The Law & Liberty Podcast

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

Sharp Dressed Man 06/03/2025

The Need for Neighborhoods 05/20/2025

Border Disorder 05/06/2025

In the Rubble of Totalitarianism 04/08/2025

The Pursuit of Ignorance? 03/18/2025

Scrutinizing Christian Nationalism 03/04/2025

The Moral Life in a Therapeutic Age 02/18/2025

Religion and the Republic 02/04/2025

The Disgrace of Legal Ed 01/21/2025

A Voice in the Modern Wilderness 01/07/2025

Optimism for the Western Project 12/17/2024

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

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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

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