The Law & Liberty Podcast

Law & Liberty’s James Patterson interviews prominent authors and thinkers. A production of Liberty Fund.

Debt Politics 11/19/2024

A Higher-Ed Renaissance? 10/22/2024

Conservative Fusion 10/08/2024

Keeping It Real 09/16/2024

Back to School 09/02/2024

England’s Troubles 08/19/2024

Constitutional Tensions 08/05/2024

The SCOTUS Summer 07/15/2024

Observing American Freedom 07/01/2024

Shakespeare's Power 01/15/2024

Shakespeare's Power Eliot A. Cohen joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss his new book on Shakespeare and power politics, The Hollow Crown. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law and Liberty and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. Thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. But today, in fact, we are not left to any arbitrary leniency of a willful goddess of inspiration to get us going for this latest episode of Liberty Law Talk because our theme today is Shakespeare and politics, the stagecraft of statecraft, and even the statecraft of stagecraft when it comes to understanding the halls of power and those who would be in it. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting Fellow for the Independent Women's Forum. But importantly, for today, I am a partisan, wholly and devotedly, of all things Shakespeare. And joining me today is Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly counselor of the Department of State. His books include The Big Stick and Supreme Command. Thrice welcome, Eliot. What news on the Rialto, as we might say? Eliot Cohen: Well, Rebecca, first and foremost, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I lead a very odd life in some ways, bouncing between military matters at the moment, which is my professional expertise in one way, and then Shakespeare. It's odd, but it's nice to be back with Shakespeare because the rest of the world's pretty grim right now. Rebecca Burgess: All right. He provides us comfort and also much thought to chew on. So I thought, in this midwinter moment, when everyone is settling down in front of their fires, all sated with holiday cheer, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that all thoughtful people want, or are in need of, a good book and a good conversation. And voila, you have gifted us The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Just out recently by Basic Books. And so I thought we could use the next hour or so to talk about what Shakespeare teaches us about politics today or helps us analyze those in the halls of power. The characters within Shakespeare are always of interest, whether it's Henry V, whether it's Richard II, or whether it's Prospero. And I'm going to needle you about some you didn't put in there, including the prince from Much Ado About Nothing and that band of unserious statesmen, not statesmen yet, the princes in Love's Labour's Lost, who have to learn how to become serious statesmen. But I would love to start off by asking you: What has teaching Shakespeare and introducing Shakespeare into your syllabi at Johns Hopkins or others taught you anew about international relations, grand strategy, or politics? Eliot Cohen: Well, that's really a whole range of questions. Let me just start as a teacher. So, I'm about to become emeritus at Hopkins and shift over full-time to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I've had a 34-year career at Hopkins, which has been wonderful. The last course that I taught was for freshmen, and it was a freshman course on Shakespeare. And I have to say—it was just a wonderful way of rounding out a teaching career because what you see is how young people, who maybe have never really been exposed to this in a really serious way, they may have had an encounter with it in high school, but they're now at a stage where they can begin to appreciate it. You can see how it opens a world for them, and that's a delight. And it's, in a way, at a time when we could all use a bit of optimism—it's a source of optimism that you realize there's always going to be a new generation coming on, and they can respond to the classics very, very powerfully. So that's the Mr. Chips in me, if you will. I began ... I've always loved Shakespeare. I began thinking about teaching it after seeing Henry VIII, which is a play not often put on. There used to be some dispute about whether it was even by Shakespeare. I think most people think it is now a collaboration with another playwright named John Fletcher. And if your listeners will bear with me, I'd like to read the bit of the soliloquy that got it all started. So what's happened is Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII's chancellor, has just been deposed, and it's sudden, and it is a sudden fall from power. And here is what he says: "Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now has left me Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me." So my wife and I saw the play, and I was really struck by that soliloquy because my immediate reaction was, I know that guy. I mean, I've been in Washington now for well over three decades, and I've seen all kinds of things, and I was so taken by that, I took it ... I was meeting with a bunch of students who were all graduate students by the way, later on, and I said, "Let's talk about this." One thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of students at a professional school of international relations. And I think the thing that strikes you, as you study Shakespeare from the vantage point that I have, which includes a fair amount of government service as well, is, first, how a lot of the fundamental predicaments of political characters just don't change. He also mentioned how there are phenomena that he captures that are still very much with us. You just need to learn how to do the translation. So, if I can give just one example of that. So, one of the plays that I have always enjoyed teaching is Coriolanus, which is about the great Roman general who becomes a traitor and comes to a sticky end. But, first, he's an incredibly successful general. The problem is he has no political sense whatsoever. I've known a few generals like that, actually, in my time. Rebecca Burgess: Zero political prudence. Eliot Cohen: Right. Political prudence is not their strong suit. But there comes a point where he's just been tremendously successful in battle, and they're about to make him consul, which is the thing he really wants—it's the honor he really wants. But he has to kind of go along with the people, with the plebs. Until they ask him to show his wounds, to take off his toga and see the scars of battle, and then he detonates, and everything goes downhill from there. And I was teaching this to a group of graduate students, including about half a dozen people who'd been in very hard places and done hard things in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I said to them ... So these are people in their late twenties, early thirties, some of them. I said, "Don't feel obliged to answer this question, but has anybody ever asked to see your wounds?" And the conversation just exploded. Rebecca Burgess: I bet. Eliot Cohen: Because, yes. I mean, psychological wounds, not physical wounds. And so I think part of what Shakespeare gives us is the ability to see things that are around us, much more vividly in a way, because he's abstracting us from our current context. I could go on, but let me pause there and see where you want to take this. Rebecca Burgess: Well, in every direction, of course. But on this particular note of showing wounds, I think it is of interest, and we'll probably touch on it later. I think it's inevitable that in the rise to power, or in statesmanship, how much do you have to show the work of statesmanship to be a successful statesman? Are you supposed to make it look easy? Are you supposed to reveal your trials and tribulations? And I think there's a difference, perhaps, between Shakespeare's day and ours, between that. It seems like, today, we emphasize the personal story of the politician. But is it any different than that showing of the wounds, or showing of the interior, if you will? Eliot Cohen: Yeah, we like people to show their vulnerabilities. But, the point that Shakespeare is making with the story of Coriolanus is we've always wanted our leaders to show their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Now, we've taken it to a pathological extent. So I'm going to just give an example. So when they finally do the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, what do they do? They make a big point of having him in a wheelchair. In point of fact, FDR went to great lengths not to be photographed in a wheelchair because that was not the image he wanted to convey. To go back to Shakespeare, what you see is a lot of leaders who actually have all kinds of burdens, pathologies, and so on, and who do make considerable efforts to conceal them. Actually, Henry IV, the father of Prince Hal, who became Henry V, talks about that about how he tried to conceal himself. But the truth is, those things are always there. And I think one of the things Shakespeare shows us is, if you pay close attention, you can see what they are, which is a useful thing if you want to understand the people who are your leaders. The challenge that Shakespeare gives us, and the more I've read Shakespeare, and reflected on the more kind of diabolically cunning I think he is, he just gives you frequently little glimpses into a personality. And if you're not paying a lot of attention, you won't notice, which is kind of what the personality wanted. But what Shakespeare is going to do is say, okay, I will tell you the things you need to know, but you've got to watch carefully. And that's one of the things that Shakespeare can teach the student of politics, is the art of close observation. Rebecca Burgess: Well, so you already quoted Cardinal Wolsey's beautiful speech, it is so powerful. And it is from that point of vulnerability, a man who has realized that power is no longer in his grasp. Is this where we start to study power and those in power, from their vulnerabilities or the vulnerabilities inherent, or is it just one of many paths? Does it open up something, or are we missing something if we start from the standpoint of vulnerability? Eliot Cohen: I don't think that's where you start. This is Cardinal Wolsey at the end of his career, not at the beginning of his career. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Eliot Cohen: No, I think you look at all kinds of other things if you want to see how people actually get into the business of acquiring powers. The way I organized the book is I didn't go play-by-play. I began with one large section on how people get power, how they use power, and then, finally, how they lose it. Again, one of the things that's a bit sick about our current world, is that is where we want to start, with people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Not that you shouldn't pay attention to them, you should, but first you want to see, I think, what is it that makes them effective? What is it that makes them succeed? I mean, if you take Prince Hal, for example, who becomes Henry V ... Of whom, by the way, I have a very dark view, that is of King Henry V. Rebecca Burgess: You do. Eliot Cohen: A very dark view of this is Henry V, the Shakespearean character. The real Henry V, I couldn't care less. But you see him kind of having a glorious old time, hanging around with a bunch of lowlifes in the east cheap, in what's probably a brothel. And it's comic, and it's good fun. And here, again, you get to Shakespeare, the close observer. Actually, this is one of the ways in which Prince Hal is learning how to be a king, and that becomes clear, I think, later on in the play. But, again, you have to pay close attention if you want to see how this is going to feed into his ability to inspire people, to manipulate people, which he does a lot, and to rule. Rebecca Burgess: Right. The setting is, in fact, quite important for Shakespeare. I know you spend a little bit of time talking about how important, when you're talking to those who actually put on Shakespeare plays, they say that figuring out the staging, figuring out the costuming, sometimes is where they start from. It's not the secondary consideration, it is where they start from. For Shakespeare, the opening scene, the first scene, and the second scene of the first act, in fact, are always of prime importance. In Henry IV, it is so well done because you start in the halls of power before the king, and it's the exact same speech, the exact same dynamics that are in scene two with Prince Hal in the tavern. And so Shakespeare is telling you, here is politics high and low, here is England, for Prince Hal to figure out how to govern and rule England. He's going to have to figure out how to understand both of these on their own and how to tie them together. And I've always thought, gosh, darn it, that's so brilliant, how can we not do that, too? Eliot Cohen: Well, you're absolutely right. You always need to pay attention to how Shakespeare sets the stage initially. It's also very important, I think, to pay attention to the very end, where he'll occasionally drop this little thing on you, where, if you pay close attention, you go, aha. So at the end of Henry V, for example ... Throughout you've had the chorus, who is cheering Henry the V on and saying, "Oh, how can we possibly capture this guy's greatness in just this little theater of ours here, and touch of Harry in the night," all that stuff. And at the very end, the chorus says, "Thanks for being here. By the way, he died young, and his son was an infant, and all his conquests kind of fell apart. And we've talked about that before. See you later." It's just a couple of lines, but if you look at the end of that, of Henry V's story, you go, listen, why does Shakespeare put that in there? Why does he have to end on a two-line downer? And I think the reason is he's explaining a lot of the stuff that went before. One of the things that I talk about, I use, there's a technical term for it, it's what the Greeks called anagnorisis, where you suddenly realize the truth of your situation. That's what happened to Wolsey there, where he goes, I've been swimming on a sea of glory, and, poof, it's all gone. It happens to individuals, but it can happen to us as readers of Shakespeare and people who observe Shakespeare. I think if we read it closely enough, where you go, "Oh, oh, that's what's going on." But just to connect it to the real world of politics, that's very important too. I think one of the problems that we have when we talk about foreign policy, military affairs, and so on, is a lack of close attention to what's going on right before our eyes frequently. Governments, in particular, fall prey to this, and I've seen it firsthand, but I've also seen it in other places as well. You get caught up in government talking to itself, you get caught up in highly classified this and that, and you forget to say, "Whoa, that's right in front of me, that actually means something," and to pause and reflect on what it means. Rebecca Burgess: Right. And there's a timing aspect to that as well, right? And I wonder sometimes whether the pace of government in our daily life is just so frenetic now that we ... Unless someone is astute enough to carve out some time for themselves for reflection, the reflection doesn't happen. And the consequences of that, of course, as you just mentioned, we see all the time. But I've wondered about that, especially recently, since my own time in coming to DC, which has not been as glorious as yours, I'm still laboring in the analytic vineyard ... Eliot Cohen: It's still early yet. I'm towards the tail end, you're at the beginning. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Right, right. And we'll talk about that arc of power soon, so you can tell me the pitfalls to avoid. But I've wondered: Have we taken away the ability for our leaders, for ourselves, to have that moment of anagnorisis, of actually understanding the situation in front of us? Barring some huge kind of cataclysmic changing of the guard, which happened with Putin invading Russia, and then, of course, all the events on October 7th with Hamas and Israel. But should it really take something so profoundly catalytic for us to have these moments of, oh, the real world actually has changed from how we have been talking about it? Eliot Cohen: So, to get very serious for a moment, I just came back a week ago from eight days in Israel, where I'd led a small military and national security delegation to meet with a lot of people there high up. And they've just gone through this shattering experience. And, of course, one of the things ... I'm actually writing a piece about this for The Atlantic. One of the problems is that for the people at the very top they don't actually have time to process any of that. And the surge of emotions is such that you can't really expect them to process it. No, I think it's a very large problem. One thing I've always been struck by, and I made a bit of a study of some of the decision-making during the Second World War, it made a big difference that Churchill, when he would go to meet Roosevelt, would sail across the Atlantic, which meant that he would have three or four days where he wasn't checking emails, and he could think things through. And I think wise executives do try to carve out that time. I was, for my sins, I was a dean for a number of years at Hopkins. And one of the things that I learned, I said, I wanted to get an executive coach because the situation we were in was pretty difficult, and I wanted to get all the help I could get. She was a wonderful teacher and is now just a good friend. But that was one of the things she always emphasized, you've got to figure out a way to give yourself blocks of time where all you do is you think. And that's when I began taking really long walks every day and without headphones on, without listening to music, just long, long walks and I think it's a critical thing. And I do think that we've lost it in another way. I think a lot of senior political and military leaders don't have the time to immerse themselves in Shakespeare…I don't know, J. R. R. Tolkien, I mean something that is deep and fascinating other than what their day-to-day lives are like, and I think they suffer for it. Rebecca Burgess: So, to turn to the actual contents of your book, I love the taxonomy of power that you give, so essentially, your theme is power and the arc of power, and there's almost a little bit of a Homeric cataloging of ships in how you go about in acquiring power and exercising power and losing power. So, how does one acquire power? For Shakespeare, of course, there are three different ways, and you give us those. Eliot Cohen: So, the easiest way is inheritance. Now, of course, a lot of the plays that I use are primarily the histories, one or two of the tragedies, some of the Roman plays, but preeminently the history plays. And you might say, "Well, okay, fine, if you're living in a monarchy, of course, the crown prince inherits, but what relevance does that have to us?" Well, actually, it has a lot of relevance because if you stretch the concept of inheritance a bit, that's where it's not the case that you've... Let's take a particularly pointed case right now. If you become the president of Harvard, it's not because you've necessarily worked your way to the top in a difficult competitive environment. You've been picked and you enter into it. Now, in the past,... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/29457683

The First Empire 12/18/2023

The First Empire Eckart Frahm joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient Middle East and his recent book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: “When time was young and world in infancy, man did not strive proudly for sovereignty. But each one thought his petty rule was high if of his house he held the monarchy. This was the golden age. But after came the boisterous son of Chus, grandchild to Ham, that mighty hunter, who in his strong toils, both beasts and men, subjected to his spoils. The strong foundation of proud Babel laid Erech, Accad, and Culneh also made. These were his first, all stood in Shinar land. From thence, he went Assyria to command. And mighty Nineveh, he there begun, not finished till he his race had run.” Those are the opening lines from Anne Bradstreet's lengthy first of four poems on the earliest great empires called The Four Monarchies. She was no respecter for word economy. Her title runs The Assyrian being the first beginning under Nimrod, 131 years after the flood. A mouthful. Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World poet. She emigrated to Salem from England in 1630, one of a group of Puritan pilgrims, just as she arguably introduced Assyria to the New World. So today, we'll be steeped both in novelties and in the ancientness of things, also via Assyria, the world's first empire, being our main topic of conversation. And with that, welcome to a new episode of Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. Joining me today is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Previously, Frahm was a research assistant and assistant professor of Assyriology at Heidelberg. He has also worked on cuneiform tablets in the British Museum in London and in the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, among many other museums and other collections. Professor Frahm, so many welcomes. It's truly splendid to have you join us today. Eckart Frahm: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor. Rebecca Burgess: This spring you released a new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire published by Basic Books. In an instance, I think of the Amazon algorithms getting things right. I chanced upon your book because, for my own research on empire, I'd been ordering probably a library's worth of books on Persia, Greece, and Rome. Also on Egypt by German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. And thankfully or coincidentally, you begin your account of the rise and fall of Assyria with a very dramatic story of a bloody encounter between Assyria and Egypt during the reign of Esarhaddon that results in the capture of the Egyptian crown prince, much of the royal harem, and with enormous amounts of booty being taken back to Nineveh, then Assyria's capital on the Tigris River in Northeastern Iraq. Before me, cities, behind me, ruins is the inscription that encapsulates this classic imperialist behavior, rather reminds me of the Front Toward the Enemy warning on Claymore mines. But from that story, you weave a very richly textured account of Assyria as the world's first empire whose legacy in fact is the idea and form of empire, however protean you reveal that form historically to be. And it seems to me that in putting archeological artifacts, cuneiform text, and historical scholarship in conversation with Persian, Greek, Roman, and importantly biblical texts and attitudes, you set out to do at least three things with your book. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong later. The first is to brush away the cobwebs of history from the picture of who and what Assyria was. The second to create an audience for the centuries-long silent voices of Assyrians themselves, who we can now hear in their own words. I thought that was a very lovely image that you opened with of these long silent voices suddenly being able to speak again. And third, to reveal precisely that Assyrian legacy to the world of empire and the surprising modernity, if you will, of what's been called the first half test of the history and the relevance of that age to our own pandemic, great power competition age. As you weave in so much of this cultural history, I hope our conversation can touch on, not just the politics, but the deep cultural echoes that have concealed as much as revealed Assyria throughout history, from Herodotus to Shakespeare, Rossini, and Lord Byron, to perhaps the particular staging of Adolf Hitler's suicide with his wife and dog. And to Saddam's very kitschy, anonymously published 2000 romance novels inspired by Assyrian warriors and queens. And with that, the almost beginning. What is the surprising anti-imperial origin story of Assyria as you put it? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. When you hear of Assyria and you know a little bit about it, then you usually think of Assyria as this great imperial power, this militaristic, geopolitical entity, and that is what it will eventually become. But it is indeed quite remarkable that initially, Assyria is almost the opposite of an imperial state. In fact, there is no Assyria at the very beginning. Assyrian identity starts off at the little sort of town on the Tigris, some 60 miles or so south of the modern city of Mosul, the city of Ashur from which Assyria of course eventually gets its name. This is also the name of the Assyrian state god worshiped there. And it really is just a small place initially in the third millennium, largely dominated by southern powers. Remember we are here in Ancient Mesopotamia where writing, and cities, and all these things were for the first time invented in a way. But this happened primarily in the south, in Southern Iraq, in places such as Uruk, or Ur, and so on. And during much of the third millennium, the city of Ashur was probably largely dominated by those southern powers. Actually, we don't have particularly good evidence for this time. But when for the first time sources allow us to reconstruct life at Ashur, and Ashur, so to speak, really enters the stage of history. It is a small city that doesn't receive its wealth from war, but instead from trade, from long-distance trade. So this is something quite striking. While in the south, a number of city-states and territorial states seem to be engaged in almost perpetual warfare with each other, Ashur stays away from the fray. And instead, merchants from the city of Ashur engaged in long-distance trade, mostly trading tin from the East, and textiles from the South, and also made in Ashur itself by women from the city trading this for silver in Anatolia. We have a lot of evidence for that from a place named Kanesh in Central Anatolia, some 24,000 clay tablets. This is the type of document on which much of the reconstruction of Assyrian history actually rests. They are almost indestructible. Fortunately, these people didn't write on paper, papyrus, or parchment, which wouldn't have been preserved, but on clay. So we have these texts on there. And what these texts reveal about the city of Ashur is interesting that at this time, this is a city not ruled by powerful kings, but rather one which has something kind of akin to a mixed constitution in the way Polybius has described it for Ancient Rome that is, you do have a kind of dynasty of hereditary rulers. But rulers isn't even the right word. And these people weren't allowed to be called kings, and their power was very much restricted. So they were allowed to put their names on texts, temples, and things like that. But there wasn't even a palace. They didn't even live in a palace. There wasn't a royal court or anything. And they shared the little power they had with two additional institutions. One was the city assembly, kind of a popular assembly of free male citizens. So of course, Ashur too included women and slaves. Probably not that many slaves, but still there were slaves, who were not part of this. But nonetheless, I mean, an almost democratic institution that would, for instance, deal with legal matters. And there was also the institution of the so-called Limmu, as it is called in Assyria and it's often translated as Eponym. On one hand, this was the individual after whom individual years were named. And that indicates that this Limmu was in office only for one single year. He was selected by lot, probably from the leading families of Ashur, certain aristocratic dimension to it. This idea of choosing politicians througha lot has actually just saying that in the sidelines received some interest by modern political scientists who are not particularly enchanted with the quality of the political class these days, and believe that we too might profit from such a process. Anyway, they do this. So they have these eponyms in place who are in charge of the city hall, where taxes are determined, rates and measures, and things like that. So these two institutions compete with the institution of the ruler, was not called a king. So it's actually altogether a political situation that seems really remarkably modern in many regards. Rebecca Burgess: It seems more accurate then to say that Ashur was a city-state, and one that predated Greece. So perhaps Herodotus is not quite correct or needs a correction, an outside correction when he, in his account, rather binary account of Greece where everything is liberal, and free, and the barbarian other, which is very intriguing. But also on that note, I was struck by your invocation or your quote of an inscription from a stela that was erected near the Step Gate, a structure in Ashur where justice was administered, precisely about this question of justice and royal rule. So the quote is, "May justice prevail in my city. Ashur is king. Erishum is Ashur's steward. Ashur is a swamp that cannot be traversed, ground that cannot be trodden upon, canals that cannot be crossed. He who tells a lie on the Step Gate, the demon of the ruins will smash his head like a pot that breaks." It's very direct and very dramatic. But there seems to be a direct linkage of the divine royal power and justice and even nature, the physical world of nature. So you touched on this a little bit. What can be pieced together of the dominant understanding of justice in relation to the ordering of society at Ashur, and everything from the religious cult of Ashur to the lack of palaces that you mentioned? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I mean, this being a Law & Liberty podcast, it's of course absolutely right for you to ask the question about law and legal practices. And yes, you're right. There's this text that talks about law being administered at the so-called Step Gate, which is near a place where later the ziggurat, the temple tower would be located. At this time, probably it wasn't yet there, and where this popular assembly would actually come together and deal with these matters. It was not something that was solely handled by a very small group of elite members, but it was really all these free individuals, apparently. They were in charge of administering law. And it seems, based again on documents from Kanesh, as though in this location near the Step Gate, there were a number of stelæ inscribed with actual law. We haven't found those. So altogether because all these early, well, layers are very deep down. The site of Ashur haven't really been reached by archeologists. Most of this is known from this other place on Kanesh. But what we learned there is that those stelæ included laws such as, for instance, that no one, no merchant in Ashur was supposed, on punishment of death actually, to sell gold to anyone from Babylonia or from the Hurrians, who lived around the city of Ashur. So this sort of economic protectionism in place, and gold was apparently considered primarily a medium for storing wealth rather than for exchange. Exchange was actually handled through silver. So silver was the money of the ancient that he is including. The money in this earlier Assyrian history. So this is just one example of those laws inscribed on those stelæ. Now, the people of Ashur were not the first to have the written law. Written law is actually an invention from Ancient Mesopotamia, and it started not that much earlier. So these laws would be from the 13th century, perhaps BCE. The earliest written law that we actually have documented is from Southern Mesopotamia, from the reign of a king by the name of Ur-Nammu, whose law code, the Ur-Nammu Law Code is from roughly 2090 or so. And we see already with that law code, and then later with famous law codes, such as the Laws of Hammurabi, which are the most well-known laws from Ancient Mesopotamia, that these laws often have some monumental dimension. So the Hammurabi Laws, some of your listeners may know that they are primarily known from a large stele with an image of Hammurabi receiving insignias of power from the Sun God, a stele that is now in the Louvre in Paris. And there are some 300 laws inscribed on it. So what the people of Ashur have in place with this law is nothing that they invented where they came up from it first, but they too participate in this legal discourse. And this law is guaranteed in a way. This is what this inscription that you mentioned shows. It's guaranteed and execution is supervised, well, by the God Ashur. And this inscription says something else, namely that Ashur is the actual king. I mentioned that the hereditary rulers of Ashur were not allowed to use the title king. That title of king is reserved for the God Ashur. So with that, in addition to these earthly dimensions of governance in Ashur, you also have a divine dimension. There's an almost theocratic element to it. And to a certain extent, we might be able to talk about it a little later. This conception of Ashur being the actual king of Assyria remains in place. You also quoted these strange statements about him being a swamp that cannot be traversed. So in very nature, that's very unusual for Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, otherwise, the gods have anthropomorphic dimensions. They behave and look like human beings. They participate in all sorts of events, and wars, and have families. Ashur does not really. Eventually, he gets these things from other gods, but he's very malleable. He's in a way a god without qualities almost. I mean, that's actually quite convenient as Ashur undergoes some major transformations over time. The god too undergoes these transformations and becomes a more warrior-like deity. Initially, it isn't that at all. But when Ashur becomes a more belligerent state, then the God Ashur too assumes the qualities of a warrior god, and so on. Rebecca Burgess: Well, speaking of those transformations and that gravitation towards more belligerence. So there's around the 14th century BCE, which you identify as the proper birth of Assyria. You note how Assyria kind of abandons its more peaceful mercantile ways and embraces policy of military expansion. What transformations are occurring internally in Assyrian political and social institutions that are prompting this? And who are those peoples and kingdoms that Assyria is now seeking to dominate? Eckart Frahm: Yeah, the big difference really is that now in the 14th century, you suddenly actually do have a king, and I would say, of Assyria, because this is now actually becoming a territorial state. But first and foremost, there is now a king. There's an individual who bears that title, which in Assyrian, Babylonian as well is Shahu. And the first for whom this title is attested is a king by the name of Ashur-uballit, who was probably instrumental in the transformation Assyria undergoes during this time. Unfortunately, this happens in the wake of, well, a kind of dark age. Dark, primarily because we do not have too many sources. And so, it's actually somewhat difficult to establish exactly what prompts this very significant change that takes place. But we do see the outcome. And the outcome is that there is now this king. We actually have fragments of a coronation ritual from a little later, but probably already in place, at least in similar form in the 14th century. And in this coronation ritual, you still have this notion of theocracy. There still is the priest shouting to everyone during the coronation of the king, "Ashur is king. Ashur is king." Twice, actually. So there's this notion that Ashur remains king. But then, there is also now a kind of earthly counterpart. And that is, well, the king of Ashur at this point. I mean, this Ashur is king is reminiscent of medieval coronation chants such as, "Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!" Christ is victorious, he rules, he governs. But there too, of course, it's in the context of a king being put into office. And that's the case here as well. And the god through the priest then asks the king of Assyria to expand his land. So Rapesh Matka is the Assyrian. So there is a divine command to the Assyrian king in this coronation ritual to expand the territory of Assyria. So a kind of proto-imperial mission is expressed here for the first time. And that is what these kings from this period onwards actually do. Very much in contrast to the so-called Old Assyrian period about which I've talked before. They now go on campaign almost on an annual basis. And the King, sort of starting in the 14th century, expanded primarily first into the North and the East, so that cities, such as Nineveh and Arbela, which later on would become emblematic urban centers of Assyria, were included in this territory state. This is kind of the core area of Assyria. It's marked by this triangle of cities with Ashur in the south. Nineveh, opposite of the modern city of Mosul in the north. And in the east, the city of Arbela, which is modern Erbil in Eastern Iraq. But then, they also expanded to the West. So towards the Levant, especially towards a region known as the Khabur Triangle, a very fertile area and a tributary of the Euphrates River, where they sort of create a second center of power, thereby really becoming, I mean, one of the major players, political players of this time. And they also became interested in the South. They engaged in numerous wars with the Babylonians. This is another sort of light motif of Assyrian history, this preoccupation with Southern Babylonia. The Assyrians acknowledged they received a lot of their culture and their religion from there. The relationships are very much like that between Rome and Greece in this, and also in other ways. But they also want to kind of politically dominate Babylonians. The Babylonians are not too keen on that. So there's the beginning during this period of a constant set of conflicts that are very charged because of the emotional nature of the relationship between these two places. So all these things essentially happen now and remain major features of Assyrian foreign politics for centuries to come. Rebecca Burgess: And it seems like as Assyria is barreling towards empire, one of these classic problems shows up, which is suddenly you have military leaders and heroes who can take away from the authority and rule of the king. So how does Assyria, one, how do they keep their military commanders and heroes in check? And how do they keep informed about the security threats on their perimeter? What kind of storylines should we be having in mind as we're seeing the king seemingly lose some power in regards to some powerful court officials as they're on the brink of empire? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. We see that, for the first time, this conflict between the king as the absolute ruler and someone competing with him for power. Well, you see it... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/29076978

A Sick Joke 12/04/2023

A Sick Joke Comedy writer Graham Linehan joins host Helen Dale to talk about cancel culture, comedy, and his new book Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Helen Dale: My name is Helen Dale, and I’m Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. With me today is Graham Linehan. Graham is the writer and creator of multiple beloved British sitcoms, most famously Father Ted and The IT Crowd. With so many star-studded successes to his name and multiple BAFTAs—including a coveted lifetime achievement award—one would assume his place in the nation’s comedy firmament would be assured. Well, it was—until it wasn’t. Graham Linehan was one of the first prominent people in the UK to raise concerns about gender identity ideology (in 2018). He did so using the only tool available to him at the time, a Twitter account with 900,000 followers. Over the next five years, Graham’s career was disassembled. Not only was he abandoned in his hour of need by people he’d worked with for decades and known for longer, but current and future projects were also cancelled, including a completed West End musical based on Father Ted. Given his literary gifts, he’s fought back with a book, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, released last month in the UK and coming to US shores soon. Tough Crowd is both a wise and amusing guide to writing funny things for television and an account of the madness that has overrun the arts and universities throughout the developed world in the last two decades. Thank you for joining us, Graham. Graham Linehan: Thank you for asking me. Helen Dale: You were—until a Comedy Unleashed show featuring you at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was also cancelled—probably the most cancelled major figure in the UK. All the 2023 Fringe did was make your cancellation into a national scandal. You talk about the wider cancellation in Tough Crowd, but for obvious reasons, you don’t discuss what happened at this year’s Fringe. What’s it like to be cancelled on this scale? Graham Linehan: Well, it’s a destabilising thing for a comedy writer because when you’re a comedy writer, you want to be an observer of human frailty and confusion and all the other comically negative things about humanity. And so when you’re in my position, I’m now no longer outside things looking in. I am at the centre of a story. I am a figure who is incredibly divisive and scandal-ridden, and it makes even thinking about comedy somewhat difficult. I mean, in terms of coming up with a new idea or a new show—for the last five years, six years, I’ve been basically firefighting trying to protect my reputation, trying to rebuild it—and you can’t really write comedy when you’re in that kind of state. You’re in a kind of constant fight or flight mode. So yeah, it’s a very destabilising and upsetting place to be, but I just have to live with it now. Helen Dale: Has there been any sense since the book came out…It’s only been out for a few weeks now, three weeks now. Has there been any sense of... Are more people starting to talk to you now, apart from the sort of obvious media and publicity around Tough Crowd being released? Graham Linehan: Well, it’s an interesting thing because when you bring out a book—and this was actually part of my plan—I did think of it as a two-stage plan. The first stage was the book, but also the interviews that followed it because there were lots of things I couldn’t put in the book because they didn’t fit thematically to each chapter or it was simply too much information. And I thought I would use the interviews to fill in the rest of it for people. But it’s an interesting thing. I get two types of interviews. The first is what I’m getting here, which is being interviewed by people who know the issue, who understand the points, who understand what’s happened to me. And the second is what you might call the more mainstream interviews on TV and national TV over here—in the national press—which is usually with people who sort of understand the issue, but really are just kind of reporting on my Wikipedia page rather than anything that’s actually true about me. So far, it’s been okay. Just before Edinburgh, I was ambushed on TalkTV by someone who simply did not understand the issue in the slightest and was responding to the portrait that’s been painted of me by others in our profession. But yesterday I had an interesting one. I appeared on Times Radio, and even though the interviewer was taking the usual tack—which is making me apologise for either things that I didn’t do or things that have been misreported—and for once, he actually gave me a chance to respond. So, I was able to put the points as clearly as I could, and I’m hoping that will just go on. Helen Dale: Well, that’s something at least. I should just note here that some of the questions in this show were provided by subscribers to Liberty Law Talk and to my Substack. I did this last time, in my previous podcast, and it was very successful—that podcast was with Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater. And so I’ve decided to do it again. Subscriber questions are of course mixed in with my questions, and you don’t necessarily know which ones are which. However, this question is from a subscriber. Do you think most other comedians in the industry who didn’t support you are scared to speak up, or do you think they’re true believers? Graham Linehan: It’s a very good question. It’s really hard to know. What I find extraordinary is that even people I was extremely close to don’t seem to understand the issue. I heard recently that Adam Buxton—who was a very close friend of mine when I lived in Norwich, and our families hung out with each other—and you would think someone so close would make a special effort to find out exactly what the issues were and to approach them in a serious way. But no, he’s platforming people who engaged in harassment against me, and he’s allowing people on this show to smear figures like Posie Parker. So I think there’s... What you might call it is a kind of protective ignorance. It’s like, I saw an interesting thing today: two people interviewed who were at a Hamas march, and were kind of pretending they didn’t know about the October 7th attacks. And I think it’s a similar thing going on here. They don’t know about this stuff, but they deliberately don’t know about it because knowing about it to the extent that they would have to do what I do and protest about it means they might lose their careers. So it’s a kind of a faux ignorance, if that makes sense. Helen Dale: It’s a very interesting take on the idea of pluralistic ignorance or preference falsification. It’s like people are participating in those willingly. Graham Linehan: Yes, I’ve never heard those terms, but I will start using them because they sound like exactly what I’m talking about. Helen Dale: Preference falsification is when everybody says that they believe a thing, but the majority of people saying it don’t actually believe it, and then there are revealed preferences—where what they actually believe tends to be shown at the ballot box. So, they vote in a different way from what they say. Graham Linehan: Yes, that’s one thing I’ve been doing for the last five or six years is trying to find a way that people can safely make their complaints or their worries known. But it’s very difficult in this world where we’re always on a... I mean, that was one of the other reasons why the theme of audiences goes through my book. I think one of the things we did that we didn’t realise we were doing was, we decided to step on a stage. The internet is a stage—and we all decided without really knowing what we were deciding to do—to play out our lives to a public-facing audience. Once these movements started to make themselves known—the gender identity movement is obviously the one I’m fighting—but there are many others out there. Everyone realised, I think simultaneously, that it’s a little bit difficult to be a political person if you’re on a stage. You can suddenly have tomatoes or rotten fruit thrown at you. And I think it’s made, and this sort of goes back to the earlier question, I think it’s made many people very, very shy. Shy in a way that’s actually harmful, shy in a way that means that they can... One of the things I put in the book is that I always thought the Holocaust, another Holocaust, would be impossible in a connected world because you wouldn’t be able to build the concentration camps, you wouldn’t be able to commit atrocities because too many eyes were on you. And instead of that, what we have is a situation where the people committing the atrocities are filming it themselves. It’s like I heard an interesting thing about CCTV cameras in crime-ridden areas. Apparently, they had a very good short-term effect. The cameras would go up, and the crime would just disappear. But then, after a few weeks, when everyone got used to them, these places would simply resume their old kind of character. And it’s just so strange. I just think that the effect of everybody having a camera, everybody being able to spy on everyone else, has been not to suppress bad behaviour, but to amplify it. And my rosy view of what the internet would bring was completely decimated. Helen Dale: A lot of Tough Crowd is devoted to Twitter, or TwitterX as it appears to be now, and how it ensnared you. And I found it a fascinating part of the book I must say. I’ve since heard you talk about—and you’ve touched on it here—how social media produces a type of digital panopticon. I’d be grateful if you could outline some of your thinking on this here. What has this done to us and how is it playing out? Graham Linehan: Well, I think the main thing it’s done is it has turned us all into Stasi operatives. I’ve been reading a lot about the Stasi recently, and I believe it was something like one in four or one in five people in East Germany were Stasi members. So that kind of speaks to a... What’s the word? People seem to be predisposed to spying on neighbours. People seem to be predisposed to being an informer, being an operative, being a kind of member of the religious police, you might say. Unfortunately, Twitter has just allowed us all to take this role to report on our neighbours and friends for thinking the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and making the wrong joke. It’s one reason why I think comedy is in a really bad place at the moment. There’s a famous quote by a comedian over here who said, “the joke that will destroy my life is already out there.” And what that means is that, let’s say this comedian enters into a contentious debate. It can be about anything, not even as contentious as Israel, Palestine, or feminism. It could be about football. Well, the enemies of that person will be able to simply do a search through that person’s timeline to find a tweet that uses a forbidden word or says a forbidden thing. And again, this forbidden thing might not have been forbidden at the time the person wrote it. It’s just forbidden now. And so what you have, again, sorry to use all these references, but there’s a quote I think by Cardinal Richelieu who said something along the lines of, "give me three letters by any man and I will find enough to condemn him." Which means that it’s the interpretation that’s the killer. What you say is one thing, but the interpretation applied to it can be used to destroy you at any time. And unfortunately, comedians are particularly susceptible to this because their whole existence, their job depends on them being able to walk a very fine line between what’s acceptable to say and what’s not acceptable to say. So again, if there’s an enemy of this particular comedian out there, he has the power now to destroy that man’s or woman’s life. So that’s what I mean by panopticon. Helen Dale: What do you think will happen to British comedy in the future, near or far? Do you see any future where there is diversity of thought allowed in the wider industry? Graham Linehan: I think so because I think in the end, people will follow the money. I believe that Disney in the States, it’s now very easy to... There are no queues, there are no long queues at Disney. That might’ve changed recently, but this was the last time I checked at Disney World because people are so disgusted by the propaganda that Disney is pumping out. And you can see as well the popularity of shows like South Park in their recent attacks on Kathleen Kennedy that have just really struck a chord. I think Cartman has the line—which he plays Kathleen Kennedy in it—and he says the line, "Put a chicken in it and make it lame." And it’s a very funny way of looking at what’s going on. There’s this concentration on things that do not make for good stories, forced diversity, again—the lack of diversity of thought. These things don’t resonate with audiences who are themselves diverse. When you get a diverse audience, they’re not looking to see diversity. They’re looking to see things that connect them to a shared humanity. And these stories have been told down through the years for centuries. And yeah, sure, some of them are out of date and some of them have creaky opinions and so on. But replacing those creaky opinions with modern-day creaky opinions, it’s no substitute. So I think that eventually people will... I think what you’ll find is that companies like Netflix, companies like Disney, they will suddenly get sick of losing money and their shareholders will take over. And I think at that time, you’ll find people actually actively seeking out comedy that is challenging and confrontational and exciting. Helen Dale: I’ve heard you comment to the effect that writing Tough Crowd made you feel like a comedian again. Do you have any comedy work or more creative work in the pipeline? And if so, how can we support those projects beyond buying the book of course? Graham Linehan: Ooh, that’s a good question. I think, no, you know what? I think buying the book is really the only thing I need at the moment, because what I need to do, what I really need is to feel a sense of safety in terms of my financial situation. It’s really hard to write comedy when you’re worried about where the money is coming from. So if the book kind of takes off, and if people realise that it’s not just me whining about being cancelled, there’s a lot of stuff in there about how to write comedy and comic observations in themselves. If that does well, then once I feel that the rubber hits the road on the sales, I’ll be able to just start thinking about the next project. But at the moment, my whole existence is spent trying to overcome the devices that are in place to stop the book from selling. For instance, WHSmith isn’t stocking it at the moment, which is the big retailer over here for the… Helen Dale: Are you in Waterstones? Graham Linehan: We are in Waterstones, and with Waterstones, it’s a shop-by-shop basis. From what I’ve been told, every shop is the subject of a power struggle with the kind of people who would be offended by the book and the kind of people who just love books and want to sell them. So it’s up to individual shops, whether they hide it in the stockroom or put it out on display. But yeah, it’s a tough one. But I have- Helen Dale: Have WHSmith even told you why they’re not stocking it? Graham Linehan: They’re even refusing to answer emails. Helen Dale: Oh, wonderful. Graham Linehan: Yeah. But we were expecting things like that. And I think also they would be very clever just to try and not have any controversy about it and keep it quietly hidden because these types of things, when they try and suppress a book, it’s a bit like, I don’t know if you remember the episode, but it was an episode of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal protested outside of a cinema, and all they did was drove people to go and see the film. And I think these activists within every organisation are beginning to get wise to that phenomenon. And quiet cancellation is the order of the day. So yeah, I’m just trying to fight that and trying to raise awareness of the book as best I can. Helen Dale: In Tough Crowd, you observe at one point that you love audiences, and this is a direct quotation for listeners. “They’re smart, they keep you on your toes. The reason so much content is so bad at the moment is because the audience is being edged out of the relationship.” I know what you mean, and I think Liberty Law Talk listeners will know as well, but what does this look like? Because I’m assuming your comedic antennae must start to twitch when it starts. Graham Linehan: Well, it kind of speaks back to what I was saying earlier. It just looks like a box ticking. When you see a cast that’s made up of one black person, one white person, one Asian person, my antennas start to go up that I’m being lied to. And I feel like for me, a show like The Wire is a much more honest and kind of meaningful attempt to get black faces and black folks’ voices on screen because it speaks to a world that’s hidden, that’s very uniform and it feels truthful in the same way Reservoir Dogs feels truthful. It’s like basically five or six white men on screen the whole time, but it feels authentic. It does not feel like these guys would be feminists or would be great kind of battlers for race relations. They’re just what they are. And I think those stories are just as valid as every other story. And I think that what you will find—and this is what I mean when I say audiences are being edged out–—is that a black audience would love Reservoir Dogs just as much as they would anything else. It’s a very funny joke. I can’t remember who said it, but he said... Oh yeah, it might be Shane Gillis, who’s an American comedian, and he was talking about slavery movies, and he was talking to his black friends and he said, “Do you guys like these movies?” And his friends were going, “No, no, we thought these were for you.” Helen Dale: That’s so true. Graham Linehan: Yeah, so it just feels like... When I cast The IT Crowd, the central comic figure in it is Moss who is played by Richard Ayoade, and I just responded to him as a human being, as a person, and it kind of gives you what you might call a natural diversity to the cast. Helen Dale: And also he’s the nerdiest nerd nerd who ever nerded. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Which gives another twist on it that’s also useful. And also, again, it’s truthful; because I was talking to the commissioner at the time who asked me to do it, and he said I find a lot of these IT guys are usually... Are often, sorry, not usually, but often Black or Asian or whatever it happens to be. So it kind of feels right. So when I see a show where they are forcing something and they are pretending that something is a, I don’t know what you would say, a kind of truth. They’re pretending that something is truthful and it’s not, that’s when I think the audience’s alarm bells go off and they don’t even know it. You can watch something and feel slightly unsatisfied by it and not really realise why. And it’s because at some level, you’re being lied to. Helen Dale: Do you have a favourite comedic period or era, and if so, why? Graham Linehan: Oh, that’s a good question. I really love the whole... I mean, feel very, if I could go back in time and be in one place, it would be on the Bilko writing team. That was Phil Silvers, Mel Brooks, and I think Sam... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/28841073

The Architecture of the Republic 11/20/2023

Jefferson's "Essay in Architecture" 11/06/2023

Jefferson's "Essay in Architecture" Rebecca Burgess is joined by Frank Cogliano to discuss Jefferson, Monticello, and the Jeffersonian legacy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: We know this outline from every nickel we've ever handled, it's part and parcel of America's iconography, the pillared domed home Thomas Jefferson built on his mountaintop outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and named Monticello. Jefferson called his self-designed creation his "essay in architecture," but it is not just a thought-provoking essay in building materials and lines and perspectives, it's an essay in American political and social thought, not to mention America's political history. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. For the next 30 to 40 or so minutes, discussing Jefferson's Monticello on the 100th anniversary of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, is Frank Cogliano, Interim Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Cogliano is a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the University Dean International from North America. He's a specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States and is the author or editor of nine books, including Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy and Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson's Foreign Policy. Welcome, Professor Cogliano. Frank Cogliano: Thank you, Rebecca. I'm thrilled to be here. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. And I should have asked you if you're coming from Scotland today or from Monticello, Charlottesville. Frank Cogliano: I'm coming to you from Charlottesville today, I'm pleased to say. I'm spending the current year here in Charlottesville at Monticello, directing the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Rebecca Burgess: Could you tell us just a quick little background about what the International Center for Jefferson Studies is? So many people know the building, Monticello, the home, but don't know that there is this whole study center. Frank Cogliano: Yes, I'd be happy to. So Monticello is the home, as you say, that many people will be familiar with and hopefully they've visited. But Monticello is much more than the house; and it's owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and run as a museum by the foundation. But the foundation has several other arms to it, if you will, one of which is the International Center for Jefferson Studies, which is located in another historic home, about a half mile or so beyond the main entrance to Monticello at a place called Kenwood. And the International Center for Jefferson Studies will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year in 2024. And it was set up to be a center for scholarship and research and to encourage scholarship and research into Jefferson and the world that Jefferson inhabited, not just on Jefferson himself, although we do a lot of research in that area, but also on the American Revolution, the era of the American Revolution, the history of plantation slavery. As I say, the world that Jefferson inhabited and helped to shape. For 30 years, the center, through promoting scholarship, both internally within Monticello but also externally through fellowships for scholars from all over the world, promoting conferences, promoting publication, and helping new scholars publish but also senior scholars, has really helped to shape our understanding of Jefferson and his time. And in so doing, has led... I mean in the past 30 years, and I hope we'll get to this, there's been a real kind of efflorescence of studies about Jefferson in his time, and I think ICJS and, in particular, Monticello generally has played a part in that. Rebecca Burgess: Don't worry, we will definitely get to the 30 years of efflorescence, as you call it. A wonderful word, wonderful image. So we'll probably go a little bit chronologically here, but I did kind of want to for our listeners start out by just saying the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has two twin pillars of its mission: preservation and education. And I'm hoping that our conversation touches on both, but really on the education element because it has become so vital towards America's understanding of Jefferson actually through the decades, through now a century as we are at the 100th anniversary this year. And it includes, as you mentioned, the other historic home, Kenwood. There's a fascinating presidential history that extends beyond Jefferson through Lincoln to the Civil War, obviously, to FDR in World War II, and that's a wonderful story as well. But if we want to start maybe at the beginning of the kind of conceptual question here, the history of presidential homes and estates, including most especially those of American Founders, often are stories that are just as rich and complex and interesting as that of their original owners, and they often reflect the larger history of the American nation. This is especially true with Monticello. Many are not aware, of course, that unlike in Europe and America, the homes of the Founders or presidents are not owned by the federal government nor fully funded by taxpayer support. They don't necessarily have continuing grants even from the NEA, the National Endowment of the Arts, or the National Endowment of Humanities. So it's really been up to private individuals and foundations to protect and preserve them. So Thomas Jefferson's Monticello has a very rocky few years or decades or beyond decades after his death... His heirs had to sell his estate after his death to settle his debts with the infamous story of the public auction of enslaved individuals on the front lawn. And Monticello passes out of the hands of the Jefferson family. Can you give us just a little bit of that story of what happened after the death of Jefferson, happens before this American Jewish family, the Levy family, comes into the picture? Frank Cogliano: Sure, absolutely. And you've done a very good job of summing up the kind of big picture, so thank you for that, Rebecca. As you say, Jefferson died on, many people will know, on the 4th of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as did John Adams. And Jefferson died in debt. He was in pretty extreme debt for a number of reasons, which we can discuss if you like. But that debt resulted in his heirs having to sell his estate, which was Monticello, but also, as you referenced, his human capital as well, the people he enslaved. And so more than a hundred people were auctioned on the west portico. So you mentioned the nickel. It's the nickel view of the house, the house that one sees on the nickel today and has for decades. That view on those steps, more than a hundred people were auctioned in January of 1827, and the home fell into a state of disrepair. It passed through the hands of several local people in the decade immediately after Jefferson's death. And then, it was purchased in 1836 by a man named Uriah Levy, who was an officer in the United States Navy from New York. And Levy was unusual. He was one of the few Jewish officers in the Navy at that time, and he was a reformer. He was a sort of social reformer. He campaigned against flogging in the Navy, for example, as a punishment. And he bought Monticello because he admired Jefferson's commitment to freedom of religion. This is where I think Levy's own religion, the fact that he was Jewish in a majority Christian country at that time, was really important. So he bought it as a home, and really he used it as a summer home, but he also bought it and sought to preserve it as a monument and as a tribute to Jefferson's commitment to religious liberty, which was one of the things enshrined on Jefferson's gravestone here on the mountain top. And the Levy family owned Monticello for longer than the Jeffersons did. They owned it for almost a century, for about 90 years, throughout most of the 19th century. It's a complicated history because Commodore Levy, Uriah Levy, as he's called, died in 1862, and he sought to leave the house for the United States at that point. As many listeners will be aware, and undoubtedly you're aware, there was a small matter of the Civil War going on in 1862, and Monticello was in Virginia. So, there was some debate about whether it was in the United States or not at that point. So, leaving it to the United States was a complicated question. And eventually, there was a series of lawsuits, and again, we don't need to belabor this history, but the man who comes to own Monticello is one of Uriah Levy's nephews, a man with the wonderful name of Jefferson Monroe Levy and Jefferson Monroe Levy owns the house basically after the Civil War down to the early 20th century, he served as a congressman at one point, but when he eventually sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, then the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which is the foundation established in 1923. Rebecca Burgess: If we could just maybe have a little tangent there about that whole Civil War moment and Levy trying to gift it to the United States and the United States refusing Monticello and why he wanted to offer it to the United States, to be a home for orphans of naval officers. I think this is very interesting. And, of course, just the bloody reality that the fields around Monticello, that area of Virginia, is the side of the bloodiest battlefields. Frank Cogliano: There was a lot of fighting, as you know, in central and northern Virginia during the Civil War. So you are right. Commodore Levy's wish to create a kind of an orphanage basically at Monticello for the children of naval officers was again in fitting with his kind of reformist impulses, but it was completely impractical. And he knew that at the time, during the Civil War. That plan or that ambition or that aspiration, I should say, didn't bear fruit. What's interesting I think, and you made reference to this in your introductory comments a moment ago, is the fact that most presidential homes are not owned by the United States government. And although presidential libraries, which are often but not always at presidential homes, are homes run by the national archives, again, there's often a kind of quasi-public-private dimension to this. But with the homes themselves, especially in the 19th century, the preservation of these homes was not seen as something that the government should do. And the best example in the mid-19th century, so shortly before Uriah Levy died in 1862, is Mount Vernon, and of course, Mount Vernon is bought and preserved for the nation by the organization that owns and runs it to this day as a museum, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association doesn't take any money from the federal government and runs Mount Vernon as a preserved and maintains Mount Vernon as a museum. And that was the model that emerged in the 19th century. And that's very much the model that the founders of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation have in mind when they buy the house from Jefferson Monroe Levy in 1923. Rebecca Burgess: And there was also an unfortunate note, if I'm remembering right, of antisemitism about the Levy family owning a Monticello, which in part prompted... Or maybe not prompted their sell of it, but it made it difficult. And there were public letters and op-eds basically saying, "How could a Jewish family own this thing that is American?" Various different attempts to get either the government or some other entity to own it. Could you give us a little bit of that story? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that's an unfortunate part of this story. And you're right. And of course, between approximately 1890 and the early 1920s when this foundation is created, there is a period of mass immigration to the United States, mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. And so whereas most immigration to the United States, voluntary immigration that is, prior to that period had been from Northern and Western Europe and the British Isles, this so-called New Immigration was mainly from, as I say, Southern and Eastern Europe. And many, many millions of those immigrants were non-Protestants. Many were Catholic, but a large number of them were Jews, and they were Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. And there was, as we know, a kind of backlash against that so-called New Immigration that culminated in a rebirth of the so-called second KKK in the 1920s. So there's a great deal of antisemitism kind of in the air in the United States in the early 20th century, especially in the early 1920s. As you say, there was a good deal of criticism of the Levy family, despite the fact that they saved Monticello and were the caretakers of Monticello, basically saying, "They're not really worthy of owning this iconic American site, this site that kind of represents what the United States is." Sometimes it was explicitly said because they were Jewish. Other times it was left unsaid because frankly it didn't need to be said. In our current vernacular, it was a dog whistle that everybody understood. And at one point, Jefferson Levy said that he would not sell the house under any circumstances because of this. He eventually acquiesced and sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923. Many of whose members, I should say, original members, were themselves Jewish. And so the debate about Judaism or the association of Monticello with Judaism, it's a deep history and it's an important history and it's an American history and it needs to be remembered. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Once again, these historic homes of presidents and especially Monticello, is so tapestried, I would say. Maybe that's not the right word, but it's the best metaphor I can come up with, which is how interwoven with so many different facets of the America story, the religious liberty, the education, the political, the social, the questions about slavery and race, and the dichotomies that we have had with professing certain ideals and aspirations, and then how we have failed or succeeded in achieving some of them. And this gets to, I think, maybe Jefferson himself, of how complex of a character he is intellectually, politically, and, of course, definitely privately. He had so many public personas. He is a young Virginia land owner, colonial elite, and Virginia State delegate. Importantly, of course, I have to say this: a member of the House of Burgesses. This is how I tell people in Virginia how actually to pronounce my last name. It's the one state where you see the light bulb click. "Oh, okay." Rebecca Burgess: ... That you see the light bulb click a bit "Ah, okay." It's not a hard G. Anyway, but then of course, he's also Virginia Governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and Ambassador to France, US Secretary of State, Vice President, President of the United States, founder and architect of the University of Virginia, a founder of the United States. Which story is told at Monticello of this public persona, this man? And when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation was officially incorporated, how did they choose one of these personas or just the whole man and how did they go about stating what their purpose was with this foundation and what they hoped Monticello to be? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that's a small question. Thanks. Rebecca Burgess: You're welcome. Frank Cogliano: And as you say, it's a pretty full CV he's got. He did a lot of things. I think when the foundation is originally established, Jefferson's reputation was actually at a low point. So Jefferson's reputation has risen and fallen over the past two centuries since his death. He is in a low point after the Civil War, down to about the '1930s, really the '1940s, I would argue. And the reasons for that are complicated. To some extent, it's just the ebbs and flows of history. He's slightly implicated because of his association. He's tainted with secession. There's a hint of secession in some of his writings in the '1790s when he was the main author of the Kentucky Resolutions and suggested that states could nullify federal legislation they didn't like. And so I think it's slightly unfair to hold him responsible for a civil war that happened a generation after he died. But there's an association there that doesn't help him. And his reputation is at a low point. I don't want to overstate this because he's always had admirers, men like the levies, like those men and women who helped establish the foundation in the early '1920s. But he's at a relative low point. But the founders of this foundation, it's a terrible formulation, forgive me, are committed to what we might call the tombstone legacy. So for people who visited Monticello, you'll know despite that amazing CV, there are three things on his tombstone, author of the Declaration of American Independence, as he puts it, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Founder of the University of Virginia. And that tombstone legacy, if you will, I think neatly encapsulated for all the things he could have said. He didn't say I was a two-term president. He doesn't put the Louisiana purchase on there. It's a very elegant summation though, because what you have there is a commitment to... So let's break these down. In terms of the Declaration of Independence, you have a commitment to political independence and really, small are Republican self-government. Basically, we should be able to govern ourselves. That's what the declaration stands for. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the first time in American history that we have a separation of church and state and one of the first times we get it in modern history and globally. And that's a commitment to freedom of thought. And separation of church and state is about protecting the state from the church and the church from the state. But it's also a commitment to freedom of thought. And Jefferson famously says, and this is one of my favorite lines of his, in the notes on the state of Virginia, "It doesn't bother me whether my neighbor believes there's 20 gods or no God, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." And so that's an important legacy there. And then finally, in the founding of the University of Virginia, we have a commitment to education as the way you perpetuate those first two things, which are the point of having society, right? So political independence, Republican government, again, small arm, we're not talking partisanship here, freedom of thought and education is the silver bullet, that's how we get it done. So that tombstone legacy is really what the foundation is committed to in its early years. And it's about, as you said, preservation as well as education. And so the first thing they've got to do is they aspire to restore the house to the way it was in the early 19th century, excuse me, when Jefferson was living there. So the house you visit today approximates the way it would've been in about, I don't know, '1819, '1820. And so they have to remove a lot of the modern furnishings and the modern decor because the levies and others have lived there in the succeeding century. But they're really committed to this vision of presenting the house as it was when Jefferson was living there in retirement. But they're crucially, with regard to your question about education, interested in conveying, I think in those early days, that tombstone legacy as being what Jefferson stood for. Rebecca Burgess: Right. So in terms of education or presenting the house as a... So I earlier used the quote, it's a Jefferson's quote that it's an essay in architecture, but it's an essay of Jefferson's thought as well. And so uncovering that through the tour and... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/28485302

Religious Community and Democratic Education 10/23/2023

Religious Community and Democratic Education James Patterson is joined by Rita Koganzon of the University of Houston to talk about the Amish, the Satmar, and democratic education. Brian A. Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening. James M. Patterson: Hello, you are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is September 29th, 2023, and my name is James M. Patterson. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy as well as the Institute for Human Ecology, and President of the Cicerone Society. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanted to make a brief statement of mourning for Dr. Ellis Sandos, who died on September 19th this past week at the age of 92, New Orleans native, father of four, 10 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, but people who are familiar with Dr. Sandos listening to Liberty Law Talk may know of his incredible contributions to the work of classical liberalism and political philosophy, including his edited volumes called the Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730 to 1805. These are two volumes of the most important sermons that helped shape the politics of their day, as well as reflect on the beliefs and standards for constitutionalism held by outstanding religious leaders of the period. He was also the founder of the Eric Voegelin Institute. Many of the people you'll hear on Liberty Law Talk were participants in Voegelin Institute panels, including today's guest. Before we move on to her, I just wanted to read from the foreword that Dr. Sandos wrote in 1994 for the first volume of the political sermons. "Liberty is thus an essential principle of man's constitution, a natural trait which yet reflects the supernatural creator. Liberty is God-given; the growth of virtue and perfection of being depends upon free choice in response to divine invitation and help in cooperative relationships. The correlate of responsibility is that liberty is most truly exercised by living in accordance with truth. Man's dominion over the earth and the other creatures, his mastery of nature through reason, is subject to no restraint but the law of his nature, which is perfect liberty. The obligation to obey the laws of the creator only checks his licentiousness and abuse." Dr. Sandos will be missed, and his contributions are many. And now, I'll move on to today's guest, Dr. Rita Koganzon, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston. While there, she teaches political theory and American politics. Her research focuses on the themes of education, childhood authority, and the family and historical and contemporary political thought. Her first book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, Childhood Education, and Early Modern Thought, examines the justifications for authority over children from Jean Bodin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wow, that's a pair. And explores how and why Locke and Rousseau departed from their absolutist predecessors by refusing to model the family on the state by nonetheless preserving authority, even extreme authority over children within the family, for the sake of liberty of adults. She's working on a second project that focuses on education from the early republic in the United States through the 20th century. But today, we're talking about something a little different. We're talking about her recent presentation at the 2023 American Political Science Association, as well as two things that she's published recently on Judaism and religious liberty. The first is The Satmar Option, which she published for the summer 2023 edition of the Hedgehog Review, and her outstanding chapter from the book Religious Liberty and Education. It's titled Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life: Yeshiva Education Versus Liberal Education Theory. Dr. Koganzon, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Hi, thanks for having me. James M. Patterson: Sorry for the long preamble, but I'll give you now plenty of time to describe this central insight that really has stuck with me since your presentation on the difference between what you refer to slightly paraphrasing here as the kind of Amish paradigm for religious liberty and religious minorities versus what you call the Satmar option. So who are the Satmar, and how are they different from the Amish? Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, the Satmar are a Hasidic religious group. They are from Hungary originally, but they sort of crystallized, actually, in New York after World War II, the survivors of the Holocaust came and sort of reconsolidated the Hasidic group, and they were led by a rabbi. And they now live mainly in Williamsburg and in this independent community in Upstate New York called Kiryas Joel. It's kind of complicated to define what exactly Hasidic Judaism is or how it is analogous to certain kinds of Christianity because the ecclesiology of Judaism is not really the same as Christianity. So people will often say, well, this is a sect, which I guess is fine as a description. I don't know that they love it so much, but it's a sort of Hasidic group that follows this particular rabbi who actually has passed away. And now they have a problem with figuring out who they're following exactly. And so they're different from the Amish in a lot of ways, namely that they're not Christian. But in terms of the political question, there's been a kind of treatment of religious minorities in American constitutional law, and also, I think, in American public opinion, that is very sort of Christian-centric in terms of the way we think about religious descent from the mainstream. And so the Amish are a kind of radical form of religious descent from the mainstream in that they don't want to live what we would consider a modern life, that they reject a lot of modern technology, that they reject living in cities. They live in their own rural communities that are based largely on agriculture. And so they look very different from sort of modern Americans in this respect. And they maintain a certain kind of separation from mainstream, secular, modern, whatever appellation you want to use, Americans. And so then the question with them becomes, okay, well, when there are sort of generally applicable laws passed in state legislatures or by Congress or whatever, are they required to follow them if somehow following these laws would obstruct their ability to practice their religion? And this comes up in the 1972 case, most famously Wisconsin v. Yoder, where the question is if there are compulsory schooling laws in the state of Wisconsin, which are facially neutral, and they require everybody to go to school until they're 16, do the Amish have to comply with this if for them going to school until they're 16 would potentially disrupt their ability to remain in the Amish faith? And in 1972, the court decided that they don't have to comply with these compulsory schooling laws because they're a sincere religious minority and they have a First Amendment free exercise right to, in a sense, be exempted. Although that's not the technical legal understanding of what's happening here, that is the practical effect of what's happening here. They're exempted from these compulsory schooling laws. They're allowed to pull their kids out of public schools early. And as the Amish put it, in this case, they're going to give them an Amish education at home, essentially an agricultural education and an education in their community. And so that is somewhat controversial, I guess. But as far as public opinion goes, that's acceptable to Americans becomes the basis for a lot of subsequent homeschooling legislation and other sorts of exemptions from public schooling. And the thing about the Amish is that they're very, I think, admirable to Americans in a certain way. They resemble kind of what America looked like at the founding or sort of what we imagine it looked like at the founding. And the important thing from the court's perspective is that they're self-sufficient in the sense that they don't rely on any government assistance. And not only do they not rely on any government assistance, they actually do not contribute to or draw from Social Security. And so there really are very sort of distinct from the government. And so what I'm calling the Amish paradigm is a way of thinking about the terms of religious liberty as a kind of contract in the United States. And so what the Amish offer a model of is this kind of contract between the majority and a dissenting religious minority where the majority, in a sense, is willing to let the religious minority have some autonomy over its own internal government and be sort of less beholden to the federal government or the state governments, or maybe beholden is not the right word, but maybe something more involved with, regulated by. That's key. Secular government in exchange for their self-sufficiency. And they're not calling on these secular governments for assistance. And I think that has been sort of the mental model that we hold for justifiable religious exemptions from generally neutral laws, regulations, and things like that. And the challenge that the Satmar posts to this is that they're urban. They are not self-sufficient in the sense that they're not an agricultural community that grows its own food or anything like that. They live in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, or in a suburb in Upstate New York, in New Jersey, in other very densely populated places. And they do receive government welfare and transfers. They receive a sort of direct aid like SNAP benefits and things like that. They also receive aid for schooling and things like that because they qualify for Title 1 funds. It's hard to say that they're poor. The issue is they have a lot of kids so even when they're working and they make an income, it's very hard to support eight kids or 10 kids on a single income or even both parents' incomes. And so they often qualify for federal and state poverty funds because those are based on family size. So they pose a different kind of dilemma, I think, for us because then the question is, well, how far are we going to allow them to practice their religion, especially to the degree that their religion is in conflict with mainstream norms when at the same time they are sort of reliant on federal and state aid. So they're not self-sufficient, so shouldn't we have some sort of control over them? And this comes up very saliently in the last few years. There's been a conflict in New York City because they run their own private school system, and the allegations of the New York Department of Education and the New York City education bureaucracies that they are not doing a sufficient job of educating their children, that they don't teach enough secular subjects, that they don't teach English. The Satmar speak Yiddish. And so should the state and the city governments be allowed to intervene in their school curricula and change them or bring them up to date or mainstream them, however, you want to think about it, on the grounds that this is a violation of their children's rights and we're paying for those schools? That's the other salient thing. So that's what I see as the contrast. There's a kind of vision of a very self-sufficient, almost sort of noble agrarian group who's practicing a divergent way of life in the United States. And we're sort of willing to forgive that so long as they don't depend on us or ask us for anything. But that's not really a common model of how religious descent works in America anymore. Most people don't look like the Amish. They look a lot more like the Satmar. They're doing something out of the mainstream, out of the ordinary, but they are pretty much integrated into American society and are sort of entangled in government institutions and also are often recipients of transfers. James M. Patterson: The subject of the Amish as a kind of exemplar reminded me of one of the worst movies I've ever seen called For Richer or Poorer with Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley, about a man and a woman from New York who retreat from a scandal to live on Amish country. And there's a kind of a rediscovery of what it means to be authentically human by living among the Yoders, which is, of course, one of the people in the Wisconsin v. Yoder case. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, I think that's just an extremely common Amish Mennonite surname. They're not all related. James M. Patterson: Oh, okay. They're not related to fictional people. Dr. Rita Koganzon: No, it's an extremely common surname. So you've been to UVA, right? If you drive just north of UVA, there's a great children's farm market thing called Yoders, where they have a petting zoo and everything. Those people aren't related, either. James M. Patterson: That is actually a great recommendation. If you need to stop off with your kids, please go there. They were goats on a giant contraption that they'd built. It's incredible fun. And the food is amazing. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah. James M. Patterson: We are- Dr. Rita Koganzon: Unrelated Yoders. James M. Patterson: We are not endorsed by Yoders, but we will gladly take any shoofly pie they will send our direction. We have just a real rich chapter here, and there's a lot that I want to talk about that Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life. The thing that you point out first in this chapter is that the preoccupation that many post-Second World War liberals had was with the possibility of a Christian theocracy. You say here, the 1980s, 1990s, "Fear of Christian theocracy can no longer reasonably motivate our considerations when so many of those asking for considerations are not Christians." So this older understanding that even by the nineties seemed to be pretty antiquated remains more or less enshrined in our laws. So, talk to me a little bit about what that liberalism was and why it was so preoccupied with this particular case of Christian theocracy. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, so I mean, the rise of the religious right and the election in 1980, I think sort of set off panic bells among many people on the left, that suddenly there is this insurgent movement of right-wing Christians who basically had not been heard from for a long time. I mean, not that they weren't there, they just weren't politically involved in the 1950s and 1960s. They started to become more politicized in the 1970s. And this takes a lot of sort of liberals, especially academic types, by surprise, and they become very worried. And so if you think about Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, that's a response I think is written in the early eighties, is a kind of fever dream or fever nightmare of what she thinks might happen if these people were really to come to power. And I mean, they came to power through Reagan, but they were just part of a conservative coalition that included obviously many other parts. And so the Wisconsin v. Yoder decision starts to look kind of nefarious or ominous to the left, and then there's a second decision. I think this is just a circuit court decision. It doesn't go all the way to the Supreme Court called Moser v. Hawkins in the early eighties, which deals with or involves a group of what we call fundamentalists, whatever that's supposed to mean, who are challenging the secular humanist curriculum of their public school. Their argument is that actually secular humanism is its own religion, and it's being imposed on us evangelical Christians as though it were neutral, but there's actually nothing neutral about it. It's a replacement for our religion, and that's a violation of our religious liberty. They lose. The court ends up saying that this kind of secular humanist curriculum is not religious, but they make a really important point. Their political theorists, especially people working in the tradition of John Rawls, take this seriously as a real problem, that there are these people who think that even neutral secular education is a form of religion. There's a lot of writing done around Wisconsin v. Yoder and Mozert v. Hawkins in the 1980s and 1990s by this kind of Rawlsian tradition of liberal education or democratic education. They're very concerned about, for them, the real question motivating a lot of this is: How can we neutralize religious rights? How can we prevent them from taking their kids out of schools entirely and homeschooling them into some kind of fundamentalist theocratic regime to promote such a regime or from developing their own schools that are going to promote this? Because their fear is that sort of the civic fabric is going to be rented by these people's children who are educated in this really insular fundamentalist type education and who are going to grow up and come out of it basically ready to overthrow the liberal, republican regime of the United States. They write lots of theories of education, political theories of education that are mainly about how to constrain these sorts of people. What sort of public education is required and necessary so that everybody gets the same civic foundation implicitly/explicitly so that they don't become fundamentalist theocrats when they grow up. James M. Patterson: The term that you use and that's used among the people that you cite is the word autonomy. The autonomy standard is, as you point out, not neutral. Even though you may not, I think, necessarily identify with the Hawkins case or its results, there is all the same kind of, I don't know how to put it, kind of acceptance that the religious right did have a point, you say. Although the autonomy aimed at by liberal education reports to give children a neutral or broad selection of lives, it is neither neutral nor broad in reality but highly normative and narrow. Although childhood exposure to diversity is intended to expand our liberty and capacity for independent thought as adults, it actually undermines the development of the very virtues necessary to exercise such independence. In fact, you point out later that this kind of education is really only beneficial to secular would-be elites, and the rest, more or less, have to suffer in silence. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, so I mean, the way that these political theorists who are concerned about the rise of right-wing theocracy or religious theocracy try to theorize this problem is to say, well, the kind of education that everybody needs is an education for an open future or an education for autonomy. That if we set this as a standard, we're sort of guaranteeing that nobody can get this kind of theocratic fundamentalist education and get away with it. The idea of autonomy is that you should have the kind of education that allows you to continually revise your understanding of the best way of life. That if you're sort of locked into one understanding that shows that you're not really autonomous, that you're hetero autonomous. In order to facilitate that, we need to expose you to diverse ways of life as a child as part of your education so that you can sort of rationally choose among them. That's the sort of prevailing assumption of this kind of theory that if you were exposed to a diversity of ways of life, then in a sense, your insular fundamentalist parents don't have the kind of control over you that they can sort of determine how you turn out because you're going to have the resources to decide for yourself. I think that's sort of intuitively appealing to liberals. I mean, not just on the left, but just liberals broadly that that's the case because sort of how public education understands itself or what it understands itself as doing often. The argument that I make is that there's an assumption buried there that constantly revising your... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/28343330

An Unholy Postmodern Synthesis 09/25/2023

When Does Sex Matter? 09/11/2023

Toward a Conservatism of Freedom 09/04/2023

Toward a Conservatism of Freedom Avik Roy joins host James Patterson to discuss Freedom Conservatism, its "Statement of Principles" and the broader political and intellectual environment. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. James Patterson: Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today is August 18th, 2023. My name is James Patterson. I am a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University. A fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy in the Institute for Human Ecology. And president of the Ciceronian Society. With me today is Dr. Avik Roy. He is the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank improving the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder, using freedom, innovation, and pluralism. Roy's work has been praised on both the left and the right. National Review called him one of the nation's sharpest policy minds. Well, the New York Times, Paul Krugman, concedes, "Roy is about as good as you can get in this stuff. He actually knows something." That's high praise. Roy also serves as the policy editor at Forbes on the advisory boards of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And is a senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center. He's advised several presidential candidates, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. Roy was educated at MIT, where he studied molecular biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Roy, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Dr. Avik Roy: It's nice to be with you. Please call me Avik. James Patterson: Oh, okay. Yes, Avik. So the reason for our conversation today is because you are one of the principle movers behind the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles, as well as a broader effort to articulate a freedom conservatism. So for the readers and listeners at Law & Liberty who are not familiar with freedom conservatism, why don't you explain to them what this project is? Dr. Avik Roy: Sure. So a bunch of us have, over the last many years, I'm sure including many devotees of this podcast and of the Liberty Fund and of Law & Liberty, have watched with dismay as there has been a rise of authoritarianism, not just on the left, but on the right around the world and in the United States. And I think in the initial going, obviously many of us hope that this would be some temporary eruption that would eventually fall aside as people realize that authoritarianism is not something that Americans really want. But as time has gone on, I think it's become clear that the people on the right in particular who like the rise of authoritarianism, who are inclined, who believe that it's a good thing, it's a salutary development, have succeeded at moving beyond merely trying to align with Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies at times, and instead try to build a permanent movement around authoritarianism. They call it national conservatism, by which they mean that the classical liberal movement is too nice; it's too willing to engage in toleration of multiple points of view. And that what we really need is an authoritarianism of the right to combat the authoritarianism of the left. And last year, in 2022, the national conservatives got together and created a statement of principles with 10 planks that they published at their website. They have conferences twice a year, usually one in the US and one in Hungary or some other aligned location. And they have created an organized group of young people in particular, Capitol Hill staffers, people out of college, for whom this is the only kind of conservatism they've ever known. For those of us who are older, we take for granted that classical liberalism is a central part of the 20th-century conservative tradition and 21st-century conservative tradition. But for the nationalists, if you're just graduating from college now, you're 22 years old, 21 years old maybe, you were just entering middle school when Trump went down that golden escalator. So, you're not aware of any other form of American conservatism. So, young people growing up today have had the impression that if you are to be a conservative, if you see yourself on the right or right of center, and especially if you see yourself as an opponent of the left, that nationalism and authoritarianism are the philosophies you need to adopt. And that trend, in particular, has become very concerning. It's also become very concerning that a lot of politicians on the right have concluded that the way to win a Republican primary in particular, whether it's running for president or running for Congress or state legislature, is to adopt these nationalist authoritarian positions because they see that as the base of the party. It wasn't that long ago that the Tea Party was the base of the party, a group of people who were seen as being constitutionalists, people who wanted the government out of their lives. That's been replaced by this new theory that the base is nationalistic and authoritarian. And so you put all these things together, all these different trends, and a bunch of other people felt that this was a great concern, "We need to do something about it." And that the first step in doing something about it was to put together our own statement of principles. Now, obviously, we have the advantage that others in the past have also created statements or principles. The most relevant one for us was the Sharon Statement, which was signed by a group of people at Bill Buckley's house in Sharon, Connecticut, who ended up creating Young Americans for Freedom, a young organization of libertarians, individuals, and conservatives. And they put together a statement of principle that we took as our core inspiration. But our goal was to say, let's create a statement of principles ourselves that, while it takes inspiration from the Sharon statement, is adapted to the political and policy challenges of our time. And also, it evolves and iterates upon that statement of principles in certain ways and allows us to articulate a different form of conservativism than nationalism. And also allows us, by gathering a bunch of signatories, to start building that movement. A group of people that are willing to put their names on a piece of paper and say, "Hey, I'm standing up for these principles." And thereby, if I look around and I see other names on that list, you know that these are people who are aligned with you, who are your friends, who you can reach out to and connect with, and we can start to build our own organization and network of people who advocate for the role of liberty and freedom in America once again. James Patterson: I agree with the concern about the interest in authoritarianism. For Law & Liberty, a couple of years ago, I noted the growth of the Francisco Franco appreciation threads that had emerged in social media. Strange. But the people who often write these threads or are participating in national conservatism conferences, paying attention to the publications and other media that come from national conservativist sources, one of their mantras, one of their rhetorical questions rather is what has conservatism conserved, here meaning fusionism? There's an answer to that question, I think. What is your answer to that question? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, boy, we could spend a whole hour on this topic. But I think I would answer it, I would flip your question to its inverse in a sense, which is that the national conservatives believe that America is lost. It's a profoundly pessimistic movement. They believe that the things that made America great are no longer present, that America is lost. Now, why do they believe that? Why do they believe that America is lost? Now, we could come up with lots of things that, in terms of trends in the United States, we think are negative if we wanted to look at the pessimistic side of things, right? The amount of money that the government spend has gone up. The size of the Federal Register, the compilation of all the regulations at the federal level, has gone up. The deficit and debt have gone up. So there are things like that that are not great. There are things like entrenched and aggressive political correctness, as we used to call it, and now people call it “wokery” or “wokism.” That's not just in educational circles but in corporate settings as well. So those are the kinds of things that the nationals point to and say, "Hey, America is lost." Now, there's something that some will say out loud, and others will not say out loud, which is arguably the core animating concern that they have, which is not so much those things, though those things I think all of us would agree we don't like about the state of America today. But the reason why they say America is lost is because of demographic issues. That is what you hear that some of the nationals say in their own settings and their own journals, and again, particularly the most frank and blunt and open ones who don't worry about any pushback they might get on this topic. They say the biggest problem with America is that America is increasingly a multi-ethnic, multiracial society. That's something that they believe will help drive America to lose its fundamental character. That America, in order to preserve its fundamental character, needs to be a white ethnostate. And that's why immigration policy is front and center, not just in the United States but in nationalist movements all around the world. Skepticism of immigration, not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration. And this is really a core point, a critical distinction; I think most Americans don't like illegal immigration, but most Americans like legal immigration. They believe that since almost all of us are descendants of legal immigrants, we understand the role that immigration has played in making America this dynamic, great, prosperous country. So many of the greatest companies and successes we've had, economically and otherwise, scientific achievements, our athletic achievements, come from the people who have come to America from elsewhere. This movie Oppenheimer is in the theaters as we're recording this podcast. I mean, much of our ability to win World War II and develop nuclear weapons came from immigrants, people who left Europe, who were being persecuted because they were ethnic minorities. And so those are the things that have made America great and continue to drive America to greatness in many ways. There are a lot of good things that are going on in America. We are still the most innovative country in the world. We're still the cultural leader of the world. We're still the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We're still a country where basic freedoms like being able to say what you want. Yes, there are people who are trying to push back, there's cancel culture, there are all these issues. But fundamentally, we have the ability to record this podcast and say what we want to say. And yes, there are others who don't like it when you say what you want to say, but we are still basically a free society. And yes, there are things to improve about that free society, but we are not doing as badly as the nationalists think. And the reason why the nationalists say that we're lost, already lost, because this is a demographic issue, that, well, America is already not American, if you think America should be a white ethnostate, and that's why they lean towards authoritarian ideas because they know they can't persuade a majority of the electorate to go along with reformatting America as a white ethnostate, most Americans don't want that. And so that's why they veer towards these anti-democratic, anti-Republican ideas of what America should be in the future. James Patterson: Well, the freedom conservatism principles have a lot of continuity with what used to be called fusionism, which is the older version of conservatism that really was part of the original sort of conservative movement following the Second World War of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank Meyer. And that was regnant during the Reagan years and really had a lasting influence through the George W. Bush administration. Do you see freedom conservatism as a fusionism 2.0, or is it a new stage of conservatism that's meant to reckon with the things that you just mentioned? Dr. Avik Roy: I think it's both, right? For the listeners who are not familiar with the term fusionism, let's just make sure that we're describing it. So, you could say there are two forms of fusionism. There is the, you could say, coalitional fusion. So, the American conservative movement of the 20th century was a coalition of people that included libertarians, classical liberals, social conservatives, anti-communists, and a lot of people in between. And that coalition won the Cold War and did a lot to make America the preeminent nation in the world in the late 20th century when we defeated the Soviet Union. There were people in that movement who would've said, I'm not a... And there's a second, is what I'm getting at, there's a second form of fusionism, which is what Frank Meyer, in particular, was known for, which was trying to actually come up with a philosophy, a political philosophy that incorporated both classical liberalism and social conservatism into a single philosophy. And his argument was that in order to be truly virtuous, if you're a social conservative and you care about virtue, one must live in a free society because it's only through freely choosing virtue that you can actually be virtuous. If someone's forcing you to be virtuous, you're not really being that virtuous. That was Meyer's argument. And so the thing I'm trying to make clear by getting into all this, the etymology or taxonomy, is that the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles is open to both kinds of people. So there are signatories to the document who are libertarians, classical liberals. There are signatories to the document who are social conservatives and foreign policy hawks, who wouldn't think of themselves as fusionists in the Frank Meyer sense of the term. But there are also people who are signatories to the documents who are fusionists. So it encompasses both kinds of fusionism, is what I'm trying to say. James Patterson: Awesome. Yeah, I was originally... I'm sorry, an original signer of the document. And I don't really consider myself a libertarian, but I thought the language was capacious enough to address people who share your concerns about the emergence of national conservatism and its attraction to this or even endorsement of this oddly authoritarian approach to the American republic. So what do you think is the cause for so much interest in this alternative vision, this national conservative vision? You mentioned earlier that part of it is youthful ignorance. Is that everything, or is there more to it? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, I do think that if you're the kind of person who's gone to college in the last seven years, it was really 2015 when this Yale Halloween incident happened that things really started to change. Jonathan Haidt wrote an interesting article, I believe for The Atlantic, where he traced some of this to the rise of Instagram and some of these other relatively newfangled social media tools, where things really started to change, and the cancel culture really took off. And so I think there's a cohort of people who come out of that environment who've been radicalized in the other direction. Right? So if you're in an environment where you're told you are a fundamentally guilty and inferior person because you are a white male, a heterosexual white male in particular, then you're radicalized in the other direction and you feel frustrated because to the degree that your elders are telling you, "Hey, you should believe in freedom and let different sides coexist." That doesn't seem sufficient when you feel like you're being extubated. So I think that's part of it. I think also there's a degree to which Trump's victory in 2016 was an opportunity for, what you might say, bandwagon jumpers to kind of say, "Hey, here's the new wave." The new hotness is to be a nationalist because Trump is at least instinctively a nationalist. I wrote in a piece for National Review recently that I made the argument that, look, almost all of Trump's domestic policy success came from freedom conservative principles, his tax reforms, his judicial appointments, his deregulation initiative. Those are all freedom conservatism policies that were executed by freedom conservatism acolytes. But to the degree that Trump has tried to break from that Bill Buckley/Frank Meyer consensus and say, "No, we should be against free trade. We should be skeptical of immigration." Now, actually, I should parenthesize this because Trump is not actually against legal immigration. He produced a plan in 2019, an immigration reform plan that would be about securing the border, but actually reforming legal immigration so we were improving the quality of immigrants we were getting to the country, in terms of high-skilled immigrants who can really contribute to the country's economy. So, his immigration plan in 2019 was pretty aligned with what a lot of freedom conservatives believe. But there were plenty of people who saw in Trump an avatar for a nationalist agenda, some of whom believed it from the start, who were always nationalists, you could say. And then others who were perhaps persuaded or converted to become nationalists, because they believed that this was the way of the future, this is the way things were going to go. And I think that's a mistake because I don't think that nationalism is the wave of the future. And I think that most Americans, the vast majority, particularly young Americans, are not okay with a nostalgic movement that believes it can recreate the demographics of the 1930s. James Patterson: With the politics of the 1930s, too. At least in European politics. So, I've noticed that there's almost no real interest from Trump himself in national conservatism. It just seems to kind of pass him by. It's a funny thing where they're appealing directly to him, and he spends most of his time trying to get crowds to cheer for them. So what are some of the principles of freedom conservatism, and especially, how do you see them operating in political institutions or having policy implications for 2023 and beyond? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, there are a couple of things I'll say. The first thing to say is that the document makes it pretty clear that the most important thing that freedom conservatives stand for is individual and economic liberty. That's not only core to freedom conservatism; that's core to America. To go to your question from before, which is what is it that we're trying to conserve? What freedom conservatives are trying to conserve are the principles of the American founding, which is that the government exists to secure the liberties of the people, not the other way around. And that is the, in a sense, you could say the core contradiction, but also the core distinctiveness, the core creed of the United States. Which is that the tradition of America, the one that we seek to conserve, is the tradition of individual and economic freedom. That's what America was founded on, with the notable asterisk and exception of slavery. And that is the principle that those of us who believe in those founding traditions have sought to expand and apply to the circumstances that we're in today. The nationalists don't believe in that tradition. They want to import the Hungarian or continental European nationalism, which is basically that your country is a collection of... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/27914361

Israel's Judges 08/14/2023

The Term in Review 07/20/2023

The State of the West 07/14/2023

The Founders' Intellectual World 07/07/2023

The Life of Leadership 06/23/2023

Recognizing Real Difference 06/16/2023

The Conservative Encounter with Leviathan 05/26/2023

The Conservative Encounter with Leviathan Johnathan O'Neill joins host John Grove to discuss his recent book, Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal. John Grove: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. I'm John Grove, the managing editor of Law & Liberty. In his recent book, Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal, Johnathan O'Neill chronicles the conservative movement's response to and development following the New Deal's Constitutional Revolution. Conservatives found themselves in a unique situation, one in which the old constitutional order had not been utterly destroyed, but one in which, to use the author's words, a new dispensation was laid over its predecessor without fully undoing the reality or the memory of what was defeated. The New Deal and subsequent constitutional developments gave birth to a more self-conscious conservatism, but it did so in circumstances of uncertainty. How should one respond to this new situation? What should we make peace with and what should we fight? What touchstones do we appeal to in resisting this encroaching Leviathan? Tradition, philosophy, written law, the so-called principles of the regime, be they democracy, natural rights, natural law, or some other fundamental principle? Self-described conservatives did not have a unified answer and various approaches sometimes led to interesting and consequential differences. Joining me to discuss the dynamics of 20th-century conservative constitutional visions is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, Johnathan O'Neill. Jonathan, thanks for coming on. Johnathan O'Neill: Oh, wonderful to be here. I very much appreciate the invitation. I've been looking forward to this talk for a while now. John Grove: Great. This book is structured around four basic groupings of conservatives, traditionalists, neoconservatives, Straussians, and libertarians. You walk through very systematically how these groups addressed questions like the expansion of the administrative state, the decline of federalism, their vision of the presidency, judicial review. Let's start, why these four groupings? What are the distinctives of these four groups? And what did each see as the essential threat that this New Deal political order posed? All we're concerned with it, but maybe sometimes for slightly differing reasons? Johnathan O'Neill: I start the book out, as you know, by defining in a thumbnail way the major commitments of each of the schools that you named, and from there try to look at how the post-New Deal developments, how they assess them and responded to them. While it's hard to quickly summarize each of them, I attempted to do it in the beginning of the book. I think that traditionalists' primary focus is on the local custom, oftentimes with a religious basis, but not exclusively so, and tending towards a conception of American political order as inherited from the long tradition of Western civilization, more particularly the English and the common law Christian humanist tradition. Libertarians focus on individual liberty and suspicion of the state as inherently coercive and dangerous, an orientation towards private ordering through the market and spontaneous order. Straussians, a little harder to pin down in part because they argue so much amongst themselves, but an orientation towards the great debates of Western civilization, in particular, biblical morality versus ancient philosophy and trying to understand America as in some sense and its constitutionalism as a place where this vitiating tension can still exist and be argued about and improve people at the individual level of virtue, but also improve our politics in America, while a modern regime still has an openness to this kind of input, and therefore they find American constitutionalism worth defending. Neoconservatives, again, an always definitional problem, in part because they gather so much from preexisting forms of conservatism and oftentimes resolutely refuse to define themselves. But I think for my purposes, the characteristic element of neoconservatism that I'm interested in is its assessment of post-1960s progressive liberalism as just asking too much of the state. A great word that they always used in the period was overloading, that the state is overloaded, and the polity is asking you to do things that just can't be accomplished by a government. Another element of, which we'll talk about more I'm sure, of the neoconservatives is the idea of a new class, of a managerial conception of politics in which elites in various kinds of institutions, media, government, cause lawyering are pursuing... They have an inherent interest in the growth of the state because it gives them something to do and something to direct. I think that that plays very much in their assessment of modern post-New Deal conservatism. John Grove: You distinguished pretty clearly between Straussian and neoconservatives. A lot of times those two are lumped together. Why has that conception developed, and why do you think that's wrong? Johnathan O'Neill: I talk about this a fair amount in the chapter on the presidency, and of course, I mean, the behemoth in the room here is the debate about the post 9/11 foreign policy and the George W. Bush administration invasion of Iraq. I think very quickly the media conflated Straussian and neoconservatives in part because there were some people with somewhat attenuated Straussian connections or influences in the Bush administration. But it quickly became this conspirational notion that Straussians were directing American foreign policy by hijacking neoconservatism, which no one was really good at defining anyway. It just became this post-modern media firestorm without a lot of basis and fact. I spent a couple, well, at least a section of one chapter sorting this out and trying to show that there are many neoconservatives who are not Straussians. There are Straussians who condemned the Bush administration foreign policy. There are Straussians who explicitly rejected the invasion of Iraq. There are Straussians who use one of Strauss' masses or concepts of the regime or politeia as this fundamental ordering of society, its norms, its mores, not simply its laws, its institutions that is pervasive and hard to change. If you understand that, you would understand why just writing a new Iraqi constitution isn't necessarily going to remake the place. There were Straussians making that argument against the gist of Bush administration policy. I think it took me a lot of pain and suffering to sort through all of that and make sense of it for myself, but I became increasingly convinced that this conflation of Straussians and neoconservatives is just mistaken and was a media bubble that a lot of people made a lot of for a short time. You don't really hear much about it anymore. John Grove: How did some of these groups differ in terms of the way they thought about constitutionalism and political order? I draw out one distinction, it's partly just it's a pet interest of mine, but the traditionalist, you talk a good amount about the traditionalists' nomocratic vision of constitutionalism, very much process oriented about the establishment of particular rules, very much went along with a heavy emphasis on federalism and the division of authority versus some conservatives that had more of an emphasis on fundamental principles, more ends oriented vision of constitutionalism. How did their overarching vision differ before we get into some of the specifics? Johnathan O'Neill: I learned a lot in writing about this about some of the deeper more principle basis for traditionalist or customary conservatism, which oftentimes is just dismissed as it's ours and therefore it's good or unquestioning, thoughtless loyalty to one's own. The distinction which comes initially from Michael Oakeshott between a nomocratic regime and a teleocratic regime. Telos, end, right? A teleocratic regime is a regime with a kind of uber value that it tries to instantiate and permeate because it's loyal to it, but as a pervasive political program, whereas a nomocratic regime, as you suggested, is more about process, about deliberation on a small scale. It doesn't have an ambition to remake things in the name of a teleocratic concept. It's much more modest in its understanding of what politics is capable of and what institutions are for. On some level it's because it is rooted in people's customary shared moral understandings. Therefore, because we are rooted as a civilization in this way, we don't need to ask institutions to remake our civilization. We just need to use them to abide together and make common decisions together. I think that a lot of traditionalists would say that, and this is one of the fundamental cleavages in American conservatism, would say that the release of the equality idea, the egalitarianism that comes a lot of these people would say from the Declaration of Independence and from Abraham Lincoln's ratcheting up of the idea of equality has derailed their understanding of the way the regime really should be. As I'm sure you have some familiarity with, this is a major conflict between people like some Straussians and some traditionalists. You see it come up in the book. One of the things that certainly became clear to me over time thinking about traditionalists and studying people like George Carey or Russell Kirk is a sense of loss. The regime as they knew it, they just see as, in some basic sense, irretrievable. You see more conservatives of that dispensation, someone like Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option. There's a withdrawal, that we're aliens in a regime that is now operating on different principles. And to the extent that we can preserve what we believe in, we have to withdraw from it a little bit. I think that's certainly something that became clear to me as I studied this more. John Grove: Getting into some of the specifics, you spent a lot of time talking about federalism. Obviously that's one of the biggest conservative themes of this time. You put it this way. It says, "The reality that post-New Deal conservatives faced was that federalism had precipitously and irreversibly declined even though constitutionalists since the founders in Tocqueville had taught that the US regime needed it to survive." Federalism has been undermined. It's been eroded to the point almost like you were just saying, almost to where it's just irretrievable. It's not something that can ever be revived, at least in the sense that a lot of conservatives thought it ought to be. And yet it was seen as something that you can't just say, "Oh, well, let's just make peace with this." It's absolutely essential. A difficult situation. In defending it then, conservatives have to make this positive case for it beyond just this is the constitution's inheritance that it's given us. What's the reason for federalism? You get into themes of community, which brings up one of my favorite conservative thinkers, Robert Nisbet, of Democratic self-government, arguments about that, the kind of polycentric political order, public choice. In some of these cases, also maybe just some more lukewarm defenses, especially some of the Straussians and neo-conservatives, they weren't as animated about federalism. They defended it, but like I said, maybe a little bit in a more lukewarm way, maybe as a practicality, not to be taken as too axiomatic. Talk to us a little bit about the variety of the defenses of federalism that you see coming out of these different groups. Johnathan O'Neill: I'll start with the one that probably seems the least obvious, which is neoconservatives in the '60s and '70s who were questioning the Great Society and the principles of the Great Society and the way that it was run and administered. They're frequently urban Eastern intellectuals. They're not Southern States' rights guys. They don't really argue in the idiom of states' rights or traditionalist custom localism. And still, what you see them saying is this one size fits all policies administered from the center don't take account for differences in local moraes, inheritances. They don't take account for local level cultural differences. This approach will inevitably founder on the particularities that exist at the local level, which, of course, is a very old argument in defense of federalism that you hear from all kinds of different conservatives for much of American history. One of the things I found fascinating is that even though the neoconservatives don't really understand themselves as arguing oftentimes in explicitly constitutional principles, they come round to this way of thinking because the reality of it is just right there in their face. I saw that Straussians, or at least different groups of them, changed tacks on several issues as time went on. Federalism, certainly one of the core arguments for much of the Straussians was that America was always designed to centralize power more than oftentimes writers in The Federalist Paper wanted to overtly reveal. It was a somewhat veiled, careful project, but they thought all along that the orientation of the nation will be to become a continental and world power, and that you need to overcome the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation in order to do this. And then when people see that the federal government is fundamentally more competent than the states and administers affairs better, their loyalties will gravitate towards this. It may take a little time, but this is what will happen. And on some level, endorsing this basic idea. And then by the time you get to the '80s, you start to see more Straussians saying, well, this kind of centralized leviathan behemoth amidst a commercial and materialistic society is just destroying the capacity of local communities to recreate Republican virtue, public mindedness, at the local level, which is the only place it can be created. If the larger part of the constitutional government is going to endure, we have to have some provision for localities to tend to inducing virtue in the next generation, and concomitantly then we have to restrict the federal government putting its hands into everything, which is not really an argument that you saw them making against segregationist in the '50s and '60s. But as time goes on, they come to see that this kind of argument is necessary to preserve the regime in the way that they want to. John Grove: It seems a little bit more circumstantial in the sense that similar kind of arguments were made at the founding era by Anti-Federalists and Jeffersonians and so forth. Straussians were in this position, it was like, well, no, the Jeffersonians were wrong, and Hamilton and Marshall and Company were generally right at that time, but that things have just gone a little too far now. Johnathan O'Neill: Famously, Herbert Storing is the one who goes back to the Anti-Federalists and the first one to really retrieve the Anti-Federalists arguments and start publishing major Anti-Federalists writers who are making this argument. It's through his efforts that we start talking much more about the Anti-Federalists starting in the '80s. I think that that's true that the... I would say it's another thing that impressed me writing this book is the universe of constitutional concepts and the grammar of their use moves around and is used and deployed by people sometimes in one circumstance making one kind of argument that they run away from. People in that camp run away from decades later. As I tried to point out a little bit in the conclusion, one of the ways you preserve a constitutional system is by having this argument about what its fundamentals are, what its limitations are, what it asks of us as citizens, what we need to adapt to technologically, but what we should never cleave off as a fundamental. I think that that discourse of constitutional debate contestation is itself a fundamental way that conservatives are contributing to the project of constitutional government. John Grove: Yeah, that's interesting. Federalism goes along with, of course, the rise of the administrative state at the federal level. If you're concerned about this expansive new administrative state, one answer is reviving federalism, just the federal government as a whole doing less. Other potential answers that become important themes here. You already mentioned a little bit the idea of thinking about the type of person that's in the administrative state and is there a way to reform our elites in some way. Why don't we talk about that a little bit? You mentioned that was a big neoconservative theme and a little bit I wouldn't say making peace, but more so than say the traditionalists and the libertarians, a little bit of sense of making peace with certain elements of the modern system. Johnathan O'Neill: That's a fascinating question because this is one of the things that really surprised me when I was writing this book is leading Straussians, Herbert Storing and then I believe John Rohr, who was a student of Storing, they basically say, "Look, we're not going to be able to undo the New Deal," which a lot of other people say too, but they say modern regulatory bureaucracy is here to stay. In the complex society of even the middle of the 20th century, let alone today, the social interactions and the economic interactions are so complex that no legislature will be able to write a law that can contemplate every possible situation, and therefore you will need to seed some discretion to regulators. And that no system of law understood as rules will ever be able to do without discretion as it is applied. So then the question becomes, what kind of people do we want to have exercising this discretion? How do we inform their discretion? How do we bound their discretion? The argument that Storing and Rohr and then others after them give is you want to educate bureaucrats in American regime principles. You want the exercise of their discretion to be informed in the most basic sense by the constitutional tradition, by understandings of the rule of law, by understandings of the importance of private property, the limitations cast on office holders by the remit of their office, by consent. They can't be automatons. Fundamentally, applying the law is a political act, but you have to educate their discretion by having them read some of the great opinions of John Marshall, having them read some of The Federalist Papers, so that they understand what the basics of the regime are and what their place in the regime is, and therefore the limits cast upon them because of the kind of regime it is. I found this fascinating because I just didn't know that this argument from this group of people was out there. It's a fundamental admission that this understanding of law in administrative state is inescapable, that you won't go back to the minimal 19th-century state. If you're a fundamentally realistic person about politics, you have to accept this and then you have to decide what to do about it. John Grove: Another thing that a lot of conservatives wanted to do about it was then rein it in by focusing on the person of the president more than the executive branch as a whole. That's another part of this reaction to the administrative state, the unitary executive. It seemed to me going through this that the unitary executive emerged first as thinking in terms of how do you reign in this administrative state and saying, well, not the "value-neutral expert bureaucrat" making decisions, but ultimately these people are making decisions on the behalf of a president. Getting the president more in charge, gripping the reins of the executive branch a little bit... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/26941122

Classic Caution for Modern Strategy 05/16/2023

Classic Caution for Modern Strategy Jakub Grygiel joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient wisdom in his recent book, Classics and Strategy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawandliberty.org and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. At this point, I'm sure it's no surprise that I like to think about questions of statesmanship at home and abroad, or that I have a distinct fondness for discussing such with professors, practitioners, and other thinkers who've been willing to engage thoughtfully with writers of the past and present around these issues. Joining me today is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, Jakub Grygiel. Professor Grygiel is a senior advisor at the Marathon Initiative. In another life, he served a stint at the State Department. He's authored several books, including Great Powers and Geopolitical Change, The Return of the Barbarians, and with Wes Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier. It is lovely to have you on today, Jakub. Jakub Grygiel: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. One of the books that you've authored that I didn't just mention, you published late in 2022, titled Classics and Strategy. It's a collection of essays on different classic authors from antiquity, the Renaissance, and even the Enlightenment. I would say it's geared towards students, even practitioners of strategy and international relations. I've super enjoyed the opening inscription that you gave to that from Charles Péguy, that Homer is original this morning, and nothing is perhaps so old as today's newspaper. Within your introduction, you affirm that classic texts give us not just important insights, but often, unusual insights into strategy. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of the backstory of how this book came out of a month's long project, maybe even years-long frustration, with the limitations of the modern IR classroom. Would love to hear a little bit about this project and what you're hoping to accomplish with it. Jakub Grygiel: It's a great question. That little line from Charles Péguy, it's great because it really conveys with a great brevity the idea that this morning newspaper, it's old by now. What is it now? It's in the afternoon. I don't know whatever date it is. We don't pick up the morning newspaper anymore unless we forgot to read it in the morning, et cetera. There's something to that. Whereas we'll always, we'll pick up Homer, or Tacitus, or Plutarch, that we know well, or any other great authors, and we'll read that work with great interest and I think great profit to our intellect. Obviously, these are two different things. Reading Plutarch and newspaper, I think you should do both, to a certain degree, but the originality of it is interesting of these classic texts. Anyway, so one of the impetus for writing several of these essays and then the book was simply that I just like reading old stuff. It's very selfish. It's always fascinating to me, there are always interesting stories, interesting insights. Above all, I think, even though I'm not a classical historian or a classist, it's a refreshing way of thinking about current problems. When I teach classes in obviously foreign policy, national security, there's a tendency for students and often other professors to assign and read current policy articles, books, et cetera. I think there's a use for it, and I'm sure students enjoy it too, but sometimes you ask the questions to the students, do you really think that nobody has thought about deterrence before 1950? The answer will be, of course, somebody must have thought about it. It was like, yeah, even if you read the 1950s classical text by Thomas Shelling on deterrence, well, he starts with essentially Julius Caesar and other sort of anecdotes from ancient history, pointing to fact that this is actually not, the reality of deterrence is not new. Obviously, he phrases it a different way, in a more economic way, et cetera. There's these political realities are not always that new. Maybe instead of reading something that tomorrow will be old, read something that is old that tomorrow is still young. I think as soon as I think after a moment of sort of worry that they're not going to be up to speed with the latest foreign affairs article, or New York Times oped, they realize actually reading Thucydides or passages, it's interesting. You can have great debates about war in Ukraine, or what to do about Iran, or whether a land power can become a sea power, like the question of China and ocean going navy. I always thought that these are great, well, A, they're fun to read, and then from a teaching perspective, they're great tools of teaching current debates, current geopolitical dynamics, without actually going into the current debates, which often are ideological and personally unpleasant. That's the main impetus. The other one, which is probably a little bit more, I'm not sure, I have never written on that, and kind of perplexed whether I should say it, is that especially in graduate school, there's this emphasis on literature review. You write your dissertation or whatever, you read a book, an academic academic book, you have to review all the literature on the subject, which usually means the recent literature, the last 20 years, 30, maybe 40, maybe 50, right? Maybe done in political theory, it may be different. International relations, that's the sort of approach, comparative politics, American politics. Fine. I think it's useful, necessary perhaps, but it forces you then to place your work within a very limited context, within the context of essentially your peers. Fine, you should do that, but why not place it in the context of a much wider tradition? This idea of this pressure to have literature review, I think in very serious ways, it's very limiting intellectually, because then what you end up is you carve a niche within what is already a niche literature. Look, at the end of the day, that's why publishers will never publish a literature review chapter. They'll tell you the first thing that has to go out of your dissertation is the literature review, because nobody wants to read this. Okay, so why did you spend a year and a half doing this? Why didn't you read Thucydides and place it in context of that, right? Anyway, so in many ways, this is a freeing moment. It's like, look, I've been reading these guys for decades, and well, I don't have to do the literature review. I'm just going to write about them. Rebecca Burgess: It narrows so drastically the scope of what you're trying to do, but I think also the scope of imagination of the writer and then the scholars that you're trying to engage with. On that question of, well, one, you are so correct. The number one complaint I see on Twitter from all the Twitter scholars is that they hate doing a literature review. No one reads it. They don't want to do it themselves. Thankfully, I lucked out. I just got to incorporate all my literature throughout my dissertation draft in some sneaky way. It does raise this interesting question about I think imagination and reality. You argue in your introduction and throughout the book, you make a case not just for history. We're all more or less inclined to accept that we can study Thucydides, and we have our Graham Allison's, even though many of us have problems with his interpretation of Thucydides. Okay. This Thucydides is accepted, but the Tragedians, like Aeschylus, even other historians, Tacitus, Plutarch, you mentioned, you include these. I think this is a wonderful broadening of the discussion into international relations that you add, but you offer this very intriguing little soup song, if you will, into why, and you say that it's because they offer what modern thinking about strategy lacks, a deep grounding in reality. Could you tell us a little bit more how tragics and the classics give us maybe more reality than our current doctrines and schools have thought about realists, internationalists, what have you? Jakub Grygiel: It's a great question. I probably would have an hour long answer, another book perhaps, but in brief, I think they're, in general, it seems to me reading a lot of these classics, and the reasons why there are classics in my view is they are not abstract. By that, I mean they do not attempt to create rationalist theories of how the world, maybe they think it works, or it ought to work. Rather they trying to describe a particular tyrant, a particular moment in time, a particular speech, or maybe they make up the speech or they think they should be said, or they think that Pericles said at the moment or whoever, or they try to describe how somebody like a Persian thought about their loss of the battle at the Battle of Salamis, trying to get into their mind. Actually, that's imagination, that they're not sitting there with a camera recording what the Persians are saying about their loss. It's a flight of imagination. It's not an abstraction in the modern sense, which is usually the creation of a fairly mathematical reality, which may or may not correspond with actual facts on the ground on the reality. As a saying that or story that somebody once told Hegel that his theory didn't reflect the facts on the ground, the reality. Hegel allegedly responded, says, "Well, too bad for reality." This is the modern approach. The classical one seems to be "Okay, now hold on for a second. If my theory, whatever I'm saying, does not reflect reality, oh, not too bad for reality, too bad for me. I better be careful. I better actually figure out the actual events or the actual truth or what I think the reality really is." I think it's this pre-modern, perhaps allergy to overly abstract theoretical thinking, which is attractive in a lot of these writers. It doesn't have to be a historian per se. As you mentioned, it's Aeschylus and others that convey something of the way that people thought, that people were thinking, of how people assess each other, how people had a wrong assessment of each other, and they're not lost in great theoretical debates, which is very, very modern. Rebecca Burgess: Right. You argue or write that a modern strategic thought is shaped by three broad ideas: a belief in equal rationality of all, a trust in impersonal forces of, well, often progressive in nature, and a pension for data gathering, and that all of these work towards discounting the role of individual statesmen, and replacing strategists with planners and managers, essentially. Then the argument, as I take it throughout the essays, is kind of showing how the planner and the manager are not helpful models for us today, and kind of restoring the individual and the statesmen. Could you just give us a little bit of why you chose the authors? You have Plutarch, Tacitus, Aeschylus, Montesquieu, missing someone else. Jakub Grygiel: Now, I'm thinking too, what are you missing? Guicciardini is the last one as the Renaissance one. Rebecca Burgess: Xenophon. Jakub Grygiel: Xenophon, exactly. The problem with lot of modern thought is that it conceives politics as a mechanism, like the mechanism of physics, or an engine of some sort. Therefore, the only thing you need to know is the science of discovering how that mechanism works. Once you have figured out how the mechanism works, you can replicate it. Once I know how the diesel engine works, I can rebuild it and with the right tools, et cetera. It's often the question is when you write a modern academic book or some argument is, how can you generalize this? Meaning, well, you figure out the science of this mechanism, can you now extend it to every other mechanism of similar nature? The classical authors are somewhat reluctant to put it in those terms. Politics is the realm often of the chance there'll be sort of Fortuna, the Machiavellian concept, but it's broader than that. It's of free will, which is a key component of human action, and therefore a certain level of not chaos, but surprises, is that certain things that you think if you look at a mechanism of incentives, cost and benefits, you should do or you should not do, well, suddenly, free will kicks in. You might do the opposite. You might actually not calculate it according to the cost benefit analysis. I think these are the authors that, and they're not exhaustive. You can talk at many other authors in sort of classical thought and both historians, theorists, or philosophers, or poets. Why these specific ones? Well, partly again, selfish, I like them and I always like reading them. Part of it I think is that they have certain set of themes that, I don't want to exaggerate their sort of unity among them, but certain themes there are recurrent. For instance, the recurrence of call them tyrants, dictators, but actually they use the term tyrants often, very peculiar type of political leader, which is for them, it's a recurrent reality in politics. It's not something that is passe. The progress has removed authoritarian or tyrannical leaders. No, it's always there because it's part of human nature. It's not a mistake of institutional building or a momentary lapse of the progressive march of history. No, no, no. It's a constant thing in human history. Let's look at that. What's the problem with tyrants? How do they think? Are they peculiar forms? Do they have a peculiar form of behavior? A lot of them will say yes, they have very peculiar forms of behavior. Another one is fragility of political order. I think it's more specific than that, because even a lot of modern thoughts will say political order is fragile. I think for a lot of these classical writers, it's the impermanence of political action. In other words, politics is necessary, but it does not have, and it should not be thought as, how to put it, a creative force. Modern thought seems to me often puts a lot of emphasis or gives a lot of power to politics. You can create new lasting realities. You build the mechanism of institutions, and you have great domestic or international stability or peace. You build the right set of an incentive structure of economics, for instance, free trade, and you'll have an outcome which is peace. It'll be lasting and sustainable. Here's tools of politics that you can arrange that create a new reality that will maintain itself in many ways, as long as that institutional or setting or that the structure of incentive remains. For classical authors is no. Politics is yes, absolutely essential. It has the capacity to mold things, but it's not classic, right? Yes, you managed equilibrium today. Well, tomorrow the equilibrium will change. Good luck, right? Work again, right? Never relax. It's fragility of political order. None of this says, "Okay, well, we have revolutions. Let's come up with a better state to create new order to bide our time." No. Fragility is no matter what you do, you'll have to do it tomorrow, and you'll have to under different circumstances with different actors, different states, different individuals, different set of incentives, et cetera, et cetera. It's this constant struggle of politics, in a good way, that I think is very refreshing. Rebecca Burgess: Well, the fragility of politics, it's derivative, I guess I would say, of human beings. Therefore, it is as limited as we in our individual capacity, and even in our collective capacity, are. In that way, I think one of the most hopeful things I ever learned was actually in a Politics in the Bible course, Leo Paul De Alvarez, where essentially he said, "Politics has always been going to hell in a hand basket, so cheer up." Jakub Grygiel: Great. Sorry to interrupt. Just even if they're not Christian, there is a certain temporal pessimist, but at the same time, metaphysical optimist of a lot of these authors. That may be the point about the class. Rebecca Burgess: That's wonderful. I think we said we need to remember that in return back to it, because it dovetails with this other question I was going to raise is whether politics is ultimately tragic or not. Of course, you could say the ancients perhaps answered that differently than post-incarnation, but maybe not. Maybe that's where there is, I think, another argument for studying tragedy, that tragedy in a way can actually offer more hope for our politics than our actual politics do. That's a little different. Jakub Grygiel: Right. Rebecca Burgess: You mention tyrants, and that's kind of the question of regimes, individual statesmen, and particular individuals. It seems to me that one of the things that comes out is the theme not just of tyrants, but also of just enemies and knowing your enemies. Why is it so important to know one's enemy, and what does that actually entail for, well, there's the essay by Plutarch, but in fact, several of the others mention knowing your enemies collectively and individually. Jakub Grygiel: Well, first of all, the main one is that you'll never get rid of them, right? There always will be enemies. That's the nature of politics. That's the nature of human just daily life and political life in particular is that you'll never get rid of enemies. That goes back to the fragility of political action or the impermanence of political action. You will never solve the problem of the human condition. Somebody else said that you can't reduce human problems to the ills of the city. It's something deeper than that. I think classical, and obviously Christian authors will agree with that, right? Salvation cannot be reached by politics. That's the Christian view, but the same in a classical sense, the classical authors that politics has certain limits. Enemies are just a symptom of this constant struggle that you'll have to have with the reality of social life. Now, then the question becomes what do you do with them? Obviously, you might want to kill them if that's necessary, but first of all, you have actually have to know them. Knowing the enemy is sort of an ancient almost art. We often now think about net assessment or assessing the enemy or whatever other modern term you have. Essentially is, how do you know the enemy? You know that they're there, how do you know them? It involves, among other things, trying to think. They think not because you agree with them, not because they're sort of a relativist in them. No, no, they're barbarians, absolutely. You got to figure out how they think. That's why I think Aeschylus, his tragedy on the Persians is brilliant. As far as we know, it's the only, obviously any tragedy, but probably my only written document, especially of the Greeks, trying to put words in the mouth of the enemy, not in a derogatory way, not in a, "Oh, these guys are obviously enemies. They're far inferior, they're stupid," et cetera. No, no, no, no. These are human beings that have a certain set of assumptions, prejudices, a certain political structure, and we actually should have empathy to understand it. I think it's a brilliantly written tragedy, because it's all based in the court of the Persian king waiting for the news of what happens to the expedition to Greece. Messenger comes back and say, "Yeah, we lost the battle." "How can you lose a battle? We had all these numbers." It's like, "Yeah, yeah, but they're better than us essentially. They're organized, and yes, we essentially mis-assessed the enemy. We just looked at the numbers, and by numbers, you're right, queen, you should have won, but numbers are not the only thing that matter." There's this, again, attempt, very brilliant and unique attempt to get into the mind of the other enemy. That's what often we do now. If we start thinking about the enemies, like always somebody... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/26800185

The Kennedy Moment 04/28/2023

The Kennedy Moment Stephen F. Knott joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent book, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. James Patterson: Hello. You are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is April 10th, 2023, and my name is James M. Patterson. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, and at the Institute for Human Ecology, and president of the Ciceronian Society. My guest today is Dr. Stephen F. Knott. Until his recent retirement, Dr. Knott was a professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Prior to that, Dr. Knott was co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, where I met him and worked for him for a little while. His essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Post, Time, Politico, The Hill, oh my goodness, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, I’m exhausted. He is author and editor of ten books dealing with the American presidency, the early republic, and American foreign policy. His most recent book, Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy, was published by the University Press of Kansas in October 2022, and it will be the subject of today's interview. Dr. Knott, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Stephen Knott: Well, thank you, James. It's always great to reconnect with you, and I'm looking forward to our discussion. James Patterson: Listeners don't know this, but I promised to interview Dr. Knott maybe a little while ago. And so if he throws any barbs my way, understand that they're all very earned on my part. So for those who haven't read the book yet, one of the things that might surprise the reader is that Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy has a very strong personal component to it in a way that other scholarly works of yours have avoided. So what is it about Kennedy that makes the subject so personal? Stephen Knott: So, James, I grew up in a Kennedy-worshiping family in Massachusetts. And I use that term worshiping with some precision. As far as my mother was concerned, she was of Irish Catholic descent. When John F. Kennedy broke that glass ceiling that had kept Catholic or any non-Protestant out of the White House, from that point on, he could do no wrong. So my earliest memory, believe it or not, is of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So in addition to growing up in a kind of worshipful Kennedy environment, my earliest memories, two of my earliest memories, one is the missile crisis and seeing the fear on my parents' faces as they listened to President Kennedy in October 1962 talk about the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba. And then shortly after that, my father came home with plans for a bomb shelter in our backyard. That's my first memory. My second earliest memory is of the assassination, and my mother sitting in front of this grainy black and white television watching the news from Dallas that President Kennedy had been murdered. So both in terms of my memories and also just in terms of the environment that I grew up in was a rock-solid, New Deal, new frontier family. And my editor suggested, along with some friends that, that personal angle might set this Kennedy book apart from the other 40,000 titles that have been written about President Kennedy. James Patterson: Right. It's a very moving sort of introduction about the context in which you grew up. And I know a lot of ... I'm at a Catholic university, and I know a lot of people of a certain age that had that very similar experience. Another thing that I had wondered that made this book a little bit more personal was your previous book to this one, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, 2019, University of Kansas, or the University Press of Kansas, I always get that wrong. So you had a pretty strongly critical tone of the modern presidency. And so maybe developments in recent history had made you reconsider the legacy of Kennedy after growing up maybe a little bit more critical of him as you describe at the early part of the book. Stephen Knott: That's absolutely right, James. My previous book was critical, is critical of a number of the modern presidents, including President Kennedy, to some extent. And I actually wondered at times if perhaps I was a bit too critical. And I started thinking that way, particularly in light of the Trump presidency, which I viewed as quite destructive. And looking back at least at Kennedy's rhetoric, one can see a president I think who generally appealed to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, who viewed the United States as the last best hope, and belatedly, but nonetheless somewhat firmly tried to move his fellow white citizens in the direction of fulfilling the promises of the Declaration of Independence. So I still remain somewhat critical of Kennedy in terms of his embrace of this progressive notion of a kind of boundless presidency, where the president can be as big a man as he wants to be. I find that's still very problematic, but I also think that some of Kennedy's rhetoric did appeal to the best in us. And I thought it was time, after 60-plus years on this planet, for me to revisit my earlier beliefs about President Kennedy, and perhaps come away with a more nuanced understanding of this president and this man. James Patterson: As a subject, Kennedy really is a fascinating moment in American politics. It's at a critical turning point in the Democratic Party. Its coalition is shifting. And Kennedy himself is an Irish Catholic, we talked about that, at a moment when American Catholic culture was really beginning to experience its most popular moment of Notre Dame football, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day. So what is it about this moment that Kennedy is capturing that is part of what makes him so successful in winning the nomination and then just barely successful enough to defeat Richard Nixon? Stephen Knott: Yeah. I think Kennedy is very much sort of a personification of mid-20th century Catholicism for better or for worse. Again, Kennedy breaks that glass ceiling and makes a very firm commitment to the American people and to his fellow Catholics that he is going to take his guidance from the American Constitution and not from Rome. Now I know there are some folks who believe that Kennedy set far too high a wall of separation between church and state. And to this day, he remains a controversial figure in the minds of a lot of conservative Catholics. But I do see him as a kind of Catholic Irish immigrant success story that a lot of fellow Catholic immigrants really glommed onto, so to speak. And again, in the minds of so many of these folks, he could do no wrong after that point. One of the reasons, James, that I wrote this book is I do see a kind of cultish aspect to the support for John F. Kennedy, and that I find somewhat disturbing in a republic, whether it's a cultish support for Donald Trump, or Barack Obama, or John F. Kennedy, there's something troubling about that. But I did witness it up close and personal, and again, particularly for somebody like my mother who had to fight for the establishment of a Catholic Church in a very small New England town dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. She fought that fight in the late 1940s, and then 10 or 15 years later, there's a fellow Irish Catholic sitting in the White House. It's just important for your listeners to understand just how important that was to people of my parents' generation who were Catholic. James Patterson: My mother was at a Catholic school, and I want to say this was when she was in Washington, although it was when she may have been in Hawaii. She was the daughter of a man in the Army, he was a sergeant, and was the only Nixon supporter in her entire Catholic school and received very, very bad marks when writing an essay in favor of Richard Nixon. But the family, my mom’s side of the family is very old Republican, so this of course unpopular at her Catholic school. So let's get into the meat of the book, which is about the presidency. It's not a long presidency for very tragic reasons well-known to our audience. But one of the subjects you open with is on the civil rights movement. And I was very excited to read this section because I wanted to know what you had to say, especially because I have read a considerably long book on the same subject by Steven Levingston called Kennedy and King. And I think your reading of Kennedy is much friendlier and sympathetic, given that Kennedy was facing a number of trials at the same time. Stephen Knott: That's absolutely true, James. I do think there's been a tendency on the part of both the book that you just referred to and many other scholars to be highly critical of Kennedy for what, as one author refers to him as a bystander when it comes to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There's definitely an element of truth in that accusation. Kennedy was very cautious at first in terms of his actions as president dealing with civil rights. But I think sometimes folks forget, first of all, just what a narrow victory Kennedy had over Richard Nixon in 1960. And that victory was based in part on carrying some key Southern states, the state of Georgia, for instance, gave Kennedy his second-highest popular vote, just behind Rhode Island. And this is a man who just squeaks into the White House. There's kind of a cloud surrounding that election, to begin with. And then he's confronted with powerful barons in Congress from these Southern states, who are rock-solid Democrats, but also rock-solid segregationists. So he does tread very carefully, there's no question about it. He promised in the 1960 campaign that with the stroke of a pen, he could end discrimination and federally funded housing, and he waits until well over a year and a half to finally do that. But I do think, James, by his third year in office, or by 1963, excuse me, he puts the full weight of his White House behind what will become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And I would strongly recommend to your listeners that they go onto YouTube and just watch Kennedy's speech from June of '63, which was an address to the American public, where he puts civil rights as his top domestic priority, and he cites the Declaration of Independence. He cites the American Constitution. He cites our Judeo-Christian heritage in favor of a vigorous federal effort to finally break down the walls of segregation. And he'll spend the last four or five months of his presidency lobbying for that civil rights bill. And there's a reason why he's in Dallas, Texas, in November of 1963. He's in trouble in the South. He has alienated a significant portion of the Democratic Party's base by identifying himself with Dr. King, with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And I think he deserves credit for belatedly, absolutely true, but belatedly putting the full pressure, if you will, of the White House behind a significant piece of civil rights legislation. James Patterson: Yeah, that's right. He does embrace this language of Judeo-Christianity in precisely the way that Dr. King had, and that element to his speech is picked up and continued through the passage of the '64 act, in fact. So I was very taken by the treatment you gave of the speech he gives. It was a really good balance, really a correction to a lot of the anti-Kennedy stuff out there, which I have to admit I probably in my own work have been too readily accepting because of my own biases against Kennedy, obviously that I've inherited. Another subject that comes up in the book and really gets a finesse treatment given your foreign policy background is a little issue that came up during the Kennedy administration called the Cuban Missile Crisis. What exactly was going on with the Kennedy White House? And why was it that they decided to deal with Cuba, the missile crisis, as well as attempting to stage a coup the way that they did? Stephen Knott: Well, James, Kennedy had campaigned in 1960. He took a very hard line on Communism. He's one of the few mid to late-20th-century Democrats who actually outflanks his Republican opponent on national security. In other words, he comes off as more hawkish than Richard Nixon. And he accuses the Eisenhower Nixon administration of having lost Cuba just as Nixon and some of the Republicans had accused Harry Truman of losing China. So Kennedy beats up his Republican opponents on this issue of Castro coming to power in 1959 during the Eisenhower years. And he suggests that he's not going to tolerate that. And, of course, you end up with the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April of 1961. Now he had inherited a plan from the Eisenhower administration to try to topple the Castro government. We could talk for hours about the differences or the changes that Kennedy made to Eisenhower's plan. But the bottom line, that thing was just a total disaster. He took full responsibility for it, but he also continued to try to topple that government. And you end up with something called Operation Mongoose, which was a campaign of economic sabotage, but also a campaign involving trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. So this is the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That administration–the Kennedy Administration–had been trying to kill Castro for quite a few months prior to that. And, of course, the Soviets and the Cubans were well aware of this. When Khrushchev decides to gamble and put these offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba, I think he thought, Khrushchev thought, that Kennedy was somewhat weak, somewhat vacillating. He had canceled any air strikes for the Bay of Pigs operation. He had stood by while the Berlin Wall went up. And there may have been a calculation on Khrushchev's part that Kennedy would not respond in a firm manner regarding the missiles in Cuba. Now Kennedy does respond in a firm manner in terms of authorizing a blockade, or a quarantine, I should say, of Cuba. But what we didn't know at the time was that Kennedy also made some pretty significant concessions to Khrushchev in order to get the Russians to pull those missiles out. And so we secretly agreed to remove the missiles that we have on the Soviet border in Turkey, and also, we agreed to not invade Cuba again like we did in the Bay of Pigs. Those things were kept very quiet, very hush, hush. And one of the interesting things that comes out of the missile crisis, and the reason I can say this with certainty, is we have tape recordings of everything that was said in almost every meeting about the missile crisis. And John F. Kennedy was consistently the most dovish, for lack of a better word, the most determined to avoid a military conflict with the Soviet Union, while demanding the removal of these missiles at the same time. So I give Kennedy considerable credit for a very effective management of that crisis, which was the worst of the Cold War that could've easily degenerated into a nuclear conflict between the two superpowers. I do think it's due to Kennedy's willingness to put himself in Khrushchev's shoes, to make some concessions, to demand the removal of the Soviet missiles, but also to allow Khrushchev to save face. And I think we averted World War III by Kennedy so doing. James Patterson: Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the discussion on the issue of Cuba was that we focus a lot on the relationship that Kennedy had with Khrushchev. Normally, his presentation is one getting kind of yelled at by Khrushchev hammering his fists and/or footwear on various objects at the United Nations. But really, the part that I was most interested in was how slowly but surely, there's this sort of emergence of a three-way relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev and Castro. And Khrushchev's relationship with Castro eventually helps with the thawing of the relationship with Kennedy because of what Khrushchev's got with this guy and Cuba, and what he's demanding Khrushchev do with the missiles. So if you could tell any bit of that story just to tease it up for your future book buyers, I would be very grateful because it's one of my favorite parts of the book. Stephen Knott: Well, thanks, James. I have to say it, I'm glad you sort of highlighted this. I do think there's a tendency to put almost all of the blame on JFK for the missile crisis. The fact was this was an incredibly reckless gamble on Khrushchev's part. But more importantly, what emerges from a close examination of the missile crisis is just how zealous, how I would say, dangerous Fidel Castro was. He was furious at Khrushchev and at the Kremlin for the decision to pull those missiles out. Castro wanted this thing to go to the mat. He was itching for a conflict. And some of the statements that Castro made, both publicly and privately, to folks in the Russian hierarchy, really bone-chilling. I mean, look, saying things to the effect, if they want to take us down, we're going to take them down with us. He didn't particularly care if the whole world got embroiled in this conflict. So there's a recklessness about Castro that I think a lot of Western observers to this day still ignore. If you don't believe me, you can look at the accounts written by Khrushchev's son, Sergei Khrushchev, in which he talks about some of these really dangerous, irresponsible statements made by Castro at the height of the missile crisis, to the point where it really turned Khrushchev and the Politburo off. They became very concerned about Castro's stability. And I think that's a part of the Cuban Missile Crisis that just doesn't get enough attention. James Patterson: In my version of the text, it's this great part of the book, and pleading for a first strike in the event of an American invasion, Castro told Khrushchev that this was an opportunity to eliminate the chance for the Americans to strike first against the Soviet Union, quote, "An American invasion would be the moment to eliminate such danger," Castro told the Kremlin, this quote, "Harsh and terrible solution was the only solution, for there is no other." In Moscow, Khrushchev, the man who once promised to bury the capitalist West, and who had flaunted the possibility of nuclear war during the summit with Kennedy in Vienna of 1961, was astounded by Castro's proposed final solution, quote, "This is insane. Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him." Stephen Knott: Absolutely true. And again, not to beat a dead horse, but I've often felt that Fidel Castro to this day gets something of a pass from a lot of Western observers who sort of admire the fact that he stood up to the big bully to the north. But there's an element of Castro's zealotry to the cause and to his hatred of the United States that is particularly ... It's disturbing in an era of nuclear weapons. And I think he had a kind of cavalier attitude about those weapons that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev had, thank God. James Patterson: It's sort of like, "Well, if they start a nuclear war with each other, maybe they'll forget all about me down here." So this is something of a silly question, but it came to mind when I was reading that quotation. But is it true that Kennedy before imposing the embargo, picked up a bunch of Cuban cigars to keep for himself at the White House? Stephen Knott: I believe that is true, James, if my memory serves correctly. I don't know if I talk about this in the book or not. But I know I've come across references to, I believe, somebody in Pierre Salinger's staff. Salinger was Kennedy's press secretary, was... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/26647251

Passing the Baton 04/14/2023

Passing the Baton Will Inboden joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama, a collection of documents related to the 2008-2009 presidential transition. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. And thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Welcome and hello to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm the contributing editor with Law & Liberty, a visiting fellow with Independent Women's Forum, and a few other things. And joining me today is Will Inboden, who is the executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, and an assistant professor at the LBJ Policy School, both of which are at the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome, Will, to Liberty Law Talk. Will Inboden: Thank you, Rebecca. It's great to be with you. Rebecca Burgess: Well, I am very excited to talk about a book, which I'm not sure is on many people's radar. Because everyone is so excited about your recent Reagan book, they haven't realized that you have recently put out another edited volume, very large in fact, which is called Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama. Just came out at the very end of February, and Brookings Institution Press published it. I have to say, I was recently at a conference, I had the tome with me on the table, and several people picked it up and passed it around, and they were so excited. Because this book is really novel. It represents about 30 or so different transition memos that the George W. Bush team wrote to the incoming Obama team in 2007/2008, as the new president was getting his team ready to take up the reins of government. And something like this, as far as I know, has never happened. Would you give us a little bit of the story, the summary of what this book is? Will Inboden: Yeah. Thanks, Rebecca. And I do think that, at the risk of immodesty, it is a very unique book. I don't know of any other book there's ever been like this particular one. If that sounds too grandiose for listeners, I'm not saying it's the most wonderful book ever, listeners can judge if it's good or bad. But just the type of book it is. I'll emphasize what I mean by that. First, that has all of these declassified transition memos. And to give our listeners some context, these memos, when they were first written at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, most of them were classified top secret, others secret. So high classification levels. And according to standard American government practice, they would not have been declassified for at least 30 years or maybe longer. And so just the fact that we were able to get them declassified after just 15 years, which again, is a while, but not near as long as it normally would've been, that is very unusual. Second thing that we did, which I don't know if another book that is done, is in addition to taking these declassified memos so that readers can see what did the world look like to outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration in 2008/09, is we had quite a few of the people who had originally written these memos, now write retrospective essays on them. So these are former Bush National Security Council staff, who now 15 years later, looking back saying, "All right, what do we think we got? What do we think we got wrong?" So it's a little bit of grading your own report card, right? It's a self-evaluation. But still, a good chance to take some of our own internal thoughts and reflections and put them down on paper. Then the third thing is we also commissioned some outside scholars, Mel Leffler of University of Virginia, Martha Kumar, one of the most eminent scholars of presidential transitions, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins SAIS. And it had them write their own evaluation essays saying what do they scholars think the Bush administration got and got wrong on national security, on the transition, and so forth. And so to have all of those documents between the covers of just one volume, like I said, I don't know of any other volume there's been like this. And so there's any number of angles from which people can look at it and digest it. Rebecca Burgess: I love that it doesn't leave to future scholars. It's almost living history, it seems like. Maybe not quite, but that it's a certain transparency about it of showing the inner workings of government. And I should mention, because I didn't previously, who the other editors are that are involved in this volume, and the fact that you have a very nice forward from President George W. Bush himself and a note from Condoleezza Rice. But Stephen Hadley, who had served four years as assistant to the president for National Security Affairs is kind of the main editor. And then assistant editors are Peter Fever, who under Bush, served as the special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff. Yourself, who at the time you were senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff, and you also worked in the state department's policy planning staff, correct? Will Inboden: That's right, yes. Yeah, and the Bush- Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. Will Inboden: Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: And then Meghan O'Sullivan, who was special assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. So very well-placed individuals there at the top who were in the middle of all of these things at the time. And I would love to ask in a question, maybe a step back, why does this book happen now? What was the thoughts that you all had that clearly at some point there was conversation, maybe it was over whiskey, maybe it wasn't. Where you said, "You know what we need to do, is declassify or see if we can declassify some of these transition memos and put it together in a book." And not just put them together in a book, but also write these postscripts, these kind of evaluations on them. Where does that process come from and what is it trying to do? Will Inboden: Yeah. So the process was started, and all credit here, by Steve Hadley himself, who had been the National Security Advisor at the time and had overseen the original drafting of these memos. And also overseen the transition process when Bush is leaving office and the Obama team is coming in, and Hadley advanced that. We'll want to talk a little bit more about just how important but little understood that process is. Steve came to me about four or five years ago with the idea for doing this project. And wanting to know if I and Peter and Meghan would be interested in helping him out. One reason Steve originally approached me is I sit on the advisory committee for CIA and another advisory committee for State Department on expediting the declassification of old documents and getting them in the hands of scholars. And so I was already doing this kind of work for the Reagan administration, the Bush 41 administration, the previous administrations, so was able to help Steve with some of the mechanics of getting these documents declassified. And it's an interesting thing about American law, even though President Bush, as president at the time had complete authority over the classification of these documents. Once he's out of office, these documents are the property of the United States government, not President Bush himself. And so he could not, now as ex-president just wave a wand and say they're all declassified. They had to go through a very rigorous process that current National Security Council officials oversaw, which took about a year and a half to two years. So that was the original genesis of Steve Hadley wanted to do it. And there were two reasons why he wanted it done. The first is transparency and informing the American people of this is how national security is handled during a presidential transition, including a transition from a Republican to a Democrat, and an outgoing two term one, to an incoming one. Where there were real differences over policy, but at same time, I think I shared sense of duty to serve the country and protect the country. And the second reason is Steve Hadley wanted to produce a pretty extensive record of what was Bush administration foreign policy. We're recording this as we're... this week is the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. Obviously, one of the most controversial aspects of Bush foreign policy. And there's a big section in here on Iraq. But as a way of reminding people, reminding scholars, reminding ordinary citizens that there were a lot of other things that went on during the Bush administration. A lot of other policies that we worked on, some things we got right, some things we got wrong. And putting these documents out there so that people can make up their own minds, but a part of the, I think trying to provide as full of accounting as possible of the Bush administration legacy. Your listeners will know, I'm hardly objective on this. Right? I served this administration for five years, so I don't want to pretend to scholarly objectivity. I'm very proud of a lot of what we accomplished. And will also tell you, I think we got a number of things wrong as well. But whatever you think of the Bush administration foreign policy over those eight years, everyone will agree that it was consequential. Right? That some very important things happened, some of the good, some of them bad. And so I think to at least understand that, it helps to have these documents and these essays evaluating them. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely agree. And I think just as a little side note, as you were saying that you're hardly an objective observer. Sometimes maybe I think we downplay the importance of having people who have been involved actually give their own thoughts and feelings about it. Because at the end of the day, we're not automatons. Even those who work in government are not automatons, they're individual human beings who are also using their emotions and their intellect to evaluate. And maybe we can get into this in a little bit, but in writing these memorandum, assessing situations, it's very much intelligence gathering type of an operation, even though we don't think about it in those specific terms. And of course, what parameters were you using to make those evaluations are very much based on our personal involvement and with them often. So I was wondering actually if we can step also back a little bit and talk about transitions, because you were mentioning this, and what goes into a transition between two presidents. That's one level. The second is between two different parties, Republican and Democrat, as you mentioned. The third with this particular, is there's war going on. But then also just this basic fact that no president starts with a clean slate. No one gets to come in with an absolutely fresh new virgin landscape of domestic or foreign policy. And foreign policy, it seems to me this is where this really comes into play. The rest of the world is still doing its things. And a new president has to step in. And how does the country, the United States of America preserve a certain continuity with all those countries when there are different presidents? Is this the role of the agencies? There are so many agencies. I don't think most Americans could name which agencies are involved in foreign policy, that there's not just state and the National Security Council, there's USAID, there's multiple other of these things. How do you coordinate those activities and how do we start to think about it? And is this where the practice of writing transition memos in a sense starts coming from? Is this what President Bush in 2007 is thinking about? Maybe just walk us through a little bit of some of these things. Will Inboden: Yeah, there's a lot there, and you tee up some really great questions and I have some really good thoughts there. I think the first thing to say is this, is that there is a two and a half month period roughly, for a presidential transition. Right? Between election day, the first Tuesday of November, and then inauguration day, which is almost always January 20th. So it's about that two and a half month window. And during that time, you still have one president. Okay, so the outgoing president stays president up until 11:59 AM on inauguration day. However, during that true two and a half month time, the outgoing president is the lame duck, and the incoming president is putting together his, maybe eventually her team has some ideas on the policies they're going to want to pursue. And so it's a very complicated and delicate time. And the bad guys in the world, the threats, the potential terrorist attacks, the great power rivals, Russia and China, the rogue state actors, North Korea and Iran, they do not stop wishing harm on the United States during that transition. They're not going to pause their activities and their threats. Likewise, at any given time, the United States has hundreds, thousands of sensitive national security endeavors underway around the world. I mean, I'll just give a bunch of examples. Right? So we have troops deployed around the world. We have troops based in dozens, maybe even close to a hundred countries. During this 2008 time, we had two hot wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, those don't stop during presidential transition. A lot of other smaller scale operations going on. We have a vast array of sensitive intelligence collection endeavors underway of covert actions that are underway, that again, that the CIA usually is carrying out. You have lots of diplomatic negotiations underway that the state department is leading. Many of them out of the public limelight. You have the development endeavors underway, the different projects that USAID is funding and implementing. I could go on. Those things don't stop during a presidential transition. And as the outgoing president is on the way out, he is handing over a responsibility for those to the incoming team. The incoming president will then, as commander-in-chief, as diplomat-in-chief, and so on, have authority to maybe change or revisit a number of those operations. But about 90% of them will continue, even with a new president of a new party. And so it's a very complicated question, how do you keep some continuity going? Those things all, just as the threats to our country don't stop, those operations and endeavors are not going to stop either. And the National Security Council, as the president's main advisory and coordinating body for everything related to national security is the nerve center for keeping those going, and thus ensuring a smooth transition. A peaceful transition of power and the continuity of all of these different operations and endeavors. And so that is the backdrop for that very important, but sensitive and complex time, those two and a half months. And so what we had done with these memos originally is think all right, in addition to the different operations going on, we, I say we as both an American but also the Bush administration official, we had a responsibility to hand over as much of our institutional knowledge, our memory, our evaluations of policies to the incoming Obama team as we could. Again, it was going to be up to them to decide what they wanted to do with this or not, but we owed it to them to at least give them as much information as possible. And there wasn't real partisanship involved in this. I mean, we knew that they had run their campaign in a lot of ways, very critical of Bush administration foreign policy. We thought some of those criticisms were unfair and some of them were fair. We knew ourselves about a number of things that we had had messed up, but also thought we had some good things going that we would encourage them to continue. And so we owed it to them to give them as much of this information as possible, and then they could decide what they will do with it. And part of this came from previous presidential transitions had been a little more messy on the foreign policy. The Carter to Reagan transition, which I treat a little bit in my other book, which you mentioned, was a pretty messy one, that was a pretty acrimonious one. The Clinton to Bush 43 transition, which Steve Hadley had been a part of as incoming one, had been fairly messy. Of course there'd been the disputed Florida recount efforts and things like that. And so President Bush had decided early on in his second term that when it came time for him to do a transition, not even knowing yet that it was going to be Obama, not even knowing who the next one was going to be, that he owed it to his successor to make this as smooth as possible. Rebecca Burgess: Well, I think now all the experts who studied presidential transitions look to the Bush 43 transition to Obama as a kind of textbook handoff. And I'm glad you mentioned the Clinton to Bush because, so I'm in maybe grade school or maybe high school at the point when that happens, and I ended up having to spend a lot of time in doctor's offices. And I looked at a lot of Newsweeks and Time magazines. And I remember the political cartoons of the things that the Bush administration stepped into, everything from missing Ws on keyboards and things like that. And that what's in my head, and that's one of the first questions I remember when I saw this book being published was, does that effort, does president Bush is a slight impulsion to do it better because of how messy it was, at least on the outside, when he came into office. And how much of several steps back that can put an administration, if you're trying to just get up to speed on something, you're not quite ready to handle certain things. And I do believe, I think at some point, one of the authors of the book mentions this in regards to September 11th that there's a, I don't want to say a reason why, but part of the reason is that wasn't a lot of a good transition of information going on there. And so September 11th happens because things fall in the crack. Anyway, just maybe some of your thoughts on that. Will Inboden: I do think certainly a part of President Bush's commitment to doing a smooth and nonpartisan a transition as possible, did stem from his perception that his own earlier transition eight years earlier, the handover from Clinton to him had not gone so well. And again, it had been a disputed election. And there were some other factors too. I was finishing up graduate school at the time and was making some plans to eventually join the Bush administration, but I was not there firsthand for that 2000/2001 one. I think I read some of the same Newsweek articles you did. I will say, on the 9/11 attacks, and again, this is before I officially joined the administration, there probably is something to the messiness of the transition nine months earlier. That said, as you'll see in here, Bush administration veterans would also admit that they... we, I guess I should say, had not fully appreciated or taken the terrorist threat as seriously as it needed to be. And then you did have someone like Richard Clark, Dick Clark a who had been on the Clinton NSC staff, then continued on the Bush NSC staff, who had been raising the alarms about this as a more serious threat. And he was frustrated that he wasn't listened to as much. So there may be something to it, but I wouldn't want to go too far and blame the Clinton administration for the messy transition on how 9/11 came about. There was also, as we know, poor information sharing between the FBI and CIA, and a whole host of other factors, which we learned very painfully. Rebecca Burgess: Once again, the multiple factors and agencies involved doing foreign policy national security complicate things all the time. Will Inboden: Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: In moderation of course, in... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/26508051

Tocqueville in Hypermodernity 03/31/2023

Tocqueville in Hypermodernity Georgetown Professor of Political Science Joshua Mitchell joins host Brian Smith to discuss his book, Tocqueville in Arabia, newly available in paperback, and offer Tocquevillian insights into the malaise of modernity. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Brian Smith. With me today is Joshua Mitchell, professor of government at Georgetown University and the author of five books, including American Awakening, which we covered extensively on Law & Liberty, and the subject of today's discussion, the recently released in paperback, Tocqueville in Arabia. Thanks for speaking with us Josh. Joshua Mitchell: My pleasure, Brian. Good to see you. Brian Smith: Good to see you. So I wanted to open with a fairly general question. Which is, what led you to write this book? And now that it's being re-released, what lessons do you think it is most poignantly offering today? Joshua Mitchell: Well, what had happened in the early two tens, and really even before that, was I had become saturated with academic political theory. I thought that the discipline itself had lost its way. And by that I mean, it had lost sight of its original insight, which was there in Strauss and Arendt, notwithstanding their differences. And that insight was, look we have to return to the great texts of the Western tradition, in order to understand the contemporary moment. And so what Strauss and Arendt did, was they juxtaposed the crisis of modernity in the aftermath of the Second World War, and notably the Holocaust, with Plato, Aristotle and the rest, and effectively invented a field. These books were studied in philosophy departments and probably in literature departments to some extent too. But the unique development that they inaugurated was the conjunction, the bringing together of contemporary events and the great ideas of history, of Western political philosophy. And the problem was that insight, which inaugurated the discipline, was slowly being lost. 1989 came and went, 2001, 2007, 2008, economic crisis. And political theorists were busy exploring secondary and tertiary literature. And it struck me that we had lost our way. And so I left Georgetown. I had been the chair, I had left to go off to the Middle East to help found the Doha campus of Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and then also left Georgetown entirely for two years and went off to Iraq and helped develop the American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah. But all the time I was thinking about Tocqueville, who is always one of the ... he's the central guy really. I mean, I think of Augustine and Plato a lot too, but Tocqueville is always the central figure for me. And so it occurred to me very early on, really as early as 2001, even before I left for the startup team, that I would write a book about Tocqueville in the Middle East. Because Tocqueville has this grand claim that we're moving from the aristocratic age to the democratic age. It's not a claim about Europe alone, it's a claim about the very movement of history. And so what I concluded was that if his thesis is right, then one could talk about the Middle East as being an aristocratic society engaging in modernity, just as Europe in the 19th century began to become modern. And so I thought I should write a book using Tocqueville's framework about the crisis of the Middle East. And to come back to your original point, I did that because I thought the only way that these great books are properly studied, is if we juxtapose them with contemporary events. Brian Smith: I think that's an absolutely accurate depiction of where political theory is at. We have lost this sort of sense of how to juxtapose what's going on in our world right now, with great and profound insights of all of the authors you mentioned, and the rest of the canon besides. But so what I think hooked me as a reader of this book originally, and a lot of my students over the years who I shared this anecdote with, you open your prologue with this striking conversation you had with a Saudi man in a cafe, on your way to Doha. And you recount what he said about the effects of the 1960s in America, in Europe, and in the Arab world. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about the differences this gentleman was trying to get at. Why you use them as this interesting framing moment in the book, that opens up the field of conversation you want to raise? And what they mean today? Joshua Mitchell: So it's a great question. I did write a new preface for the paperback, but I did not include references to that conversation, and I wish I had. The reason I opened the book that way, is because as Tocqueville indicated, and is confirmed by our students' sentiments and prejudices, what's going on in the West is not universal. And while in the West we're largely moving toward, let's say the Anglo world, we seem to be fixated on notions of universalism that may have emerged out of the sixties in America, but there were other 1960s movements. And so I was trying to give the reader a sense really of the plurality of the world. That our account was not the only account. And I think as a device so to speak, that was an important way of getting readers to realize that the whole world is not like us. And what I had said in that introduction was that the 1960s in America, yeah it meant social revolution, but it also gave us Silicon Valley and huge advances in technology. And what I was trying to indicate there, was that Americans are fundamentally a practical people. And while I think that's true, and I'll come back to this in a minute, I think the American, what I described as a kind of forward edge of the 1960s, has become deeply pernicious. We can come back to that. But while the Americans are practical people, Europeans are still working out the catastrophe of 1945. And I don't simply mean the Holocaust and the wars, I mean the utter inability to deal with the problem of guilt. Which we have in America, with respect to the slavery question. But Europe has lost its Christianity, and yet still retained the Christian category of guilt, which was Nietzsche's prediction. But the catastrophe of that in my view, has been the development of the European Union. And while I did not put it in this way in the book, I put it this way now. The EU purports to be more than an economic union. I doubt it will be ultimately a political union, I think that's where it will falter. But I think ultimately it's more than either of those things. It is a public atonement for what nations did in the 20th century. Which is why elite Europeans are not disposed to go back to the national model. They believe that the only way that they can atone for their guilt is to repudiate their nations. And that's why nationalist movements in Europe are so interesting, because they're not ultimately going to succeed, unless they're able to somehow address the problem of guilt in a post-Christian age. In the Middle East, as my friend said at that cafe, they were wrestling with the question of how their fathers had betrayed them. And I mean by this, that many of the leaders, not just political leaders, but thought leaders, had halfway embraced the West. And halfway embraces are always dangerous, because they produce monstrous things, as Hobbes said a long time ago. And so you had a generation of young men who were trying to think beyond the perceived material of their fathers, and so turned to a hypothetical and imagined Islam that would be a comprehensive way of life. And this is Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And for the time it has died down, but I do not believe that we've seen the end of this. And the reason, which I believe I indicated very delicately in Tocqueville in Arabia, was that what's happening in the Middle East, at least in some regions, is you're moving to a kind of hyper-modernity, which is largely to be seen in the Gulf. And you cannot build a world on hyper-modernity, where everything is disconnected. You have all the accoutrements of life, but nothing is really linked together. And what I saw in the lives of my students was this vicious oscillation back and forth, between embracing autonomy, far more even than our students in America do, one moment. And literally the next moment, dreaming of an enchanted Islamic world from the 12th century. And so I think this movement back and forth between hyper-modernity and re-enchantment is going to be a feature in the Middle East for a long time. It's died down now, but it will re-emerge. And we need to understand it as a re-enchantment movement. I think the term Islamic fundamentalism is utterly unhelpful. Fundamentalism as we know, emerges in the United States as a category. It's a term, 1917 with the publication of the books in Los Angeles called The Fundamentals. So we're using Western religious understandings, to comprehend what's going on in Islam. And the crisis is the Tocquevillian crisis. Because what Tocqueville saw, even in the author's introduction to Democracy in America, was that while one could speculate about how the easy transition would occur from aristocracy to democracy, in fact aristocratic societies do not forget their past. "And so they look backward at the ruins," to use his exact words, and they dream of an enchanted past. And that's what I saw in the Middle East. I think again, while it's died down now, it's still very much a living option in the future. And then to pose your question, so where do we stand now? And I do say something about this in the new preface. So I think the American sixties generation has largely gone woke. While we're supposed to be a practical people, what I argued in American Awakening is we've moved away from what I, in the latest book called a politics of competence, which would be American practicality. We've moved away from that, and we've turned toward a politics of innocence and transgression. We've gone woke, to use that kind of language. So while in the book I indicated that America was probably the better off of the three groups, the three sixties movements, it's not clear to me that we are now. I would say that what I said about the Europeans continues to work itself out. They are still profoundly guilty about the 20th century. And so the EU project is their mode of atonement. It is their penance, EU is their penance. And then in the Middle East as I just indicated, I think for the moment it's died down. It's going to be very interesting to watch Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, and the other Gulfs, Saudi Arabia, negotiate their way into modernity. My sense is they know it can't be hyper-modernity. But it's not clear to me that they have a stable way of proceeding, without encouraging attempts to re-enchant the world. So I think the problem still remains there. Brian Smith: Well and that strikes me, that the enchanted dream that Sayyid Qutb, offers in The Shade of the Quran, to use his title. I mean, you can't say that that's not going to be an option on the table for people, especially because he's explicitly framing what he presents in this dream against the United States. Against his visit to the 1950s in Colorado, and all of this sort of Western decadence that he saw there. And that comparison I think is still going to be lively for the next decade, two decades, unless something ... I don't know what would change about us, that would make that comparison not seem lively to them? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. I think that's right. But I also want to defend the messiness of, I'll say America, but I mean something larger than that. I mean the Democratic age, as Tocqueville understood it. So Tocqueville knew that there would be a temptation to re-enchant the world. And why did he know it? He said because, the current moment, the Democratic age, has all sorts of discontinuities incoherencies. And it's not easy to figure out how one should be. So family tells us one thing, economics tells us another, politics tells us another. There are all these domains of life that are running across purposes. And he does ask the question at one point, you might remember it's in volume two, near the beginning. He asks the question, "So how does religion bear on this incoherence, this difficulty?" Remember, he writes the book and he says, "This entire book has been written under a kind of religious dread." By which he means, that nothing fits. We're in God's world, but God's world doesn't fit. And so he asked the question later on, "So what kind of religion do you need in this circumstance?" He says, "Look, there's two kinds of religion." We can talk about Islam, and Christianity, and Judaism, and Roman Catholics, and Protestants, but that's not how he ultimately divides it. He divides it into those religions which offer a comprehensive way of life. Which promise to bring utter coherence to human experience. And I will tell you, he doesn't believe that can work, and we have to understand why. Because he thinks we've been thrown into a moment of history which is incoherent. Where we don't really know what the future is going to bring. We can't fully rely on the past, we can't retrieve it, because we've been thrown to this new moment. So he literally thinks that religions which offer a comprehensive way of life are tempting, but literally don't comport with human experience. So then the question becomes, okay, so what kind of religion would comport with this human experience of disintegration? And he says, "Here Christianity is probably going to serve us better. Why? Not because it's a comprehensive way of life." Now, this is a huge question. Does it offer a comprehensive way of life, or not? But his reading is that it doesn't, it offers hope. And what that means, I think in his estimation, is the world is broken. There's a promise that it will be healed at the end of time, and the disunities will all be unified. And so what hope allows you to do, is to endure a world which can't be put together by us now. So that kind of religion can help us endure the fractionalizing that occurs in the democratic age. But a comprehensive way of life attempts to give an alternative, but can't deliver because life isn't that way. And he does, we should be clear, he does have criticisms of Islam on the basis of this distinction. That Islam does offer a comprehensive way of life. That's why he does think, this is again, long before Israel became the thorn in the side of the Arab world. The problem in the Middle East is not precisely Israel. The problem in the Middle East goes way back before that. Namely, modernity is coming everywhere, and Islam professes to offer a comprehensive doctrine. Now, having said that, we also know that there are many Muslim scholars, often in Europe, in England, in the United States, who are trying to provide an understanding of Islam that does precisely what Tocqueville thinks a good religion would do. Which is not to be utterly comprehensive. To somehow accommodate the strange twists and turns of the modern world, without Islam losing its soul. So there is a battle within Islam over this very question. Is it a comprehensive doctrine, or can it work within a world where one cannot find reconciliation? Brian Smith: So one other thing I wanted to draw back to before I go to the next question I actually had planned, which is with respect to what you said about Europe and the sort of repudiation of the nation-state, the European ambivalence toward it, I wonder how much that, how would I put it? Disordered, sort of uneasy sensibility, explains the European ambivalence to how on earth to deal with Ukraine right now? That they're unwilling to sort of wholeheartedly say, for us nationhood. Now they can be all for Ukraine, but I don't know how you embark upon this sort of military action, and support, and things like that, with half your heart? Joshua Mitchell: Yeah. Well so Ukraine, it's very interesting you raised this. Ukraine has been a difficult question, not only for Europeans, but for conservatives on the right, as you well know. So in the case of Europe, so you're defending a nation-state, is that what you're doing? And you're defending it with a transnational organization called NATO. This is very peculiar. So Ukraine has emboldened both groups. It's emboldened the nationalists, and it's emboldened the EU, or of philic types who say "No, the age of nations has passed. And what we'll do then, is absorb Ukraine into this larger European project." I mean, this is one of the difficulties that the EU is faced with. It purports to be universal, so where is the boundary of this? Does it march straight through into Eastern Europe? Oh, what about Turkey? Well, it seems a bit disingenuous there, because it seems to me that the real reason Turkey wasn't included, was the obvious fact that it's an Islamic country and not a Christian country. So the charter of the EU indicates that Europe has a Christian past, a Christian pedigree, but does not say that it is Christian. But the point is, if you've got a Universalist society, it's very unclear where the boundaries end for that. So Europe is, people are scratching their heads. Those who believe in the nation and the universal project. And then, among members of the right, you know this as well as I do. Ukraine has been a difficult issue. Because on the one hand, many people, and I am affiliated with the NatCon movement. I mean, I'm one of their early members and Yoram and I are good friends. And I think he's fundamentally right that we have to return to the age of nations. And in that sense, we should be supporting Ukraine. Except the problem is, that the support that goes in that direction, does not look to be oriented by national sovereignty, but by a kind of globalist impulse that encourages, or that includes, all sorts of, let's say social teachings that are probably anathema to most of the people who want to save Ukraine as a nation, or most eastern Europeans for example. So the project to save Ukraine as a nation seems to be more about the globalist empire of pushing back against any particularism, Russia being the particularist nation. And so the difficulty is whether Russia is a nation trying to defend its own rights, or whether Russia is an imperial power destroying the nations. And I think that's the way a lot of conservatives who come out of the NatCon movement and are defending our involvement in the Ukraine war, they're saying, "No no, Russia is an imperial power, trying to push back against a nation called Ukraine. And that's why we have to defend." Anyway, it's going to be very interesting to see how the Republican candidates respond to this. Europe, as we indicated, both of us, there's a huge question on the forehead of all the Europeans about this. Because it seems to be moving in both directions at once, national and transnational. Brian Smith: Right. And I don't have a lot to say about it, other than that it certainly worries me, because I've read way too much about Russian, previously Soviet and now Russian, nuclear use doctrine. And know that they view them as tools, not as this sort of abstract threat. And whatever we say or do about this, however it's resolved, has to respect, I think ... And then this gets to your central insight, the age of nations is not passed. And if we don't recognize that, and we view, however illegitimate we see some of Russia's claims, whoever the people who are on Ukraine's side fully in this, I think need to recognize that Russia has claims as a nation. That if you ignore them, they're going to continue to feel like they cannot see peace. They cannot embrace peace. Joshua Mitchell: Yeah, I think one of the things that most irked Putin, was when Kerry and Obama, a long time ago, said something like, "Don't you know, this is the 21st century?... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/26379780

The View from Israel 03/17/2023

The View from Israel Matti Friedman joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Israeli culture and identity, immigration trends, religious and linguistic divisions, and his latest book, . Rebecca Burgess: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor with Law & Liberty, and joining me today is Canadian Israeli journalist Matti Friedman. His work graces the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Mosaic, several other organizations. He's also a prolific author of a rich diversity of topics and books from everything about spies to the Dead Sea Scrolls to, most recently, Leonard Cohen's concert tour to the front lines during the Yom Kippur War. That's Who by Fire. And I'm sure, Matti, you had a lot of fun listening to a lot of music while you were writing that book. Matti Friedman: I sure did, although Leonard Cohen's music, if you know it, can be a bit of a downer. So if you listen to five hours straight of Cohen, it doesn't mean that your mood is going to be great necessarily. But I did have a good time. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. Well thank you so much for joining us today, coming from Israel. Matti Friedman: It's a real pleasure to be here. Rebecca Burgess: Great. So Israel is frequently in the news for about three things: Gaza, violence, and rocket barrages. Most recently, of course, it's been in the news for questions about its judiciary and its politics, in particular its election travails: five elections in four years, and at the end of it we have Netanyahu back in power. But I'm hoping that today we can talk about something that you focus on in your longer-form essays, which is the social, cultural and demographic change of Israel that helps us understand what is actually going on in the country as a country beyond or above those headlines. And most recently you had a wonderful essay in which you noticed that there are many French in Jerusalem now and that there is a almost war of baguette shops. So what are the French restaurant wars in Jerusalem? Tell us about what's happening in terms of the population shifts. Matti Friedman: It's rare when you can see a social shift manifest itself physically just in store signs when you walk down the street. But over the past couple of years in my neighborhood and elsewhere in Jerusalem, you just can't avoid realizing that there are more and more French people in Jerusalem. You can go to a bakery downtown called Gagou de Paris, and if you don't like their croissants you can go across the street to another one called L'Artisan. And there are other options these days in Jerusalem. French is just one of the languages you hear. And there are other cities in Israel where it's even more prevalent, particularly one called Netanya, which is a city on the coast with a particularly large French population. So clearly something is going on in France. One of the interesting things about Israel is that it ends up being a barometer for the situation of Jews in other countries. So we've had an influx of people from Ukraine and Russia recently. So even if you knew nothing about the war in Ukraine or what was going on in Russia, just by looking at the new arrivals around my neighborhood you would understand that something is clearly going on there because we're hearing more and more Russian and Ukrainian in the street. And in the case of the French, it's not a wave of immigration exactly. It's not millions of people moving, but tens of thousands have moved in the past decade and more than 100,000 Jews have come from France to Israel since the early seventies, and about half of them have come in the past decade. So clearly there's something going on. People are being drawn to Israel, people are feeling a bit uncomfortable at home in France, and that's manifesting itself in the superior quality of our pastries here in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Rebecca Burgess: Is it, do you think, related at all to some of the violence that has been perpetuated against Jews in France? So there were of course several famous [incidents], the Bataclan Theater, Charlie Hebdo and others, and it would seem natural if in the wake of those types of violent occurrences in France that there would be a sudden influx in Israel. Is it that that's driving it, or is there this other, and it's almost a third rail I know to talk about when you're talking about France, but the influx of Arab immigration within France, which seems to be driving others out of France. Matti Friedman: So there are pull factors and push factors as in any immigration wave. So the pull factor is the draw of the Jewish state, which for a certain number of Jews in every country is enough of a pull without any push factor: the desire to live in a place where your culture is the culture of the majority. And for some people it's a religious impulse to return to the land of Israel, which some interpret as a biblical commandment. So that's going on. But of course there are also push factors, and the violence that you mentioned is certainly one of the push factors. And you can see that after spectacular instances of violence against Jews, and unfortunately there have been several, there's a spike of immigration. So there was a big one after the murder of a young Jewish guy, he was 23, named Ilan Halimi in 2006, and he was murdered by a group of Muslim French citizens. They called themselves the Gang of Barbarians, and they kidnapped him and then tortured him to death. Immigration went up after that and then kind of subsided. And then there was an attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. Another French Muslim murdered a few kids. And that was also a shock to the community, and there was another wave of immigration. So yes, there's something going on in France. There's something kind of bubbling under the surface and the Jews are feeling it, and that is triggering immigration. Although, again, it's not like all the Jews in France are leaving in panic, but that is driving the numbers up. And every time there's an instance like that, you see the graph go up and then, if things get quiet again in France, the graph kind of subsides. But the trend is toward increased immigration from France. And part of it is definitely that many Jews in France feel less and less comfortable at home. Rebecca Burgess: Is there also that aspect of the secularism in France in which it is a hot point of wearing religious clothing and religious symbolisms in France? And in the public school system this is a huge fight. My sister is in fact a Dominican nun, and it's a French congregation, and they have, every day almost, to struggle with some of these questions, especially themselves. They're wearing a habit which doesn't look that unlike how some Middle Eastern women cover themselves. Is it some of the more orthodox or observant Jews who are tending to go to Israel from France, or does that seem to be not really part of the equation? Matti Friedman: I think it is part of the equation. I'd actually love to hear more about your sister. That sounds fascinating. Often Americans have a bit of trouble understanding the French system, which is different than the system in the United States. In America, there's separation of church and state and you're allowed to do whatever you want. In France, the culture is kind of aggressively secular or at least the official culture. And they have an idea called laïcité which basically is a kind of antagonism toward expressions of religious observance in the public sphere or open expressions of religious observance. And that could cause problems for a Muslim woman who wants to cover her hair with a hijab, or a Jewish man who wants to wear a kippah, or even openly displayed crosses in some cases. Many French people interpret that as a violation of laïcité, the idea that the public's sphere must be secular. For observant Jews that can be a problem. And I spoke to one young French woman who's actually now in Israel, who's interviewed in this story that we're talking about, which came out in Tablet, who remembers that in her childhood they served kosher food at public school. And then that was considered to be a violation of laïcité, so you can no longer get kosher food at the public schools. They used to give Jewish students exemptions or postponements of exams if the exams fell on Jewish holidays, and now that's also a bit tense because that's also considered to be special pleading if you ask to have your exam administered on a different day. So that makes life a bit fraught for people of religious observance, not just Jews but for everyone. And certainly Jews do feel it. And if you look at the profile of the average immigrant to Israel in the past decade, you'll see that it tends to be people who are traditional in their observance. It tends to be people who are of North African descent. So there's a huge Jewish population in North Africa up to the forties and fifties, mainly in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And after the independence movements in these countries succeed and the French colonists are kicked out, the Jewish population either moves to Israel or goes to France. So most of the Jews in France are actually not the original French Jewish population, which was European in origin, but North African in origin. And it's those Jews who tend to be moving to Israel. So they often find Israel quite familiar, I think in many ways because they're coming two or three generations back from Mediterranean Jewish societies in places like Morocco and Tunisia and then ending up in Israel, which is also a Mediterranean Jewish society. So the social leap for many of these people is not as dramatic and difficult as it would be for an American Jew moving to Israel, for example. Rebecca Burgess: I think I was reading that about a third are single young people coming, and a third are about young families, and then a third are retirees. So it almost makes me think about, and I know this is really probably not the best analogy, but in the States right now, we're seeing a lot of people leave from blue states and go towards red states where they feel that they are more free or less hampered in types of schooling choices and other ways of living. I don't know if that's in any way similar, but that tradition of going where you feel more welcome and feel like you have some roots and some familiarity with a system. Matti Friedman: No, it's an interesting analogy and definitely people want to feel at home. And part of being a minority and part of being Jewish is always a sense that you're not quite at home, that you're dependent on the acceptance of others, that you need to play an identity game where you're open to the mainstream and capable of playing ball with the mainstream, but also maintaining your own personal traditions and keeping your own identity, which makes you different from the mainstream and which the mainstream, in some cases, does not like and is hostile to. So for many people, going to Israel is a way of solving that problem. It creates numerous other problems, as I found having moved to Israel myself, of course, from Canada when I was 17. So it doesn't make your life problem-free, but it does replace that problem of being a minority. It replaces that problem with other problems. And yes, I think people want to feel at home and they would like to be surrounded by people who, they might not be exactly like them, but who are at least open and welcoming to who they are. Rebecca Burgess: Have their croissants. Matti Friedman: And also they can move to Israel without any compromise on the quality of the baguettes. Although I guess I shouldn't say that in their name. They might think that the Israeli baguettes are not quite up to par. But definitely these days you can get excellent food in Israel. It certainly wasn't the case when I moved here in 1995. I don't think it was really even the case 10 years ago, but definitely the French have brought many good things and cuisine is one of them. Rebecca Burgess: The summer when I was there on a national security trip, sponsored by Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where I met you, I had that privilege, I was rather blown away by the wonderful extent of Israeli cuisine. And thinking about adding French on top of that, I thought that's just not fair. Matti Friedman: We have the best food in the world, in my opinion. And I've been around the Israeli cuisine. Because it's made up of so many different groups that have come over many, many years, it is spectacular. Rebecca Burgess: So it seemed like you started noticing the French immigration wave to Israel through the proliferation almost of the restaurants, the French restaurants. But also I thought that your observation about the bookstores was interesting, that some of these French bookstores, they're not what you might think they are, they're not all super orthodox or religious in content. Many of them are just simply French bookstores, which kind of show that shift towards those who are moving to Israel. It's not necessarily a religious only question, but maybe more broadly cultural. The North Africa element reminded me that several years ago you had this very fascinating article in which you asked whether Israel is eastern or whether it's European, meaning is it Middle Eastern or is it western? And in the West, in America, we tend to tell the Israel story as though it is a byproduct of the West only. But that in fact, if you look at the population, the current population of Israel, it's very much a Middle Eastern story. And that to me was the first time, in reading your articles, that I had ever thought about that and what that might mean and the differences. And that article, I think you'd called it Mizrahi Nation, where you invited us to think about all the different ramifications of Israel being a Middle Eastern state and country, population. Matti Friedman: So I think that is the key to understanding Israel. And I, like many other people who grew up in North American Jewish communities, always learned about a very European country with Herzl, and the kibbutz, and the Holocaust, and the Jews from the Middle East were very much on the margins of what I knew about Israel. But if you look at the Israeli Jewish population, we have a one fifth Arab Muslim minority. So if we just set them aside for a second and look at that 80% Jewish majority, at least half of the Jews in Israel do not come from Europe. They come from the Islamic world, they come from places like Morocco, they come from Syria, they come from Yemen, Kurdistan, Iran. And you can't understand the country without understanding that. And even the Jews who came here from Eastern Europe, over three or four generations in Israel they've been Middle Easternized. And that expresses itself in the cuisine and expresses itself in the kind of music people listen to. And it expresses itself in our politics, which are incomprehensible without understanding the ethnic origins of Israeli voters, because often issues that we describe or arguments that we describe as being about policies are actually about identity. And that often has to do with whether your family came from the Christian world or from the Muslim world. So this is all very important to an understanding of the country, and yet it remains kind of marginal. People don't really think about it, they don't think it's central, but it is the central fact of Israel. I wrote a book trying to explain it, which is a book called Spies of No Country, which ostensibly is a book about Israel's first spies, the guys who created the Mossad in many ways. But Israel's first spies were the only people in the country who could walk across the street into the Arab world and disappear, and those people were Jews who'd come from the Arab world. A year or two before they were natives of the Arab world, they were native Arabic speakers. And if we understand that at least half of the Jews in Israel are the children or grandchildren of those people, then we understand something really important about the country that is otherwise missed. Rebecca Burgess: Is that reflected in any of the public education, in terms of the languages that students are being encouraged to learn? Matti Friedman: I wish I could say yes, because it would be amazing if Israeli kids could actually speak Arabic, not only to interact with our Arab surroundings. There are 6 million Jews here and 300 million people in the Arab world. So it would be nice to have more people speaking fluent Arabic, but also Arabic is a Jewish language. Jews always spoke Arabic, and there are great works of Jewish thought that were written in Arabic. A good example is the philosophical writings of Moses Maimonides, who's an incredibly important philosopher from Cairo about a thousand years ago. His philosophical words are written in Arabic. So Arabic is really Jewish language and many of the people who came to Israel after the state was founded spoke Arabic. That was their language. But what happened was that there was a real attempt to create an Israeli identity in which people spoke Hebrew. And for that to happen, the diaspora languages had to be killed basically. And that meant no Yiddish and no Polish and no Russian, and it definitely meant no Arabic. So within one generation the Arabic speakers were gone and their kids were Israelis, which was a success for the Zionist movement but a loss, maybe, for the culture of this country. Definitely a loss for the intelligence services who could really use native Arabic speakers, but that's what happened. The linguistic treasures that came here in the first years of the state, where you had all these people speaking Persian and speaking Kurdish and speaking 80 different languages or whatever it was, that was really eliminated by this drive to create an Israeli population. And that has its upsides, of course. We all speak the same language and that's good, but a lot was lost. I wish we could recover some of it, but it's hard two or three generations later to get any of it back. Rebecca Burgess: It's kind of a longer unformed question, though, about language and how language creates a national identity. At the beginning, when you are so small and you're starting out, it makes sense to tamper down on one common language, if you will. But, seven decades later, is it possible to loosen up a little bit, or is it the case that because the pressures from outside have only multiplied in that time? I don't think anyone would say that the pressures surrounding Israel have lessened. Has it entrenched the idea of having this one language to help the cultural identity have a type of centrality to it, and that's what will continue through the next decades? Matti Friedman: Yes. This society is so fractured and kind of at odds with itself that it certainly helps to have one language. And if you look at the country 50 or 60 years ago, many of the ultra-orthodox Israelis wouldn't speak Hebrew. And many of the people were immigrants, even the leaders of the country were immigrants, and they spoke kind of immigrant Hebrew, very heavily accented. And the fact that most people in the country today, including our Arab citizens, speak Hebrew very well is definitely good for communication. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to make us more unified or well-disposed to each other. So it does raise a question of whether a common language is actually helpful or not. But retrieving those old languages that were lost with our grandparents or great-grandparents is very difficult. So there are attempts to bring back Arabic, and people are much more interested in the culture of the Jews of the Middle East and in the music, and there are attempts to revive it. And people are more interested in Yiddish. And people are more open to the experience of the diaspora, which was really radioactive in the early years of the state. One,... /episode/index/show/libertylawtalk1/id/26225136

The Law & Liberty Podcast

TOPICS