Richard Reinsch (00:18): Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with Steven Smith about his new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. Steven Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He’s the author of numerous books on Leo Strauss, Spinoza, Hegel, and he previously appeared on Liberty Law Talk a few years ago to discuss his book, Modernity and Its Discontents, which has been released in paperback. So Steven Smith, it’s great to have you on again. Steven Smith (00:53): Thank you, Richard. It’s a pleasure to be back. Richard Reinsch (00:57): Steven, thinking about the book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, why do we need patriotism? Steven Smith (01:06): Well, that’s a good question to start with, why do we need patriotism? Because obviously, not everybody thinks we do. The book began, or grew out of, an attempt to distinguish patriotism from people… Or to reclaim patriotism, I should say, as the title is, to reclaim it from people who don’t like it and therefore who think we don’t need it at all and from people who… What to say? Like it too much. And patriotism, I want to argue, is a disposition which I think is inseparable from politics so long as we are what Aristotle called political animals. So long as we live in polities and political end states. We need patriotism, it’s inseparable from a sense of loyalty and identity to the place where we belong. Nationalists see the country as the only source of their identity. And then this is very easy for it to become coupled with feelings of anger, resentment, and most dangerously the attempt to identify enemies beginning often with the foreign enemies, but then always becoming domestic enemies, domestic others who are seen to present some kind of existential challenge to the national identity. But patriotism, we can go into this, is an easily misunderstood virtue. As I suggested a second ago, from one side, it is identified often with all that’s wrong or even what is responsible for all that’s wrong in our politics today. And from the other side, it seems to express everything and it’s only what’s good in our life, in our political life. So it’s a difficult virtue. It is a difficult virtue and it’s a contested virtue. We can talk about that if you like. Richard Reinsch (02:36): Well, thinking about the title of your book, an Age of Extremes, let’s just bracket for a minute. I think you and I both agree patriotism is a good thing, it’s a needed thing. It’s, I think, a consolation in a difficult life in a difficult world. But what are the extremes right now that are currently operating that are leading us astray from properly understanding it? Steven Smith (02:57): Patriotism has always been contested. Go back to the ancient world. One example I use in my book is Sophocles’ Antigone which puts forward a conflict between loyalty to his family and loyalty to country. Patriotism has always been contested by other loyalties we have and that will never go away. We are beings with conflicting loyalties, and so long as we remain beings with conflicting loyalties patriotism will be challenged by other loyalties we have. The two dominant challenges to patriotism today come from, I’ve already suggested it to left and right to pretty much map onto that distinction. I’ll start with the left, what we might call the cosmopolitan left, the kind of view that you find particularly in educated circles, among business elites, among educated people, among a range of people who believe that we have become, or are becoming, citizens of the world. Our allegiances are to a kind of global humanity and we owe no particular allegiance to the individual states of which we are members. We see that in the enthusiasm, particularly among young people, and it’s just the admirable in many ways, I’m not discounting, but they’re admirable goals to work for international NGOs, to become part of Doctors Without Borders, to think of global concerns like the environment and other things. Again, absolutely real, but the tendency is to downplay or to minimize the role of their identity as citizens, as citizens of a country rather than global citizens of the world. The other extreme is nationalism and that of course has, in the last five or six years or more, even maybe more, become a very potent force throughout the world. In the US too, including the US. We’ve seen nationalism arising in China, in Turkey, in Russia, certainly in places like Brazil, and many other places. Nationalism is a very potent course of political identity, but different from patriotism, I want to argue. They are often linked, but one of the things I try to do in my book is to decouple them. They grow out of a common root. Nationalism and patriotism are not opposite as it’s sometimes said. They are not opposite. They grow out of a common root. That root is to have your way of life and your culture and so on to be strong and respected, natural and within limits, understandable and admirable quality. But patriotism and nationalism are growing out of a common root but move in different directions. Nationalists see the country as the only source of their identity. And then this is very easy for it to become coupled with feelings of anger, resentment, and most dangerously the attempt to identify enemies beginning often with the foreign enemies, but then always becoming domestic enemies, domestic others who are seen to present some kind of existential challenge to the national identity. And it is this kind of friend enemy logic that I think invariably grows out of the nationalist mindset, the nationalist imagination, that is quite different from the patriotic disposition that I try to defend in my book. But those are the two, I think, challenges that kind of frame the debate as I see it. Richard Reinsch (06:58): Do you see, as I read your book, it seems to me also nationalism arising from perceived excesses of, let’s say, humanitarianism, or sort of downplaying what I think would be legitimate interest of the nation. And I think about Brexit. When the Brexit campaign was happening, I saw good arguments on either side for that position. And I ultimately thought, “Well, if the people come out and vote at like 70% and they vote 52%, then I would respect that vote.” But I also said that this belief that the European Union was just ever increasing and some of their statesmen actively downplay I think what I would call a legitimate interest of the nation. And so you get nationalism arising from that, but that in turn feeds it’s opposite. Steven Smith (08:04): Well, let me say, I discuss, I’m certainly not an expert on the EU, but it comes out for some discussion in my book. And I do think the debate about Brexit and I listened to it and followed it. There were powerful arguments on both sides. But I do think the EU is seeing what is or was… The EU is now becoming terribly fractured. But it was seen by many, sort of in the heyday of its ascendancy, as sort of a model of this kind of notion of trans national or trans political citizenship or sovereignty or something. A seamless world of open borders, of common currency, of free trade. It had many dimensions, many of them quite valuable and useful but it created aspirations and dreams and ideals that cannot be satisfied. And this movement was always combined, as you pointed out, with a heavy handed bureaucratic apparatus that really ended up, in many ways, overriding people’s national institutions, their loyalties. They were told they are members of Europe. What is that? And so there was always this tension between, in many ways, the aspiration and, again, the bureaucratic apparatus in which those aspirations were enfolded. So the EU is one example of how exactly this kind of tendency towards cosmopolitanism and to believe that we are now outgrowing the nation state as the basis of our political identity and show how this can go wrong. Let me just say before I sound like I’m simply in the camp of the EU skeptics or the anti EU, I am not. And why do I say that? Because the EU, for everything that is questionable about it, they’ve done one very important thing that I don’t think we can entirely forget, and that is it has managed and still managed to maintain the peace in a continent that was the most violent continent of the last century, certainly the last century, and perhaps even the most violent continent in all of recorded history. The world wars, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings that European States imposed on one another were just terrible blemishes on humanity. And the EU has rose to respond to that and to some degree it’s very admirably pacified many of these aggressive European tendencies. So that is nothing to sneeze at. And so I just want to mention that. It’s something that I think deserves to be said about the EU, whatever its other failings. Richard Reinsch (11:11): Yeah, that’s well said. Although it does seem to me now and the history of, you recounted it well and all of its wars, it does seem to me… when I think about Europe in many ways, it’s sort of a lethargic continent now. I was reading recently by 2007 the economy of the European Union was largely on par with America’s, but what’s happened in the last 14 years is it’s barely grown and the American economy has grown and we’ve sort of moved beyond them in a lot of ways. And a lot of people thought the EU economy would overtake us. And then of course now our big concern is China and what it’s doing. And I could produce a lot of examples, demographics. Where Europe just seems, although it was this tremendous dynamo, to me, it just seems sort of like a large vacation park at this point. Steven Smith (12:11): I agree. I don’t want to sit here and opine about the future of Europe- Richard Reinsch (12:16): No … Steven Smith (12:16): … I don’t know, but two devastating world wars within a 50 year span can do a lot to take the life out of a people. Richard Reinsch (12:26): Yeah, that’s true. Steven Smith (12:27): I don’t know. I hear what you’re saying and what you say is probably right in some respects. Richard Reinsch (12:32): You have an interesting epigraph here and I thought it might be a way to get into a question that I’ve got for you, which is you said patriotism is a virtue. And I think that’s at the center of the controversy. You have the epigraph, “I am an American, Chicago born. From Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.” Can you elaborate more on that for us? Steven Smith (12:53): Yeah, that’s great. Thank you for mentioning that. I’m glad you caught that because that epigraph means a lot to me. Why? First, I’ve been a more or less lifelong admirer, lover, of Saul Bellow’s literature. That famous opening sentence, “I’m an American, Chicago born,” first sentence, opening sentence, of The Adventures of Augie March captured something to me, not just of the spirit of that novel, but of me. I also am an American, Chicago born, and I lived away from Chicago for many, many years. More than half my life has been spent in New Haven where I live now. But this identification with a place I think is very important. It shaped me to a considerable… For good or bad. I don’t necessarily simply have a kind of rosy nostalgic image of the place where I grew up. I don’t at all, really. But we are shaped by our past, by our histories, our family histories, our national history and I thought that statement, that sentence, captured something pretty important about that. It did to me, at least. Richard Reinsch (14:12): It reminded me of the opening of Ulysses Grant’s memoirs. He says, “My people are American.” That’s always resonated with me. When I read that sentence I always thought, “That’s something new, I would think, in American life at that time,” that you think of this as an American civilization and your people being shaped by it. Steven Smith (14:30): Yes, and Augie March is a very American story. Of course, the difference between him and Grant is Grant traces his ancestors back to the Puritans, back to the real founders. Bellow’s Augie March is like Bellow himself, is the child of immigrants. I am the grandchild of immigrants. So there’s a kind of vibrancy about this too. And the title of the book, The Adventures, it shows that this is a kind of a picaresque novel, an adventure. It’s an adventure story in some ways. And I think that’s very much the American story. I’ve been emphasizing and reemphasizing here this aspirational or creedal dimension of American patriotism. But in many ways that’s only one side of the coin. And I argue in different ways in the book that patriotism is, like all virtues in many ways, patriotism is a matter of both the head and the heart. It is both an intellectual virtue, based upon understanding of our founding documents and the principles for which we stand. But it’s also a matter of the heart and it’s also connected to loyalty. And I hope I tried to capture in my understanding of patriotism that it’s an adventure. It has an aspirational quality to it. And that to me is very much one of the things that distinguishes patriotism from nationalism also is this sense of aspiration and adventure. It’s not just a land and soil ideology. It’s not just America first, it’s not simply, “My country right or wrong.” There is an ideal and an adventure and a creed to it that makes, I think, American patriotism unique. Richard Reinsch (15:46): Let’s talk more about that. In your book, you talk about the elements of American patriotism. Talk about that because as we think about patriotism, you said it’s a disposition, a virtue. So there has to be a common thread there. It can’t just be purely an adventure. Steven Smith (16:03): Sure. No, no, absolutely. There is a core, a broadly defined core, that for generations was called, very loosely, the American Creed. What is the American Creed? It was not anything formulated necessarily in a document or legal text of any kind, but it was a set of beliefs and ideas growing out of our founding documents that shape what it is to be an American. For example, let me just mention three, our commitment to equality, going back most famously to the equality clause in the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal.” We are all endowed with a certain basic dignity that is worthy of respect. That egalitarian impulse is a very important aspect of American patriotism. What does equality mean? In part, it means there are no more aristocrats, no more monarchs and aristocrats. It is an open field. It’s an open field for all of us to rise or fall. It’s a field of rights that we have liberties and rights that are essential to that. And once again, these are aspirational that, as Lincoln points out, probably most famously in his speech on the Dred Scott case, that our aspirations to equality and dignity have not been fully achieved. They are constantly being labored for, being worked upon, being, in a sense, a work in progress. But this idea that we are creedal nation, a creedal people, and be a core of the idea of some of our best students of American politics. Let me just mention three of those students, Samuel Huntington, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Martin Diamond. All of them saw this sense of creedal peoplehood as central to America and that’s in part what my book is an attempt to reestablish. Richard Reinsch (18:14): Yeah, and as I read that, you think about what country has something like the House Committee on Un-American Activities? Obviously, there’s a creedal idea of America that could also be used in various ways. Thinking about that creedal concept, is that enough, I guess was my question for you? And I guess I say is that enough, because as I think about the human person, I think about our relationships with others, our communities, communities of moral worth and meaning that we find. It’s a long conversation, but I think that’s a huge problem now in America is I think a lot of people look around them and don’t see communities they want to join, or they feel abandoned in various ways. And then what about memories and battles, ways in which people attach themselves to the country? How does the creedal concept incorporate those things? Steven Smith (19:09): A great point, Richard, and it’s one that I work on in the book. I’ve been emphasizing and reemphasizing here this aspirational or creedal dimension of American patriotism. But in many ways that’s only one side of the coin. And I argue in different ways in the book that patriotism is, like all virtues in many ways, patriotism is a matter of both the head and the heart. It is both an intellectual virtue, based upon understanding of our founding documents and the principles for which we stand. But it’s also a matter of the heart and it’s also connected to loyalty. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about what is loyalty and how is loyalty a virtue associating it, as you were calling out these ideas of membership and being a part of something, patriotism isn’t just or can’t be exhausted by our aspirations, although it’s that. But it’s also an appreciation very much rooted in ideas about appreciation, of gratitude. It’s a term that I used at times throughout the book, is a sense of gratitude. Being a patriot is, in many ways, I say like being a member of a family. And here I think that helps us also distinguish patriotism from nationalism. We have been shaped by our families. For better or worse, we’ve been shaped by our families, but we love our families. We usually do, some of us it’s another story. We usually love our families. It would be absurd to say, “My family is better than your family. My family first.” No, in many ways, we love our families because of their imperfections. That’s what makes our families, in some ways, but they have shaped us. And I think patriotism is a virtue, it’s a loyalty virtue, like family membership that is rooted in loyalty and gratitude for shaping who we are. Yet at the other side of it, I call it the head and the heart. I think I used two fancy Greek terms in the book. I speak of logos and ethos, reason, logos, and ethos is character. And I do speak of patriotism, is a character shaping virtue. It is the virtue of character, it shapes who we are. I cite a famous Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who says, “Our ethos, our character, is our destiny.” That may be a bit too strong, but I do think he captures the quality of what I call ethos patriotism which I think is the way I sort of interpret what you were trying to bring out. I think it is a very strong component in what I think of as the patriotic disposition. Richard Reinsch (22:09): You said loyalty. And I agree with you, we struggle with that, contemporaries, we struggle with that idea of being loyal to something. And you discuss in the book, I’ll say, two of our leading cosmopolitans, Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb, who both in various ways, and you could talk about it more, seem to argue patriotism is an affront to enlightenment principles of liberty. Why? Well, it’s because of this loyalty thing. It’s because of the dispositional thing, “I don’t get to choose. I don’t get to be a willing agent of my self development. I’m sort of with everyone else by virtue of where I’ve been born and all of that history and what all those people think and I don’t get to be me.” And what’s really me is to be transactional with a lot of other people across borders around the world, around civilizations, and to have sort of this menu of things I can choose from. That’s very attractive. And from what I’m reading, it’s very attractive to people in their twenties and thirties. They want to live their lives like this. But, of course, Roger Scruton always would talk about this and the claim would be patriotism is subject to xenophobia, but there’s also an oikophobia here too I think we could discuss, or fear of home, hatred of home. And I thought maybe you might address those concerns. I don’t think you’re saying ethos and character is destiny. I think you’re also saying, particularly with regard to American patriotism, it’s contested and we argue about it. And even the elements you list of American patriotism, it’s an ongoing argument. We can lose balance. Say egalitarianism runs amuck. You say that’s an important American value, I agree, and it starts to win out and we lose a lot of other things. So I just wanted to throw all that in. Steven Smith (23:59): You probably said it, at least as well, better than I would. I’m glad you mentioned the article. I got an email the other night from George Kateb congratulating me for the book and also expressing disappointment that I don’t see things his way. I said, “George, what the hell. The argument is better than the agreement.” So anyway, George is a great man. I unhesitatingly say that, I do, even though we passionately disagree on the nature of the subject. And he’s right, there is much in the American experience that he draws on, going back to Emerson, going back to sort of the American transcendentalism, that was the first movement to really to give voice to this kind of free wheeling individualism that we have. In many ways, once again, it’s an admirable quality of Americans, our individualism, our sort of sense that nobody can tell me what to do, or that we want to figure things out for ourselves, we shouldn’t be constrained simply to live in the way that our parents lived if we don’t want to. This is, in many ways, a crucial part of America and one that I think is invaluable. I very much appreciate that claim yet, I would say, and I think we were getting into this a little while ago, that is only part of the story. In many ways, this kind of expressive individualism that Thoreau and others have, they presented it as a heroic disposition, the ability to break free custom and tradition, to live as you like, these are cliches today. But there was originally something heroic in the model of how to live in a certain way. It’s not to say that most of us aren’t heroes in that way, but it is say that many of us in fact find meaning in the way we’ve been brought up, in the traditions we’ve inherited, in the customs and habits that have formed and shaped us. Most people don’t feel a need to challenge and to resist the courses of history, tradition, and family and customs. So we have to find a way to hold those two together. If you want to bring this up to the moment, in some ways, I think what we’re witnessing today in much of our culture, in politics, is the outgrowth of a kind of angry libertarianism that says basically, “Nobody has the right to tell me what to do.” That is not a good formula for society. It may work in some occasions and in some contexts for individuals, but as members of a society it’s not a useful, to put it mildly, it’s not a useful formula. And I think a lot of this, I would say, angry libertarianism we see expressed in the response to COVID, that’s it’s a conspiracy, “Nobody can tell me that I should put on a mask,” or something. We live in a society and that requires that we make certain sacrifices. It seems to be pretty minimal to me, but for many people it’s an affront to their liberty. And I think that’s one of the dangerous sides of the kind of what they call abstract individualism that is very much a part of the American character. Richard Reinsch (27:53): Thinking here, angry libertarianism. There’s also this notion too of to make patriotism work it requires enough of us who disagree with one another. To put things like law and the nation and, I’ll say, the Constitution or being constitutional people that that is above everything else. That’s above who’s going to win an election because what we know is probably the next election, the other side is going to lose or the following election and so we’re able to live with those results. We’re able to live with say some laws being passed that we don’t like because we know there’s probably going to be a reversal. And that’s how I have looked at a lot of things, and this is a very dour look, even that sort of formal consensus breaks down. And I think that’s really at the essence of patriotism or, I’ll say, a humane loyalty to your country that there are things we just don’t question because we acknowledge that it’s so good. It’s not that we’re ignorant, or silly, or are not educated well. We just know these are good things and so that must be unquestionable. And that itself is now in dispute. So I see a lot of the COVID stuff happening like this basic distrust, not that the government at times doesn’t earn it, but this sort of a basic distrust out there you see and I think that fuels a lot of this stuff. Steven Smith (29:21): I couldn’t agree more with the way you just framed the issue. I think it is a matter of patriotism that it requires trust. It requires stability. There are a series of kind of qualities that it embraces. It also requires a sense of our own fallibility, an awareness that we may be wrong or at least what we believe is maybe only partially true. These are qualities that are essential to a decent society and have been eroded with the talk about the sources for the erosion of social trust, and this kind of ethos, as I call it, the glue in a certain way for what binds people together and what makes patriotism possible. And a lot of sociologists, political scientists, have talked about this in kind of more empirical ways in recent years. I think probably most famously, remember Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, the decline of associations in America kind of resulting in atomization. That was written back in the nineties or maybe the early 2000s where we hadn’t really seen the full consequences of the breakdown of what happens with that atomization. I totally believe in the Treaty of Westphalia solution. We live in a world of states and states are defined by borders and they have the right to determine who’s in and who’s out. Of course, you can determine that broadly or narrowly. But I very much believe that, that is the basis of our stability. And I think what happens with it is not just people no longer join with others, it leads to a breakdown of trust among people, among neighbors, among citizens. And that breakdown of trust leads us to see others as enemies, in some ways. They are not just others to us, they are enemies. And this is, more and more, I fear the world we are living in. And the question in the book, if I knew how to restore this I guess I would win the Nobel Prize or something, but it is trying to find both institutions, but also not just institutions, habits of hearts and minds that will restore the conditions for a decent patriotism. Richard Reinsch (31:19): I agree wholeheartedly there. I just think too, in the past year, we’ve had these sorts of jarring experiences, obviously, with COVID being one. And it seems to be our political class, every conflict we get and they manage to find the most intense way to come at it, and so things can’t be negotiated or compromised and that sort of drives things. So I look around my neighborhood, which no one has any reason really to be that upset about much. I see neighborhood signs with, “I believe in Peter Fauci.” I see signs about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These are suburbanites in Indianapolis, you’re this plugged into politics? This just sort of being someone who is interested in politics, is most people for most of my life have not really cared and think that I’m kind of weird for caring so much. And now this is upfront in everyone’s mind, not in a good way. I do think in terms of patriotism, something that most nations struggle with, particularly in the West is the harder question of borders and immigration. And that’s obviously very contested and has been for much of American history. How does the American patriot think about immigration? Steven Smith (32:33): Yeah, that’s something I talk about in the book and, like most people, I don’t have an answer to it. There’s not a simple answer to it. Just state the obvious. We are a nation of immigrants, not to say the history of immigration has been a happy one. We have not always welcomed the immigrant. “Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” this was not always the way immigrants were treated, going back to the early part of the Republic. But we are a nation of immigrants. And the question is, how does a society like ours both balance diversity, ethnic, racial diversity, immigrants, new immigrants, new people to the table with a sense that we are still one people in a way, “E Pluribus Unum,” out of many, one? That balance between to kind of put it in high falutin philosopher’s terms, how to combine the one and the many, how to do that? If we say our borders are endlessly open, everybody’s welcome in all at once, we lose our ethos. We lose any sense of who we are as a people. But if we begin to say, “We’re filled up, no more,” or very few, then we are in danger of losing our humanity. And I would only say, there’s not an algorithm for determining it, it’s just a willingness to people, our leadership class, to compromise on these issues. Immigrants can be a source of new blood- Richard Reinsch (34:24): Yeah, new businesses. Steven Smith (34:26): New ways. And at the same time we live in a world with borders, I very much believe that. I totally believe in the Treaty of Westphalia solution. We live in a world of states and states are defined by borders and they have the right to determine who’s in and who’s out. Of course, you can determine that broadly or narrowly. But I very much believe that, that is the basis of our stability. And again, I would say, you ask maybe the hardest question facing American public policy or legislation today on this question of immigration. It’s so powerful and it’s so potent on all sides. It requires statesmanship. It requires state craft, statesmanship, compromise, and willingness to stop demonizing each other. Richard Reinsch (35:20): No, I think that’s well said. Another hard question, maybe less controversial… Well, equally controversial, but not in the public eye as much. And this is something that I think Nussbaum and your friend George Kateb would point to are conflicts between our loyalties and how do those get settled? And does patriotism not offer a fulfilling settlement? Speaking of our country, our family, for many of us, our religious faith, and our conscience. And those do come into conflict. And so how does the patriot think about these conflicts? Steven Smith (35:56): Wonderful question. I have a section of the book going back to our earlier theme of our discussion when I talked about conflict of loyalties. When in fact patriotism comes in conflict, love of country, with other duties or loyalties that we inhabit, my favorite example, I used a few, but I’ll just mention my favorite, is the one that Lincoln encountered. I should say for those who haven’t read the book, Lincoln figures prominently in it. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln was visited in the White House by a lady named Mrs. Eliza Gurney, a Quaker. She came as the head of kind of a Quaker delegation. And Lincoln very much appreciated the visit. Not because she was coming to hector him about something, but they wanted to pray with him. And the Quakers were in a difficult dilemma because they were antislavery. They favored emancipation and anti-slavery and yet at the same time, we know they are anti war. And Lincoln appreciated that dilemma. How, if they fall on one side of the equation, they cannot support the war effort. If they fall on the other side of the equation, they seem to be in violation of their religious beliefs. It’s a painful moral conflict. And Lincoln sent her a beautiful letter stating to the effect, stating that dilemma very beautifully and saying something to the effect that, “I have and will do all I can as commander in chief to honor both sides of that.” But he admitted, more or less, that even Lincoln couldn’t figure out which of the sides was right and what to do. That was going to be left obviously to each person, each member of the Quaker faith, to have to work out for themselves. So that was a very powerful example, a real world example, of that kind of very, very serious conflict of duties between patriotism and, in this case, religious fidelity. There are others too. I consider some examples from literature, some from film. There’s a wonderful scene in The Godfather, one of my favorite films, that it deals with exactly this question. In that particular instance, it’s a conflict between family loyalty and loyalty to country. Things are real. And that’s why I say patriotism is a contested virtue. I also deal with the question of patriotism and protest. There are issues, not only when we have a conflict of obligations as it were, the kind that I was just talking about, but then there’s questions is it ever patriotic to protest? We hear this almost as a cliche. It is a cliche, “Protest is patriotic.” Well, my answer is yes and no. Like so many things in politics, it depends on the context. So I try to sort that out a little bit as well. But my point being in general, patriotism does not automatically just trump every other loyalty and obligation that we have. It is, as I say, contested. And it’s probably a good thing too. It remains and always will remain a contested virtue. Richard Reinsch (39:33): But at the same time, one we can’t do without. Steven Smith, thank you so much for your time. We’ve been talking with the author of Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Today we’re talking with Leon Kass about his new book, Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus. Leon Kass is one of our most significant thinkers and writers. He has the distinction of having a medical degree and being a practicing physician at one point in his career, but also is known for teaching at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago for decades and also being a major public intellectual. He is at the American Enterprise Institute and is the author of a number of wonderful books and essays, including Reading Genesis. He was also the chair of George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics and, I should also mention, co-editor along with Amy Kass and Diane Schaub of What So Proudly We Hail, a book that American civic educators definitely need at this point. Leon Kass, thank you so much for coming on the program. Leon Kass (01:22): Thank you very much, Richard for having me. Pleasure to be with you again. Richard Reinsch (01:23): It’s my honor to have you on. This book, Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, now, at one level, you write a book on Genesis, so maybe it’s natural or logical that you would turn to another book on Exodus. Yet, this is a weighty book, a lot of analysis, but one that pays well in reading. I can say that to all of our listeners. But why did you turn not just to reading Exodus but wanting to write a book on it? Leon Kass (01:51): Well, I mean partly, as you say, Richard, it is a sequel to the book on Genesis which, like the first book, is being read in search of its wisdom. In Genesis, we saw how after the first 11 chapters from the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the flood, Noah and his sons, and Babel, where it would show us what human life would be like left to its own devices. Beginning with Abraham, God embarks on a project to introduce into the world a way of life that can minimize the evils of human life uninstructed. The rest of that book shows how the germ of that new way of life barely survives two to three patriarchal generations. If you want to know how you get from families to peoplehood, you got to read Exodus. So in terms of subject matter, I want to follow the emergence of the Israelites as a people. For historical reasons, they are one of the world’s oldest and most consequential nations. But continuing to read philosophically, I hope to learn from reading Exodus about nationhood, using the case of Israel as an example. What actually makes a people into a people? What forms their communal identity, holds them together, guides their lives? To what do they look up and for what should they strive? On the assumption that this particular case might provide material for thinking about and maybe even teach us a thing or two of importance about those permanent human questions, that really was what I was hoping to find. Richard Reinsch (03:32): You say you read Exodus philosophically. Now, I thought that was interesting. As a Christian, I’ve always read it as something revealed directly from God through human agency and those who wrote it. You sort of outline that. What did you discover in a philosophical reading of Exodus? Leon Kass (03:53): Well, I should perhaps say a sentence or two more about by philosophical. I don’t mean reading as they would do in a philosophy department necessarily or reading it irreverently. I mean that I treat this book regardless of the authorship and even if it’s a revealed book, I’m reading it not necessarily because it’s binding on me, but because it has wisdom that’s available to me even if I’m not yet a member of the community. Moses, in fact, says deep in Deuteronomy about the laws. He says, “These laws are your wisdom in the eye of the nations.” So there’s a sense in which, although the Bible might be binding in terms of its law and obligations only on the people within the covenant, nevertheless, there are teachings there that if people were willing to have a look, might be available to everybody. So that’s what I mean by philosophical, wisdom-seeking. I don’t want just to learn about the book, but I want to learn from it and to learn from it by dwelling with it, by living with it, by imagining myself a participant in the story, but also stepping back with the aid of the text to reflect on it. I suspend whatever disbelief I might have about God or anything else. I’m just going to enter into this leaving my own prejudices aside as much as I can. I treat the book as a whole book, as an integral whole with a beginning and a middle and an end, not some patchwork quilt from different sources, like the source critics like to talk about. I read it naively. I try to keep my own opinions to myself. I read it without commentary and try to learn from the text how it wants to be read. I treat every word as if every word matters, the juxtapositions, the ambiguities. The silences are invitations to reflection. If you just slow yourself down and ask yourself, “What’s going on here? What does this mean? What sense does it make? What can you learn from it?” It’s amazing what you could learn from it, even if you haven’t signed up as a member of a faith community to begin with. I’ve allowed the text to work on me, to live with me, to live inside me. I’ve had a filling out not only of the political, philosophical questions with which I began, but also in who and what exactly and less who and what, but more what it means to live in relation to this voice and this teaching and this source of this teaching because, as God says to Moses, “I will be what I will be.” Richard Reinsch (06:28): I wanted to ask you a question. I’ve got a lot of questions about something you just said. How does the text, Exodus, want to be read? Leon Kass (06:37): How does the text want to be read? Richard Reinsch (06:39): Yes. Leon Kass (06:42): I mean this is perhaps presumptuous of me to say, but dwelling on it, dwelling in this text for, well, more than 20 years, I first started teaching it at Chicago in 1998, a full course devoted just to Exodus, 10 weeks, four hours a week, undergraduates and graduates. I repeated that five more times, had a study group in Washington with friends and family members, really high-caliber people. I taught a class in Jerusalem at Shalem College, Israeli students, and another very intense seminar where people who really knew the Bible much better than I do read my draft chapters with me and actually got me across the finish line. I had to produce a chapter a week because they were meeting to discuss it. So over this time, look, it tells a story. If you want to read it, you could either read it the way the scholars do as a prism, as an information about the beliefs and myths of an ancient people. Or you can read it as the Orthodox Jews do and pick out from this narrative story what are the laws that are obligatory? The rabbis have, in fact, treated the text in that way to extract the details of the law that have kept alive a way of life even though they were no longer living in the land for 2000 years till Israel was reestablished. Or you can read it by sort of submitting and saying, “What’s going on here?” And try to enter into this text as intimately as you can, to imagine yourself each character, even to imagine yourself Pharaoh, even though he’s the bad guy in the story, and to try to see the world through his eyes so that the power of the contest between Moses and God and Pharaoh turns out to be a real victory and not just beating up on some fellow who’s stupid and stubborn. I think the thing that finally came to me is that the story is not a history book. The story is a book that’s intended to somehow move the soul of the reader to understand certain things, to believe certain things, to come to know not just the story of the people but also of their God. Maybe this is premature in this conversation, Richard, but a person who doesn’t know anything about the book picks it up on the first page, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth.” I mean we can’t help being moderns in a Judeo-Christian tradition, having some idea of who this character, God, is. Our head is filled with stuff on it. But for a reader who doesn’t have all of that going for him or her, the name, God, is a kind of placeholder in the text, the meaning of which is going to be filled in as you read along. I have to say that these last few times through, the thing I’ve learned the most about in reading Exodus is because I’ve allowed the text to work on me to live with me, to live inside me. If I’ve had a filling out not only of the political, philosophical questions with which I began, but also in who and what exactly and less who and what, but more what it means to live in relation to this voice and this teaching and this source of this teaching because, as God says to Moses, “I will be what I will be,” which is a rejection of the answer for a name that would give His essence, but basically says, “You want to know who I am? Pay attention and see what I do.” In the course of Exodus, you see what He does and you see the effect of what He does. When the tabernacle is erected and you imagine yourself inside with the people, a building that you’ve built under His instructions so that you might have an experience of His presence in your daily life, I imagine myself in that place. I begin to see what it might be like to acknowledge the source greater than us, a teacher who has given us our law, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the thing that I’ve learned this time through, the book wants to be read by a person who imagines himself a character in the story, not one of the ones talked about, but as a living participant in this book, both through memory but also through allowing the text to be actively at work in him. I’ve done that reading Plato’s dialogues. I’ve done it with other books. But it takes a while before you make this book as a book, not just as selected passages, but as a whole book, something that you live with and it works on you. Richard Reinsch (11:58): Building on that question, I love the way you write about Moses in the book. How did you live with his example and trials in the Book of Exodus? Leon Kass (12:13): Look, this is an absolutely astounding figure. God needs a champion to bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. He doesn’t find some Spartacus to lead a slave revolt. He gets Himself an outsider who’s born to the Levi family, the spirited tribe. He gets an Egyptian rearing an education in the palace. The text doesn’t say a peep about it but, boy, it would be really interesting to know what did he study there? It makes a difference. When you first meet him, he’s a spirited defender of the underdog. He’s offended by injustice. He’s a passionate young man, but he also has a kind of philosophical side. He wants to know, and God catches him on the curiosity side of the burning bush. Moses turns aside to see why this bush is not consumed. None of the patriarchs ask why. Moses wants to know the cause. Although he’s curious, his wonder turns to awe when the voice speaks to him out of the bush and says that, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Take off your shoes. You’re standing on sacred ground.” It’s the most beautiful description of awe in literature that I know. And yet, Moses’ philosophical disposition isn’t silenced. He still wants to know God’s name in the conversation there. He takes on the job, but a very reluctant leader. So beginning, you’ve got Moses who’s a spirited young man, a very philosophical man, sort of reluctant about this job, but he goes. Then you see him get on-the-job training with Pharaoh. He’s sort of courageously holding his own in the administration of the signs and wonders known as the plague. He gains stature as God’s agent, but he increasingly takes his own initiative. At the end of the story of the plagues when the Egyptians finally know about God, the Egyptian who’s learned most about him is Moses himself. He learns the difference between a God who is a voice in his head as he goes along the rest of his life. He’s got this voice traveling with him. He learns about God as the antithesis of Egypt and, in a way, as a correction of whatever philosophical teachings he picked up there. Then the next great moment is at the sea of reeds after the Egyptians drown and the children of Israel now trust in God and in His servant, Moses. What does Moses do with that trust? He becomes a poet and he writes the immortal song of the sea which interprets for generations to come the meaning of the event that’s just been witnessed. He teaches the Israelites that this was not a victory that I caused, but this is a victory of the Lord, the man of war who is like you among the gods. This is the equivalent of Lincoln at Gettysburg teaching everybody the meaning of the sacrifice and the meaning of the war. So Moses is not only philosopher and not only spirited leader, but poet and interpreter. Richard Reinsch (15:53): Interesting. In different ways you write about Moses, one of which is something that perhaps we need to learn, although when I say it we’ll automatically think authoritarianism or something. But his obedience to what he’s called to do, because it doesn’t happen right away, that meaning the liberation of the Israelites. But he keeps at it. The first time he goes in to Pharaoh, you point out, he’s arrogant. He goes in with his brother, Aaron. He’s arrogant. He wants to do it his way and he fails. He almost loses everything. And then he has to go back and do it the way he was told by God. I just thought, obedience. I mean I’ve been thinking generally obedience is something we need in appropriate ways to reconsider our culture. But I thought that was worth mentioning. Leon Kass (16:40): Yeah. He is obedient, but gradually as he gets the point, he’s able to embellish and act on his own, not from arrogance but because he’s gotten the spirit of it so that there are certain things he says to Pharaoh later on that he’s not told. In a kind of crucial time for him, I mean we see him … Well, one of the great moments, and this is not generally noticed, Moses doesn’t really like this people, and not without cause. They’re slavish. His first encounter with them when he tries to break up a fight between the battling Israelites and one says to him, “Who made you a prince ruler over us? Do you want to kill us like you killed the Egyptian?” Moses says these people are ungovernable and repeated episodes of that. So he always calls them either, “Your people,” when talking to God or, “That people.” It’s only after the episode of the golden calf where he starts to plead for them against God’s threat to destroy them, that he finally identifies with them and starts calling them, “We, my people, our people, us.” His relation to God is on an intellectual plane. He doesn’t really understand why the people need … He can go 40 days and 40 nights without food and water. He doesn’t understand ordinary people. But finally, finally, he embraces them. He stands for them. It’s really one of the most beautiful moments where you see God makes him, in a way, plead for them. As a result for pleading for them, he now owns them and owns up to being part of them. That’s, in a way, the leader really becoming of the people and not as he’s in endanger of being seen by them as a separate god high and above them. Richard Reinsch (18:45): It’s funny. As I was reading your book, I thought to myself, “I’ve never really given that point consideration, Moses’ separateness.” What did you make of that, that the liberator would be separate from the people? I thought, “I’ve never given that consideration before.” Leon Kass (18:58): The problem of political leadership could be stated something like this. I mean you start with slavery. Then you move to a condition of anarchy. And then you get that before the law is given and they work on Moses’ charisma. Then the law is given and there’s still hierarchy. But in the end, Moses disappears into his law, not in Exodus, but in Deuteronomy. You then have equity under the law. That’s sort of the sequence of political things here. But if you’re going to have a political leader and you cannot somehow expect the people to liberate themselves from servitude, then the danger is the leader has to be sufficiently above the people to command their respect and to be followed, but not so high above them that they mistake him for God and that he himself might mistake him for that. He can’t be so close to the people as Aaron gets to be, that they can manipulate him, hold him in contempt, and revolt against him. So the problem of the relation between the leader and the led is one of the late … It’s not a theme. The book doesn’t have themes. But it’s a thread that you can follow here in how Moses came from being, in a way, much too good for them, to not only taking pity on them but embracing the cause not just from on high but from among them. Richard Reinsch (20:40): I mean just a big question here. How did this change or did it change your thinking about freedom and virtue generally? Leon Kass (20:49): Well, that’s very welcome. The Book of Exodus is taken by lots of people as a kind of basic text and inspiration for various struggles of national liberation. To go from slavery to freedom is thought to be the main theme of the first third of the book. But it’s very curious. It’s not the language of the text. There are Hebrew words for freedom, but they don’t occur at all in the story of the liberation from Egypt. Instead, the terms are redemption and deliverance. The transition really is said to be from service, I should say servitude to Pharaoh, not to autonomy but to service to God. In one of the most powerful insights that I think I had from this text in reading the beginning of the 10 commandments, it begins when God says when He starts to speak out of the mountain to the people, “I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage.” Now, as a historical statement in the text, that’s true. He is the same one here on the mountain who was the one who brought you out of Egypt and then, redundantly, out of the house of bondage, suggestion. The Israelites are told basically, “You people have two great and enduring possibilities. You can either be aligned with me and follow me and have a relation with me or the alternative is there’s the land of Egypt and the house of bondage.” Those are the two enduring human possibilities, either some relation with God or live in the kind of way that ultimately will lead to being enslaved to men and to the mightiest of men. I think that even though the language of freedom doesn’t occur, I think it can speak to our understanding of freedom in the following ways. First of all, if freedom is opposed to being in bondage, it’s clear. They’re no longer subordinate to human will and to despotism. I would say that Israel becomes a people in the Book of Exodus in three phases, and its peoplehood rests on three pillars. First is the shared story of slavery and deliverance. Second, they get a comprehensive law governing all aspects of life through constraint, through encouragement and uplift. That happens at Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the ordinances. Third, the building of the tabernacle, which is a place of worship. Second, they acquire national self-rule under wise legislation, in this case, divinely given and/or inspired. The rule of law is consented to. The covenant is consented to. This rule of law, unlike comparable law of the ancient Near East, all are equal before this law. There’s not one law for the nobles and one law for the commons. Third, the law doesn’t speak this language, but the law aims to free people internally from the enslaving passions, from fear and despair because we think we are lowly and of no consequence, from the opposite pride and hubris because we tend to believe in our human superiority and self-sufficiency, from our greed and stinginess because we think the world is inhospitable and will not provide for us. In a way, freedom here means not doing as you please, but doing as you should so that you will no longer be slave to Pharaoh or be enslaved within. I mean the formula would be getting the slaves out of Egypt was the easy part. Getting Egypt out of the slaves took forever and is not finished. These are people who have been emancipated or have been delivered from servitude to acquire a way of life, a kind of law that will make them free, make them free to be what it means to be the only creature made in God’s image. Richard Reinsch (24:48): I said obedience earlier talking about Moses. In listening to you, there’s almost this idea maybe obedience takes the form of participation in the law. Through that emerges your freedom. The temptations to lowliness or the temptations to arrogance fall away and you actually find who you’re supposed to be maybe. That is a thought that I had listening to you. Leon Kass (25:14): That’s wonderful. There are two nice formulas about the Torah. The Torah is a yoke and the Torah is a tree of life. In my formulation, putting them together is, the Torah is a tree of life because one has voluntarily put one’s neck in the yoke. The yoke sounds like slavery. It’s oxen. You tame the stiff-necked beast by yoking him. But if you voluntarily put your neck into this yoke, it enables you to live upright, rooted, reaching for what’s highest. Richard Reinsch (25:56): Yeah. Something else you said, law and self-rule. What kind of a nation is formed in the Book of Exodus? Leon Kass (26:05): This is complicated. English language has two words that we use interchangeably often, I do it myself, nation and people. The word, nation, comes from the Latin word, natio, meaning birth. A nation would be a large, distinct group of people who are united through generations upon generations of common descent from which follows by their separation, probably common language and culture. Whereas, a people is less a naturally constituted body, but would be a group of human beings who are united by a common story, by common mores and law, by shared aspirations, shared ideals and institutions, a common way of life. We would say, I think, of the United States, but we sometimes call it a nation. But the United States are a people, “We the people,” et cetera. That’s a people-defining act in the constituting law, just as the covenant approving consent is the constituting moment, the first major constituting moment of the children of Israel. I would say that I use the word, nation, but I, in a way, mean it in the sense of people. I would say that Israel becomes a people in the Book of Exodus in three phases, and its peoplehood rests on three pillars. First is the shared story of slavery and deliverance. This is told from generation to generation. In fact, the deliverance is for the sake of the story. One of the most astounding things is the commandment to tell the story annually at Passover is given the night before they actually go out. So they go out instructed already thinking about their children and their children’s children who have to hear this story. So one of the fundamental features of being a nation is you have a shared national story that tells of your servitude and divine deliverance. Second, is they get a comprehensive law governing all aspects of life through constraint, through encouragement and uplift. That happens at Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the ordinances. But third, and this is in there and I used to neglect this because a lot of the description’s just boring, is the building of the tabernacle, which is a place of worship. This embodies the people’s aspiration not only to have rules governing their conduct with each other, but to remain in contact with their God, with what is highest. Those are the three pillars of Israel’s founding. If you’re reading this not just historically but for its wisdom, you can then ask yourself the question, “Can a people, a people such as ours, flourish if it lacks a shared national story, if it shares an accepted law and mores, and if it shares common aspirations of something higher than our own comfort and safety?” The book doesn’t do contemporary politics. There’s a paragraph or two at the very end, but I think it’s a serious question for us whether we can substitute technological progress, economic prosperity, private pursuits of happiness in place of a national story which is now contested and partly despised in the nation when our morals are weakened, when the national dedication is abandoned. It looks like we’re in danger of losing our national fabric and submit to angry passions, technocracy, and hedonism. Richard Reinsch (30:21): Reading your book, that came to mind because I think what was going on, particularly this summer when monuments were being defaced and destroyed, was something like ancient tribal warfare in the sense of we destroy your gods. We reject your gods. That’s why we pull them down. That’s why we rename high schools. Just reading before we got in this discussion today, a high school in San Francisco named Abraham Lincoln High School is going to have its name changed, these sorts of things, yeah, losing your shared national story. I thought also, and this is more controversial, thinking about the tabernacle discussion in the book, it suggests that a good nation also has to have a third term, that being not just the people in the law, the people in the government, but something higher than both that they submit to, participate into, that grounds them. I think that’s also a part of any well-regarded, healthy national loyalty. I’m teaching the founding text of the Jewish people to really admirable, noble young people. All of them had done national service being coming to college. I’m reading it in Jerusalem in a reborn land of the people after 2000 years of dispersion, kept alive only by adherence to this book and the ones written on top of it. They’re reading it and speaking a language which until 100 years ago had not been spoken in public in everyday life anywhere in the world for 2000 years. Leon Kass (31:25): I agree with you completely. Near the end of the book, I quote Chesterton, his remark, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” The other thing, really important thing I learned, you see, Israel is formed as a nation or a people in a context that has several other very dominant nations, Egypt, the Canaanites, and the Babylonians or Mesopotamians. These are just ancient peoples, but what they represent or what the soul of those nations were are permanent human alternatives. In Egypt, you have the techno-administrative state finally ruled by one man and his will. Among the Canaanites, you have Earth-worshiping people with licentious sexual practices. In Babel, you have the cosmopolitan soulless dream that man can be a god to man. Those alternatives are here waiting in the wings. They’re waiting in the wings. With atheism on the rise in the West and in America, we could very well return to those dehumanizing pre-biblical conditions where the choices will be the battles between the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the Babel builders. The achievements of biblically-based Western civilization could be permanently lost. My serious Christian friends tell me despair is a sin. I have a close Catholic friend who told me, “Leon, God will win in the end. You may not live to see it.” I hope he’s right. Richard Reinsch (33:21): I thought too your discussion of Egypt and Pharaoh, the overwhelming power of this state, of this empire, and also Pharaoh’s power, the attempt to use science and magic, to worship and also control nature I thought was significant in thinking about the modernist quest. And then also Pharaoh’s attempt to control life and death, in particular, to control birth, and you made the observation, “This is every what tyrant does, to control birth of those worth dwelling on.” Leon Kass (34:00): Yeah. Look, we’re halfway there. I mean the technological project to conquer nature, to relieve the human condition begun by Francis Bacon and friends in the early 17th century, the ultimate goal of the project, the mastery of nature, is to eliminate mortality. At the end of Genesis, one saw the two alternatives very starkly laid out. We had the funeral of Jacob in which his sons take him back and bury him in the cave and which the idea is you bury the dead and you transmit their way of life in remembrance of the covenant with God that began all of this. The alternative was the mummification of Joseph in Egypt where he will lie in rest. He actually asks to be taken out, but with the pharaohs lying in wait until the magicians can figure out how to reanimate them. There it’s this world and this life for ourselves and for the mighty alone rather than a way of life which is transmitted from generation to generation, excepting for now the limitations of our mortality but keeping alive a righteous and a holy way of life which is why we’re put on Earth to live. The West has been nourished by this fountain. Now the project to finish the Egyptian project is back and it’s doing very well. By the way, lest I be misunderstood, only an idiot would complain about modern science in the age of COVID. God bless them, but within limitations. Richard Reinsch (35:52): That’s why I wanted the modernist quest or the notion that some of these can relieve us of the human condition, that somehow economics or science alone or medicine alone can somehow answer the deepest questions finally is a source of many problems. Something else that’s working in Exodus is the plagues, the visiting of the plagues on Pharaoh. I think that, to me, was instructive in the sense of power meeting power and one man’s quest to use power finally defeated and that being something that Moses and the people need to see. I thought that was worth dwelling on. Leon Kass (36:37): It’s certainly about power, by the fact that Pharaoh’s magicians can only imitate two of the plagues. With each passing one, everybody else in Egypt tells Pharaoh, “Quit, we’re all going to be destroyed.” Pharaoh, strengthening his heart and refusing to give in, plays the game to the end. But the plagues are also a metaphysical contest about an attack on the gods of Egypt and finally on the highest god of all, Pharaoh himself. Pharaoh has wanted to be in command of life and death. Pharaoh finally yields when a god can come into a house and distinguish the firstborn from all the others, including in Pharaoh’s own house. So there’s a kind of contest not only about pure power, but the question is who’s right about divinity? That’s really very, very important. Let me try to say this slightly differently. If you’re simply thinking about liberation or you’re simply thinking about power politics, you will miss the fact that God says He sends these plagues into Egypt, “So that Egypt may know who I am,” that the purpose of all of this, in a way, is knowledge. It’s knowledge. It’s knowledge to begin with with the Egyptians, including Moses the Egyptian. It’s finally because the greatest civilization of the world as they’re sinking into the water after the sea of reeds, the last thing you ever hear from Egypt in this book is, “It’s hopeless. The Lord fights for them.” It’s, in a way, the acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Lord God of Israel. When the Egyptians pay that tribute, the Israelites will know it and then the world might know it as well. So it’s a kind of correction of the wrong metaphysics of the belief in nature gods, on the one hand, and the belief in man’s godly powers on the other that are both at issue in that contest with the plagues. Richard Reinsch (38:51): Something I just wanted to circle back to here at the end, you said you taught this book for a number of years at Chicago and then in Israel. What did you discover from American students and Israeli students reading this book? Leon Kass (39:09): I had a class of mixed religious and nonreligious kids in both places actually. There were a small number of students in the American classes who were reared on the Bible, including a couple of evangelical Protestants who, they really knew the book. I learned from them because they pushed me on this or that or showed me things that I hadn’t yet seen. But they were willing to enter into my wisdom-seeking reading. In Israel, there were religious kids who had read the Bible from childhood. They read it with commentators. They never read it as a whole book. My favorite practice is to find passages and dilate upon them for their teaching for their law, for their wisdom. But that there could be a coherent political teaching through the book as a whole, that they had not done before, and what I was doing was strange. I was also teaching in English and some of them didn’t have adequate English. But it turned out, in certain personal terms, the teaching of this text in Israel was just an extraordinary experience. I can’t find the right words. I’m teaching the founding text of the Jewish people to really admirable, noble young people. All of them had done national service being coming to college. I’m reading it in Jerusalem in a reborn land of the people after 2000 years of dispersion, kept alive only by adherence to this book and the ones written on top of it. They’re reading it and speaking a language which until 100 years ago had not been spoken in public in everyday life anywhere in the world for 2000 years. I have this privilege to do this, aged 77. I said to myself and I think I say it in the book, “Even an atheist would have to think this was a miracle.” It was as if I was on a kind of journey to have this experience to teach this book in this place to these people at this time of my life and that there was still something for me to see and learn. Teaching was frustrating, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that this was a kind of destined experience for me. It moved me immensely and has still. Richard Reinsch (41:41): Maybe we can end there. That was excellent. Leon Kass, thank you so much. We’ve been talking with the author of Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus. Thank you for coming. Leon Kass (41:52): Thanks very much, Richard.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Today we’re talking with Helen Andrews about her new book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Helen Andrews is senior editor of The American Conservative, before that managing editor of the Washington Examiner, she was a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Times and First Things, among others. She’s also written for Law & Liberty in the past. So we’re glad to have her on the program to talk about Boomers, Boomer nation. Helen Andrews (00:53): That’s us! We are the boomer nation. Richard Reinsch (00:55): So Helen, what got you interested in writing about the Boomers? I mean, there’s been obviously a lot said about them. What did you want to add? Helen Andrews (01:03): Well, I’m a millennial to start by laying all of my cards on the table. And the millennials and the boomers are natural enemies, in many cases because the boomers are our parents. And as I looked around the world, when I graduated from college in 2008, into the teeth of a massive financial crisis, I started thinking that the world that my generation had inherited was not the one that we were supposed to, that something had gone wrong, somewhere. And so I wanted to trace back, where mistakes had been made, in the economy, in politics, in religion, in the family. And every time I tugged on a thread, I found that it led me back to the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and started running the world in the 1990s. And that was the baby boomers. Richard Reinsch (02:00): Something that I’ve always thought about with the baby boomers. And I think about it in terms of my own family, one of my grandfathers grew up on a farm during the Great Depression, in northern Indiana. He talked a bit about that with me difficult times, then very early in his life goes off to fight in a world war in the Navy, and then comes back. And GI Bill goes to college, becomes an engineer, and raises a family. And when I juxtapose his early life with the life he was able to create for his children. And this is I think, throughout the baby boomer generation. And so he would be a part of what’s called the silent generation. So we have a boomer generation that grows up, obviously, underneath the specter of nuclear war. But they grow up compared to previous American generations and conditions of unparalleled prosperity, and peace, and good education systems, largely very much intact families. And what do you think goes wrong there? Helen Andrews (03:13): The long and short of it is that the boomers, as you say, came of age, at a time of unparalleled prosperity. I don’t think America has ever been wealthier in the fullest sense than it was in the 1950s and 60s. And it was also a time of great social cohesion. All the things that make American society great, we’re still functioning at full capacity then, our churches were exceptionally strong in the 1960s, our civil society, and informal volunteerism, all of that good stuff, was hitting record highs in the 1950s. And all of this together gave the baby boomers a sense that that was just the natural order of things, that the natural state of the world is for everybody to be rich, and for society to work well. And for there to be high levels of trust among the people who live together. And they behaved on that assumption over the next six decades. And the result was that they thought they could act out and destroy institutions and that society would continue to function in the wonderful, healthy way that it had when they were young kids. Helen Andrews (04:31): And of course, that’s no longer the case. Prosperity, as we have discovered is not the natural order of things, and that if you destroy institutions like the churches, then the result will be what you see today in the Protestant mainline, which has churches their moribund, is not on their literal deathbed. So that was what happened to the boomers. They came of age at the time when everything was great. And they assumed it would always be that way, no matter how badly they acted. Richard Reinsch (05:00): Question, in your research for this book did you ever take up the question, something that I’ve been interested in. What’s the interaction between, say, the silent generation and these children that they’re raising? And it seems to me at some level, there was just a failure to inculcate time-honored habits and the American past, at some level, did you think about that? Helen Andrews (05:26): I did. But the thing that first made me start questioning that narrative, that it’s actually the silent generation fault. And the greatest generation fault is reading about the phenomenon of the 1960s in other countries because, of course, the baby boom 1960 that was a global phenomenon. And the people in Germany and France, who asked themselves, why is it that all of our students are rioting in the streets and throwing cobblestones at cops in 1968? The answer they came up with was, well, they hate their parents because their parents bequeath them a world of war. Their parents were the generation of fascism and collaboration. And that’s why these young Frenchmen don’t trust anybody over 30. I thought, well, that’s almost the opposite of the situation you had in the United States. Here, the narrative is that the generation that were the boomers’ parents were the good guys, and they made things too nice for their kids. And that’s why they hated them. And you can’t have two opposite explanations for an identical phenomenon. So eventually, I ended up concluding that the generational boomer phenomenon, the 1960s, that rebellion, was a product just of simple demographics, when you have a very large generation, as the boomers were, when they become of age, they start to throw their weight around because there are just so many of them and that makes their desires just so important to the rest of society. So that was what was going on not in the actual… The substance of generational debate did not have a lot to do with it. Richard Reinsch (07:00): You profile six boomers in your book and you in many ways mirror very successful book Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, which was a very successful book at the time for dispelling a vaunted legacy of the Victorians in the English mind. I take it you wouldn’t mind taking that place here in America with regard to the boomers, you profile Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, and Al Sharpton. I’m wondering, why not Bill Clinton? Isn’t he the quintessential boomer? Helen Andrews (07:35): He was absolutely on my shortlist. And the reason why I ended up passing his name off, even though he is as you say, the quintessential boomer, I agree with you 100% is that I wasn’t sure there was a lot left to say about Bill Clinton that hasn’t already been said. And also, I got a chance to say most of what I wanted to say about Bill Clinton in the chapter on Aaron Sorkin. Because if people out there don’t know, if you watch an episode of The West Wing, there’s a 75% chance that at least one of the plotlines in that episode is ripped from the headlines, as they say in Law and Order from something that actually happens in the Bill Clinton White House. If you know anything about the Clinton years, you will see familiar news stories and anecdotes pop up in The West Wing all the time. So that was where I got my chance to say what I have to say about Bill Clinton. Richard Reinsch (08:32): And then in that regard to Hillary Clinton. I know there is so much that has been said about them. It’s the handprint. The boomer generation is so large, and their print on all aspects of American society continues today. And it to me he just exemplifies that and what he was able to achieve and also dissolve. Helen Andrews (08:56): And also Clinton was a man who squandered what were great gifts, not just the power that he was granted that he then abused, but the gifts that God gave them. He had many virtues, and he did not turn them to as good use as he should have. And that’s the boomer story in a nutshell. Richard Reinsch (09:14): Okay. You profile first, Steve Jobs, he seems to be the one you’re the most sympathetic to. Helen Andrews (09:22): People have told me that I get gradually less sympathetic as the book goes on. That may be true. One of the most fascinating subjects to me of California and business in Silicon Valley, is how the hippie side and the aggressive capitalist side are two sides of the same coin, that they are more alike than people tend to anticipate. Richard Reinsch (09:28): Yes, with Jobs, you profile him. Why? Helen Andrews (09:33): Because you really can’t tell the story of the last sixty years in the United States without talking about technology. And nobody shaped our view of technology more than Steve Jobs. He’s also somebody who exemplifies California more than just about anybody. If you bought Apple products in this century, you’ll probably remember turning over on the back of your iPod or whatever and seeing made in China, but designed in not in America, designed in California. So Apple was very much a California company. And if you think about the boomers’ effect on the world, pretty adequate way to summarize, it would be making us all look a little bit more like California. And that’s what Steve Jobs represents to me. Richard Reinsch (10:20): Jobs in the Apple company and creating the smartphone, which has, I mean, in my mind, transformed so many things and in conjunction with social media, in terms of how we interact with information and interact with one another. Jobs also you write about, there’s certain countercultural strains in Jobs, but also certain other strains as well, in terms of I didn’t know that he wasn’t going to allow pornography apps to be sold on Apple products, et cetera. And he said, “We’re going to do what’s right for our customers.” So there was this interesting, sane part of Jobs that you profiled. Helen Andrews (10:58): Absolutely. He was a quintessential boomer in some ways, but the anti-boomer in other ways, the stand against pornography in the Apple Store is one example. He hated politics. I mean, he would go to a meeting at the Obama White House if they invited him just because there’s always a hobnob with powerful people. But the strain that you see in Silicon Valley now where everybody’s very woke and political, he just had no time for that. And he insulted Bill Gates and his dabbling in philanthropy. For Steve Jobs, he was a true-believing capitalist. That was what he thought was his contribution to the world, which is, in many ways very unboomerish, as well. Richard Reinsch (11:42): There’s the side of Silicon Valley that it was this myth of the hippie in the garage, inventing new tech products that we would use, but it was about creativity, with some amount of bourgeois productivity and business acumen, but this was really the flowering of a new ethos and way of being in business. And do you think Jobs fulfilled that? Or is he a crossways, with that? The reason why the boomers are failing to be a bulwark against crazy woke fanaticism is that they feel like these kids are just believing the same values that they do. You see it in Silicon Valley all the time, the people who run Google in the top management positions, the boomer generation people have the same values as sensibly as the millennials who are terrorizing them. It’s just that they thought we could pursue those values and still be nice to each other. Helen Andrews (12:07): One of the most fascinating subjects to me of California and business in Silicon Valley, is how the hippie side and the aggressive capitalist side are two sides of the same coin, that they are more alike than people tend to anticipate. I think my favorite thing that’s ever been written about Silicon Valley is Tom Wolfe’s essay that’s collected in his collection, Hooking Up about noise in the early founding fathers of Silicon Valley. And because he’s Tom Wolfe, one of the things he notices is the way everybody’s dressed. And he notices that California has a much more casual style and you can spot somebody from East Coast Wall Street when they come out to visit a Silicon Valley company in a second because they’re the only ones wearing a suit and tie. But when I talked to boomers, just to have my personal acquaintance about things that they thought had changed in the last 50 years, one of the things that a lot of them mentioned was workplace attire, that is a lot more casual now than it used to be. And that’s a great example of the Californication of the rest of America. It used to be, you only saw that kind of thing on the west coast. Now you see it everywhere showing up in jeans and sneakers to an office job. But one of the boomers that I talked to about this phenomenon made a chilling observation, he said that this casual workwear coincided exactly with longer hours, that it used to be even in my hardcore New York law office, that everybody kept basically nine-to-five or nine-to-six hours, everybody understood even your boss, that everybody ought to be home for dinner. And it was only as the go-go ’80s started going and especially into the ’90s that they started thinking it’s okay to ask your employees to start staying till 10 o’clock at night on a regular basis. And so supervisors said, “Well if I’m going to do that, I can’t ask them to be in an uncomfortable suit all that time.” So in that way, the rise of casual wear in the office went hand in hand, with employers demanding more and workers losing leverage in the workplace. It’s not about self-expression and dressing how you want no, it’s about them squeezing every drop of labor they can out of you. So I think that’s the kind of California workplace the Steve Jobs represented. Richard Reinsch (14:26): As you say that I think I’m recalling something I read about Marissa Mayer, who was the CEO of Yahoo, that started on the ground floor of Google, that she didn’t go home for 30 days or something like that, something ridiculous like that in the early days of Google. I guess one thing that comes to mind here is so the wokeplace phenomenon in some ways in which is such a part of Silicon Valley and it’s become at least what you and I do. It’s something we interact with every day, an unpleasant reality. And that’s post-boomers though, isn’t it? Isn’t that something that, did they prepare the way for that? Is that a part of this merging of workplace and values and virtues? Or does that come after them? And it sparks the question. Are we afraid of an America after the boomers? Do we fear what that might look like? One place is, the presidential race, we were actually afraid of the next generation of Democratic politicians. So we chose Joe Biden. Helen Andrews (15:27): I think that’s absolutely right. But we can’t let the boomers off the hook because the reason those Millennials are so terrifying, is because of the things that the boomers taught them. And the reason why the boomers are failing to be a bulwark against crazy woke fanaticism is that they feel like these kids are just believing the same values that they do. You see it in Silicon Valley all the time, the people who run Google in the top management positions, the boomer generation people have the same values as sensibly as the millennials who are terrorizing them. It’s just that they thought we could pursue those values and still be nice to each other. They weren’t fanatical about it. So the millennials know that they have the leverage in these battles. Because the boomers claim to believe in the very same thing. So yeah, the boomers are the last barrier between the coming insanity that is the world takeover of absolutely everything. But they were the ones who created the monster in the first place. Richard Reinsch (16:37): I want to skip, this being Law and Liberty. The last person you profile is Justice Sonia Sotomayor, talk about her for a minute. There was a lot of interesting facts about her in your reporting that I wasn’t aware of. But one of the things it calls to mind and is and there’s another person you profile before her, the Reverend Al Sharpton, that there’s this awareness, particularly for later stage baby boomers of how civil rights has turned into maybe not so much transformational, you talk about that, but a way in which one can really further one’s own projects. Helen Andrews (17:17): I think that’s an accurate description of Sonia Sotomayor and she learned it back in college. She writes in her own memoir about how… she went to Princeton on a full-ride scholarship. And rather than express gratitude for being able to attend an Ivy League University for no money, she decided to attack the university for cultural genocide for not having enough Puerto Rican professors. Richard Reinsch (17:43): She used that term cultural genocide? Helen Andrews (17:46): I don’t think she used the term cultural genocide, but she did say the obliteration, eradication of an entire culture it was something suitably hyperbolic. Richard Reinsch (17:56): Yes. Helen Andrews (17:57): But we shouldn’t hold it against her. She was an undergraduate at the time, and undergraduates are just naturally hysterical. The real fault lies with the Princeton administration, which responded to the blackmail letter that she sent them about not having enough Puerto Rican-born staff, by falling all over themselves, and saying, “Oh, of course, we’ll appoint a diversity manager right away.” And that was an early lesson for her, that if you just invoke the right narrative of victimhood, everyone will fall over themselves to comply with what you’re requesting. And that’s the way that the law is, that’s not just a product of culture, that’s a product of civil rights laws, and has come to be interpreted. And now that she’s the one doing the interpreting, she’s very happy to expand its reach so further. Richard Reinsch (18:43): Yeah, and that institutionally, obviously, that goes on today, throughout all universities, Princeton’s response to the latest round of protests we’ve been experiencing in this country is to accuse itself of systemic racism and to promise ways in which it’s going to counteract that including building more majors devoted to the studies of other cultures that aren’t affiliated with European civilization. Sotomayor, though, you talk about her pushing forward. There’s a conversation one time she has about affirmative action with a law partner of a major firm. And I thought it was a law partner quizzing her about does she think it’s fair for minorities to be in certain positions when they’ve likely obtain those positions through race and affirmative action? And she’s incensed about this. And I can understand how that would be an aggressive question to ask someone from a minority background. Helen Andrews (19:46): You’re right that that was an aggressive question on the part of the law partner. The setting this clarifies the anecdote for listeners is that she was a three L at Yale Law School about to graduate and go look for a job and it was at a job fair when all of the big firms in New York and across the country come to Yale Law to interview prospective hires. And it was at a dinner of about a dozen people where the partner was there and went around the table quizzing people. And he really got into it with her saying, “Do you think you’re only here because you’re Puerto Rican? Do you think it’s fair for our firm to hire people on affirmative action grounds when we know they’re going to wash out in a couple of years?” And she complained to Yale Law and said, “If you don’t do something about this, I will file a complaint, saying that that firm should not be allowed to send partners here to interview law students for jobs ever again.” And the firm submitted a letter of apology and was actually forced to submit two letters of apology because the first one was not apologetic enough. But the reason why I liked that anecdote is that there is an exact parallel one about Antonin Scalia. When Scalia got out of Harvard Law, he went to interview at a Midwestern big law firm, I think Jones Day and the partners there said, “Oh, you’re a Catholic? Well, then you must believe in blue laws saying that we got to close our shop on Sundays. Don’t you think that’s imposing religion? Aren’t you just a retrograde, Pope follower, or whatever?” And he really aggressively attacked his Catholicism. He was, of course at the time, the only Catholic at the table. But the reason law partners do that is to see how you respond under pressure. Because judges will sometimes get into it with you, and sometimes the judges will be wrong or irrational. So seeing how you respond to aggressive, angry, irrational questioning is something that prospective hirers might want to know if you’re applying for a job as a lawyer. And Scalia himself, even though a lot of the questions they asked him were unfair and racist, just gave as good as he got. He really got into it because he enjoys the feeling of debate. That’s what he lives for. And the fact that Sotomayor responded in such an opposite way. There’s a lot about their respective characters. Richard Reinsch (21:57): Just, as I was thinking about Sotomayor, one thing that came to mind, you probably came across this, PJ O’Rourke has this analysis of the baby boomer generation that is so large, and it takes into account so many different aspects of America, given that how rapidly America changed as they came into their own, that there’s this first tranche of baby boomers who are the most left-wing, and were the most committed to social change, were the ones leading protest later as an early adulthood, then you have this middle group, who moderates more, and they’re following. But they’re also the first ones to really go home and call it a day. And then you have this later group, which he puts Barack Obama in, who pretty much figure out which way the wind is blowing and adjust accordingly. So maybe they’re left-wing, maybe they’re moderate, maybe they’re something else, they’re corporate, or whatever. They’re willing to cut deals. And he says, “This is precisely how the boomers understood Barack Obama and the famous Reverend Wright episode where Obama was in his church, presumably, while this man was preaching and saying a lot of hateful things. And Obama’s response was, “Yeah, I didn’t take any of it seriously. And I was just there because I was in Chicago politics. And that’s what people did.” And the boomers instantly accepted that because many of them actually knew that to be the way they’ve handled things in their own lives. I’m curious what you think of that. But is Sotomayor seemed like, as I read your account of her one of the ways in which she found a way to succeed was precisely to rely on the things that she was being given to rely on to succeed? Helen Andrews (23:39): Yeah, I’m glad that you brought up the PJ O’Rourke book because, in some ways, the book that I wrote was a response to his. He even wrote a whole book about the baby boomers, which is very acute and very funny. Richard Reinsch (23:50): Yeah. Helen Andrews (23:51): But it ultimately a little bit too fond. And so when I read it, I thought he hadn’t really stuck tat knife in quite the way that I wanted to see the boomers be treated. So I wrote my entire book because I thought PJ O’Rourke was too nice. Richard Reinsch (24:05): Okay. Helen Andrews (24:06): But the framing that he uses is really useful. It’s what you say that there are divisions within the boomer generation. I think he compares them to seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen at a high school. They’re all in the same cohort, but they’re different generations. And yeah, that might be a good way to think about Sotomayor. And one occasion, when Sotomayor the younger boomer came into conflict with somebody from just slightly, the generation ahead of her somebody born in their early 1940s was when she was confirmed and Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor, decided to attack her and almost along the lines that you’re saying, he said, “For me, left-wing law is a matter of intellect. I have the arguments. I’ve thought about this deeply. I know what I’m doing with bringing my liberalism to the law.” Sotomayor, Laurence Tribe famously said in a memo that he wrote to the Obama administration is, and this is a direct quote, quite simply not as smart as she thinks she is which is rather a rude thing for a Harvard professor to say about somebody who was about to be a Supreme Court justice. But it was really the argument that you’re presenting that for the younger boomers, it was just something they absorbed, they were not on the front lines of these protests, they did not arrive at their liberal opinions through deep thought or outrage response to social conditions. They just saw that it was the dominant belief system and adopted it because that’s what you do to get ahead. And Tribe was worried that in close cases, when the outcome depended on the liberal justices managing to win arguments with Anthony Kennedy, Sotomayor would not be impressive enough in those intellectual arguments to get Kennedy’s vote because her liberalism was not sufficiently intellectual. Now, I think the moral events or the outcomes of that story, proves something important about the baby boomers, which is that Laurence Tribe was wrong, the non-intellectual, more emotional, more therapeutic style of argumentation that Sotomayor prefers, has actually been really successful. She is everything he said she was. And yet she has won. And she has prevailed in arguments and won in cases. So I think maybe the intellectuals were not as powerful or as influential as they might wish they were. And it’s the people for whom liberalism is just an adopted belief system because it’s in the air supply are the ones who have the power. Richard Reinsch (26:47): You note the dissenting opinion, she writes in the Michigan case where voters in a popular referendum had eliminated racial preferences in that state, and a suit was filed that this in and of itself was racial discrimination. And Sotomayor wrote a blistering opinion of basically equating the voters in that state with Jim Crow voters. And there were some other things she said in that opinion as well that were just howlers and she was criticized directly by Chief Justice John Roberts. And also she was criticized by, it was Scalia, I think, but you said that actually referring to this, this may have changed Kennedy’s mind. You argue. Helen Andrews (27:28): Yeah. And Joan Biskupic, is a Supreme Court reporter has written biographies of I think, at least three sitting justices, maybe four. But she is a Supreme Court journalist. And she believes based on evidence, that Sotomayor blackmailing dissent was what changed Kennedy’s opinion. And if you look at Kennedy’s jurisprudence, from the moment he was confirmed, he has been a reliable vote against affirmative action. Justice Kennedy did not like racial preferences. So it was a genuine surprise that in this Michigan case that you’re talking about, he ended up on the Sotomayor side. The rumor mill attributed that really startling defections on Kennedy’s part to this blistering dissent, and really something that called out for explanation because it would require something extraordinary for Kennedy to come down in defense of racial preferences. Richard Reinsch (28:24): Helen, now, maybe switching gears here. You include, and I thought this is an interesting choice. You include Jeffrey Sachs, in your list. I’m curious why I don’t naturally think of him when I think of him and boomers. But you explore the arc of his career. And I thought that was interesting. Helen Andrews (28:43): He was one of the first people that I thought of when I was thinking of people who capture the essence of boomerness, maybe because he personifies the combination of idealism and hubris. Nobody can question Jeffrey Sachs’ idealism. He’s a professional do-gooder, but not a humanitarian in the philanthropic sense. He’s a an economist, which is also, in my mind, very representative of the baby boomers. Their consummate do-gooders are not people who run charities. They’re people who have PhDs in economics, this elevation of social science and expertise to the highest value, and that that’s who we should give true power to people with PhDs. That’s something that the boomers invented, that’s a boomer phenomenon. So you see, it’s right at the intersection of a lot of different boomer qualities, and also one of the three most famous economists living. Richard Reinsch (29:46): Yeah. Do you think his contributions and what he has done in the developing world you write about his first foray was in the country of Bolivia, one of the more impoverished countries in Latin America also heavily involved in transitioning communist countries, Russia, Poland into a more market-oriented settings? And then obviously his work goes on in Africa. What do you make of his overall contributions there? Helen Andrews (30:12): I think he’s done a lot of good. And this is probably a good moment to mention that I think a lot of the boomers that I’ve profiled, did a lot of good. None of these chapters are intended purely as takedowns. I want to give a full and objective assessment. And in the case of Jeffrey Sachs, I think a fair and objective assessment would have to say he did a lot of really good things. The downside of his career, a lot of people hate him for what he did in Russia. And there’s no question that the transition from communism to capitalism in Russia was devastating. The ’90s were just a horrible decade. And the reason why everybody loves Putin now is because he refers to the 1990s as this national trauma. And so it was, but the terrible things that happened in Russia, happened very frequently because the people in power did not listen to Jeffrey Sachs’ advice. He’s gotten so sick of people blaming him for the catastrophe of the ’90s in Russia that he wrote an entire essay titled, “What I did in Russia,” explaining that all the things that went wrong, were from people not listening to him. And I think most of what he says in that essay, “What I did in Russia,” is accurate. But the way that he approached development economics, was fundamentally deficient. He was a big believer in not cheating, national particularities. Jeffrey Sachs would frequently say, “Every finance minister I’ve ever consulted with has said, “No, Mr. Sachs, you don’t understand my country is different.” And then the reasons they give me for why their country is different, or the same as the one I get from every other finance minister, I’m an economist. Don’t give me your nation’s history. Give me the numbers. And that is all I need to know.” And that’s a very Harvard and boomerish and social scientific way of approaching questions. I’m married to a Russian. And so I think I can say that the Russians are nationally distinctive people. If you go in and try to treat them like your average homo economicus, you will not come up with an adequate solution to their problems. And I think that that was what was missing from Jeffrey Sachs development economics when he went around the world trying to consult. Just an insufficient appreciation for the complexities and the human factor in this place. Richard Reinsch (32:48): You’ve written on empires, the British Empire, and its experiences in Africa. And I think I remember reading essays from you on that. When you look at this and think about that learning and Sachs’ career. Did you ever put those together and what see what washed out? Helen Andrews (33:02): A lot of people have accused Jeffrey Sachs of being an imperialist. A lot of people on the left, really the same kinds of people who use the word Neoliberal as a consonant slur. Those guys hate Jeffrey Sachs and colonialist is the word that they always throw at him. And he bristles at that insult. He hates the old empires. Me, I think that the left-wingers are accurate, insofar as they have gone and appropriated an analogy between what Jeffrey Sachs says and what the imperialists do, I just don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, I don’t consider Empire to be a flaw the way that they do. And that was something that I really wanted to talk about in the book because it’s one of the most astonishing achievements of the boomers in the last sixty years. Empire is the most common political form in human history. And many of the greatest governments in human history, those under which human flourishing has reached its highest summits, have been empires, it’s very difficult to make a historical case, for the idea that Empire is per se, a bad thing, or an evil thing. And yet, today, it has become conventional wisdom. All it took was one generation, saying that Empire is evil, for it to be ruled out for all time as a possible political arrangement. And that’s just really weird. One of the frameworks that I adopted and going through what to talk about in the book was to imagine a time traveler, somebody from 1950, or somebody from 1850, or somebody from 1250, transports to today. What things would they find weird? And the fact that we’ve decided empires per se evil would definitely be on the list of things that a time traveler would find very puzzling. Richard Reinsch (35:03): Well, I remember William Easterly, which I’ve read some of his books and Easterly and Sachs are opposites in the sense of Easterly, a classical liberal emphasizes trying to allow the spontaneous order of an economy in a developing country to come to fruition. And that this would be the best way for economic growth to happen and human flourishing, and that counteracts Sachs to a great degree. And you said, well, they’re both wrong, and what they should do, I think, they should actually look to the British Empire. I thought that was interesting. Just in light of this conversation, that’s a bold statement, Helen. Helen Andrews (35:42): I don’t know if I would say that they’re both wrong. I would also say that they’re both Right. And there are a lot of debates within the discipline of development economics. And Easterly versus Sachs is a good example. And I read a lot of them in the research for this chapter. And they were all very fruitful. They were all really smart people arguing about important topics. But for me, I think it’s worthwhile to take a step back from those debates, which are very insular within the tiny world of professional academic economists. And just consider big questions like how do we make Africa a better place to live in a slightly longer lens, from the perspective of centuries of history because if you get too much into the minutiae, you lose that sense of perspective. And so many people have gone to that wonderful, infuriating continent, trying to make it a better place to live.And a lot of them have done wonderful things. But in the end, humanity is humanity. And Jeffrey Sachs goes around saying that we can eradicate extreme poverty not alleviate it, eradicate it. And that history lacks, and claims like that, and so do I. And there is no solution to the problems posed by Africa or the problems posed by any human policy, other than imperfect human judgments, and learning from experience. And so the thing that drives me crazy about the boomers and about Easterly versus Sachs and about development economics is the discipline, is that it cuts itself off deliberately, from a wonderful source of imperfect human experience. And that is the history of the 19th-century empires, not just the British, but the French, the Portuguese, everybody who has gone to the third world and tried to make it better, through the means of Empire. If you’re going to say that Empire is evil, and those people don’t have anything to say to us, you’re cutting yourself off from people who were if you learned a little bit more about them, would remind you of yourself and would have really useful things to say to you. So that’s the point of defending Empire is that it’s a resource, and we should learn from it. And if we start off from the premise that all those people were battling evil racists, we’re never going to learn the lessons that they could teach us. Richard Reinsch (38:24): I think you’ve got your next book. No, I’m serious. I would read it. Camille Paglia, you are critical of her. I think overall, you discuss what’s been a very interesting career. She’s somewhat, I remember beginning to read her in college, favored by many conservative thinkers because she… Very aggressive ridiculing at times, feminist writers and thinkers, and certain claims of the gay rights movement she’s been very critical of, but you place her within also a boomer deformation of culture. The baby boomers rewrote American history to center it on themselves. They said that America was a terrible, horrible racist country where nothing good ever happens until about the 1960s when we showed up. So the only good thing about American history is the baby boomers themselves. I don’t know how they got away with that. That’s just transparently narcissistic and ridiculous to try and pull on the American people, but they succeeded. And now the millennials are, to my great dismay, in agreement with the boomers that the only good thing about American history is what the boomers did. Helen Andrews (39:02): I understand why conservatives like her. Not only does she beat up on the feminists, but she also was a valuable warrior in the PC wars of the 1990s. She was right there next to Allan Bloom, saying that the western canon is worth studying. And don’t you dare come in here telling me Emily Dickinson is bad because she was white. Don’t even start with me on that. And so good for Camille in taking that line in the ’90s when it took guts to say things like that. Where she parted ways with Allan Bloom was on the subject of popular culture. She loved Madonna. She loves Hollywood movies. Hollywood is just a running theme in all of her books. And that really, to me, is- Richard Reinsch (39:51): And pornography. Helen Andrews (39:53): Well, that’s almost a story in itself but if you’re a millennial, those are two very important things in terms of explaining how your life is different from how it would have been if you had lived 50 or 100 years ago. On the one hand, your head is stuffed with all kinds of pop-cultural knowledge. I sometimes wonder if the space in my brain that is currently occupied by knowing the tracklisting and personnel of every Steely Dan album might not have been better deployed knowing things like I don’t know the Emperor or Rome or something, anything more useful. But I cease to marvel at the classical literacy of the Victorian once I realized just how much pop culture minutia was occupying space in my own head. And Camille Paglia is right there at the front saying those two things are equivalent. It is just as worthwhile for someone to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the films of Joan Crawford, as it is for someone to have encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Milton. And I just don’t think that’s true. Richard Reinsch (41:08): How would she square that then with the defense of the Western canon? Was she just being irksome to PC activists because that’s a contradiction? Helen Andrews (41:17): She wanted to elevate pop culture, to the level of the Western canon she held them both in high esteem. She’s a believer in standards, which is one of the things that I respect her for. When the PC wars where people were saying there’s no such thing as standards, everything is relative. She said, “No, shut up. There are standards, there is a difference between things that are good and works of genius, and things that are bad, and not.” She just happens to think that the films of Ingmar Bergman qualify under the heading of works of genius. Richard Reinsch (41:47): Where do you think she falters? Or why? Is it because she dismisses perhaps a classical account of the soul and virtues or something along those lines by which one would begin to evaluate of great thought and writing. Helen Andrews (42:02): She wanted to put pop culture, side by side with the Western canon. And she assumed that people would learn both of them. But as a millennial, I am in a position to tell her that that is not the way it has worked out in practice for my generation. Yes, she was very successful in getting my generation to be taught to take pop culture seriously. The problem is that that crowded out the Western canon learning that we should have gotten. And I also think it’s important to consider the vast impact of pop culture, not just in education. The boomers were the first generation to grow up surrounded by television. And I think that television has had all of the terrible brain-deadening effects that the doomsayers in the 1950s predicted that it would. One of the greatest anecdotes about Camille Paglia that I mentioned in that chapter is that she had a very famous debate with Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he really took aim at pop culture and media, the way that the media landscape was deadening and warping the human mind making us all perpetual adolescence. And in this great debate with Neil Postman, Camille took the side in defense of visual media she said, “TV is great. I wrote my great magnum opus with my TV running in the background.” And that actual debate that she had was inconclusive. But a decade later an anniversary edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death was put out by Penguin Random House, and Camille Paglia blurbed it and she says in her blurb, “I used to think that Postman was just a doomsayer. But now I have come to the conclusion that he was absolutely right.” Richard Reinsch (44:04): Wow. Yeah, I remember reading it. Helen Andrews (44:08): And I think some of that might be the result of teaching college students to be. Camille Paglia is a working professor. She teaches at a college in Philadelphia. And I think she has seen in her own students, just how ignorant they are of the Western canon. So maybe that’s where that disillusionment came. Richard Reinsch (44:26): No, that’s something I hear from professors all the time, every year the students get worse. And this is at universities we think of as elite. And every year, their thinking and writing skills deteriorate. And also the fact of what they know gets less and less relevant. Thinking about and then the conclusion of your book what do we need to unlearn? As I finished your book, it was like, “Wow, if Helen’s right then we really got a lot to do here.” In terms of thinking about the legacy of the boomers, one of the things I took from your book is Millennials are further deepening these holes that have been dug for them by the baby boomers. Helen Andrews (45:16): That’s absolutely right. The baby boomers rewrote American history to center it on themselves. They said that America was a terrible, horrible racist country where nothing good ever happens until about the 1960s when we showed up. So the only good thing about American history is the baby boomers themselves. I don’t know how they got away with that. That’s just transparently narcissistic and ridiculous to try and pull on the American people, but they succeeded. And now the millennials are, to my great dismay, in agreement with the boomers that the only good thing about American history is what the boomers did. And so the millennials are keen to adopt all of the boomers favorite political causes and reenact their methods, have their own 1968 student rebellions in the streets. I think that’s what’s going on with Antifa, I think that’s what we saw over the summer. So in order for things to get better, we first have to break free of the boomers set of values and their way of looking at the world and their version of our story of ourselves. It’s understandable that the boomer version has been able to dominate America for so long because so much of the boomers and why they are the way they are is explainable by their demographic tests, there are just so many of them, and they have outnumbered the rest of us for so long. And that’s why they managed to get away with so much. But as their numbers dwindle, I hope that we are able to take advantage of the boomers weakening demographic positions in order to get some alternative storylines going around there, which the millennials, sadly has so far not shown any interest in doing. Richard Reinsch (47:04): Something you note, which I agree with that I have thought about when thinking about the protests this summer. When I hear stories, anecdotally, from boomers of protests that they were involved in, I’ve also talked to people who were counter-protesters in the 1960s. And the awareness that basically America was not out on the side of the protesters, and we forget when we think about the Kent State tragedy, Americans weren’t exactly sympathetic to what they were doing there that day but this has really changed. And you note this and it’s a society where the guardrails have fallen off. And there’s this insistence on, “Well, let’s further deplete what good resources we have.” And as you think about what’s one thing that’s been working well in America the past few decades, and it’s been control of crime, particular in our larger cities, and that’s now at least temporarily, perhaps, fallen off from these latest rounds of protests, which do seem to regurgitate or revive or rhyme with a lot of theories from the 1960s. Helen Andrews (48:07): I think the moment that I realized things were going to be different this time around, was when NASCAR went woke, and the NFL went woke, I thought, “Gosh, if even bastions of reactionary culture are falling in line behind the latest woke BLM line, then things must be a lot worse than I thought whatever silent majority I thought was out there, it clearly is not anymore. And we saw that in polling results over the summer, when even after these riots had led to death, and millions of dollars in property damage, you still saw a large majority saying, “Yes, I support Black Lives Matter and their current protests.” So the silent majority is gone. It is absolutely gone. And that means that there’s not going to be a correction of the kind that we saw in the 1970s where America acted out and got its protest on. But then in came Richard Nixon and we have a return to normalcy, round two. And that’s not going to happen this time. So I think the widening gyre is just going to keep on a widening, and I’m very apprehensive. I wish I had a better, more optimistic answer for you, Richard I’m really wishing I had some hope to extend. But I just don’t think I do. Richard Reinsch (49:27): I tried to write a piece. It’s in National Affairs right now. I played around with Montesquieu and faction and how there is still a group of Americans who they think they’re moderating our politics and they’re willing to change sides if they think some things are getting out of control. You did see in the 2020 election, this is one of the more interesting things of the 2020 election amongst a very interesting election overall was the willingness of certain minority groups to be open and actually crossover and vote in the Republican party and I think a huge part of that were the protests. And so the silent majority maybe is more silent but is open to appeals along these lines because of these tendencies. So maybe there’s something there. Helen Andrews (50:13): I don’t know, people said that Biden winning the nomination was evidence for a silent majority within the Democratic Party. And I can see why people think that because Joe Biden, he’s not even a boomer. He’s a pre-boomer and he says things like “malarkey,” and he’s very old-fashioned. So he’s not a crazy, woke, insane person. And yet, when you see how he behaves, he is perfectly willing to recite whatever woke platitudes his handlers give him. Kamala Harris is number two on the ticket she’s going to be taking over soon and she’s way out in left field on all of this stuff, that people staffing his administration are fully paid up believers in the most extreme version of millennial wokeness. So putting a sensible middle-of-the-road guy at the top of the ticket doesn’t seem to actually help anything. So that makes me maybe even more pessimistic than I was before rather than convincing me of the existence of a silent majority. Richard Reinsch (51:15): Okay. Well, Helen on that we can end. The book is Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. We’ve been talking with the author, Helen Andrews, thank you so much for your time. It’s been great. Helen Andrews (51:30): Thank you. This is fun.

Peter Conti-Brown of the Wharton School comes to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his most recent book, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve.

Richard Reinsch (00:19): Hello, I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with Gregory Collins about his impressive new book, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. Gregory Collins is postdoctoral associate and a lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Gregory, welcome to the program. Gregory Collins (00:43): Hi, Richard. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. Richard Reinsch (00:44): Excellent. So thinking about political economy, which is the term you used throughout the book, what is Edmund Burke’s political economy? And maybe also, what do you mean by political economy? I think that’s worth thinking about too. We usually just think about economics, and economics almost as a separate sphere of study, but I think you mean something more here. Gregory Collins (01:04): Yes, that’s a great question because much of my book really hinges on an appropriate understanding of what political economy meant in Burke’s time and what it means today. So as you suggested, in Burke’s age, statesmen, thinkers, they studied political economy, not economics. Economics today is more of a specialized narrow field with particular quantitative methodological approaches. While in Burke’s time, it was a more capacious, holistic understanding of the intersecting concerns of commercial activity, trade, both domestic and foreign, as well as the broader social/religious/ethical preconditions for commercial activity. It was in this wide sense that Burke understood and tried to study the implications of commercial activity, which included, certainly, a particular insight into trade, taxation of revenue, but also broader considerations about the role of commerce in the wider social order. Richard Reinsch (01:59): What did Burke… What was his approach to political economy? Gregory Collins (02:03): His approach was… I would characterize it as a resistance towards specialization, in the broadest sense. He used this premise to inform his understanding of commercial activity, both in regard to the free internal grain trade, which was the subject of his primary economic writing, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, and it informed his understanding of the political economy of the French Revolution and the political economy of European civilization as a whole. So, one of the core arguments in the book, which I’m going to jump to it right now, in the chapters on the French Revolution, and the great intellectual historian, John Pocock, the first, I believe, to recognize this in a pioneering essay he wrote on Burke’s political economy on French revolution. Burke grew out of particular ethical preconditions that predated the mass commercial economy. The prior religious and social and ethical traditions that were built up throughout the ages by what he called the ‘spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion.’ So British establishment, such as the Church of England, and the hereditary aristocracy, which provided and encouraged a culture of learning, patronage, moral and religious instruction, all furnished the conditions of stability, moderation, an element of courtesy, chivalry, of course, that provided the necessary environment for commercial activity to emerge. Commercial activity which was more prone to vicissitudes, vagaries, unpredictability, and then the more stable orders of religion and the landed aristocracy. So, for Burke, these two pillars were essential for applying this foundation for the emergence of the mass commercial economy. If those two pillars withered way, this is part of Burke’s argument on French Revolution, then social order would decline, which for him would include commercial activity. Richard Reinsch (03:49): You note in the book, this put him at odds with many Enlightenment theorists, including many in the Scottish Enlightenment, on the origins of markets and the perpetuation of markets as well. Gregory Collins (03:59): Yes, yes. This is really a distinctive quality of Burke, with regard to sovereignty at the time. Many of the Scots, who I have to be fond of them, David Hume, Amanda Smith, Adam Ferguson. Well, Adam Ferguson’s argument was probably closer to Burke than the other two. But the general tenor of their understanding of markets is not that they severed markets morality. In fact, as we know Smith’s was moral philosophy, and he wrote a great book on moral philosophy, but as I… I outline the book… And Pocock also mentioned this, they didn’t appear to draw Burke’s specific argument that commercial activity grew out of these preconditions prior to the Enlightenment. And so not only, for Burke was there a necessary moral foundation for markets. This moral foundation was not a modern moral foundation. It was a pre-modern moral foundation. This is not to say that Burke elevated a romantic shimmery, but he thought that the roots of commercial order could be discovered prior to the industrial revolution, prior to the available-hand concept, prior to the elevation of profits as a worthy human endeavor. And then in addition, Burke he held an interesting attitude towards the idea of the doux-commerce theory, which is embraced by the Scots, embraced by the French, Enlightenment theorists as well, Thomas Paine, famously. Richard Reinsch (05:08): What’s the doux commerce theory? Gregory Collins (05:10): So doux commerce theory is the idea, and this idea persists today that the increase in commercial relations between two parties, including two nations, tend to produce peaceful effects over time. Two trading partners, as opposed to invading one another for land or power, they will find mutual interest in trading goods and services from one another. And therefore they have an investment in each other that would discourage them from starting a war with one another. The reasoning goes, therefore, the enhancement of commercial relations will promote peace relations over time. Now, Burke, he does not dismiss this. And in fact, he adopts this reasoning in regard to Ireland and England in his most comprehensive statement on free trade when he wrote two letters to merchants of Bristol, the community who was representing that opposed the free trade measures with Ireland. Burke argued in favor of the free trade measures, for many of the reasons that advocates of doux commerce theory espouse today, that they do tend to promote peaceful social relations on their mutual interest and increasing trade with one another. And he also does this reasoning with regard to the American colonies in his famous speech on America. He lavished his praise on the Americans for their ingenuity, their industry, their intelligence, their hard-work, their commercial undertaking. And these are two of the clearest instances in which Burke does embrace this idea that the increase in commercial relations will tend to promote peaceful social relations, but he does not necessarily adopt this in his broader political thoughts. And the most glaring case was the French. There are a couple examples. In 1786, Anglo-French Commercial Treaty. I mentioned his speech on Traders’ Correspondence primarily 1790s, during the French revolutionary wars, which Burke, push back against this idea that increasing commercial relations with France, or pre-revolutionary France and France during the revolution, would not necessarily have peace relations. The simple idea is that if you are engaged in commerce with an avowed enemy or rival, that is not a guarantee that that rival will tend to adopt peaceful measures. For Burke, in that sense, commercial considerations should be subordinate to wider national aims of honor of national interest. And how I harmonize these various strands of his thoughts and doux commerce, and as has been said before, it was not necessarily systematic thinkers, not treatises mostly. So you have to piece together his different thoughts from various speeches and writings. I argue that, for Burke, even the doux commerce thesis, somewhat to his broader point about how modern commercial activity requires ethical preconditions. The doux commerce thesis, especially international relations, also requires pre-economic commitment, shared values, shared principles, which is why he thought that free trade between England and Ireland, England and the Americans best reflects the doux commerce. But in the case of France, which not have broad shared political principles, he did not think that increased commercial activity between England and France would have a peace relations. And so that’s the distinction I carve out in the book. Richard Reinsch (08:09): Okay. So you wouldn’t say Edmund Burke was a free trader, but you also wouldn’t say he was a mercantilist. You would say he is balancing international trade, or transnational trade, for its good effects and good consequences. But those aren’t its own justification. It has to also be balanced against national interest and the needs of the empire, and what’s going to best serve it, which… As I read your book, I heard you to be saying, “Generally, Edmund Burke favored pretty liberalized trade, but he made crucial exceptions.” And you’ve kind of articulated some of those here. And thinking about Burke’s political economy, I thought we might go to the beginning of your book and think about the arcane topic of Britain’s internal grain trade. You write at the beginning… Because I think it’s instructive in a lot of ways. You write at the beginning of chapter two, you say, “Burke discerned poetry in the elusive motions of England’s internal grain trade.” Gregory, talk about that poetry. Gregory Collins (09:14): Yes. The internal grain trade turned out to be one of the primary protagonists in this narrative. The internal grain trade was a subject of Burke’s primary arcane treatise, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which really wasn’t a treatise. It was a private letter written for government officials that addressed the particular circumstances of mid 1790s England, which in the middle of French revolutionary war has experienced a number of difficulties, including spiking green prices, increasing normalization, population growth. There’s only a few years before Thomas Malthus wrote his famous book on whether the food supply would be able to sustain the population growth. And for Burke, however, his principle argument in this track, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, is that there was, what I call, poetry in order to their internal grain trade of England, that was delicate, that was fragile, but that nevertheless tended to work absent arbitrary meddling government intervention. And so Burke’s principle message in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, he wrote this in light of calls to intervene in and increase regulations of the labor contracts between employers, employees, laborers, and farmers, and impose harsh controls, published in the new public graineries. Burke argued for government restraints. He thought that there was this order that emerged from the private contractual arrangements and interactions between farmers and laborers in the grain economy. And particularly in times of scarcity, he was very suspicious of the idea that government meddling, suppress controls, wage regulations, coopered to more beneficial consequences than if the grain trade was left to its own order. Now, this sounds like, and it is, a defense of a free market, a free domestic market. Throughout the book, I decided that this was, for Burkes, the most comprehensive intellectual statement on the internal grain trade. He defended the internal grain trade a number of other instances in the early 1770s and later in 1787, when they were tends to revive bans on, what we today call, middlemen trading activities, forestalling, rebranding and engrossing, which were various ways in which traders would buy up provisions before the edge of the market, and then we sell them at a higher price. So in these various instances, including in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity work issued a robust defense of the middlemen in the grain economy or enabling the efficient distribution of resources, particularly those in need. And the other additional point is that Burke anticipated as it’s described in the book, as a Hayek insight into the limits of rationality in coordinating complex socioeconomic activities. In Thoughts and Details on Scarcity Richard Reinsch (11:55): So, in this period, that he’s writing the Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, you’ve got a crisis, we’ve got food shortages, we’ve got spikes in prices, we’ve got people not making enough money, it seems. You’ve got all of these conditions. We confront those periodically in our own economy in different ways. And he’s pushing back against this… And from what I could read, in a way that Hayek would agree with, that Milton Friedman would largely agree with, he’s emphasizing that in a time of scarcity of seemingly economic failure. And he’s confronting proposals like a minimum wage. As I think about it, they wanted to have the government take over granaries. So you could think about a public option for health care, as an analogy, there’s this desire to eliminate, as you were talking about middlemen, but those are just people who are making money, but they’re also providing an efficient way for grain to reach down-market buyers. And this is an efficiency thing. So he’s confronting all of this, and he’s saying, “Look, you’re actually going to make the situation worse. You’re going to depress the market for longer conditions. The recovery is going to take longer. It’s going to be less robust, but we’re not going to know what the real prices are.” So, all of these provisions are going to backfire,” as we say. “They will have unintended consequences.” And I thought that maybe you can tell us how successful he was in this debate. But I thought that was incredibly instructive. These things continue. These battles over market failure, not taking into account government failure, policy failure. All of this Burke is confronting here in a nice instructive way. Gregory Collins (13:32): Yes, this moment in the 1790s was the defining moment in England’s global economy, including its grain economy in the 18th century, really emerging for the more conspicuous presence, when Burke entered parliament, in 1760s. There were these periods in which there were food shortages, spikes in grain prices, instability in the grain market. And this was a constant subject of Burke’s concern of legislators concern about the time period. As exemplified in 1772, I should mention, when Burke led the repeal of the bans on middlemen trading activities, which were enforced… Not really enforced, but they’re still on the books. Edmund Burke or the repeal and parliament of these bans on the basis of what you just said, that these regulations tend to create conditions that were even worse for participants in the agriculture economy, when back in Burke’s judgment, they actually facilitated smooth efficiency of the distribution of goods and services. Burke provided a thinking, comprehensive rebuke of what he called the paper money despotism of the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries, they seized the property of the Gallican Church, which owned around one 10th of landmass, I believe, in France, at that time. They were going to sell the church property to help pay down France’s debt. They have a financial calamity and short France’s finances. In fact, last semester I taught a course on constitutional and business ethics. And antitrust cases, Standard Oil cases, it referenced this repeal of middleman trade activities. It didn’t mention Burke’s name, but it mentioned this repeal in the early 1770s, as an example of which the English grew to realize that these bans actually tended to help the operation of economic forces in the long run, as opposed to undermine them. And so Burke had an immediate impact on this debate. This is when Burke’s free markets really come out, and it could easily see Milton Friedman endorsing these arguments, and Hayek as well. Richard Reinsch (15:02): I mean Burke is developing the Hayek’s famous knowledge article. He’s developing those insights. He’s understanding that the market requires a lot of information that comes to you in bits and pieces. And it’s the participants in the market who can make the best decision, not this comprehensive rationalist approach that is being urged upon the market. Gregory Collins (15:24): Precisely, precisely. And then he has a couple of great quotations in Thoughts and Details that outline that point that individual legislators, magistrates, justice or the peace at a time, simply did not possess the amount of knowledge necessary to regulate his employment contracts and to regulate the flow of grain with vigor in effect. And therefore, there should be great deference paid to the actual participants in the economy, who are actually making decisions on whether to enter into contracts with one another, because they simply hold more wisdom, knowledge and experience about the particular conditions, which vary from person to person from farmer to farmer, labor to labor. Now, as I mentioned the book, I tend to be sympathetic to Burke’s argument in this case. But a couple of criticisms are necessary to mention. One is Burke, perhaps, paint two positive picture of these supposedly harmonious relations between farmers and laborers, and because there is a vast amount of literature on this particular time period. And whether these structural relations in the agriculture economy was as peaceful and harmonious and as mutually reciprocal as Burke suggests in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. And so I mentioned a couple articles that pushed back against this… They’re not Burke per se, but pushed back against this idea of a harmonious relations between farmers and laborers. But given that… Because this is when Burke’s brought a philosophical project. He does not deny that there are hardships at the time period. What he is arguing, and what you were suggesting, is that given limited alternatives during periods of difficulty, such as scarcity, which is the best out of imperfect options. That is his main point. And his judgment in this case is that the best off imperfect option is to practice government restraint as opposed to metal in the internal economic activities of farmers and laborers. Richard Reinsch (17:01): Let me ask you more broadly a question, Greg. So would you say Edmund Burke… I mean, someone listening to his podcast might say, “Edmund Burke, kind of a classical liberal, markets, small government guy, and capitalism, can solve a lot of problems.” How would you situate him broadly in the relationship between government, markets, and civil society? Gregory Collins (17:24): Yeah, that’s a great question. And when I was writing this, I had sort of a running debate with myself about whether Burke was or was not a classical liberal, to what extent was he, to what extent was he not, which was probably detective from reading the book. I determined that he did overlap with elements, what we considered to be classical liberalism, and admittedly, sometimes we parse these distinctions too finely for people, which maybe work in a classroom, but in reality what the actual practical difference between some of these different thinkers. But Burke did depart from fundamental presuppositions of classical liberalism, such as locking at the most famously in his criticism of the idea of that social contract as a consensual pact of free and independent individuals who joined the society to preserve the pre-political natural rights. Edmund Burke famously attacks his reasoning in Reflections on the Revolution of France. Richard Reinsch (20:21): The other thing about the French Revolution too, in this regard, you write about the Edmund Burke problem. That is to say generally in favor of markets, widespread commerce. At times, he says that markets come from nature, they emerge from human nature. And yet he also condemns the French revolutionary’s argument that rights, abstractly understood, come from nature. And that justifies the erasure of literally centuries of French tradition, religion, culture, law, they’re going to build again. Talk about how Edmund Burke understood those things. Gregory Collins (21:02): And that is a fundamental philosophical dilemma, but in general, if something is by nature natural, and anything that does not accord with that idea of nature exists, all those institutions’ practices, customs, illegitimate because they don’t conform to nature. For Burke… As I mentioned in the first chapter, French Revolutionaries, they did, at moments, endorse a free internal grain trade, but then they ended up meddling and imposing price controls, which was one element of the historical backdrop for Burke in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. And so Burke also endorse a free internal grain trade. So, to what extent was Burke sympathetic to some of the revolutionaries’ arguments. Also, the other historical consideration is the emergence of the physiocrats, the French economist, who embraced the idea that society should conform to nature. And therefore they justified a free marketing grain, and they were also accused of being very, very rationalistic and pushing this idea of abstract rationalism in the 18th century. So how would it Burke overcome this idea that if he embraced free markets, in part, because they were based on nature, but the physiocrats were embracing free markets, but they were embracing abstract rationalism. And the revolutionaries embracing free markets to some extent, but they were overturning French society. But whether did Burke come down to this issue, unfortunately, Burke does not provide a sufficient answer for this, but I pose that Burke, as he mentioned on his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, supply and demand laws were part of the laws of nature, which was the laws the commerce, which were the laws of nature, which were the laws of God, that’s sort of the phrasology that he uses. Recognizing the finite resources in society for him was a law of nature. However, insofar, as he held the conception of evolved nature, a natural law in general, which he called the moral law, binding people together, this law of nature was not the end-point for discussion on these issues. It could be a starting point, but it’s certainly not the end point. This is so much his critique of natural rights. He never fully reject the idea of natural rights, but what he does is question its import in these practical questions of how to actually establish and maintain political society. So if Edmund laws were a part of law of nature, to what extent, for Burke, could we integrate this idea of law of nature within a wider framework of what is necessary to perpetuate civilization? And for him, then you integrate this law of nature with what he considers to be the foundations of civilization, which is religion, aristocracy, learning, chivalry, this ethical code that predate a commercial economy. If you merge all these elements together, it could provide for commercial prosperity while also providing for these elements’ stability to cool the process of commercial prosperity. And so that’s how I thought and try to tease out the tension in the top between embracing the law of nature and embracing this idea of cosmic tradition. For him, they were mutually symbiotic and could balance one another in a way that could both promise the fruits of material goods while also protecting against the crass commercialization, commodification of civil society. Richard Reinsch (23:56): You also know too, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, that Burke seems to… He argues… “What I’m saying is coming true. You have eliminated your past, you’ve attempted to do that, and you want to create a market on paper money. You want to create a market heavily funded in debt, giving things to people and look what’s happening to you. The French economy is now awash in corruption, inefficiencies.” I thought you wrote about that well. Maybe talk about that, how he sees that the paper money thing playing out. Gregory Collins (24:31): Yeah. So this is one of the underappreciated aspects of Burke’s thoughts for the economy, otherwise. But he provided a thinking, comprehensive rebuke of what he called the paper money despotism of the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries, they seized the property of the Gallican Church, which owned around one 10th of landmass, I believe, in France, at that time. They were going to sell the church property to help pay down France’s debt. They have a financial calamity and short France’s finances. And they also introduced what was first the kind of bond, then they use this fiat paper money called Assignat, pardon my French. But I believe it’s called Assignat. And this paper money was distributed throughout France and with a lack of prudence in disregard for the potential destructive consequences of paper money not backed by any sort of metal. And what ended up happening was this paper money led to the depreciation of the currency, inflation, hyperinflation as Burke predicted, price instability, price unpredictability, a lack of distrust from participants in France’s economy at the time. It led to the invasion of private property rights of French authorities seizing grain in the countryside when farmers were hoarding grain because of this lack of regularity, the lack of consistency, the lack of predictability in these internal French markets, which in Burke’s judgment, were exacerbated by this worthless paper money that for him reflected both the economic improprieties of the revolutionaries and also some of the philosophical abstractions of the French Revolution as well. The idea of paper money, that that could be used as a saving grace to save the French economy. And for Burke, as Burke predicted in the Reflections of the Revolution of France, he criticizes these Assignats, he predicts that they are going to create hyperinflation, and that’s what ends up happening. And so this is another dimension of his political economy. Richard Reinsch (26:26): Let’s switch gears to India, to the India question. You write at length on this in relationship to Edmund Burke and his approach to the East India Company and its policies in India and the authority it held for the British government to operate in India. Burke initiated an impeachment of Sir Warren Hastings, who was the director of the company, the overseer of its operations in India, for many abuses, physical cruelty displayed towards Indians among them. You have a quote from Edmund Burke, the opening of his impeachment in 1788 of Warren Hastings, “The East India Company became that thing which was supposed by the Roman law so unsuitable. The same power was a trader, the same power was a Lord.” Talk about that because he sees the East India Company, it has a monopoly on trade in India. Burke says that’s just because it’s in this new exotic market, it should deserve a degree of protection. But then it proceeds by accumulating power to itself, accumulating the economies, local economies in India, to itself, destroying them and their own internal workings and then taking them over, and then also having this sort of quasi governmental power. And Burke opposes all of this, maybe just give us a broader understanding of that. Gregory Collins (27:48): So Burke did defend the East India Company charter because he thought… Especially in this time, we have to remember that international trade was still a novel phenomenon, and so there was great risk in trading in foreign lands. If no other reason, that there’s great physical risk in trading these lands in which you held limited amount of knowledge and experience in trading in these different territories. So for Burke, he defended the East India Company Charter for the purpose of promoting the commercial interests of the British empire. The problem for Burke, the East India Company in a series of victories in 1750 to 1760, including the Treaty of Allahabad, 1765, aggrandized the powers of the East India Company so that now they did not simply hold a commercial power to trade in India, but also, they acquired the powers of war and peace, revenue collection, public administration. And for Burke, this was a disastrous step that fueled the expansion of arbitrary power from the East Indian Company and exacerbated by Warren Hastings. For Burke, the East Indian Company now was not simply promoting the commercial interests of the British Empire, but they start to intrude on and regulate and dictate the flow of goods within internal Indian markets. And as they describe in the book, the company ended up establishing monopolies on these Indian markets, which for Burke, read the typical negative disastrous consequences of monopolies, such as price controls, wage controls, the disruption of supply and demand laws, which allowed businesses to reach more participants in an efficient manner. And for Burke, this was representative of the gross maladministration and misconduct of the East India Company. So for Burke, when he seeks the reform of the company in 1783, he does not argue to end the Company Charter. This was actually a different that Adam Smith. Burke also supported what we typically today consider to be free trade, free trade between England and Ireland, free trade between England and the Americans. Americans and the Caribbean British traders as well. So as I try to explain the book, Burke supported free trade within this context under this imperial British umbrella that was governed by the Navigation Acts. What he does argue is that it’s harder to recover its initial commercial purpose of trading for commercial aims in India while gradually loosening its control over local Indian markets and it was also being held accountable with the board in London. And for Burke, this would allow the East Indian Company to recover its commercial integrity while also relieving the Indians of the miseries that were encouraged by the company. And this is also reflected as part of imperial, political and economic thought, that the Brits… there has been running a debate about whether Burke was a defender of empire or was a critic of empire. And many of the argument is between them on both sides. But this still represented Burke’s broad imperial, political and economic thought, that the British Empire did have a right in his judgment, due to a series of treaties and military victories with local rulers, to remain in India. But they also had the moral responsibility to act with the devil at hand, and therefore, preserve the internal liberties, customs and traditions of the Indian people. And for him, the East Indian Company disrupted these traditions by extending its power of the local Indian communities. I will say that he wrote a number of reports on the political economy of India. I mentioned I discussed one report at length in the book called the Ninth Report of Select Committee. This in many ways was even more of a passive objective analysis of the economic implications of the East India Company in India. This was written for public consumption, it has more of a neutral tone than the sort of the passionate pros of Thoughts and Details of Scarcity Richard Reinsch (31:05): It seems there are similarities when it comes to the empire and how the mother country relates to the colonies. You write at length about North America and Britain’s possessions and the West Indies or the Caribbean. And Burke at length seems to be defending something like free trade. He’s defending it for… He says, “This will be good for us. It’ll be good for the colonies. It will help them to continue on their course of growth. And so we should loosen restrictions on their trade.” While at the same time, he does favor the Navigation Acts, which you can enlighten us on that. Gregory Collins (31:41): Yeah. Richard Reinsch (31:41): In my understanding, it requires them at least to sell first to the mother country and to receive goods from England also. And then also when it comes down to the great debate for American independence, he defends the right of the empire to regulate internal affairs of the North American colonies, but says, “You really shouldn’t do it. Not that often, not without a clear overwhelming reason.” And he does that, I think, not from an ideological perspective, as you note, he does it because he thinks in the circumstance and the time, this is an approach that will yield the best results for everyone involved, including the empire. Gregory Collins (32:22): Yeah, absolutely. And first start off by saying that I start writing the book, and scholars, everyone, a lot of people today tend to read 20th and 20th century conceptions of free trade mercantilism, these classifications into prior time periods, when… In my research in this time period, these distinctions weren’t as rigid as we make them out to be today, which is why this question about whether Burke… Extend this the question to Adam Smith also. The extent to which they supported free trade versus mercantilist policies. Take Burke for example, as you mentioned, he defended the Navigation Acts, which were considered the heart of mercantilism. They were the series of trade laws dating back to the 17th century, the modern law dating back to the 17th century that restricted the flow of goods within the British empire. And the goods had to be in an English man crews, English vessels, they had to go from English ports before going to foreign markets. And so this was a monopoly on the international colonial economy of the British Empire. But Burke also supported what we typically today consider to be free trade, free trade between England and Ireland, free trade between England and the Americans. Americans and the Caribbean British traders as well. So as I try to explain the book, Burke supported free trade within this context under this imperial British umbrella that was governed by the Navigation Acts. So I’ll leave it to the reader the judge, to what extent does that mean he was a free trader versus a mercantilist. But his thoughts show that you could accommodate these two different strands of thought on trade policy during that time period, even Adam smith himself defended the Navigation Acts. Richard Reinsch (33:55): Yes, he did. That’s right. Gregory Collins (33:56): The older forms of Navigation Acts because it’s a famous line, “Defense is much more important than opulence.” And this actually captures Burke’s ways with regard to the Navigation Acts, that yes, in some ways they restricted the flow of commerce, but they also supported the national security interests of the British Empire. And, people don’t realize, they also promoted the commercial interests of the British Empire as well. If you have the Navigation Acts, then you are assured that the transport of commerce, transport of goods will be on ships that won’t attack you, as opposed to trading with ships of foreign enemies that may threaten the transfer of your goods and of your trade. And so there’s a national security interest. There’s also a commercial economic interest in the Navigation Acts as well. Now, for Smith, Burke also thought that the later iterations of the Navigation Acts were economically counterproductive. Richard Reinsch (34:44): Here towards the end of our time, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith or Edmund Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Scottish Enlightenment would say markets provide their own internal reasons for their continuation and will guide people to participate in them successfully, peaceably, prosperously, Edmund Burke disagreed with that. We have now moved forward from that period, from that debate. And that debate sort of continues. Who do you think was right? Gregory Collins (35:13): I’m sympathetic to Burke’s arguments. I will also say, however, that I think sometimes descriptions of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers tend to read libertarianism, a little too much libertarianism, Smith himself praised the landed aristocracy in The Wealth of Nations. Richard Reinsch (36:09): Gregory, thank you so much for your time. Wish you the best of success with this book, Commerce and Manners and Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. This has been wonderful. Thank you. Gregory Collins (36:18): Great. Thank you very much.

Richard Reinsch (00:04): Today we’re talking with Carter Snead about his new book, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. Carter Snead is the director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame University where he is also a professor of law and a teacher in the political science department. He is also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the principal bioethics advisory board to Pope Francis. Carter, we’re glad to have you on Liberty Law Talk for the first time. Carter Snead (00:57): No, it’s great to join you. I’m a big admirer. Richard Reinsch (00:59): Great. So what does it mean to be human, and why do you think public bioethics is getting the answer wrong? Carter Snead (01:09): Yeah, so the first claim of the book is a kind of methodological claim, and the argument that I make is the best way into understanding law and public policy is to ask the question of what vision of human identity and human flourishing is underwriting the law and the politics and the public policy? The question of what it means to be human is a perennial question that has been debated and discussed ever since human beings became capable of self-reflection. But my argument is, and this may be counterintuitive to some folks, some people think of law and politics not only separate from normative questions, but separate from what I’m referring to in the book as anthropological questions, as the contested question of what it means to be and flourish as a human being. But the argument in the book that I make is that because law, fundamentally, and is really only intelligible through the lens of its purpose, which is to promote the flourishing of persons and to protect persons, the law has to have an ex-ante assumption about what person is and what constitutes human flourishing. Otherwise, the law, there’d be no way to know if the law is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, there’d be no way to measure its successes, you have to have the metric of its purpose and the premises that underlie those purposes. And so my argument is that if you want to understand the law most richly, most deeply, that’s the question that you have to ask. And it’s especially true in the context of public bioethics, which deals with not only the question of what human flourishing is and what human beings are, but the boundary questions of who counts as a human being? Or who counts as a person rather, the question of who counts as a human being as a biological matter is an easier question, but the question of legal personhood and moral personhood is really the central question of bioethics. And it becomes operationalized in law and policy when it enters the public domain, either through political branches or the judiciary. And so you’d ask, why does public bioethics get the question wrong? Richard Reinsch (02:54): And by the way, just wanted to say, I was pretty sure when I read the title, I knew what public bioethics is, but maybe just set forward that, too. Carter Snead (03:01): Yeah, absolutely. So bioethics as a field of scholarly inquiry emerged in the United States in the late ’60s, early ’70s, in reaction to a series of scandals, public scandals involving human subjects protections in Tuskegee, Alabama, and really all over the country, as documented by Henry Beecher in a article in the New England Journal of Medicine. And so as the field of inquiry, people sort of asking questions about how to think about the clinical relationship and doctors and patients and the ethical dimensions of that relationship, as well as the public policy questions associated with the governance of science, medicine and biotechnology. And when I say public bioethics, what I’m referring to is that area of law and policy, the governance of science, medicine, and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods, and that takes place at the level of the political branches. It takes place in legislatures at the state level and the US government, the federal level. Also takes place in the judiciary, the most prominent bioethics case and maybe the most prominent case of the modern era is Roe vs Wade, which set in motion a cascade of legal policy and ethical disputes over abortion. And so the distinction between bioethics as a field of inquiry and bioethics as public bioethics, is the latter relates to governance, it relates to actually the work of lawyers and judges, and lawmakers. But the interesting thing that happened is, each case, Tuskegee, the Beecher studies, as well as the case involving the just-aborted newborns, the solution was rooted in a kind of vision of human flourishing and human identity that didn’t track the violations that they were responding to. That is to say, every single individual that was violated in those three instances, was not operating at the full range of human autonomy. Richard Reinsch (04:17): What has shaped public bioethics in America? Because you mean to uproot, or really challenge, the standard operating premises and legal assumptions and conclusions of this field, but what’s shaped it? Carter Snead (04:30): Yeah, so public bioethics as a field of law and public policy is reactive. I mean, a lot of law and policy is reactive, but it’s been reacting to scandals. And the first piece of legislation that relates to public bioethics was the National Research Act, which was adopted in the early 1970s, in reaction to these scandals that I just mentioned a moment ago. So there were these scandals of 22 human experiments, documented by Henry Beecher, which involved the most prominent and elite institutions in America, including the Federal government. Research protocols in which individuals, especially very vulnerable individuals, were treated in grossly abusive ways. We had children with intellectual disabilities and injected with hepatitis, we had elderly patients suffering from dementia injected with live cancer cells. This was all done almost entirely without any mention of consent at all, and those narrow cases in which consent was secured by proxy, nothing of the material risks in these protocols were even mentioned. Tuskegee, the 40-year-study, natural history study of syphilis done by the Public Health Service, the US government in Macon County, Alabama, in which they systematically deceived poor African American sharecroppers about what they were doing. It’s been reported that they colluded with local health authorities to prevent them from having access to antibiotics, which became standard of care for syphilis in the mid 1940s. For 40 years, this went on. Richard Reinsch (05:53): Wow, that was incredible reading that in your book. And also they persuaded medical providers locally not to treat these men. Carter Snead (06:00): Yes, that’s exactly right. Richard Reinsch (06:03): It’s incredible. Carter Snead (06:04): It’s shocking. It’s a shocking scandal. It was a shameful abuse of an already vulnerable community in Alabama where I grew up, and then a third scandal that is actually less, and a lot of people have heard of Tuskegee, a lot of people have head of Beecher and his study. Not many people have heard of the third scandal that set in motion American public bioethics, which is a scandal involving researchers from the United States who traveled to Scandinavia, probably with funding from NIH, although that’s not been definitively established, to perform experiments on babies that had just been aborted. And Scandinavia, they performed abortions by C-section, and they would remove the babies intact, and they would expire shortly thereafter. These doctors would go to Scandinavia, contract with the abortionists and the women who were involved and would perform kind of grotesque experiments on these imminently dying newborns who had just been aborted. And The Washington Post had three front page articles about it in the early 1970s, it was a huge scandal. In fact, the Kennedy family, Eunice Shriver, sister of Ted Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, was so upset by this that she reached out to her brother who convened hearings and her daughter, Maria Shriver, who everybody knows is the former First Lady of California and successful American journalist, organized a protest with the Catholic schools in the DC area to come to NIH to protest this research. And so, after a series of hearings, the National Research Act was passed which imposed a moratorium on this live fetal, live neonate research. They created the National Commission on Bioethics, and it was meant to be a kind of national response to these emergent ethical questions that had public policy dimensions. But the interesting thing that happened is, each case, Tuskegee, the Beecher studies, as well as the case involving the just-aborted newborns, the solution was rooted in a kind of vision of human flourishing and human identity that didn’t track the violations that they were responding to. That is to say, every single individual that was violated in those three instances, was not operating at the full range of human autonomy. They were vulnerable, they were diminished, either by circumstances or by their physical condition, their cognitive impairments in the case of the Beecher studies, and the case of immaturity with respect to the babies that were being experimented after they had just been aborted. The solution was to extend informed consent, which is rooted in the concept of autonomy and self-determination, as the primary bulwark against these kinds of abuses. But you don’t need to think about it for very long to realize that people who are not capable, either by virtue of circumstance or their cognitive impairments, of exercising free will to the extent that would be necessary to protect themselves through participating in an informed consent procedure. That’s not the right solution to the problem, and that, you can see immediately that the issues of vulnerability and embodiment that arise in these contexts and the asymmetry between the problem and the solution, the solution is suited for a population of able-minded, able-bodied people who are not subject to circumstances or conditions that impair their free will. And so that kind of asymmetry plays out from the early 1970s to the present day, and in my book, I take the three vital conflicts of American public bioethics, the vital conflict of abortion, the vital conflicts relating to assisted reproduction, and then at the end of life, end-of-life decision making and assisted suicide. And what I try to through this analysis of the premises that underlie the law regarding human identity and human flourishing, I find that we have very much the same problem. The problem is the vision of the person that’s assumed by the law is one that doesn’t reflect or track the lived reality of the people who are endangered in those circumstances. Richard Reinsch (09:51): So talk about this, you set the standard, define the standard, call it embodiment versus expressive individualism. What is embodiment, and why should we follow that standard? Carter Snead (10:06): Yeah, so the simple insight, and it’s a simple insight and I think it’s an insight that’s easy to understand and easy to verify based in reflecting our own experiences, that we human beings are embodied. That is we don’t just have bodies, but we are bodies. That is we come into the world embodied, we experience ourselves as bodies, we experienced one another as bodies, we experience the natural world around us through and as our body. We’re living bodies, we’re dying bodies, we’re subject to the fact that our bodies are corruptible, the fact that we are dependent upon one another by virtue of our vulnerability as embodied beings. We are mutually dependent and we’re subject to these natural limits. And from that reality, the law and policy and the way we relate to one another has to be informed by that reality of embodiment. Now, you take that vision of the human person that is taking the body seriously, and understanding that embodiment is an essential aspect of being a human being, and you contrast that with the anthropology of what Robert Bellah, social scientist who wrote the classic in 1985, Habits of the Heart, and then later philosopher Charles Taylor, and after a fashion philosopher Alistair McIntyre and Michael Sandel, and others refer to as expressive individualism. It’s a very different vision of what it means to be a human being. It’s a kind of abstraction, it conceives of a human being, primarily as a disembodied will. What defines the human person is his or her will. And what constitutes human flourishing is the interrogation of the interior of the self, to discover one’s own unique, authentic, original, maybe transgressive truths, and then configure your life and your destiny according to what you discover inside yourself. You express it, and then you configure your life accordingly. And the fundamental unit of human reality is the individual, is the atomized individual will. And so the world is a world of individual atomized wills seeking to pursue their own hopes and dreams, and everything else is instrumental to that end. Relationships with other people, the natural world itself and fundamentally, also the body is an instrument to realizing the goals of the will. And within this framework, there are no unchosen obligations, there are no obligations that you didn’t agree to in advance. Everything is viewed through the lens of your projects and your purposes as you devise them through the internal interrogation of the depths of yourself. in Paradise Lost, you have this amazing scene where Lucifer addresses the other fallen angels, denying their creaturely status before God and saying, “We have no recollection at all of being created. You tell us that we’re creatures that have obligations of creatures to their creator, but we don’t remember being creatures. We don’t remember any time when we weren’t operating at the height of our powers, when we weren’t self-determined, when we weren’t powerful and able to make our own way in the world.” And Robert Bellah, when he did hundreds of interviews with Americans in the 1980s, found that this is a vision of human identity that is very common in the United States. And Charles Taylor traces the genealogy all the way back to Rousseau, who sort of transposed and reconfigured the human identity from a position that is defined by one’s role in a particular community, or society, or family, or civilization, to focusing on the inner voice as definitive and decisive regarding what one should do and be. And this took hold, not surprisingly, in artistic and literary communities and the romantic literary movement even before that. And you see artists who were reacting against the sort of linear, harmonious traditional standards of art, to try to plumb their own interior depths, to find their own originality and to project it, and not just to project it in their art, but to live it in their lives. And then somehow, in Bellah’s account, is through developments in psychology and Freudian psychotherapy and different corporate forms and different kinds of sociological changes. That notion of expressive individualism moved into the conventional communities and the conventional populations. And then in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual revolution sort of fixed on the proposition that human sexuality and sexual expression is a key element of expressive individualism, a key element of defining oneself. And it’s not surprising that around that very same time, we see this emergence of public bioethical questions involving abortion, assisted reproduction, end-of-life decision making that largely track that same anthropology. Richard Reinsch (14:07): And just thinking about these three very controversial areas, expressive individualism would seem to have a hard time with the unborn and saying, “Why are they worthy of legal protection?” Anyone who is not sort of fully active and able, mentally and physically, but it extends out to children even, to infants, to the elderly. A lot of people come under that standard, that purview. So I guess in a way you’ve deified the individual or you’ve made the individual sovereign under this standard. Carter Snead (14:43): Yeah. No, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s not just that one doesn’t recognize his or her obligations to children, the elderly and the disabled, one can’t even give an intelligible account of what they are. They remind you of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s comment about certain social contract theorists, that they’re like childless men who forgot that they were children. And even before that, obviously, in Milton, in Paradise Lost, you have this amazing scene where Lucifer addresses the other fallen angels, denying their creaturely status before God and saying, “We have no recollection at all of being created. You tell us that we’re creatures that have obligations of creatures to their creator, but we don’t remember being creatures. We don’t remember any time when we weren’t operating at the height of our powers, when we weren’t self-determined, when we weren’t powerful and able to make our own way in the world.” It’s a kind of anthem of expressive individualism, and it’s not unlike the passage from Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood versus Casey, when he talks about what’s essential to the kind of liberty that he is espousing, that includes the right to abortion, is the liberty to define for oneself, the mystery of life, the universe and to follow one’s spiritual imperatives unmolested by others or the law. Richard Reinsch (15:56): Yeah. Now, expressive individualism, I would argue, is sort of a heretical thinking here within liberalism. I don’t think liberalism is doomed to end up there. Carter Snead (16:07): I agree. Richard Reinsch (16:07): And it’s not necessarily the case that it, as a certain scholar at your school would argue, that this is sort of an inevitable outcome of liberalism in America, I don’t think that is the case. Carter Snead (16:17): I can’t imagine who you’re talking about. Richard Reinsch (16:18): I can’t either, but here we are. And it did emerge, freedom as will, I think is what you’re articulating here, and this sort of deified person. And by the way, I mean, that notion goes back, I mean, to the transcendentalists, early 19th century America. Carter Snead (16:33): Oh yeah. Richard Reinsch (16:33): I mean, the famous Harvard “Divinity School Address.” Carter Snead (16:37): Yeah. Richard Reinsch (16:38): Which has sort of looked into your own self for your truth. Carter Snead (16:41): That God is in every man. Richard Reinsch (16:42): God is in every man. So in that regard, I understand it, but I guess… So the public bioethics emerges in the 1960s, and clearly something does change throughout every western country in this time frame, as the West sort of, I would argue, sort of gives up on some things and tries to latch on to new things to understand itself. You have a quote in there, and I think it’s also key, and it’s from Walker Percy and I love the quote. Everyone has an anthropology. Everyone has an anthropology, yours is embodiment, that we have to understand ourselves in relationship to others, and to other people, and the gifts that we owe them. So what happens… I mean, I think we know very well, I mean, our entire world as Americans is dominated with this idea of expressive individualism. I mean, have you thought about, well, what would it look like if your idea, if your anthropology came into play? Carter Snead (17:31): Yeah. In the book, I make the point that expressive individualism is not utterly false, right? It’s a kind of distortion and a deeply incomplete account of who and what we are. It is true that we are individuated, right? We are individuals. It’s also true that we’re free. And those are important things, and it’s even true that the interrogation of the depths of one’s self can be valuable to try to discover certain kinds of truths and certain kinds of ways of being that, in some cases are correctly transgressive of repressive norms and wrongheaded standards in our culture, in our society and our tradition. But that’s not the whole truth, you run into trouble when you think that’s the whole truth about what we are. I talk about augmenting the anthropology of expressive individualism with an anthropology of embodiment, which is to say, we have to also embrace the proposition that we are, as embodied beings, vulnerable, dependent and subject to natural limits, which situate just in relation to other people that bring with it certain kinds of unearned privileges and unchosen obligation. And in order to bring about a culture, a society, a legal framework that takes that seriously, we have to look to what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving which are essential for the flourishing of embodied beings. You have to have these things. You have to have a world, you have to have a society and a community in which there are people who make the goods of others their own goods, without expectation, without a contract, without a transaction, without thinking, what am I going to get out of this? That they’re actually making another person’s good, their own good. And we all depend on that, literally, for our survival when we come into the world, and at that those moments in our life when we become heavily dependent, and for sure, for everybody, as our life is nearing its end, when we’re completely dependent on others. You have to have these networks in place. And in order to preserve these networks, you have to have a people that are willing to practice the virtues of what MacIntyre calls the virtues of acknowledged dependence. That includes the virtues of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving. The virtues of uncalculated giving are things like just generosity, hospitality, what he calls misericordia, which is the virtue of accompanying other people in their suffering, as well as gratitude. The idea that you have to be grateful for the fact, that need to practice gratitude. You have to be open to the unbidden, you have to be tolerant of imperfection, you have to be humble, you have to respect the dignity of others, you have to be honest. And these are all the virtues of authentic friendship, rightly understood in their kind of Aristotelian sense, leavened by, as my good friend Yuval Levin reminds us, by the proposition that all human beings are created equal, something that Aristotle didn’t quite understand or agree with. And to have a community, to have a civilization that takes the body seriously, the civilization that cultivates those virtues, that supports those networks, and the law as we all know, can play a role, has a wide array of very granular mechanisms, including just leaving people alone and giving them space for private ordering to allow them to create communities that take care of folks in those ways without interfering. But in those instances where that help and care is not forthcoming, then sometimes the law does have to intervene to protect people. And so a society that takes seriously, a community, a legal culture that takes seriously embodiment, is one that is committed to shoring up, protecting and advancing networks of uncalculated giving and ungrateful receiving and helping people. And helping can sometimes just mean leaving people to private order to cultivate those virtues and practice them. Richard Reinsch (21:08): You have three areas here where you sort of set forward how embodiment would change current law, current practices around abortion, assisted reproduction, and death and dying. Kind of off the wall thought here, I don’t know what you think of this. Since we’ve been living expressive individualism for a while, I had a thought. Is identity politics sort of the dialectical outcome of expressive individualism? Because what I was thinking is, there’s a point at which people realize that this is sort of empty. It sort of implies the sovereignty component sort of drops off at a certain point, and you actually want to recreate community. You actually do want to recreate some sort of dependency, some sort of meaning, order, something that has value and status. And that’s igniting identity politics in a certain way. It’s an attempt to recreate community apart from this sovereign self that we’ve been living with now for several generations. Have you thought about that? Carter Snead (22:11): Yeah. No, I think that’s a really interesting idea. I mean, Bellah and others say that one of the problems with expressive individualism, and Peter Lawler said the same thing, is that it is disorienting. The radical freedom of expressive individualism is so disorienting, because we can’t understand ourselves if we are a blank slate. We don’t know who we are, what we’re supposed to do. Alistair McIntyre says, I don’t know what to do unless I understand the stories of which I’m a part. So without a narrative, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do. And so when people are said, “Okay, you’re completely free. Free of tradition, free of family, free of social roles, free of any obligations to your children or your elders, or anybody. Go for it, whatever you want to be, you be that thing.” That’s a kind of disorienting and terrifying and inhuman state to live in, because we are relational. We are social animals. And people start to feel anxiety, and they start to feel disoriented and dislocated, and it makes perfect sense that people will want to cling to community, to roles. And this kind of tribalism that we’re seeing reflected in identity politics, as you just pointed out, it could very well be a reaction to that. The other thing that people have observed is that when you are expressive individualism, the dislocation, the kind of nakedness of the expressive individualism makes people susceptible to tyranny. It makes them easier to dominate. It makes them easier to fold into tribes and to organize and to mobilize, precisely because humans have that need to be part of something, to understand themselves in a larger narrative. The problem for identity politics, it seems to me, is it doesn’t have the resources to actually defend membership in-group if membership is simply a matter of what I choose to identify myself as. Richard Reinsch (23:52): I think the membership is formed by the ability to hurl accusations against the transgressor. Carter Snead (23:59): Right, certainly, that’s the way to distract people. Richard Reinsch (24:01): Yeah, in this case right now it’s the white, male, heterosexual, but some sort of scapegoat. So that’s the unity which unites a lot of these different identities together. You look around too, there’s nothing really inside me worth value, but there are these dominant opinions that I can attach myself to. And identity politics tells you who’s wrong, who’s right, what the future can mean if we have power, and what we should do with it. And say, like Ibram Kendi, the goal was totally equitable racial outcomes, which is sort of its own element of perfection that we can never achieve, but we’re always striving for it, but a lot of people will suffer along the way. So yeah, as I thought about that, it seems to me this, and it’s radically identified with people in their 20s, or seem to. These are clearly highly educated white college students, and I’ve thought as I was reading your book, maybe they just know that this is over. Carter Snead (24:53): Right. Yeah, no. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s an unstable haven, though, it seems to me, because the rules for identity politics and who’s in and who’s out seem to be constantly shifting. And as a strategy, if you’re genuinely not a member of a discrete and insular minority that has a history of abuse and mistreatment and you’re simply an ally, you’re never quite stable. The only way that you can secure your place is to be a constant critic of others. You see this on college campuses. I used to know kids when I finished high school and a lot of my friends… I went to St. John’s College in Annapolis, which is a weird little college, and it was blessedly free of politics. People had no idea what was going on, people didn’t read newspapers or watch TV. It was just it was kind of a weird little bubble, which was great. But we grew up in Birmingham, went to public school. My friends who went to places like Wesleyan, Smith College and Amherst and those kinds of places, Cornell, Vassar, they came back at Christmas break- Richard Reinsch (25:49): Different. Carter Snead (25:49): Like they were intoxicated by all the new information, all the identity, all this stuff. And the current moment in American politics feels like we’re being governed by the RAs and the hall staff of Wesleyan College. Feels like the same kind of intensity and anxiety that accompanies that setting, has made it to… And maybe just because people have grown up and now they’re in charge, but my friends would, first of all be intoxicated by all the new ideas, but then there was this extraordinary anxiety of how do I situate myself in this narrative of oppressor or oppressed, where I’m not the enemy? And it was a constant struggle to figure out how to define themselves within that narrative, to where they’re on the right side of history, they’re on the right side of the conflict. And a lot of them had nervous breakdowns, a lot of them just became completely freaked out. People would vandalize their own dorm room doors with epithets that they could then claim victimhood status. These are mostly wealthy white kids in Birmingham, Alabama. And that kind of anxiety is something that I feel like… I mean, again, Twitter is not real life, but if you go on to Twitter, it doesn’t feel that different to me. Richard Reinsch (26:52): Thanks for indulging me on that. It does seem that the way I’m reading the transgender community that that notion of altering your body, surgically altering your body to make yourself into a new gender, that that is right out of expressive individualism and right out of an anthropology that you’ve defined here. Carter Snead (27:15): Yeah, I mean, you see it in the transhumanist community in a very dramatic way also. These are very successful, high tech entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, and it’s a religion, I mean, there’s no way around it. Being a transhumanist is a religious commitment, and these are folks that want to download their consciousness into some kind of mechanized apparatus, they think of the body as a death sentence, they think of the body as a prison, they want to transcend the body through technology and through psychopharmacology. They really see it as a blank slate, and their mission is to leave the body behind. They really do want to get rid of it. They think of embodiment as a curse, as a general matter. And that is as pure an expression of expressive individualism as you can imagine, but anybody whose will doesn’t correspond to their body and wants to change their body to conform to their will, is, again, as you point out, a reflection of a kind of expressive individualism. Richard Reinsch (28:09): Yeah, and I think behind that, too, is when I get this new body, I’ll be a new person. I think that’s also the implicit assumption. I’ll be a new person in the sense of I’ll have a new lease on happiness, which is also a part of this mindset. Question for you, the embodied disembodiedness, how would that change medical research? Have you thought about that? One critique is medical research moves very slow in this country because of bureaucracy and the development of new drugs, but how would experimentation happen? Carter Snead (28:39): There are different levels in which one could think about that question. I mean, if you think about the purposes of medical research, and how that might change if we really took seriously the vulnerability, mutual dependence and natural limits that are necessary entailments of an embodied community and people who are embodied selves, who encounter one another as bodies, you would be focusing more on those kinds of research projects that are aimed at responding to vulnerable others rather than trying to free people from their bodies or to help them to transcend their bodies through, and this is the old therapy versus enhancement, distinction and debate. How do you define… I mean, the purpose of medicine is to be in service of health, right? And the nettlesome question, of course, which we dealt with in the President’s Council on Bioethics, back when I served with general counsel, Leon Kass, is how do we define health? Do we define health according to a baseline of normal flourishing or is health a function of desire? Is health a function of the subjective wishes of the person involved? And medical research is driven by markets obviously, and markets are driven by preferences. And if an entire culture or a segment of the culture that’s most wealthy, that are going to drive the revenues for drug companies and medical device companies, are focused on these interventions that are more in service of desire than they are to restoring persons to natural functioning, that could be something that would change if there was a shift in the direction of taking the body seriously. And defining health in light of bodily flourishing is different than defining health in light of the wills and desires of a subjective individual. As far as research protections go, I think we would be more thoughtful about the principles that we use to craft protections for human subjects of research. I mean, human subjects, for those of you listeners who don’t follow these things closely, research involving human subjects is in fact a transaction in which a researcher is intentionally instrumentalizing a human being as an object for purposes of obtaining generalizable knowledge. That sounds like a bad thing. That was one of the initial sort of nesting places from which bioethics emerged. How do we fix the potential for exploitation of human subjects in this context? Because the purpose of the researcher is not to help the human subject, that’s not the point, the point of the exercise is to obtain generalizable knowledge. If I oversee a clinical trial in which people get sick or get injured by the testing of a drug, that’s a successful trial. It’s not successful in terms of bringing that drug to market, but it’s successful in the sense that it’s obtained generalizable knowledge. We now know this drug is dangerous. And that’s good, it’s good that we learned that, unlike the clinical setting, where the doctor and the patient have the exact same purpose, that is to heal the patient or to ameliorate his or her symptoms. The interests of a person who enrolls in A clinical trial as a human subject, is the hope that A, you’re not in the control group, you’re in the group that gets the drug, and B, that the drug works and that you get some benefit from it. But that’s not the point of the protocol. I’m sure the researchers hope the same thing, they hope that the drug works, but that’s not their purpose. So the way we’ve tried to salvage that circumstance of instrumentalization and potential exploitation is through the principle of informed consent. They say, “Well, we can transform this relationship of instrumentalization into one of collaboration where the subject agrees, makes a knowing, intelligent and voluntary agreement to participate, understanding the risks involved and the possibility they might not even get the drug that’s being tested. We try to save the situation that way.” But even with able-minded people, there’s risks of what’s called the therapeutic misconception, where people, because they’re so desperate and they want to be benefited by the drug so much that they actually convinced themselves that the researchers are their doctors. And in some cases, the researchers are their doctors, and they’re just operating in a different role, which makes it even more risky. You have people being euthanized because… They don’t even have clinical depression, they’re just tired of living, so put that to the side. You have kids who have spina bifida and it’s treatable, and is not a fatal condition, and in fact, the fact that it’s not a fatal condition is treated by the authorities in these countries as an argument in favor of euthanasia, because their metric of suffering, because they’re not imminently dying, they’re not dying at all, is greater because they’re gonna have more years of suffering than a person who is dying in six months. But forget that situation, imagine a scenario which the crucible from which public bioethics emerged in the first case, where human subjects are of a certain kind that don’t have the capacity for consent or they don’t have the full capacity for consent, because they’re unborn babies, because they are suffering from dementia, because they are intellectually impaired in some way, cognitively impaired in some way. That, if we took the body seriously, we would ask ourselves the question of how do we develop a framework for research ethics and protections that focuses on that population? They’re kind of an afterthought in our framework for human subjects protections. We focus on the able-minded people who can sign a consent form. And there are risks involved with those folks, and then we sort of say, “Well, for those other groups, we should act in their best interest and subject them to minimal risks.” And there are different concepts that people use, but it feels to me under-theorized. And I think that we could do a better job of reconstructing medical research in a way to think through how do we involve those folks in our research? Which we want to do, because that research benefits those populations without subjecting them to exploitation and abuse. Richard Reinsch (33:36): Okay, we’ll go to your heart issues here. Controversial questions, death and dying. Embodiedness, I presume, would be counter to the push for euthanasia throughout Europe, where it’s legal, where they even have suicide centers in Switzerland, I’ve read about these places where you go. But you would emphasize, I presume, the care and what comes about through walking with people through the late stages of life without killing them or creating this opportunity for them to kill themselves if they want to. Carter Snead (34:10): Yeah, no. That’s exactly my position. And my critique of… I focus on the American landscape in the book, although in the European situation it’s more advanced and more problematic. Richard Reinsch (34:19): But the Belgium situation seems to be it’s going beyond just consent, actively killing people. Carter Snead (34:24): That’s right. I mean, in Europe, we have circumstances where, in the name of compassion, we are seeking to euthanize, directly kill children who are not capable of even participating in an informed consent process. And it’s an injustice that these children can’t be dispatched, and the amazing thing is, you’ve got cases where spina bifida… And putting aside the psychological circumstances, you have people being euthanized for autism in certain parts of the world. You have people being euthanized because… They don’t even have clinical depression, they’re just tired of living, so put that to the side. You have kids who have spina bifida and it’s treatable, and is not a fatal condition, and in fact, the fact that it’s not a fatal condition is treated by the authorities in these countries as an argument in favor of euthanasia, because their metric of suffering, because they’re not imminently dying, they’re not dying at all, is greater because they’re gonna have more years of suffering than a person who is dying in six months. And it moves very, very quickly. Once euthanasia is under discussion, talk about directed killing, nobody wants to commit suicide anymore themselves. They want to get an injection from their physician or whomever is going to dispatch them. And as you point out, we’re not just talking about voluntary euthanasia, we’re talking about non-voluntary euthanasia, meaning no request on behalf of the person who’s being euthanized to euthanize that person. And there are even reports of involuntary euthanasia, that is euthanasia over someone’s objections, or over the objections of someone’s parents. There’s the most famous example from a nun who said that she didn’t want to be euthanized, and I think this was in the Netherlands, it was written up in Herbert Hendin’s book, and I think Neil Gorsuch covered it in his book too, who said, “I don’t want to be euthanized.” But she was euthanized over her objections on the grounds that because she was religious, her grounds for opposing euthanasia were not rational. Richard Reinsch (36:11): That’s incredible. Carter Snead (36:12): That’s a sobering thing, but here in the United States, we’re not quite as advanced down that pathway. But the fundamental critique that I make is that both in the context of the law of end-of-life decision making, where we’re talking about the decision to discontinue life-sustaining measures, as well as assisted suicide in those 10, 11, 12 jurisdictions of the United States and allow assisted suicide. The problem again, is an anthropological problem, because in crafting the law of assisted suicide, and even to a certain extent crafting some of the laws connected to discontinuing life-sustaining measures, the underlying assumption about personhood and flourishing is this expressive individualism concept that human beings flourish when they are free, autonomous choosers, radically individuated and atomized, and the highest flourishing is the assertion of their unencumbered selves. But that is not an accurate description, because of embodiment, and because of the impact embodiment has on a person as they’re dying, or even when they’re just very ill, or depressed, or what have you. That’s not an accurate sociological description of what it means to be sick. When a person is sick, and when a person is dependent upon life-sustaining measures, especially a person who has lost the capacity for cognitive decision-making, and that’s the example I talk about in the book regarding discontinuation of life-sustaining measures, people who are not capable of participating in decisions about their own care in the moment, because they’ve lost the capacity for making those choices. And in terms of assisted suicide, that’s not a fair description of who commits suicide and what a person needs under those circumstances. The social science evidence is very clear, the vast majority of people who have suicidal ideation are suffering from treatable depression. That’s not an autonomous person, that’s not a person who’s operating at the height of their powers. A person who is unconscious and can’t make decisions on their own behalf is not an autonomous person, so why would you look to the anthropology of expressive individualism to craft remedies, the right to be left alone, the right to kill yourself, as the legal response to that human context? It’s a category mistake. Just take a generic case of a person going to the doctor because they’re sick. You don’t go to the doctor to assert your unencumbered will. You go to the doctor because you’re sick and you don’t know what to do and you want someone who has your best interest at heart to take care of you. Richard Reinsch (38:26): Yeah, I suppose too, here, it’s why does euthanasia moves so fast once it settles in, in law? And then, from what I’ve read, it’s they have this garden variety case. It’s your 90-year-old, terminally ill patient who doesn’t want to suffer anymore, and that’s kind of what we’re told. But it rapidly moves beyond that context to now, like the Netherlands children. I think I’ve read teenagers. It’s sort of this underlying dynamic we’ve been discussing that the expressive individual can’t really make sense of these lives, and why want to live them. Carter Snead (38:55): And quality of life, which becomes the grounds for euthanasia, a life that is dependent and diminished has no quality through the lens of expressive individualism. The greatest thing you can do when you’re faced with a life of dependency and decline is to author the conclusion of your own story by the assertion of your unencumbered will to choose self-annihilation. Again, that’s not a fully human account of those circumstances. That’s not what those patients want or need in most instances. Now, there may be occasions, there may be instances in which a person of wholly sound mind is facing a painful terminal illness, refractory pain, and they want to commit suicide there or they want to decline life-sustaining measures. And I’m sure there are circumstances like that, but when we construct law and public policy, we don’t just think about those exceptional cases, we ask the question of what happens to those vulnerable communities who are subject to fraud, abuse, duress and mistake? Those elderly communities, the disabled communities, those minority communities who are already vulnerable. And now we open up the laws, you say, to allow this pathway for assisted suicide or even euthanasia. And all of a sudden, you’ve endangered an entire population of vulnerable people for the benefit of some very privileged folks who are a small sliver of the community that wants this legal change. And I’m sympathetic to those folks who want to change the law in that way in some respects, but we can’t change the law when doing so is going to endanger those people on the margins of our communities because of their disability, their age or even their racial status. Which is why, interestingly, in the debates in America over things like Terri Schiavo, you may remember. And Terri Schiavo in 2005, the dispute over life-sustaining measures for a woman in persistent vegetative state in Florida. There was a massive expression of support on the part of the African American community and the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress. Jesse Jackson and others went down to Florida to argue against the doctors discontinuing her life-sustaining measures, joining Ralph Nader, by the way, Joe Lieberman, Tom Harkin, disability rights advocates. People forget that, they think it’s like a right wing, left wing, religious/secular thing. It’s not. There are actually communities, the disability rights community, even the American Medical Association, to their great credit, oppose assisted suicide, because they see system-wide consequences of opening that up as a pathway. And that’s, by the way, a huge distinction between the United States and Europe. In Europe, the physician professional societies support assisted suicide and euthanasia. In the United States, they don’t, and that’s the reason we have not gone, I think. The main reason we haven’t gone in the direction, and you see in those states like California, where the local chapters of the AMA, like the California Medical Association, what they do is they declare a position of neutrality towards the state law proposed on assisted suicide, and then it passes. But in states like Massachusetts, in 2012, when they had the referendum, the Massachusetts Medical Association said, “No, this is not medicine. This is not the role of a doctor.” Ezekiel Emanuel wrote an op-ed to that effect. Richard Reinsch (41:52): Yeah. Assisted reproduction, how would embodiment interact here? Carter Snead (41:57): The framing of the legal question, the anthropology that animates the law, operates at the level of framing and then at the level of execution. So in the book, I provide a couple of quotes to give you a sense… So ART is interesting, because unlike abortion, which has been basically constitutionalized by the Supreme Court, any major changes in the law of abortion in the United States would require the Supreme Court to depart from, change direction from the trajectory established by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey. Assisted reproductive technology not been constitutionalized, and so there is room for the political branches to legislate, but the reality is they haven’t done it. It’s basically a wide open wild west in the United States in this area, and other than the restrictions of licensure and certification for physicians and the law of medical malpractice, there’s basically no oversight of assisted reproductive technologies. And so you what you end up seeing is, no limits on the number of embryos that can be conceived and transferred. You have multiple gestations and multiple pregnancies, although that number is going down, thankfully. You have routine practice of sex selection in IVF clinics, they call it family balancing, but that’s an overwhelmingly widely practiced technique, an adjunct to IVF. You’ve got growing industries of people that want to screen embryos before implantation, that is in-vitro embryos, for non-medical traits, traits that relate to height, or IQ, or eye color, or skin tone, or hair. This is a growth industry, and the law at the moment says nothing about that. And again, I’m not making a comment on the attitudes of people who seek fertility treatment at all, I don’t think that those people are seeking to express their unencumbered wills. I think those people just want to be parents, and they want help from reproductive endocrinologists and fertility care doctors to help them realize the dream of becoming parents. But the law isn’t animated by that impulse, because if it was, the law would be shaped in a way that would take seriously the category of parenthood. It would take seriously the notion that you can’t be a parent without a child, and that every stage of the process, the goal should be conception and birth of a child who is welcomed and loved unconditionally by her parents. The law is constructed rather, without any guardrails, which reflects the views of John Robertson, who was a recently deceased law professor from University of Texas who was instrumental in crafting the legal landscape in the United States, both in his role as a law professor, but also in his role on the many advisory committees on which he served over his long and illustrious career. And his role as the head of the Ethics Committee for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which is the most powerful lobbying organization in the country. And I begin chapter four on assisted reproduction with the quote that says, “Reproductive technologies are means to achieve or avoid the reproductive experiences that are central to personal conceptions of meaning and identity.” That’s the vision of human identity and flourishing that animates the total absence and vacuum of law in the United States regarding assisted reproductive technologies. And we had a guy named Dr. Gerry Schatten, who at the time was a very prominent scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m not sure where he is now, but he was very prominent, heavily involved in reproductive technologies, and especially genetic screening of in-vitro embryos. And we asked them, we said, “Come give us a talk, come give us some testimony before the President’s Council on bioethics. We’re focusing on assisted reproduction, and tell us in one or two sentences what you think the purposes of reproductive medicine are. What is the point of this exercise?” And he had six weeks to think about it. And he came back, and he gave us this quote, and it’s really quite arresting. December 13th 2002. He said, “Reproductive medicine is helping prospective parents to realize their own dreams for a disease-free legacy.” Now, both of those quotes are clear that they are privileging and prioritizing the desires and the will of individuals who are seeking a very deep form of expression that is realized through participation in these reproductive technologies. The word that’s missing from both of those quotes, is the word child, is the word son or daughter. And that, to me, is a kind of evidence for the proposition that the anthropology that underlies that ideology, the anthropology that then animates the complete vacuum of law in the United States, is one of expressive individualism. It’s the idea that the whole point of this is to find your truth, to express your truth, whether that means being a parent or not being a parent, and it utterly misses the human context of how human beings come into the world. They come into the world situated in relationship to other people, relationships, biological relationships, and those relationships have unearned privileges and unchosen obligations, and that’s completely invisible. The word child doesn’t even appear in those quotes. Richard Reinsch (46:54): And that would largely seem, to my mind, to kind of come out of the jurisprudence of abortion in America. Carter Snead (47:01): You’re right, and the jurisprudence of abortion in America has influenced every other aspect of public bioethics, not just because of the politics of abortion, although that’s a hugely important piece of the puzzle. I remember very clearly back in the early 2000s, going with the chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics to meet a prominent senator, a man of the left, who had previously authored consumer protection laws relating to assisted reproduction. And we asked him directly, said, “well, are you willing to augment those laws to provide additional protections for patients, additional protections focused on the health of children who are conceived with IVF, and focusing on the women who go through this process?” And he was very blunt. He said, “I can’t join a coalition that includes Sam Brownback, who was a prominent pro-life advocate. He’s like, “That’s too politically risky for me, I can’t do it.” I was surprised by how blunt and candid he was in that meeting. And so there’s obviously a brute political reality, but the deeper issue is that the concepts of privacy and liberty and now, equality, if you think about the sense of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the partial birth abortion cases as the normative rationale for abortion, those rationales are in fact themselves rooted in expressive individualism. And those rationales are invoked, because of that, in the context of assisted suicide, embryo research, and elsewhere. So you had this thing called The Philosopher’s Brief. And Washington v. Glucksberg, and Vacco v. Quill, which were the two assisted suicide cases before the Supreme Court in the mid ’90s. When people argued, and unsuccessfully, in a 9-0 rebuke, the court held that there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide, either in the due process clause or in the equal protection clause. And there was a famous brief, called The Philosopher’s Brief that was filed by some of the most famous philosophers living at the time, John Rawls, Nozick, Scanlon, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ronald Dworkin, they all… And people who disagree with each other on important questions, all signed a brief saying, “If you take Planned Parenthood versus Casey seriously, and if you take the mystery of life passage from Anthony Kennedy, and you think seriously about the autonomy, freedom and self-determination that the court has enshrined and entrenched in that decision, then this is an easy case. Obviously, you have the right to assisted suicide, if that rendering of liberty is the legally operative rendering of liberty. And it was humiliating for those brilliant philosophers who published their brief in the New York Review of Books also, because that view was rejected nine to nothing by the US Supreme Court, but it nevertheless shows how potent and durable and widespread this anthropology of expressive individualism is across public bioethical contexts. Richard Reinsch (49:37): I think that’s an interesting way to wrap up, Carter. I think that really ties all this into a nice bow, as we think about public bioethics. Carter Snead, thank you so much for discussing with us, your new book, What it Means to Be Human. Carter Snead (49:53): It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Richard Reinsch: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re joined by Steven Teles to discuss his new book, coauthored with Robert Saldin, Never Trump: Revolt of the Conservative Elites. Steven Teles is professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He’s the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality, with Brink Lindsey, and also Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration, coauthored with David Dagan from Oxford. Steven, glad to welcome you to the program to discuss this new book. Steven Teles: Happy to be here, I should mention my coauthor in this book is Rob Saldin of the University of Montana. Richard Reinsch: Okay, excellent. Thinking about this book, what got you interested in writing about the Never Trump phenomenon? Steven Teles: I’ve made a little bit of my business over my now 25-year career of writing about various forms of conservatism, going all the way back to my first book on welfare policy. So, studying conservatives has not been a recent phenomenon, and I’ve largely focused on what you might think of as the elite stratum of conservatives. There’s lots of other political scientists who study conservatism as a mass phenomenon, or who study conservative social movements, but I really focus on what you might think of as the intellectual or professional cadre of conservatives. I studied with conservatives way back when at the University of Virginia, where my advisors were Martha Derthick and Jim Ceaser and Steve Rhodes. So, I’ve been at this for a while, and when the election happened, I obviously paid close attention to the conservatives who had opposed Trump, a lot of whom were very disproportionately in that group of intellectual and professional conservatives who I make it my business to study. And it turned out that Rob Saldin, who I’d known who was also a PhD at the University of Virginia, was also nosing around this subject, and we decided to dive into it together. And so, we partially studied this in a way that you don’t usually get to in political science, in realtime. We started this pretty early in 2017 doing interviews, and I just thought that people who were left behind by a lot of the rest of their party, and yet seemed to be sticking to their guns, was a interestingly counterintuitive phenomenon, and I usually start out not with a theoretical question but with a puzzling phenomenon in the world, with the assumption that I’ll figure out what it is about theoretically later on. And so, that’s where I started. Richard Reinsch: I want to get into the principles and reasons and motivations which you set forth in the book, to understand the Never Trumpers. But before we do that, a question I have for you, and you just mentioned this. One of the great parts of the book are the interviews that you have with these leading thinkers, writers, political operatives, lawyers, et cetera. But do you have a sense in 2020 of what they make of their efforts now? Was it worth it? Regrets? Are they proud of what they’ve done? Where are they four years later? Steven Teles: Yeah, there are very few of the people we interviewed for this book who really turned back on what they did in 2016 and after. Again, the people I’ve talked to, most of them say that they were proud of it, that they think that nothing that’s happened subsequently has altered their view of Donald Trump, and that many of them often express this in terms of, they simply thought this was the honorable thing to do. Now, again, one problem with interviews is it’s always a little hard to know how much of it is post-talk rationalization, but I do think that one fact that we really underestimate in politics is… often because we have cynical, and especially in political science, we have public choice theories that are basically just applied cynicism, we tend to underestimate people’s conceptions of honor. But I think especially among the national security conservatives who really were the sort of leading edge of Never Trumpism, that honor is a really powerful and important part of the way that they make sense of the world. And they found Donald Trump a dishonorable person, and they, I think… You can look at all of the Machiavellianism that you might project on them, but I think simply, a lot of them thought that it would be dishonorable to, as they often use the term, to “bend the knee” to Trump in a way that they thought many other conservatives did. Richard Reinsch: I want to get to the principles question. You’ve kind of touched on that, but I want to ask it. You asked this question on page three, I’ll ask it to you: why did these men and women, who had not long ago been party stalwarts, take the historically dramatic step of actively opposing their own nominee, and then continuing to hound him in office? Steven Teles: Again, one thing to note is that there are different people here who come in different shades, and that some of those differences are actually quite important. I do think there’s one set of Never Trump conservatives who you might think of as the people who are associated with the ancien régime, right? Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Steven Teles: They dislike Trump because he represented a rejection of what they understood to be conservatism, and they liked the old conservatism and didn’t like this new populism that Trump was trying to substitute, and in particular we argue in the book that they believe they were authorized to try to stop Trump. Especially when you think about the public intellectuals, they had a conception of their role in the party that was really about preserving it against what they took to be dissident or unclean versions of conservatism. And for many of them, they had been at that work for quite a long time, so there’s some interesting interview material here with Jonah Goldberg, and Jonah had been having fights with people on the alt-right for a long time. And so, I think when Trump came around, he partially processed Trump through the same fight he’d been having with the alt-right for years. And so, I do think that many of these people thought that they had a particular role in the party, which was to preserve it as a conservative movement party. I think there were other people who stood up against Trump and continued to do so, partially for religious reasons, right? I don’t think it’s an accident that so many Never Trumpers were Jews and Mormons; here’s some very vivid interview material in the book along those lines that… where other conservatives could imagine Trump as someone to negotiate with, or cut a deal with, or that they didn’t love him but they would have to make the most of him, many Jews and Mormons processed him through a very different filter, which we call a catastrophic imagination, an ability to imagine things getting far, far worse. And so, they saw in Trump more than just what was on the surface, and I think reacted to him in a much more intense way than many other conservatives who eventually made their peace with him. Richard Reinsch: What do you make of… I mean, just interesting, the Jews and Mormons… evangelical Christians widely known supported Trump. The vote share that he received was incredible. But also, devout Roman Catholics seem to have had not as much of a reticence supporting him, and I’ve read stories of Cabinet members and those in high places serving Trump in the White House, quite religious along those two lines. What do you make of that? Steven Teles: Yeah. I mean, I do think especially with evangelicals and to some degree with Catholics, and I don’t want to say I’m an expert on the Catholic side of this, but I do think… again, when I mentioned the catastrophic imagination before, in a way, there were sort of two catastrophic imaginations going on in this campaign. We have a long discussion of the famous “Flight 93” article. Richard Reinsch: Yeah. I remember it well. Steven Teles: Yeah, which Michael Anton wrote, which again was this very powerful metaphor of, this election was potentially the last election in which conservatives could still preserve their role in American society, and if they lost, then it was going to be essentially communal destruction with a Hillary Clinton presidency, right? They imagined that their institutions would eventually be regulated out of existence by liberals, and therefore, even if they had concerns about Trump personally, the option of accepting Hillary Clinton was sort of unimaginable. And again, I think Hillary also played her own… just personally had a particular resonance for this community in a way that it didn’t, for example, with Jews and Mormons. So, I do think many evangelicals had convinced themselves that this was not just the normal cycles of American politics, but that a Clinton win would be a more fundamental break in history, and therefore, they needed to find a way to get behind Trump. So, I do think that really was in the background for many Christians, and I think the other thing to say is the fundamental force of polarization is just very powerful. We have a binary political system and not supporting Trump meant supporting Clinton, and many conservatives, especially evangelicals, viewed her as indigestible pretty much to the same degree that they found Trump to be indigestible. Richard Reinsch: Yeah. No, also I think another part of this, too, is how Barack Obama chose to govern throughout most of his presidency regarding the opposition. And I think in particular, the last two years, his use of executive orders to get his way, apart from Congress, I think left a mark on the minds of many people regarding executive power. In the book, you kind of break out different aspects of those who identify as Never Trumpers by specialty, foreign policy, lawyers, political operatives, economists, public intellectuals. The first group you talk about are the foreign policy specialists, and I kept waiting… I mean, was there ever an awareness on the part of this group that maybe they, in fact, their consensus… which you note in the book, their foreign policy consensus, had in fact become the problem? That is to say, that they formed these groups to fight off Rand Paul, or to fight off Donald Trump, that actually, they should have been willing to more dialogue and talk to them, given that they may have been the group most responsible to make Trump possible? Steven Teles: No. I think… at least, I didn’t get… I mean, there was little- Richard Reinsch: I knew the answer to that question. I thought it… Steven Teles: There were references in some of the interviews to Elliot Cohen, who’s now the dean at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, and was a very prominent Never Trumper and had served in the George W. Bush administration. He did say that a lot of the conservatives, the national security conservatives had been, in his quote, “sobered up” by the Iraq war. But I don’t think there was really the kind of fundamental reconsideration of foreign policy conservatism or… and I think a recognition that some of that sort of extends to foreign policy commitments to the United States, were related to support for Trump, and I do think there’s some evidence for that. So, I don’t think that was true. I mean, again, I think they very much thought that Rand Paul and that sort of species of foreign policy libertarianism, or isolationism if you want to put a different term on it, they really did think that that was the enemy. And they thought… And again, going back to that same idea, that they had a obligation, given their role in the party, to protect conservatism and protect the Republican Party against that. Just as many of these others conservatives saw themselves as authorized to perform a kind of guardian role against unclean versions of conservatism. I don’t think that they really re-thought that, or have done so now. I think many of them have more of that, “I didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me,” sort of attitude. Richard Reinsch: Assessing their efforts, when you talked to them, what exactly did they think was at stake? I mean, on one level, it’s sort of obvious, but at another level, as you note in the book, presidential candidates of both parties come to the foreign policy professionals, which you note are of all of the groups the most bipartisan, the most moderate in terms of domestic politics, the most willing to actually cross the aisle and work for another administration of another party. Do they, when they’re sort of looking at and seeing Trump arise, what are they thinking in terms of their overall consensus? What do they see at stake? Steven Teles: Well, I mean, again, to go back a little bit, one thing that really does characterize this group is what you might just think of as a fundamental anti-populist orientation to foreign policy, that they really do think that popular involvement in foreign policy is not a great thing. And in that sense, you might think of them as status. They believe that there is an American national interest, that it’s largely embodied in the continuing institutions of the American foreign policy apparatus, and that’s supported by this particular national security establishment that cuts across both parties. And that really is a fundamental belief that holds together a very large part of this establishment, and differentiates them from the centers on both the left and the right, who often do think that we need more popular involvement in foreign policy. So, they really do have a professionalized conception of this domain of public policy, and again, a lot of what holds the Republicans and Democrats together, even as they disagree about particular policy areas like our stance toward Iran, or how aggressive we should be toward China, they do think that that debate should be mainly dominated by them and not by the hoi-polloi. Richard Reinsch: Not by Congress. Nah, I’m just kidding. Thinking about your work on this group, what do you make of them as a whole? You note in the book, the foreign policy consensus group, they’re all sort of in one block, they inhabit a small network of institutions, they’re all in Washington, DC. Is there something peculiar about this group that sort of left them open to a Trump candidacy? Steven Teles: Yeah, well, I mean, again, one thing that did come across that we did try to make clear is… one of the main reasons why they were so aggressively against Trump is that Trump was so aggressively against them. As compared to any… most of the rest of the professional groups that make up this stratum of the Republican party, Trump was most directly willing to say that he was rejecting their role. We use the concept of jurisdiction, which comes from Andrew Abbott’s fantastic book on profession, and essentially, what Trump was doing was he was rejecting their jurisdiction over foreign policy. And Trump repeatedly said that these guys, in his colorful terms, were losers, that he was going to bring in a whole new group of people. And so, in part, they rejected Trump because Trump rejected them. The other thing I would say is these people are quite distinct in their experience of the state. Almost all of them have had actual governing experience. One quote, I think it was from Phil Zelikow, I’d have to go check, is to say that the lives of people who do this kind of work are characterized by parades and funerals, that the ceremonial element of the state really matters to these people in a way that it’s just not as true for other groups. And I should say, I’m a child of government, although a different part of government, my parents were both civil servants, and procedure and routine and the actual rituals of the state matter to a particular set of people. In some ways, you can think of populism as a rejection of those sort of state rituals. So, I think I understand that group of people, and why Trump… and again, his very active and open attack on the ritualistic quality of how state actors are supposed to behave… for them, was so indigestible. And so, I think that’s one thing that really struck me. But again, that also means there are relatively insular groups. They’re very much defined by their relationships with each other, and their relationships to the state apparatus. Richard Reinsch: Okay. I wanted to just move on to the political operatives that you discuss in the book. They seem to be the group most willing to compromise their Never Trump credentials. You describe them at one point as samurai without masters. What calculations does a political operative face here with the rise of Donald Trump? Steven Teles: The political operatives are a complicated group, and I actually think, in a way, the lawyers might be the one that were most willing to compromise with Trump, right? Some of the most active Never Trumpers, which now are associated with The Lincoln Project, came from that group of political operatives like Stuart Stevens and Mike Murphy. So, there were a lot of those, and again, a lot of that group initially had very strong anti-Trump attitudes, and I think a lot of that was based on their theory of how the Republican party was going to be competitive in the future, that they… I think this is an important thing to understand about this group, that a lot of the core coalition partners in the Republican party have a conception of the Republican party that’s very much rooted in the people who already support the party. That is, they think the Republican party are evangelicals and business and those core people who sit around the table, whereas political operatives, pollsters, often have a more entrepreneurial theory of the party. They think about the various different groups in the electorate, and who might be able to be moved over. And as they look at, especially in the aftermath of the 2012 campaign, when they looked at the map, they saw an increasingly shrinking core Republican electorate, and believed that the Republican party needed to reach out, especially to African-Americans and Hispanics, or that the odds for them winning would just keep going down. So, they had a much more demography-rooted theory of how Republicans had to get elected, and therefore- Richard Reinsch: But that also had support in George W. Bush’s… particularly his 2004 presidential run, where I think he got close to 45% of the Hispanic vote. Steven Teles: Yeah. So, again, a lot of these people had worked for George W. Bush, or around George W. Bush, and they mostly thought that George W. Bush was on the right track. And these were also the kind of political professionals who ended up working for the ill-fated Jeb Bush campaign, which was also based on that particular theory of the Republican party, that the Republican party, especially on immigration, needed to soften its approach because they believed there were lots of Hispanics who, on the basis of faith or other things, would be open to voting for Republicans, but that the immigration issue just stood too much in the way. So, part of what one group of these political operatives saw is that they spent four or more years trying to get the Republican party oriented to a different kind of approach where the non-white electorate was concerned, and suddenly Trump was coming in and blowing all that up, right? Doing everything the opposite of what they had been trying to convince people they were supposed to be doing. And I think many of those kinds of people, again Stuart Stevens and Mike Murphy, those kind of people, are good examples of that. They were the parts of the political operatives who formed the hardest core of opposition to Trump. Now, again, there was a whole other set of political operatives who had a very different theory, what you might associate as the missing white voter theory of the Republican party, and they didn’t agree with that. And so, Trump in some ways was doing, often in ways they found distasteful, but he was following more of their playbook. Either you make the choice to change your business model, and sell services to someone else, or sell them largely to go more into market research or something else, or you had to find a way to make your peace with Trump because he controlled the party apparatus. Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Well, you also talk about in the chapter the reaction to the so-called autopsy report, because the other, I think legitimate, criticism of that report was made by people like Yuval Levin, Ramesh Ponnuru, others that… It was more free markets, more immigration, don’t talk about social conservatism, and that would win more elections. Their theory was, “Well, it’s actually the shrinking middle class that doesn’t really see this making their lives better. There are new problems, new challenges to living in America, raising a family in America, and the government should actually find targeted ways to make their lives better.” And they had ideas about college education, the family… subsidy child leave policies, et cetera, and their theory was that was what the party needed to emphasize. In a way, though, many of them I think temperamentally were Never Trumpers, or not on a level of principle, and they couldn’t really wrap their minds around supporting Trump who, in a way, sort of touched that thread they were playing on. Steven Teles: Yeah. So, that view… this cuts across between that and the public intellectual chapters of the book. I think for me, the people who are most interesting are the ones who were sort of pulled in opposite directions, and I do think that people like the Reformicons that you mentioned had been engaging in a sort of ongoing battle with the people who were around the autopsy on… again, a very different theory, the autopsy people more or less treated standard conservative economics, and also foreign policy for that matter, as fine. They thought that there was a significant part of the non-white electorate who I think they often imagine is sort of middle-class, as aspiring, as entrepreneurial, who would vote for a Republican party if they just didn’t think that Republican party was exclusionary or even racist. And I think that’s not inconsistent with where the sort of Koch network part of the Republican party was, and that was a very important part of the 2016 primary, is what some people call the sort of Koch primary. Where all of the candidates had to go around to these various Koch-supported events, and that money and the events and all that other things, created a lot of pressure to accept what you might think of as the full Koch package, which was very free market on economics, and much more open to more open immigration and other things on the other side. And in some ways, I think that does explain a fair amount of why Trump had a pretty open room to run in the primary, because that Koch primary had kind of squeezed out a lot of that Reformicon synthesis which imagined the Republican party as a more consistently working-class party, which had implications both for immigration but also for economics. And so, that’s why those Reformicons are in a way the most interesting group here, because they liked the direction in policy terms that Trump was pushing, and yet they also found him entirely morally bankrupt. I think that certainly is the kind of approach that comes across very clearly in the quotes in the book from Yuval Levin. Richard Reinsch: That resonated with me, because in November, late November of 2016, I wrote a piece for RealClearPolicy where I made this argument, that Trump was the Reformicon candidate. He’s the one they’ve been waiting on. I also analogized Theresa May to this, as well, in Great Britain. I remember talking to a significant reform conservative, and I could tell they understood that, but they didn’t want to go out in public and say it, or try and make these linkages, which I thought, that’s an interesting way to do politics. Maybe not the most effective way, but this is true, and their theory, America may be still sort of socially conservative; they don’t want to be lectured or hectored about anything, and somewhat economically liberal. Much more than, say, the Koch network has their thumb on, and a lot of people like Henry Olsen and others have sort of come out and written about this a lot… I mentioned at the beginning of this segment on the political operatives that they seem to be the most fluid. I was thinking here about the autopsy report itself, the principal authors, you mentioned Avi Fleischer, who was Press Secretary for George W. Bush for a time… Ari Fleischer, I’m sorry. Sean Spicer, we all know his performance, and then also Reince Priebus. And then, they sort of go over to Trump, and then you also have Never Trumpers setting up PACs to fight Trump. But then, most of them quickly peel off and go to Trump’s camp. You make that to be the business model, really, that political operatives face. Steven Teles: Yeah. Again, when you think about how… I’m not typically a highly materialist social scientist, but I do think these people’s business… politics really is a business, and there’s actually a great book by my colleague at Hopkins, Adam Sheingate, called Building A Business of Politics, about the growth of this particular segment of people for whom selling political services, whether it’s polling or turnout or whatever, really is their business. But they have a very small number of people they sell to. In a way, it’s a kind of monopoly model where it’s not like they’re selling it all to the RNC, but the RNC is often a very important filter through which people get jobs, and Trump took that over. So, either you make the choice to change your business model, and sell services to someone else, or sell them largely to go more into market research or something else, or you had to find a way to make your peace with Trump because he controlled the party apparatus. Richard Reinsch: I think also, for all of the groups you describe, my sense is… and I’m not in Washington, I’ve never worked in Washington, but there’s a sense that Trump’s going to lose. And then, I think it’s clear by… I’m trying to remember March or April of 2016, that he is going to be the Republican primary winner. That seems assured, even though you have… maybe you can talk about the machinations of Bill Kristol and others to try and recruit an alternative candidate rather late. But with that, Trump is going to win the Republican primary, and then it’s, “Well, he’s going to lose. We know he’s going to lose the general election.” At what point… maybe it’s election night, maybe that’s the point, but it begins to dawn on people that this was a choice that comes now with rather severe career consequences? Steven Teles: Yeah. I do think that it’s really hard to underestimate how much people really thought Trump was going to lose, right? And again, that’s a little hard to reconstruct now because we know he won, so it’s hard to get our minds back in that moment when everyone… when this was a consensus position that Trump was, in some ways, obviously absurd. I do think that was behind a lot of the political professionals, is that they thought everything they knew meant that Trump was going to lose, and lose very badly, and drag down a lot of other Republican candidates, and that their job… again, going back to the idea of jurisdiction, their job was to try to get across to people what the basic facts were about the electoral map. And I do think a lot of people made decisions that they might have made differently if that wasn’t the case. One thing we mention is a lot of people had this idea that one reason to go out so clearly against Trump is that they would be in a good position to come in as kind of the clean team after the election, and go and fumigate the place, and clean up, and get back to sort of normal Republican politics… And the fact that this was so unexpected, I think, did mean that a lot of people had to very suddenly readjust where they were in the presence of this enormous, unexpected shock. And so, some people stuck to their guns and decided that they were going to stick to the Never Trump train, but a lot of people thought that Trump was going to get impeached and removed, potentially, and that that was going to sort of make the nightmare go away. But then, a lot of other people were suddenly faced with the decision that either they bent the knee, or they were going to be thrown out into the ether with no influence whatsoever. And I do think that those calculations, which I do think we have to be somewhat empathetic with, that this was such an unexpected situation, and a situation in which people really didn’t have any anger for rationality, for figuring out how to make sense of what you were supposed to do in a situation like this. And as a consequence, people had to make fairly binary choices fairly quickly. Richard Reinsch: Is there any sense, in your interviews with these political operatives, many of whose names I recognize and they’re successful and they’ve made money in this business, which I’m sure is not an easy business, any sense after the election of, “Wow, I really got it wrong, and I’ve got to rethink how I’m doing this”? Or, “Man, this was just such a fluke. Who knows?” Steven Teles: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the people we talked to did think about Trump in terms of… if you ran the same election over again, that the odds that he would draw the inside straight that he did, with so many very small wins in so many places that allowed him to win even though, again, it’s very important to remember that he quite substantially lost the popular vote… That was kind of a fluke, right? And I do think in general, people are not great at updating their mental models of the world, and that there were… in general, people tended to lean into where they were already. So, the Reformicons took this as a lesson that they should have been paying more attention, too. There’s a great quote by David Frum who, I should say, gives very good quotes. He said that someone had actually approached him and said, “Look, Donald Trump is saying everything you were saying about immigration. Isn’t this great? Shouldn’t you get behind Trump?” And Frum said something to the effect of, “The reason I had been pushing for a more restrictionist immigration policy was precisely to keep us from getting somebody like Donald Trump.” So, I think a number of people leaned into their preexisting theory, rather than updating their priors. Richard Reinsch: Yeah, and I mentioned a third option is, “No, I’m sticking by my principles. I want the party to expand along the lines we had, and that’s what I’m going to work for.” Who knows? Thinking along the lines… you talk about public intellectuals. We’ve mentioned a few here. How do those who identify as Never Trumpers see their role, many of whom still do, I think… they seem to be the ones who’ve been most secure also in their careers… but there’s also the demise of The Weekly Standard… It’s hard for me to understand that apart from being sort of an attack on an institute, on a periodical that had stayed Never Trump largely. But what do you make of them and their principles and ideas? Steven Teles: Yeah, I mean, one thing… again, one of the trickiest things to do in social science is to balance material and ideational theories at once, and usually, people just go into one or two camps, and we did try and balance that here. But if you look at public intellectuals, they often do have a very different kind of business model, right? Theirs is a nonprofit business model, for the most part. Whether it’s an actual nonprofit or it’s one that a… National Review, I think, is still mostly a notional corporation, but it’s mainly a nonprofit. So, many of conservative public intellectuals work for institutions where they speak largely to a liberal audience, and that a lot of the way they think of their job is trying to demonstrate that conservatism is in fact a legitimate intellectual enterprise, that it’s not just a matter of racism or greed, but that they have really deep, fundamental principles that deserve respect. And Trump for them was obviously a very big problem, from that point of view. This is the old line that his business is making the subtext, text. Right? Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Steven Teles: Saying out loud the thing you’re supposed to say quietly, and that’s a big problem for them. And so, I think that certainly effected a lot of the ways that they responded to Trump, and the way that distinguished them from other parts of the party. Richard Reinsch: Also, we’re talking about people, many with academic training… reading a lot, you write a lot, you’re thinking deeply about ideas, and seems to me there’s just this awareness that Trump doesn’t really have any ideas other than the sort of very visceral statements like, “Ban Muslims,” that would seem to then resonate, and that sort of horrifies public intellectuals, because this is going to shape how people see conservatism and the Republican party. Steven Teles: Yeah, and again, I think the other thing to remember is, to go back to the guardian mentality we mentioned before, they really generally tend to tell a story of the conservative movement in which the role of conservative intellectuals is a really important part of that narrative. Right? Their story is about how the Republican party became a conservative party, and how it incorporated conservative ideas and intellectuals. So, intellectual consistency matters to them a lot more than it would to other parts of the conservative movement. So, it wasn’t as easy for them just to sort of switch and say, “Oh, but we’re all populists now,” when that was in some significant tension with what they thought their job was. There’s a lot of discussion in the book about National Review, and National Review had sort of regularly played this role of… I think Jonah Goldberg describes it as a Texas Ranger sort of protecting the conservative movement against invasions from outside forces. And that’s really what they… when they saw Trump, they saw that as this kind of invasion of outside forces. And again, outside forces that they have been fighting for quite some time. When you think of the battle between National Review and Breitbart, they saw this thing of sort of mainstream conservatives and the Trumpism as just a reiteration of that same battle that they had been fighting going back to the Jon Burge Society, back to Pat Buchanan. When you think about that, that in one way the conservative movement’s story as itself is a story of these recurrent purges, and that they thought it was their job. Their job was to purge the unclean elements outside of the party. Richard Reinsch: It does seem to me in retrospect… and things have changed a lot in this world in the last four years, but it was hard to have a conversation if someone just wanted to dial back on immigration. Not as a anti-immigration measure, certainly not even having racial overturns, but just have a discussion about, “Well, should we have this immigration policy that we’ve operated with for the past 50 years? Should it be rethought?” Similarly, and much more dramatically in Europe, obviously, in European countries, but also in foreign policy and wars, that it was hard to have a conversation about that. A good one. And certain magazines were formed, like The American Conservative, to try to have them. But I just wonder, too, was this group, in seeing themselves as the purgers, just too cloistered, really, from a lot of elements or a lot of kinds of people who were open and thought of themselves as conservatives in some way? Steven Teles: Yeah. I mean, I do think that… again, we’ve mentioned the Reformicons, and I do think that group again, which was very important in National Review, had been trying to get the rest of the party to pay attention to this. And again, National Review had always been more restrictionist, and it always had a significant group of people… Again, one thing is there always had been a significant group of people who were also on the much less… I don’t know what the word for it, sanitary side of the immigration debate. And those were many of the people who got purged, right? Peter Brimelow, who eventually ends up becoming the leader of the VDARE, which was a very longstanding alt-right publication, had been in National Review and had actually been a very senior and important figure in National Review. But the point is that I think this debate was happening inside the Republican party and inside of the conservative movement, and I do think this is where the very significant core of that Koch network really limited how much that could filter down to working politicians, both because of the financial and network and other kinds of roles that Koch played. There was no similar large financial coalition partner who was behind the ideas of the Reformicons, right? Their base, such as it was, was a base in the larger conservative voting population, rather than the organized and sponsored networks of the Republican party. Richard Reinsch: Also in terms of influence, I’ve heard Jonah Goldberg say… he thought basically… a large percentage of Republican voters basically were on board with what they were saying. And then what they learned throughout their primary campaign was that they weren’t. In fact, really, their ideas didn’t go that deep at all. So, did you find a lot of that sort of thinking in these interviews, that, “We were really not that deep. Yeah, I mean, we’re important to each other and to other high-caliber thinkers, but beyond that, it gets thin”? Steven Teles: Yes, I do think that’s true, and you saw that, I think, in the national security side that the one thing that Trump… again, we can have all the criticisms we want of Trump, but Trump had a kind of sixth sense for who actually held power, right? Real power. The ability to actually hurt somebody. Which, again, is that how I think Trump thinks about the world. And that there was a lot of power that was held by national security conservatives, or these public intellectuals, because people had developed highly routinized relationships between those professional service providers and the Republican party… And again, in the national security context, we talk about how Republican politicians generally thought that, just as almost a kind of hardwired matter of how you ran for office, that you would go collect up a bunch of these people, they would advise you, they would write position papers for you. And Trump saw that you didn’t actually have to do that. That these people had no way to hurt you if you didn’t do that. But I think it’s interesting that Trump so clearly thought that he had to defer to their expertise, and he went so far as to basically sign on to these lists of potential Supreme Court justices that were put together by conservative organizations, and that’s because I think he saw in social conservatives, evangelicals in particular, real power. These were core coalition partners, and if they didn’t get behind him, that they could really hurt him. And lawyers got in through their relationship with social conservatives. That was their source of real, raw power. But public intellectuals for the most part had power because people believed normatively that they were supposed to look to these sets of people for guidance, and policy, and authority. And Trump sort of saw that they didn’t really have that kind of power, that it was kind of a inner, subjective agreement that people would have a certain kind of authority, and once you decided that you didn’t believe it, then it would disappear. Now, I do think… in the book, we talk a lot about how there are consequences to not drawing on that professional authority where governance is concerned, that it just becomes very hard to staff an administration when most of your professional class is on the sidelines, and I think that’s actually had very strong consequences for the way that the administration has run itself. Richard Reinsch: Talk about the economists. Where are they in this? Steven Teles: The economists were an interesting group. We actually went kind of back and forth about whether to include them. One thing that’s worth mentioning here is that almost no economist endorsed Trump, especially those from the elite stratum of the Republican party, and that’s because maybe even more than the national security conservatives, Trump rejected root and branch their entire way of thinking about the world. That in its very sort of basic founding, the economics is based on the idea of exchange for mutual interest, a basically non-zero sum view of the world. And that’s apart from any of the technical economics or analysis that we often talk about, but that just general worldview, that the world is made up of lots of opportunities for exchange for mutual benefit, is not Trump’s worldview. Trump’s worldview was a worldview of winners and losers, right? The mistake I think the Never Trumpers made is they didn’t immediately recognize that they were now a minority part of the Republican party, and needed to organize appropriately in creating distinct, factional organizations. Instead, a lot of their organizations were more along the lines of Defending Democracy, where they thought that what they needed to do was to create a kind of unified front of classical liberals of all parties, or something. Richard Reinsch: Yeah. Steven Teles: And that extends to his view of the economy, that international trade is simply a matter of winners and losers, kind of a mercantilist theory of the world, and that was really, I think, built on his grounding in New York real estate, where it’s only business to go to manipulate the rules for your advantage, to take advantage of the people on the other side of the exchange. And most economists found that just genuinely almost like the economic equivalent of atheism. Questioning what the fundamental semi-theological view of the world. On the other hand, one thing that came up in a lot of our interviews is economists generally tend to have a very dim view of the state, whereas national security conservatives really do think the ritual elements of government matter. Economists are much more likely to think of the state as simply a giant forum for exchange, and that’s rooted in public choice theory. And so I think, as a consequence, they were less fundamentally appalled by Trump as a person, with some exceptions; I think Greg Mankiw certainly was one… but for the most part, many of them were more likely to see Trump as the reductio ad absurdum of what they believed about government already. Richard Reinsch: Yeah. So, right now, what are the institutional embodiments of Never Trumping? What lives on, what goes away, what dies? I mean, I suppose The Bulwark has become a significant online journal; Checks and Balances, but they don’t seem to be doing much; what else is out there? Steven Teles: Yeah. I do think, though, in the conclusion of the book, we raise the question of what becomes of these people, and there are a number of scenarios. I do think that it was a mistake in a way for Never Trumpers to respond organizationally the way they did. I think many of them… again, in this shock that came in the aftermath of the election, did treat Trump being elected as a kind of terrible trick that fate had played upon them, and maybe the earth could get put back on its axis in which they would be the dominant source of ideas and professional expertise for the party as a whole. And we argue that that was really a mistake, because it assumed that the Republican party could get put back together again as a more or less homogenous, fusionist party. And we say that the future, and the way the future of both parties is going to be much more deeply factional, where the parties are going to be organized into well-structured, deeply institutionalized, different factions that will negotiate with one another even as they’re competing against the other. The mistake I think the Never Trumpers made is they didn’t immediately recognize that they were now a minority part of the Republican party, and needed to organize appropriately in creating distinct, factional organizations. Instead, a lot of their organizations were more along the lines of Defending Democracy, where they thought that what they needed to do was to create a kind of unified front of classical liberals of all parties, or something. And as a consequence, very few of those factional institutions of what we call in the book the liberal conservative faction of the Republican party have been built… I do think in the aftermath, if Trump loses quite badly in 2020, there will be much more of a market for that, and I do think a lot of the funder base of the Republican party has been frozen in terms of supporting stuff like that, because many of them are worried that Trump would retaliate against them, and not without reason. So, I do think that their future is to be the intellectual vanguard of a minority but pivotal faction of the Republican party. Richard Reinsch: Steven Teles, with that, I think that’s a good way to end. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss your book, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites. Thank you. Steven Teles: Thank you for having me. Richard Reinsch: This is Richard Reinsch. You’ve been listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk, available at lawliberty.org.

Editor’s note: This podcast originally aired in May, 2019. Greg Weiner, contributing editor to Law & Liberty, and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Assumption College, returns to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln & the Politics of Prudence.

This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Mitchel Sollenberger and Mark Rozell on the use of ‘czars’ by American Presidents. Sollenberger and Rozell are authors of The President’s Czars: Undermining Congress and the Constitution. The conversation places this twentieth century presidential phenomenon in constitutional, political, and historical context. We focus on exactly what constitutes and defines a public official being labeled a czar. Of course, most importantly is the constitutional legerdemain engaged in by presidents who create and appoint czars, outside of the senate confirmation process, to exercise power in a manner that is accountable to the president alone. Sollenberger and Rozell also provide an interesting historical perspective on the use of czars by Woodrow Wilson (the first president to create a czar), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and, of course, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, where the practice has flourished like never before.

Richard Reinsch (00:18): Welcome to Liberty Law Talk, I’m Richard Reinsch. Today we’re talking with Arnold Kling about the post-COVID economy. Arnold Kling is an economist. He’s a scholar and he’s a writer, frequent public commentator on policy issues, which he approaches from an economics perspective. He writes frequently for EconLog, a sister website to Law & Liberty. He also contributes to Law & Liberty from time to time, usually on issues related to macroeconomics. He’s the author of numerous books, including The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across The Political Divides, Specialization and Trade: A Re-Introduction to Economics and also Unchecked and Unbalanced. Arnold, this essay that we’re going to discuss, and I’m glad to have you on Liberty Law Talk, this essay appeared in the summer edition of National Affairs and is a sort of an exploration of our economy during this COVID-19 pandemic and how the government is trying to interact with it. Maybe talk more about the themes you explore there. Arnold Kling (01:22): One theme is that I feel that the general macroeconomic paradigm has been breaking down for a while and it’s particularly not useful for this situation. There’s a ton of confusion out there about what’s going on. We can get into sort of what that paradigm is. Richard Reinsch (01:40): Before that though, so we got a number back yesterday, 33% GDP growth in the third quarter. Second quarter GDP had declined by, I’ve got 31.4%. What do you make of those numbers? Arnold Kling (01:56): Not much, actually. Either one, because GDP is most reliable when the nature of the economy is pretty stable and the economy is very different in this COVID environment. So if you’re trying to measure output, what you’re trying to do is add together sort of apples and oranges. And if the relative value of apples and oranges changes, then that addition process doesn’t really work so well. And that’s what’s happened, is that a lot of the so-called lost output, that means the decline in GDP, is stuff that all of a sudden people decide they don’t want. Like they don’t want to take their airplane vacations, stay in hotels. They don’t want to go to conferences. They don’t want to go to big sporting events. Even if the fears of the virus went away tomorrow, people have learned to do a lot of things differently. I think most people who have the luxury of working from home would not want to go back to commuting five days a week. I bet there will never be as many business conferences as there were a year ago. So to value that output at yesterday’s prices and say, well, it’s lost, I think it isn’t correct. And the output that’s regained, kind of a different story, that may be more or less valuable depending on the nature of that. So anyway, GDP is a tough measure. Like you’re trying to add together the value of healthcare services and manufacturing of nails and pins. It’s a difficult measure. So what I prefer to track, see how well the economy is doing overall is employment. And year over year from September to September employment is down by 10 million or about six or 7%. So that to me is an indicator of sort of how off the economy is and that’s pretty far off. That’s a major year over year decline. So rather than try to figure out what’s going on with the GDP numbers, I would use the employment numbers. I would say that the economy has really been thrown off. We have 6%, 7% fewer people working than you did a year ago. Richard Reinsch (04:07): And that kind of gets into your essay. One you talk about macroeconomic dominant paradigm. Right now you don’t think is very useful. And this can be a way to think about how the economy will evolve after the pandemic. So maybe talk more about that. Arnold Kling (04:25): Yeah. So the dominant view is to treat the whole economy as if it were a single factory, I call it the GDP factory where everyone’s producing the same thing and all of a sudden demand falls off for what our single factory produces. And then the factory hires fewer workers. That’s greatly intuitive. It’s a very intuitive picture, but it’s wrong. It’s just wrong. But the challenge with the economy isn’t getting enough demand for what the factory produces. The challenge is to allocate people properly. So you can think of a situation where you have a thousand people and you don’t know really what they’re good at and who’s best at things and which things are valued. How would you allocate them? How you decide who becomes a garbage collector, who becomes an entertainer, who becomes a farmer. The economy challenge is to figure that out. And when the economy is unstable for a while, people mostly have that figured out. Millions of people actually change jobs every month because the economy is constantly reconfiguring in response to changes in technology, other factors. So my view of what happens in a downturn is that in concept, the economy gets confused, it gets mixed up. I think of it as a Rubik’s cube where the pieces have been really shuffled and it’s going take a long time to get them back into the place. Richard Reinsch (06:00): What kind of a crisis do you think COVID poses to the economy, comparative to say the 2008 financial crisis, so to speak? Arnold Kling (06:07): The 2008 financial crisis, first of all, it’s very concentrated in the financial sector. And the economy, I think, is still in the situation where everyone is trying to run with minimal cash reserves as possible. So people wanted to buy a house with no money down, firms were heavily indebted and so you have this very fragile financial situation and then a relatively minor crisis in the broad scheme of things and the real estate industry just cascaded through because people shouldn’t have, not so much people, but businesses and especially banks didn’t have the kind of cash reserves to get through a crisis. So that’s a very different situation. People were not caught so much short of financial reserves. Although businesses, especially small businesses, could have been in better shape. But there was just a change in what people wanted to do. People did not want to be eating in restaurants next to people who might be sick. They didn’t want to go and undertake business travel. They didn’t want to go into the office. And if they didn’t go into the office, they didn’t go out to lunch near the office. So all these activities had to change. The current situation is so extreme in terms of the reconfigurations that are needed, that you need just an awful lot of entrepreneurial activity, and it’s going to take a long time for entrepreneurs to figure out how to use these extra 10 million or so people. So it’s like the Rubik’s cube got really messed up and it’s going to take a long time and a lot of turns of the cube to get it back in shape. And another complication is that you don’t know how much of that is short-term and how much that is long-term. And then if the fears of the virus went away tomorrow, a lot of these activities would come back. But even if the fears of the virus went away tomorrow, people have learned to do a lot of things differently. I think most people who have the luxury of working from home would not want to go back to commuting five days a week. Maybe two days a week, maybe three, I bet there will never be as many business conferences as there were a year ago. It’ll just be, “Oh, we don’t really need to have this conference.” Richard Reinsch (08:21): What do you make of habitation patterns? I mean, you’ve read a number of sort of anecdotal pieces. I’ve had read in The Wall Street Journal of people leaving high cost locales like San Francisco and decamping to Utah and they’re still working there. Their company is still based in Silicon Valley, but they’re now working from Utah, much lower cost of living, et cetera. Do you see that as really a huge change to the urban landscape in America? Arnold Kling (08:47): Potentially yes. But we don’t know how much that will be. I mean, people are arguing back and forth. Some business executives say working remotely doesn’t work well. Other people say it does. I think the typical worker is probably pretty happy to not be commuting and so on. Not have to deal with that. So some of these changes could be changes that would have happened anyway, that have just celebrated by… I mean, everyone just, they’re building what I call remote work capital. People learning to use Zoom and those kinds of tools. There’s a combination of short-term changes and long-term changes. And so we talked about the GDP number which showed a sharp decline that included a lot of short-term changes. And then the bounce back with some of the reversals of those severe short-term changes. But there’s still a lot of long-term changes that are going to be worked through. I mean, do we think that higher education is going to revert back to what it was a year ago? I suspect not. Richard Reinsch (09:53): Yeah. I was just going to say, you in the National Affairs essay, you talk about the way unemployment just lingered at pretty high levels after the financial crisis in 2008 and didn’t really come down until maybe seven or eight years later. And that’s sort of maybe a way to think about the patterns of specialization that you discuss. But then do you see something like that happening with sort of the post-COVID economy that unemployment remains at seven, 8% as we figure out this stuff? Arnold Kling (10:22): The question is, how do we understand what’s going on? I think it was misunderstood in 2008. Now with this old paradigm of the GDP factory. If we just somehow put enough money in people’s pockets, they’ll go to the factory and everything will be fine. Whereas it’s really a problem of figuring out where people fit in, in reconfiguring the economy. In a way it’s odd that it took so long to reconfigure the economy in 2008, or is it that things got so bad. But I think again, it was because banks and businesses were operating on very thin margins. And so a lot of people went under that wouldn’t have had to if they’d had more reserves. And also the policies that were followed were again, based on the assumption of GDP factory, if anything, what you need, in my opinion, when the economies get shaken up in this way, there’s a lot of entrepreneurial activity because people need to start new businesses and figure out new projects that employ people. What’s the best use for the people who are not working. Are there 10 million people who were working a year ago who are not working today? I mean, it’s actually, there are many different people, many people got in jobs who didn’t have them before many people lost jobs, but did have them, but on net 10 million people not working. That’s an entrepreneurial opportunity to find something useful for them to do. But that means you have to encourage entrepreneurship. And under the Obama administration, you had discouraging entrepreneurship because they kept piling on regulation. And one of the quiet things that the Trump administration has done is to loosen those regulations so that entrepreneurs could work more quickly. But the current situation is so extreme in terms of the reconfigurations that are needed, that you need just an awful lot of entrepreneurial activity, and it’s going to take a long time for entrepreneurs to figure out how to use these extra 10 million or so people. Richard Reinsch (12:27): You write about that, the government in 2008 responded with a lot of stimulus and also the Federal Reserve engaged in quantitative easing, trying to take on productive assets off of financial balance sheets and putting it on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. And then now in this crisis, a much larger stimulus package was passed over 3 trillion. And the Federal Reserve, to a lot of people’s thinking, has sort of crossed a new line and is now lending directly to businesses. Talk about that. How does that relate to sort of this macro economic thinking. Arnold Kling (13:02): It’s really odd. It’s based on this old paradigm. In the GDP factory paradigm has something called a supply shock where the factory has to shut down because it can’t get new parts or a machine breaks down or something. And even a conventional macro economist would look at what’s going on and saying that has elements of a supply shock in it. That the economy isn’t supplying the stuff that people want in the current environment. And the cost of supplying things has gone up. You could see that in terms of like schools having to reconfigure themselves and come up with new equipment to open. So there’s a supply shock, but the way the policymakers respond is entirely trying to boost demand, which is really strange. If you think about it, the government shoving money at people and then saying, but don’t go to restaurants, we’re going to close them down. Don’t go to small business, we’re going to close them down. It’s really kind of feudal. What needs to happen is there needs to be some reconfiguration. Again, if fears of the virus decline, which is probably the best thing the government could do is sort of take steps to reduce people’s fears of the virus. Then some of the other activities will come back, but then a lot of activities left to be reconfigured. Maybe people have been projecting for a long time, that education could be reconfigured, sort of some different combination of in-person and remote learning. The value of putting a thousand kids in a lecture hall just can’t be compared to giving that same information online. There may be other things that are much more valuable in person, but it’s time for higher education to figure that out. Things like business conferences, again, will be reconfigured. So the longterm changes, they’re not affected by stimulus measures, they’re affected by people in business and in these institutions figuring out how best to do things. Richard Reinsch (15:14): How would you advise, I mean, to me the stimulus was sort of this democratic process where something had to be done, something large had to be done. Because the government had shut down so many businesses, state governments, local governments. The government had to act in some way to compensate people for those losses. But how would you prescribe, if we could follow what you’re saying, what would be measures to take? Arnold Kling (15:39): Okay. The first thing that comes to mind is some kind of employment subsidy. So you’re giving employers reason to hire people. You could just have a one year or two year moratorium on the payroll tax, for example, would give employers more reason to hire people, that would be one. Richard Reinsch (16:03): Make business startups easier. Make it easier to form and start new businesses. Arnold Kling (16:09): Yeah. And any kind of deregulation on those lines and things like clearly reducing business liability for people getting COVID when they go to work or go to an event. And as long as the business isn’t sort of unreasonable and forcing people in close quarters or whatever. Richard Reinsch (16:33): We are likely though to just continue to bail out these different parts of our economy, hotels, airlines. One can see higher ed getting a bailout. We haven’t even touched a lot of the states that are way over their heads here. I see that as a possibility. Arnold Kling (16:51): And that’s something where you wish that there were some thought going into it, as opposed to just who’s got political power. But if you think about it, the political power will be, people have businesses in every congressional district. So if the real estate industry were in trouble, which is not, you would get a big bailout. But it did in 2008, things like auto dealers will probably get whatever they ask for and higher education will get whatever they ask for, you’ve got institutions everywhere. And it’s a very powerful lobby. A real challenge is what to do with small businesses. What I proposed months ago was to have a general line of credit available to small businesses that’s sort of equal, proportional to the revenues that they were getting prior to the crisis. But the longer this goes on and the longer the small businesses are down, the more unreliable they are, even if they were given very low interest loan. Again, the best subsidy there is somehow reduce the fears of virus. Richard Reinsch (18:06): If I were doing the exact opposite. At least the reporting that I see every time there’s a spike in cases that we’re told and this is of its own an alarming fact. Do you fear, I ask a question about the Federal Reserve, my understanding is that lending facility they were given by the first stimulus, they have not even remotely exhausted. Do you fear that there’s a new Federal Reserve coming into being, in relationship to businesses and the economy? Arnold Kling (18:33): Yeah. There’s the potential really for almost the end of capitalism, as we know it, and that the Fed basically has so much power over particular businesses, whether they live or die. Even if they didn’t use that politically, which they probably won’t do that as they’re not going to all of a sudden saying, well, every business owner who supports a particular political party gets credit and the other ones don’t, I don’t think they’ll go that far. But they don’t have the wisdom to make the decision that local banks do about which businesses are likely to survive and which are not. And they will be under pressure to give credit to the airlines or whatever. Even if airlines have a low probability of survival, which means there’s less credit for other businesses. But it’s very disturbing that to centralize the decision-making about credit to that extent. And what I think the Fed ends up doing is kind of re-decentralizing it in a way, but in a weird way, by hiring companies like BlackRock or whatever, to tell them what to do. So it’s the opposite of the bank with the local knowledge, making a decision, large firms at the behest of the Fed. Richard Reinsch (19:56): Elite driven financial system, truly. Arnold Kling (19:59): More like a Chinese system where you want to centralize financials. Richard Reinsch (20:05): I know there’s a monitor limit on what the Fed can do. But is there a time limit? I mean, does it just sort of keep on until they’ve exhausted that supply or? Arnold Kling (20:13): I don’t know legally, but I don’t think the history shows any instance of the Fed ever losing a power that it gained. The history is it just gets more and more power. And Congress is talking about giving it more and more mandates. A mandate to worry about climate change, for example, mandate to worry about economic inequality. And the more mandates it gets, the more power it will hold on to. You don’t gradually notice a debt crisis. You can either be in one of two states. You can either be trying to borrow or in a crisis. There’s no kind of simple warning, gradual onset. It comes suddenly or not at all. And I guess that’s a weird thing for people to get their minds around. So what’s happening now is we’re creating a situation where a crisis will be harder and harder to resolve. Richard Reinsch (20:41): Systemic racism was one I’ve heard, also at least the Fed should be concerned about systemic racism. It springs the obvious thought here, or maybe not obvious. You’ve got those in control with power, making very top-down decisions, as opposed to a more market process of people interacting based on what they know about their discrete situation in the market. And that should inform lending. And that leads to this sort of waste of capital or not the most efficient deployment of capital. And so you get a very different kind of economy too. Arnold Kling (21:14): Capitalism is an evolutionary system. There’s a lot of trial and error. I mean, that’s how we’re going to get these 10 million people employed. And there are a lot of businesses are going to start. At least half of them will fail. And over time, people will settle into jobs that are productive. When you have this centralized allocation of resources, you don’t get that evolution, you mostly get attempts to prop up what’s existing businesses. There’s a little bit of value in propping up to think that their problems are temporary. So again, if it’s a business has a problem because the fear of the virus is very high now, but the problem will go away very quickly if the fear goes away, fine. But what you’re going to get is long-term propping up of institutions and businesses that really have lost their viability for a long time. And that takes you to a bad place. Richard Reinsch (22:12): You write, towards the end of the essay, about debt about household debt and also public debt. In the midst of this crisis, you’ve got this large stimulus, there’s a call for even more stimulus. We don’t seem really to be constrained that much by thinking about what we’re doing to our already very high debt. And then we’ve got, of course, these sort of structural debts and forms of entitlements that are going to be coming due over the next few decades, and it seems we can’t even begin really to pay off. Why did we stop worrying about debt? Both the debt households carry and also public debt? Arnold Kling (22:52): Well, I haven’t stopped worrying about it. Richard Reinsch (22:54): We seem to be the only ones. Arnold Kling (22:56): Yeah. I think the reason is that we’ve survived so far. It’s sort of like the guy who jumps out of a 10-story window and halfway down says well, it’s fine so far. Government debt is a weird thing. And that as long as people are confident that the government can repay it, that the interest rate will be low and it will just be able to keep rolling over debt. Once people lose confidence, then they won’t supply credit to the government anymore. The interest rate goes up and it becomes a self-fulfilling thing where it hits the debt crisis. So my point is you don’t gradually notice a debt crisis. You can either be in one of two states. You can either be trying to borrow or in a crisis. There’s no kind of simple warning, gradual onset. It comes suddenly or not at all. And I guess that’s a weird thing for people to get their minds around. So what’s happening now is we’re creating a situation where a crisis will be harder and harder to resolve. That’s what having all this high debt GDP at high amount of unfunded future liabilities means. Is that if and when a crisis occurs, it won’t be much more severe than it would have been had we been more prudent. So it’s not that we’re gradually bringing on more of a crisis it’s that we are sort of making a bigger bomb to go off when the crisis occurs. There will be much worse devastation when a crisis occurs Richard Reinsch (24:46): You think about the debt situation America was in after World War II, which is understandable. But a younger country, a country that was about to embark upon a tremendous productive surge in its capacity. And a country that was really the one of the few countries standing at the end of the war. That was a totally different picture than where we are. Now we just seem incapable of paying this debt off. Arnold Kling (25:08): There are two main differences. One is we actually did for a little while and payed our way out of some of the debts. The second is that we really ran government surpluses for most of the years following. At the time we had two budgets, we had the official budget and we had Social Security, which was running big surpluses at the time because the Social Security system was very new. They weren’t paying out very much to people and a lot more people were paying in than paying out. But the social security surplus was not counted as part of the budget until the late 1960s. So all through the 1940s and 50s, people were looking at the budget and saying, “It’s about balance.” It’s actually a big surplus. So we actually ran surpluses for about 15 years and that paid off the debt. Like if you pay down your credit card bill, you pay down your debt. The government was doing exactly that. We’re not close to that. Now we’re including Social Security, but Social Security actually, there’s more money being paid out than coming in. There’s nothing like that where we’ve been running bigger and bigger deficits in good times and bad. Trump ran a bigger deficit even in the pre COVID economy. So yeah. No, you’re right. It’s just not at all like World War II. Richard Reinsch (26:37): We are accustomed to deficits year over year, we’re accustomed to debts and it’s been a part of American government for four decades. The speech that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave in the early 1980s, calling attention to this fact that this had become an American way of life and how odd that was. And I think now we just sort of, we just accept this. There’s no real debate going on. Arnold Kling (27:00): And part of the problem is that those of us who’ve been warning about deficits and debt have been warning about it for a long time. And it’s easy to say, well, you made the same argument 20 years ago for 20 years, we’ve run bigger deficits and nothing’s happened. It’s like, again, you’ve jumped off the 10th story, you’ve made it all the way down to the second floor now, still nothing wrong, so you just extrapolate from that. Richard Reinsch (27:28): So the bomb going off could be inflation likely that doesn’t seem to be a fear at all either. You’ve written about inflation for Law & Liberty, but I think it relates to the situation. Arnold Kling (27:40): And even that doesn’t necessarily get you completely out of the crisis because things like Social Security and Medicare, these unfunded liabilities. They go up in inflation. So my view of it is it will cause tremendous political conflict that, basically the way we resolve political conflict in recent years is just spend money. Give people wealth, now you’re going to have to take it away. You’re going to have to tell somebody that they’re not going to get paid. You’re going to have to tell a bond investor, sorry, you’re not going to get your money. Or you’re going to have to tell a Social Security recipient, you’re not going to get your money or something. Richard Reinsch (28:21): And the government would do that through inflation, would be one way? Arnold Kling (28:25): Yeah. Again, that may or may not work. But the point is the politics will be very very rough and there’ll be a lot of strife. So you want to simplify the costs and say, Oh, your children will be poor or something. That’s not really what happened. What will happen is that the government that claimed that it can satisfy everybody will now be in a situation where it’s got obligations to lots of people, but it cannot satisfy. And there’s fight over who bears the pain. It’s a big cost. Richard Reinsch (29:04): Yeah, it seems to me, it’s just thinking about this, the financial crisis of 2018 to reveal that we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing in a lot of ways, both financially our financial system, our government debt payoff system, we didn’t really restructure to take account of that. COVID seems to be revealing also these kinds of same problem, but we don’t want to heed them in any sort of accountable, responsible way. Arnold Kling (29:31): I think that there’s kind of a trade-off between running a business or an economy at high efficiency and running it in a way that’s robust. So for example, if you have a really complex supply chain, it may be very efficient, but if one little part of it breaks, then trouble. And financially, if nobody’s got any reserves, if the typical consumer run into any financial difficulty at all can’t function, or if a small business that loses revenue for a month and has to default on its loan, it’s not a robust system. That’s a very fragile system. And I think that’s the way we’ve kind of run. And after 2008, the claim was, “Oh, we’re not going to do that again. We’re not going to have this kind of fragile financial system.” So when we came right back to it, come right back to a situation where a lot of financial institutions and a lot of corporations could only operate if there was no adversity at all. So running an economy that’s not fragile, it’s a real challenge, I guess, politically, but it would mean changing the ways the laws treat debt versus equity. For example, people to run less fragile businesses with sort of lower returns on equity, but more ability to withstand the shot. Richard Reinsch (31:05): Yeah. There’s no political will to do that. Arnold Kling, thank you so much for talking with us about economics post COVID. We appreciate your time. Arnold Kling (31:14): Okay, thanks.