understand that the question of original sin is involved in all sorts of huge debates between Protestants and Catholics, I’m actually trying to go back and move beyond that debate and say, “What does it mean for us today in light of identity politics?” My point is, if it’s original, then we can’t solve the problem of stain and impurity by purging another group, which is exactly what identity politics is trying to do. The Christian claim is, the only way out is to recognize that all of us are broken, whatever we may have done to each other as groups or individuals, all of us are broken and there is a divine innocent one. There’s no mortal innocence. What identity politics does, and here we return to Voegelin, is it immanetizes the innocent one. That would be my difference with Voegelin. He says it immanetizes the eschaton, I say it immanetizes the innocent one. Richard Reinsch (19:09): The innocent one by definition doesn’t sin, they are only sinned against, which unleashes tremendous- Joshua Mitchell (19:18): Yes, exactly. Richard Reinsch (19:18): … arrogance and hubris which we’ve seen on display throughout the past four months in this country. You can do no wrong, but wrong can be done to you. What I ask, something that I keyed in on in the book and it resonated with me because I grew up in the ’80s in a small town in Tennessee. What I remember learning in the public schools about Martin Luther King Junior, he was called Reverend and I distinctly remember that. Also I attended a Methodist Church growing up. Reverend Martin Luther King I heard about. the only group that can stop this identity politics madness are Black Americans who will say, “Wait a second. This is not what Martin Luther King signed up for.” You talk about, and only a few people have noticed this, the transition. It happened some time I think in the ’90s from Reverend to Doctor. You talk about the meaning of that and how that helps us think about identity politics. That resonated with me because I understood as a kid in some way that the Reverend meant not only did he defeat segregation at law, he understood what it was really about and how to defeat it spiritually, but you go on to talk about that. Joshua Mitchell (20:18): This is, I think, something people who are concerned with the real legacy of Martin Luther King need to constantly talk about. He was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. What that meant was he understood exactly this theological formulation that I gave and advanced it. It would be impossible for Martin Luther King as a theologian to advance identity politics, because identity politics makes the grievous error of presuming that there are innocent and guilty ones here in the world of time and that we can find a solution to the problem of transgression by scapegoating other people. Martin Luther King, I remember on occasion said, “Look, the problem is not White people, the problem is evil, the problem is principalities and powers. That’s what we have to fight against and the ally we have in that fight is Christ.” As we know, you read the gospel, he’s exorcizing the demon, so only Christ has power over evil itself. Of course sensible people can’t talk about evil and sensible people don’t believe in incarnation, but sensible liberals … remember there was something about transgression and innocence in the 1960s, so now we’re going to do this without the theological accoutrements altogether. You have the categories without the profound theological insights, so you have to separate the world now between the innocent and the stained. Before all the world was stained and God alone was the innocent one. You see the innocent voice as victim, but that category now is taken up by particular identity groups. This is, again, a profound distortion of Christianity. I say that, through the indication of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we actually have a way to begin to wrestle with this problem of innocence and transgression. Through the indication of a Doctor Martin Luther King, which is the way the identity politics people now do it, the only thing you have is one group aggrieved against another and never ending cathartic rage, anger and resentment and then defensive postures, which never allows us to build a world together. That’s where we are today. Richard Reinsch (22:28): That is also a way of thinking of the Black experience in America. You talk about this in the book. You quote Robert Woodson, who was a community activist, rightly understood, I would argue, who was trying to rebuild civil society and Black neighborhoods in America. He talks about this idea now, the part of the Black experience in America that was heroic in an age of real oppression and very real segregation forming mutual self insurance societies, fraternal societies I should say, building their businesses, churches and how that worked. That’s sort of forgotten and there’s the plantation and there’s oppression and there’s the Democratic Party doing an activist thing and that’s it. It’s like you’ve whitewashed even the history, you’ve taken that out. Woodson says it’s like Blacks are another identity group and their experience is this ever growing fund that new minority groups draw on to vindicate their claims. Joshua Mitchell (23:34): A couple of things on that count. Bob and I have become good friends. We’re actually working together very closely on something called the 1776 Unites project, which is in response to the 1619 project. We’re on a weekly call with a dozen or two dozen people, largely Black, who are pushing back against this idea of systemic racism. Bob’s claim … two things. First, I think Bob and other serious Black intellectuals are realizing that their movement has been co-opted. I say this in the book, making reference in a sly way to Rosa Parks. I mean Black America is now asked to sit at the back of the Democratic bus. Black America was what I call the template of innocence that feminists, gays and transgenders now have adopted. The argument is, of course, as civil rights go, so goes women’s rights, gay rights and transgender rights. You look at Martin Luther King and what he understood was Black Americans survived slavery because of family and Church. What a paradox now. The left starts with the template of innocence of Black America and now it’s gotten to the point where the group it’s defending want to undo the family and the Church. Something has gone seriously wrong here. Bob knows and he and I have talked at length about this, his view and mine is that the only group that can stop this identity politics madness are Black Americans who will say, “Wait a second. This is not what Martin Luther King signed up for.” The expectation is that Blacks are just going to go sit in the back of the bus while new groups keep taking on the crown of thorns using the template of innocence of Black America. My sense of this, I don’t know if it’s this election or the next or who knows when, but it cannot be the case that, in order to be inclusive now, to use that leftist word, we have to oppose heteronormativity, we can’t be cisgender, we can’t believe in the Church because it’s really homophobic and we can’t live that way. Most importantly, and this is Woodson’s point, belief among us absolutely needs those institutions. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, Bob is upset because he says there is a grand history of Black achievement against incredible odds. He and I are trying to set up something called the Center for the Study of Resilience. We’re trying to find a university where we can do this. What we want to do is simply chronicle, either in video or a written form, the extraordinary exemplars in the African American community, but it can’t be only them, it’s immigrant communities, it’s the American story against all odds to build families, to build communities, because our young people, rich and poor, desperately need some evidence that there’s human agency and there’s hope in the world of time. The real objection to the 1619 Project is, yeah, it’s bad history, that’s fine, but look, forget the history, what is at stake is the politics of this. The politics of systemic racism is this, the problem of racism is so deep that your families can’t help you, your Churches can’t help you and your neighbors can’t help you. Only the state can help you. What that teaches is there’s no human agency and there’s no hope. The real message of the 1619 Project, the real message of those who claim systemic racism is that you can’t do it on your own. Nobody’s saying you do it on your own, our view is a Tocquevillian view, which is we build a world together in our families, in our Churches, in our neighborhoods, in our local communities, in our towns. That’s how we do it. My favorite line of Democracy in America is feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, the mind expanded only by the reciprocal actions of men, one upon another. It’s one of the most beautiful lines in Democracy in America. He’s saying that everything in the modern world conspires to isolate us, conspires to let the state step in because you and I find forming human relations difficult and that will produce the kinder and gentler tyranny at the end of history. Bob’s addition to this is, the people who are first hurt by this are the least among us. They’re the ones that most need the mediating institution in order to pull themself up. Bob is a profound Tocquevillian. I’ve been a Tocqueville scholar all my life and when I met Bob two years ago I think, oh my God, here’s Tocqueville in action. He is, as you say, he’s the right kind of activist, meaning someone who is really interested in empowering local people. You find the people who’ve been able to make their communities work and you help them. Bob tells a wonderful story. First he says, “80% of my friends are exes, ex-cons, ex-prostitutes,” and he finds the broken among us. He says, “When I go into a town, I go to the barber shop and I say, “Who do you go to when things are bad?” We’re not saying go down the welfare agency, but who is the person you go to? They’ll invariably, after talking to 10 or 12 people, there’ll be two or three people that you identify and he goes and meets them. He says, “What’s your secret?” He hears these incredible stories, oftentimes of regeneration from alcoholism or prison or whatever, it completely transformed their life, they become the pillars of the community. Bob’s answer to the problem of racism in America is a really straightforward one. It’s a Joseph/Pharaoh model in Exodus where you find the Joseph of the community who has prevailed against all odds and has immense respect and you say, “How can we help?” That’s how you address racist America. It’s a profoundly Tocquevillian understanding of what we are to do. I’m so hopeful that the kind of thing Bob is doing can start to resonate. What we’re finding is that Conservative donors are beginning to realize that there is a way to talk about race in America that doesn’t require that we capitulate to the left, it says, “Well okay, there’s a problem of racist America, that’s why we have to have more state programs.” That was the model for 40 or 50 years. The right, not wanting to grow government, decided they didn’t want to talk about race. That’s wrong. We have to talk about race in America. There’s a really constructive profoundly Tocquevillian way to do so and Woodson, he’s 83 years old now, he’s been showing the way for half his life and we have to get behind this man who’s a national treasure. I cite him a number of times in the book. Richard Reinsch (30:06): This book, there’s identity politics, there’s also a discussion about bipolarity and addictions and also substitutes and shortcuts as well. Could you talk about those parts of your book? I mean I was going to talk and maybe we can, I think you’ve been giving us a really nice understanding of the liberal politics of competence versus the identity politics, I think you’ve done that well, but the bipolarity and addictions, what do you mean by that? Joshua Mitchell (30:34): I have been fascinated in my readings of history and political thought to observe this idea that human beings … I’ll be brazen, naturally oscillate back and forth between highs and lows. I see this as early as Plato’s Republic book nine when he’s talking about the tyrannical soul. It’s in Saint Augustine, the Confessions. Yes, it’s a beautiful account of the cosmos and the journey to God, put if you look at Saint Augustine, he himself, he shows, he tells in his confessions about how he has these moments of tremendous highs and tremendous lows. His answer of course is there is no rest until I rest in peace, until I rest in the presence of God. I can show this in the writings of Hobbes, I can show this in the writings of Rousseau and absolutely in the writings of Tocqueville. The most troubling thing is that this phenomena that has been known about since people began to think seriously about the human soul, has been rendered as a biological problem with the brain and this is a tragedy. This is in a way the fuller development of Huxley’s work in Brave New World where he says all these deep longings, all these deep anxieties, which should point at the human freedom, will be medicalized away. That was the dystopia that Huxley’s raising and laying out in Brave New World. I dare to suggest to a world that can only see this problem as a medical problem that in fact, in Tocqueville’s language, it’s a problem of human association. Tocqueville says, at the end of Democracy in America line two, which I think is the deeper line, he says, “In the distant future I can imagine a time where we will think of ourselves as greater than kings and less than men.” What he means by this is we will become so socially isolated that we will have no other people who check us, so, to use my language, will become selfie man, completely isolated. We’ve got our Facebook pages and our social media platforms and we de-friend anyone who raises the slightest question about the things, the crazy things that we believe. We produce selfie man on the one hand, this is the I feel greater than kings, I’m the sovereign of my universe, but it’s precisely those conditions of social isolation that lead us to profound loneliness and emptiness and feelings of impotence. When Tocqueville says I foresee a day when we will sense ourselves to be greater than kings and less than men, he’s saying the full consequence of a world where all of the links have been broken is bipolarity. He’s literally saying that. I say that the problem of bipolarity is a problem of human association on the Tocqueville I’m reading. Now I’m not going to step in and say well therefore go off your medicines. I think medicines can be supplements and we’re really interested in that section, they can be supplements that can help us return to health, but they can’t be substitutes for that health. In Tocqueville’s reading, until we build a world of rich human association, we’re going to oscillate back and forth. He says in one passage, he says yes, in Europe there’s going to be suicide, but in America there will be madness. There will be all sorts of mental instability. He thinks it’s because we’re going to become increasingly lonely and isolated. It’s only by building a world together that we can ameliorate, not solve, but ameliorate that problem. That’s again why that passage, feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, the mind expanded only by the reciprocal actions of men, one upon another is so important. He’s saying if we don’t do that, we’re in deep trouble. To come to what I take to be the important insight of the new national conservative movement, is, I think, completely on board on this, the biggest project that we have is to rebuild the mediating institution. Yes, it’s important who’s the president, but if we’re just looking up then we’re not putting energy into all these mediating institutions that we so desperately need in order to build a life together. That’s what Tocqueville saw. Richard Reinsch (34:58): Just listening to your analysis, it should not surprise us that identity politics, anti racism, systemic racism has come full bloom in this time of COVID isolation, of job loss, of all the things people are experiencing. You talked about … it was before the podcast, what you think some of your students are going through and then this movement erupts because of George Floyd, although the more I think about it, I mean it’s just the cause and effect is just ridiculous. It’s horrible what happened to George Floyd. How that though has justified the last four months, or could justify it is just … it makes me scratch my head every time I think about it. I think arguments have been made, we haven’t realized it, I haven’t realized it, how deep they had gotten and then they met this crisis and opportunity with the COVID restrictions. Joshua Mitchell (35:58): First on my students, I’m teaching at Georgetown now all through Zoom and my experience at Georgetown is not unique, so it’s not a Georgetown problem precisely, but I’m starting to get emails from my students saying, “Listen, I can’t get that test in, I’m really suffering from serious anxiety.” Actually the first thing I wrote after the COVID outbreak was on social distancing and how what we’re doing is really doubling down on exactly the pathology that Tocqueville thought would happen and the consequences will be untold. We’re always looking at how many deaths from COVID, well let’s talk about the grave collateral damage, the number of suicides that are going to happen. As I drive out here to the eastern shore I see a big billboard for opioid addicts saying you are not alone. Guess what? You are alone. You can’t go meet people. The people who are addicted, they know this. I have friends who are in Alcoholic’s Anonymous. They can’t have real meetings. When you meet face-to-face, to come to your second point, we have all the correctives we need. A great Christian insight is that the imagination can really cause all sorts of trouble. God sent the floods because they became vain in their imagination. This is very important. Tocqueville sees this problem by the way. The more and more isolated you become, the more you have a demonic imagining of who the other person is. The only antidote to that, the only way to diminish our assessment of the demonic-ness of other people is this never ending face-to-face association. We know this, because we’re all involved in groups where we might not like someone and we’ve got to work with them. You go into the meeting and you’ve been imagining all sorts of terrible things about that person and then you go into the meeting and you have to work out some solution, all of you have to come up with an answer to a problem and you do. You make compromises and you walk out of the meeting and you say, well maybe that person isn’t as bad. They still might be bad, but they’re not as bad. You attenuate our demonic imaginings of the other only through face-to-face associations. Okay, so now let’s run the clock. We’re supposed to have a two week lockdown and we’re now six or seven months into it, what do you think is going to happen to people’s imaginations? That’s the first thing. Then the second thing, you mentioned the George Floyd riots. I wrote something about this for First Things. It is a curiosity that these people who insisted on social distancing, on locking down, instantly went out and protested and rioted. This calls out for an account. My account is it’s a deeply distorted Christian understanding. Let me explain why, background. Plato, the opening lines of the Republic are about going down to the Piraeus and they’re worshiping at a festival with Bendis where death is ever near. The central problem of the Republic is death and how to avoid it. It’s only through the philosophical practice of death that you can see the light of eternity. Philosophers are concerned with overcoming death with noetic knowledge. That’s the brief format. Christian’s don’t think that’s right. Death is the second problem. Death is the consequent problem because of the first problem. It’s because Adam and Eve sinned that death came into the world. Now plug that in to what happened with COVID and George Floyd. Everyone says death is the problem, death is the problem, we have to isolate from one another, but if sin is a deeper problem than death, then people are going to give up on the death thing as soon as sin becomes the real problem, or the perceived sin becomes a real problem. That’s why people who mask on the left who are scared to death of death, ultimately they still have this Christian sensibility. This is what I’m trying to say, it’s a deeply distorted Christianity. That’s the bad news and the good news. At least it’s a distorted Christianity, but that’s why people went out on riots, because the problem of sin is deeper than the problem of death in the Christian world. I’m saying that people went out to riot is a perverse confirmation that understanding is still the deepest one in the psyche of the west. I’m thankful for that, but if I may, here I would like to invoke Nietzsche, by the way it’s his birthday today, what Nietzsche saw was that the west had purportedly renounced it’s Christianity, this is in the 1880s, but that it was still trapped by many of it’s categories. The fateful question was whether it could fully renounce the questions and move on. This, by the way is the alt-right, because to move on is to forget. It’s to not be oriented by guilt and sin and stain. The language of stain and purity, the language of the innocent victim, these are all Christian terms. He wanted to completely jettison it and move on to the new/old aristocracy, which would be a return to the aristocracy of cruelty, where the only categories were weakness and strength, not innocence and transgression. I think that’s really the fateful question that we have in front of us right now, because I think Nietzsche got this diagnosis right. I’m a Tocqueville scholar, I love Tocqueville, but Nietzsche adds something to the picture that we really need to pay attention to. We’re living in a world of Christian categories without the Christian architecture. The question is whether we’re going to go forward with the Nietzsche product and the alt-right is doing this in Europe and in America, we’re just simply going to forget, we don’t care about slavery, we don’t care about colonialism, we don’t care about 60 million people dying in World War I and World War II, we don’t care. My whole project here is I want the categories of transgression and innocence. I don’t think we’ve achieved human responsibility. I don’t think we’ve achieved the depth of soul without being constantly attentive to the categories of identity and transgression. Within the Christian context, which allows us to go forward with self consciousness about fault, but with the understanding that we can build a world tomorrow on hope notwithstanding that, that’s the good news of Christianity, so I’m frightened to death by the current moment. I mean on the one hand I should be thankful we’re still invoking the Christian categories, but without the Christian architecture, it just reminds people that they have a guilt they can’t get rid of and then people are going to say, “Well maybe Nietzsche’s right. Maybe the only way to go forward is to forget and to go back to the old cruelty.” That’s the moment I think we are in in the west as a whole. We can talk about the collapse of the mainline churches in America and how that contributes to identity politics. I think that’s true, but I think the deeper issue is the historical moment in which we find ourselves, which is not secular. I mean if identity politics doesn’t prove that we’re not living in a secular age, I don’t know what will. We’re using all these theological categories. This is not a secular world. This is a world where we’re searching for answers to the problem of transgression and innocence without God and forgiveness. That’s the American awakening right now. We have really two choices. We can go back and put these categories back in their proper theological context, or we can go forward to the alt right and to the new cruelty. Those are our existential choices. Richard Reinsch (42:59): It’s interesting in this regard thinking about your discussion of addictions and the place of addictions in America now and how it encompasses so many things that we do. As I finished your book I thought the ultimate addiction will be identity politics, precisely because of these categories- Joshua Mitchell (43:19): Yeah. Richard Reinsch (43:20): … you’ve been discussing and the ability to find a transgressor and place everything on that person. Also, as you discuss, though very nicely put about the 1619 Project, the power of the state, that itself becomes it’s own deity that can call forth our worship because of what it can offer us if we get it right and getting it right also means finding who’s getting it wrong. Why is there an unending series of transgressors in your account? The White heterosexual male will be displaced at some point and a new, probably White females will enter that place and so on and so forth, why is there a need for constant transgressors? Joshua Mitchell (44:03): Identity politics is a theodicy. It’s an account of how there is evil in the world. The way I … well, I have to return to what I said at the outset, which is that it’s a relationship. The Christian theological formulation, the Son is eternally present as the innocent one and we are eternally present as the transgressors, by virtue of our inheritance from Adam. That’s the Christian theology. The identity politics theodicy is an eminent theodicy of good and evil. Here’s the problem, now we dumped everything on the toxic male, toxic masculinity. Of course toxicity is a medical term and so is purgation. We’re using these medical terms to indicate that we have to expunge something from the body social. Let’s imagine that we do, let’s imagine that we socially avoid our natural desire to be protective and to go to battle for noble causes, it’s okay, we’ll send them into the video universe. They’re going to stay there. They know where they belong, they’ll just play their games, we’ll let them do that. Let’s imagine we purge the White male. You have a theodicy problem. People are still experiencing this sense of guilt and stain, so they need to find a new person who can bear the burden for this, because the problem is clearly not within them. The Christian claims it’s within you, because you’re all inherited with Adam, but no, it can’t be. But wait, we’ve gotten rid of the White heterosexual male. You need a new scapegoat. You always have to have a scapegoat. The great Christian insight is there’s a divine scapegoat, stop looking at other people. If you get rid of that divine scapegoat, then you’re going to have to find a new scapegoat group. My argument is the next group will be White women. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe … it’s very interesting to look at the tension between Nancy Pelosi and the squad. Richard Reinsch (46:03): Yeah, yeah. Joshua Mitchell (46:04): One way of looking at that is that, in point of fact, this is the beginning of the purging of the White women. Look, Joe Biden is kind of an impotent man, that’s the only reason he’s allowed to be the candidate. He proves everything that identity politics says about the White man. He’s impotent, he’s a buffoon, he’s perfect. We get rid of him, Biden’s the last of the White men and then, look at Pelosi and, I put this in quotes, women of color who want to take over the Democratic Party. The White woman is next, she’s clearly next. Then my point is it’s the Black heterosexual male who believes in the family and goes to church, he is the next guy. He’s Martin Luther King. He’s the next guy, because if you have a theodicy and it’s based on eminent groups, then once you get rid of the transgressor, you need to find another one and it will go on and on and on and on. You need to have the high, to come back to your point about addiction, you need to have the high of saying, “That’s the person.” If we can just purge him, if we can just shame him and humiliate him and call him a leper by declaring he’s a fascist homophobe, I’m going through my list, hater, denier, Nazi, what are the other ones? Transphobe, Islamophobe, I mean these are all equivalent terms. They basically mean you are the scapegoat on whom I’m going to vent my cathartic rage in order to get high. That’s identity politics. It can never end. It can never end. At the end, as I say, I speculate hundreds of years into the future, I say at some point, after hundreds of years of cruelty to one group after another, it may occur to someone that maybe the guilt that never goes away can’t be expunged by looking outwards. Maybe it has to look inwards and maybe we have to recognize that there’s only a divine solution to this guilt that’s always eternally within us. That’s the agony. It can’t work is what I’m saying. It can’t work, but people are continuing to try. Richard Reinsch (48:15): Now you and I would like to avoid that fate of hundreds of years of agony, of the sclerosis that would result from this kind of politics. You know this, being in higher education in our elite sectors of our society, journalism, education, politics, entertainment, law, more and more institutions, it’s not that just that they’ve been overtaken, I mean they’ve just willingly given in, surrendered and now wear this stuff. That was sort of the story as the sporting season’s got underway. There’s willingness to take this on and to flaunt this. The question is renewal, I think your answer would be the liberal politics of competence, but we have really only one political party, some of it’s people understand what’s going on. Your prospects though for renewal here are, what? Joshua Mitchell (49:10): I said one thing which is Black Americans. The beginning of the end of identity politics will take two forms. One, when Black Americans say, “No, this is not what the Reverend Martin Luther King had in mind.” No, you cannot trade on what happened in slavery, I’m very precise about what I mean here. You can say women have been oppressed, gays have been oppressed, fine, you can say all that and it’s true. In a society that’s concerned with generation, women and people outside the generative mode are going to have a second place standing. If we’re not concerned with generation then all bets are off, but it can’t be the case that those groups can say, “Our problems are like what happened in slavery.” What happened in slavery was the destruction of the family, this is what we have to get. Every feminist I know had a mother and a father. Every gay person I know can at least say they had a mother and family that wasn’t ripped apart by law. That’s the difference. That’s why the family, the so-called heteronormative family, sorry, you don’t touch it. You don’t touch it for the reason that the least among us need it. Full stop. Now a plural society, and here’s perhaps where I differ from some Conservatives, whatever your religious convictions may be, a plural society will be one which does not demand that everybody do the same thing, but it does demand that generation has to come first. I’m perfectly fine being tolerant, but I’m not prepared if the tolerance means that I am guilty of a thought crime called heteronormativity. Sorry, that cannot work. That’s not liberal. Liberal is there are things that a society must do and it must do them first. If there’s room for other things, those are political decisions that we can make and you have to live with the political decisions. In that sense I’m not quite in the Conservative camp on this matter. But where I think we must push back is we have to say, “Look, a society has to regenerate itself and you can’t tell the people who are doing that, especially, as it were, the least among us who are struggling, you can’t say that the very institution through which you can find stability to do that is guilty of a thought crime.” It can’t work. I think the first hopeful sign is that Black Americans are beginning to wake up. I hear from Bob Woodson through his network there is a slow awakening here. There’s something seriously wrong with the left right now that claims to have the backs of Black American. They do, by the way, just before every four year election and then you forget about them. I think that’s exactly what Black Americans are seeing. The other place of renewal, and I don’t see it right now but it’s going to be necessary, are the churches and the synagogues, because they’re the only place where this can be set right. I don’t think there’s a political solution to this problem, because the problem is that the category of transgression and innocence has just drifted out of religion into politics. Only when it returns to religion will we be able to return to a liberal politics of competence. That’s a very tall order and I don’t see it happening really in the divinity schools. I think the Martin Luther King idea of what a Church is supposed to be is still alive and well in some portions of Black communities, although identity politics has penetrated there too. The so-called White churches, they’re the worst of it. They’re practicing, as you say, White people going out and kissing the feet of the innocent ones, this is really twisted. Do we have a legacy that must be fixed? Absolutely. There’s a wounded America that we have to pay attention to. I’m not saying it’s unimportant, it is tremendously important, but we have to get it right. We have a collective responsibility, but not collective guilt. I mean, look, most of us can’t trace ancestors back who had slaves. Even if we could, are we to bear the burden of things that happened generations ago? Or is there a promise of redemption? That’s the great question. The churches themselves have betrayed their charge. Richard Reinsch (53:04): Well Joshua Mitchell, on that, why don’t we bring this conversation to an end? This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. Josh Mitchell discussing his book, American Awakening. Joshua Mitchell (53:16): My pleasure.

Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with David Goldman about his new book, You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World. David Goldman is the author of the widely read Spengler column for the Asia Times. He’s an award-winning Wall Street strategist. He’s worked for Credit Suisse. He was the head of global trading research for Bank of America. And he was an investment banker for a Hong Kong boutique called Reorient, which was purchased by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba. He also is widely read and published in foreign policy and national security. He’s advised the US National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and institutional investors globally. He’s the author of a number books, including most recently, How Civilizations Die. David Goldman, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. David Goldman: Thank you so much for inviting me, Richard. Richard Reinsch: David, on your book, two items from China everyone is discussing, and I know that they in some way feature into what you’ve written. First, China’s move to encroach upon, if not eliminate, the semi-autonomous zone of freedom given to Hong Kong. Recently, the British government has offered to every Hong Kong citizen, I’ve read, a passport or some sort of regularized status in the United Kingdom. Your thoughts on what China is doing there? David Goldman: Hong Kong has never been a Chinese city. It was a British city. It was founded by the British at the beginning of the opium trade. The majority of its population never wanted to be Chinese. So I think the biggest mistake Margaret Thatcher made in her glorious career was to cede Hong Kong and Kowloon to China when she didn’t have to. Most of the Chinese population hasn’t liked this. There is a significant independence movement in Hong Kong. From the Chinese standpoint, China’s like a Roach Motel. Once you go in, you don’t get out. The Chinese are always terrified that if one rebel province can secede, they’ll all secede. So they will use whatever measures they need to prevent that. Their solution to this long term is going to be a population tragedy. A lot of the Hong Kongers who don’t like living under Chinese rule will leave. They’ll go to Taiwan, Britain, Canada, some to the United States. More and more people will migrate to Hong Kong from the mainland, and eventually it will become a Chinese city. Richard Reinsch: So your thinking there, what China stands to gain is really consolidation. They’re worried about the sinner pulling away from the country in some way, or people seeing Hong Kong be successful, operate on its own, without Chinese authority or control. David Goldman: Well, it’s worried about secession. There is a significant secession movement. And the most important thing that’s happened with the new national security law is that it has become illegal, seditious to talk about secession. So a lot of the pro-Taiwan, anti-Beijing protestors have simply left the island and will never come back. Remember, China is not a country. We tend to think of it as a country. It is a heterogeneous empire with 200 languages spoken in 90 major ethnic groups, and always at risk of falling apart. The Chinese Empire, whoever runs it, whether it’s called an Imperial Dynasty or a Communist Party, lives in terror of a rebel province that will encourage other rebel provinces. So that’s why China will go to war over Taiwan. It will never allow Taiwan independence without a real fight. It has a good deal to do with why China is being so aggressive in the South China Sea. Xi Jinping told this to Barack Obama during the APEC summit in 2015. There’s an old Chinese proverb: kill the chicken while the monkey watches. Well, the South China Sea is the chicken, and Taiwan is the monkey here. China is saying, “We’re willing to go to war over a bunch of empty atolls based on some glorious old map. Think of what we’ll do with Taiwan. Think of what we’ll do with Hong Kong.” So that’s China’s method of governance going back thousands of years. Sadly, there’s a continuity between what was always a very heterogeneous set of men who has a very cruel empire and what the Chinese are doing today. This is based on traditional Chinese governance. It’s not per se a function of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The West has underestimated Asians for the past century and change. The Russians underestimated the Japanese during the 1905 war. The British underestimated the Japanese at Singapore. The French underestimated the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. And I think we can say fairly that the American military in the ’60s underestimated the North Vietnamese Army. We simply have difficulty believing that a culture so different from ours, and one that was so impoverished and humiliated for such a long period of time could come back so quickly.  Richard Reinsch: On another front, something else people are discussing widely right now is a video purporting to show Uighur Muslims, who have been persecuted by the Chinese government for years, being loaded onto train cars to be sent to concentration camps. That’s widely believed. There was a fascinating segment the other night on BBC, where the BBC commentator presented this video to the Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, who was literally speechless and had nothing to say. I mean, it was sort of a fascinating interview. What’s going on here from the Chinese standpoint, and what they’re doing to this population? David Goldman: Every Chinese I’ve talked to, ranging from senior officials of the Foreign Ministry to taxi drivers, when asked, “What are you going to do about the Uighur problem,” has said, “We’re going to kill them all.” China has had a policy of exterminating what it considers unruly barbarians on its borders for a very long time. Their attitude towards the Uighurs is that they don’t want to assimilate into China. You get the traditional Chinese choice, which is column A, you become Chinese, column B, we kill you all, and there isn’t anything on the menu. I don’t have detailed information about what’s happening in Xinjiang Province to the Uighurs. It’s impossible to get reporters in. The Asia Times is not able to send correspondents in like the rest of the world press. However, the suppression of the Uighurs through forced sterilization, forced use of birth control, cultural suppression amounts to a slow motion ethnocide. In other words, an attempt to extirpate this culture entirely. So putting Uighurs in concentration camps would not surprise me. They’ve already put between one and two million Uighurs through reeducation camps. From a Western standpoint, this is repugnant and brutal. From the standpoint of the vast majority of Chinese, it’s business as usual. Richard Reinsch: That’s incredible. You write about the transformation, the economic transformation that has happened in China. I welcome you to talk more about that. The way they’ve brought hundreds of millions of people from the rural countryside into their cities, the tremendous growth of Chinese cities, and their economy, their technological transformation. Why did American policymakers for so long underestimate China? David Goldman: The West has underestimated Asians for the past century and change. The Russians underestimated the Japanese during the 1905 war. The British underestimated the Japanese at Singapore. The French underestimated the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu. And I think we can say fairly that the American military in the ’60s underestimated the North Vietnamese Army. We simply have difficulty believing that a culture so different from ours, and one that was so impoverished and humiliated for such a long period of time could come back so quickly. But you look at the economic miracle of South Korea, you look at the transformation of Japan from a rural society in the 1860s to a major industrial power by the beginning of the 20th century. China’s rise is not at all without precedent. We saw the same kind of thing in Japan and Korea before. The difference is that China has 1.4 billion people. As you mentioned, they’ve moved in the past 35 years nearly 600 million people from countryside to city. That’s the equivalent of the whole of Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine building a new Glasgow, a new Rome, a new Lisbon, a new Helsinki. Build every city in Europe to accommodate that many people. That’s the biggest economic transformation in history. I don’t know if it’s the fastest. But I calculate that per capita household consumption in China has risen nine times, 900% in the past 30 years. That’s one generation. When you talk to Chinese, they’ll tell you, “Well, I grew up with a dirt floor and an outhouse and an outside pump. Now, my kids have indoor plumbing and central heating and a car.” It’s a completely different kind of world. So however brutal and repugnant the Communist Party of China has been, the economic accomplishments of China are real. Walk around Chinese cities. I urge people to just go onto YouTube and look at tours of Chinese cities that you’ve never heard of: Chengdu, Chongqing, Hefei. Names that you don’t know. These are cities of 30 million people that look like science fiction movie sets that were third-world backwaters just 20 years ago. This is an incredible transformation, and the energy and intelligence of the Chinese people is impressive. I am not a panda hugger. I’m not a Sinophile. I don’t like Chinese culture. I find it brutal, and from a Western standpoint, in many ways repugnant. But it’s nonetheless impressive, and underestimating it would be a terrible error. Richard Reinsch: Yeah. So if we think about the standard post-Cold War view of our elites, bipartisan, that has this middle class forum which you’ve just described, as the wealth grew, there would be this just natural desire for democracy or some sort of civil society rule of law to form. That hasn’t formed. It’s evident, as you know, that we’re moving from that post-Cold War view. Help us think more about … Help us understand China. Help us understand maybe their thinking about who the human person is. Because that seems to me interesting alone in how this has not produced any sort of desire for more freedom. So the Chinese have no experience of self-governance. In place of democratic governance, you have a selection of supposedly the smartest people, or at least the best exam takers in the country. Imagine if the United States were ruled by a committee of National Merit Scholars, that was a self-perpetuating elite run by exams. David Goldman: Well, there are three things to understand about China, what makes China China, that go back literally 5,000 years. One is its enormous wealth and population are based on fertilized river valleys which could produce eight times the caloric content per acre with rice that Western European or Middle Eastern cultures could produce with wheat. So enormous wealth, but also enormous susceptibility to flooding and famine. So massive infrastructure to control floods has been the foundation of the Chinese Empire. When we look at things like the $2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative where China proposed to build infrastructure all across the Eurasian continent and basically lock it in to the Chinese Empire, that is the old Chinese imperial model extended into an external policy. The second thing to understand about China is imperial bureaucracy. For thousands of years, the smartest kids in the provinces that sat and taken an examination to become government officials, used to be called the mandarin system. You can see pictures from over 2,000 years ago of young Chinese sitting in an examination hold taking the mandarin exam. This is now the university entrance exam, the Gaokao, which is taken by nearly 10 million Chinese every year. About six out of 10 of whom get to go to university. If you look at the math questions on that, I doubt one in 500 American high school seniors could answer them. I know a little math, and they made me sweat. The third thing to understand is family. Chinese society is based on the extended family. It’s hierarchical. The emperor is like the big pater familias of the nation, and he has smaller pater familiases under him. The foundation of the Chinese economy has always been an extended family farm led by one pater familias. So you’ve never had a civil society where people have peers. No Chinese has ever sat on a school board or a little league committee. Everything’s always come top down. There’s no sense of rights and obligations as we have under Roman law, no sense of the divine spark of the individual as we have under ancient Hebrew law. What you have is a set of loyalties to hierarchy. That, in a thumbnail, is what Confucianism is about. So the Chinese have no experience of self-governance. In place of democratic governance, you have a selection of supposedly the smartest people, or at least the best exam takers in the country. Imagine if the United States were ruled by a committee of National Merit Scholars, that was a self-perpetuating elite run by exams. They’re awfully smart. The system is in many ways awfully inefficient. But they’re not stupid, and they’re incredibly ambitious. They’ve never liked their emperor. The emperor in China is just the capo di tutti i capi. He’s the guy who’s there to prevent the underbosses from killing each other. That’s exactly what they do when there isn’t a strong emperor. So the Chinese tend to like having a strong emperor because in their experience, when you don’t have one you have civil war, war widows, and you lose 10 or 20% of the population. Richard Reinsch: You said something in the book that stuck with me, and I wonder if you can elaborate on it. You’re touching on it here. The Chinese don’t have friends. David Goldman: Well, they don’t have friends in Aristotle’s sense of political friendship where you have a peer group that governs a city, and you have to form friendships in order to solve governance problems and advance policies. Everything in China comes from the top, so the Chinese tend to kiss up and kick down. You don’t question the order that comes down from the top because it’s bad for your health. You could become a kidney donor real fast. And the people below you, you simply tell them what to do. You’re the pater familias. They owe you loyalty. You’re supposed to be benevolent under Confucian philosophy. But in fact, you have absolute control. As I’ve said, there is no subsidiarity. There is no civil society structure. Everything is up and down as opposed to parallel. So the Western concept of political friendship, which was first enunciated by Aristotle, is something which the Chinese simply have never experienced. It’s also a winner-take-all system. There are only a certain number of places. So you have to look to your left and right when you’re in second grade, and decide who you’re going to step over to get ahead. Richard Reinsch: So listening to you describe China, it’s almost as if our foreign policy consensus in the post-Cold War period was at odds with reality, at odds with their cultural, economic, political reality. I mean, it sounds absurd that we thought this. David Goldman: Richard, I agree with you. The whole idea that China was going to evolve into a Western style democracy simply because they got more prosperous ignores the fact that this is a culture that’s been around for 5,000 years, which operated radically differently from Judeo-Christian cultures. This is the purest form of paganism. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, it’s incredible. David Goldman: It is. Well, the Chinese are probably the least spiritual people in the world. They believe in fate and themselves. When you say, “Well, what’s Chinese religion?” Well, you can say that there’s Buddhism, there’s some Daoism, there’s some household gods. But the Chinese really are down-to-earth pragmatic. How do I advance my family? How do I get rich? Richard Reinsch: On this point, in the book you say China has no desire for war or military confrontation with America. It does desire global economic domination in many respects, and I want to talk about that specifically. One point you make is their technological prowess matches ours, if not surpassing us in quantum computing now. Their ability to deploy the coming generation of 5G technology surpasses America’s, or anything a Western corporation could offer. How did that tech superiority or equality emerge so fast? David Goldman: Well, we got very complacent after we won the Cold War. We decided we were so powerful that we could rest on laurels and coast. We could, under the Clinton administration, turn NATO into a responsibility to protect kind of social work organization. Or the George W. Bush, we could go out to support democracy to the world. I think that was a big mistake. I very much agree with President Trump in his criticism of that kind of policy. With the Chinese, they watched what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They saw the United States created technological miracles that no one could have imagined. We created the digital age, the fast microchip, optical networks, plasma displays, the internet, graphic user interface. Everything that goes into modern economy came from America’s commitment for superiority over the Soviet Union, Defense Department funding of public-private partnerships with US corporations. Chinese watched this, and they learned. So China is attempting to emulate what the United States did in the 70s and 80s as it won the Cold War. It has a vast budget for public support for advanced technologies. China’s idea is that there’s going to be a fourth industrial revolution. That industrial revolution is going to be based on artificial intelligence. And whoever controls the porting and storage and processing of data is going to run the world, because that’s going to allow you to have industrial robots talk to each other and automatically program themselves in flexible manufacturing. It’s going to allow artificial applications to medical diagnoses based on analysis of billions of people’s digitized medical records, DNA, and daily upload of vital signs into the computer cloud. It’ll be based on autonomous driving vehicles, detailed analysis of consumer behavior. And 5G internet is kind of like the railroad in the 19th century, which was the carrier for all these other technologies that made them possible. They want to dominate that, and they want to dominate the industrial applications. They saw the United States dominate the third industrial revolution, the computation revolution. They want to dominate the artificial intelligence revolution. Richard Reinsch: The Chinese government invested a lot of money in this technology itself with the idea that the spinoffs, the entrepreneurial creativity and how those would be deployed in various ways would come, but they wanted to beat us in this technology front. You argue they’ve largely succeeded. David Goldman: The Chinese People’s Congress, at the end of May, just approved a $2.2 trillion five-year technology budget for any number of things. I mean, 5G itself, the Chinese are spending, according to a study by Deloitte, three times what we spend per capita on 5G. They’ll have the fastest rollout. They also are the biggest market for robotics in the world. The last I saw, their robotic purchases have gone up 25% year on year. And the chief technology officer of Huawei, whom I interview in the book You Will Be Assimilated, explained to me that with 5G and artificial intelligence, you can get a bunch of industrial robots in a factory floor, give them an assignment, and they will work out autonomously a production process that human engineers wouldn’t come up with, in a tiny fraction of the time. So the implications for manufacturing productivity are just staggering. You add that to medical diagnosis. I mean, let’s say you’ve got hundreds of millions of digitized medical records and DNA, and you have a smart phone that takes your blood oxygen content, your temperature, your blood pressure, and so forth with attachments. And with these hundreds of millions of people, in real time, uploading their vital signs into artificial intelligence services run by servers run by Huawei. What’s already happening, Richard, is that every pharmaceutical company in the world is setting up shop in China because the data the Chinese have is a vast mine for researching new drugs, interactions, genetic defects, and so forth. The Chinese computer scientists aren’t any smarter than Google. I think Google’s probably the best computation company in the world. But if you think of artificial intelligence as the engine, data is the fuel. And China, where there’s no guarantee of personal data protection, has the biggest trove of data for medical research in the world. Richard Reinsch: On the question of Huawei, which you write about compellingly in the book, and in this interview you’ve mentioned. Their position versus, say, Silicon Valley. Because we always think Silicon Valley has the best technology, the best creativity. Capital is flowing to the best opportunities, those with the best ideas. And there’s Huawei out here which seems to be in position to supply all of Europe with 5G, if not many other countries around the world. Where are we on this? I take it we have the technology. It’s just what? The ability to deploy it or implement it? David Goldman: Well, starting about 20 years ago, American technology companies decided that they were much better off in terms of share price by letting the Asians do the manufacturing. Not just China, but also Korea and Japan and Taiwan. Now, to some extent, Vietnam. Let the Asians do the dirty work, and we do the software. Software, if you’re successful, has incredibly high return on equity, because the marginal cost of adding a customer is zero. They just download the software from the internet and pay you. So a company like Cisco, which used to dominate the hardware for internet routers has basically gotten out of the manufacturing business entirely. There was a report in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. It mentioned that the US government, specifically Larry Kudlow, the head of the President’s Economic Council, had gone to Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, and said, “Well, why don’t you go and buy another big telecommunications equipment manufacturer? Go buy Ericsson so we would have a national champion to compete with Huawei.” And Robbins told him, “Cisco’s not in the business of buying low-margin companies.” In fact, Ericsson’s return on equity is a fraction of that of Cisco. So if they did that, Cisco’s stock price might go down. The problem is not so much that we don’t have smart people. It’s that the US tech sector made a conscious decision to become dependent on China for the production of hardware. And of course, the Chinese, who excluded Google and other US companies from the Chinese market, has spent vast amounts of money developing their own software, their own computation, and are now in position to compete with us in the software field, as well. I think this was terribly short-sighted. But I don’t want to entirely put the blame on the tech companies because in Asia, capital-intensive businesses are subsidized the way we subsidize sports stadiums. We don’t have that kind of subsidy in the United States. So to some extent, we are running according to an industrial policy which steers people into that kind of choice. The problems is it’s not our policy. It’s China’s industrial policy which is guiding our investment decisions. Richard Reinsch: So just thinking about that, I mean, you and I are both students of free market economics, understand those arguments well. Let’s just play this out, though. Is it not the case though, that in subsidizing these things and having incredible government directed investment, that the technology over time is deficient? Or that resources themselves aren’t being well-utilized and, say, the Silicon Valley sector should over time find the highest and best uses, not only for capital but technology itself? David Goldman: I think China’s system is extremely vulnerable because any kind of top-down system tends to make very bad choices, but there are certain kinds of subsidies which stood us in good stead in the past. I think the right division of labor is the key. For example, under Reagan we spent about 1-1/4% of our gross domestic product on federal support for R&D. What that meant is that RCA Labs and GE Labs and IBM Labs would get a research grant from DARPA, and they’d do basic research. Bell Labs, their people won Nobel Prizes doing things there. That produced things like the semiconductor laser, which made optical networks like cable television possible. Produced fast and light computer chips, which made look-down radar in F-15s possible. The US government did not build enterprises. It subsidized the basic R&D, but it let the private sector take the risk of commercialization. Now, to some extent, the Chinese have tried to emulate that. If you look at the National People’s Congress, the entity which just passed this $2.2 trillion technology investment budget the end of May. In that People’s Congress, there are 100 billionaires. The different between the Chinese and the Russians is the Russians said, “You’re a good engineer. Have a good invention. We’ll give you the Order of Lenin and maybe a dacha.” The Chinese say, “You’re a good engineer. Produce a good invention. We’ll let you do an IPO in the Shanghai Market and become a billionaire.” So to some extent, the Chinese have combined that kind of incentive into their system, and let a lot of people take private sector risk. It’s sort of a mixed thing. Now, I believe that American ingenuity and the American system, if it’s unleashed, can do a lot better than China. I saw this in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a very young man. In the late 1970s, everybody thought Russia would win the Cold War. The Russian economy was doing wonderfully, and the United States was a declining power. Reagan came in. By 1982, it was clear that the United States would win a conventional war, and the Russians weren’t too sure they wanted to fight a nuclear war. That was the beginning of the end for communism. We turned them around in a very short period of time. Richard Reinsch: You used the word unleashed. What’s leashing, say, America’s tech firms now? David Goldman: If you look at what our kids are doing, we graduate, I think, about 40,000 mechanical engineers a year. That’s not half what Germany does. A tiny fraction of China. The smartest kids aren’t going into manufacturing because the smartest companies aren’t investing in manufacturing. Really ambitious kids at US universities want to either go with a software or a Goldman Sachs, so they study mathematical finance or computer science. The danger is we end up being, if you pardon the expression, geeks in a new Roman Empire. I think we need a very strong signal from the government, including very strong tax incentives and, in rare cases, subsidies for manufacturing investment. We have to get our best talent thinking about manufacturing, particularly the kind of artificial intelligence, computer-driven manufacturing, which the Chinese call the fourth industrial revolution. We need to restore the level of federal support for R&D that we had under Reagan and under Kennedy. We need to get US corporations to understand that their future depends on the future of the United States, and they have to put the kind of effort into R&D that they did back when Bell Labs was the wonder of the world. Nobody knows what happened to Bell Labs. Well, it still exists, because Nokia bought the assets of Lucent. It’s now called Shanghai Bell. It’s sitting in Shanghai, and Nokia employs 16,000 Chinese scientists and engineers in China doing research there. That’s our problem. Richard Reinsch: It’s interesting. You’re saying this is a national security exception to markets and we just need to draw that line, and the government has to step in in various ways to push things forward because the market itself isn’t, or American companies operating in the market aren’t recognizing this problem. David Goldman: There are always things government does for the general welfare, and promoting science and engineering research, basic research, is something the government legitimately can do. I don’t like the idea of the government picking winners. That always lead to corruption and cronyism and inefficiency. Entrepreneurs will take risks, but it’s hard to get entrepreneurs to take risks on the unknown unknowns, when you’re talking about something where the science isn’t yet established. When we talk about Bell Labs in the past producing Nobel Prize winners, it’s because they did basic science. Texas Instruments in 1958 invented the integrated circuit. That was basic science, and that happened because you had federal support for that. So I think there’s a legitimate basis for that, but there is a real world out there. We’ve got competitors. So to the extent that the Chinese have tilted the pool table by producing massive subsidies for capital-intensive industries … Not just the Chinese. Koreans and Japanese, as well. That’s the Asian model. We have no choice but to respond in kind in some cases. As much as I’m an old supply sider or old free marketer, our economy is being guided, as I said, to a great extent by somebody else’s industrial policy. We have an industrial policy like, “They’re not the problem. It’s not ours. It’s China’s.” Richard Reinsch: It seems to me also in this regard, and I don’t know what your thoughts are. Marco Rubio favors an industrial policy. This seem to be much more about bringing manufacturing jobs to America, and that’s a key element of it. I guess my fear is that actually doesn’t do what you want to do, which is advance science and research in order to push technological bounds with likely commercial applications. It seems to me this is more of a, “Well, we just want to bring the past back.” David Goldman: Richard, I share your views. I wrote a response to Senator Rubio’s paper, which I thought was a good contribution to the debate, on the website of Claremont, The American Mind. I said you have to treat these problems as different. If you want to make a case for promoting industrial employment because it’s a good thing for American workers, make that case separate. But we also have a national security issue, which has to be pursued on its own merits. If you lump these two things together in an overall industrial policy, you tend to get into a pinata grab for funding by people. Congressmen who want money for their district, and industries who want subsidies. We have to distinguish very carefully what the policy objectives are. Clearly, it can’t bring the past back. And in fact, the best kind of manufacturing, the kind that really could reshore efficiently American production is going to be very capital intensive. It won’t involve a whole lot of workers. If you look at the pinnacle of manufacturing today, that’s chip production. That involves 10 different processes, each of which is incredibly complex and involves massive amounts of investment. A new chip foundry costs about $20 billion and employs a few hundred workers. So what we have to figure, is that if we have a massive increase in productivity, that’s going to lead to all kinds of spinoff. Take the optical network. One result of that is we created hundreds of thousands of jobs in building out the cable TV industry. Building out cable created a massive surge in employment, and well-paid employment. There weren’t a lot of people employed produced in the lasers that went into the optical networks, but the secondary effects created a vast number of jobs. Richard Reinsch: Okay. Yeah, well said. Thinking here, you’re aware of this as well. I just want to go through, because there’s also a counter argument or counter thinking to your position on China, that the country may be more brittle than we might think. I want to get your response to those. Thinking about the Belt and Road Initiative, you’ve written a lot about that. What’s China doing there? But then also, is it not just sort of massively overextending itself and eventually creating a lot of debt problems? Basically, it’s just not going to recoup the gains that it’s invested. David Goldman: China has some serious problems. The Belt and Road Initiative has been very poorly done. Chinese really don’t have the expertise in dealing with a lot of countries where they’ve thrown a lot of money around and created a lot of white elephant projects and a lot of bad debt. They do have $3 trillion worth of foreign exchange reserves, and they do have a current account surplus. With that kind of starting position, you can afford a number of mistakes. But I think the Belt and Road has been, in many ways, a disappointment in some ways, in other ways it hasn’t. If you look at Southeast Asia for example, that’s 600 million people. China’s imports from Southeast Asia have just exploded. Southeast Asia has become a source of not just cheap raw materials, but cheap manufactured goods for China. As the cost of labor has gone up in China, they have substituted cheaper labor in Southeast Asia. And as the Chinese labor force has ceased to grow, the Chinese population is stagnant, they’ve managed to integrate into the Chinese economy the labor of hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia. So it’s a very mixed picture. In terms of China’s debt profile, China’s debt to GDP is about the same as the United States. The difference is that government debt is much lower and corporate debt is much higher. Look at the corporate debt levels. They’re staggering. A lot of people have said, “Gee, aren’t they all going to go bankrupt?” Well, we did a study of this at Asia Times. The thing about China is that infrastructure has been the key to Chinese productivity growth, and the cost of that infrastructure was placed on the balance sheet of state-owned companies. So the majority of corporate debt is related to building railroads, building oil refineries, building airports, building roads, harbors, and so forth. That shows up as corporate debt simply because you have state-owned companies doing that instead of having a municipal corporation that issues municipal bonds and builds the infrastructure. It’ll go onto the balance sheet of Shanghai Pudong Development Corporation, which does ports, or China Petroleum, or China Tower, which builds towers. So a lot of that debt is infrastructure related. Although it looks like a lot, it’s fairly sound. Now, where the Chinese have a serious problem is in the housing market. In the United States, the average cost of a house is four or fives the annual income. In China, 10 to 20 times the annual income, depending on the part of the country. Now, Hong Kong is 50 times. That’s because the savings of the Chinese people have gone overwhelmingly into houses, because they’ve never trusted the stock market. That’s viewed as a casino. So housing prices are excessive. If they go up much further, people won’t be able to buy a house. If they go down, you wipe out the savings. So very carefully, the Chinese government is trying to shift household assets away from housing into the stock market, and make it better regulated and less a casino-like entity. That’s a significant problem. They’re trying to address it. That could lead to a major issue for them. Now, typically, countries that have current account surpluses … In other words, they’re not dependent on borrowing money from overseas. They’re not lenders to overseas … and very high savings rates and have economic growth don’t have unmanageable crisis. They have adjustments they can deal with. China has a current account surplus, a 44% national savings rate as opposed to about 18% in the United States. Richard Reinsch: I’m surprised it’s that high. David Goldman: Vast savings rate. High. That’s households, corporations, government. Very high savers. And it has economic growth. So the idea that China is going to have an unmanageable financial crisis as opposed to some painful adjustments here and there is, in my view, highly improbable. There’s simply no record of a country that has those three criteria getting into really crippling financial problems. I don’t believe China’s demographic problems are going to hold them back massively. However, if China doesn’t fix them, China will go into a decline towards the end of the 21st century.  Richard Reinsch: Talk about how is capital deployed in China? I mean, is there this idea of a market of winners and losers, and it happens apart from state direction or state funding or financing. I mean, describe that process for us. David Goldman: Well, for most of the past 30 years, 40 years, capital in China has come from state-owned banks. A state-owned bank is basically a bureaucrat with a shovel standing next to a barrel of cash, waiting for a state-owned company to come along with a bucket, and he shovels some cash into the bucket. So even though you have this clever mandarin caste composed of the top exam scores in the country directing the investments, and they’re not stupid people, massive inefficiencies have cropped up in that. Increasingly, China is trying to use equity markets as source of financing. For example, Semiconductor International Corporation, SMIC, China’s biggest chip foundry, just did an IPO for tens of billions of dollars at a value that’s now tripled in the mainland markets. Ant Financial, which is the biggest consumer payments company in the world with 900 million customers. That’s Jack Ma’s big company. Ant Financial is going to come to market and do an IPO for, I think, $40 billion, which would make it the biggest IPO in history. So there is a significant amount of money which is being channeled into new enterprises, new technologies through equity markets. That’s what China is trying to do. Now, of course when you allow the markets to make decisions, that is a certain kind of democracy. That gives the public a certain kind of veto on government policy. Because if they don’t like your policy, they don’t have to buy securities. Same with bonds. So that does mean a certain kind of concession of power away from the center to the public on the part of the Communist Party, and they’re trying to make that concession very carefully and very gradually. By the way, one of the reasons they’ve invited American financial companies into China is to help them do that. Companies like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley now have wholly owned subsidiaries in China. The banks that are expected to manage this Ant Financial IPO, biggest IPO in history, are I believe Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan. So America’s financial sector is being given a huge incentive to help the Chinese government accomplish exactly this transition, and they’re very eager to do that. Richard Reinsch: Interesting. Thinking about other observations. One, you’ve mentioned the aging workforce, but also birthrates, demographics. How do you see China trying to surmount those problems that it presents long term? David Goldman: China traditionally had a high birth rate. Children were the most valued possession. China imposed, 40 years ago, a one-child policy, which is the cruelest demographic policy since King Herod or Pharaoh. It forced people to have only one child. Of course, the result is that China’s population growth is old. Its workforce has stopped growing. And it’s said, “Well, now you can go ahead and have two children.” It doesn’t appear that the population is responding very quickly to this incentive, partly because China created a set of winner-take-all incentives in which the average family will spend the equivalent of a year’s income in tutoring fees so their one child can get ahead in the university system, can get the brass ring. So whether the Chinese population will get out of this hole or not, is not clear. As I mentioned, a great deal of the motivation for the one belt, one road policy is for China to lock in the available pools of usable labor around the world, of which the biggest is the 600 million people in Southeast Asia. They’re not necessarily the biggest pool of labor. There are more people in Africa. But if you want to find people who will show up to work on time, follow instructions, and be able to read the users manual, that’s Southeast Asia. So to some extent, that will buffet. For the next 20 or 30 years, which will be the critical years for us, I don’t believe China’s demographic problems are going to hold them back massively. However, if China doesn’t fix them, China will go into a decline towards the end of the 21st century. That, however, will not be soon enough to bail us out. So although it’s something to watch carefully, I don’t think we can count on China going into a demographic winter that’s going to cripple them as a strategic rival in the kind of time horizon that we really care about. Richard Reinsch: We should see them as a rival. Not as an enemy, not as an ally, but as a rival. David Goldman: It’s like meeting a tiger in the jungle. A tiger isn’t wicked. It doesn’t hate you. It just looks at you and thinks protein source. China is the old pagan world. The concepts of good and evil don’t exist in the same way they exist in the Judeo-Christian worlds. Loyalty and obligation substitute for good and evil. So we will never be friends with China. It’ll take a very long time, if ever, for China to decide that the Judeo-Christian concept of human society is superior to theirs. They’ve been around for thousands of years, and they change very slowly. Our system is better. I believe in the sanctity of the individual as the highest good in society, and that’s entirely absent from the Chinese system. But the Chinese idea of, “Let’s have a meritocracy of the cleverest people who run everything from the top,” occasionally does better than the messy brawl of democracy, and unfortunately. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, and I’ve been mentioning China’s weaknesses. We need a whole other podcast to mention our weaknesses, which are glaring and evident to all right now. In many ways, to even take seriously what you’re proposing requires a great effort on our part. David Goldman: Well, we did this before. We worked miracles when we beat the Russians in the Cold War, when we beat them in the Space Race, when we beat the Axis powers with the arsenal of democracy. America’s capacity, for a generation, has astonished the world before. But I really think we have to understand that this is a lot more serious than we’ve been telling ourselves, and we need to say goodbye to a lot of self-consoling illusions about where we stand in the world. This is the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced. Richard Reinsch: Wow. David Goldman, well said. We’ve been talking with the author of You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World. Thank you so much. David Goldman: Thank you so much for the conversation, Richard. It’s always a pleasure.

What does conservative nationalism mean for American foreign policy, immigration, trade, and other international commitments? Colin Dueck, author of the new book, Age of Iron, discusses these questions in this edition of Liberty Law Talk. Richard Reinsch: Today we’re talking with Colin Dueck about his new book, Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism. Colin is professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He has worked as a foreign policy advisor on several Republican presidential campaigns. He’s been a consultant for the State Department and Defense Department. He’s also the author of a number of other books including Reluctant Crusaders, Hard Line, and The Obama Doctrine. Professor Dueck, welcome. Colin Dueck: Thank you, Richard. Richard Reinsch: So thinking about this book, Age of Iron. I thought it was an interesting title, because of what we commonly associate, another phrase, blood and iron, or iron and blood to a nationalist of sorts, German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck who said that blood and iron would displace parliaments and parliamentary procedures. The title of your book, Age of Iron, I don’t think was meant to recall that. Colin Dueck: Well that’s right. Even though I often do ask myself what Bismarck would do in any given situation. But the term age of iron is from an ancient Greek myth that suggests that history can go down rather than up. In other words, you can have decline or decay over time. And so the reason I chose it is that I do think there was actually a kind of golden age of liberal internationalism, but that was a long time ago now, that was in the 1940s in my opinion. And so it’s been generations since that time. And so in a way, Trump, I think the Trump phenomenon is kind of an effect more than it is a cause of a number of long-term problems, or conditions including, for example, frustrations over globalization, and whether they benefit working Americans. Frustrations over military interventions that don’t seem to have successful and conclusive endings. Frustration over national sovereignty that seem to leave decision making further and further out of touch. So I think these are some of the trends that fed into the Trump phenomenon back in 2016. Richard Reinsch: So Age of Iron in a way, just kind of thinking about your answer, you’re challenging standard ways we as Westerners, as Americans, think about the future, as you call it, Whig theory of history, or a progressive theory of history that history changes, but is always in ascent upwards in the realm of greater individualism, greater material security, greater prosperity, all of these things we associate. You’re perhaps suggesting, well, maybe that’s not the case, or if it is the case, it’s not that we’re going to necessarily proceed as we’ve done in the past. We might have to do things differently than we’ve done in the past, say 50 or 60 years. But that’s okay, and you go on to make an argument in the book for conservative nationalism. Maybe talk about that. What is conservative nationalism? Colin Dueck: Sure. So your first point, I think you got it exactly right, which is that the liberal, or the progressive view of international relations is that it’s kind of this long-term upward trend where we sort of transcend power politics through multilateral organization, interdependence, cultural exchange, human rights promotion. And I actually think that some of the central features of world politics haven’t really changed that much over time. I mean, there has been some progress, but power politics is a reality. So just denying it in a sort of a furious way doesn’t really get us very far. In fact, it leaves us actually at the mercy of our adversaries overseas. Richard Reinsch: What would you say is the biggest embodiment of liberal internationalism today? I mean, what are you sort of pushing against? Colin Dueck: The biggest flaw, is that it? Richard Reinsch: Or embodiment. Institutional representation of say liberal or progressive, and maybe I guess liberal internationalism isn’t necessarily progressive trans-nationalism but I also, I think about those in conjunction as the latter being a goal of the former, maybe. Colin Dueck: Sure. Well I think there’s the liberal internationalist tradition and there’s some variety within it, too. There’s people that are more hawkish people and more dovish, but you have a variety of think tanks, you have journals, you have leading newspapers. I mean, for the most part kind of the center left establishment really in DC and around the country, and certainly in Western Europe, I mean these are assumptions that are just taken for granted. I think that in the Democratic party, I mean if I had to name an institutional embodiment, I would say the Democratic party is dominated by liberal internationalists. And then you have interesting debate going on where progressive’s like Bernie Sanders, they don’t really argue with the liberal element, but they think that the US should be less interventionist militarily overseas. So that’s an interesting debate that’s going on right now on the left. But there’s really no debate over whether the core kind of left liberal progressive assumptions are true. I mean, if anything they are furiously offended by any suggestion that they’re not. But your question, I think the second part of the question was what is conservative nationalism. Richard Reinsch: What is conservative nationalism? Colin Dueck: In the American case, one of the points of the book is to point out that there are different versions internationally. So I’m not denying that there are versions of nationalism around the world that really are authoritarian. I mean, we’ve seen that over the past century, and beyond. But I think in the American case, there is a kind of core American nationalism that is benign, actually. I mean foreign policy, which is the main topic of the book, I really trace it back to George Washington in his Farewell Address where he said that the US should have no binding political commitments of a permanent nature. That it could be engaged and friendly with a wide variety of regimes, but that it should avoid those kinds of permanent alliance commitments. Colin Dueck: And so that was really the dominant strain well into the 20th century, and it was Woodrow Wilson who broke that, or challenged it by suggesting that the US could best serve and promote its interest and its values overseas through a set of global multi-lateral binding commitments as embodied in the League of Nations. And even though he’s failed in the short term, I think he had a lot of success ideologically in the long-term, because eventually that’s where mainstream US foreign policy elite sort of landed in a more practical way with FDR and Truman in the forties. So Republicans and conservatives for their part could never really figure out exactly how to handle Wilson. I mean, they knew they didn’t like him, but they had a lot of disagreement amongst themselves, and I traced those disagreements in the different factions. There’s a more non-interventionist faction that is very skeptical of any military engagement overseas. And then there are others that are more muscular, robust and those coalitions have formed and reformed over time, particularly when conservators are convinced if some concrete security challenge, whether it’s Soviet communism, or Al-Qaeda. But I think most conservatives, at the grassroots level, never really bought into the most ambitious Wilsonian vision for what the US should do overseas, and so eventually what you get after the frustrations of Iraq, and after Bush 43 has left office, you get this rethinking of what are we doing here? And Trump, in a way, tapped into that, and expressed at least one side of it very forcefully. And I see him as a resurgence of traditional American nationalism in foreign affairs. Not because I’m suggesting that he’s gone back and he’s possibly read these documents, but because he does have a point of view that he’s expressed pretty consistently for more than 30 years. He thinks that US allies are free-riders, that they free-ride off of the US economically, militarily, and otherwise, and that the US should assert itself, and assert its freedom of action, not only against adversaries, but actually against its own allies. So for better or worse, that that is his point of view. And it is a more traditional American nationalist foreign policy. And it’s the most dramatic such shift, I think, since really before World War II. I mean, who doesn’t take it for granted that liberal international model should be dominant. In fact, I don’t think he has much use for it, and he says so. Richard Reinsch: Well, let’s talk about nationalism just a little bit more here because as you know, and I certainly know people hear the word nationalism and they lose their breakfast, they get upset. There’s a fear that individual liberty will be swallowed up by a comprehensive government defining unilaterally what it means to be an American nationalist, or something like that, or pick the country. You said that’s benign just now, that nationalism in America has a benign tradition. And I wondered if we could talk more about that. In the book, you argue there’s a civic nationalism at the core here, and that’s also important because if we’re going to pursue this strategy you say was the mainstream tradition in American foreign policy thinking before Woodrow Wilson that also applies they’re acting on behalf of a certain understanding of America. I wonder if you could talk about those things. Colin Dueck: Sure. Yeah, that’s a good point. So I do think, and I say in the book that there is a kind of civic American creed which has these classical liberal elements well beyond foreign policy, and that it is fundamental to the founding, and it’s no coincidence that Jefferson writes into the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and that’s going to have foreign policy implications as well. So there is a kind of classical liberal element in the founding from the beginning, it is a civic form of nationalism, rightly understood, and in America at its best, which much of the time I think has tried to work toward that. Now, the implication for foreign policy is not that you have to intervene militarily all over the place, all the time. I mean, you’re hoping that eventually this order, this republican form of self government spreads, right, as the founder’s hoped, but they never dreamed that you could do this by force on all fronts at once. In fact, they took it for granted. You would have to have normal diplomatic relations, and even sometimes alliances with undemocratic regimes in order to promote US national interests so they could be quite hard nosed about that and that’s a lesson that’s useful as well. Richard Reinsch: Thinking about just the civic nationalism component, is there a sense in which that becomes a forward doctrine, that people want to use it to project American power abroad to make other people like us? Is that so illogical? Colin Dueck: It certainly has been used that way and it can be a problem. So when you have this tradition that says that we have our own civic creed, and we really believe it, and it says that all men are created equal, it might create the impression, for example, that you then have an obligation to spread democracy, for example, in a country that isn’t particularly ready for it. I mean, so we’ve seen this more than once. I mean one of the lessons that some drew in the United States after the end of the Cold War is that the experience of Eastern Europe could be transferred to other parts of the world, like the Middle East. As it turns out, Iraq for example, was not as ready for democracy as Poland. So if every foreign policy debate is just an attempt to project ourselves, or what we think it means to be an American onto other countries, that can actually be misleading. It’s not always very helpful, because you can get yourself into trouble when you’re talking about other parts of the world that are just very different in terms of their own political cultures. So I think it’s useful to always be very careful. We want to stick to our core principles. We have our own civic traditions, but what that means for a foreign policy is something we need to be very careful about. Richard Reinsch: You referenced George Washington as being a great representative, and our first president acting on behalf of American nationalism, and you referenced the Farewell Address and that phrase entangling alliances, avoid entangling alliances. Also, though, throughout the 19th century, and I’m just sort of thinking about your argument here, there’s also, though, a growing sense of American national power and one way that expresses itself as the continent is ours, the famous manifest destiny understanding. I guess one question for you is, how does conservative nationalism deal with hubris, or arrogance, or assertions of power on behalf of this growing 19th century reservoir of power America had, which has now made us this incredible nation? How does one deal with that? So I guess I’m also thinking what is a statesman trying to achieve with foreign policy, or an American statesman, I should say, particularly. Colin Dueck: Well, so, right. I think that’s right. In the 19th century, there is this growing sense of American power. And so as US statesmen are sticking to this model of no entangling alliances, they are at the same time expanding American influence, and trade dramatically. They’re expanding American territory across the continent. They are debating with each other what is right and what is appropriate. I mean, in fact, factions at that time often hurled the most violent nations against one another. So, apparently this isn’t entirely new to our era, but if you look at the Mexican war and other cases, both sides typically thought of themselves as being more true to the original tradition, but the overall pattern in 1800s is clearly an expansion of American power. And I think that in the end though, Washington’s foreign policy model continues to reign right into the 20th century. Now your question was about arrogance or hubris, are you thinking about at that time, or today? Richard Reinsch: Well, in any anytime really, I mean, but in particular because I think Washington, while I admire his statecraft, but Washington has a pretty weak country, and he’s got a lot of difficulty. So one can see circumstantially the need to be a great steward of that, and to be very protective and humble in how you approach the world. But what do you do in your post-Civil War Woodrow Wilson, you’ve got this industrial capitalist state which Woodrow Wilson possessed that could be marshaled into a war machine. Challenges like that. Challenges post-World War II you face international communism, international aggression, you’ve got an incredibly weak Europe that you’ve got to rebuild. I mean, all these sorts of things coming to play as well here and I guess what I’m asking you is, is there a philosophical core here to what you’re describing that would help us think about the use of power? Colin Dueck: Right. And so I think for conservatives throughout the 20th century, there was a constant wrestling with, on the one hand you don’t want to go all the way that Wilson has gone in arguing for this kind of dramatic handing over of US sovereignty. I mean, that was something all Republicans agreed during the Treaty of Versailles debate, even though Henry Cabot Lodge on the one hand is pretty hawkish against the Germans, agrees that the League of Nations goes too far. So the core principle there is it is not appropriate to hand over US national sovereignty to this multilateral organization. It should be the United States that preserves the right to choose war or peace for its own interests, and for the security and prosperity of the citizens. Now, over time eventually most conservatives, most Republicans become convinced of the need to act energetically overseas in more of a long-term way during the Cold War. And that’s one of the stories I tell in the book, is that it was that visceral anti-communism that sort of cemented conservative nationalists like let’s say a Senator Barry Goldwater, who didn’t have much use really for liberal foreign policy projects, but he was a staunch cold warrior. So that allowed for a coalition to form, right, for decades, which also continued successfully under Reagan. But then, after the end of the Cold War, the question becomes, what next? I mean, the Soviet Union’s collapsed, and so for many conservatives, the question is, why are we still doing this? And that’s where the point about arrogance or hubris comes in, because I think now looking back on it, it has to be admitted that there was a kind of hubris. And I think it was very sincere. And I think it was well intentioned, but the idea that history had kind of ended, that democracy and human rights would just continue to spread, that this could be done at low cost. The globalization of free trade would benefit everybody and be seen by everyone as mutually beneficial. If you look at George Bush’s, I’m talking about Bush 43 here, if you look at his 2005 Second Inaugural, he talks about the defeat of tyranny worldwide. It’s very ambitious, and I don’t doubt that he- Richard Reinsch: It’s a Wilsonian address. Colin Dueck: It’s Wilsonian. It is absolutely a Wilsonian statement. And I don’t doubt his sincerity. He’s an honorable man and he meant it, but it was overly confident, and Trump for all of the strangeness of the Trump phenomenon, I think one of the things Trump tapped into was a reaction to all of that. Looking back on the last quarter century to say, we’ve been very optimistic now for 25 years, 30 years about what globalization, free-trade, multilateral organization, military intervention would get us. Maybe we’ve been too optimistic, and we need to take a step back, and find some sort of more solid basis, or correction for this. And I do think for a lot of voters that that actually really resonated. Richard Reinsch: And I want to talk more about the Trump phenomenon, and what Trump currently represents. I did want to just briefly, because Woodrow Wilson is such an important figure in your book, and a parting of the waters you argue, but also before him we have Teddy Roosevelt, and you point to him as a good example of conservative nationalism, and maybe people don’t know so much about Roosevelt’s foreign policy thinking, or his conservative nationalism, maybe they’ve heard quotes, things like that. Maybe delve more into what separates those two men on this question. Colin Dueck: And by the way, I wouldn’t deny that over time Teddy Roosevelt on domestic affairs really does move in a progressive way. By the time he’s running in 1912 as a third party candidate, I mean he has split off from obviously pretty far from any kind of mainstream conservative view, but he’s a fascinating character, and he’s charming, and he’s an excellent foreign policy president, really. And the reason I say that is he understood that there were limits, at the time, on what the public would tolerate. He also understood that the US had national interests. Wilson, by contrast, hated to talk about US interests. He claimed that the US only acted selflessly and that that’s what made it exceptional, which I think is a misunderstanding of American history. Wilson was also bent on collective security, as opposed to what he called or criticized as special alliances. So Teddy Roosevelt believed you had to promote balances of power overseas, for example, between Germany and France, between Russia and Japan. He tried to do his best in his own limited way in the opening years of the 20th century when the US was not, for the most part, interested in playing that kind of forward role. But he did a very good job in preserving and expanding US interests in Central America, at sea, overseas, and he was an impressive figure. Wilson, I think, is much more idealistic in the worst sense. I mean, he’s unrealistic in the sense that Wilson wants to sort of teach or scold other countries into following interests that they do not view as their own, and that is just not how international relations works. So I think in that sense, there were important differences between TR and Woodrow Wilson. Richard Reinsch: So Wilson would be ignoring not only conservative nationalism and the pursuit of an abstraction, but also, I mean, and obviously just ignoring realist foreign policy thinking as well. Assuming realism is a valid or viable way to think about foreign policy. I mean, he’s really progressing so to speak on his own here. And I guess it was his famous idea of World War I being not just in pursuit of a balance of power pushing Germany back, but something grand, universal like democracy. This is sort of where you can then see how conflicts don’t end, resources are constantly thrown in, factions form internally in the United States, bitter factions which tie themselves forward against the foreign policy, et cetera. All these things you can see start to come into play with that type of an approach. Colin Dueck: Right. I mean, he had a way of handling stuff in foreign policy that tended to drive, Wilson did, that tended to drive his Republican critics insane, because in fact he started this in cases like Mexico in his first term, and then he applied the same model to Germany, and the model was this, and I think it’s a common pattern with liberal international threat up to the present. You begin by laying out some universal abstraction, and tie your country’s credibility to it. That’s step one. Then step two, you refuse to do anything about it meaningfully. So you create a gap between the stated moral commitment or legal commitment, and then the material cost that you’re willing to sustain, which makes you ridiculous in the eyes of other countries, and it creates problems with credibility and perception. And then finally third, you eventually agonizingly have to close the gap. This was something Wilson did over and over, and it’s a mistake that TR avoided. TR’s model was very different. He said, as everyone knows, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Which means you don’t make commitments that you can’t keep in the first place. And then at the same time, you maintain the power, for example, the Naval power, the Navy, to back up those commitments. I mean that is just common sense. So that’s an important difference in the tradition that’s set by Wilson on the one hand, and TR on the other. Richard Reinsch: Now you talk about in the book it was in liberal internationalism that it did work. It worked post-World War II. It worked during the Cold War in American interests. But it required a whole structure of institutions, ideas, politics. It didn’t just go of its own. It had to be created primarily by the United States. Talk about that, because I think that’s an important way for us to then to transition into whatever it is we’re in now. Colin Dueck: Right. So I think that the two democratic party presidents of the forties, so FDR and Truman, on foreign policy, I mean they each made mistakes. For example, FDR was far too optimistic about the possibilities for cooperation with the Soviet Union, but in a lot of ways, they both got more right than wrong. And Truman in particular, I think, led a very useful effort in the end to counteract Soviet power in the months and years immediately following World War II. So that required the creation of a new set of institutions that meant overseas you had new alliances, which clearly broke George Washington’s original methods. I mean, the United States decided in the forties it would abandon that tradition. That was a dramatic shift. Now you’re forming long-term alliances with countries in Europe, Asia, eventually the Middle East, the Americas. So that is a dramatic shift. You’re setting up bases and diplomatic commitments overseas. You’ve joined this new institution called the United Nations, and FDR and Truman were much more practical, or hard-nosed and adaptable than Wilson in recognizing valid concerns and conceding to Republican sometimes on those concerns. So they had more success in building support from at least one wing of the Republican party. And I think on balance, they did a lot of good and then that continues with Eisenhower in the fifties and then into the sixties where I think the liberals really hit kind of a brick wall was in Vietnam. And in my opinion, they never really recovered. I think that the liberal internationalist model and the Democratic party splintered and fragmented in Vietnam. And actually I think every Democratic party president since, whether it’s Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, has been very much preoccupied with bridging internal differences within the Democratic party between the establishment on foreign policy, and then the base of their own party, which is really to this day is antiwar based on the reaction of Vietnam. So there are set of assumptions that have taken hold among Democrats since the late sixties and seventies, but I don’t think have ever really been shaken. And then at the same time we get added to that this just increased emphasis over time on the idea that the world will be a safer, better place as long as you just keep adding an unlimited number of multilateral treaties and institutions, which is not necessarily realistic. Richard Reinsch: Now you argue in the book, many have argued, liberal internationalism, or certain liberal thinking in the Cold War leads us into Vietnam, and of course we know a lot of resources are put into that conflict. But I think it’s crucial here to think about something that other foreign policy scholars have noted, a few bring this up, that we never talk about, that we stopped talking America’s commitments in terms of victory, and in terms of what it meant for the United States of America to actually win wars. They became something else. Ongoing, continuous policing actions, to use the phrase in Vietnam, things like this. This is a part of liberal internationalism and that school of thought and where it leads with the projection of force, or is this just a part of the Cold War containment strategy? Colin Dueck: Well, yeah. It’s an important point. You have in Vietnam, it’s worth pointing out that, for example, Goldwater had argued in ’64 against Johnson that the US, if anything, should be more forthright in countering communism with Vietnam. And of course he was attacked by LBJ as a warmonger, and then the next thing that happened in ’65 was that LBJ led the US into Vietnam, although in a much more indirect and kind of stealthy way than Goldwater would have preferred. So there was a way in which the US approached Vietnam, partly for domestic political reasons under LBJ as a sort of halfhearted effort at first deliberately, and that is not necessarily the most likely to produce military success. I mean, to this day you’ll still get a lively debate over whether meaningful success was possible in Vietnam. But I think that a responsible president could have either put forward the full effort early to try to achieve that success, or admitted that it wasn’t going to happen and then act accordingly. So we’ve seen that pattern over and over of halfhearted interventions. I would give credit to Bush 41. I think in 1990-91 the first Gulf war, he handled that quite well. But then you get a series of interventions in the nineties whether it’s Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and then you have Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Libya in the past 20 years, and it’s a frustrating pattern, and that’s no doubt part of what Trump and his supporters were responding to as well. I mean, Trump used to say it regularly, “we don’t win anymore.” So what is the purpose of lengthy, inconclusive military engagements? It’s a popular concern often from people who have family and friends that have served overseas. What’s the plan? When does this end? Richard Reinsch: And also in that regard, thinking about just the mindset here, you referenced the term in the book, “the blob,” and the blob being sort of this moniker to describe the foreign policy establishment in America that is sort of there, which suggests there’s a group-think. There’s a reluctance to criticize, or to look back on say the past century of foreign policy in America, and evaluate what’s happened. There’s sort of this ongoing acceptance of deployment of American soldiers abroad in numerous places without regard to what it actually does for the country at home. I mean, that’s sort of what, when I hear the term the blob, that’s what comes to mind. Do you find there being merit in that in writing a book on conservative nationalism? I take it, you mean to, in great respect, challenge foreign policy thinking in America, or give it a jolt? Colin Dueck: Well, one of the things that I’ve actually… I had some serious concerns about candidate Trump when he first came on the scene, and I still do have some concerns. I lay these out in the book, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking first order questions. I teach students at George Mason foreign policy, and if a student asks me, “Why do we have alliances overseas?” I don’t respond by saying to them, “What an outrageous question. Get out of the room.” It’s a perfectly legitimate question for a US citizen to ask, why do we need these alliances? My own view is that we’re on balance safer, and more secure, and more prosperous by having allies than, for example, if we were to dismantle all the alliances, I mean, that’s my own view. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for President Trump, or any American, to just ask that question, and if the blob, to put it bluntly, can’t answer that question convincingly, we have a problem. And I think a lot of Americans in both parties right now are asking, why do we do these sorts of things? What’s the reason? You have to be able to present the argument in a sensible way, in a common sense way that connects to people’s concerns. And so I think that where there has been a kind of problem with the blob is, for example, to treat those questions as just outrageous, or out of the line. That’s not appropriate. Richard Reinsch: And we saw a lot of that, I mean just even the idea Trump suggested during the campaign that NATO partners contribute their agreed upon GDP percentage contributions to their defense budgets. That question seemed to go too far, to even suggest that as if he was questioning NATO or something like that, which struck me as a very weak sort of approach to this whole thing, particularly when NATO was created to thwart the Soviet Union who no longer exists. And so the question obviously becomes, well, why does NATO really need to exist? And of course the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, seems to be suggesting the same thing as he calls for a European Integrated Force. Do you see a displacement happening? A new age? Do you see signs of a new age of foreign policy thinking in America, or conservative nationalism, or is there actually still great continuity with what’s existed in the post Cold War period in American thought? Colin Dueck: So I would say what Trump has done is to kind of blow the lid off the top in the sense that there are questions now that have been asked that you can’t just put those back in the box and pretend that they haven’t been asked. So for example, when he said that NATO was obsolete, once you have a successful presidential candidate who, at some point, said that NATO is obsolete, you can’t pretend that was never said. Europeans continue to know that president Trump said that at one point, and they worry about it. Macron does, others do as well. So I think what you’re going to get is you may have the next president, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, you may have somebody who’s more conventional in terms of their style and their approach, but there is going to be a long-term shift in the sense of maybe a new willingness to look at some first order questions or assumptions and ask how these serve the interest of US citizens. I’ll give you an example. I’m struck by how many progressives are actually questioning very basic assumptions about the military overseas. And so you have this odd alliance between some on the right, and some on the left where particularly younger, it seems to me, particularly younger Americans who just don’t have that memory of the Cold War. In fact, for many of them, 9/11 was when they were small children. But what they’ve experienced is Iraq and Afghanistan, which doesn’t give them much positive to go on, and they are often more skeptical about the use of force overseas. So I think you may have a shaking up, and we’ll have to see where it ends. I think there’s more than one way this could go. I mean you could have the sense looking back on it that Trump rearranged things in a way that lasted. I think in the case of NATO, Trump supporters actually for the most part say they support NATO. So when you ask people in public opinion polls who are Republican, and who are Trump supporters and you say, “Do you oppose NATO? Do you favor dismantling NATO?” They say, “No, we support NATO.” However, they also support Trump, and they support his efforts to increase ally burden sharing, particularly on defense spending. And by the way, our European allies have long since got the message, I mean, they know that that is the US position right now, and they also know that Trump may very well be reelected. So they are trying to come to grips with this, and that is a challenge. And those countries, each have their, the Germans have their own point of view. The French have another. The French for example, kind of pride themselves on independent military capabilities. So their ideal would be a strong European Union led by France. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, I mean they’re the only nation in continental Europe with actually an aircraft carrier. Colin Dueck: Right. They really do have some serious expeditionary capacity. Richard Reinsch: Question here that I wanted to raise is the degree to which the future, and you write this in the book, our future is going to be oriented, though, by great power competitions with other nations. China immediately emerges. Russia comes to mind. India, not necessarily an antagonistic relationship, but a country that we want to further some interrelationship with, the need to have relationships with nations in the Asian sphere to counteract or buffer China. This seems to be the future of American foreign policy. In a way, if that’s true, then the conservative nationalists thinking comes back of necessity, I think. Colin Dueck: Yes. I think that’s right. I mean, and actually the administration has identified that. So national security strategy, the national defense strategy of the Trump administration make this very clear that this is how they view it. And I think they’re right to view it that way. It’s an interesting shift from really Clinton, Bush, and Obama all said, and you can go back and look at the documents, they all said in their own national security strategies that the assumption was that the great powers of the world, including Russia and China, would eventually converge on a kind of a market democratic model, a liberal model. And the hope was that you could nudge that forward, for example, by trading with them, and diplomacizing them with them. And I think this is another area where that just didn’t work out. I mean, it was a kind of gigantic gamble, particularly in relations to China, and the gamble did not succeed. So now we have a wealthier China, much wealthier China, more powerful, but it’s not any more democratic. In fact, in some ways it’s more authoritarian now than it was 10 years ago. So we’re dealing with now a very powerful China that doesn’t want to play by our rules. And to the administration’s credit, they have recognized this, and said that they understand that reality, and they’re trying to push back against China commercially, as well as diplomatically. So I do give the administration credit on that. And then you have Russia, similarly, Vladimir Putin has no intention of playing by our rules. He leads a great power, which is Russia, and in its own way it is a major power, and it is not any more democratic than it was 20 years ago. Probably less so. And we have to deal with these challenges that are very real. And then you have Asian powers like Japan and India, which are worth taking very seriously as major democratic Asian powers that have their own armed forces, and their own role in the world. And the Japanese under Shinzo Abe are, to some extent, reasserting themselves. And I mean that as a compliment actually. I think we need them. We need the Japanese to play more of a role in the world. The EU is a bit of an anomaly, because the EU feels squeezed by this new reality. Is the EU a great power? Is it sort of the Holy Roman Empire of the 21st century? What exactly is it? There are deep questions as to whether it can cohere on these matters of high politics. So I think you have the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, but then the Europeans are sort of caught, particularly the Germans, in their own mind, they are sort of caught between these competing powers and they feel torn, not only for strategic reasons, but actually for economic ones as well. Richard Reinsch: As I was reading your book, there’s this thought that the hopes for the post-1989 were all perhaps expressed succinctly by president George H.W. Bush of sort of open minds, open markets, open borders, this sort of thing of growing together as a new world order, that famous speech, that this didn’t happen. That in many respects, China, Russia, other countries didn’t become like us, and I think the evidence is really staring us in the face. So if that’s true, then how does America readjust and recalibrate? And it seems to me that process has started, and we’re in it right now. Colin Dueck: Exactly. And so, I mean there were certainly some great gains for the US from the end of the Cold War, and there were democratic consolidations that happened, and that have lasted in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, parts of Latin America, parts of East Asia. But these bigger powers, Russia and China, it did not work out as planned. And there’s also been backsliding, other cases like Venezuela. So we’re dealing with a world where if we look at it honestly, we have to admit that we may not have the luxury anymore of picking and choosing, for example, in every case, whether we can only ally with other democracies. I mean with China, just to take an example, if we were to say that we only work with democracies, and counteract in China, we could be shooting ourselves in the foot, because we might need the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese, under their own system, are very worried about China just as we are. And even though they don’t live in a liberal democracy, we should work with them. And as a matter of fact, there seems to be, I mean, for all practical purposes, I think there’s agreement on that. So it is odd to see how often you get this line of argument, for example, from Democrats outside of the administration saying that the administration has betrayed American values by conducting diplomacy with undemocratic regimes. And yet we know perfectly well that we’re going to have to, and not only that, we know that Obama and Clinton did in a case like Vietnam, and that it made sense to do so. So there is a kind of an odd quality to some of those critiques. Richard Reinsch: It sounds like in certain respects, you think about Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous essay defending Reagan’s foreign policy during the Cold War, and aligning with authoritarian governments against communism as well. So, Colin Dueck, thank you so much for coming on the program today to discuss Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism. I appreciate it. Colin Dueck: Thank you.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m your host, Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal, Law and Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Richard Reinsch (00:19): Hello, I’m Richard Reinsch, and today we’re talking with Christopher Owen about his new biography of the conservative thinker, Willmoore Kendall. The book is titled Heaven Can Indeed Fall. Christopher Owen is Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma. Christopher, welcome to the program. Christopher Owen (00:40): Thank you, Richard. I really am excited about being on your program. It is Professor of History instead of English, but other than that everything’s right. Richard Reinsch (00:49): I apologize for that. Christopher Owen (00:51): No problem. Richard Reinsch (00:52): Okay. So who was Willmoore Kendall and why does he matter? Christopher Owen (00:57): Yeah, a great question. Willmoore Kendall was probably best known as being the mentor of William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale, so he was a Professor of Political Science at Yale off and on after World War II. And at Yale, certain talented students fell under his influence. He was a dynamic, colorful personality and really a great teacher. So William F. Buckley and also L. Brent Bozell Jr. were both sort of his mentors, or he was their mentors at Yale. And he had a great influence on their life, and their thought, and their activism, which is important in itself. But I believe, and I argue in the book, that he’s probably most important as a political theorist. So he was a founder of conservatism, one of the co-founders of National Review, for example, but his thought doesn’t really fit neatly into any of the common categories that we think of as contemporary conservatism. So not a neocon, not really a state’s rights guy, not really a theocon, not really a social or religious conservative exactly either. I call him in the book a populist. One might call him in today’s lexicon, I guess one could call him a national conservative. Those were neither terms that he would necessarily have embraced. But when thinking about his ideas and his thought, that’s really where I would put those. I would say that if you look at the early days of National Review for example, his ideas had some importance and resonance that in time kind of faded away, particularly as conservatism came closer to power and liberalism went more on the defensive. Richard Reinsch (02:52): He also worked in the CIA and part of his influence over Buckley was recruiting him to the CIA. Is that right? Christopher Owen (03:01): Sure. That’s right. Buckley, I guess, was recruited by Kendall to serve in the CIA. That was one way he could avoid getting drafted and sent to Korea, I guess, was part of it. There were other people at work in the CIA with National Review, James Burnham, for example. Kendall’s work as an intelligence officer was really important, and he was really good at it, and he was briefly head of what became the CIA for all of Latin America. He was also really important as an intelligence officer during the Korean War. But I think that experience that he had in the bureaucracy of the federal government made him skeptical about the federal bureaucracy and that it should be maybe more controlled by the popular will. Richard Reinsch (03:54): Yeah. That’s interesting in itself, a PhD in political science who had spent some time in academia at that point, then making his way into the CIA. How did that happen? Christopher Owen (04:04): Sure. Well, he really spent most of his entire life really in academia. So he had been in the 30s, Kendall was a man of the left. He was an isolationist. So he was sympathetic, I guess, with Trotskyism, though not so much as James Burnham would’ve been. He sort of, as the war broke out, which he had opposed the U.S. entry into the war, so after Pearl Harbor he had to figure out what to do. And what he ended up doing is falling in with a group that was led by Nelson Rockefeller called the CIAA, which is the committee for—I can’t remember the exact initials, but essentially an intelligence group that where it’s the—The Coordinator for Inner American Affairs is what that stands for. It was basically American intelligence work in Latin America. So Kendall was fluent in French and Spanish and so he put his language skills to work there. Worked in Columbia for a while and was really good at sort of public information, I guess we would call it propaganda, counterintelligence, not covert stuff, not spying so much as public intelligence work. His Spanish also kind of bonded him to Buckley, because I’ve heard that William F. Buckley’s first language was Spanish, and Buckley’s dad made his money in Mexican oil investments. And so that was probably one thing Kendall and Buckley had in common- Richard Reinsch (05:36): Yeah. Christopher Owen (05:36): … was that language. Richard Reinsch (05:38): Thinking here, you mentioned Kendall was at Yale, so very bright obviously. Early on, his career took off academically. You write in the book and maybe help us understand this, he had a way of analyzing texts that was unique amongst political theorists and this seemed to really bring out the brilliance in his work. Talk about that some. Christopher Owen (06:06): Sure. So he had a couple of different influences in that way. He was a Rhodes Scholar and he was a student at Pembroke College in Oxford and was a student there of the philosopher, R.G. Collingwood. And Collingwood was an analyst of the philosophy of history and Collingwood really focused on sort of investigating questions, almost like a detective asking the right questions, trying to carefully, systematically work through your evidence logically to come to a logically coherent answer. That was part of the influence. The other was when Kendall, in the late 30s, taught at LSU, which at that time had a lot of money and was pretty prestigious. And there he became good friends with both Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who were sort of pioneering the new criticism of close reading of texts and they would sort of put historical context aside to really focus in on the text itself. Kendall became, I don’t know of any other political scientists who did this, but he really liked to focus on a specific text and delve into and dig out its deepest meaning and putting aside historical context for the purpose of analysis. And so he was really able to do that with John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government very effectively and kind of come up with some new ways of looking at that key text that others hadn’t really brought out too effectively. Richard Reinsch (07:40): Also, I mean, I think this is sort of key to his unique position in conservatism is an author who’s a foundation for Kendall was Rousseau. So talk about that, because I think that helps us understand his thinking better. Christopher Owen (07:57): Yeah. So Kendall was very sympathetic to Rousseau. He found him first really as a man of the left. A lot of Kendall’s focus was on democracy and so he saw Rousseau as the sort of main theorist of democracy. Most conservatives, Kirk, etc., Russell Kirk, hated Rousseau. In fact, I don’t know of any other conservatives but Kendall who really admired him. I’m sure there are some. Look, so Kendall said, “If we’re going to have democracy, we have to figure out how to maintain it in the large nation state,” which is a reality of the day. So how do you have both a large nation state and democracy? So that, I think, drove Kendall to focus on local government where he believed democracy was more real and so he really, when he got an assignment to do a discussion of local government, he taught classes on local politics at several different universities, but he went to Rousseau to make this not just a mundane routine assignment on the, I don’t know, the commissioner system of elections, but something that was more fundamental to maintaining democracy. And therefore he came to believe, I think, that representatives in Congress and so forth really ought to protect and safeguard the interests of their own local communities, which they represented. And that ultimately was Rousseauian in the way to best preserve democracy in a large state. Richard Reinsch (09:34): So in that regard, it’s interesting just to think about his work on Locke as well. Christopher Owen (09:41): Right. Richard Reinsch (09:41): And his dissertation on Locke, which very well received at the time. Christopher Owen (09:46): Right. Richard Reinsch (09:46): And he does something new with Locke. He says, Locke is a majoritarian theorist. He’s not… To think of him as a proponent defending individual rights doesn’t fully make sense of that. Christopher Owen (09:58): Right. Richard Reinsch (09:59): And talk about that too because that seems like it’s going to play out later in his career, particularly when he turns to writing on politics in the 60s. Christopher Owen (10:08): Sure. So he starts out as, at that point, I call him an absolute majoritarian, Kendall, so the majority had the right to rule, the minority has the duty to obey. So in reading the Second Treatise, instead of relying on what others had said about it, he read it and analyzed it carefully. And one of the things he noted is chapter one focuses on the right of the majority to rule the community and to impose its will up to and including the death penalty for those who step outside of its bounds. And it’s really only in the second chapter when Locke turns to natural rights. So the right of the community to rule as it sees fit is logically and prior to the rights of the individual not to be ruled by this society. So he argued really that there’s a fundamental contradiction, I think, between those two things. That if individuals have natural rights that are not given to them by society and cannot be taken away by society, that seems to contradict the idea that the majority has the right to impose its will on the rest of society. So he sort of saw that seeming contradiction by suggesting that Locke had a tacit understanding that the majority was virtuous enough that it would never take away the rights that individuals deserve. That was his position, at least in 1941. That changed a little later. Richard Reinsch (11:49): He changed later. His thinking changes about Locke as well. I guess we should say Willmoore Kendall found the politics department at the University of Dallas. Christopher Owen (12:02): That’s right. Richard Reinsch (12:03): And towards the end of his career, he dies, I think, in 1966? Christopher Owen (12:09): ’67. Richard Reinsch (12:09): ’67. And he taught at Yale. He had a, shall we say, a difficult personality wherever he went. Christopher Owen (12:17): Right. Richard Reinsch (12:18): I think it was said of Kendall, he never wanted to be on speaking terms with more than two people at the same time. Christopher Owen (12:24): That’s right. Richard Reinsch (12:26): And he was an alcoholic, he was married three times, and very just challenging personal life. But he was also a genius who entered, was it he entered Northwestern at the age of 13 or 14? Christopher Owen (12:41): Right. 13, yeah. Richard Reinsch (12:43): Yeah, and overbearing father, his father was a blind Methodist pastor, a progressive pastor in Oklahoma in the early part of the 20th centuries. So I think that also is obviously a part of Willmoore Kendall’s story. Christopher Owen (13:01): Absolutely. So he certainly had a contentious personality, but I think that was one of those things where it was a thing that also attracted people to him because people never really forgot meeting him when they did meet him. Richard Reinsch (13:18): Yeah. Christopher Owen (13:19): Saul Bellow wrote a short story or a novella really about him called Mosby’s Memoirs. He knew Saul Bellow and he just made a vivid impression on people when he did meet them. So he had a charisma about him, particularly when he was young, that attracted women and young people and his contentiousness was mostly focused on his superiors or his colleagues. He was never brutal or really argumentative with his students. In fact, he was never really ideological with his students, he was able to tolerate people of all sorts of shades of opinion within that. And I do try to… I don’t really connect necessarily all the dots, but… Yeah, so his childhood, he was really rushed into a lot of stuff by his dad as a child prodigy and he had a lot of scars from that I think, and that really came out in his later life. I do mostly in the book try to avoid saying that his father, Reverend Kendall, that it was unfortunate that he did blah or whatever, because kind of my idea was that it is what it is and so the good that was in Kendall and some of the contentious parts all came from that. And he could have been an obscure professor somewhere and nobody would’ve ever heard of him, he might have lived a happier life, but made less impact. So I tried not to make too many judgements on that and just tell the story like it was. Richard Reinsch (14:54): Yeah, Kendall… I mean, if you’re trying to consult him to understand sort of the essence of his thought there’s several books of his that are really collections of his essays. The one that sticks out to me is the Conservative Affirmation and although there’s a collection of contra mundum, but we’ve been talking about this, how would you define his approach to American constitutional thought? Christopher Owen (15:20): Sure. Well, it’s also lined out in his book, Basic Symbols. Richard Reinsch (15:25): Basic Symbols. Christopher Owen (15:27): Really I think for American constitutional thought he really regards himself as a follower. I call him a Madisonian, but Madison himself is all over the place at times. He really calls himself, I think, a follower of Publius, and the Federalist, and the Constitution and the papers that explain the Constitution is really where he came down. And he even comes down with the original Constitution pre Bill of Rights because he believes. He cites Madison at a couple of points that the Bill of Rights are really part, what he calls, parchment barriers, paper that really don’t mean anything unless you have a virtuous people who’s willing to rule with restraint, carefully deliberate its course, and proceed into the future, so that’s really where he lies. And he really puts a lot of emphasis on the Preamble to the Constitution as the purpose of American government, so more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare, and so forth. So his thought really uplifts the Constitution, the Preamble, the Federalist. He is less enamored with the Declaration of Independence, which he thinks is sort of hastily put together, not well thought through, and less coherent than the Constitution, which was carefully deliberated over months before it became the law of the land. Richard Reinsch (17:08): But you said, Publius mattered. Christopher Owen (17:10): Right. Richard Reinsch (17:11): How did Publius inform his thought and how did he understand Publius? Christopher Owen (17:15): Sure. So he likes to… The Publius of course is John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, the anonymous title, pseudonym, that they wrote the Federalist Papers justifying the Constitution. So Kendall, like his focus on textual analysis, he thought it was less important in trying to determine which of those individuals wrote each, Federalist 51, Federalist 10, or whatever, than to look at the document focusing on the text itself and what it said about the American Republic and how it was supposed to operate. So the Federalist, written by Publius, he thought was the best guide to how the Constitution ought to be understood and interpreted, and really the best guide for how the American system of government was supposed to operate. And that was a defense of the Constitution before the Bill of Rights was attached to it. Richard Reinsch (18:21): Uh-huh (affirmative). So talk more about that, because I know he had this idea of constitutional morality inside the workings of the federal government should guide those people, people working in the institutions and the branches. Help our listeners understand that. Christopher Owen (18:37): So Kendall believed that there was a constitutional morality of restraint, and a lot of that meant not seeking to impose one’s will, or desires, or policy goals at the expense of other forces in society, that if you through, this is his later thought, it changed from what he was thinking early, that if social forces, reformers, et cetera, tried to impose their will and ran sort a roughshod over large groups who resisted, that that would almost certainly lead to social disorder, disrupt if not destroy the public government, the federal government. So Kendall really put the sovereign center and his focus on Congress, that Congress really was the place where sovereignty as loaned to Congress by the people resided and that as Congress went, so went the Republic. And when Congress was weak, that wasn’t good, that that really threatened sort of dictatorship. Richard Reinsch (19:50): Thinking about that, he has a great essay about the different types of majorities in American politics, and there’s a presidential majority and the congressional majority. And the presidential majority, I would say, I’m interested to get your thoughts, I think that largely governs us now. And Kendall was trying to say, well, congressional majority are different, that they’re defined by districts, by personalities representing those districts, and it’s going to be more directly responsive. And the goal should be to build around those majorities, which would represent something that approximates the majority of the actual people. And a presidential majority, it’s about television, it’s about grand ideals, it’s foreign policy related, it seems to be more elite driven. It’s a brilliant essay, but I think it’s… Now, it’s very much how we do politics and it has been true for decades. Christopher Owen (20:52): Yes. I think that’s true. And he saw that coming and he thought that, that would be really destructive. By the way, I think in that he was, even in his day, he was butting his head or running against the grain there because a lot of political scientists believe that the presidential majority is where real democracy resided. So a lot of that, he uses the phrase structured communities, so your Congressman represents a particular community, a structured community, his constituents can know him. He understands the particularities of his place in a way that presidential candidates never can. So he talked about how in a congressional election the candidates can talk about something real, tangible, local that affects people. Whereas in presidential campaigns, he said, mostly the candidates were just full of hot air talking about nothing, just sound bites that really didn’t mean a whole lot when it came right down to it. So absolutely he saw that coming and thought it would be destructive. Richard Reinsch (21:57): Yeah, and I think this leads into my next question. I’d like to get our listeners to understand. So Kendall defended Joseph McCarthy, why did he defend McCarthy? Christopher Owen (22:07): Yeah, that’s a great question and that’s something that I’ve really struggled with. And boy, if you want to turn someone’s head say someone was favoring Joe McCarthy, that’s still… McCarthy, his name is not well received, obviously. So look, that does go with what he’s saying. So Kendall, and this is the early 50s, he basically sees that there’s an out of control bureaucracy. So there’s some resonance here when people today start talking about the swamp, et cetera, Kendall didn’t use those terms, but that’s what he was thinking back in the 50s. And there’s a bureaucracy that doesn’t really have a particular boss anywhere, it’s kind of loosely under the control of the Executive Branch. There’s an unelected judiciary and he links them together in what he calls kind of this three-headed great bureaucracy, which he says is the news media, the federal bureaucracy, and the judiciary, and that those three combined basically are imposing their will on the people. Christopher Owen (23:19): And his whole idea was in a democracy you need someone to right herd on this bureaucracy and the only real institution set up to do that is Congress. And Congress of course, that would be in this case, Joseph McCarthy, could have been Martin Dies from earlier on in the 1940s, and that the only way that the people can exercise some control on this bureaucracy is through their elected representatives in Congress. So that’s why it sort of logically connects, I mean, he had no illusions about McCarthy. Richard Reinsch (23:55): Yeah. Christopher Owen (23:55): He knew what McCarthy was doing and he didn’t think of him as right on all accounts by any means, but he saw no alternative to what he said, right herd on this bureaucracy, the only body to do that would be Congress. And so I think that’s why he would gravitate towards supporting some of what McCarthy was doing. Richard Reinsch (24:16): And he also wrote a brilliant essay on the trial of Socrates. Christopher Owen (24:25): Right. Richard Reinsch (24:25): And I think further revealed sort of the political thought of Willmoore Kendall. Christopher Owen (24:29): Yeah. Richard Reinsch (24:30): But why wouldn’t he defend Socrates? Christopher Owen (24:34): Well, he might defend Socrates’ ideas, but look, his basic idea is there. A great example, great article, he loved to shock people by saying it was right to kill Socrates, so he definitely got a rise out of people by doing that. But the basic idea there is that the Athenian’s Assembly of the People’s purpose, function, was to safeguard the Athenian way of life and that’s the purpose of any government is to safeguard the life of its people. And if you have a dissident who attacks, attacks, and refuses to stop attacking that way of life, that the Athenian Assembly was within its rights in order to defend that way of life to silence that criticism any way that it saw fit. And then he of course goes on to make the argument that Socrates himself recognized the democratic Assembly’s right to do so by refusing to flee when sentenced to death. So that essentially was the idea that the people have the right to defend their way of life, and that there are critics who refuse to stop attacking that way of life, then the Assembly has the right to silence them through death or exile. Richard Reinsch (25:53): So you would say he’s an offender of the polity and the centrality of their needing to be a governing consensus, a moral consensus that governs the people, which I think that would make… That’s another way to enter into his thought and even to think about… He’s sort of reemerged recently, and you note this in the book, some conservative thinkers talking about Kendall again in the current moment, the present moment, applying Kendallian insights. Matthew Contenetti has done so in a couple of essays, Daniel McCarthy. I wrote a piece about Basic Symbols for the 60th anniversary last year and thinking about trying to develop that approach, the constitutional consensus approach. How do you see those efforts and how do you see Kendall’s ideas? Does it give us leverage in thinking about problems today and should conservatism become more, or is it becoming more Kendallian, not necessarily intentionally, but just through experience? Christopher Owen (26:56): Yeah. Well, so I say in the book that really Kendall is the theorist of what I call conservative populism, so a brand of conservatism that takes seriously the right of the people to enact their will into policy. Some of that does have to do with having a political orthodoxy, a standard to which we adhere, a minimum standard to which we all adhere. And Kendall, a lot of what he says is a society that doesn’t have that, a society that’s open to every point of view, a society that says it’s okay to talk about destroying the Republic, is not a society that lasts very long. It’s destroyed. It comes apart at the seams. So he said at one point that the open society, that is a society where all points of view are equally fine, is an enemy to the free society because a society where all points of view are fine ends up destroying itself. And so the goods that we have, and one of the goods, the freedoms that we have, end up being destroyed in sort of what he calls the phosphorus of political debate, where everyone hates one another. Richard Reinsch (28:11): John Stuart Mill, he was not a defender of John Stuart Mill. He was a passionate- Christopher Owen (28:16): [crosstalk 00:28:16] Not a fan of John Stuart Mill, right. Richard Reinsch (28:17): … So the society that believes in everything, I guess Kendall would say falls apart because it can defend nothing. Christopher Owen (28:26): That’s right. And it doesn’t have a place to stand. It doesn’t have a political, social orthodoxy to defend and with no social orthodoxy to defend, you suddenly sort of fall apart. Richard Reinsch (28:39): Yeah. Christopher Owen (28:40): Another thing I’ve been thinking about some with current events is… So you mentioned McCarthy and I don’t want to dwell on McCarthy per se, but one of the things I talk about in the book is Kendall made his conservative turn partly because he was personally involved in ferreting out some Soviet spies that were at work in some of the bureaus that he was in. And so I guess one of the things I thought recently about foreign influences on the American policy and if different actors, I don’t know, it could be Russia, or China, or whatever, if they’re having a major influence on our policy makers, or at least our bureaucrats and so forth, and that’s negative for our country, who is it that can stop that? And I think the only place I can come up with is where Kendall came up with, which is Congress. Congress has to somehow reign that in if that is in fact what’s happening. So a similar question in a different context to what was happening in the 50s, I would say. Richard Reinsch (29:45): No, that- Christopher Owen (29:46): 40s and 50s. Richard Reinsch (29:47): … I think that’s interesting and it also raises the point too of orthodoxy, that for example, American corporations acting in this country in ways that the Chinese government wants them to act. Christopher Owen (29:59): Right. Richard Reinsch (29:59): Or firing employees, if the Chinese government tells them to, silencing voices, pulling people off a social media platform, that raises this question of well, do we know what it means to be an American now? And I think Kendall… Kendall says, you probably know it, it’s something like Americans live their liberty in their hips. I mean, it’s just like something that they do. Christopher Owen (30:25): Right. Richard Reinsch (30:25): They know how to do it. Christopher Owen (30:26): Yeah. Richard Reinsch (30:26): And do we still know how to do it? Well, I mean, would Kendall just be pulling his hair out right now? Christopher Owen (30:31): I think he’d be pulling his hair out to some extent, but Kendall had really this abiding faith in the people to make the right decisions. So if he looked at what’s going on right now, he wouldn’t blame the people. Okay? He would blame sort of the corrupt institutions that are failing to enact the will of the people. So he always really did… He trusted democracy, but he believed that people could be misled by the elites. By the way, he stole that in the hips thing, that’s a Lincoln Steffens thing I discovered. Richard Reinsch (31:02): Oh, okay. Christopher Owen (31:04): That he picked up from him, which I didn’t know until I discovered that. But yeah, so that’s definitely… I think he would have faith that the people ultimately can do the right thing. So his idea of the role of a political theorist or philosopher was not to tell the people what was right, but to try to guide them in the sense of if you decide A, the consequences will be B. That’s what a political leader or political scientist was supposed to do, not tell the people what to do, but to tell them, let’s say, if you mandate COVID vaccines, then this is a consequence that might ensue from that, not to tell them whether they should or they should not do that and that’s a key point. Another key point I’d really like to talk about is his ideas about political parties. Richard Reinsch (31:58): Please do. Christopher Owen (31:58): So he was one of the few people in his day who thought it was good not to have ideologically distinct parties. It was good to have overlap. It was good to have conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, so that you had to have these cross-party negotiations in order to enact a law, in order to enact change, to make changes. So the votes that we’ve had really, I mean, I guess for the last several decades, but really, I think starting with… I did a thing on the Obamacare vote, where you have a vote that’s pretty much right down the line, like zero Republicans vote for it, all but one Democrat’s votes for it or whatever, or some of the recent votes we’ve had on spending bills that are right party line votes, that he thinks is really destructive because what you get is two camps, two choices, one side hates the other, and that’s a division that cleaves right down the middle and divides us as Americans. And he thought that was almost certain to be destructive, which went against what almost every other political scientist at the time was saying, that they believe we needed two ideologically distinct parties. He thought that would be almost certainly destructive. Richard Reinsch (33:22): No and that’s very well said in thinking also now we’ve become accustomed to it in the last, what? I would say, 15, 20 years to having these two ideologically distinct parties. Christopher Owen (33:35): Sure. Richard Reinsch (33:35): And it makes it… It’s interesting watching the debate over this Build Back Better bill that even within, say the Democratic party, but the Republicans aren’t immune from this either, but that there would be a handful of senators choosing against the President itself has become a spectacle. It’s interesting in that regard. Christopher Owen (33:56): And that’s part of the nationalization of politics. So Kendall would argue that those different representatives of whichever party they might represent really ought to be safeguarding the interests of their own particular district rather than serving well, what the national leader of their party might tell them what they should or should not do. Richard Reinsch (34:20): Also just thinking, Kendall was a part of National Review at the beginning and has a falling out with Buckley and leaves, and what was he doing in National Review? How would you characterize his writing? Christopher Owen (34:36): Yeah, so he writes a column called The Liberal Line, which is pretty much a regular feature in every issue from the founding of the magazine until 1958, so three or four years. And in that… It’s amusing to read, so he could write in amusing… His best writing’s pretty dense. You got to work, it works you. Richard Reinsch (35:00): Yeah. Christopher Owen (35:00): But he could write in an offhanded kind of satirical way. So he basically used that as a metaphor, arguing that there was kind of a liberal machine that had told its echelons what the right story was that they needed to come up with and follow, and that there was kind of a liberal machine that tried to control both parties. So he really kind of set out, I argue in the book, to kind of denigrate the term liberal and to make it not a term of praise, but one that you might hold with, if not contempt, at least not a great deal of respect. So he was pretty good at that. He was initially also, I think, the book review editor and he was sort of dropped from that. So Kendall kind of distinguished between his serious writing I think and his popular writing and his serious writing was not really that accessible to a mass reading public. And I think he, over time, wanted to focus more and more on his political theory and a little less on his popular writing, but he did value National Review and that was really important to him. And I think getting kind of eased out of that, that hurt him. He was kind of emotionally hurt by the break with Buckley and kind of getting pushed out, eased out at National Review. That was, I think, hurtful to him. Richard Reinsch (36:31): Yeah. Christopher Owen (36:32): But he had started focusing more on his formal academic political theory and less on his popular writing at National Review, which is one of the reasons he was eased out there. Richard Reinsch (36:43): That’s interesting. In Kendall’s overall writings, what do you find to be the most compelling? Christopher Owen (36:56): Gosh, that’s a little tough to say because Kendall, he doesn’t write one big, huge book, here’s my total theory. I think the thing about when you read Kendall and the thing that got me really fascinated with him, when you read Kendall, you go, I never really thought about it that way before because he says stuff in a way that nobody else said it. So I would say with Kendall, it really starts with we the people. That’s the key. How do we make democracy real in the modern world? He also comes in later life under the influence of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. So Kendall does believe that there is an ethical, moral component, there is a right and wrong independently of what we think, what we do, grounded in Christianity or grounded in natural reason, whether that be this Voegelin or Strauss. But he also believes that the people are the most likely to enact that virtuous society, more likely than smaller self-interested bureaucracies or nine people on the Supreme Court. Trust the people, don’t trust the elite. Interesting, another thing he really talks about, this is really early, going back to 1938 in his career, he has a distrust that scientists know what’s best for society. He argues really… I mean, some of this I’ve thought a lot about with the COVID stuff. He argues back in ’38 that scientists know the mechanics of their field, but they don’t have any special insight into what the good is. Richard Reinsch (38:50): Yeah. Christopher Owen (38:51): So determining what is the good, he believes the people are just as good, if not better at that than the experts. So he believes we should trust the people to determine the good and that the experts should help guide the people in order of how they might enact their will. Richard Reinsch (39:11): So he has an… I mean, it’s a classical notion of politics in many ways of politics is an ethical pursuit, an ethical practice. Christopher Owen (39:18): Right. Absolutely. Richard Reinsch (39:20): And he’s constantly… And I think also, as I’ve thought about it and you said, he really looked to the political philosophy in the Federalist Papers to ground the Constitution. Sometimes I thought his understanding of Publius is almost like an anti-Federalist understanding in the sense of he wants to bring out virtue as a part of political deliberation and Publius has some nods to virtue, but it’s also very much focused on institutions themselves doing a lot of work and balancing those appropriately. What do you think of that? Christopher Owen (40:00): Well, Kendall did not like, in theory, the anti-federalists because that’s one of the things where it gets complicated. So he focuses on local government, but he’s not at all into states rights. He really- Richard Reinsch (40:14): No, no. Christopher Owen (40:15): … believes that Congress is the place… So it rests with Congress because Congress is where the structured communities from all over the country can send the representatives and these are, as I say kind of in the conclusion, they’re sort of Aristotelian best men to deliberate for the future of the country. So he really focuses on the powers of Congress and he really puts the central symbol, I think he says, is the people deliberating together in their assemblies, that he says is really fundamental and that. So I think he doesn’t say a lot about this, but I think he’s enamored of the British parliamentary system as it was in his day, which he thought safeguarded democracy as much as the structured judicial review and so forth that was associated with the American system. So he really put a lot of focus on that deliberation of the people. He thought the anti-federalists were, I think, too provincial, maybe, too focused on state’s rights, which he was not particularly sympathetic to, even though some have called him a Calhounite, I think that completely misunderstands where he’s really coming from. So really he believes a powerful Congress where representatives deliberate can best safeguard democracy at the local level, but that sovereign power rests at the center with Congress. Richard Reinsch (41:52): Yeah, and you allude to Harry Jaffa, I think referred to him as a Calhounite, and Harry Jaffa referred to a lot of people as a Calhounite. Steven Hayward, a student of Harry Jaffa said, “That’s an unfinished argument between Jaffa and Kendall and is worth reviving and worth thinking about.” I agree with Hayward. Talk about, maybe we can end with this, the title of your book is a great title, Heaven Can Indeed Fall, talk about the significance of that. Christopher Owen (42:21): Sure, so that comes really from a lecture that Kendall gave at the University of Dallas and it relates to Kendall’s reaction both to liberals who want to promote rapid social change and to conservatives in the Jaffa, I guess, Strauss camp. Kendall liked, actually he liked Jaffa for that matter, he got along with him fine on a personal level and he admired Leo Strauss immensely, but he saw danger in those who wanted to promote social change at all costs. So he says, “These are the people,” in this lecture, “who will do justice, even if the heavens fall. And I say to you,” he’s talking to his students, “heaven to can indeed fall and it can hurt those heads it falls on mighty hard.” And what he meant by that is if you promote your reform, liberty, or justice, whatever camp that might fall into at the expense of other social goods, you can collapse the whole social system. So if you want to promote liberty at the expense of the general welfare, well, that’s going to cause problems. If you want to promote justice and you don’t care about domestic tranquility, you’ll end up having neither, neither justice nor domestic tranquility. So he really looks a lot at the preamble and those six goods enumerated there have to be held in balanced tension. You cannot promote domestic tranquility at the expense of justice nor justice at the expensive domestic tranquility. They have to be held in balanced tension with each other. So as you know, I mean, Jaffa wrote Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty” speech and Kendall hated that speech. Richard Reinsch (44:21): Yeah, that’s interesting. Christopher Owen (44:24): Because he believed that you can’t… Extremism as a defense of liberty is a vice, if it destroys the other social goods in society. So those have to be held in balanced tension and if you’re promoting liberty and the society general welfare is collapsing, rural America’s dying, or something, then you got a problem. Richard Reinsch (44:49): Yeah. No, well said. Christopher Owen, thank you so much for coming on to discuss your new book, Heaven Can Indeed Fall. Thank you. Christopher Owen (44:57): Thank you so much for having me on Richard. It’s been a pleasure. Richard Reinsch (45:02): This is Richard Reinsch. You’ve been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I’m your host Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Richard Reinsch (00:18): Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with Michael Rentz about all aspects of the supply chain crisis. Mr. Rentz is the chief revenue officer of Gnosis Freight, an international shipping company based in Charleston, South Carolina. He also previously worked for Maersk in their shipping operations, so he knows the industry really well, and has thought a lot about its problems in our current scenario where they stem from, and is here to talk about it with us today. And I think he brings both an interesting perspective, both economically, both theory, and also in the practical problems, and details that he has encountered working in this industry. Michael, welcome to the program. Michael Rentz (01:03): Thank you, Richard. I appreciate you having me. It’s an honor to be on the podcast, and I appreciate the opportunity. So thank you. Richard Reinsch (01:10): Great. So thinking about the supply chain crisis, this thing that has exploded in American life, and has affected everything from new cars, semiconductors, shelves at Target and Walmart, energy. And so we’ve got a lot of things happening that people don’t like and are experiencing, and a lot of fingers are being pointed, and there’s a lot there… As you and I were discussing offline, there are numerous causes contributing to this but maybe before we get into that, just to help us give us the context for the supply chain, international supply chain. I mean, as I was thinking about this, a small business owner has a supply chain. It may just be that all of his products are sourced locally, but he has some sort of supply chain he’s got to do to bring his business together. It’s just that the supply chain crisis we’re discussing is truly international, but help us understand what is the supply chain, and what has it become in American life over the past two decades? Michael Rentz (02:10): Great question. And that’s a great place to start to kind of frame up the fundamentals of what we’re dealing with regards to supply chain. The way I describe it is I tell people it’s a loose collection of a lot of different industries. It’s not one monolithic industry supply chain. Under that umbrella are huge industries in and of itself like ocean carrier industry, ports, warehousing, factories, trucking, air freight, as well as trains… Rail. So a tremendous amount of economic activity under the umbrella of the supply chain. And what that means is it’s a massive problem that deals with how they communicate with one another as they’re passing goods along through the chain. The one ubiquitous part of the entire industry is the container itself, the international shipping container, which revolutionized the industry in the 1950s. And so that’s ironically enough the perspective I take when analyzing the supply chain is that of the container as it goes intermodally, through the entire supply chain. Richard Reinsch (03:15): The container. I’ve read that this is an important factor. How did international shipping happen before the container, and what did it do in terms of volume speed, things like that? Michael Rentz (03:29): Right. So before the container, when it came to moving goods on boats, primarily, I mean, people literally picked them up in rope nets off the docks, and loaded it, floor loaded it onto the vessel. And you could… As many goods as you could fit on the deck of the vessel was about as much goods as you could transport. And it was just a massive bottleneck, and taking it from one mode of transportation to the next. And obviously, the throughput, the amount of goods you could fit through the entire system, was tiny. When they created the container, I think in 1955, it was a uniform point to which every different party involved in moving goods, adjusted to the trucks, the ocean carriers, the rail. And then, in addition, it made it much easier to store those goods on the vessels. So if you look at an image of a vessel, it’s not just the containers you see stacked up on top of the vessel itself. It’s stacked way below deck as well. So it really is almost unmeasurable or incalculable as far as the magnitude of difference that made. Richard Reinsch (04:35): Yeah. Michael Rentz (04:35): To moving goods and really international trades. Richard Reinsch (04:38): So you’re saying the container, it’s not just international shipping on these massive cargo vessels. It’s also, then you unload it, and it can be put on an 18-wheeler. It could be put on rail. Its goods can be easily dispensed with, and then reloaded. It can be shipped back to its point of origin, and then reloaded. It offers an array of uses that makes shipping quicker, stronger, faster, cheaper, all of those things. Michael Rentz (05:05): Exactly. It’s standardized, there’s only a handful of different container sizes and everybody adjusts accordingly. Richard Reinsch (05:11): Question. Just how big is a container. I mean, could you live in it? Michael Rentz (05:14): You could. People do. It’s very trendy right now. The most common size is what’s called a 40-foot container. It’s 40-foot by, I believe, eight foot by eight foot. The other unit, depending on the entity, measures them in 20-foot. But I would say an overwhelming majority of the goods are moved in 40-foot containers. They have, in addition to that, what’s called a 40-foot high cube, which is 45 feet long, and a bit more space you can utilize inside as well as what’s called a 53-foot container, which is oftentimes referred to in this country as a domestic container because the United States is the only country on earth that has the infrastructure large enough to move those 53-foot containers. So you won’t see those going around Europe or Asia. Ironically enough, they’re manufactured in Asia, the 53 footers. And so, a lot of retailers compete to get access to those 53-foot imports. They’ll ship the asset itself with goods inside of it. Then it will live here in the United States for the remaining time. The last point is if you see goods moving in a 20-foot container, it’s usually incredibly heavy stuff. It’s what’s called loaded-out, as opposed to cubed-out, you move light goods in 40-foot containers, and heavy goods in 20-foot containers. Richard Reinsch (06:23): And also, I remember being in a hotel room in Savannah, Georgia a couple of years ago, and I was on the water. And I remember looking out my window, and almost losing my breath as one of these massive cargo ships sailed by. I mean, this largest thing I’ve ever seen, give us a sense of how big these vessels are. Michael Rentz (06:42): The new ones, I think Maersk calls them the Triple E vessel are large enough to put the Empire State Building inside of them. They’re about 20,000- Richard Reinsch (06:49): That’s incredible. Michael Rentz (06:50): 20-foot equivalent to these container ships, which are huge. Richard Reinsch (06:54): Yeah. Michael Rentz (06:55): And some of the largest vessels in the world, those don’t even call the east coast. The infrastructure is not even big enough. So the ones you saw in Savannah are pretty big, but not the biggest in the world. Funny enough. Richard Reinsch (07:07): So thinking about America’s ports, but before we get to that, let’s just think more about… So we talked about sort of the nuts and bolts of how these goods travel. Why did the supply chain come to be so… Such an important part of American commerce? I suppose part of that is the free trade globalism story of the last 20 years, but also, in the search for cheaper costs and the ability to deliver products at that cost to American consumers, there’s also something else which is, they seemed to really make it work and delivered high-quality goods and services that people wanted to buy. Michael Rentz (07:38): That’s right. And I spent a lot of time thinking very deeply about this, and what I can come up with is about 40 years ago, you really start to see offshoring, and the primary objective of that was cost. And the reason they utilized it for cost is because cash became king. Ultimately, I mean the largest export in the United States really today is cash. And that is where most companies make their money is lending their dollars. And so, they wanted to create as much working capital cash-on-hand so they could invest it in the markets to make more money. Walmart, for example, their business model is literally to sell their products on their shelves at a loss. They have incredible terms. They collect on those goods immediately and have 90 or 120-day terms before they have to pay. And they just invested in the markets and take seven, eight, nine percent return. That’s pretty much how they make a lot of their money. So I think that became a structural problem in the economics where everybody was optimizing for cost, as opposed to optimizing for efficiency. And that just kind of perpetuated itself decade over decade. And everybody assumed this is the way you do it. Richard Reinsch (08:43): So are you, and this is interesting, so you work in the international shipping industry, but you’re saying that there’s something structurally wrong with it? Michael Rentz (08:50): Fundamentally yes, I do think there’s something structurally wrong with it. I mean, it’s not just in our industry. If you look at the best and brightest minds are going into financial services, everybody’s trying to optimize cash… I think that’s not a sustainable way to do business ultimately. Richard Reinsch (09:10): Okay. So let’s maybe think more about the supply chain issue here. I mean, cause I guess part of that would be we’re the world’s reserve currency. Michael Rentz (09:16): Right. Richard Reinsch (09:16): And as the world’s reserve currency transactions are going to happen in dollars, they’re going to be pegged to dollars. So foreign companies, foreign investors want dollars in order to engage in those transactions. I mean, part of that’s understandable, and is that actually, most people say that’s actually a benefit to America globally. And also it seems that the search for or lower cost is understandable and also allows for comparative advantage and to develop highest-end uses and the most advanced- Michael Rentz (09:43): Right. Richard Reinsch (09:43): Technology to dominate the American economy. So I understand that, but the supply chain itself becomes sort of, a product of offshoring, but talk about more in depthly about what happens, and we just pick a company, how do they operate? How do they work? How does this come to be? Michael Rentz (10:00): Yeah, great question. So, I think one component to chat about is landed cost, which is actually pretty simple. It’s the cost to make, manufacture, plus the cost to import, your transportation costs. And when initially, globalization offshoring began that landed cost was very low. That’s why it was such a good business objective. But as of recently, for a multitude of reasons, that landed cost has gone up tremendously. And unfortunately, that’s being pushed a little bit to the consumer, and we can chat about that later. But most retailers, it’s a giant pareto distribution. About 10 to 15 companies import an overwhelming majority of the goods. And then there’s a long middle and smaller tail. And most of those companies are set up doing what their main objective is, take a garment importer or a clothing company that sells goods. They’re great at selling shirts. And so their expertise isn’t necessarily in moving goods or getting those goods in. They know what they want and they know who… How to sell it to their customers. So they outsource their logistics to a variety of different players. And here we go with the supply chain. So they have factories primarily in Asia, mainly in China, but some in Southeast Asia as well. And then once they are monitoring those inventory levels to try to sell as many T-shirts as possible, they cut purchase orders. They go to their factories that then start producing to make sure that they don’t stock out on the front end to the customers. The last thing they want is to not have any shirts to sell to their customers and miss out on that opportunity to collect the cash. So the factory will make it. And then those t-shirts that are made, let’s say, China for this example, need to get from the factory to the port. So they’ll dispatch an empty container from the port. A trucker will pick it up, take it to the factory, stuff the container, and then bring it back to the port. Then that container needs to get onto a vessel, traverse across the ocean. While it’s going across the ocean, it needs to clear US customs, which is a very burdensome process in a lot of regards, get off the vessel into a port, and then get from the port onto a truck to a distribution facility, probably from a distribution facility to a retailer. And that’s the simplest way to explain it. So they say on average, a container changes hands 20 times on its journey. Richard Reinsch (12:17): Okay. So talk about one part of this is this idea of the bullwhip effect. And that’s playing out right now in America, where I guess would be where the whip strikes, so to speak, but that’s being delayed. Talk about that. Michael Rentz (12:33): So the bullwhip looks like a bullwhip. It’s the small amplification at the beginning, but at the end of the tail, it’s massive. And so, in that chain, when that retailer cuts those purchase orders, the factory sees a huge order come in. And then that factory places another order to their suppliers for more goods because they’re anticipating that there’s all of a sudden going to be a long sustaining spike in demand. And that just amplifies throughout the entire process where everybody in the chain orders more, and then you get a massive amount of goods trying to flow through the system that may not necessarily truly match the actual demand. And then, from there, everybody’s playing catch-up, and that’s exactly what happened, I think, at the beginning of the pandemic. Richard Reinsch (13:20): So with the bullwhip, but also there’s this idea too, of like a delay results in a huge, huge delay on down the line. Michael Rentz (13:27): Right. Conceptually it’s the same thing. So, everybody’s pretty much operating on a weekly schedule, and maybe like a 10-minute delay, say, in Shanghai, could result in a 10-day delay in Denver, as those delays process through the system, the handovers miss, the windows miss for an opportunity to exchange the container, and it’s pushed off a week, or it’s pushed off a few days until they have the rhythm, the capacity to pick it back up and keep it moving. And, it just throws off the entire system, which is already brittle, to begin with. I mean, it’s really stretched out like a rubber band, again, optimized for cost, not necessarily optimized for efficiency. Richard Reinsch (14:03): Yeah. So efficiency here. That’s something I also want to discuss with you. So we know, I mean, COVID diminishes production across the globe for obvious reasons. Michael Rentz (14:12): Right. Richard Reinsch (14:12): A number of governments, particularly Western governments, the United States, print money, gives it to people in the form of stimulus payments, and then- Michael Rentz (14:21): That’s right. Richard Reinsch (14:21): People spend it, and we’ve got, the money supplies increased dramatically in this country, and people are spending money. And we’ve also got this strange effect no one I think counted on of the workforce diminishing, although that would seem to allow with the incentives of giving people money. And so we’ve got labor shortages, increased cash. And so we’ve got all sorts of problems, and we now have inflation. So we know all that. We know that’s a part of this problem. You and I are discussing on a micro level and tell me where… What you would add to that. But it’s also the case. When we think about these issues, there’s a lot of ways in which the government has interacted with the pieces of the international shipping supply chain industry that are not beneficial to a market. I mean, you said it’s price-for-cost. Well, that, duh, we know that, but it’s not priced for, or it’s not acting according to efficiency. Maybe we should talk more about that. Michael Rentz (15:18): Sure. There are… We do have good examples, both domestically in the United States and globally as like the premier operating model for certain legs or certain components of the supply chain, take ports, for example, whether it’s Rotterdam in Northern Europe or the Southeastern ports of the United States, the Virginia Ports Authority, South Carolina Ports Authority, Georgia Ports Authority, I think have the premier models, which is one governing managerial structure, the South Carolina Ports Authority, or the Georgia Ports Authority, for example, and a non-unionized competitive labor force that is a meritocracy fundamentally. And they are competing to be the best of their jobs because they get paid more to do so. Richard Reinsch (16:00): Yeah. Michael Rentz (16:00): Compare that to New York, New Jersey, or the ports on the west coast. It’s the opposite. There’s a tremendous amount of friction at the top. The port is really a landlord. And then there’s a lot of different entities that manage the port. So inherently, there’s a lot of friction and communication issues. And then, on the labor side, it’s completely unionized, and they’re not ultimately competing to be the most efficient. They’re trying to make the most money. And funny enough, they make the most money when they’re working overtime. So it’s… They’re disincentivized to work as efficiently as possible. And then in a moment like post-pandemic world where there’s a gluttony of goods flowing through the system, you absolutely need efficiency. And that is part of the problem. Richard Reinsch (16:45): So it’s interesting. You mentioned the ports, so just comparing American ports to ports around the globe, which is at a comparative disadvantage in how we receive goods, but ultimately the voracious demand of the American consumer overrides that, those problems to a great extent, I imagine. So, but then not to say that we shouldn’t fix it, but how do you… You mentioned the Rotterdam port, how does that operate? Michael Rentz (17:09): The Dutch have always been incredibly forward thinking and progressive with logistics or with water resources, and if you’ve ever been to Holland, you can see that firsthand. Richard Reinsch (17:19): Yeah. Michael Rentz (17:19): The terminal that I have firsthand exposure is the APM terminals. The APM is the Moller – Maersk company, the parent company of Maersk, and it’s completely automated. There are literally no human beings on the port. If you walk over a certain line, the entire port shuts down. The crane operators work virtually. They work in an office off the port, and they have a joystick. And I think it’s virtual reality, and they operate the cranes from there. And so it’s perfectly optimized. Now, would that work in the United States? Probably not. I think we need to give people good-paying jobs so they can take care of their families. But I think I read something. That’s how the Virginia Ports Authority apparently was able to withstand the most recent crisis was they had relied heavily on automation. Now that’s not the solution, but it’s certainly a factor. Richard Reinsch (18:07): Well, I mean, I would think that is the solution. I mean, it’s… This is creative destruction. This is how a capitalist economy advances, would be automation. Michael Rentz (18:17): Yeah. I mean, totally. Richard Reinsch (18:17): I would… I mean, I would disagree with the notion that we’re supposed to lock in these jobs to help people protect their… Care for their families. I mean, to me, that’s actually the recipe for decline. If we try to lock in the… Michael Rentz (18:28): Fair enough. Yeah. Richard Reinsch (18:28): Economy into one labor system. It’s funny listening to you I was thinking of that. I think it’s the second season of The Wire, maybe the third season of The Wire. Where we’re… We get to sort of look at the Baltimore port through the lens of this family, intergenerational family, that’s worked in the Baltimore port, and at the end of the season, they’re introduced to automation, and they’re sort of scratching their heads about it. This means to me, yeah, no, I was reading about the Virginia port. Semi-automated, and it’s been of what I’ve read, it’s been the only port in America free of backlogs. And that would seem to accord with what you are saying internationally, that this is just a more efficient way of doing it. And yet obviously there’s a lot of built-in invested interest who resist that. And that’s clearly what we’re seeing in California. Michael Rentz (19:20): Right. I would add the port of Charleston in there. I’m pretty sure they’d never- Richard Reinsch (19:23): Yeah. Michael Rentz (19:24): Sustained any type of backlog. And I’m from South Carolina, and any time I worked at Maersk, that seemed to be the sentiment globally. I would sit in the conference room, and they put a map at the United States up in South Carolina would be colored a different color, and it’d be for a good reason for the first time ever. And it was because it was the premier port, people globally recognize how good the South Carolina Ports Authority system is. I think we chatted about so Virginia relies heavily on automation. I know more about the South Carolina Ports Authority, and they rely on a competitive workforce. And as we also talked about, they also have the only recent CapEx infrastructure project, which started in 2009 to double the capacity of the port here in Charleston, in the entire country. Richard Reinsch (20:06): Well, now that’s interesting as well. So that would be South Carolina as a right-to-work state is free of, say, the longshoreman’s union- Michael Rentz (20:14): To a certain degree. Richard Reinsch (20:15): That dominates ports. So there is some unionization of the port? Michael Rentz (20:18): Right. But the overwhelming majority of the port’s staff are employees of the Ports Authority, and it’s a right-to-work state. Richard Reinsch (20:27): In Charleston? Michael Rentz (20:27): For example, and this is a few years outdated, and my numbers may be slightly off, but the base salary of the crane operator for a year, $70,000, but the top-performing crane operator, I believe, took home somewhere around $170,000. Richard Reinsch (20:39): Wow. Michael Rentz (20:40): That year, because they were paid per container to take off the vessel. And so at one point in the last few years, this may be off as of super recently, but the Port of Charleston was the most efficient port in North America, as well as the fastest growing and what they could turn a vessel over in one day, it would take people in LA Long Beach, seven days to do that vessel. Richard Reinsch (21:02): That’s incredible. Michael Rentz (21:03): That’s the comparative difference. And that I believe, is why elevating what I would call meritocracy at the labor level, so important to efficiency as opposed to call. Richard Reinsch (21:13): Oh yeah. So, but yeah, I mean, I was reading, just doing some research for our discussion here today, the longshoreman’s union at the ports in California, average worker there makes over $200,000 a year. Michael Rentz (21:26): Right. Richard Reinsch (21:26): Which that seems like a generous income, but also seems like one, that’s the result of a lot of protection, a lot of labor protection- Michael Rentz (21:33): Right. Richard Reinsch (21:33): A lot of insulation from competition to the detriment of a much broader group of people, namely the American consumer. And then, also thinking about our ports, dredging, which would be necessary for growing ports. I mean, so we think about… Michael Rentz (21:48): Yes sir. Richard Reinsch (21:49): International shipping increasing in volume, which I assume is a pretty regular thing or was, and will be again, do the ports themselves, are they able to update the way you think they should? Or are they themselves hemmed in by a lot of regulation? Michael Rentz (22:03): Yes and no. I mean, I’m looking out the window at the Charleston Harbor right now, and there’s, there’s always going to be dredgers out there. So the key number is 52 or 54 feet. You don’t want to be tidally restricted to be able to handle the big vessels, and it’s the ocean. So you need to constantly dredge to do that. That project started in 2009. So it had to go through the Army Corps of Engineers. It’s just a very lengthy, clunky, and robust process that you got to have good leadership. You have to have good foresight and a good finger on the pulse of the macroeconomics of where the goods are going to go. And so, thankfully, the port of the South Carolina Ports Authority has probably the best leadership of all the ports in the country right now, contrast that maybe with some of the other ports who don’t necessarily have that vision in- Richard Reinsch (22:49): Yeah. Michael Rentz (22:50): Overly burdened with their regulatory environment per… By state. Richard Reinsch (22:54): Good. Just a question, the Charleston port, so you’re singing its praises. This is great. That’s what seems to compete with what I would think, but where does it rank in terms of volume of goods received routed to the other ports in North America? Michael Rentz (23:06): I think it’s eighth right now. It could be seventh or eighth or ninth, but it’s in the top 10. Richard Reinsch (23:12): Out of how many? How many ports do we have? Michael Rentz (23:15): It depends. I mean, there’s a lot of niche ports. Richard Reinsch (23:17): Okay. Michael Rentz (23:17): But I mean probably 10 to 15. I could rattle them off. Richard Reinsch (23:20): Yeah. That’s okay. That’s okay. Michael Rentz (23:21): Yeah. Main ones. But I think it’s important for everyone to know, imports go to population centers, imports go to cities. So in the Southeast, they go to Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, they go to New York, DC, Miami, LA, but exports come from the rural places of this country where land is cheap, and labor is cheap. So there’s an inherent problem of getting that equipment. The container specifically from where it was unloaded, say Atlanta, to a rural part of Georgia or South Carolina to where there’s a factory. If there’s a factory, to put goods in it, to export it to somewhere. Unfortunately, because of the trade imbalance in this country, and this goes back to what we were talking about initially, the largest containerized export in the United States of America today is air. It is empty containers. We send more empty containers back to China to put more stuff in and then to bring it back into the country than we do anything. And I think second and third in that is scrap paper, scrap metal, scrap cardboard, things like that. Again- Richard Reinsch (24:21): Yeah. Michael Rentz (24:22): To go back to those countries to make more stuff, to put it back in here. Richard Reinsch (24:25): Well, I mean, trade imbalance doesn’t really bother me. It doesn’t bother me one, just thinking about the dollar being the world’s reserve currency, but also because the people outside of America are investing American dollars into American equities, also into bonds, treasuries, things like that. So you can say it’s a trade imbalance, but I think what we actually have is probably an equity imbalance, and that doesn’t bother them. I think that works long term to the benefit of our economy. And I think we export air because we have a lot of hungry consumers. We have a lot of voracious demand, and we want a lot of goods delivered here that it may not make sense for us to produce ourselves. We could produce them, but what would be the cost that we would bear doing that? Thinking about the Jones Act, I’ve read just things that have made things worse. I mean, both preceding this crisis but have made it worse. The Jones Act entails American chartered vessels have to move goods between the ports. And that, of course, is a high cost, and that’s a regulatory cost and which would raise prices, et cetera, decrease of efficiency. What do you see there? Michael Rentz (25:30): Right. So American flagged to American made, and I think American owned and operated, which there are no American ocean carriers anymore. So inherently, that’s a problem. The Jones Act, I think, was created in 1920. North America. The United States has the most navigable river system, I believe in the world, and we don’t utilize it. So it’s a huge problem. And it’s not contemporary in the least. Richard Reinsch (25:51): And is that… And that’s because of the Jones Act? The navigable river problem. Michael Rentz (25:55): I believe in part, yes sir. Richard Reinsch (25:57): Yeah. Michael Rentz (25:57): So you can’t deliver goods, let’s say from New York to Miami via ocean, it’s got to go over land. Richard Reinsch (26:03): Well, yeah. That’s a problem. Michael Rentz (26:03): That clogs- Richard Reinsch (26:04): I-95 is a problem. Michael Rentz (26:07): Right? And so, it sucks up the capacity of trucks and trains to make these long haul moves when they could be put on what’s called a feeder vessel, which is not the giant vessels that you can put the Empire State Building in, but smaller vessels, which is common to Europe, Southeast Asia, the rest of the world to transport goods domestically, via water. And with that new capacity, that’s not being sucked up, to move these goods across the land, they could be used to do what’s called drayage, which is short haulage from the ports to the distribution centers, usually about 30 miles. And that’s where a lot of the congestion is, around LA, Long Beach, New York, New Jersey, Charleston, everywhere. Those trucks are taking the goods out of the port complex to a distribution center nearby and back. They try to make three or four runs a day. And a lot of that capacity, because there’s already a trucker shortage of 80,000 drivers in this country are doing long hauls, because we can’t use the navigable waterways. And because we’re not using domestic ocean moves. So the Jones Act certainly is antiquated and old, and definitely needs to be revisited. I don’t know if I have the answer myself, but if we get enough smart people around the table. Richard Reinsch (27:15): Well, I mean, you just delete the legislation, right? I mean, just end the legislation, which is inhibiting markets, inhibiting price discovery, it’s inhibiting how people would actually engage in commerce, but for the cost associated with this bill, this legislation, and things would move a lot better. So I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that complicated, do you? Michael Rentz (27:37): No. I mean, yeah, in theory, it shouldn’t be. I mean, I would love to see an American ocean carrier come up. There are certain, what they call Jones Act carriers that will make feeder runs from Florida to Puerto Rico or from Seattle to Alaska. But they’re tiny. They have like four vessels in their entire fleet, but I would love to see that. I would love to see an American ocean carrier emerge. I would love to see us take advantage of the navigable waterways with a barge system. Northern Europe does an incredible job of barges. And I think that would alleviate a lot of of the problems. Richard Reinsch (28:10): Yeah. Michael Rentz (28:10): As well as a real infrastructure investment into some new ports. Richard Reinsch (28:14): Yeah. Michael Rentz (28:15): Our ports are confined by these old cities that haven’t grown. Take Charleston, for example, 400 years. It’s confined to how the city developed, the population developed. And if you want to make infrastructure investments, if you want to find empty land to store containers, it doesn’t exist. Doesn’t exist in LA, Long Beach, it doesn’t exist- Richard Reinsch (28:31): I can only imagine, and I know nothing about this, but I can only imagine the regulatory cost associated with trying to create a new port or enlarging an existing one to fit new market realities. I imagine it’s a mess. Michael Rentz (28:45): Right? I mean- Richard Reinsch (28:46): Years, years, years. Michael Rentz (28:48): Decades process. Richard Reinsch (28:49): Yeah, exactly. Michael Rentz (28:49): It’s a decades process. I know South Carolina and Georgia Ports Authority are exploring building a joint terminal in Jasper, South Carolina. And I think the goal was 2030 or 2035 and they started on it five years ago. So the foresight… Richard Reinsch (29:04): Yeah. Michael Rentz (29:04): Is in leadership has got to be… Richard Reinsch (29:08): Talk about the intermodal chassis. I’m reading here 221% trade remedy tariff on imports of the intermodal chassis from China. That can’t be helping us. Michael Rentz (29:22): That’s a funny problem. It’s not the main problem, but yeah, so there was the shortest of chassis, and chassis are the metal frame with the wheels that the container sits on. So, the 18-wheelers that people see on the road aren’t really how the containers move. You have a truck, a big trucker that goes to the port, grabs a chassis, hooks it to their… The cab of their truck then goes and picks up the container. So it’s three parts that metal part with the wheels is the chassis. There was a shortage of them. So they decided to order them. And they’re all manufactured in China, and they’re stuck in the same supply chain crisis that we’re trying to solve. And they won’t get here to the middle of 2022. So that’s just a funny problem. The real problem is who owns the chassis. So I think about 10 years ago, the ocean carriers Maersk, CMA, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, these big international ocean carriers owned the chassis. And it was a problem. People complained it cost the industry billions of dollars a year. And so the ocean carriers said, fine, we’ll sell them. They sell them to private equity groups. And so the private equity groups care about one thing, and that’s sweating the assets out to get as much cash as possible out of them. They don’t necessarily care about the industry or efficiency or anything like that. So the chassis are inherently a problem. And it’s a big problem. And it’s incredibly complex. I mean, I’ve tried to read and study about it, but it has to do with who owns them, how you rent them, who takes care of them, who fixes them when they break. Richard Reinsch (30:46): And I suppose, I mean, just for our listeners, the function of it, right? This is what allows you to move the containers. Michael Rentz (30:52): Right. The container is just a metal box. Richard Reinsch (30:55): Over land in a truck, right? Michael Rentz (30:57): That’s right. Richard Reinsch (30:58): Yeah. Michael Rentz (30:58): That’s right. So, the trucks don’t have… It’s not a trailer, it’s not hooked, like I said, you see the 18 wheelers, it’s just the front of the truck with the trailer hitch basically. Richard Reinsch (31:09): Yeah. Michael Rentz (31:09): And they come to the port, they pick up the chassis, go get the container, et cetera. Richard Reinsch (31:13): As you’ve worked in this, international shipping. And you’ve thought about the elements of the “supply chain,” quote unquote, is it a dynamic industry? I mean, we’ve been in sort of sending forward the case that it isn’t, but shouldn’t it be? Maybe parts of it are, you can enlighten this, but what do you see as the future and what do you see as holding things back? Am I overly insisting upon sort of the… A free market store here that’s not being allowed to work or what’s… What do you see as going on overall? Michael Rentz (31:46): So I’ll take the perspective as an American, and I think we have stretched the rubber band about as far as we can possibly stretch it. I just can’t conceptually in my mind, think about how much more globalization there can be. I mean, we’ve pretty much tried to extract as much value as we can from the system. That plus the pandemic, I think there is going to be a natural reshoring of goods. And I think the ground today is different than it was a few decades ago when offshoring began. And what I mean is I think people are more equipped today to move back closer to what I would call only mile delivery, as opposed to last-mile delivery, which is like a completely vertically integrated supply chain domestically for certain goods. Richard Reinsch (32:24): Mm-hmm. Michael Rentz (32:26): So I think we’re going to see the pendulum swing back towards that way. Certainly, different administrations will help and probably incentivize people to do so. I think it would be best for the American citizen to have some of those goods back, but certainly, access to capital, access to information, and access to technology is different today than it was, say, 40 years ago. So if you and I wanted to go start a toilet paper manufacturing company in rural South Carolina, the likelihood that you and I could do that today versus 40 years ago is extremely high. I mean, we could take… The cash is there to go out and finance the equipment. The equipment is much more advanced today than it was. It could be highly automated. And then, with access to information, whether it’s YouTube or any other online resources, we could learn what it takes to run a toilet paper business. And that’s a very small and limited scope of an example. But I think in general that’s the American spirit is people will take it into their own hands. And then that’s a truly resilient supply chain. You’re buying from your neighbors to a certain degree for certain goods. Richard Reinsch (33:27): Yeah. I mean, my sense is, thinking about the… Just to continue talking about toilet paper here. So, we ran out during the pandemic, a lot of panic buying, and we heard a lot about pharmaceuticals of not being available, potentially the way that China could make things unavailable and make things scarce for their own benefit. Vis-à-vis America. And of course, now this dawning realization that China isn’t… Not is it not, no longer an ally, it’s not even really a competitive partner or an opponent, but maybe an adversary. And the realization- Michael Rentz (34:03): Mm-hmm. Richard Reinsch (34:04): That the last 30 or 40 years of our thinking about China was wrong and okay. And of course the Chinese government in the last five or six years seems to be interacting in a much more aggressive authoritarian manner. Not that it wasn’t before, but even more so. And so I understand all of that at and, but it is… I mean, it does seem to be the case apart from what’s happened with the pandemic and the way governments have dealt with it, which I think has been not optimal. It does seem like the supply chain has worked and held up nicely. I mean, I don’t know of anything. Certainly the pharmaceutical… I don’t know of anything we really missed out on or that we had dramatic shortages and that weren’t sort of replenished fairly quickly. And I wonder overall with the crisis that we’re in, you tell me, seems to me, we’re going to work through it, despite all of these government issues and the way they’re impeding it, we’re going to work through it probably by the middle of next year. What do you see? Michael Rentz (34:55): Yeah, no, that is the best point. And that’s exactly right, is the industry as a whole is operating, it is working. It’s not broken. It’s clogged, but the people of the industry are the best workers in the world. And our entire country really sits on the back of them; whether it’s the truckers or the port operators, or the inbound logistics managers for those retailers, they don’t get enough credit. And they have been working tirelessly to make sure the goods keep moving. And they have. There might be delays on your new couch. It might not be six weeks, it might be six months, but ultimately those should flush through the system by the middle of 2022, barring that they don’t inject any more stimulus capital into the system where people go out and reinitiate the bullwhip effect. So yeah, I mean, it should flow out, and then hopefully once the systems unclog and then more at a steady-state, we can start to have serious conversations about the regulatory environment at certain ports about real infrastructure projects, about opening up some of the navigable waterways to better prepare for the next system. I mean, really, the supply chain industry has dealt with one catastrophe after another. It’s just the whole world knows about this one, but it seems like every few years, there’s a problem. And the industry always seems to swallow it and handle it. But now’s the time. Richard Reinsch (36:16): Well, that’s testament to the industry and also to market forces themselves and how they can incentivize people to make things happen. Absolutely. Michael Rentz, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about our supply chain crisis and the industry itself. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Michael Rentz (36:33): Thank you, Richard. I appreciate it. Richard Reinsch (36:36): This is Richard Reinsch. You’ve been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk available at lawliberty.org.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Hello, today we’re talking with Sam Gregg about the question, “What’s wrong with America?” Sam Gregg, many of you know, is a contributing editor at Law & Liberty. He’s also, his day job, he’s a research director at the Acton Institute. He’s the author of numerous books, including, he’s been on this program to discuss Wilhelm Ropke’s Political Economy and Becoming Europe. He’s also the author of the prize-winning book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. He contributes to a number of publications and he is also a visiting scholar at the Feulner Institute at the Heritage Foundation. Sam Gregg, welcome back to Liberty Law Talk. Sam Gregg (00:56): Richard, always good to be with you. Richard Reinsch (00:58): So Sam, this question now “what’s wrong with America?” We can also discuss what’s right with America, sort of inspired by GK. Chesterton’s great book, What’s Wrong with the World? Now we don’t have to be as theological, obviously, as Chesterton, but it is to suggest that, or not to suggest, but to say there’s something wrong with America. Many people sense it. It has many facets to it. You follow political economy, you follow law, constitutional thinking, social thought, just any number of areas you write on. And so, I think you can address this well. There was an essay published this week that a lot of people are talking about. Yuval Levin’s, “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown,” was the title, it was published in The Dispatch earlier this week, this being the third week of November. And Yuval Levin advances something in there that resonated with me. He said in the nineties, and that’s sort of when I was coming of age, that we had this sort of impression of America, still the high crime rate, a lot of anti-social trends, up-ticking, and a lot of just frenetic energy, a lot of chaos in America, a lot of dislocated people who had not been formed well, who had been let down by institutions. And he says in this essay, we may have the opposite of that problem now in America. We may have a lot of passivity on the part of individuals pursuing education, pursuing career, pursuing family formation, having children, we’ve seen a decline in divorce in America, but we’ve also seen decline in marriage in general. We’ve seen a decline in out of wedlock childbirth, but we’ve also seen a lower birth rate. And so, Yuval wondered why is that? And he thinks it, there really are no scripts anymore. And in the absence of scripts for people’s lives, people become inert and passive, and that has its own set of consequences. Let me ask you, I didn’t know if you had a chance to read that, but how do you react to that? Sam Gregg (02:57): Well, I did read the article and there are things that I had thought that Yuval Levin got right and there are things I suspect I’d quibbled with, because I think it’s true to say that the scripts to use his term have broken down to a certain extent. The American story, which maybe because I’m an immigrant, I tend to pay more attention to, but the American story of people coming to the United States or being born in the United States, they’re experiencing a path of upward mobility socially, economically, educationally, that story seems to have broken down. So that narrative, which has informed a lot of American political discourse has informed the way that Americans think about themselves and their country and the history of the United States. I think it’s true to say that there are many Americans who are skeptical about whether it’s even possible to live that story any more. There are some groups, some thinkers in the United States who would argue that it was always a myth and that it’s a myth that has covered up numerous sins on the part of the United States that are being present for a very long period of time, whether it’s the sort of the legacy of slavery or whether it’s the various isms that they say are permeating American society. So there’s lots of different ways of thinking about what’s gone wrong with America. I would say in many respects, that it’s also a question of ideas. And to my mind, there are significant groups of people on the left. And now, by the way, some groups on the right who aren’t just questioning the scripts or the script as it was laid out for so many people coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, there are people who are fundamentally questioning the founding of the United States, the key thinkers and ideas that have formed the basis of the United States, who are presenting a vision of American history as one of numerous forms of oppression. And many of these people, many of these groups have been very present in some of America’s major culture-forming institutions for quite some time. And I’m not simply thinking about obvious places like the universities, where since the late 19th century, we had many professors often educated in German universities who came back and had a whole vision of essentially dispensing with the founding in many respects and adopting what came to be called the progressive agenda, through federal government, top-down management and administration of society, because bottom-up faith in freedom was messy and disorganized. And so, if you go through the 20th century, that influence has always been there. And I don’t think you can discount the effects of the 1960s and particularly the generation of people that were formed in that period, that the thinking they were exposed to, the ideas that they imbibed. Now, that generation of course is, I guess you could say sort of on its way out in some respects, but their legacy is immense. And it’s a legacy of skepticism, it’s a legacy of distrust of basic institutions of America, a rejection in many respects of the ideas and the figures and the history associated with the founding and the way that that all played out in the 19th century. I would suggest is that if we’re going to identify the boomer generation as being part of the problem in the sense that the legacy that they have bequeathed to the United States is at best a mixed one, there were other things going on, which reflected older forms of what you might call skepticism about the American experiment and ordered liberty. So when a country, especially many of its cultural elites or political elites, legal elites, economic elites, when they start questioning the very experiment in ordered liberty, that’s very dangerous for a country like America, because that’s what defines the country. That’s what makes America different from other countries where they have a history, a long history, they have symbols, they have events, they have even an ethnic dimension, linguistic dimension to their history. And America’s always been different. The historian Gordon Wood makes this point in one of his more recent books. He says, what defines America are these key ideas, these key principles to which lots of Americans continue to refer when they’re thinking about what should the direction of the country be? How do we deal with our problems? We go back to look at these founding documents and principles and ideas. So when all that gets canceled out in some respects or dismissed as the product of late 18th century, white male slave holders, we shouldn’t be surprised a deep doubt starts to enter the body politic and no country can endure that for too long. Richard Reinsch (08:31): A Republic that depends on voluntary associations, voluntary political institutions, people have to want to be a part of them, have to want to run for all office or have to want to serve in various boards or in anything about the vast network of voluntary civil society institutions in American life. All of those depend on people taking part in the American project as a whole, and the inability to transmit your legacy, your memories to the next generation is certainly as you’re saying a major problem. It seems also just thinking about moving, maybe moving over to the right from it, talking about the left, there’s two conservative authors, one from the boomer generation, Mary Eberstadt, but also Helen Andrews, who would be a millennial, both sort of saying, I mean, Mary Eberstadt, if I’ve read her correctly, she wrote a piece recently saying to millennials and gen-Zs, “We robbed you,” talking about the boomer generation, “In terms of the legacy we’ve left you.” Helen Andrews has said, “Basically, more or less, yeah. You did. What we were left with is sort of fool’s gold in terms of the America that we’ve inherited.” What do you make of those, those critiques, which are kind of similar? Sam Gregg (09:48): Well, I think they carry some weight, because let’s think about the boomer generation. So these are the people born after World War II, up until around about 1964. That’s the generational cohort that we’re really talking about. And they grew up in a period of immense American power, economic power, political power, military power, unparalleled, really unparalleled in many respects that put America as the number one country in the world that had slammed the national socialist and fascist colossuses. It had paid for effectively the allied victory in World War II. At the Second World War, the United States accounted to something like 50% of the world’s GDP. The United States essentially saved Western Europe from becoming engulfed by Soviet communism, established bastions of freedom around the world. And I mean, literally bastions. You had American military bases all around the world and America was seen as a citadel, not just of democracy, but also of liberty. So the children, and remember the people who did that, these were the people who had gone through the depression, they had been gone to war, they’d sacrificed immensely. We all know the story and their children of born into this world of immense affluence of security, et cetera. And they reject it, they reject so much of it. And it’s partly, because they were reacting to things like, things they should have been reacting to like the ongoing presence of segregation in the south. They were disturbed and in retrospect, we can say rightly so by the prospect of endless war in Southeast Asia being carried out by the United States. So there were things to critique about the United States, but it’s also very clear that this is a generation that abide ideas and even models of thinking that reflected a lot of what’s often called the hermeneutics of suspicion. So you look around the world and you think behind everything that seemed real and good, not everything is so good. And this is of course, when universities very quickly started the March towards the left. American universities had obviously been mostly progressive up to this point, but that goes in a very radical direction, the radicalization of so much of American higher education and culture. People like Michael Novak, the late Michael Novak used to talk about this, because he was one of them. He was one of the people that were part of this whole generation. And that I think to talk about the boomers in that way, Michael Novak himself wasn’t a boomer, but he was very good at discerning what was going on among that generation of people that he was very much part of. I think there’s a fair amount that we can say yes, that the boomer generation with the skepticism, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and to a certain extent, the hostility that they brought to the public square about certain things that have been seen as always true, whether it’s, America’s understanding of itself, whether it’s things like the place of traditional religion, place of business, the type of economic life that existed in the United States, despite the New Deal, despite The Great Society and all these things. So I think there’s some truth to that, but I think we also need to think about some of the very grave errors, political errors that we were made in this same period, which I’m not sure you can put on the backs of the boomer generation. So we see the Supreme Court, for example, in the 1950s, and this is not populated with boomers adopting a pretty progressive agenda quite deliberately. So you see that is happening. You see the Johnson administration embarking upon what was one of the biggest expansions of government into society and the economy in the 1960s. Again, the people who were in charge were not part of the boomer generation. These are sort of holdovers in the respects from the New Deal and that whole way of thinking about things. So on one level, I think the critique of the boomers is in many respects accurate, but I’m not sure it explains everything. Now, I don’t think that people like Helen Andrews or Mary Eberstadt are claiming that either, all I would suggest is that if we’re going to identify the boomer generation as being part of the problem in the sense that the legacy that they have bequeathed to the United States is at best a mixed one, there were other things going on, which reflected older forms of what you might call skepticism about the American experiment and ordered liberty. Richard Reinsch (14:58): Question that comes to mind and one responsibility. This is what democracies do, but it does seem in the last 10 years, maybe even beyond that, we’ve lost any sense of fiscal responsibility. And thinking about, obviously this is a very, in the headlines right now, in terms of the amount of money that we’re spending, it does seem there’s something in the American psyche right now of the belief that this won’t really hurt us, or that we can just continue to get away with this. Certainly, if you listen to Jay Powell, this is going on this sort of justification, legitimation of a lot of spending. And I just sort of throw that to you, is that also an indication of something profoundly wrong with this country? Sam Gregg (15:43): Well, it’s not the first time the United States has experienced- Richard Reinsch (15:47): Outside of a major war though. I mean, it is quite amazing. Sam Gregg (15:51): Yes. Now I think that’s true that what’s different now compared to say the levels of indebtedness that the United States incurred during the Second World War in particular, we are obviously going heavier and heavier into debt. And as last time I checked, we weren’t in involved in a major war against a major European power, and that hasn’t been the case for a while. So there to be a loss of sense, not just on the left, but among considerable portions of at least the political right, of a sense of fiscal responsibility. Now, so what’s driving this. Well, one, I think is obviously the gap between income and expenditure. And it’s very important to understand that most expenditures, for example, in the federal budget are pretty much fixed. Most of it’s on what are basically, we would call welfare programs and that’s been the case for a while. So the degree of what’s called discretionary spending that Congress authorizes or it’s supposed to authorize every year has actually shrunk significantly in terms of their wiggle room. So one of the ways they deal with that is by going further and further into debt. Now America’s lucky in the sense that it’s the world’s reserve currency, that it’s in a position whereby it can print more dollars, but this catches up. And it’s clearly something that is driving a lot of irresponsible behavior on the part of a lot of the left and much of the right. So there’s a certain detachment from fiscal reality that’s going on. So you even see this, when you hear politicians talk about things like, “Well, we are going to reduce the rate of growth in federal spending.” So they’re not talking about reducing the actual real expenditure, they’re talking about reducing the rate of increases in expenditure. It’s really interesting to listen to that type of language, the notion that you might be actually reducing expenditures in real terms seems very foreign. We spend as much and we borrow as much, but we never actually get back to paying for what we need to pay for. So that does seem to me, interestingly enough, to be somewhat of a departure from the emphasis upon fiscal responsibility, and a certain degree of frugality, that was certainly present in the rhetoric of the founding, even if it wasn’t necessarily lived out in practice. But I think it’s also because a lot of Americans they’ll say things like, “Well, I believe in limited government, but I also want a welfare state. I think we should be doing X, but I also think we should be doing Y.” So the notion of fiscal responsibility, imposing choices that when you choose X, you therefore do not choose Y, that seems to have been dispensed with. And what’s interesting, I find about this is that in many respects, this is somewhat new in American political culture. If you go back to the 19th century or even a lot of the 20th century, especially the early part of the 20th century, American political culture was very hostile to the idea of the federal government spending lots of money and even very hostile to the notion of heavy levels of debt, very hostile to this. And presidential administrations would brag about how much they had reduced the debt by in the 19th century and even in the early parts of the 20th century. So I’m not sure what’s changed, but it’s clearly a problem. Richard Reinsch (19:23): It is interesting. Just speaking impressionistically, Americans are very comfortable with carrying huge levels of private debt in their own personal lives, in their consumer lives, and not balancing ends and means, and the money they make and the money they spend. And you just look at the credit card advertisements, they appeal to that. And I just, I’ve always kind of, I mean, I’ve started to think, well, there’s a line there between this personal behavior and the way you view the federal government and the way you view spending and the way you view things that you’re entitled to. What do you think of that? Sam Gregg (19:56): Well, I have to say that when I first came to live in the United States in 2001, I was shocked by the attitudes of a lot of Americans towards things like credit. I was shocked that Americans so quickly resorted to credit to basically, overcome the problem of distance in time between my means and what I can buy now, as opposed to waiting to buy something in the future when I have a bigger income and I can probably afford it. So credit is one of the magical things of any economy, which allows us to basically pay for things now and build businesses now and do good things now, and then pay back with interest, the capital that we borrowed to do those good things now. I mean, credit is a very important, very useful, very productive financial instrument, not just on a private level, but also in many cases, especially in times of crisis, this is what governments do. And so, a very important role that credit and sensible credit policies play in the role of people’s personal lives and at the level of government. But it does seem to me that the sense of restraint that at some point you borrow now, but you know you’re going to pay it back in the future and you undertake the responsibility to do so, and you use credit for things that are really important rather than things that just satisfy immediate desires and wants. Richard Reinsch (21:39): That’s sort of like, Chris DeMuth has made this argument, the federal government increases its debt every year, but it doesn’t really do it for things that might, we might think of as investments or things that actually build the strength of the country, various things of federal government might spend money for. But we’re a debtor nation to fund consumption in the form of entitlements. Sam Gregg (22:05): We’re also a destination at the moment to fund social security programs, because the social security programs, as we all know, we’re all told every time we get these social security statements, that the fund will be exhausted by such and such a date. That date doesn’t seem to be going away, doesn’t seem to be extending into the future very much. And if you look again, if you look at American history, there have been times when the federal government has embarked upon extensive borrowing in order to fund very important things like winning the Second World War or paying for parts of the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War, or even further back buying Louisiana, that was a very worthwhile set of borrowings that the federal government undertook under President Jefferson to expand the United States, that was all really very important stuff. Now we are borrowing to basically pay for existing programs. And it seems to me that that is problematic on so many levels, because governments really shouldn’t be doing that. You would think that they would stay within the limits imposed by revenue. And this is, I mean, it also points to this dysfunctionality in the politics of some of these things, because Americans generally are quite hostile to high levels of taxation, it’s a longstanding tradition in United States. And even a lot of people on the left are somewhat perturbed by high levels of taxation, but they also want the federal government to be spending on any number of programs, not just welfare programs, but also things like subsidies, subsidies to entire sectors of the economy. So it’s not just the left who are guilty of this, there are sections of the right are also guilty of this. We spend as much and we borrow as much, but we never actually get back to paying for what we need to pay for. So that does seem to me, interestingly enough, to be somewhat of a departure from the emphasis upon fiscal responsibility, and a certain degree of frugality, that was certainly present in the rhetoric of the founding, even if it wasn’t necessarily lived out in practice by say, people like Jefferson himself, but even through the 19th century, in parts of the 20th century, the emphasis upon the federal government, staying within budgets, only spending what they can, that has gone. If you go back in the debate that they were having in the 19th century, presidential candidates would be bragging about how much money they’d saved, if they’d been in public office. Richard Reinsch (24:58): And better than Calvin Coolidge. Sam Gregg (25:01): Yeah, agreed, this is just Calvin Coolidge. If you go back to the 19th century, one of the reasons why after the Civil War, the American military was shrunk so quickly was because American legislators were so anxious to reduce public spending as much and as quickly as possible and to reduce debt as much as possible, that is a very different political world from the one we’re in now. Richard Reinsch (25:26): Yeah. This is something that, struggle to formulate it, but John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths, makes an argument that if a people start to disagree about the ends of their political association, they should actually, they should agree on the end, they should have a consensus about the ends and extent they have public debates over things. It’s really about the means. And it seems in my mind that we are at odds at the level of ends, do we want to be a constitutional people with what that implies in terms of accepting, fixed limits on government power, accepting that those who are in the government are actually accountable to people and we want to strive to work that way as a people? We want to have a rich, simple society. That’s actually the purpose of government. We want to have a lot of market activity. I mean, am I being too critical or negative to think, I’m not sure everyone’s onboard with that anymore. And we’re actually at odds over those ends. And that of course, makes a lot of other things really difficult to have a conversation about, because we’re not even really locked into a consensus framework to begin with. Sam Gregg (26:35): Well, I think that’s right. If you go back to the founding and you had disagreements between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, they had different visions of foreign policy, they had different visions of what they thought economic life would be like. They even had somewhat different visions of the relationship between the federal government and the states. They had different visions of what they thought, the role of what we would call monetary policy should be et cetera. But no one was really disputing that the end was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And very few people were disputing the idea that by life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that there was a lot of normative context, which gave form to what that content of that life was, the way that liberty was lived, and the substance of what happiness consisted of. And that broad consensus was informed by a variety of sources ranging from let’s call it a type of Protestant, Judeo-Christian conception of the world, what you might call also the moderate enlightenment associated with Scottish enlightenment in particular, French enlightenment thinkers, and a certain commitment to much of the heritage of limited government and constitutionalism, and even I would argue, natural law and natural rights discourse as developed in 18th century Britain and Scotland. And that persisted, I think, for quite a long time. And even up until I would say maybe the 1980s, you would still find a fair amount agreement about what the ends were, even though you have two very different political parties articulating often quite different visions of what that should be like. So if you look at a president like Jimmy Carter or a president like Lyndon Johnson, not clear to me that they were aiming for anything else beyond this broad life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that just agreed with Republicans and people on the right about how to get there. So there wasn’t really an argument about at least a deep substantive argument about the ends in the way that you clearly have today, because there are many people I think in among many educated Americans who have essentially rejected the founding, rejected the experiment and ordered liberty, and they’re reflecting ideas that are coming out of many of the universities now. I think of someone like John Rawls, for example, it’s very clear that his vision of the United States is one of more or less Western European egalitarian social democracy. Now there’s a big gap between that on the one hand and the type of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and all the emphasis, as you said, being a constitutional people and what that means. There’s a big gap between all that and what you hear coming out of what you might describe as modern liberalism. And even modern liberalism looks moderate now, compared to some of the ideas that are being articulated about what America should be, that are coming from much of the left these days, but also on the right, because we have people on the right today who explicitly reject the American founding, who say that it was flawed from the very beginning. And so, I’m not sure they have a very different vision of, to the left in many respects of what they want. But I do know that what they want is inconsistent with the type of constitutional Republic and the normative foundations underlying that Republic that I think formed a reasonable consensus among a critical mass of the American population. Richard Reinsch (30:48): Yeah. Okay. They’re going to call us “the grumps,” Sam. Maybe we should change focus. Let me ask you this question. What do you think is right about America right now? Sam Gregg (30:58): Well, I think there are many things that are right about America. America remains, for example, for many people, the most desired country that they would want to move to, if they ever felt that they needed to do that. I’ll never forget. I think it was Tony Blair. So this is in the middle of the 2000, when many people around the world are becoming disillusioned with the United States, primarily because of the war in Iraq and all the things that were entailed with that. And Tony Blair said something like, “Lots of people are very critical of America, but it’s still the place that people want to migrate to. People don’t want to migrate to China.” Richard Reinsch (31:40): Julius Krein does. Sam Gregg (31:42): When people want to migrate to a place like Western Europe, why do they want to migrate there? Because they’re interested in getting access to very generous welfare states. They not going to Europe, because they want the opportunity to flourish economically under their own volition. Many of them are going there because there’s generous welfare programs. So the fact that I think America is a place that people want to move to, because they believe it is a place of opportunity, a place where they can exercise their freedoms and they can realize a degree of personal responsibility for themselves and their families, that’s something that’s really powerful about America, that doesn’t seem to be diminished. Another thing I find optimistic about, to be reason to be optimistic about America, is it still remains despite the fact that we have the legacies of the New Deal and The Great Society and things like Obamacare and all these regulations and government programs, America still remains by most indices of maybe even all indices of economic freedom, the number one country in the world for entrepreneurship, that’s telling you something. That’s a very powerful thing. The third thing, which I think is a very good reason to be optimistic about America, is that Americans, a critical mass of Americans still are very uncomfortable with the idea of arbitrary power. They don’t like the government telling them what to do. They don’t like the idea of politicians behaving badly. Now lots of politicians on both sides do behave badly, but at least in America, there’s still a critical mass of people who are disturbed when they see this type of thing happening. Whereas in many European countries, I think there’s a certain degree of cynicism about all this. It’s just part of the way things are. I think Americans still not all, but still Americans are still somewhat perturbed by that. It’s a sign of hope, it’s a sign of freedom, it’s a sign that things can be done in a country that takes constitutional liberty seriously. But what you also said about rule of law is extremely important, because one of the reasons there are good numbers of people coming to the United States is because they’re trying to get away from situations where they have constitutional anarchy, where they have rule of men, rather than rule of law. The fourth thing I would say America has going for it is I do think that the particular constellation of ideas of principles and institutions that came into critical formation in the 1780s is still a major reference point for Americans as we talked about before, but it has immense potential for America to renew itself, because whenever we go off-track, we can look back. We have this set of principles and ideas we can look back to and say, “Okay, we are departing from what we’re supposed to be. We need to correct that.” And many of the best movements in America that I think have helped to shape the country in positive ways, generally speaking, that is where they’re getting their inspiration from. And lastly, I’ll say, I have a fair amount of faith in ordinary Americans. I have less faith in elites. I think in many respects, we have a problem of elites in America on many levels, but I’m astounded every day by just the common sense observations of ordinary American people who recognize silliness and nonsense when they see it and are willing to try and do something about it. And we see this today, for example, with the pushback against some of the things that are going on in schools. It’s as if a light has been turned on in many people’s minds, and they’re saying, “This is bad, this is wrong that our children are being taught these things,” but rather than just sort of accepting it and just saying, “Well, this is just the way things are,” what do Americans do? They go in and they vote out the school board and they put new crew of people into the same positions. I can assure you that in lots of other countries, most other countries that initiative coming from below is far less evident. Richard Reinsch (35:35): And it’s been interesting watching, and then the attempt to thwart this parental opposition, which has been very heavy-handed, which indicates to me a certain mindset of we really have to cram this down people’s throats. This really may not have a lot of belief and a lot of support amongst parents, if you keep in track of even the federal government getting involved. And I thought that’s been interesting. Something that also seems right with America is we talk a lot about immigration. Everybody talks a lot about immigration. It seems that apart from the federal government and what the federal government wants to do, particularly to the civil rights state to do to immigrants, that immigration is actually, when we look at what immigrants do, when they come here, it’s actually pretty good. Sam Gregg (36:35): It is in fact amazing. Richard Reinsch (36:35): It’s still a very positive story to tell. And that seems to be forgotten that we can talk, I mean, certain people will talk about, well, the rates of welfare dependence and expense and all that, but that’s a function of the federal government programs that have been put in place. That’s not necessarily the case that they are coming for that, I don’t think that’s true at all. And so, there’s still something very good there to be told, but you’ve also got to have a rule of law system in place and that to be widely perceived in order for immigration to work also. Sam Gregg (37:05): Yes. So if you look at the rate at which businesses are created in the United States, or if you look at who is creating new businesses in the United States, immigrants are disproportionately represented in the number of new entrepreneurs, the number of people that are creating new businesses. So they punch above their weight, way above their weight, when it comes to creating new businesses, generating wealth, providing jobs for other people. And many of people come here precisely because they have an opportunity to do that in a way that’s a lot less evident in Central America or Latin America or Africa, or in the case of Europe, it’s less about the chaos, it’s much more about the bureaucracy they’re trying to escape. That makes it much harder to start and create businesses. So immigration, in that sense, provides a way for people who are optimistic in many respects, people who are looking for opportunity, who are not looking for a handout, they just want to be able to exercise the freedoms in a way that they can’t in their own country, that’s something that’s very, very unique in many respects and I think it helps the economy to keep ticking over, it means as if you like fresh ideas, fresh people coming into the country. And remember, if America wants to continue to grow, it’s going to need immigrants unless Americans start having more children again. So demographically, we are very dependent on that. And the other thing is that we often think of many immigrants as refusing to assimilate, of not wanted to be part of the American body politic. Most immigrants do want to be part of the body politic, they do want to become citizens, they do want to get involved, they do want to become American, they do want this. And that’s a very powerful thing in the sense that it tells you that the idea of America is still extremely attractive to people all over the world. It’s a sign of hope, it’s a sign of freedom, it’s a sign that things can be done in a country that takes constitutional liberty seriously. But what you also said about rule of law is extremely important, because one of the reasons there are good numbers of people coming to the United States is because they’re trying to get away from situations where they have constitutional anarchy, where they have rule of men, rather than rule of law. And I do worry, I do worry to a certain extent about how strong rule of law is in certain parts of the United States. I do worry about that, because I do know, I think we all know that a society that abandons a commitment to rule of law is a society that’s inevitably at some level, going to undergo some degree of deep degeneration. Sam Gregg (40:02): And remember that that’s why a lot of immigrants come trying to escape chaos in their own countries where you can’t rely upon the court system, you can’t rely upon judges doing what they’re supposed to do, you can’t upon the different branches of government, doing things in particular ways, rather than other ways. They’re coming here to escape all those sorts of things and that’s precisely why immigration needs to be structured under a rule of law framework, because we have in some respects, the worst possible immigration system you can have, because it’s very easy to migrate here illegally, but it’s very hard to migrate here legally, believe me, I know, I migrated here legally. It’s really complicated. It’s very hard. Whereas if you just swim across the Rio Grande, it’s easy to get in, at least now it is. Sam Gregg (40:57): So if you’re going to have immigration and I think America generally benefits from immigration at some level, all of us are associated with the immigration experiment. It has to be built within a strong structure of rule of law. And that I think is absolutely key, if you want to keep immigration as something that’s a positive force in American society rather than what it is today, which is a source of division. Richard Reinsch (41:24): No, that’s exactly right. And also gets turned into a way to drive Americans farther apart from one another. Sam, maybe we should end there. We’ve covered a lot of ground here. Thank you for joining us and sharing your immense knowledge on this general question that a lot of people are thinking about. And I think you’ve broken it out in several parts to help us understand it better. I appreciate it so much, Sam Gregg, thank you. Sam Gregg (41:47): Thanks Richard. And thanks to all the crew at Law & Liberty and Liberty Fund for having me on.

Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m your host Richard Reinsch. Liberty Law Talk is featured at the online journal, Law & Liberty, which is available at lawliberty.org. Richard Reinsch (00:19): Welcome to Liberty Law Talk today, I’m talking with Allen Guelzo about his new book, Robert E. Lee: A Life. Allen Guelzo is one of our great American historians of the Civil War, of Abraham Lincoln, of slavery, of reconstruction. It’s an honor for him to join us today. I mentioned the subjects he’s published on. He’s published numerous books in those areas, also books that are award-winning, including Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list, won the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Roundtable, and the Richard Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable. Recently published a book, Redeeming the Great Emancipator with Harvard University Press, and Reconstruction: A Concise History with Oxford University Press. Allen, we’re glad to have you on the program and we’re thankful also for the contributions you’ve made to Law & Liberty over the years. Allen Guelzo (01:20): Richard, thank you for the invitation. I’m glad to be here, glad to be able to speak to the Law & Liberty audience, and especially be able to talk about this new book on what is really something, I guess, of an unusual subject for me to be handling. Richard Reinsch (01:34): Yeah, and I mentioned to our audience, I couldn’t go through all of your publication achievements, because there’s so many, but as I said, they include Lincoln. They include slavery, the Civil War, and you are not shy about the side that you take. And I think about you, Allen, I think about not only your historical work, but I think of you as a man firmly dedicated to natural rights, to the Declaration of Independence, and firmly to the American Constitutional Project. And so that leads me to ask you this question. What got you interested in writing about Robert E. Lee? Allen Guelzo (02:13): It might have been a certain perverseness or at least the perverseness of curiosity. I have spent a lot of time writing about the Civil War. I spent a lot of time writing about Abraham Lincoln, in particular. And you might say that in 2013, after I’d finished work on the Gettysburg book, the question that came to my mind was, what next, and the thought that came in accompaniment with that was, what would it be like to look at this Civil War from the other end of the telescope? Now, I’m a Yankee from Yankee land, no question about it. And I was always raised at my grandmother’s knee with a sense of the righteousness of the Union cause. She had been a school girl in Philadelphia at the turn of the last century. And at that time there were still old union veterans who would make a point of coming to her school, the George Clymer School on what they then called Decoration day. We call it Memorial Day. And they would come and they would talk about the real meaning of the war and the real meaning of the war was not what those horrible, treasonous Johnny Rebs were telling people way down below the Mason Dixon line. So she imbibed early on the Union cause, and I learned that from her and that for me was the default position. So that it was always a curiosity for me growing up to find people who would display the Confederate flag. What are you doing that for? That sets the flag of the enemies of the country. And people who glorified Robert E. Lee, I’d go, wait a minute, the man committed treason. So I thought in 2013 and into 2014, what would it be like if I was on the other end of the telescope, what would the Civil War look like? And in particular, I was intrigued by a question I just sort of barely alluded to. And that is, how do you write the biography of someone who commits treason? That’s an interesting point of view because it’s easy to write biography of people you can admire. If not entirely without any qualification, I don’t think you can do that for anyone. But certainly, to write about people whose basic achievements are things that we admire today and take strength and take consolation from, Robert E. Lee is different because he did commit treason and I don’t use the word lightly either. Some people throw that around as a negative term that they would hang on someone like said, you are ugly. Treason has a very specific meaning for me. My father was a career army officer. He took the oath that all army officers take. My son is, United States Army and he took the oath. I took the oath when I became a member of the National Council of the Humanities when I was appointed there by President Bush in 2006, and I take that seriously. It was an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And Lee fought against that oath. He turned his back on an oath he had sworn and he raised his hand against the flag and the Constitution that I and my family had taken an oath to defend. So when I looked at the man, my most general sense was, I am looking at a face of a man who committed treason. How do you write the biography of someone like that? That’s a challenge. And the challenge, well, the challenge appealed to me, I guess in the same way that Mount Everest appealed to Mallory. When people ask him, why do you want to climb Mount Everest? And you know, he responded “because it’s there.” So to Robert E. Lee I went, and what we have now is the result of seven years worth of work on Robert E Lee. Richard Reinsch (06:19): Trying to think about the treason point, trying to walk in Lee’s shoes and think about the world as he did as best we can do that, just for even trying to do that on this treason point. And you can probably reproduce the quote word for word. It’s something like “I’m a citizen of America, but I’m a citizen of Virginia first.” Why didn’t he think he was committing treason? Allen Guelzo (06:45): He wouldn’t even talk in terms quite that specific. When he makes his decision in April of 1861, it’s really a series of decisions. It’s a decision first to turn down an offer that comes to him from Abraham Lincoln through an intermediary, the old Washington political hands, Francis Preston Blair. And Blair and Lee meet at the home of Blair’s son, Montgomery, on Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s Blair House, literally, that’s where they met. And there, Lee declines the offer that is made to him to take command of any federal forces that are going to be used to suppress the Southern rebellion. He then goes and resigns his commission in the United States Army. He was at that moment, colonel of the First United States Cavalry, resigns that commission, then he goes back home to Arlington and he makes a third decision. And that is to leave for Richmond and to accept an invitation from the governor of Virginia to take charge of Virginia’s state forces. That’s really three decisions that happen in sequence, but they are decisions that take him, each one of them, a step further and further away from his original allegiance. And the one thing which runs as a common thread through all of those decisions is this insistence, I cannot, I cannot draw my sword against my native state. Now, people have interpreted that as saying, well, this is because in Lee’s day, people understood their citizenship in their states to be on an equal plane with, or maybe even superior to that of their citizenship in the nation. I think that’s questionable. I think that’s questionable in 1861. So what exactly is he referring to when he says I can’t draw my sword against my native state? I think what he is really talking about is this vast network of kin. And I think he’s also talking about protecting the property that he was charged with passing on to his children, and especially the property that today we identify as Arlington. Richard Reinsch (08:42): Yeah. Allen Guelzo (08:43): Yes, there was some constitutional uncertainty that’s not actually clarified finally and utterly until the 14th amendment, but I don’t think there’s a whole lot in the way of Lee’s decision making that was bound up with technicalities like that. I think for him, when he says he can’t draw his sword against Virginia, what he’s really talking about is the vast network of his kin folk and his family. Richard Reinsch (09:07): Okay. Allen Guelzo (09:08): Because many of the members of that family are people who came to the rescue of Robert E. Lee and his siblings and his mother when they were pretty well left on their own in Alexandria before Lee went off to West Point and he was thinking about the debts and the obligations he owed to this vast network of kin. And that was an important consideration for him. Richard Reinsch (09:32): So as I listen to you and I want to talk about that Lee in Virginia too, because that is new to me, this difficult childhood he had and being abandoned by his father, his father being “Light-Horse” Harry Lee, a famous man. Allen Guelzo (09:47): Oh yes. Richard Reinsch (09:49): And so one question, and maybe you’ve answered that. Lee is a political thinker. You don’t at all think perhaps what was in the air was the compact theory of union, of Calhoun, other Southern thinkers that had become certainly part of the discourse, that somehow that legitimated what he did. To me, I listen to you and I think, well, this is home and men just don’t turn against their home. Allen Guelzo (10:18): For Lee, the notion of the union as being a compact theory was nonsense. And he said as much in letters that he wrote during the secession crisis. For Lee, the United States as a nation had the primary authority. And he dismissed argument in favor of secession as being nothing but revolution. And we might say, well, what’s the difference between secession and revolution? Actually, there’s a big difference. secession is, technically speaking, a peaceable process of separation. It involves legal and constitutional niceties, but it’s the kind of things that happen when two particular groups of people within a single nation state decide that they really, for a variety of reasons, want to go their separate ways. And you had secessions like this take place within Lee’s lifetime. For instance, Belgium is a secession from the Netherlands. And then later on after the of the 20th century, Norway. Norway as an independent nation is a secession from what had been the dual kingdom of Norway and Sweden. That’s a secession, but a revolution is different. A revolution is when you cut the ties, you create discontinuity, you do what we did in our American Revolution. That’s why we call it the American Revolution or revolution. We didn’t secede from the British Empire, we had a revolution because we not only cut our ties to Great Britain, we actually got rid of the entire notion of monarchy, hierarchy, British law, everything that connected us in any real way to the British past. All of those things were thrown overboard and we created an entirely new nation, a Republic, based on entirely different principles than the British Empire had been built upon. That’s a revolution. Lee looked at what Southerners were trying to do, and he was scornful when they tried to use the term, secession. He says, this is not a secession. This is a revolution. And if you take him on those terms, then you scratch your head and you wonder, well, if he understood what all this argument about secession and compact theory and so on like that was just a massive donkey’s kidneys, then you wonder why did he do what he did. And I think the answer is bound up with questions about family and questions about family property. After all, Lee, although Lee is born in Virginia in 1807 at Stratford Hall on the Northern Neck, he actually does not live most of his life in Virginia. When his mother decides that they’re going to pick up from Stratford and move to Alexandria when Lee is less than 10 years old, Alexandria was not part of Virginia then. Alexandria was then part of the District of Columbia. Alexandria and that part of Virginia on the Potomac shore is not retro-ceded to Virginia until the 1830s when Lee is long gone. So Lee grows up in the District of Columbia, not Virginia. Then he goes to school at West Point in New York. His first assignment as a graduate of West Point is to Georgia. He works on saving the waterfront at St. Louis in Missouri. He has a brief assignment at Fortress Monroe that does take him back to Virginia, but then he is assigned to Fort Hamilton in New York. He serves a spell as Superintendent of West Point, again, New York. And he’s assigned to coastal fortification construction in Baltimore Harbor. Look, you take all that together, the man actually spent more consistent time living in the state of New York than he did in the state of Virginia. So what exactly is he referring to when he says I can’t draw my sword against my native state? I think what he is really talking about is this vast network of kin. And I think he’s also talking about protecting the property that he was charged with passing on to his children, and especially the property that today we identify as Arlington. We think of it as Arlington National Cemetery, but before it became a national cemetery, Arlington was the estate of Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And Lee felt a particular responsibility as the executor of Custis’s will to make sure that that property got passed on appropriately to Lee’s own children. When Lee talks about his native state, I think he’s very largely talking about protecting family and protecting family property more than anything else. Richard Reinsch (15:02): It’s almost like a deep, very deep Burkean sense of social responsibility, family responsibility. Allen Guelzo (15:10): Yes, but it’s also connected because I don’t think he would’ve, if we had quoted Edmund Burke to him, I don’t think he would’ve even necessarily recognize who we were quoting. I think what it really goes back to is the experience of his own father. Light-Horse Harry Lee was a great hero of the American Revolution. He had come into the Revolution as a young man, fresh out of college. He shows a remarkable talent right away for command of horse soldiers. And he becomes part of that circle of young men whom Washington virtually adopts as his surrogate sons, people like Alexander Hamilton, people like John Lawrence, people like Marquis de Lafayette. And Light-Horse Harry, he acquired that big name from his talent at command of cavalry. He becomes part of that circle and he’s very successful during the Revolution. The problem is that after the Revolution, that was when the success dried up. Like many veterans of the Continental Army, he looked to make a fortune in investing in Western land, lands of the upper end of the Potomac River, lands in Western Virginia, which they hoped would be developed with a view towards establishing a water connection between the Potomac estuary and the Ohio River. And beyond that, of course, the Mississippi. That never ever practically panned out. And Light-Horse Harry Lee lost money, hand over fist. He married his cousin, Matilda Lee, that made him the master of Stratford Hall, but he burned through her cash. When she died, he remarried, this time to her Virginia Carter and he burned through her cash too, so much so that he ends up in debtor prison. And not only does he make one catastrophic economic decision after another, he makes catastrophic political decisions. In Jeffersonian Virginia, he identifies as a Federalist and in the early months of the War of 1812 finds himself mobbed by a pro-war of 1812 mob in Baltimore and is beaten within an inch of his life. And after that, he decides it’s time to go someplace else. So he decamps for the West Indies. And although he makes a brief effort to return to the United States, he makes landfall on Cumberland Islands on the Georgia coast, he’s dying of cancer and he dies two weeks after making that landfall, never makes it back to Virginia, never sees his son Robert again. Robert, the last time Robert saw his father, he was six years old. Richard Reinsch (18:03): Wow. Allen Guelzo (18:04): And that meant that effectively Robert grew up fatherless and the trauma that inflects on children who are standing somewhere shy of the door of adolescence, that is one of the severest of all human hurts. And I think Lee carries that with him all his life. He carries with him the embarrassments of his father’s actions and his father’s shortcomings. And he carries with him the pain of his father’s desertion for a good 40 years of Robert E Lee’s life. He’s always being introduced to people as the son of Light-Horse Harry Lee, yet Lee himself, only one time in all of his voluminous personal correspondence, and this is a man who’s a compulsive letter writer, he writes something like six to 8,000 letters in his lifetime. In only one letter, does he ever refer to his father, and that’s his application letter to West Point when he really needed to be able to cite the old man’s authority. Apart from that, no reference to his father. In fact, he does not even visit his father’s grave in Georgia until December of 1861 when he’s finally coming into his own as the great General Lee. So at the outbreak of the Civil War, people would’ve scratched their heads a bit and said, why should Robert E. Lee be given major command of anything? And I think the reason lies in the fact that Winfield Scott thought so highly of him, praised him so highly, pushed him forward first to Lincoln’s attention. But the other person who was interested in him was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, because Davis had been the Secretary of War during the years when Lee was the superintendent at West Point. Davis was very impressed with Lee. Richard Reinsch (19:32): Yeah. Allen Guelzo (19:33): That is a remarkable omission. And I think it says a lot about how Robert E. Lee felt, that he was responsible for redeeming the losses inflicted by his father and I think that governs a great many of the decisions that he in life. Richard Reinsch (19:52): Now, Lee at West Point is a success as a cadet, as a student. Allen Guelzo (19:57): Oh, absolutely Richard Reinsch (19:58): Remarkable success. You are right, he’s able to join what was considered the very prestigious civil engineering corps in the United States Army because of that great success at West Point. And he’s in the military at that point. And what I thought was interesting is, civil engineering wouldn’t exactly be battlefield command. I mean, he’s like building fortifications and diverting water, things like that. How does he go from civil engineering to great battlefield commander? And maybe that’s a sub-question, was he a great battlefield commander? Allen Guelzo (20:33): It doesn’t happen naturally, let’s put it that way. Robert E. Lee has this wonderful record at West Point, he graduates second in the class of 1829. And by the way, whoever remembers who graduated first? I’ll tell you, it is a man named Charles Mason, who later became a judge out in Iowa. Robert E. Lee graduates second. That’s good enough to get him a commission in the Corp of Engineers, which is the elite technocracy, shall we say, of the United States Army in those days. But the Corps of Engineers was devoted entirely to constructing things, constructing roads, helping to build canals and especially constructing fortifications, which, in the American context, really falls under the category of what we call coastal engineering. That’s the way he spends most of his Army career. And the only exception to that is the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848. When the Mexican War breaks out, he is assigned as an engineering officer to general John Wool in Texas. From there, he’s moved over to serve on the staff of Winfield Scott. Winfield Scott is launching one of the most ambitious expeditions of the 19th century. He lands at Vera Cruz on the Mexican coast, captures Vera Cruz and then marches inland to the capture of Mexico City. Scott had a sharp eye for military talent and that eye comes to rest on Robert E. Lee. He makes Lee into more than just an engineering officer. He makes Lee into almost his chief aide. It’s Lee who does the reconnaissance for him. It’s Lee who carries the messages and the orders. And Scott would say in years later that all the laurels he won in the Mexican War were really due to Robert E. Lee. But that’s really the first time the man has any connection with active combat operations of the Army, and even then he’s not commanding them. And when the Mexican War is over, he goes back to constructing fortifications, first in Baltimore, and then he takes charge of West Point. After his superintendency at West Point, he’s had really enough of the lack of promotion that you sustain in the Corps of Engineers and he accepts a transfer into the Second Cavalry, which takes him off to Texas. But even there, even what he is really doing is, is kind of frontier policing duties. It’s sort of the Texan equivalent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And even then, he never fires a shot in anger. The very first time in Robert E. Lee’s life that he ever commands soldiers in action under fire is in 1859 when he is called upon to take charge of suppressing John Brown’s Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, which he does very successfully, very neatly, very cleanly, very responsibly, but it takes until 1859. He’s been in the army for 30 years before he’s ever really in charge of people who are initiating combat operation. And even then, it only involves two companies of US Marines. So at the outbreak of the Civil War, people would’ve scratched their heads a bit and said, why should Robert E. Lee be given major command of anything? And I think the reason lies in the fact that Winfield Scott thought so highly of him, praised him so highly, pushed him forward first to Lincoln’s attention. But the other person who was interested in him was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, because Davis had been the Secretary of War during the years when Lee was the superintendent at West Point. Davis was very impressed with Lee. Almost everybody who met Lee was impressed by the man, but Davis, in particular. And so Davis undertakes to have Lee put in charge of major aspects of the Confederate War effort in 1861. So there we find ourselves by this very crooked path with General Robert E. Lee, a man who, as far as 1861 goes, his sole combat experience was dealing with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. It’s a very unpredictable, and I think the word really is, surprising development. Richard Reinsch (25:03): So you and I were talking offline about Lee, the legend. And you mentioned just now everyone that, virtually everyone, that meets him is impressed with him. So maybe let’s just talk about that. Is the legend real or what were his personal qualities that so esteemed him in people’s eyes? Allen Guelzo (25:24): Well, the legend is, it’s as real as legends can be real because nearly everybody who laid eyes on Robert E. Lee was tremendously impressed by the man’s bearing, by his dignity. And yet at the same time, as people are impressed by their dignity, there’s also a certain coldness, a certain off-puttingness about Robert E. Lee. On the road to Appomattox, he’s ready to come to the point where he is going to surrender his army. He says to one of his, in fact, he says to more than one of his aides, this is how I knew it was always going to end. I knew it was going to happen like this. Why, because southerners just weren’t up to the task. So he’s willing, even at the end of the war, to point the finger at the behavior of his army, at the behavior of the Confederate people, themselves. They, in a sense you might say, they failed him. There’s the perfectionist at work. The famous South Carolina diarist, Mary Chestnut. Her husband was a Confederate senator. She kept one of the great diaries of the Civil War era. She met Robert Lee just before the outbreak of the war at the White Sulfur Springs in Western Virginia, because that was where Lee took his wife, Mary, because Mary Lee at that point was plagued by rheumatoid arthritis. And so they went to benefit from the hot springs there. Mary Chestnut writes in her diary that a man riding a beautiful horse joined us with a hat that somehow had a military look to it. And she said, he sat his horse so gracefully. He was so distinguished in all points. She regretted not actually getting his name. So she went around and asking afterwards, who was he? And the answer came back, Robert E. Lee. Chestnut marveled everything about him. She said, what’s so fine, and the word that came to her mind was, perfection. You couldn’t find a fault in the man if you hunted for one. And yet even Mary Chestnut, when she says that is not really enchanted by him. She said that she actually liked his older brother, Sidney Smith Lee better because Smith Lee was so affable and so friendly. One of these hail-fellow-well-met types. Chestnut wrote, I know Smith Lee well. And then she added, can anybody really say they know his brother? I doubt it because Robert Lee, she said, looks so cold and quiet and grand. A cadet at West Point when Lee was the superintendent there wrote to his mother and described Lee as the marble model. And even Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, they’re there in the McClain Parlor conducting surrender negotiations, and Grant, in his memoirs writes about how small he felt compared to Robert Lee who was sitting there dressed in this beautiful uniform, everything perfect. And here it was Grant and this muddy old uniform and his muddy boots. And it was almost the case where you had this sense, that Grant felt almost in the edge of apologizing for how he looked. Lee impressed people over and over again with that demeanor of the perfect man. But you see it was a perfection that arises out of this deep need for redemption. He is going to redeem the reputation of the Lee family destroyed by his father, and not only by his father, but by an older half brother who committed even worse offense and became known as Black-Horse Harry Lee. Richard Reinsch (28:48): Yeah. Allen Guelzo (28:48): But Robert Lee is going to redeem the Lee reputation. And I think that that determination, that passion to redeem is what drives the perfection of his behavior. He’s going to show that he is not Light-Horse Harry. Richard Reinsch (29:05): So if we think about that, what are his faults? What leads him astray? Allen Guelzo (29:12): The perfection leads him to demand of people things that ordinary human beings are not really capable of doing. He’s very demanding of his army. His adjutant, Walter Taylor, wrote in letters that Taylor sent to his fiancee during the war, General Lee is so unappreciative. I work for him and I do this for him. I do that for him. And there’s never a word of thanks. Now, this didn’t mean that Taylor didn’t admire Lee, but he had to admire Lee from distance. Lee demanded much from himself and he demanded much from others. And so those who didn’t live up to his expectations, he could be very, very hard on them. He once erupted at another aide who had permitted someone to come in to his tent and argue with Lee. Lee came out afterwards and he upbraided his staffer. Why did you let that man come in and make me lose my temper? And he’s particularly hard on other subordinates. At the end of the Battle of Chancellorsville, he really expected that his brigade commanders were going to close in and push the Army of the Potomac right up against the Rappahannock River and destroy it. And they don’t, they allow Joe Hooker and the Army of the Potomac to escape across the fords of the Rappahannock River. And Lee goes on the tirade denouncing, well, he fixes on General Dorsey Pender, and he said, General Pender, how could you let those people get away? That is what you young men always do. I can never get my orders carried out. After the battle of Antietam, he writes a letter to his two principal subordinates, James Longstreet and the famous Stonewall Jackson upbraiding them for the lack of discipline in the Confederate Army. And he lays out in this severe, scorching letter, how the Army has to completely restructure how its officers behave. We have to have an end to this. We have to have punishment. There has to be enforcement. We need brigade guards to force stragglers to rejoin their unit. It goes on and on and on. And I have this picture of Longstreet and Jackson reading this letter and looking at each other, rolling their eyes and saying, what is the old man want from us? Richard Reinsch (31:43): This is the Battle of Antietam, one of the worst battles in the war. It’s incredible. Allen Guelzo (31:48): Yeah. This is after Antietam. Yeah. So he’s extremely demanding of people. And probably the people he’s the most demanding of are the Confederate politicians. He goes all through the war doing nothing to complain about how ineffective of the Confederate politicians are. He complains to his son, he complains about the Confederate Congress. He says, all they do is chew peanuts and spit tobacco. They take no action of any worth or any reckoning themselves. And even on the road to Appomattox, he’s ready to come to the point where he is going to surrender his army. He says to one of his, in fact, he says to more than one of his aides, this is how I knew it was always going to end. I knew it was going to happen like this. Why, because southerners just weren’t up to the task. So he’s willing, even at the end of the war, to point the finger at the behavior of his army, at the behavior of the Confederate people, themselves. They, in a sense you might say, they failed him. There’s the perfectionist at work. Richard Reinsch (32:56): That’s incredible. Another question that comes to mind, which I’m sure our readers would, would love to hear more about. Robert Lee and slavery. How does he approach? Allen Guelzo (33:06): Oh yes. Richard Reinsch (33:07): How does he approach this? Allen Guelzo (33:08): The best image I can sum up for people in explaining this is a zigzag. On the one hand, Robert E. Lee never was personally closely wrapped up in the institution of slavery. He inherited one slave family from his mother’s estate, but emancipated them in December of 1862. So on the one hand, you might say, well, he’s only tangentially connected to slavery. Yeah, but he marries Mary Anna Randolph Custis. And by marrying into the Custis’s, he is marrying a family that not only owns Arlington, but owns 190 slaves. That means even though Robert E. Lee doesn’t own slaves in his own name, he still benefits from most of his life through the labor and the services that those slaves provide to his wife and to his children. So yes, he is involved in the slave system. At the same time, the Custis’ had a very dicey connection to slavery. Both of them, both old George Washington Parke Custis and his wife, Mary Fitzhugh Custis were great supporters of colonization talk. I mean, Custis himself talks about slavery as a vulture, which is devouring the innards of the south. And in his will, he actually provides, mandates the emancipation of the Custis slaves within five years of his death. And Robert E. Lee is the executor of that estate, and Robert E. Lee is charged with that. And Lee, in fact, does go ahead after the period of five years to emancipate the Custis slaves, according to the will. He does that in December of 1862, and when you think about it in December of 1862, if Robert E. Lee had gone into any Confederate court in Virginia and said, oh, look, we’re not going to go through with this. We’re not going to emancipate slaves. Well, the Confederacy is fighting to keep people in slavery. Why should we emancipate slaves? If Lee had gone into a court and done that, I have a hard time imagining a Confederate judge objecting. Nevertheless, Lee insists. He signs up his son, Custis, in Richmond to make sure all the papers are done right. He ignores people who are suggesting that he should wait until the end of the war. He marches ahead to that emancipation. And as I say, also emancipates the one slave family he owns in his own name. There were many things about Lee that I learned that I had not taken account of earlier. I had not fully understood the impact of his father’s departure and the trauma that, that inflected on him. I had not fully understood the yearning that Robert E. Lee had for independence. He wanted to be able to stand on his own two feet. He knew what it was like to be dependent, and he disliked it intensely. Beyond that, he is hectoring Jefferson Davis during the war, telling Davis that slavery is a millstone around the Confederacy’s neck, that the Confederacy has to move to emancipation. And then finally in the spring of 1865, the early spring, he is the most vocal of Confederate leaders advocating the recruitment of blacks for the Confederate Army, with emancipation as a reward for themselves and for their family for service in the Confederate armies. That catches him a lot of criticism. When he goes public with that, the Charleston Mercury simply goes berserk with rage. It denounces … this is a Confederate newspaper. They denounce Robert E. Lee as a sell-out, as just another old time Federalist, who was never with us from the start. And you know, there’s one interesting footnote to this too. During the war, of course, Arlington ends up being occupied by the Union forces. And that meant that the Custis slaves, many of the Custis slaves at Arlington just simply drifted away, across the river into the District of Columbia. And when they were there, a number of them were emancipated under the District of Columbia emancipation bill of April 1862. One of them was interviewed in the process by the emancipation officers and it turned out it was Philip Meredith who had served as Lee’s valet. Well, this caused quite a ruffle of interest because here was General Lee’s valet, and he’s applying for emancipation in the District, so they interview him. And he says, well, you know, General Lee never liked slavery. General Lee always told me that he wished that I could be free and that there would be no slaves. And yet here’s the zigzag. Richard, here’s the zigzag. Lee will say things like that. He’ll even write in a letter to his wife, slavery is a moral and political evil in any country, yet he will never actually do anything about it himself. He will emancipate the Custis slaves, but that’s because he’s the executor of the estate. He could have done it right away instead of waiting five years, but he doesn’t. He knows that slavery is wrong. He says that slavery is wrong. And yet he looks at that and then he looks away. Richard Reinsch (38:17): Well, that sounds like Thomas Jefferson. Allen Guelzo (38:19): Yeah. Well, in that respect, yes, he is like Jefferson. He does not have the profundity of a Thomas Jefferson. He doesn’t reflect on the inconsistency of what he’s doing the way that Jefferson did when Jefferson talked about having a wolf by the ears. Richard Reinsch (38:35): Yeah. Allen Guelzo (38:36): Lee looks at slavery and then he looks away. And if there is a tragedy in the personal character of Robert E. Lee, it is that defect that he could look at what was wrong, know what was wrong, know that it was a violation of natural right and natural law, and nevertheless, look away from it and do nothing. Richard Reinsch (38:59): Yeah. I hear you. That also sounds like human nature to me. Allen Guelzo (39:03): Yes, it does. Richard Reinsch (39:06): It sounds like the way of the world. Allen Guelzo (39:06): It is very much the defect of human nature. Of course, we have the privilege 150 odd years later of being able to sit in judgment on that and saying, well, he should have known better. He should have done this. He should have done that. Richard Reinsch (39:18): Yeah. Allen Guelzo (39:19): Well, yes, he should have. And as a historian, it’s my job to make judgements like that. And I do make that judgment about Robert E. Lee. On the other hand, I hope that in making that judgment about Robert E. Lee, I cause myself and all the rest of us to reflect on kinds of inconsistencies that we perform ourselves on an everyday basis so that when we find ourselves pointing the finger at Robert E. Lee, we recognize that we also ourselves stand under that kind of judgment. That’s what brings me to a kind of Lincolnian view of the entire landscape of writing about Robert E. Lee. Richard Reinsch (39:59): And I wonder maybe that’s sort of an answer to my next question. In the course of this project. And, of course, we set forward at the beginning, the history that you’ve done, Lincoln, slavery, reconstruction, Civil War. In the course of all your research and writing, what did you learn that surprised you? Anything cause you to rethink past convictions, past judgements, or did new thoughts and ideas form in your mind about America? Allen Guelzo (40:30): That is a difficult question to answer because every time you plunge into a subject this way, you find yourself dealing with so many aspects and so many details. There were many things about Lee that I learned that I had not taken account of earlier. I had not fully understood the impact of his father’s departure and the trauma that, that inflected on him. I had not fully understood the yearning that Robert E. Lee had for independence. He wanted to be able to stand on his own two feet. He knew what it was like to be dependent, and he disliked it intensely. He had had to grow up dependent on the goodwill, and sometimes the handouts, of his Carter relatives and his Fitzhugh relatives and other Lee relatives. And like any person with a modicum of talent and understanding of his own gifts, he accepted that because he had to, but he also learned to resent it and to yearn for independence. And that’s a theme that runs through Robert E. Lee all through his life. The other thing that you learn in working through Lee’s material and reading his letters is how much he yearned for security as well. He was not what you would call a poor man. Part of Anne Carter Lee’s estate involved lands and money that today we would reckon as being fairly substantial. When he makes out his will, before he goes to the Mexican War, he makes out a will. And in it he has to itemize what his property is. And when you add all of that up, his estate at that point amounted to about $32,000. And so translate that into 2021 dollars and we’re talking about something in between one and $2 million. The man was not poor. And yet all through his life, he does nothing but cry a poor mouth. He is one of those people who is perpetually convinced that he’s about to go broke, that he’s about to go to the poor house. And he puts all kinds of constraints on his wife and on his children this way. He writes a letter, advice for one of his sons through his wife. And he says to Mary, tell him to be just before he is generous, and to be wise before he is liberal. In other words, wise, before he is open handed. Don’t give money away to people. He doesn’t have the avarice of the get, but he really does have the avarice of the keep. And when you put that beside the fact that he really was fairly well off, that’s just such a surprising juxtaposition. He just did not feel secure in that. And he’s constantly, through his life in search of security. And the curious thing is that I think that he finally, in the last five years of his life, he finally takes those three threads, that passion for perfection, that yearning for independence, that searching for security. He finally is able to take those threads and twist them together in a rope that really works for him, that he can really climb. And that’s because after the war, he accepts this very strange invitation that comes to him to become the president of Washington College, in the upper Shenandoah Valley. Now, Washington College was this very small college. It was not much more than a classical Latin and Greek academy for the Scots-Irish gentry of the upper valley. And it was almost wiped out by the war. He accepts the presidency to the surprise of almost everyone. And when he does, when Robert E. Lee takes over Washington College, he takes it over like he took over the army of Northern Virginia. He revamps the curriculum completely. He raises the endowment to a quarter of a million dollars. A lot of it from Northern donors. And he builds the student body up to over 400 students when it started out with just 12. He really makes Washington College into an educational powerhouse and a really, in educational terms, a progressive powerhouse, because he shoves to the margins, the classical education curriculum, and brings in majors in business in journalism, in engineering. I think that finally at Washington College, he’s able to draw together all those yearnings for security, for independence, for perfection. He’s finally able to call his own shots in life. And not surprisingly, he tells a student at Washington College, this is a real shocker. He tells the student, my greatest mistake in life was taking a military education. That point you think- Richard Reinsch (45:49): Wow. Allen Guelzo (45:49): Maybe he should have yielded to his older brother Carter’s blandishments to go into real estate development, or maybe he should have just retired from the Army years before and lived at Arlington as a country gentleman, or maybe he should have just, at the outbreak of the Civil War, declared neutrality. He could have done all those things. But finally, he gets a measure of resolution in those last five years of his life and I think it’s in those last five years as president of Washington College, that he finally gets a quotient of what we can call happiness. Richard Reinsch (46:27): Well, perhaps Professor Guelzo, we should end on that. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss your new biography, Robert E. Lee: A Life. Thank you. This is Richard Reinsch. You’ve been listening to another episode of Liberty Law talk available at lawliberty.org.