Andrew Klavan and Lawrence Mead dissect America’s cultural divide, framing it as a clash between "friends of the founding"—who champion constitutional values—and "knuckleheads" pushing progressive narratives like Howard Zinn’s revisionist history. Mead’s The Burdens of Freedom argues Western success stems from Judeo-Christian and Protestant-driven individualism, while non-Western immigrants often lack this proactive mindset, straining assimilation. Klavan ties this to declining pride, citing polls showing Republicans’ higher patriotism, and blames leftist policies—from AOC’s migrant claims to Nike’s Kaepernick cave-in—as proof of engineered cultural decay, urging a return to faith and self-governance to reverse the trend. [Automatically generated summary]
More details are coming out about the historically historic meeting between that fat, crazy man in North Korea and Kim Jong-un.
President Trump and Kim met at the demilitarized zone after Trump sent Kim a playful, spontaneous tweet saying, dear murderous lunatic with stupid hair, meet me at the DMZ for laughs and denuclearization.
Kim immediately rushed to the meeting place with an entourage that included his agent, two publicists, a makeup girl, and 300,000 heavily armed infantrymen with eyes like zombies.
In a thrilling, off-the-cuff moment, Kim invited Trump to become the first sitting U.S. president ever to step into a country where the first man to stop applauding for the leader turns up three weeks later in several different plastic bags.
Trump and Kim then took 19 paces together, each more historically historic than the last, after which Kim offered to welcome the American press corps with a traditional North Korean disembowelment ceremony.
President Trump promised the reporters it would all be in good fun, but the cowards preferred to escape with their lives.
In a private meeting, Trump and Kim then agreed to reopen the denuclearization talks, which faltered last February when Kim threatened to extinguish life on Earth, and Trump responded by poking him in the eye, then hitting him on top of the head with a mallet.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, promptly responded to the incident with a harsh editorial, accusing Trump of damaging the work of previous presidents whose more measured statesmanship had developed the relationship between our two countries to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Trump and Kim then returned to South Korea for something to eat after Kim remarked, quote, man, I'm starving and so is everyone else around here.
Supporting Free Speech00:03:21
Ha ha ha, get it, unquote.
After the summit, Trump said Kim was, quote, a great little guy and a total mass murderer.
He even offered Kim a job in his administration, but the dictator declined, saying, quote, I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So yesterday, I put forward a somewhat different way to look at the division in our country, not so much a division between traditional right and left, but a division between friends of the American founding and the founding's enemies.
Those of us who are proud and committed to the ideas on which this nation was created, and those who think a better world is going to grow spontaneously out of the glowing compassion and virtue of their own glorious hearts.
Knuckleheads, in other words.
Now, the friends of the founding tend to talk about the Constitution, the law, the Declaration and its principles, the Federalist Papers and its philosophy, and so on.
But of course, no ideas, no principle, and no Constitution can support our liberties if the people themselves don't support them too.
We can't just have First Amendment speech protections in the Constitution.
We need individuals and corporations who believe in a culture of free speech.
Not free speech, but a true commitment to letting our worst enemy have his say.
We can't just guarantee the right to worship.
Enough of us have to care about worship to make that right meaningful and worth defending.
I suspect the people who torment the cake baker in Colorado, I think they don't even realize that his right to follow his faith is actually more important than their right to have sex however they want.
We can't enjoy our freedom without a deep understanding of the self-restraint and virtuous behavior that's required to make liberty practicable.
The founders who said our Constitution was only for a religious people weren't kidding around.
I don't think I'm stepping too far out on a limb to say we've lost some of that culture of freedom or to go even further and say it's in danger of being extinguished altogether.
And there are real questions about how and whether that culture can be restored.
I've long believed that Donald Trump was elected not so much for his political skills as for his cultural savvy.
He was the belligerent voice of a frustrated people who felt their own voices, their culture, and their country had been taken away from them by urban elites with a multicultural leftist agenda, the enemies of the American founding.
President Trump was the only way they could fight back short of revolution.
The terrific slogan, make America great again, has a plaintive aspect to it.
It's the slogan of people who think some greatness has been lost and needs to be recovered.
It's not just a matter of a better economy, though a good economy helps.
It's not just a saner foreign policy, though God knows that would be a relief.
It's a whole hearts and minds structure of faith and pride and self-restraint that used to hold up our freedoms and now seems in danger of collapse.
A lot of people tell me that that culture can't be saved, which seems to me just a pointless observation.
Despair is defeat.
Make America Great Again00:10:11
If you make the attempt, you simply don't know what can happen.
So I think we need to begin talking specifically about what needs to be done to restore our culture.
And I will try and start that today.
I won't obviously be able to do the whole thing, but we'll talk about it.
First, we have to talk about Big Token.
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And let us not forget, tomorrow is the mailbag.
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So the New York Times this morning, a former newspaper, ran a video op-ed called something like, stop telling me America is great.
And they ran this thing.
It's very well made.
It's very clever.
And it puts forward the idea that this whole idea of America being great is ridiculous.
Here's a cut.
America, the greatest country on earth.
A narrative packed and sold to tiny patriots, reinforced by every cartoon, movie, cheeseburger, and mattress sale.
Guaranteed.
A mythology so entrenched, our most beloved personalities urge us never to question it.
Don't let anyone ever tell you that this country isn't great.
This right now is the greatest country on earth.
Greatest country God ever gave me.
You're the greatest country in the world, though.
America is the greatest country in the world.
But what if we did question it?
It's a really dishonest video in a lot of ways.
First of all, the entire setup that children are being taught, all the pictures of the children being taught are from the 50s.
So the idea that children today are being taught this is a great country is kind of garbage.
And the fact that you put, you know, they put Michelle Obama and then they put Sean Hannity.
You say, oh, it's both on the left and the right that they're saying it's a great country.
We know that the Obamas did nothing but apologize for this country.
We didn't forget that Michelle Obama said the first time she was ever proud of her country was the day her husband happened to get elected.
So, you know, we know it's really only one side.
And then they go on afterwards.
I'm not going to play the whole thing, but they go on afterwards and talk about all the ways they think America is not great.
And they use, you know, some of the stuff they say is fair, but a lot of it is questionable.
So they use our high poverty rates without mentioning the fact that poverty in America is wealth anywhere else because of wealth transfers.
The problem we have here is not that people don't have enough money because they can get enough wealth transfers so that people living in poverty today are living at a fairly high level compared to other countries.
If you've ever been to another country, with the exception of Democrat cities where people are homeless, that's the kind of poverty that is widespread in a lot of other countries.
And that'll talk about the high mortality rate among infants without mentioning the fact that we try to save a lot more infants who have been born so early that they would die in any other country.
So the statistics are questionable.
But I don't think that there is any question, that there is any question that this is not the country that it was.
That is the fact that that is the reason Trump is so popular with his slogan, make America great again.
The idea is something has been lost.
And I think after eight years of listening to Obama apologize for this country, after eight years of listening to news people like Katie Couric, who said she was uncomfortable when she saw the American flag, when she saw somebody wearing an American flag pin, wasn't that going too far?
When we were supposed to wonder why Al-Qaeda disliked us instead of just bombing them into the Stone Age?
I mean, why should we wonder why animals like Al-Qaeda dislike us?
They dislike us because we're better than they are and we're free.
That's why they dislike us.
And it goes on to talk about how we're not free.
I mean, it really is a dishonest video, but still, still, I can't help feeling that everybody senses, everybody senses that this is not the country that it was and something was lost.
And a lot of the people on the left say, oh, that's because you're a racist.
You want to go back to those days of Jim Crow and go back to days when women were stuck in the house and all this stuff.
But that's nonsense.
That's absolutely absurd.
What people want is to go back to the days when people were proud of their country, when their children were taught to be proud of their country.
And yes, now we understand that people were left out.
Let's include them too.
Nobody's against it.
I don't think anybody is against that.
I think the problem is that we've lost some sense of pride.
You know, Gallup has a pollout.
It says, as Americans prepare to celebrate the 4th of July holiday, their pride in the U.S. has hit its lowest point since Gallup's first measurement in 2001.
While 70% of U.S. adults overall say they are proud to be Americans, this includes fewer than half who are extremely proud, marking the second consecutive year that this reading is below the majority level.
It's only really a 2% decline, which is kind of meaningless.
Still, people were extremely proud of America.
The last time that number really spiked was after 9-11 when people suddenly realized, oh yeah, good country.
But when you read more closely into this Gallup poll, it's the Democrats who aren't proud.
The latest overall declines in patriotism are largely driven by Democrats whose self-reported pride has historically been lower and has fluctuated more than Republicans.
Democrats' latest 22% extreme pride reading is the group's lowest in Gallup's 19 years of measurement and is half of what it was several months before Donald Trump's 2016 election victory.
So they're happy when they're winning.
They're not happy when they're losing, which is not true of the Republicans who remain very proud, even during Barack Obama.
Republicans have remained extremely proud of their country and the latest 76% reading is just 10 points below the high recorded in 2003.
Even when Barack Obama was in office, Republicans' extreme pride never fell below 68%.
And that is really telling to me.
It's really telling that when the Democrats lose, they lose their pride.
In other words, they're only proud, like Michelle Obama.
They're only proud of a country they run, and they cannot see that there might be another way.
Whereas Republicans are proud of the structure.
They're the friends of the founding, right?
They understand that the founding is still in place, even if they lose an election.
The fact that there's an election, the fact that it works the way it's supposed to work, the fact that we transfer power peacefully, that people are still constrained by the Constitution, Obama less than any other president I can think of, but still was constrained to some degree by the Constitution and by the separation of powers and by the courts who gave him a record number of 9-0 defeats in the Supreme Court because he overreached on his executive powers.
So we remain proud because we feel the system is in place, whereas we know when the Democrats lose, it's suddenly, oh, we've got to get rid of this system.
We've got to stack the Supreme Court.
We've got to get rid of the Electoral College because they are only proud of this country when they win.
And that is the difference between somebody who's proud of the founding, who's a friend of the founding, and someone who is just proud of himself and think his own glorious compassion and virtue is going to transform the world into something it has never been ever.
Okay, and that is the difference.
So I want to go back and show you the difference between these two cultures in just a sec.
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Candid Clear Aligners00:14:57
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The fourth is coming.
Trump is talking about having a great big parade.
Here is Donald Trump talking about the parade he's going to have on the 4th of July.
We're going to have a great 4th of July in Washington, D.C. It'll be like no other.
It'll be special.
And I hope a lot of people come and it's going to be about this country.
And it's a salute to America.
And I'm going to be here, and I'm going to say a few words.
And we're going to have planes going overhead, the best fighter jets in the world, and other planes, too.
And we're going to have some tanks stationed outside.
So of course, this makes the left crazy.
Now, this is one of the reasons that Trump was elected.
He was elected to say, stand up when they play the national anthem, you rich, lazy, stupid football players.
He was elected to say, no, we love this country.
We don't want a globalist world.
We don't want to lose our borders.
That's why he was elected.
And this drives the left crazy.
The very fact of having pride in your country upsets them and worries them.
So here's Eugene Robinson, very far left writer, I think, for the Washington Post on MSNBC, reacting.
It's glorious.
It's wonderful.
It's one of the best days of the year in Washington, despite the fact that it's usually 95 degrees.
And to take this and to make it into what seems to be kind of a combination Trump rally and Kim Jong-un style military parade of hardware and equipment with Sherm tanks, which is ridiculous.
The last Sherm tank, I think, was taken out of service in 1957.
But it's just obscene.
It really is.
And I just hope it doesn't spoil the whole day.
Oh, it spoils the whole day to have those military parades.
We've done this, I don't know, seven or eight times in history.
Usually, you know, we've had tanks go by before.
Usually these military parades take place after a victory in war, World War I or World War II.
But during the Cold War, John F. Kennedy, here's a picture, I think, of Kennedy's inauguration with the tanks going by right by the reviewing stand.
There was one for, I think it was Eisenhower.
Eisenhower had one after the victory in the Gulf War.
So it's been done before.
There's nothing obscene about it.
There's nothing evil about it.
There's nothing Kim Jong-un about it.
We're a powerful country.
Trump wants to celebrate that power.
But that's the difference.
That is the difference between the right and the left.
And it's not just patriotism.
It is not just patriotism.
It is an actual belief in what this country is.
Remember, this country, only country on earth, this is true, this country is created by its constitution.
It wasn't there one day, and then the next day it was.
When we are patriotic, now look, we all have, everybody has a natural feeling of love for their native land.
If you don't have that natural feeling for your native land, it's like not having a natural feeling of affection for your mother.
It really is something is wrong with you if you don't have it.
And yes, that natural feeling can lead you astray, as it can lead you astray with your mother.
You know, I mean, sometimes if your mom is doing something abusive or something terrible, you might have to cut her loose.
You might have to protect yourself, defend yourself.
And that natural feeling of desire to be attached to her can get in your way.
Same with your country.
If your country is doing something evil, something truly wicked, you might have to overcome that natural feeling.
But America deserves more than that from us because of what it has done, because it has become increasingly more free.
It has become increasingly like the image of itself that's presented in the Declaration.
It has been a great country.
There is no one, as I've said a million times, there is no one walking the planet Earth who is politically free who does not owe a debt to the blood and treasure of this country.
We have freed, all freedom has come from us in some way, has been defended by us in some way.
And I know the British get very upset about that because they are the mother of parliaments, and I respect that totally, but they'd be gone if it weren't for America.
They resent hearing that too, but it is true.
And it's true, you know, it's true to this day.
And so we love this country.
This country deserves a kind of love that goes beyond our natural feeling for our motherland.
It goes beyond that.
And there's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing to be afraid of.
And it is actually celebrating the best thing we are.
And I think on the left, it's gone.
I think that that culture is gone.
And the reason it's gone is because it has been trained out of people.
See, this is why that New York Times video was so dishonest, because they say this is what we teach kids in school as if.
As if.
I mean, the biggest history book, the biggest seller history book is that Howard Zinn, he was a communist.
He hated this country.
He wrote that People's History of the U.S. in which he said this is history told from the point of view of the victims.
I want to tell it from the point of the view of the victims.
But the thing is, there are always victims everywhere.
You know, I'm not forgiving the sins of this country.
I'm saying that every country has its sins, but this country has something different that transforms it, usually, toward more freedom.
And it's that that we've lost.
And we've lost the underlying mechanism that supports it, which is our virtue, which is our religion, which is our sense of self-restraint.
You know, it is interesting that when we're talking about pride, when we're talking about pride and country, they're having these pride parades that basically celebrate leftism, but also celebrate sexual liberation.
Sexual liberation, you know, I don't actually think that that's a value.
I think you should be able to, you know, have the love affair you want.
I think you should be able to have the, you know, be in love with the person you want.
But free sex is destructive to you.
It's not just, I'm not just talking about, oh, it's immoral because God doesn't like it.
It's destructive to you.
It ultimately makes you a slave because it's going to get you sick.
It's going to get you in trouble.
It's going to mean that you have to come to the government and beg them for help.
And that's why the left loves it so much.
So when you see our old friend, Congresswoman Alexandria Occasional Cortex, who really is awful, I mean, she's an awful ignoramus, and she really is, I think she's a dishonest person as well.
You know, at first I didn't actually think that she was entirely dishonest, but now she went down to one of these Texas detention centers and she comes out and she says, oh, I wasn't safe in there.
These guys were threatening to me.
She says she wasn't safe from the guards, from the people running the detention center.
And she came out and she just said what a nightmare it was.
Can you say it again in English, please?
There's abuse in these facilities.
There's abuse.
This was them on their best behavior.
And they put them in a room with no running water.
And these women were being told by CBP officers to drink out of the toilet.
They were drinking water out of the toilet.
And that was them knowing that a congressional visit was coming.
That was, this is CBP on their best behavior, telling people to drink out of the toilet.
Did you see somebody actually do that?
She rolls up the window of her car before answering if she actually saw anybody do that.
And of course, the press, the leftist press, this is the reason they know they can say these things because the leftist press will back them up.
New York Times, you know, women held in rooms without running water, sleeping bags set up on concrete, and children left apart from their families.
That was what Democratic lawmakers said they heard about.
That's what Democratic lawmakers said they heard about on Monday as they toured two Texas border facilities.
Okay, this is what they said they heard about.
So the New York Times has nothing, but they lead with it.
They write the lead as if it's really true, as if that's the drama of the story.
The border agents said one border agent told the examiner, said, this is what happened with the migrant and drinking water from the toilet.
She wanted water, didn't know how to use the faucet in the cell, and drank from the toilet.
She never told AOC that we made her drink from the toilet.
AOC, of course, changed it.
This was when she, the migrant, was apprehended and brought into the facility.
This is, by the way, I mean, and others have suggested, you know, they have these, the same kind of things they have in prison.
It's one unit that has both a sink and a toilet on it, and the sink works up top, and AOC didn't see any of this happen anyway, so it doesn't matter.
You know, this is a full-on Kavanaugh hysteria going on.
This really is.
We know they do this because we saw them do it with Kavanaugh, and they're doing it again.
All the stuff that's happening was happening before.
The only difference is, is because the Congress has done nothing to change the asylum laws that need changing, that everybody agrees need changing, because they've done nothing, because they have this Leninist policy that they want this to go so badly that they will cause hysteria and the whole thing can collapse.
Because of that, because more people are coming in, and there are reports that they're buying children so they can bring in and say, this is my beloved child that I paid.
I love him so much because I paid so much to get him.
They're coming in dishonestly.
What are we supposed to do with them?
What are we supposed to do with them?
The only difference between now and Obama is more of them are coming in and we're understaffed.
And when they said, let's send more money to help them out, AOC voted against it.
This is a full-on Kavanaugh lie that they're telling.
There was some website, some Facebook page where some people who they claim to have been part of the border security unit were making racist remarks.
And the government says they're going to investigate that.
Let's wait and see who that really was.
Find out.
There are always some bad hats.
There are always some bad apples.
Maybe it was really border guards, but we'll see who it was.
And they put those two stories together to gin up hysteria.
And that's what it is, because it really is people who have been trained not to be proud of their country.
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All right.
So all of this, what I'm saying about this, all of this is a matter of culture.
There are people talking on the right right now saying we need to restore this.
We need to use the government to restore that virtue.
There's no way to do this.
I mean, the government can do helpful things.
It would be nice if we could dial back the imposition of regulatory agencies.
It would be nice if we could dial back the imposition on local schools that keeps prayer out of school.
I don't think that that was what the founders intended.
I think this wall, so-called wall between church and state, is a made-up leftist trope.
That was not what they intended.
They didn't intend for religion to be chased out of the square, out of the public square.
But the question is, how do we do this?
And obviously, it is a cultural question.
You have to make people proud again.
You have to make people have to be religious again.
Look, you can't defend the right to your faith if you, in fact, don't have any faith, if you don't understand that why faith is so important, why it's more important what you believe and whether you can practice your faith, then it is who you sleep with.
It's more important because that's an expression of your soul, that's an expression of your mind, that's an expression of the way you see eternity is the way you see the world as well.
All of these things have to be restored.
And when I talk about this, people say, well, as somebody said to me the other day, it's like moving the sky.
How do you change the culture?
But the thing is, the left did it.
The left did it.
You know, this is not the culture that it was even as far back as the 1980s.
They did it through the courts.
They did it through Hollywood.
They did it through the universities, maybe most especially through the educational system.
They taught people out of their freedom.
They de-educated people about freedom.
If they can do it, I do not see why we can't do it.
What we can't do is we can't do it tomorrow.
We can't do it immediately.
That's different.
And so I think we really have to talk in very specific terms because I hate when people talk about this stuff and they kind of have these vague, high-sounding words about what we're supposed to do.
I think we have to talk in very specific terms about what it is, what it is we have to do in order to get our culture back even over time.
Hey, I've got a really interesting guest coming up.
It's Tuesday, so we're going to cut away, but come on over to thedailywire.com and you can hear it, Lawrence Mead.
He's going to be talking about some of these issues basically and what has gone wrong and how maybe we can start to take it back.
But come over to dailywire.com for that.
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube while you're at dailywire.com.
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All right.
Lawrence Mead is professor of politics.
Lawrence M. Mead is professor of politics and public policy at New York University.
He's got a lot of previous books.
He defined the theory behind the radical welfare reform of the 1990s, which for the first time required many welfare recipients to work as a condition of aid, and it was a great success until Obama basically gutted it.
But he has a new book called The Burdens of Freedom, The Burdens of Freedom by Lawrence M. Mead.
Are you there, sir, Lawrence?
I am.
There you are.
How you doing?
Good to see you.
Non-Western Individualism00:15:46
Well, you know, I'm talking a lot about the culture and the culture that's required for freedom.
And that's basically what the burdens of freedom is about.
Can you describe for people what the thesis is?
All right.
The basic thesis is that freedom as Americans understand it depends upon an individualist culture where people pursue personal goals and interests that they decide.
But they also have a moralistic idea of right and wrong, which is general and applies to virtually all situations.
And it's that that allows us to combine personal efforts that serve our own interests with a collective capacity to mobilize government to help us out in various ways and to pursue other goals around the world.
So the individualist culture is really crucial to what America has become.
And today, however, parts of our society have a different culture that comes from the non-Western world, which is much more passive and reactive, where people really adjust to conditions rather than seeking to bring about change.
And they're much more situational about right and wrong.
They tend to adjust to what other people expect them to do rather than what they think is right and wrong themselves.
And that division is, I think, the main problem facing the country.
It affects our domestic policy and also relations with foreign countries, most of which are non-Western and don't behave as we would expect ourselves to do or Western countries that have a similar culture.
So the concerns that you have about immigration, which are a big part of my argument, are actually rooted in cultural difference.
The thing that makes immigration controversial in America is primarily the fact that immigrants don't come from an individualist culture, and therefore they hit other Americans as different.
And it creates problems of adjustment for both sides.
And we have to focus on this.
We have to be willing to talk about cultural difference, which in general we haven't been allowed to do because it's thought to be improper.
And the kind of discourse you're showing on the Daily Wire, I have to say, is closer to what we need.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
The minute, of course, you talk about cultural difference, you're accused of racism.
Is it a matter of race?
No, no.
My sources are primarily scholars of cultural differences around the world, which, and they say, this is not about race.
It has to do with the culture in which you're raised.
And it just happens to be that the Western world has this individualist culture, which arose, it's not entirely clear how, but there are a lot of historical antecedents that caused the West and only the West to be an individualist culture.
And the non-West is not individualist for other reasons and isn't related to race.
Furthermore, there can be cultural change, and there has been change over time.
Part of America that began as non-individualists, I'm thinking here of black Americans, part of that group has become individualist because they've lived in America long enough to pick up the dominant individualist culture.
But today we have immigrants coming in in large numbers from Latin America, from Asia, who are not individualist, and thereby are in tension with the mainstream culture.
And that is where most of the problems arise.
And we have to be ready to see that.
On the one hand, I accept that.
I think we need to have a multicultural society.
But on the other hand, we have to expect all groups will take on an individualist culture.
That really means taking on the burdens of freedom.
Freedom is not easy.
Now, freedom is not easy.
How do you do that?
How do you teach people to become individualistic?
Well, I think it's primarily something we pursue in the schools, also the churches, civic groups, all of those that bring in new people who've come from other countries and show them how mainstream America relates and how people work together to solve problems and also pursue their own interests.
That's what we need to get across, particularly among young people.
And in fact, the most effective schools for poor students have shown a way to do this.
They really are rather effective in getting students from immigrant families to take on a different way of life, rather than just adjust and try to survive and get through the day, which is what most non-Western peoples try to do.
Rather than that, you set a goal for yourself and you set out to achieve it.
And that means taking on responsibilities.
You agree to do certain things.
You promise yourself to do certain things.
And now you have to carry it out.
So actually being free is not free.
Free involves responsibilities.
And it's that, taking on burdens inwardly, that confers outward freedom.
If we don't do that, we are not free in the American sense.
We can't just talk about the outside world getting better as we would hope it to be.
We can't do that.
That's what the non-West does.
They wait for the world to change.
No, Americans set out to change the world themselves and work with others to do so.
And it's that inner-driven temperament that is absolutely crucial to what America has achieved and what today's newcomers also have to do.
They have to set goals and go out and try to change the world.
You know, every democracy after a certain period develops a welfare state, and we've developed a welfare state.
And it seems to me that there is a conflict between a welfare state and individualism.
Is that small-minded of me, or true?
Actually, that's not the argument I make.
In general, the welfare state, I think, has a minor influence on the attitudes of Americans.
The welfare state was the creation of the moralistic culture that is part of an individualist society.
People who were working and struggling to get ahead, they said, hey, government can help us in certain ways, and we'd like government to help us.
Doesn't mean we give up helping ourselves.
In fact, the major social programs, the most expensive ones, are premise on paying payroll taxes.
So you have to be a worker in order to get those benefits.
We don't just give money to people who aren't doing something to help themselves.
Now, we do have welfare programs that traditionally did not require work, but we started to condition those benefits on working, exactly because we want to make sure people are also helping themselves.
So the major source of this passive culture that I'm talking about is really demographic.
It has to do with the fact that people came from outside the West.
They didn't come from Europe.
Countries founded primarily by Europeans, but other groups never were part of Western culture.
I'm thinking now of blacks, Latin Americans, Asians, also Native Americans.
These people all have a different view of life, and there's some value in that other way of life.
But on the other hand, we have to expect those people to take on the burdens of freedom.
So the welfare state is not our main problem.
And remember, most of the non-Western world does not have a welfare state.
Yet those people are quite involved in a life of survival, of just getting through the day.
And they're very good at that.
One of the strengths of the non-West is stoicism, the ability to deal with things that we cannot change.
Well, the West, that isn't the West.
The West is a masterful culture in which individuals and people working together think that they can change the world.
That's what made America a great country.
That's what made it the richest, the most powerful country.
We have to be sure that that temperament doesn't pass away.
So the advocates that you're criticizing, like these recent democratic liberals, they actually are individualists in the sense that I think is important.
They are moralizing.
They're making judgments against the society.
That is absolute orthodox individualist behavior.
The problem isn't them making these claims.
It's the fact that the groups they're speaking for are so passive.
That's the real problem.
They couldn't present these groups as victims with no recourse unless they were so passive.
It's remarkable to me.
See, this isn't like the labor movement.
This isn't like the civil rights movement or the feminist movement or the recent gay movement.
In all those cases, those who sought change made an effort themselves to bring about change.
Whereas today's victim groups, the groups supported by identity politics, are entirely passive.
And they're spoken for by advocates who are not at all like them, who are much more active, more moralistic.
Would that they were more like their own people.
See, when Martin Luther King marched for civil rights, he didn't do it alone.
He had a lot of other blacks marching behind him.
These were people who had learned in school, learned in the church, to assert themselves, to assert what King called their assertive selfhood.
That's the way forward.
So the problem isn't really that these advocates are making these outrageous claims.
Indeed, they are outrageous.
I don't believe them.
Nonetheless, they can make those claims only because the people behind them do not march behind them.
In fact, act like victims, act passive, act helpless.
That is the mentality of the non-West.
And in the non-West, it makes sense.
A lot of those countries have never seen the dynamic society that America has.
They haven't had a history of individualism.
So in those worlds, it makes sense to be passive and to wait for the world to change.
And that isn't what we want in this country, however.
That's not America.
We don't want to bring that attitude here.
We certainly should accept it initially, but those groups coming from outside the West have to take on the burdens of freedom.
That's the name of the book, The Burdens of Freedom by Lawrence M. Mead.
That's a fascinating theory.
I have to ask you the thing that popped into my mind with the backdrop of your bookshelf.
You're at NYU.
Am I right about that?
Yes.
When you say these things, do they show up at your door with torches and rocks?
I mean, there have been occasional students who were upset by these arguments.
Only a few.
Others are fascinated.
They never heard anything like this.
Because, see, I'm presenting freedom as obligation.
I'm really saying to be a free person means to take on a lot of responsibilities.
Most free people in America who don't see themselves as victims.
Their lives are full of obligations.
You and I agreed to do this show right now at this hour some time ago.
We made a promise to be here then, and we made it happen.
We just had to unscramble certain problems with the Skype system, for example.
So you take the steps needed to realize your own goals, your own promises.
So most successful people in America are not free in any simple sense.
Their lives are full of obligations.
Promises to others promise things that government asks them to do, like pay taxes and obey the law.
So freedom isn't free.
And it's only if we accept those inner obligations that we become outwardly free.
I'm running out of time, but I would just like some kind of idea of what it is you feel that the West did and needs to do to create that culture of individualism.
It's a combination of the influence that came from the groups that formed European society a long time ago at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, plus the religious influences coming from Judaism and Christianity, the classical world, Protestantism.
These things all generated a society in which even ordinary people thought they had some control over their lives and they could actually try to achieve something personal.
And when you did that, you produced a dynamic society that never stops, never stops changing, never stops improving.
That's why we get rich and powerful.
And the question ought to be not how the West became rich and powerful, but why the whole rest of the world didn't do that.
Why is only the West individualist?
We need to recognize that we are an extraordinary, very unusual culture, and it's our fate to lead the world.
I don't think I see no way in which the non-Western world, even China, can do what we do because they have a much more cautious culture.
People adjust to life as it is.
They don't seek to bring about changes.
So we need to ask our new, the out-groups in America, okay, what do you want to do?
And will you take on board the burdens of freedom in order to pursue your goals?
That's what we need to do.
So the advocates, though, they're irritating and impossible and so-and-so-and-so.
They're not our real problem.
Our real problem is that part of our society has checked out and has decided that it really can't pursue the burdens of freedom.
Wow, really interesting theory.
I have a lot more questions, but I don't have time to ask them.
I hope you'll come back and talk again.
Lawrence M. Mead, the book is The Burdens of Freedom, Cultural Difference, and American Power.
You're a brave man.
I'd like to hear more.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
All right.
That was really interesting.
I obviously haven't had time to read the book, and I really would like to and talk to him again.
You know, when I first started this show, I had a thing called Stuff I Like, where I would talk about some of the classic books and movies that really shaped my mind.
I stopped doing it after a while because I felt it was going to get repetitive.
But I have to talk about two books.
Really, I want to talk about one book that I reread over vacation.
But the two books that I feel have informed me most about what politics is like, how politics actually works in a democratic and a free society.
One of them is The Powerbroker by Robert Carroll.
And if you haven't read The Powerbroker by Robert Carroll, it's about a subject that didn't mean anything to me.
Robert Moses, who helped build most of New York City, Jones Beach, all these things in New York.
It's called Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
But it just taught me so much about how politics actually works.
Fascinating, fascinating book.
And Carroll is just a spectacular writer, a really great writer and great researcher.
But the book that I reread over my vacation was a novel by one of my favorite Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope.
And people don't read Trollope a lot.
He is the conservative Dickens.
He has been called the conservative Dickens.
He is a much more realistic writer than Dickens.
He's not the great prose stylist or character creator that Dickens is.
He didn't believe in plot, and he just kind of tells a subject, just tells a kind of slice of life.
But his book, Phineas Finn, is a novel about a guy in parliament, a young man entering parliament at the time when the Great Reform Bill was passing in, I think it's the 1860s, I believe, which sort of spread voter rights beyond the nobility and it gave more freedom to more people in Britain.
And it's about how that looked to people and just their individual life.
And it's a love story and it's a real novel.
It's a real story of a young man and his psychology.
But if you ever want to see, in the most entertaining way imaginable, I mean, I couldn't put the, it's like 800 pages.
I read it in a week.
And in the most entertaining way imaginable, if you want to see the psychology of democracy, the psychology, when I say democracy, I mean civilizations that run by vote, that have some kind of care for the freedom of the people.
If you want to see how that works, it is just an amazing psychological view, and it is so helpful to understanding how change comes about, how it doesn't come about, what matters, what people sacrifice, what they don't sacrifice, and how these things work.
The Psychology of Democracy00:01:33
Obviously, it's the British parliamentary system.
It's not our system.
But still, you will learn an immense amount, not just about government, but also about career and what career looks like.
Great book, Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope.
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