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Nov. 2, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MINORITY PRIVILEGE D’Souza Podcast Ep448
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Coming up, I'm going to look at the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases on affirmative action.
Anticipating a strikedown of affirmative action comparable in significance to the strikedown of Roe v.
Wade. I'll make the case for why people should terminate their PayPal accounts and why the company should be investigated for a plan to steal from its customers.
Progressive scholar Shadi Hamid joins me.
We're going to talk about his formula for left and right to coexist in a deeply divided society.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The justices of the Supreme Court have just heard a dispute in a very important set of cases, two cases, involving affirmative action, affirmative action in American universities. One involves Harvard University, a private university, but one that does have relations with the government, government contracts, and so on. The other, a state university, University of North Carolina, and these
universities are being sued by a group called Students for Fair Admissions.
And they're being sued for engaging in widespread and systematic racial preferences.
Now, for many years, these universities tried to hide and disguise what they were doing.
They would say things like, well, when two applicants apply and they have similar credentials, we kind of...
give a nod to the one that is coming from a minority or disadvantaged background.
It's become very clear, and these cases affirm this, that we're now talking not about equally qualified applicants and giving somebody a nudge. We're talking about candidates who are completely different in their academic preparation, their grades, their test scores, their extracurriculars, their recommendations, and by and large, academically inferior candidates are chosen and given admissions and superior candidates are turned
away. This is done on the basis of race.
By and large, what universities do is they identify candidates, applicants, as members of either underrepresented or overrepresented groups.
And they use kind of broad categories.
So the broad category is like white, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American.
And you fall into one of these camps.
Now, Right away, you can see that these camps are a little problematic.
Consider two guys who applied to UNC Chapel Hill or to Harvard.
One guy is an Afghan who came as a refugee from Afghanistan after the long period of turmoil over there.
And the other is a guy from Spain.
Now, the guy from Afghanistan is classified as an Asian because he's lumped in with the Chinese and Japanese and the Indians.
And since the Asian Indians and Chinese are really smart and have really high grades and test scores, there are sort of too many of them.
So the Afghan is like, you're privileged.
You're privileged. And then you turn to the Spanish guy who's white, but his last name is, you know, Diego Rivera.
And so, wow, he's classified as Hispanic, he's Spanish-speaking, and so this guy now gets a benefit.
Points are added to his score.
He gets a leg up.
It's easier for him or her to get in over the Afghan because the Afghan falls into the wrong category.
So this, as you can see, there's a kind of madness to all this.
And all of this comes before the Supreme Court.
And what this group, Students for Fair Admissions, is very clever in doing is they put the Asian Americans out front and they go, wait a minute.
Look at this. You got these Asian Americans, and by the way, they've been themselves victims of historic discrimination.
You know, ever heard of the Chinese restriction laws?
Ever heard of the exclusion acts against Asians?
Ever heard about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II? There's been this kind of, there's been this history against Asian Americans.
Asian Americans are not discriminators.
They're not benefits of any kind of historical privilege.
And yet, They are the main targets of affirmative action.
Why? Because they're the most successful group.
Even more successful than whites.
So whites are disadvantaged by affirmative action, but Asians even more.
And... Now, the excuse used by these universities to do this, they don't like to blatantly take an Asian with, let's just say, a perfect SAT score and put him to the side and give the seat to a Black or Hispanic who has basically a markedly inferior score.
So what they do is they pretend that Asians fall short on all the extracurriculars.
Now, it doesn't really work because Asians, you know, play the violin and they're really good in chess and they do community service.
So that doesn't really work.
So what Harvard does is they try to, they have a personality index and the Asians always rated low.
So this is their way of doing it.
They pretend like Asians, well, Asians lack compassion.
Asians aren't very witty.
Asians don't really have any sense of community.
And all of this was picked up by Justice Alito, who turns to the Harvard lawyer and he goes, Why are you saying all this about Asians?
Are you actually saying that Asians emotionally and morally are inferior to other groups?
You're ranking them on lower scores.
So either you are accurately describing the inferiority of the Asians in these areas, or you're using it as a false pretext to deny them admission.
And then the Harvard guy backs off, and he basically goes, well, we don't really...
Yes, we do this ranking, but it doesn't really...
It fades into the background, was his phrase.
So in other words, a blatant lie, because...
And this is what these universities have become.
They're like the media.
They've become ultimately wedded to a kind of a racial...
A deeply entrenched racial system.
They don't want to admit it.
They can't really intellectually defend it.
And so when they're put up against the wall...
They lie about it.
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Although we hear ad nauseum about white privilege, the fact is we are living in a society of minority privilege.
Now, minority privilege is too broad a term because not all minorities are included in minority privilege.
Jews are a minority, but they don't have minority privilege.
Asian Americans are a minority.
In fact, they're a smaller minority than either blacks or Hispanics, but they don't have minority privilege.
Minority privilege is reserved for really three groups.
Native Americans and Hispanics.
Now, universities claim that they have to engage in racial preferences because that is the only way to produce roughly proportional representation.
What the Harvard lawyer told the Supreme Court, he wants a Harvard that looks like America.
And Not a Harvard that thinks like America.
Not a Harvard that reflects the intellectual diversity of America.
Not a Harvard in which, let's say, Republicans and Democrats are equally represented among the students or on the faculty.
Not a Harvard where there's religious diversity.
And so, for example, there would be evangelical Christians represented, let's say, at their purport.
No, no, no, no, no. Harvard's concern basically is on primarily the race front, but they're also big, of course, into gender and sexual orientation.
Now, why is it important to have a Harvard that looks like America?
Let's think about it.
By and large, if you look at all the different types of restaurants and companies like Microsoft, it seems like this is just like Little Asia.
You've got a Chinese restaurant over here, you've got Indian restaurants over there, Japanese sushi over here, reflecting the population of people who work there.
And so, Silicon Valley doesn't look like America.
Why is that a problem? The NBA doesn't look like America.
You look at the basketball court.
If someone came from Mars and that's all they saw, they'd think America was like 80% black.
So that doesn't look like America.
So why does Harvard need to look like America?
And here's the other question.
If Harvard were to admit students solely based upon merit, you would have more Asian-Americans.
The number of whites would be a little bit more or about the same, and the number of blacks and Hispanics would probably be less.
So the seats currently taken by blacks and Hispanics would be occupied by having more Asians.
Now, why are Asians not diverse, but blacks and Hispanics are diverse?
So you begin to see here the kind of obsession with this racial balancing that has no evident academic justification at all.
Universities have never been able to show that, let's say, for example, if you take two populations, in one we have four Asians, four whites, that's eight, one black and one Hispanic, so that's ten.
Versus, let's say, three Asians, three whites, two blacks and two Hispanics, that somehow the second distribution produces a better academic outcome than the first one.
No one has even attempted such a demonstration.
It's pure dogma.
Now, Sandra Day O'Connor, many years ago confronting this problem, basically said affirmative action is something that's like on its way out.
It's something that could last for 25 years.
And using the Sandra Day O'Connor measure, we basically would have six more years to go.
But it looks like the Supreme Court is having none of it.
Even the left-wing journalists who are watching the Supreme Court said that none of the six conservatives on the court, and this would include Justice Roberts, seem to show any real sympathy for the idea of continuing racial preferences.
Racial preferences is going to go down in some way.
Now, there are a couple of ways the court could go.
They could strike it all down and basically say that diversity is not a legitimate rationale.
In other words, diversity is not an adequate excuse to somehow override the Civil Rights Act.
And by the way, I'm going to read now Section Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
No person in the United States shall, on ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation and be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
And that applies, by the way, to both Harvard and UNC. They're both covered by the Civil Rights Act.
UNC, being a state institution, is additionally covered by the 14th Amendment, which establishes equal protection of the law, equal rights under the law, and so this kind of racial discrimination would seem to be outlawed.
So the universities are desperate to hang on to it.
Harvard brought down some left-wing students to the court.
We want racial preferences.
None of them, by the way, if they're white, willing to give up their seat at Harvard to make room for a minority kid.
They always want They always want some sort of higher morality, but at somebody else's expense.
Fortunately, I think the Supreme Court is on to this scam.
And although we're going to have to wait for the result, it's probably going to come March, April, sometime in the spring.
I think it's going to be a result worth waiting for.
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Feel the difference. I want to talk about why we should cancel our accounts with PayPal.
In fact, Debbie was going over our list of items for the podcast today, and she's like, well, we have PayPal.
So this is funny. Sometimes I come up with these ideas.
We haven't done them ourselves.
But we're going to do them.
So PayPal, look, PayPal comes out.
With their so-called anti-misinformation policy.
Here we go again. And like so many other tech platforms, apparently PayPal thinks it is the job of a payment processing company to monitor misinformation.
Wow. And this is the kicker.
PayPal said that if you abuse this policy against misinformation...
By the way, let's look at what their definition of misinformation is.
Some of it is unobjectionable.
They talk about, you know, promoting illegal drug use or depicting explicit nudity or sexual activities, promoting violence, criminal activity.
I get all that. We're not interested in debating that.
But, quote,"...you can't post things that are harmful or obscene.
You can't post things that depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups, which are then specified groups based on, quote, protected characteristics." Such as religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race. You cannot promote information that is, quote, fraudulent or promotes misinformation.
Now, some of this, as you can see, is very vague.
And the definition of misinformation comes, by and large, from fact-checking groups that themselves promote misinformation.
And PayPal says that if you do this...
They can take out $2,500 from your account.
What? So there was an uproar over this and PayPal kind of backed up.
And they said, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
We sort of posted that in error.
And... And then people noticed that shortly after that died down, people thought, okay, view, PayPal has come to its senses.
PayPal reposts the policy as if to say, well, now that we've kind of cooled you guys down, we're going to still do it.
Wow. The former president of PayPal, David Marcus, he calls the policy, quote, insanity.
He says, now a private company gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with.
So yeah, that's the heart of the issue right there.
And... PayPal recognizes, of course, that people are annoyed.
Many people have canceled their PayPal accounts.
At one point, PayPal got so scared that they were offering people $15 not to cancel your account.
So if you say, hey, close my PayPal account, they would, first of all, not let you do it.
You'd have to call them as opposed to being able to just do it right there.
And then here is a PayPal reply to one guy.
Quote, PayPal is not fining people for misinformation.
And allow me to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
And since we value you, I'd like to give you a one-time courtesy of $15 worth of PayPal voucher.
So they're like bribing people not to bail out of PayPal.
But look, these guys have had a chance to think about it.
They have doubled down.
It looks like they have kept this...
$2,500 policy in place.
I mean, what kind of madness is it?
You think it's your money.
Somebody pays you for something, a product you've sold.
PayPal is supposed to be the guys.
They're just the intermediary.
The money passes through, kind of like the bank.
Imagine if the bank were to say, well, listen, you're an election denier.
I'm going to take money out of your bank account.
Yeah, or the phone company decides, listen, I'm going to increase your bill because you've been saying some objectionable things on the phone.
Yeah. I think this is not only a case where we, the consumers, should exit, but I think this is a case where we need some sort of investigation.
This is something that Republicans might want to look into post-November.
I mean, this is corporate theft.
Talk about greedy corporations that are kind of using the pretext of misinformation to steal from their own customers.
I mean, I think that as a business practice, this is disastrous.
This is suicidal. And so...
So, I'm going to exit PayPal.
I recommend that you do also, at least until they, A, take this policy down, B, apologize, and C, pledge to never do something like this again.
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I want to talk about this continuing fight or legal argument going on in Phoenix in Arizona about patriots observing drop boxes. Now the group that is doing this is called Clean Elections USA. There are a couple of other smaller groups but this one seems to be the main one.
And they seem to be really motivated by the work of True the Vote and 2000 Mules.
And their idea is, hey, we're just going to check out these drop boxes.
And they're not just doing this in a kind of informal way.
People can just show up there.
They've created a sort of a database.
If you see things that are wrong, they say, listen, upload your information to the database.
There are in fact sheriffs around the country who are eager and willing and ready to prosecute abusers of the law.
So their idea is to provide, be in a sense responsible citizens and provide information to law enforcement where appropriate.
Now left-wing groups, notably one called the, it's called some Association of Retired People, but the force behind it are left-wing Democrats who are from out of state.
And they're working with these local groups to sue Clean Elections USA and say, you can't do this.
You can't watch the drop boxes in this way.
The Biden Justice Department has weighed in with, quote, serious concerns over voter intimidation.
And they decry, quote, vigilante ballot security efforts and, quote, private campaigns to video record voters.
Now, first of all, I want to say that all of this can be avoided by having 24-hour...
Surveillance on all dropboxes.
Why that is not the case throughout the country, I want to know.
In an era where every parking lot, every store, every mall has surveillance, why not follow the election rules and have surveillance?
You wouldn't need to have citizens doing it if the state did its job and did it itself.
Now, I obviously agree that people should not intimidate voters in any way.
By that, I mean interfere with them.
Certainly, I saw one video on social media.
I don't even know who was doing it.
There's no indication or no proof this is related to Clean Elections USA in any way.
But there were a couple of guys in military fatigues, and they came in a van, and it looked like they were armed.
And this is obviously not a good idea.
I mean, you don't want to be sitting by the dropbox and like cleaning your shotgun because there's a reasonable inference of voter intimidation in those cases.
While the Justice Department appears to think that recording people going to Dropbox is somehow illegal, I can't see why that is the case.
You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
You're performing a public act, which is voting.
You're doing it in public space.
Typically, some place on the street where a dropbox has been installed, there typically is surveillance on streets anyway, and of course there's video surveillance on some dropboxes.
A local judge, District Judge Michael Liberti, I think is striking a reasonable balance here.
What he's basically said is, listen, citizens do have the right to observe dropboxes, but He has said they need to keep a certain distance away.
I think it's 75 feet.
So they're not intercepting voters or voters don't see them as somehow blocking access to the Dropbox.
And he has also said that there's nothing wrong with these citizens recording on their phones or taking video of what they see, particularly if what they see is something inappropriate.
And But he is prohibiting the display of any kind of weapons or any kind of objects that could be taken to be threatening.
And I think that's actually right and appropriate as well.
So what we have here is a case where citizens are exercising responsible actions.
Oversight over these drop boxes, as they have every right to do.
And at the same time, a judge is making sure that that doesn't cross over a line where citizens are in any way intimidated or discouraged from casting a vote.
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Guys, I've been really looking forward to this.
My guest today is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research professor of Islamic Studies at Fuller Seminary, a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
He is Shadi Hamid.
His book that I want to talk about is called The Problem of Democracy.
It's a very timely book.
It deals with issues that we're dealing with here in America, but also around the world.
The full title, The Problem of Democracy, America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea.
Shadi, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
It seems that this is a problem that you generalized by first examining its application in the Islamic world, that you began by thinking about Islamic democracy and the relationship between liberalism and democracy in the Islamic world, and you began to see some anomalies there that this phrase liberal democracy that we often
habitually use almost synonymously as like one word is really not only two words but really two distinct ideas.
So talk a little bit about how you came to this topic and let's talk about the world of Islam first and then we'll pivot and apply some of those ideas to America.
First of all, thanks for having me.
So, yeah, I was living in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, and there were democratic elections, and there was a lot of optimism about what was to come.
But when Islamist parties, in other words, parties that believe in the implementation of Islamic law...
When they came to power freely and fairly in consecutive elections in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, a lot of people said, oh, well, we like democracy in theory, but we don't like the outcomes in practice.
And this, to me, as the title of the book suggests, is the problem of democracy.
And what I was trying to do in the book was to use these dilemmas in the Middle East to get to a broader set of universal questions because democracy brings about a lot of uncertainty.
It can be frightening because you don't know who's going to win before they win.
And then also I think as you said, we do tend to conflate in the West liberalism and democracy.
So when we're talking about the classical liberal tradition, we're talking about individual freedoms, personal autonomy, gender equality, minority rights, and so forth.
Democracy as I see it is more about the procedural mechanisms.
It's about alternating power through regular elections.
It's about being responsive to voters.
And in the Middle East, in religiously conservative societies, if people want to vote for right wing religious parties, we don't have to like it.
We can find that to be quote unquote bad.
But in the end, people have the right to make the wrong choice when they're voting.
And I think that right has to be protected.
And obviously, as you can see, that has implications more broadly.
So you're now making, I think, a really important point, and that is you're saying that it is conceivable that you can have a free election in a place like Afghanistan or Tunisia or Egypt.
And because these are traditional societies, you could have a society, in principle, that, let's just say, votes democratically for Sharia.
And says, we want to have Sharia law in all aspects of society.
And that is decided not by cheating, not by rigging the election, but by a fair vote.
And you're saying that, I think, that democracy should trump liberalism in that sense, because democracy is primary and liberalism is secondary.
Is that an overstatement of what you're saying?
Or is it an accurate reflection of what you're saying?
That's right. When there's a tension between these two concepts, my preference is to prioritize small d democracy over small l liberalism.
I want to emphasize that when we talk about liberalism, we're not talking about left-wing liberalism like here in America.
We're just talking about the classical tradition of Of post-enlightenment thought.
But yeah, so in the Middle East, you don't necessarily have a lot of proper liberals.
So you can't force people to be liberal if they don't want to.
So when these things are in tension, I think we have to make a choice.
And we have to ask ourselves, is democracy good because of its outcomes or in spite of its outcomes?
And what I want to move away from is an outcomes-oriented approach that we only like democracy when it gives us these other things that we want.
Now there still has to be some level of freedom of expression, the right to protest, the right to organize, form political parties because if the government restricts you from doing that, then the election won't be fair because you're not able to get your message out to voters.
That part has to be protected.
I mean I want to, I think it's interesting historically that democracies have typically had this illiberal component, even if you go to the birth of democracy in ancient Greece.
And let's leave aside slavery or the fact that the vote was restricted.
by and large, Greek society was highly restrictive.
The citizens voted for all kinds of things that we would consider tremendously illiberal.
These were provincial, xenophobic, warlike societies.
And even today, if we look around the world in places like India and Hungary, you could have a majority of Hindus in India vote for a Hindutva party, a party that says India is a Hindu country, it's not a secular country, not to say you can't be something else, but Hinduism is going to kind of inform the public ethic of a society.
And I think what you're saying, which is controversial, but I agree with it, is that, look, those societies, if you're gonna consider them autonomous, that they have a right to determine their own destiny, who but the majority of citizens is going to do that?
Exactly, exactly.
And we as Americans, I don't think we should be going into the Middle East and pressuring people to vote a certain way or raising our expectations because during the Arab Spring, there was a lot of optimism that, Oh, Arabs are going to become like us.
Look at these English-speaking liberals who are on Twitter and all of that.
There's a danger that we project too much of a burden on the democratic idea.
Democracy is not a panacea.
Democracy, in my view, is about regulating conflict.
It's about having diverse societies and everyone agreeing that This is a system that we use to resolve our differences.
And we might not like who wins.
We might see that as personally threatening.
But the good thing about democracy is that four or five years later, you'll have a chance to fight again, peacefully, through the ballot box.
That's what people really have to buy into.
We can talk about how that applies to Western Europe or the US, but democracy is hard.
People just assume everyone believes in democracy, but what we're finding out more and more in situations where the stakes seem so high and existential and so...
And the future of the republic is at stake, or questions around religion and identity, which are hard to compromise on because they're very raw and personal, right?
So that's where the real test is.
That tests us. Will we still stay committed to respecting democratic outcomes if...
If the other side wins, and we don't like the other side and they're scary, for example.
Yeah, excellent point. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, we're going to dive right into that, applying your ideas specifically to the American context.
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I'm back with Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at Brookings, author of the book The Problem of Democracy.
By the way, you can follow him at Twitter, at Shadi Hamid, S-H-A-D-I-H-A-M-I-D. Shadi, you were making a point at the end of the last segment where you were saying that Societies can come to a point where the population is sharply divided, as we seem to be now.
And unlike the old days, the days of Truman and Bush and Reagan, where it appeared that people shared goals but disagreed on means, There now seems to be a divergence on goals so that a win for one side is seen as a loss for the other.
It's not just a disagreement about how to make America more prosperous.
It seems like the two sides want to go in completely different directions and one side's utopia is the other side's nightmare and vice versa.
Let's talk about how you think that that This dispute can be adjudicated through the democratic process because, in my view, this is not a one-sided problem where the Trumpsters reject democracy, as we hear in the public rhetoric.
I think it's fair to say that if you probe either side, that they seem to be really afraid that democracy that delivers to the other team is somehow lethal for their values and their way of life.
Exactly. And, you know, if we just backtrack a little bit, I think that Republicans were right in 2017 that Democrats overreached when Trump won and they began delegitimizing Trump almost right from the start.
And that, I think, set a bad tone.
That said, you know, I am on the left side of the spectrum.
And the way that I saw Republicans reacting to Biden's victory in 2020, in my view, was an escalation.
It was in some ways, in many ways, including, I would say, January 6th, the riot or insurrection.
It was worse. So I think that, yes, both sides have a lot to work on.
My goal, because I speak mostly to left-of-center audiences, is to tell my own side, hey, liberals, hey, Democrats, let's be careful here.
Let's make sure we stay committed.
I don't want Trump to win.
That would be scary for me if he wins in 2024.
But if he does, and he wins fair and square, we have to respect that.
Now, my critics sometimes say, well, Shadi, you're extending the benefit of the doubt to Republicans.
But Republicans, a lot of them support election denial conspiracies.
And I think the polling here troubles me.
And I'd be curious, you know, Dinesh, what do you think about this?
But I looked back the other day, and only 20% of Republicans, according to various polls, consider Biden to be legitimately elected.
A majority of Republicans consider January 6th to be a quote-unquote legitimate protest.
That, to me, is scary, right?
So then the question is, what do we do?
And I hope that every Republican who's listening now, and the few liberals maybe who listen to your show, Didesh, that they look to their own side, because that's all we can do, right?
That's who we can persuade.
That's what I'm trying to do.
No, I agree. Shadi, you have been doing very important work, and the courage of talking to your own side is something that you have been displaying and carrying out, and I want to commend you for it.
Let me push back on you a little bit in a friendly way and say this.
Number one, historically, the Democrats have been the party of voter fraud.
I mean, going back to the 19th century, Tammany Hall tried to steal this 1864 election from Lincoln, Democratic voter suppression in the South, the blacks.
So there's a history there.
The Kennedy race with Nixon, which could have been stolen in Illinois.
Number two, Democrats have challenged a number of recent elections, right?
2000, 2004, 2016, you mentioned with Trump.
To my knowledge, and all the time I've been in the United States since 1978, I have never heard Republicans challenge a single election.
Republicans typically are the people who go along, whoops, we lost this time, better luck next time.
2020, in that sense, is a complete anomaly.
So, whether or not you think they're right, I want to emphasize that these are Republicans who sincerely believe that the same animus that drove the left against Trump in 2016, the refusal to accept a legitimate outcome, Pushed into a corruption of the 2020 election.
Now, that's a factual dispute, which we're not going to adjudicate today.
But why is a factual dispute of that sort somehow out of bounds in democratic politics?
In other words, I think everyone who would say that Biden is not legitimately elected would agree that A, he is the president.
Right? They're not saying that Biden's not my president.
They're not saying that Biden doesn't have legal authority to do what he's saying.
They're merely saying that as a matter of fact, we think something went deeply wrong in the 2020 election and we still don't have the full story.
Why do those people have to somehow come around to your point of view in order for democratic solidarity to be affirmed?
Yeah, well, so I do think there's a difference in the sense that Obama didn't try to block the transition to Trump's presidency in 2016.
Hillary Clinton said some bad stuff, but she did actually concede almost immediately to Donald Trump, where I think in 2020, Trump and many of his supporters were not willing to, did not concede, but also did try to overturn the election through decertification.
And we don't have to go into the debate around that.
I just do think there is a qualitative difference.
Now, I think that this is important because if Republicans didn't like what Democrats did in 2016 with Trump, they should be more willing to apply that same principle to their own side.
They should say, well, we know what it feels like to be delegitimized, so we're not going to do that to Biden or the Democrats, however much we dislike them or hate them.
So it does require a kind of we have to go high when they go low.
And that's hard in a very tense political situation because everyone feels like the other is out to get them.
So I do think there has to be a kind of presumptive generosity.
And that's why whenever I talk to Republicans and make an effort to hear what they have to say, I'm trying to go out of my way to do that because what's the other option?
We have to live together.
But my concern is that, as you said, yes, 2020 in some ways was an anomaly.
But my fear is that this is a new precedent that's being set on the Republican side, that in 2024, we're going to see an intensification of these efforts.
If Biden or another Democrat wins, we'll have to wait and see.
But that's going to be a real test.
I mean, what if a Democrat wins in 2024?
Are we going to see something similar to January 6?
Are we going to see efforts to decertify results on the local or state level?
Yeah, I'd like to have you back with your permission some other time, and we should pursue this further, because I do think that there is, on the Republican side, a belief that when the Democrats come in, basically...
I'm thinking here of free speech, equality of rights under the law, not using the police agencies of government against your political opponents, that these things are now being deployed in the name of fighting election denialism.
And so the net effect of it is to create not a de-escalation of the kind you recommend, but a further escalation And the paradox for Republicans is Republicans say, listen, you get to pack the court, but we're not going to pack the court.
You get to shut down our free speech, but when we come in, we're going to let you talk.
You get to use the FBI against us and the IRS, but when we come in, we're not going to do it against you.
How do you reach that point where both sides are respectful of each other's liberties and If you don't escalate in this peculiar situation.
So we're not going to resolve that today.
I just posed the question.
With your permission, we'll circle back to you and see if we can have round two to pursue this.
But I've enjoyed it very much.
Thank you for joining me, Shadi.
People, you've got to check out this book, The Problem of Democracy, Shadi Hamid.
Follow him on Twitter, at Shadi Hamid.
Shadi, it's been a real pleasure.
Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
We are now in the very bloody Book 22 of the Odyssey.
Odysseus is now heavily armed.
He has a bow with poisoned arrows.
The suitors are horrified.
And Odysseus takes a deadly aim at Antinous, one of the most vicious of the suitors.
Reading from Homer, Odysseus aimed at his throat and shot.
The point pierced all the way through his soft neck.
He flopped down to the side and his cup slipped out of his hand.
A double pipe of blood gushed from his nostrils.
His foot twitched and knocked the table down.
Food scattered on the ground.
The bread and roasted meat were soiled with blood.
This is Homer giving you his great observational ability to capture little details that make you create a really powerful mental picture.
Now, the suitors are taken aback by this Stunning display of violence.
And they try to pull a fast one on Odysseus.
Eurymachus, one of the other kind of leaders of the suitors, he jumps up and he goes, Hey, Odysseus, if that's you, if you're back, oh my gosh, there are lots of people here who have really abused your home.
And then he goes, quote, But now the one responsible is dead.
Antinous. It was all his idea.
Antinous. This is a guy who wanted to kill your son.
Quote, These are the bad guys.
By the way, these are the people who kind of remind me of the people today who call for COVID amnesty.
They abuse us.
They shut down our churches.
They ruin our lives.
They prevent our kids from getting an education.
They make our parents and grandparents die alone.
And then they're like, hey, listen, it wasn't...
It wasn't our idea. Man, we were a little bit confused because things got kind of crazy.
So this is the suitors playing this kind of scam on Odysseus.
But while they're doing that, Eurymachus is whispering to the other suitors, basically, listen, let's all mobilize together and charge against Odysseus because even though he may have the weapons, we don't.
We're more of us than him.
He's just one and maybe Telemachus, but that's it.
But as one of these guys jumps up to get Odysseus, Telemachus comes behind him and thrusts his bronze spear from behind.
Once again, Homer gives a gory description.
So what we have here now is Odysseus and Telemachus, heavily armed, are just...
Killing the suitors left and right, one after the other.
This is not a case where there's a sort of restraint here, because Homer gives us the idea that these suitors deserve it.
Now, there are some scholars who disagree, and particularly in the modern era, you have progressive scholars who tend to think, well, Odysseus here kind of goes too far.
These were maybe misbrought up young men, and maybe they were a torment to his wife and his house, but did he really have to massacre them in this way?
By the way, once Odysseus has finished killing the suitors, he rounds up all the slave girls who were sleeping with the suitors and informing the suitors and conspiring with the suitors and kills them too.
So this is a, well, we can just call it cleaning house.
And at the end of book 22, quote, Odysseus made smoke and fumigated every room inside the house and the yard.
So, you know, in those days, I guess you don't have Lysol, so you need smoke to burn the odor of the blood.
And In some ways, Odysseus is also doing, you could say, a kind of a ritual purification.
In other words, my house has been defiled for now, not just months, years.
And so I kind of have to do a kind of top-down cleaning, and the smoke will essentially get everything back so that I can then live here in harmony.
And now we move to...
Really the closing scenes of the Odyssey.
Very well done set pieces by Homer.
Homer is reconciled to his wife Penelope.
And what I think is kind of cool is that Odysseus told her how much he hurt so many other people and in turn how much he had endured himself.
She loved to listen and she did not fall asleep until he told it all.
So this is Odysseus with sort of full self-disclosure.
He obviously trusts Penelope, and he's normally cagey.
Homer doesn't hesitate to call him the father of lies, but here he kind of fesses up. And then he goes and reconciles with his father. Now when I say reconciles, they didn't have a falling out or anything, but he's just been gone for so long. In fact, he hasn't really seen his father in old age, he's been gone 20 years. So let's assume that Laertes is maybe 60 or 65 years old. Odysseus, He was only 45 when Odysseus left for Troy.
So we have this kind of coming together of the family.
Homer gives us a very good description.
And then, and I guess I'll pick this up tomorrow, there's a kind of final scene in which The parents of the suitors.
I mean, this is Homer.
He doesn't just leave it. Oh, the suitors are dead.
Story's over. Okay, no.
He realizes that when you do something like that, there's backlash.
And the backlash is that the parents of the suitors, who are influential and powerful men in their own right, say, listen, this is intolerable.
Maybe our sons were a little out of control.
But Odysseus is a scoundrel.
This guy does not deserve to be our king.
As it is, he's been away for 20 years.
It's time for us now to come together and kill him.
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