CSPAN - Conference on Liberalism in 21st Century

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 14, 2025 16:12-18:34 - CSPAN

02:21:53

Conference on Liberalism in 21st Century

Participants

Clips

peter navarro

admin 00:24

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		This military takeover.
		Thank you.
		Jillian.
		You brought up two important things.
		So, trust.
		That is something huge.
		R Street, we do a lot of work on police legitimacy and the institution and culture of policing and how community members feel about it.
		So, if you don't trust the institution of policing, you're less likely to, you know, call 911 when you see a crime, call 911 when you're the victim of a crime, or just respect the law entirely.
		So, I think it's really important to note that agencies since 2020 have been working really hard to do more things in collaboration with communities to try and rebuild that trust.
		On the other thing we were discussing about the altar.
		I think Trump, I think the president is looking at this through the lens of public safety.
		He ran on that platform.
		That's something he's always been very vocal about.
		And again, many callers today have expressed gratitude because they've said they don't feel safe and they think that this is a necessary thing.
		Ultimately, I think that what will have to happen is it's not a takeover.
		Thank you all for coming.
		I am Shikha Dalmia, president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, or ISMA.
		It is a great honor to have you all here for ISMA's second annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference.
		ISMA is the publisher of Unpopulist, a Free Substack, you should all subscribe to if you already don't.
		Both are devoted to defending liberal democracy from the neo-authoritarianism, bigotry, and intolerance on the march in the world today.
		Like last year, we have folks here from all over the world: Nepal, Bosnia, Israel, England, Mexico, Latin America, and beyond, despite the growing fear of traveling to the United States.
		Your efforts reflect both a deep concern for liberal democracy's fate and an equally deep commitment to defend it.
		So, thank you.
		I'd also like to thank our wonderfully diverse and courageous sponsors.
		Hewlett Foundation's generous general support has helped keep the lights on at ISMA.
		The Packard Foundation has been extraordinarily generous.
		I'm also deeply grateful to Stand Together Trust and the Institute for Humane Studies for their support.
		The new pluralists and Johns Hopkins at Agora, Agora Institute, at Johns Hopkins, have also pitched in to make today possible.
		And a special nod to our media partners, Vox and Persuasion, for not only helping us reach some of the speakers you'll be hearing from over the next two days, but also for spreading the word far and wide, along with our many other partners, especially Project Liberal.
		It is fitting that we have gathered at this venue.
		If we are discussing the abuse of political power, what better place than the scene of the biggest political crime, at least until January 6th?
		Unfortunately, we didn't have enough meme coins to book the Capitol building.
		This venue is a reminder of how far we are from the Helsinkian days when a single scandal could bring down a corrupt regime.
		The forces of authoritarianism are stronger now than we convened when we convened last year.
		Poland's Law and Justice Party has rebounded.
		Modi's Hindu nationalist BJP has regained ground.
		Marie Le Pen's national rally has surged, and Netanyahu's unpopular right-wing government has doubled down in Gaza, even as starvation sets in.
		Remarkably, the one country holding its leaders accountable is Ukraine, and that too while battling the Putin Goliath.
		But the big story then, as now, is America.
		Last July, when we all met, Bill Crystal joked that we might be hosting this event at Guantanamo Bay.
		Trump has dispatched the National Guard to DC, and who knows, any minute now, it could barge in and haul us all away, turning Bill's quip into a prophecy.
		Should that happen, you should all be aware that although Guantanamo's yelp rating is not so good, it does have a really nice spa with a bracing waterboarding option.
		At the time Bill made this remark, few thought Trump would win the popular vote, gain unified control of Congress, and hold a Supreme Court majority.
		If you've traveled abroad, you know how large America looms in every conversational.
		Partly because its elephantine economic footprint can flatten economies and destroy lives with its abrupt aid cuts and tariff resets, and partly from global curiosity and anxiety over what follows if the American experiment collapses.
		The beauty of this 249-year-old experiment is that it delivered living standards unprecedented in history, not by sacrificing moral progress, but making it central to America's success.
		America rejected the old world's zero-sum economic model of territorial conquest, mercantilism, colonialism, and replaced it with one that was based on open commerce and mutual benefit.
		Slavery is this country's original sin, and much work remains for true racial justice.
		Still, America's success came from flattening hierarchies, ending exploitation, harnessing human potential, and offering opportunity regardless of caste, creed, religion, or color.
		America's genius is not that it draws the best people, but it draws the best out of people.
		Even the world's wretched manage to make themselves something here.
		But we are getting a first-hand taste of what happens when liberal democracy starts to collapse.
		A liberal democracy aspires to impartial justice.
		Trump has exploited his power to reward loyalists, even violent ones, and retaliate against his expanding list of enemies, including universities, prosecutors, judges, law firms, media companies, and opposition leaders.
		A liberal democracy holds corrupt rulers accountable.
		Trump has fired watchdogs without cause.
		A liberal democracy keeps civil society out of the clutches of the state.
		Trump's anti-DEI crackdown aims to scare these groups into silence.
		Above all, a liberal democracy affirms the equal dignity of every person and builds institutions, especially a just rule of law, to protect it.
		That commitment means, first and foremost, forbidding rulers from dividing the public into favored and unfavored groups, and then denying the latter the guarantees of due process.
		Yet, in the last few months, masked ICE agents have smashed car windows and abducted people.
		Immigration and law enforcement is being militarized.
		The Marines were hardly out of Los Angeles than the National Guard arrived in DC.
		The Alien Enemies Act is being used to send many innocents to Salvador and Gulag.
	Foreign students have been detained for months for writing op-eds or protesting.
	Other immigrants are simply being vanished in the detention system, the Wall Street Journal reports.
	Foreign tourists have faced harsh interrogation and invasive phone and computer searches just to enter the country.
	Family separation is back in vogue.
	A friend of mine, Riley, joked recently, Hungary is not looking so bad these days.
	Authority consolidation is Trump's true operation warp speed.
	After 250 years as a constitutional republic, America has stunningly shown that it has no exceptional immunity to the authoritarian vices.
	Like everywhere else, all it has is us liberals.
	So we have our work cut out for us.
	Trump has pulled out of the dustbin of history, the patrimonial system, as Jonathan Rausch has written.
	In this system, rulers treat the state as their personal property and citizens as their personal serfs.
	The result always and everywhere is incompetence, rank corruption, and repression.
	Honest people get fired and the worst rise to the top.
	Witness Trump's rogue cabinet.
	A World Bank study two decades ago found that America's strong institutions, its courts, property rights and effective government, accounted for about 418,000 of its 735,000 per capita wealth.
	Under Putin's patrimonialism, the average Russian builds $73,000 of wealth over his lifetime, despite the country's vast oil resources.
	Russia's corrupt institutions siphon out more than they put in people's pockets, it seems.
	Ditto in socialist nepotistic India I grew up in.
	That is America's future if we don't stop the trashing of our institutions.
	Of course, there are post-liberal contenders besides patrimony vying to replace the liberal order.
	Victor Orban is the neo-right's chief hero with his promise to purge wokeness and reviving Western civ.
	Yoram Hazoni, the architect of the national conservative movement, seeks to replace liberalism with an ethno-religious nation-state.
	Catholic integralists want to fuse religion and state and establish a national faith that rules civic life.
	And hyper-individualistic and futuristic tech pros, ironically, want to resurrect past collective group hierarchies around race and gender in the name of merit.
	Make no mistake, together they will restore religious persecution along with every form of bigotry.
	Nativism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, no matter how much they package their ideas in gauzy utopias.
	We have an entire panel tomorrow to parse these post-liberal alternatives, so I won't dwell on them, except to say this.
	Expect each of these systems to end up riddled with exactly the same patrimonial corruption that we are seeing from Trump.
	Why?
	Because realizing this vision requires handing unchecked power to ideologues while sidelining good governance, equal protection of the law, and citizens' rights.
	These facts give us liberals a huge political opportunity.
	But to capture it, we need to fashion a broad counter-movement to replace the left-right divide with a new liberal, illiberal one, as I tell anyone who is willing to listen to me.
	That means opposing bigotry and uniting around core liberal values, tolerance, pluralism, equal protection, and accountable rulers.
	To some extent, the realignment is already underway in the U.S. at least.
	Look around you and you'll see in this room devoted Democrats, skeptical Democrats, independents, libertarians, recovering libertarians, former Republicans, anguished and heartbroken conservatives, practically everyone except the MAGA right and the extreme left.
	There is a self-sorting mechanism here.
	But let's not kid ourselves.
	Solidifying a new alignment won't be easy.
	Why?
	Because it's easier to know who our enemies are than who our friends are.
	That's one big reason there aren't that many examples in the world of successful resistance movements yet, a topic we'll consider tomorrow.
	Building a liberal coalition requires former political foes to learn to trust one another and negotiate their inevitable moral disagreements.
	We'll have to overlook what we regard as each other's past transgressions.
	We'll have to live with disagreements over whether non-right-wing threats to liberalism are worth addressing or mere distractions.
	We'll have to thrash out differences over how much to concede to our opponents to secure electoral victories.
	That seems like a strategic issue, but often strategic disagreements stem from different levels of commitments to competing moral values.
	As in any workable marriage, we can't paper over these differences, but we can't let them turn into separate Netflix accounts either.
	But one thing we must bear in mind is that although moral clarity will help our effort, insisting on moral purity would be self-defeating.
	My inspiration as I grapple with these issues is Frederick Douglass, specifically the oration he delivered at Lincoln Park to commemorate a statue of Lincoln commissioned by emancipated slaves on the 11th anniversary of our 16th president's assassination.
	I live right next to the park in the middle of the swamp, and every day I walk by the larger-than-life 12-foot bronze figure with Cherry, my beagle mix.
	What is striking about this speech, Douglas' speech, given the occasion, is its utter honesty.
	It is no Lincoln hegeography.
	To the contrary, Douglas is shockingly scathing, as if he wanted to make sure that history did not paper over Lincoln's faults.
	Reversing a previous statement he dubbed Lincoln the white man's president who was entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.
	He pointed out that Jefferson had said that one hour of slavery was worse than ages of oppression that American revolutionaries had endured at the hands of British colonialists.
	He noted, Lincoln seemed to love the Union more than he hated slavery.
	He rattled off a litany of Lincoln's troubling views, including his desire to resettle blacks to Africa, his belief that if he could save the Union without abolishing slavery, he would, and his refusal to let blacks in the army, at least initially.
	Despite all this, Douglass also admired and trusted Lincoln.
	The hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln, he praised.
	There was no man better fitted for this mission of emancipation than Abraham Lincoln.
	Lincoln's name was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and the most perilous hours of the Republic, he said.
	He defended Lincoln against slams by his radical abolitionist brothers like William Lloyd Garrison, who never gave Lincoln for his alleged slowness.
	What did Douglas see in Lincoln?
	For starters, Douglas was too clear-headed to confuse radicalness for commitment or prudence for lack of principles.
	Unlike more weak-knit slavery opponents, he could see there were basic moral lines Lincoln held deeply in his heart.
	For example, his fondness for the Union did not cause him to minimize the heinousness of slavery.
	His depictions of its evil were unflinching, nor did he ever concede an iota to the notion that the South's economic dependence on slavery was any reason for caution.
	The dependence wasn't mitigating, it was implicating.
	As Douglas reminded his audience, Lincoln, for all his determination to keep the Union intact, hinted in the second inaugural that the Civil War was divine retribution for slavery when he said that, if God wills that the war continues, it was because he wanted the wealth piled by the born man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,
	and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.
	In short, Douglass did not create a checklist of moral principles and expect Lincoln to score full marks on it, nor did he put blind faith in Lincoln.
	Douglass drew moral boundaries that allowed him to see Lincoln's heart, not build moral silos that prevented him from joining hands with the most effective champion of his cause.
	In our common struggle against authoritarianism, we should make Douglass our role model.
	We need to be generous, forgiving, clear-headed, yet committed.
	So let's join hands together and defeat the bullies and the tyrants and defend a reinvigorated liberalism for the 21st century.
	Thank you now for the main program.
	It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you my friend, my accent buddy, a great American and a celebrated writer, Suketu Mehita.
	When I met Suketu at a mutual friend's Brooklyn townhouse over 13 years ago, his book, Maximum City, Bombay Lost and Found, had been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years.
	It had a work of narrative non-fiction.
	The book was based on Suketu's time in Bombay.
	It had catapulted Suketu into the star-studded galaxy of writers from the Indian subcontinent.
	But it was 560 pages long, so it required a commitment.
	After meeting Suketu, I decided to make it.
	And suffice it to say, it was an excellent decision.
	It is one of the best works of contemporary literature I have read.
	The book is epic in its scope, but not because of the author's literary ambitions.
	It is because there was no other way to comprehensively capture the complex and contradictory reality of a bustling metropolis like Bombay.
	Suketu recounts the stories of real-world Bombayites and include Bollywood stars and film directors, Mona Lisa, one word, a trans woman who disowned by her family made a living in Bombay's dance clubs, and a Jain diamond merchant who, along with his family, renounces his wealth and becomes a wandering monk.
	To me, it is a gritty ode to cosmopolitanism, a much maligned ideal right now.
	It shows that only in a diverse, polyglot, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, tolerant city can individuals find the space to shape their own destiny in vastly divergent ways without risking conflict among each other.
	After I finished the book of Pulitzer Finalist, I sent a personal Facebook message to Suketu.
	I spent the last several weeks lost in your book.
	I usually race through books, but this one I forced myself to slow down so that I could stay immersed in the world a little while longer.
	And I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering how all the stories of your characters ended.
	If we meet again, I'd love to find out.
	This message is still sitting unread, Suketu.
	I'm not the only one who procrastinates on my reading.
	He is working now on a book on New York, where he has lived for decades teaching journalism at New York University.
	This time I'll read it immediately.
	Today, Suketu will tell us different stories about how, even when authoritarians are in control and using their megaphone to fill the airwaves with their suffocating narratives, individuals always retain their inner freedom to write their own stories.
	These uncontrollable narrative spaces are a great foil to totalitarian designs.
	take it away.
	Thank you so much, Shikha, for that incredibly generous introduction.
	I really owe you a reply to that message.
	And thank you all for coming here.
	I was here last year, and I'm deeply honored to be invited to give this talk today.
	The title Shikha proposed was Boiling the Frog.
	I'd like to change it.
	It's more like throwing the frog in the boiling pot.
	There's nothing flow about this boil.
	We're in the midst of revolution.
	In the last six months, we've seen, as Shikha mentioned, ferocious and sustained attacks on habeas corpus, the universities, journalists, immigrants, everything that has made America great.
	And now, Trump has taken over the city we're in, the capital of the nation, and sent in troops to drive home the message.
	He is the emperor and can do whatever he wants.
	Dante wrote that the greatest sorrow is the memory of earlier good times when we are going through a bad time.
	We live in fear of the tyrant's dungeon, but we remember a time when we weren't even aware of the existence of the dungeons.
	We may never have been as free as we supposed, but at least we felt free.
	And when you feel free, you act as if you were.
	You speak, you write, you protest.
	Can you still do that today?
	I am an immigrant, a journalist, and an academic, the bullseye in the when diagram of everything this administration hates.
	As a writer, I ask myself, what is my dharma?
	Which is Sanskrit for duty.
	Trump is exactly what the founders were thinking of when they warned against a monarch.
	But the current Supreme Court seems to think they were wrong.
	Never before in American history has the president been granted so much power, including advance immunity for any crimes committed while in office.
	As Justice Sottemeyer wrote in her dissent in Trump via the United States, if the president, quote, orders the Navy's field team six to assassinate a political rival, immune, immune, immune.
	The law is supposed to protect the citizen against the tyrant.
	But among the most gutless cowards have been the nation's most prestigious law firms who have explained their abject surrender to the despot by fighting their obligation to continue making money for their partners, who pull in an average of $20 million a year.
	These are not people who are afraid of being sent to the gulag if they defy Trump.
	They are concerned that if they do the right thing, they might have to settle for a 40-foot instead of a 60-foot sailboat.
	Some law firms bent with the wind.
	Paul Weiss bent with the Zephyr.
	That statement of principles, still up on their website, reads, we are committed to achieving our objectives without wearing any client's collar or any political party's livery.
	They have now committed to doing $40 million worth of free legal work while wearing Trump's collar in Republican livery.
	There's got to be a better word that describes this than authoritarianism.
	As an author, I take umbrage.
	Fascism might be a bit of a stretch since Trump is not a person that Gabe D'Annunzio and the Italian futurists had in mind when the term was first coined.
	He's not holding up a bundle of sticks in his small hands.
	There's nothing martial about a man who dodged the draft due to his bone spurs.
	So what other words fit?
	Tyranny is good, so is despot.
	But the word that most describes someone like Trump is bully.
	A bully who believes that on the world stage, as in the playground of the school he was expelled from in Queens, the strong rule over the weak.
	We've all known bullies.
	That nasty kid in school who grows up to be your manager, your neighbor, your ex.
	Bullies aren't shy about being bullies.
	They brag about it and hold kindness in contempt.
	JD Vance has publicly ridiculed empathy as unchristian.
	He seems to have read a different Bible than the one I have.
	The bully sees the world in terms of power, might, acquisition.
	What can I get for myself and my tribe and how fast can I get it?
	Literature, on the other hand, is, first and foremost, about empathy, the exercise of imagination about the life of the other guy, no matter how different their life is from yours.
	It is every novelist's birthright to appropriate the lives of others, recreate them on the page in whatever fashion they choose.
	I've always bridled at this idea that you can't write about people you don't know.
	Tolkien wasn't a hobbit, so how could I write Lord of the Rings?
	Tolstoy wasn't a woman, so how could I have written Anakaranina?
	There's a great battle of storytelling that's taking place all over the world.
	This battle is being fought in the public squares, in the political conventions, on television, in the op-ed pages, in social media.
	And it is a battle that we, my friends and I and most of you in this room, are losing.
	A populist like Trump, like Modi, like Putin, is above all, a gifted storyteller who can tell a false story well.
	He specializes in a false narrative, a horror story about the other well told.
	That other can be Mexicans or Muslims or Ukrainians or trans people.
	The only way a populist can be fought is by telling a true story better.
	The problem is that lies can be wildly entertaining.
	Which surrealist novelist could dream up a cabal of satanic paedophiles headquartered in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington and a butterfly refuge in Texas led by a mysterious administration official who periodically drops messages in runes.
	These are the central fantasies of the QAnon conspiracy, which have millions of followers.
	So much more entertaining to follow than an analysis of systemic inequality and the historical issues which have led the country to its present plight.
	I personally love watching conspiracy thrillers, The Manchurian candidate, Three Days of the Condor, because all the evil lies in one person or cabal.
	Once he or they are vanquished, we can all rest easy.
	It's that simple.
	Recent elections have been about the triumph of stories over numbers.
	Hillary Clinton had the most sophisticated algorithm spitting out numbers in a Brooklyn command center.
	Trump went with his gut.
	He got up on the stage and told stories, ripping yarns.
	The audience laughed, they cried, and then they voted him in.
	We respond with our head to numbers.
	We respond with our heart to stories.
	God speaks to us in stories, not in studies.
	The scriptures of every faith are collections of stories, not assemblages of data.
	Just imagine if the golden rule had been rephrased as, in a recent poll conducted by St. Peter, 65% of people surveyed believed that they should behave with others as they might wish others to behave towards them.
	13% disagreed, and 22% had no opinion.
	This is not to say that numbers don't matter at all.
	Without the data, the stories are mere anecdotes.
	But a good data scientist also knows this.
	A spoonful of story helps the data go down.
	Trump understands the elemental power of stories and speaks not in policy, but in parables.
	I met a fella in Paris who told me there are no-go zones for the cops there.
	And because he says outrageous things, people vote for him.
	He often departs from the script on his teleprompter to do a kind of improv comedy at the podium with insults, imprecations, bizarre shit that has freshly entered his head.
	His voters say approvingly, Trump doesn't speak like a politician.
	He says what's on his mind.
	They confuse the art of outrage with honesty.
	The most hateful stories being told today are about people like me, immigrants.
	When you move from one country to another, are you less human?
	Much of the world now seems to think so.
	That they are coming not to work or to chase the same American dream that all our forefathers did, but to rob and to rape, that they have no family values.
	They'll walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat, screamed Trump.
	I found another kind of story about immigrants when I went in 2018 to a place called Friendship Park.
	For years, if you didn't have papers or lacked the authorization to leave the U.S. without the right to come back, the only place along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border where you could meet your family face to face was at the end of the line, a small patch of land adjoining the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and Tijuana.
	It was inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971 as a friendship park between the two nations and originally didn't have a fence.
	Families on both sides could meet, give each other a hug, even have picnics together without hindrance.
	May there never be a wall between these two great nations, Nixon said, only friendship.
	Over the years, succeeding administrations, including Democratic ones, put up walls at Friendship Park.
	By the time I went there, there was a thick, ugly industrial mesh fence at the park, and families could only meet for 10 minutes under the watchful eye of the border patrol.
	I spent two weeks reporting in Friendship Park.
	I met a Mexican construction worker from Colorado who had left his village 17 years ago because his mom needed money to go to the hospital.
	He crossed the border without papers and found work as a carpenter, exhausting, underpaid work.
	Every week, 17 years, he sent a large part of his paycheck home to his mother.
	Every week, he called or Skyped with her.
	And now, for the first time in 17 years, he was going to be able to meet his mom here, face to face.
	I watched as he walked toward the fence and put his face up to it.
	And on the other side, there was his mom's face.
	Mama, I miss you, he said.
	I wish we could be together for Christmas.
	Mi Ito, she said, I miss you too.
	You look too thin, she said.
	You're not eating enough.
	I wish I could give you a hug.
	But she could not.
	There was a fence between them.
	But there was something else she could do.
	The holes in the fence were only big enough to stick your pinky finger through.
	So she put her pinky finger through the fence, and her son put his pinky finger.
	And after 17 years, he was able to touch his mom.
	Give her what they call in Friendship Park, the pinky kiss.
	And all along the fence, there were mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, doing this dance of the fingers, the pinky kiss.
	If you've ever stopped speaking to someone in your family, go to this park and watch the families separated by a government trying to talk to one another through the wire mesh, trying to force their fingers into the little holes to touch their mother's or their grandmother's finger.
	Friendship Park is at once a monument to nationalistic stupidity, as well as to the power of love and family to surpass it.
	It is the cruelest and the most hopeful place I have ever seen.
	Who are the storytellers today that have captured the imagination of those that are in power?
	Curtis Yarwin is arguing for a return to monarchy.
	Yoram Hazani, as Sheikha mentioned, and the National Conservatives are singing the stories of the virtues of ethno-nationalist states, a Christian America, a Hindu India, a Jewish Israel.
	There's one God, one culture that is the center of a nation.
	Not an idea, but an ethnic group.
	What can this lead to but tyranny, incarceration, and the expulsion of anyone who doesn't subscribe to this unitary idea of the culture?
	Ein Wolk, Einreich, Ein Führer.
	Who has permission to narrate that story?
	Free speech warriors like Barry Weiss have railed against woke speech, but they've been not just conspicuously silent about the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech, the greatest attack on the First Amendment I've seen in my 50 years in America, but actively supportive of government efforts to stifle such speech.
	Deport people who utter such speech.
	The false stories the populists tell are often fueled by hate, because hate has emotional power.
	Hate is also very sure of itself.
	It admits no doubt, no ifs, ands or buts.
	Hate is going to hate.
	They don't do nuance.
	But that hate doesn't stand the test of time.
	It feeds on itself and burns itself out.
	But before it does, it might burn everything else with it.
	To understand how to fight it, we have to understand its appeal.
	Can you be forcefully nuanced?
	In the West, we are enthralled to the Aristotelian law, the excluded middle, which is one of the foundations of Western logic.
	A proposition is either true or false, P or not P. You believe in my God, or you are an unbeliever.
	You are with us, or you are against us, quotes Bush the Younger, summoning the princes and potentates of the planet to declare where they stand or be branded a terrorist.
	Humanity has now splintered off into a divide as absurd and arbitrary as left and right-hand drive or 110 and 220 volts.
	We've lost the ability which great literature gives us to differentiate between individual human beings in a group and class.
	We classify people in huge binary categories.
	Blacks, whites, migrants, natives, male, female, straight, queer, police, criminals, Democrats, Republicans.
	And then each member of the category has to walk around the heavy weight of their classification on their head.
	In our current discourse, we are all assumed to be fungible.
	But the individual human being is complex.
	Each one of us is a variant.
	Complexity, diversity, heterogeneity will save us.
	Unpredictability, eccentricity.
	It's an exhilarating moment when the human being escapes the history set out for him.
	I remember a huge rally against police brutality in New York in the 1990s in the wake of the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Senegalese immigrant.
	It was a beautiful morning and there was a massive crowd in front of police plaza.
	Speaker after speaker from organizations ranging from Maoists to immigrant rights organizations to anti-war groups got up to the stage to denounce the tactics of the NYPD.
	Then, a nervous young man named Salim got up.
	He was the representative from the Leave Drivers Coalition, a taxi driver's group.
	Salim was Pakistani and he had never addressed such a huge crowd before.
	He walked up to the stage, a wave of applause.
	He looked at the huge applauding crowd, which expected him to talk about how the cops abused the rights of the cabbies.
	And Salim, feeling empowered like never before in his life, burst out, I am gay.
	There was an astonished pause from the crowd.
	I am gay.
	I can finally say it now that I never could in Pakistan.
	And then an even louder round of applause, including from the cops in front of police plaza.
	I am gay, I am gay, Salim said over and over.
	He had just come out and he had just addressed what was most powerfully human in himself.
	He had just stepped out from underneath the burden of the message he was expected to deliver and it was a beautiful moment to watch.
	Where Aristotelian logic admits only two possible states of being for a proposition, there is another system of logic that the Jain religion created 2,500 years ago in India, which expands these to no fewer than seven possibilities.
	Something can exist, not exist, both exist and not exist, be indescribable, exist and be indescribable, not exist and be indescribable, and exist, not exist, and be indescribable.
	It's the most exquisitely nuanced system of conditional logic the world has known, and you know what it's called?
	Shyadvada, the science of maybe-ness.
	It does not connote doubt or skepticism.
	It just means that truth is many-sided.
	It seems to me that the essence of liberalism, what we're all here to talk about, is maybebiness.
	It's against the binary logic of the excluded middle.
	It's a sort of quantum epistemology, a Schrodinger scat that allows you to be in two mental places at once.
	Trump's philosophy was shaped above all by the crooked lawyer Roy Kohn.
	Never admit error, never apologize.
	But I question myself, do I not?
	I admit doubt.
	I say I'm sorry where I've screwed up.
	I'm willing to entertain the possibility that the other side is right and I am wrong.
	I do not lack conviction, but I am not convinced I am right all the time.
	I find maybe-ness to be an accommodative framework for understanding many phenomena, including love.
	Love makes you morally complex, sometimes in ways that are uncomfortable for others and for yourself.
	The heart wants what it wants.
	Love exists, does not exist, and is indescribable.
	Maybiness is a great way of understanding gender and sexuality.
	Am I male?
	Am I female?
	Maybe I'm non-binary.
	All over the world, there's a giant overthrowing of romantic binaries, a giant choosing.
	Never in the history of the world have so many people chosen their own lovers, older lovers, younger lovers, other sex, same sex, richer, poorer, taller, shorter, lovers for a day or lovers for a lifetime, lovers of all different races, castes, creeds, and now different species, including beings that have no corporeal existence, like AI chatbots.
	There's a gigantic experiment underway in the human race, a gigantic cross-pollination.
	This is why the bullies in all countries of all religions, all political persuasions, are engaged in squashing this choosing, declaring this or that form of love taboo, beyond the pale, immoral, godless, and existential danger to the future of the species.
	But is there such a thing as absolute truth?
	The late columnist and provocateur Alex Coburn made fun of this kind of moral relativism by mimicking the MacNeil-Lehrer Report, a PBS news show that was studiously neutral about everything.
	Tonight, on the McNeil-Lehrer report, we look at cannibalism, good or bad.
	Some people say it is wrong to eat your fellow man.
	Others say human flesh is a cheap and readily available source of protein.
	There's no maybebiness about genocide, the veteran Sri Lankan human rights lawyer Radhika Kumar Swami pointed out to me.
	True.
	This is one thing that is absolutely evil.
	There is no complexity about it.
	no other side to genocide.
	But I think it can be accommodated in Shia Dawada because one of the seven states is absolute truth.
	Moral complexity doesn't mean not taking a stand, but it is also important to recognize my truth can be your falsehood.
	That's why the notion of genocide is so contested right now.
	As the Israeli writer Etgar Keret pointed out in an interview with the New York Times shortly after the October 7 attacks, we're living in a very binary world.
	I don't like the terms pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian.
	Because when you speak to somebody and he says that he's pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, then it doesn't matter what argument you're going to give, he's going to stay in the same opinion.
	It's like being pro-Israeli.
	Are you pro-children dying in Gaza from bombing?
	The idea that reality is complex, and for me, the primal responsibility is a human one.
	And when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood in which you support one team and really don't care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective.
	You see only some pain.
	You don't want to see other pain.
	To go forward, we could all use a little maybebiness.
	Banish the binary, include the middle and the fringe and the top and the bottom.
	The universe is not forever a Manichean fight to the death.
	I was once on assignment for Harper's magazine in the holy Indian city of Varanasi, Benares, studying a brutal outbreak of Hindu-Muslim rioting.
	Benares' main industry is exquisite silk saris.
	Muslims receive them and Hindus sell them.
	They've been coexisting for centuries.
	But in the early 1990s, that compact broke down and the city erupted.
	Dozens of Muslims were killed by Hindus affiliated with the BJP party.
	I sought an appointment with the Hindu leader of the BJP, a Sari merchant who had fomented the riots, and he asked me to come over to his house one morning.
	As I went into his house, I passed two old Muslim men who were sitting on his veranda talking among themselves.
	During the interview, the Hindu merchant spewed hate against Muslims, telling me nothing I hadn't heard before, that Muslims are outsiders, they should have gone to Pakistan after partition, why do they cheer for Pakistanis during cricket matches, etc., etc.
	As I was wrapping up this not very valuable interview, I asked him what the two Muslim men were doing on his balcony.
	Oh, they've come to me to settle a property dispute, he said.
	What's your dispute with them?
	Oh, no, not with me.
	The property dispute is between them.
	They've come to me to judge it.
	Why you? I asked.
	I thought you hate Muslims.
	Yes, but I hate them all equally, he responded.
	If the Muslims went to someone in their own community to adjudicate the dispute, that person probably would be related to or biased against one or the other.
	But since they knew this Hindu merchant hated them all equally, he could render fair judgment in the matter of the property dispute.
	No wonder India drives foreign journalists mad.
	I found this maybe-ness flourishing here in America too.
	I lived part of the year at the end of a dirt road in rural North Carolina.
	My neighbors are, by and large, Trump supporters.
	We are the only non-white family on the block.
	We disagree with most of our neighbors about most political issues.
	But when my father died a couple of years ago, the couple next to us, who manufacture handcrafted assault rifles and whose yard is festooned with a giant Trump flag, flew up to stay with my bereaved mom in New Jersey.
	The entire neighborhood signed a condolence card and bought us a rose of Sharon Tree in memoriam, which is now festooned with white blossoms.
	Over Gujarati food in Kentucky Bourbon, we discuss faith and family with the evangelical military veterans across from us.
	Their grandkids swim in our pool.
	They replenish our log pile in the winter with wood from their yard.
	We have rarely met kinder, more welcoming people anywhere on the globe.
	How can I convince these good people that the story they're getting from Fox and Newsmax and X is not the whole truth?
	What is the alternative?
	Certainly not the weak democratic tea of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
	Nobody's bothering to break into the DNC headquarters these days.
	According to Masha Jepsen, who wrote in the New York Times, the only thing that can possibly work is a visionary, loud, appealing alternative, rather than a milder form of the same thing that the very charismatic aspiring autocrat is offering.
	Enter Zorhan Mamdani, possibly the next mayor of my city.
	New York is the antidote to America.
	In the age of Trump, it looks like it will elect a socialist, pro-Palestinian 33-year-old as its next mayor.
	We are witnessing an epic battle of the two queens, the archie bunker queens of Trump, son of a racist slumlord who grew up in the all-white Jamaica estates, which, by the way, is now predominantly Bangladeshi, and the Indian Ugandan assemblyman from Estoria, Zorhan Mamdani.
	They're so different, it's a wonder they're of the same species.
	It's the closest you can come to a binary in American politics.
	But they appeal to the same voters who can't afford to live in New York or in North Carolina.
	People are scared because they can't afford to pay the rent and eggs cost too much.
	They will vote for anyone who will acknowledge these fears.
	Have you tried to go out to dinner in Manhattan, felt the lurch in your stomach when you see the check, look for an apartment where your child doesn't have to sleep in the bathtub?
	There's political tyranny and then there's economic tyranny.
	the tyranny of loving a city so much and being told that you can't afford that love because it's a contest of story-telling the sworn enemies of the populists are people like me journalists writers filmmakers This is why all over the populist world, in America, Russia, India, there's a war against the free press.
	All over the world, writers are being attacked, imprisoned, censored like never before, our funding threatened, our taxes audited, our university jobs taken away.
	Israel alone has killed, according to the UN, 242 Palestinian journalists since the Gaza genocide began.
	In India, the movie adaptation of my book, Maximum City, was dropped six days before production because Netflix considered my book and the director, Anurag Kashyap, too politically radioactive.
	It censored itself before the Modi government asked it to do so.
	It crawled when it had not even been asked to bend.
	A friend in London recently wrote a book about Gaza.
	After reading a hatchet job of a review of this book by another friend, I invited the author to do a talk at NYU.
	Two weeks before the event, the author wrote to me that he was cancelling his whole U.S. trip.
	He was too scared to come to America, lest he be tossed back across the Atlantic, or worse.
	This is an author whose name most of you probably know.
	He has access to every big name newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking world, but he's scared of coming to America.
	I understand his fear.
	There's something worse than being silenced, being killed.
	As Woody Allen said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
	I'd rather have immortality by not dying.
	I know plenty of writers.
	My life is lousy with writers, and there's nothing heroic about most of us.
	We're always hustling for our next gig, our next free meal.
	We love to be noticed except by the eye of Sauron.
	The Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek, author of The Good Soldier Schweik, wrote about a private in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I who's fighting not for a cause, but simply to be able to eat, drink, and sleep.
	Hasek wrote his novel in chunks.
	When he needed money to drink, he would take a few pages to his publisher, who would pay him a few coins, and then Hasek would go to the pub and go on a three-day bender with the money.
	After passing out on the bench in front of the pub, he would wake up and have to write another chapter so he could buy more beer.
	This is how the masterpiece, The Good Soldier Schweik, was created.
	A predecessor to Schweik is Ivan Goncharov's indolent Russian nobleman Oblomov, who can't even get out of bed for the first 50 pages.
	Italo Calvinov's Markovaldo, an impoverished migrant from southern Italy to Turin in the 1950s, is motivated by very basic urges to capture a pigeon for his dinner, to fill up his cart in the supermarket with things he can't afford.
	There's a direct line from Oblomov and Schweik and Markovaldo to Yusarian in Catch-22, to Agastya, the gormless rookie, Indian civil service officer in Upmanio Chatterjee's English August, to Rikki Gerais in the office.
	These characters, like the mass of humanity, have no interest in nationalism or ideology.
	They just want to get by, get pissed, eat a good meal, go to sleep.
	The individual human is unclassifiable, objurate, honory.
	Like the good soldier Schweik, you can be unheroically patriotic, because a tyrant, a bully, can only enjoy power if people obey.
	Power rests with the subordinate, upon the bully's ability to force the subordinate to do his will.
	They are powerless if we say, like Melville's Bartleby, the scrivener, I would prefer not to.
	But as a writer, I don't have that luxury.
	I can't prefer not to write.
	As the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert noted, for anybody else not to tell the truth can be a tactical maneuver.
	But a writer who is not telling the truth, even if he is just staying silent, is lying.
	And telling the truth means doing your dharma, bearing witness to her terrible times.
	It is the dharma that the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova best described at the beginning of her greatest poem, Requiem, which is about her loved ones who were killed by Stalin.
	Her poems were banned by the Soviet Union, and so millions of people memorized them and recited them to each other.
	Akhmatova writes, In the terrible years of the Yezov terror, I spent 17 months in the prison lines of Leningrad.
	One day, someone recognized me.
	Then a woman with lips blue from the cold standing behind me who had never heard me called by name before came out of the stupor so common to us all and whispered in my ear.
	Everyone spoke in whispers there, Can you describe this?
	And I answered, yes, I can.
	Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.
	This is what gave the old woman waiting in the freezing Siberian winter a measure of comfort.
	That the writer was there, bearing witness and could describe this.
	In most countries, at most times, writers are defenseless.
	We are the easiest to attack because words are not bulletproof.
	We do not have a vote bank.
	We do not command blind loyalty from our followers.
	We question and urge our readers to question.
	We are soft targets, but tyrants and bullies be warned.
	We become more powerful with time, and our words will outlast your mobs.
	Threaten us, and we will sing the truth louder.
	Imprison us, and others will take up our chants.
	Kill us, and we will come back with ten new heads.
	Thank you.
	Hi, thank you very much for your remarks.
	Just to be provocative, you talked about writing.
	Oh, sure.
	Sure, Daniel Dresner, I'm a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
	Just to be provocative, you said that writers have no armies.
	Writers can't mobilize.
	Unfortunately, there do seem to be some that actually do have that power, and you so in a very illiberal way.
	And I'm wondering, how do you distinguish the writer as you've defined it from, let's say, I don't know, the Jordan Petersons of the world?
	Sure.
	I mean, I'm talking about the good writers.
	Radovan Karadžić also, I mean, there have been plenty of examples of, you know, these, I mean, Hitler was a writer in one way.
	So there's also these other writers, not my friends.
	You know, I think that the point is about storytelling, that there is this one kind of storytelling, which, like the Jordan Petersons of the world, and there's a long line of these writers who are able to use the power of a false story, right?
	There are writers, in a sense, who are also populists who can use the power of a false story to motivate people into...
	I think the difference between these writers and the ones that I like, the ones that I've hated, is that my kind of writers aren't very sure of themselves.
	They're like Walt Whitman in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, who says, it is not upon you that the dark patches fell.
	The dark fell upon me too.
	I too knew what it was to be evil.
	I too lied, felt the touch of young men.
	So these are writers who are capable of self-doubt.
	And I think the ones who mobilize these armies, like the Petersons, are very sure of themselves.
	And the difference is between that simplicity, that unanimity that they seek, and the heterogeneity, the maybebiness that the writers that I read, that the writers that I admire, traffic in.
	Hi, J.K. Putnam.
	I'm a writer.
	That's not important.
	I was affected by mass layoffs in May.
	And you talk a lot about telling a true story better and combating lies with just effective, many-sided, truthful storytelling.
	What exercises do you look to when you are trying to make a compelling, again, not argument, but when you are hoping to tell truthful and impactful stories to counter those more destructive narratives?
	Sure, that's a great question.
	And I'm sorry you were affected by layoffs.
	So I teach long-form non-fiction writing at NYU, and my students come to me to learn how to tell a story.
	They want to tell a story.
	When they come to my classes, they want to write books or magazine articles.
	And I really don't believe in all these writing guides that are floating around, how to be a great writer in 10 easy steps.
	But over the years, I've come up with, you might call it a formula for what makes for a good magazine article or book, certainly.
	And it needs three things: stories, statistics, and a statement.
	So as I mentioned in my talks, human beings are moved by stories.
	You need to come in with, if you were to tell your story, we would need to understand who you are as a human being, how you are affected, how the quality of your life changed with these mass layoffs, how your conception of yourself as a person in 21st century America changed.
	But that's not enough, because then they're just anecdotes, right?
	I mean, we all have stories.
	Your stories need to be backed up by the statistics.
	And here we get into what is sometimes the boring stuff, but it's also the policy stuff.
	It's what scholars do to understand the economic engine that shapes whatever industry you're in.
	The wider numbers of taxation, of tariffs, what's causing these layoffs.
	And the two together have to come together to make a powerful statement or argument.
	And so when I read a piece of non-fiction, I look for these three things and how they interplay.
	And if you do these three things well, if you interweave them, then you'll have grabbed both the reader's head and their hearts.
	I think that's all that's fine at the moment.
	Okay.
	Well, thank you very much.
	And I look forward to it and it's great.
	Good afternoon.
	I'm Walter Olson.
	I'm a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
	More important, I'm a frequent contributor to The Unpopulist, which you should all be subscribing to, most recently on the attacks on universities' independence.
	And our first panel in what will be a great series of panels is entitled Liberalism at a Time of Constitutional Crisis, Taking Stock of U.S. Democracy.
	And yes, we are starting with the United States because the world's eyes are on the United States.
	If liberalism fails here, it's hard to hold out as much hope for it elsewhere.
	And to discuss this, we have a fantastic and distinguished panel here.
	I'm going to go through alphabetically.
	Frank Fukuyama is one of the best-known analysts of American society and its trends.
	He is at Stanford University in the School of International Relations, and he has a new book out on challenges to liberalism.
	Jack Goldsmith is a professor at Harvard Law School.
	He was a founder of Lawfare and also taught at the University of Chicago and University of Virginia Law Schools.
	Ruth Marcus is a writer at the New Yorker on law and the courts.
	She had a long and distinguished career at the Washington Post, where many of us learned to read her columns and other writings.
	And finally, moderating our panel will be Ben Wittis, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a founder of Lawfair.
	You see a pattern here.
	You should all be reading Lawfare.
	It's also great.
	So please join me in welcoming our panel today.
	Thank you, Walter.
	Your check is in the mail from Lawfair.
	We actually don't have a whole lot of time, and we have a huge issue to discuss.
	So I'm going to dispense with a lot of formalities and of panels, things like introductory remarks of all sorts, and just go directly into a conversation with what is really an incredible panel.
	And Frank, I wanted to start with you and ask you, in our correspondence in advance of this, you said you wanted to address the assault on the deep state.
	And I think that's a great place to start.
	We have some people when we heard about mass layoffs before.
	I assume we have some people in the room who are affected by that.
	It's hard to have a room this big in Washington without that right now.
	How severe do you think it is?
	And what do you think is the relationship between that assault, if we will call it that, and liberalism?
	Okay, thank you very much, Ben.
	So I actually like the deep state.
	I think that any functioning political system has to have a civil service that meets these basic Navy requirements of being nonpartisan, expert, professional, and the like.
	And that has really been the target of this current administration that really came into office.
	I mean, Project 2025, a lot of it was really about what they would do to the so-called deep state.
	One of the most deepest political characteristics of American culture is distrust of government.
	And so this is nothing new.
	But the ferocity of this particular attack is really, I think, quite unprecedented.
	It's done already a lot of damage, but unfortunately, I don't think it's over because they still have an agenda that they haven't fully carried out.
	So let me just describe the different parts of it.
	So the beginning part was Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency.
	It built on actually something that was a very good part of the U.S. government, which was the U.S. Digital Service that Jennifer Polka and other people had established in the Obama administration to try to modernize the digital systems of the U.S. government.
	So they began with the assumption that the U.S. government doesn't actually do anything all that important, that most of the workers are sitting at home playing video games, and therefore if you fire a random 10 or 20 percent of them, really nothing is going to happen.
	It was carried out by people outside the government, by 20-something engineers that had no concept of what it was that these different government officials did.
	And so they did this kind of random firings.
	Now, there are several aspects.
	I think people are aware of this, but there are several aspects that we haven't really fully understood the effects of.
	The computer systems that the federal government uses are extremely fragile and very old.
	A lot of them are written in Fortran or COBOL or languages that modern software engineers simply don't know anything about.
	They've been patched together by heroic civil servants over periods of decades.
	It's very hard to know exactly how they could have broken these systems.
	But the more sinister thing is that with support now of an appeals court, they've actually had permission to get into most of the government systems they wanted to.
	The thing is that these are, it's not like the GAO doing this, a government agency that is tasked with overseeing the affairs of the rest of the government.
	These are basically private sector actors who work for Elon Musk and they have private sector interests.
	And we simply don't know what kinds of back doors they left in these systems where that information could be updated with further downloads, now that Doge is largely out of the picture.
	And it went into things that, you know, legal territory where it should really not have gone, shutting down USAID and closing entire agencies.
	When I'm particularly close to, the National Endowment for Democracy had its complete funding revoked, despite the fact that it, like USAID, had been created by Congress with money appropriated by Congress and so forth.
	So that was one initial assault.
	That phase is winding down.
	The second phase had to do with so-called for-cause employees.
	So there's about 200 of them scattered through the U.S. government.
	A four-cause official is a policy, is an official that makes policy, fairly senior position, but the law says that you cannot simply fire them, that you have to give a reason, and the reason really has to be a fairly serious one, like, you know, corruption or malfeasance that can be at least articulated and demonstrated.
	So a number of these were fired.
	We understood that there was a good reason for having for-cause employees because there are certain roles in the U.S. government that are technical that are best done by nonpartisan experts.
	This includes a head of the Bureau of the Census, this organization called the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
	You have inspectors general scattered throughout a lot of federal agencies whose main job is simply to watch for corruption and malfeasance in different agencies.
	And these were summarily fired.
	Now the lawyers here can expand on this, but the ability, you know, so Congress created this as well as these multi-member commissions like the FEC, SEC, ICC, and so forth for good reasons, because it was felt that there were certain positions in the U.S. government that needed protection from ordinary politics because they depended on a kind of, if not just non-partisan,
	at least balanced partisan oversight.
	And that's why you had multi-member commissions and that's why you had four-cause employment.
	The conservatives on the court had been gunning for this for a good long time under a theory of the unified executive or unitary executive where a single person in the executive branch, the president, should have the ability to fire basically everybody across the U.S. government.
	And we've seen the effects of this.
	This was actually supported by a Supreme Court decision in the 1930s called Humphrey's Executor, the right of Congress to make rules like this to make it more difficult for the president simply to take these officials out.
	That's been under a lot of pressure.
	They have not invalidated it yet.
	I suspect that they will next year when they have to take this matter up.
	The thing that stopped them in this particular instance was the Federal Reserve, because even the conservative supporters of President Trump understood that the independence of the Fed was something that the markets really, really cared about.
	If you remember on Liberation Day, back in August when there was first brooded the idea that Trump would get rid of Jerome Paul, the markets reacted very, very badly to this.
	And so the courts had this, or the conservatives on the court had this dilemma because they wanted to get rid of Humphrey's executor.
	They wanted to give the president permission to get rid of any senior official he wanted to, but they also didn't want to make it seem like they were empowering him to simply get rid of Jerome Powell and the rest of the Federal Reserve.
	They are going to take this up again next year.
	I suspect that since Powell's term is up next year, he's already had the ability to appoint new governors.
	He'll have more of that by the time Powell's term ends.
	And I think it's going to be kind of a moot problem next year.
	So I think Humphrey's executive will be gone and the precedent that the president can fire any of these officials he wants at will be established.
	Final thing is what's now called Schedule G. At the end of the first Trump administration, they issued an executive order creating a new Schedule F that basically put the entire federal civil service on at-will status.
	That was rescinded immediately by the incoming Biden administration.
	But it's back now.
	It came back first as something called Schedule PC, and then they've posted a new version of it called Schedule G, which expands the ability of the president to remove federal officials beyond these very senior at-will officials to basically everybody in the federal government.
	This basically puts the country back to where it was before the passage of the Pendleton Act.
	In the 19th century, beginning with our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, every post in the federal government, every fourth-class postmaster was a political appointee.
	And every time there was an election, when the parties changed positions, as they did almost every two years in the period after the Civil War, almost every federal employee was fired and replaced by another, basically, you know, by a candidate who owed his position to political patronage, to one of the two political parties.
	This was ended in 1883 by passage of the Pendleton Act that for the first time required a civil service examination and put the civil service on a merit basis.
	This really took until World War I to become generalized throughout the U.S. government because Congress really did not want to give up its power of patronage and so it was a very gradual purpose.
	Even before Trump got there, we still had about four or five thousand so-called Schedule Cs who are political appointees, which is about 4,000 more than almost any other modern democracy where you have a professional permanent civil service.
	And so we retained more of the patronage system even before Trump.
	And now they want to get rid of the whole thing.
	So yes, your fourth-class postmaster will flip over if there's an election that brings a different party to power.
	And I think the problem there is different because it basically is going to bring back opportunities for just massive corruption.
	That's what the patronage system in the 19th century was characterized by.
	That's when you had all of these big city machines like Tammany Hall in New York.
	And with this ability to fire any employee of the federal government, the incentives for politicians to use that power to reward supporters is going to be very great.
	All right, so I want to ask you very briefly, connect all this to the word liberalism, because it seems like what you've laid out is a sea change in constitutional politics, maybe some really bad policy and opportunities for corruption.
	But what's illiberal about it exactly?
	What's illiberal about it really has to do with rules.
	Liberalism, my definition of liberalism, really has to do with the rule of law and constraints on the exercise of executive power.
	And what Congress was doing by creating these different rules for federal employment was to put constraints on the power of the executive to simply do whatever that person wanted to do.
	And I think that by turning all of this into a single, into a policy decision, you've eroded those kinds of checks.
	And quite frankly, you know, in Trump's first term, the federal bureaucracy was a check on a lot of the things that he wanted to do.
	They simply slow walked, you know, for example, I mean, now we're in the midst of the National Guard coming into Washington, D.C.
	He wanted to do that back in the first term after the George Floyd protests.
	And he was stopped from doing it by a bureaucratic structure that was slow-moving and resisted him and had the power to do it because a lot of the officials that were put there were chosen for professional background, for neutrality, and the like.
	And now, you know, that's going to be gone.
	All right.
	So first, before we move on, Ruth, Jack, do either of you have responses or thoughts limited to the material that Frank has put on the table?
	No.
	I don't think, I'll just say this.
	I don't, this question of Humphreys' executor, this very important Supreme Court decision.
	It's going to need its own executor.
	Yes.
	Humphreys executive executor.
	This very important Supreme Court decision about constraints on the president's power to fire senior executive branch officials who have certain protections from Congress.
	The court has been attacking this precedent for a long time.
	President Trump is not the first president to rely on this diminution of power to fire independent agency heads.
	That honor goes to the Biden administration, which did it in reliance on this precedent in many contexts.
	Trump is hyper-charging this, obviously, turbocharging it.
	I'll only say that Humphreys might be overruled.
	I've actually been surprised by how ambiguous the court has been in its interim orders about whether it will do that.
	I don't, there's still many constraints on the president's constitutional power to fire executive branch officials, even if Humphreys is overruled.
	So I don't think that the president's going to have free reign, constitutional reign, to fire every executive official just by the overruling of Humphreys.
	But let me say one more thing.
	One of the many things I've learned this year is that the president has many better legal arguments than I ever appreciated for winnowing out firing members of the executive branch, not on the basis of some constitutional power, but rather simply relying on the various statutory schemes that have many ambiguities and loopholes and that have largely been regulated by norms.
	And of course, if there's a norm in the room, Trump is going to sniff it out and violate it.
	And so a lot of what's been going on for most of the clearing out of the bureaucracy has not been an exercise of constitutional power, but have been these down-in-the-weeds legal arguments where it turns out Congress did not do the greatest job in ensuring that the president didn't have the authority to do what he's doing.
	So that's all I would say.
	Interesting.
	And of course, the merits of those cases, of which there are literally tens of thousands, have not yet been approached because most of them have to go through the Merit Systems Protection Board, which doesn't have a quorum right now.
	I didn't think I was going to say anything because I wanted to, you know, let us get to some of the many other things that we need to discuss.
	I can't let some of this stuff go unsaid, unchallenged, because what's going on in the executive branch right now and the assault on the deep state, and I say this as somebody who's just finishing up a long profile of Attorney General Pam Bondi, so I've been looking a lot into what's going on at the Justice Department in terms of the firings.
	And this president's assertion of authority, you know, leave aside Humphrey's executor, which applies to a very small number of people, leave aside the independence of the Fed.
	This administration is just willy-nilly asserting the authority under its alleged Article II power to fire anyone for any reason at any time, law be damned.
	And there's some folks in this audience who have been the beneficiary or victim of this kind of firing, which pays no respect whatsoever to the rule of law.
	And that is the situation that we are living under right now.
	So I'm just curious if I can get the two of you to agree.
	No, not really.
	No, no, no, I'm sure.
	I bet I can.
	I bet I can, that there are some firings, for example, the firing of Maureen Comey, the prosecutor in the Epstein matter, who is...
	I'm sorry, what did you say her last name was?
	Comey, yeah.
	And Maureen Comey is the only authority cited for her firing is Article II of the Constitution.
	It doesn't cite one of these esoteric loopholes.
	So on the one hand, you have stuff that represent an extraordinary power to reach down into the career bureaucracy and just get rid of anybody you don't like.
	And at the other end of the spectrum, there are riffs that are probably reductions in force that are probably lawful.
	If distasteful, there are people, for example, FBI agents, who do not have the degree of civil service protections that exist in some other agencies.
	And so as you litigate this broad range of civil service decimations, you're going to have a variety of different outcomes.
	So this is a problem being on a panel with a bunch of lawyers.
	I think there's three categories of bad things that are happening.
	So one are unconstitutional things, you know, like birthright citizenship.
	There are things that are illegal where you've got a statute that says you can't fire somebody except under these conditions.
	They violate that.
	And then there's a big category of things that are just bad governance.
	Right, yes.
	And I actually think that most of the really bad stuff has actually been in that third category.
	For example, among the people that they went after first were probationary employees.
	Now, this is just some factual background.
	The U.S. government has the same number or roughly the same number of full-time employees today as it did in 1969.
	The size of the federal government has not been growing.
	I mean, this is a conservative myth that the government's just grown by leaps and bounds.
	It actually processes about four or five times as much money as it did in 1969.
	But many federal agencies are really, really strapped.
	They've got a really big problem in getting young people, especially tech-savvy young people, to come into the federal civil service.
	The average age of a civil servant is somewhere in the high 50s, right?
	This is not the kind of government you want to deal with, artificial intelligence and all the changing social conditions that we face.
	And it's probationary employees that are these young people that they made a big effort to get into the government and they're the first to go.
	So that's bad governance, maybe perfectly legal, but it's really bad governance.
	Right, but my point here is simply that there is, you know, as these things get adjudicated over the next three to five years, you're going to have within the civil service decimation a pretty wide range of outcomes.
	And I'm just trying to figure out if that point is a point of common ground between Ruth and Jack.
	I agree with the way you describe the situation.
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	Yes, probably where Jack and I disagree most vividly, and we're friends, so it's an energetic and fun disagreement.
	It has to do with what happens in the interim period.
	Yes, okay, but let's come to that in a moment because I'm about to ask you a question that's going to tee that up for you, Ruth.
	All of this stuff ends up in the courts.
	Congress is dealing with exactly none of it.
	That puts an enormous burden on a set of institutions that likes to congratulate itself for passivity as a virtue.
	And the performance of the courts over the last six months has been extremely variable by level of court, by individual judge.
	And so I want to start with you, Ruth, on this.
	How do you assess the performance of the courts in relation to the question of liberalism and illiberalism in this moment?
	I think I want to fight the question, not the hypothetical, but the question.
	And for this reason, I don't think we can assess the performance of the courts in itself in a vacuum.
	I think we have to assess the performance of the courts in the context, and Jack would probably disagree with me about that because the courts maybe shouldn't pay attention to what's happening in other branches or in outside society.
	But I can, and I do.
	And the courts are operating in a sphere where there's been a complete systemic breakdown of checks and balances and the way things should operate.
	So you have law firms that are caving to outrageously unconstitutional edicts and therefore not stepping up to the plate to do the jobs that they would normally do.
	You have the media, much of it, not all of it, thank goodness, notably cowed by completely frivolous lawsuits, but paying up millions of dollars and not doing its kind of constitutionally envisioned role.
	You have educational institutions anteing up enormous sums to make Trump leave them alone and scared about what they're doing.
	That's kind of external to government.
	You have one constitutional branch, Congress, that is completely absent from the scene, that provides very little, if any, check at all.
	You have a president who's determined to exercise maximum constitutional authority and to just clearly, I can't tell you how many times I have written this sentence, this is not normal.
	But I also get to write this sentence, this is just flagrantly illegal.
	I mean, you can argue about Humphrey's executor or various things on the margins.
	But look at the firings of individuals.
	You have a system where people are fired.
	There are clear violations of the civil service law.
	They have to go to the MSPB, which is going to take forever, which is non-functional.
	It doesn't have a quorum to adjudicate these things.
	So you have, so then, so to get to your question, which you knew you had faith I would finally do.
	I trust you, Ruth.
	You have to think about the courts within this system that feels to me, and I'm not usually such a kind of hyperbolic pants-on-fire type person.
	That seems to me that the entire system is falling apart slash falling down on the job.
	So the courts in this context have been not the least dangerous branch, but actually the most effective branch.
	But that may not be saying very much.
	And we also don't know very well how effective they're going to be in the end.
	If there is any institution that has performed well to date, it has been the courts.
	But I have enormous concerns about, I think, two things in the end.
	One is what the Supreme Court will and won't allow the lower courts to do as these cases are making their way through the system.
	And we've all heard about universal injunctions and there are legitimate worries about lower courts overstepping their bounds.
	But there are also legitimate worries about an administration run amok and not hemmed in while these cases make their way through the courts.
	And I, for example, I do not worry in the, I don't lose any sleep, and I tell other people not to lose sleep about birthright citizenship.
	I don't think in the end, even this Supreme Court, as we say, is going to allow President Trump's flagrantly unconstitutional executive order to stand.
	But a lot of mischief is happening in the, you know, not necessarily on birthright citizenship, but within that process.
	And I also think, so this court, for various reasons, you know, it's worried about exercising its authority because if it exercises its authority too much, it won't have its authority, which creates a kind of like, well, what's the point of having the authority if you're never going to exercise it?
	It's like, I think it was Madeleine Albright who used to say, what is the point of having these armies if we're never willing to use them?
	And I kind of think that a little bit about the court's power.
	But you combine that with the Supreme Court majority may not have the same conception of the President's Article II authority that President Trump has, but it's a pretty capacious vision of it.
	And when you combine its hesitation and unwillingness to intervene to stop the president in the interim with its broad conception of Article II authority, that is what interferes with my sleep.
	Jack, you have a more, I think your sleep is less interfered with by the court than Ruth's.
	Talk to us about the court's performance as you understand it.
	Sure.
	So the first thing I would say, Ben, you said all of it ends up in court.
	And as you know, that's not true.
	A lot of the illegal things Trump is doing can't end up in court.
	So give us the corruption.
	By the way, I take that point.
	That is exactly right.
	And I spoke hastily when I said that.
	But give us some examples of the things that don't end up in court.
	So the president is acting blatantly illegally by not enforcing the TikTok ban.
	This is presidents have played fast and loose for a while in their discretion to not enforce certain laws.
	No president has ever just said, I'm not going to enforce this law because I don't like it.
	That is blatantly illegal.
	It's actually arguably one of the most clearly illegal things he's done.
	And just to be clear, this is a law not merely passed by Congress, but upheld by the Supreme Court.
	Right.
	That's one thing.
	The corruption, the open corruption, he's basically exercising his Article II authority.
	He's basically said no prosecutions of any of this corruption stuff.
	So he's greased the wheels of that in a way that is never going to reach the court in this administration, and it's going to be hard in a later administration.
	Some of the stuff Ruth mentioned, which I put under the heading of extortion, the universities, the law firms, these things can make it to court, and they have, and the administration has lost every one of these cases in court.
	But it doesn't matter because we've learned that the extortion can still work.
	These are the settling law firms and the settling universities, even if you can win in court, because the administration, if it's completely shameless and willing to use power extremely aggressively, can absorb the losses in court and still win.
	So that's another example where the courts can't save us.
	There are many, many, many examples of things not reaching the courts or reaching the courts.
	Court's doing the right thing, and it doesn't matter.
	That's the first point.
	Second point is people have looked at people have looked at the Supreme Court's record.
	The Supreme Court has basically been engaging this in what's called its interim orders docket.
	These are decisions about what the rules are going to be during the course of litigation.
	And the Trump administration has won most of these.
	So people look at this and say the Trump administration has won 15 of 18 cases or whatever the numbers are.
	The court is in the tank for the Trump administration.
	And I just think that is massively, massively misleading.
	There are many, the court only considers the cases that the Solicitor General, the Justice Department agency that argues these cases before the court, thinks it can win, i.e. the weakest lower court decisions are the one the court is looking at.
	And frankly, I've looked at all 18 of these.
	You can argue many of them, but the court has not, in my judgment, done anything obviously wrong in any of these cases.
	It's also stood up to the administration in some areas where it really matters.
	More importantly, I'm putting this in context.
	There are literally dozens.
	By my count, it's hard to count, but four to six dozen injunctions by lower courts against various things that the Trump administration has done, which are being complied with, which the government has not sought interim relief from, and which are basically having an impact in slowing down what's going on.
	So, and then the last thing I'll say is the courts, this is really important.
	Two more things, sorry.
	First thing is the courts, and I'm picking up on what Frank said, they have to comply with the law.
	They can't just pick up the vibe that the president's out of control and start pushing back.
	They have to pay attention to the law.
	Now, we can debate about what the law is and what the president can do, but they can't just respond to the vibe and push back against the president because they have to ground it in law.
	And here's the really important thing.
	The court, without the support of the Congress and without the support of the executive branch, is simply not as an institution, in part for the reasons that many of these cases can never make it to court, and in part because the court does not have sword or shield and has always been in this precarious position vis-a-vis the executive branch.
	Going back to Marbury versus Madison, the most famous court decision in Supreme Court history, where John Marshall took a dive in that case because he was worried that his decision wasn't going to be enforced.
	The court is always in this precarious position vis-a-vis the executive.
	And if we think that the court is going to save us from President Trump, that is just a massive mistake.
	It's not going to happen for all those reasons.
	All right.
	So I want to ask you about the issue that Ruth raised earlier, which is she doesn't necessarily disagree with you that on some of these big cases, on some of the most important ones, the court's going to end up in a good place.
	But there's all this mischief that happens in the interim.
	And the issues that Frank raises, you know, it turns out you can actually destroy an entire federal agency just by reductions in force or firing all the people in it, right?
	It turns out that you can take away citizenship from a lot of people, or at least you can try, between the time your order goes into effect and when the Supreme Court says, well, we all know it's going to say, which is the, you know.
	And so my question is, how tolerant should we be of the court being, and I concede right up front that this is its traditional posture.
	Let things ripen, let things percolate in the lower courts, wait till there's a conflict in the circuits, don't rush to rule on anything.
	But there's something about, to me, that moves me, frankly, when Ruth lists all the institutions that are not doing their jobs and saying, hey, this thing is before you on an emergency order.
	That the failure of everybody else is actually worth some measure of urgency on the court's part.
	So fairly, I would just point out that most of the things Ruth mentioned aren't before the court.
	The law firm issue hasn't come before the court.
	It's coming.
	I mean.
	It's coming, and I have zero doubt that the court will rule against the Trump administration on that, the universities as well.
	So let me put the point, let me just contextualize the point.
	What you're basically saying is the court has, without blessing what the administration has done in the 15 cases it's looked at, it has, without fully blessing, it has allowed the administration to proceed for one or two years, during which period massive damage can be done no matter what the court decides.
	Massive irreparable damage.
	Yes, massive irreparable damage.
	And it has said, and it has linked that sometimes explicitly, sometimes not explicitly, to a probability of success on the merits.
	Yes.
	Right.
	Implying that when it comes time to it, we may actually say this is fine.
	I think implying that we're probably going to say it's okay.
	But all I can say is that I think under the law, this is a cost.
	The court is not a perfect institution.
	It's a reactionary institution.
	It has rules.
	It is the most reactive of the three institutions of government, and it has many constraints.
	I would just say on the merits of those cases, there's not a lot to obviously disagree with, but I acknowledge that this is a massive cost.
	I would just say to put it in perspective, because the court is allowing those things to continue, but all these other things that have been slowed and stopped by the lower courts, the court is not looking at that because the solicitor general hasn't even brought it before it.
	So we're really looking at a massively skewed sample.
	And I think it's kind of hard to get the full picture by just looking at the Supreme Court decisions without looking at the four dozen lower court injunctions against the administration, which, despite the early nonsense, they're being complied with.
	And so all I can say is the court is following its rules.
	We can argue about the merits of each case.
	We can get down in the weeds.
	But I just think the court is doing in, look, it could have, maybe it should have sent a signal in a couple more cases, go slow.
	These are non-legal calls that the court often makes, and maybe it should have done that a few more times.
	But I think in the round, the court has been doing your point is well taken.
	And just as an example of it, Jack is speaking in big round numbers here, dozens of injunctions.
	One of them involves the case that Frank mentioned earlier, which is the National Endowment for Democracy case, which there was a ruling in the other day at the lower court that said we don't believe the district judge basically said, I don't believe this is not a political interference, and you need to give the NED its $97 million, I think it was.
	It was some big number.
	Is this the Friedrich opinion?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so this is...
	And this is a Trump appointment.
	Dabney Friedrich is a superb judge, in my view.
	And she's a Trump-appointed judge.
	And I have, I read this opinion.
	It's a completely convincing opinion.
	I expect that this is not one the Solicitor General.
	I was going to follow it up with that, that just today there was a status report in which the government said, oh yeah, it did not mention that it was appealing, which I take it means it won't.
	And it did say it was going to obligate the funds in an expeditious fashion.
	And so, you know, there are, it is a, you know, these things are, the interim statuses can be quite variable.
	Ruth, I want to, don't want to leave this stage without talking a little bit about the press.
	So for those who don't know our respective professional histories, Ruth and I worked together as Washington Post editorial writers for a long time.
	Over the last three weeks, we have seen a mass exodus from the Washington Post of people with a, with, I would say, longer than X number of years of experience there.
	It's really, I don't know whether Ruth would agree with this term, but it's death spiral-like in its and so Ruth, I'm interested in your thoughts on the state of the press in general.
	You yourself have left the Post recently, although not as part of this particular wave, but also the state of the press more generally and the state of the Post, our local city's institution and you're in my home, your case for many more years than mine professionally.
	So not all of the problems with the press are Donald Trump's fault.
	Many of the, we have a business model that was in the collapsing separate and apart from Donald Trump, but He has not helped matters.
	I think that the capitulation of entities like CBS apologizing and settling a lawsuit involving its decisions about what to quote from an interview when the quotes were entirely.
	This is an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes when the quotes were entirely accurate and fair.
	And the notion that you would pay money to settle this suit because, guess what? You want to get your merger approved by the authorities is appalling.
	There's just no adjective that could be strong enough to describe this.
	The notion that ABC would settle a bogus defamation claim involving the fairly accurate description of what the president did in his private life to a woman is just another example of the fear that he has put in people.
	And I think Jack made a really important point that whether Trump ultimately loses, Trump was going to ultimately lose these lawsuits, but it didn't matter because he won by filing them.
	Trump is going to ultimately lose his efforts against law firms, but it doesn't matter because he has cowed them by threatening to put them on his little blacklist.
	Look, the media is still, the Post specifically and the media generally is still doing what it is instinctively institutionally supposed to do, which is covering rigorously the Trump administration as it's supposed to cover all administrations.
	But the combination of this punitive environment and the disintegration of the news cycle has caused woe, not simply for the Washington Post, but across the industry.
	And if that I spend most of my year these days living in Wyoming, where I think about somewhere between a dozen and 19 local newspapers have just suddenly, all of a sudden, because they were owned by the same conglomerate, shuttered their doors.
	If we do not have functional press, if we do not have functional local press, if we do not have functional national press, corruption is going to thrive.
	You cannot have, the framers understood that you cannot have a functioning democracy without the sunlight and reporting that's necessary for it.
	And we should all be very worried about things.
	And honestly, I have to say, if Donald Trump were to recede from the scene tomorrow, that my degree of worry would not be greatly lessened.
	Yeah, I agree with that.
	Although there are a few areas where it would be lessened, and one of them involves the Institution of the Voice of America, which brings together Frank's point about the sort of drive-by destruction of the federal workforce with Ruth's point about journalism.
	We recently posted a job at Law Fair, and the unbelievable number of VOA formers who applied for it with incredibly refined expertise in very specific parts of the world was just heartbreaking, actually.
	And, you know, I don't know if that's fundamentally a media story, i.e. What Ruth was talking about are fundamentally a federal agency destruction story of the federal workforce, but it's an awful, awful situation.
	Can I ask a question of my fellows?
	By all means.
	So, Jack and Ruth, you both referred to the weakness of a lot of the cases, and I assume that's because what Trump is trying to do is extortion, essentially, right?
	The university has a contract to do cancer research with the federal government, and they're canceling that because of anti-Semitism, right?
	And that's why they're going to lose if they take it to court.
	Why are they so afraid to pursue these things then?
	I mean, why are they settling early if they really don't have a legal basis?
	For the same reasons, well, you had a split among the law firms.
	Some of the law firms fought, and they've all won in court, and they got their formal legal protection, and then some firms settled, and they're in many ways in a worse position.
	But the ones that got their formal legal protection, it doesn't matter.
	The Trump administration can continue to impose pain on them through informal means by just on the sly not hiring any of their clients to do federal government.
	Okay, how about universities?
	Same with the universities, I think.
	And I'm not an expert on this, but the university, Harvard won its injunction when it went to court.
	But the Trump administration has endless tools.
	It recently went after all of its patents.
	It has endless tools in reserve to continue ratcheting up the pain.
	And Harvard can, and again, I'm not speaking for Harvard, but Harvard can fight these things legally.
	But ultimately, even if it wins in this round, it's going to end up losing in the politics in the next round.
	So I think the universities want the pain to go away because the fact is, and this is the way I wrote a book about the mob, and this is the way a shakedown works.
	You bring illegal pain on someone, and they settle because they want to lessen the pain, even though it's illegal.
	And the government, it turns out, when you really weaponize it, can bring round after round after round of pain against you.
	That in a nutshell is the way I think it's working.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	And that has immense implications, just to go back to the name of the panel for liberalism, right?
	And I want to close.
	We have six minutes left.
	And Ruth, you have a Pam Bondi profile coming out, as you mentioned.
	And, you know, the pointy end of the spear in any effort to weaponize the government is the Justice Department, both because in an offensive sense it prosecutes cases and investigates cases, but also because in a defensive sense, when you shake down Harvard University and Harvard University sues you, it is the Justice Department that is going to defend that.
	And so my, I'm going to throw a provocation at you and see if you my general impression is that the magnitude of the changes in the Justice Department are breathtaking and it is very hard to overstate how impactful the last seven months has been, that particularly at the FBI, it is much worse than is public.
	But also there are large parts of the department that are decimated of personnel and frankly decimate that there's an inverse quality between inverse relationship between the quality of the personnel and the likelihood that they've left or are leaving.
	I'm curious in your reporting for this story, is it any better than my that admittedly hyperbolic characterization?
	Oh, it's so much worse.
	You've completely understated it because it's not just the hollowing out of the department.
	I think 70% of the civil rights division is gone.
	Half the career lawyers in the Solicitor General's office are gone.
	Half the lawyers in the office that defends the federal government against these lawsuits are gone at precisely the wrong time.
	And Jack's former.
	But that really gets, I'm going to turn to Jack's former office, which is the Office of Legal Counsel, which gets to the point.
	It's not simply the hollowing out and what that means, by the way, in the next administration that comes, because there will someday be a Democratic president elected.
	And what does an attorney general in a Democratic administration do?
	Does he or she then purge the people who have burrowed in in that administration?
	Are we just in this endless cycle of retribution?
	But it's so much worse than that because the Justice Department has always, in Republican and Democratic administrations, occupied a complex and shifting role where it is both the job of the Justice Department, and I can't believe I'm sitting here explaining to you the job of the Justice Department.
	Not explaining to me.
	But explaining while you sit there the job of the Justice Department.
	But it is both an advisor to the president, which means giving legal advice not just about what you can do, but about what you can't do and what the law, the requirements that the law imposes on you.
	This Justice Department conceives of itself in an entirely different way, which is it is married just as closely as it can be.
	Its job is simply to achieve the goals of the administration no matter what.
	The president was frustrated by his first attorney general, William Sessions.
	He was frustrated by his second Attorney General, William Barr.
	He picked Pam Bondi for a reason.
	He is getting what he wanted, which is, you know, full steam ahead.
	There are no people at the Justice Department telling him, Mr. President, you really can't do this because they wouldn't last if they did.
	And that is something, that is another constraint that's a really important internal constraint.
	I should stop talking and give you a chance to elaborate on this, Jack, because it's another internal constraint that is gone.
	So I'm going to give Frank the first, the last word.
	But before I do, Jack, so one thing that y'all should know about Jack Goldsmith is that he has trained half the Justice Department and he is an exceptionally beloved teacher.
	I cannot tell you how many people come to me and they learned about, you know, they know me as the guy who did lawfare with Jack and I bask in the radiation of their affection for him.
	I'm exaggerating only a little bit.
	You have a lot of contacts in the Justice Department from students there.
	Is Ruth overstating the matter?
	She's not.
	She's not.
	In fact, I would say it's even worse than Ruth describes.
	I mean, it was described to me.
	I did call you many months ago.
	And it's basically, it's like an atomic bomb dropped on the two things happened.
	An atomic bomb dropped on the department, as Ruth said.
	And also, I can't, I always want to underscore something Ruth said.
	There are tens of thousands of lawyers in the massive executive branch spread out whose job is to ascertain the massive array of laws that's supposed to govern executive branch behavior.
	And you can be cynical about this system, but it always worked, including with the Justice Department, in keeping the White House and the senior executive agencies more or less within the law, with some exceptions.
	And they have systematically and ruthlessly and successfully eliminated, with one exception, which I'll say, all internal legal resistance.
	It is simply not acceptable to offer an opinion contrary to the one that the president, who is not a lawyer, wants to push.
	It's really an extraordinary thing.
	The exception, and I'll stop here, is the Solicitor General's office.
	The Solicitor General is the branch, and this is an amazingly interesting fact.
	The Solicitor General is the branch of the government that argues before the Supreme Court.
	And it has a very conservative Solicitor General.
	But the Solicitor General has quite clearly told the White House, we have to play different and play nice with the Supreme Court.
	And they have been playing different and playing nice to the Supreme Court in ways that's not on board with the way the rest of the Justice Department works.
	And I can go into this in detail, but it's a remarkable testament to how important the court is seen even by the Trump administration.
	So I do think there's still some independent, I know that there is independent judgment being brought to bear in that office, but the rest of it has been decimated in terms of personnel and decimated in terms of independent legal judgment.
	Frank, you get the last word?
	Sir, there's a I just want to expand on the point about what the next administration, a Democratic administration, will be faced with, because you've got a live case of this in Poland right now.
	A little less than two years ago, a Liberal coalition ousted the peace, this law and justice populist party, and they've not been able to deliver on their agenda because there are too many peace people that have burrowed into the bureaucracy, into the courts.
	They can't get rid of them.
	And it's going to lead to the peace coming back because people are saying you promised that you do all this stuff and you're not delivering on it.
	So we're going to face that same thing, I think, here.
	You will hear a lot of great panels during this conference.
	You will not hear one with deeper expertise about the way the federal government works, has worked over the last eight months, and the way the justice system has responded to it.
	Please join me in thanking Frank, Ruth, and Jack.
	Oh!
	I am informed by the computer in front of me that we have a 15-minute question period.
	AIs are informing me of all things.
	So I can barely see you guys.
	So if you have the gentleman over there has a question, and if you have a question, wave your hands wildly at me and I will try to smoke you out.
	Yes.
	Hi, Baron Soka, Tech Freedoms.
	I'm a regulatory lawyer.
	I really appreciate your conversation.
	The bit you talked about at the end is well documented.
	It's called jawboning.
	It's the ability to use weak claims of legal authority to achieve great effect for anyone who wants to look that up.
	And Jack did a good job of summarizing it, but it's the link between liberalism and the rule of law.
	When the administration can weaponize the legal system to get what it wants by making claims, by bringing lawsuits, the rule of law doesn't exist anymore.
	But my comment was about the dimension of this we haven't talked about, which is how Congress should respond.
	So I'd like to hear your thoughts about what you would suggest the Democrats are prepared to do if they are able to take Congress.
	What legislation should be drafted to respond to the problems of the undermining of the independence of regulatory agencies, and particularly to focus on the things people have taken for granted.
	I mean, just.
	All right, let's do that.
	Go down.
	So in the future, Barron is exempted from this because he beat me before I said it.
	But in the future, please direct your question at one of the panelists.
	But in this case, I think all three of them have probably useful things to say.
	One, Jack wrote a whole book with Bob Bauer about remedial legislation.
	What's one piece of remedial legislation from each of you?
	I actually wrote a whole book with about 60 different proposals in response to Trump 1.0.
	And I think that, first of all, it's hard for me to imagine Congress engaging in serious legislative reform.
	It's just hard to see how we get there.
	There are a lot of people yelling and screaming that this was coming and you should do something in the last four years.
	No one was interested.
	I think that this is a problem that goes, obviously legislation can help in some areas, especially with some of the corruption, which is very under-regulated by design and needs to be fixed.
	Maybe that's where I would start.
	But this is a problem that goes beyond what law can fix.
	It's a problem about the lesson I've learned in the last 10 years is the extent to which I'm sorry to use this word, it's really non-legal norms that are kind of part of the working operation of the government that have now just can't be legislated easily.
	So I just don't think there's anything close to a silver bullet.
	I mean, it would take a long, long list of reforms.
	The pardon power needs reforming.
	Ruth.
	In the aftermath of Watergate, we enacted a whole slew of changes that were designed to prevent a repeat.
	Almost all of them over the years or recently have been defanged and disestablished.
	And it is really hard to imagine a Congress in the current environment that's willing to take up that task in any meaningful way.
	I'm sorry to say.
	Frank.
	This is why Humphrey's executor is so important.
	If the court actually overturns Humphreys, it doesn't matter what, even if Congress could agree, if they wanted to limit the executive, it wouldn't be held constitutional.
	So it's a meaningless discussion.
	All right, I disagree with all of you.
	I'm going to be the ray of sunshine here.
	There is three things that Congress coming in that had, and none of them involves legislation.
	The first is appropriations.
	90% of what Trump is doing can be stopped dead in its tracks by an appropriations committee that pardon me gives a shit.
	If there's a will.
	If there's a will, yeah.
	Assume a can opener.
	No, no, no, but we're talking about, but we're talking about whether legislative action can be effective, not merely whether.
	So the second thing is investigations.
	Investigations are a non-legislative function of Congress.
	The House of Representatives in the first Trump administration did a heck of a job with investigations.
	The Ukraine investigation was a very, very serious piece of work done with no executive branch cooperation under difficult circumstances.
	And we learned a lot, actually, from it.
	And then the third thing is I know, oh, by the way, the January 6th Committee, which was created in the House of Representatives, everybody's forgotten the name Liz Cheney.
	You shouldn't.
	That was an amazing accomplishment that she and Benny Thompson and the others did.
	I mean, it was really a terrific piece of work.
	And then the third is impeachments still matter.
	It bothers Donald Trump a great deal that he's been impeached twice, and it was an important moral statement both times.
	So I want to say congressional action, it is not the perfect branch of government, never going to be, but I actually want to resist the sort of Debbie Downerism on Congress, particularly about the House of Representatives, which vacillates between extremities but is capable of doing great things.
	Yes.
	Oh, I'm sorry, you didn't have a question.
	Oh, you're managing the bike.
	I'm so sorry.
	Since you asked me to direct this to a specific person, I'll direct this to Frank.
	This may have some familiarity in any case.
	I grew up in Canada, and I'm a Canadian citizen.
	I moved to the U.S. 40 years ago, became an American citizen.
	I live in Detroit at the moment.
	Should I throw all my stuff into a truck and drive through the tunnel?
	Well, no.
	I think that the single biggest check we have is an election.
	And there's a bunch of elections coming up.
	And that's the one thing that can really put the kibosh on all this illegal activity.
	So no, I would definitely not go back to Canada.
	I would stay here and vote.
	And I persuade all your friends to vote, and the friends' friends.
	Thank you.
	My name's Laura Field.
	And I think my question is probably for Jack.
	But I'm wondering, since you're talking a little bit about civic morale and some of the norms that undergird the system, I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about the morale among lawyers and the legal community.
	Among the legal community more broadly.
	But before you do, Laura Fields has a really important book coming out.
	And I would be remiss if I didn't, from the stage, invite her to tell you what it's called.
	Oh, my God.
	Curious Minds, the Making of the Maga New Right.
	I'm going to connect this back to my question, Ben.
	Thank you, Ben.
	That's very good of you.
	I didn't know it was you.
	There's a spotlight in back of you.
	Ben blurbed it.
	Anyway, but I guess my interest in this question is because there's so much turmoil in the intellectual movement more broadly, and we've sort of seen them taken over.
	But it seems like the Federalist Society and the lawyers more generally are not being swept up in that.
	I mean, Tocqueville has this great line about the lawyers and the civic virtue and the norm.
	So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that.
	Thank you.
	I apologize.
	I just don't understand the question.
	Can you say it one more time?
	I'm wondering if you can tell us the temperature, like with the civic morale among the legal community more broadly, not just in the DOJ.
	You mean the private legal community?
	Just, I guess, like the whole thing.
	So I think I can speak for every lawyer in America.
	Yeah, I can't give you a good answer.
	There are a lot of lawyers in America and a lot of different communities.
	There's a massive split among lawyers about these attacks on the law firms and the split among law firms who have stood up to Trump versus capitulated to Trump.
	That's a massive Fisher.
	Federal society, I don't know how much you're aware of this, but it is very much on the outs of the Trump administration.
	That is passe and not nearly aggressive enough for the Trump administration, so they're kind of being pushed to the side.
	There is, in my experience, there is no single coherent legal community.
	I have to say, I've been, the legal community has been largely, I mean, relatively, as a community in the round, silent in Trump 2.0.
	He's done a good job of cowing them.
	And that's happened in many, many contexts, but I can't speak to what the morale is.
	I think it's probably, and it depends.
	I mean, there are many conservative lawyers who are on board for what's going on in the legal community.
	So I don't think there's any simple answer to that question.
	I'm sorry.
	Ruth, do you have thoughts on that?
	I think it's a community.
	I wonder what you think about this, Jack.
	I think it's a community that's pretty traumatized.
	Whether you're in a firm that capitulated or whether you're in a firm that resisted or whether you're in a firm that has kept its head down, I think it's really hard to look at what's...
	I think it's hard to be a law professor in this environment.
	I think it's hard to be a law student in this environment.
	I think it's hard to be a practicing lawyer in this environment and say, I would like to take on this client, but my firm doesn't want me to.
	A judge has asked me to take on this case, but if I do this, I'm going to run afoul of things and I'm going to screw my partners and we'll make a few million dollars less a year.
	I think it's a very difficult, I'm being snarky, but I think it's a very difficult climate for lawyers.
	I will just point to a fact in one of Ruth's articles recently.
	A fact?
	How did that get through?
	So Ruth did an excellent profile of Paul Clement, who is a conservative super lawyer who has taken on a number of really important cases in this environment and deserves a lot of credit.
	And one of the things that he did is he did an amicus brief at the request of the court in the Eric Adams case.
	And this was when Emile Bovey, whom I suppose we should now call Judge Bovey, decided to drop this case in a pretty explicit quid pro quo for policy support from the mayor of New York.
	And the judge then wanted to see whether there was any question about whether he had the authority to maybe not dismiss the case at the request of the Justice Department under those circumstances.
	And according to Ruth's story, the initial lawyer that he approached was unable to do it because presumably because the firm refused to let him do it.
	And so Paul Clement was actually the second choice.
	I cannot think of a previous case in my, I've been in this business a long time, of a situation where a federal judge comes to a big firm lawyer and says, you're a genuine expert in Thing X. Would you, as a service to the court, do an amicus brief?
	The lawyer is willing to do it and the firm says no.
	I'm sure there are such examples.
	I can't think of any.
	And so that's the atmosphere I want to, or one component of the atmosphere, I want to identify one area where the morale is extremely high and the bar deserves a lot of credit, and that is the mostly left activist organized, litigating activist organizations.
	And, you know, these are groups, there are some that are less political, but these groups have really taken on an enormous amount of weight on their backs, often with firms helping them quietly in the background, but the firms can't put their name on anything, and sometimes without any help at all.
	And so, you know, like I have spent a lot of my career doing battle with the ACLU.
	They've represented me in the last year.
	You know, there's a real, there's a group of groups that have really overperformed.
	And I do think in those settings, people feel very good about practicing law.
	We have time for one more question.
	Sir, I can see you.
	You get the nod up in the front.
	Hi, my name is Kaushik.
	This question is, I guess, for Ruth or maybe Jack.
	You talked about both the weaponization of the government, but also the hollowing out of it.
	So I'm curious if you could explain how those two things go together.
	With what manpower is the government being weaponized?
	So I think they're probably, I think of them as distinct.
	We haven't even talked about weaponization enough because one of the things that's going on at the Justice Department is that instead of seeming to resist Trump's admonitions and exhortations to go after his political enemies, we're seeing at least the incipient stages of launching investigations and convening grand juries.
	And Ben, you and I have to talk about this afterwards because we have slightly different approaches to it.
	Just using the mechanisms of the criminal justice system in a way that has not been done since Nixon to go after political enemies.
	And that is very dangerous.
	The hollowing out maybe involves people who won't participate in that, who refuse to participate in it, and who refuse to defend it, and the erosion of norms of behavior so that generations, generations may be overstating it, so if you don't have people who are trained up in the way that they should behave, if you don't have transmitters of the norms, then you don't have effective norms.
	And so I do worry about the hollowing out as a long-term consequence, but I do worry about the weaponization as a very short-term and dangerous consequence.
	Jack, do you have thoughts on the weaponization versus...
	I just want to say one thing in response to Ruth, which will probably be very unpopular in this room.
	The Trump administration believes the weaponization did not start with the Trump administration.
	I believe that.
	And they're not without some basis in thinking that.
	And I think this is hugely important to understand as a predicate to what's going on now.
	I'm not saying that what's going on now is justified.
	It isn't.
	But there were some, in my judgment, bad decisions made in various contexts at the federal and state level.
	And so I just, I didn't want, I think that's important to understand.
	There is a tension because you need manpower to weaponize, but it turns out you can weaponize with not many resources.
	This has been a problem for the department.
	They've had all these lawsuits against them and they've hollowed out the Justice Department and they don't have enough people to defend, so they haven't been doing a very good job on a lot of these cases.
	But it also turns out that, you know, you can open an investigation with one person and ruin someone's life.
	So you can, it doesn't take massive resources to achieve consequential weaponization.
	But there is a tension there, I agree.
	It is also the case that some of the weaponization, particularly on the extortion side, is being done by people outside the government entirely.
	And there's an interesting New York Times story about Mr. Boris Epstein's particular role in the law firm relationships that's actually not sufficiently appreciated phenomenon.
	Yeah, I mean, the call actually doesn't have to come from the Justice Department.
	Thank you very much for sticking with us.
	And please join me again in thanking our panel.
	Very nice to meet you.
	How can the U.S. and the U.K. strengthen their relationship in an era of heightened global competition and technological change?
	Tonight, British Ambassador Peter Mandelson will speak to that and other topics, including the impact of artificial intelligence and how to broker trade relationships while preserving each nation's competitive edge.
	From the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, watch live at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
	C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org.
	American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
	This weekend, as America celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026, join American History TV for its new series, America 250, and discover the ideas and defining moments of our founding.
	At 6:30 p.m. Eastern, an event to mark the 250th anniversary of the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, an early Revolutionary War conflict between colonial and British troops.
	And at 7:30, America 250 Commission Chair Rosie Rios announces the kickoff of Our American Story, a project designed to collect and preserve thousands of personal stories from across the country as it heads towards its 250th birthday.
	At 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, law professor and author Joyce Lee Malcolm on Benedict Arnold's triumphs as an American Army general in the Revolutionary War and whether his legacy as a notorious American trader is entirely accurate.
	Exploring the American Story.
	Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history.
	The latest economic numbers show the cost of making goods in the U.S. has increased.
	The Washington Examiner writes that this jump in the producer price index raises concerns about inflation and the economic consequences of the Trump administration's tariff policies.
	Earlier today, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro spoke to reporters about the inflation numbers.
	Mr. Navarro, I'm Tom Deputy with News Nation.
	Can we react to you about this PPI index?
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Hang on.
		I've got a mission here.
		What I want to talk about at some length is the pharmaceutical executive order that was signed yesterday by President Trump.
		After I get through that, happy to take any questions on that and then happy to talk a little bit about the PPI.
		So let's stay focused on big pharma.

▲