April 28, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| People often ask me just how dire I think the state of free speech in America really is. | ||
| In the last two weeks I've spoken at several college campuses in California, Arizona and Texas, as well as attended a conference in Dallas primarily focused on free speech from an academic perspective. | ||
| I spoke to dozens of professors who feel that the ability to truly exchange ideas or even to express unpopular opinions on their campus is at a perilous crossroad. | ||
| The University of Berkeley, once the home for the free speech movement in this country, quite literally went up in flames when Milo Yiannopoulos spoke there. | ||
| People with fairly moderate opinions like Professor Jordan Peterson and historian Charles Murray are shouted down by self-righteous students on college campuses all the time now. | ||
| Ann Coulter was first barred by Berkeley and then told she could only speak on a day when students weren't actually having class on campus. | ||
| These safe spaces and trigger warnings, concepts designed to protect feelings instead of dealing with facts, coupled with constant smearing of any intellectual opponent as racist or bigoted, has birthed a generation who are increasingly intolerant of tolerance. | ||
| I should also be clear here, it really is one side who's being far more intolerant on campuses these days. | ||
| Just think for a second, if any college campus invited a far left Marxist or Communist who wanted to end capitalism and ultimately destroy the United States, there would be virtually no outcry. | ||
| The Marxists and Communists would have their event, with maybe a couple curious people challenging their ideas in the Q&A, and that would be it. | ||
| The absolute reverse is happening all over the country when a conservative or any non-leftist speaker are invited to college campuses. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, a friend and former guest of the Rubin Report, has been banned from DePaul for sharing his brand of pretty mainstream conservative thought. | ||
| Antifa, the self-proclaimed anti-fascists, who actually use fascist tactics to silence their opponents, and who also happen to dress like Cobra soldiers from G.I. | ||
| Joe, issued a statement and threatened to protest Portland State University when Christina Hoff Sommers, Peter Boghossian, and I spoke there. | ||
| Apparently at the last second they found something more anti-gay and more anti-woman right before we started, so they moved their protest somewhere else. | ||
| And of course, as I always say and will continue to say, you have every right to protest and use your speech to counter someone else's speech. | ||
| What you don't have is a right to silence someone by using violence or intimidation. | ||
| This is why I talk so much about self-censorship and the chill effect around free speech. | ||
| Violence not only silences the speakers of today, but in essence it silences the speakers of tomorrow who will quiet themselves instead of dealing with the protests and smears and everything else that comes with being someone who thinks outside of the group. | ||
| What's being stolen from these college students is the ability to learn how to think about complex issues while in university so that they can be equipped to engage with a diverse set of ideas in the real world. | ||
| And that diversity, diversity of thought, is far more important than diversity of immutable characteristics, be it race, religion, or sexuality. | ||
| Last week I spoke at the University of Arizona with my friend and former guest Michael Shermer. | ||
| It turned out that there was a trans holocaust denier in the crowd. | ||
| Yes, apparently trans holocaust deniers do exist. | ||
| Not only did we not silence her, but we opened up the floor for her to ask us the first question when we did the Q&A. | ||
| Michael, the editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine, who specializes in debunking conspiracy theories, is an expert in debunking Holocaust denial myths, and he answered her questions clearly and with facts. | ||
| The students in the room didn't attack her or kick her out, despite her abhorrent beliefs. | ||
| It was actually a beautiful moment, which shows why free speech is so important. | ||
| We exercised our right to talk openly at a public event, which anyone was welcome to join. | ||
| She then shared her ideas, which then we countered with better ideas. | ||
| While I suspect Michael didn't change her mind on Holocaust denial, we put our principles of free expression to the test. | ||
| This open discussion with a wide array of opinions is how you expand knowledge and figure out what you believe, not by silencing, shaming and defaming your ideological opponent. | ||
| Sadly, the true tolerance that we experienced in that room that night is an increasing rarity on college campuses these days. | ||
| I know I don't have to sell you guys on the lunacy that's happening at college campuses. | ||
| You see it every day with the language police telling people what pronouns to use and the endless stream of insane stories coming from America's campuses showing how intolerant the so-called tolerant side has become. | ||
| What I'd like to focus on here for a second is the creeping groupthink and obfuscation around free thought and free speech that is now creeping up Just this week you may have seen new Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez say that the DNC won't back any politicians who aren't pro-choice. | ||
| While I have no problem with a party having a set of beliefs as a guideline for its policies, this type of intolerance to other ideas, even if they're incredibly difficult topics like abortion, set a terrible precedent for the exchange of ideas in a pluralistic society. | ||
| This specific event isn't a direct threat to free speech, but it does go to the heart of how intolerance by the left is driving otherwise liberal people to the center and even to the right, or as the left calls it, the neo-Nazi alt-right white supremacist far-right. | ||
| The more egregious assault on free speech in the last couple days, however, was from the former head of the DNC and one-time presidential candidate Howard Dean. | ||
| Dean is a progressive who at this point really sums up why this ideology is not truly for progression of freedom and liberalism, but for regression of them. | ||
| After hearing that Ann Coulter was going to be banned from Berkeley, Dean claimed that Coulter's hate speech was not protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| Well actually Howard, it is. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Absolutely full stop. | ||
| First off, Dean uses the amorphous term hate speech, which sounds like something but doesn't actually exist. | ||
| Yes, you can't call for direct violence to a person or a group, that's a criminal offense, but you are allowed to say hateful and mean things. | ||
| That's the very part of free speech that we have to protect, because the definition of hate speech will just keep expanding until it includes any speech that veers ever so slightly away from groupthink. | ||
| Beyond Dean's confusion about hate speech, he also apparently doesn't know what the First Amendment actually is. | ||
| As I know you know, the First Amendment is about prohibiting the government from making any laws prohibiting free speech. | ||
| It has absolutely nothing to do with the speech of a private person, or hate speech, or a university deplatforming a speaker. | ||
| If you truly care about minorities, college Republicans, I hate to tell you, are a minority at most universities and they deserve to be heard from, just like anyone else who has been offered a platform. | ||
| Sadly, Dean is a progressive thought leader, while he seemingly has no idea about the very constitution our political leaders are supposed to defend. | ||
| With this in mind, I still absolutely believe the best way to beat the violent tactics of Antifa or the intellectually challenged ideas of Howard Dean is to counter them with better ideas. | ||
| We shouldn't stoop to their level of violence or try to take away their free speech. | ||
| We should teach the ideas of liberty, freedom, and true liberalism. | ||
| Yes, they'll always scream louder than us or act more hysterically, but I believe our game is a long one and our better ideas will win if we actually put them into practice. | ||
| With this in mind, we're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week. | ||
| And joining me is Brandon Turner, a professor of political science at George Mason University. | ||
| He's an expert in political theory with extensive knowledge of the writings of everyone from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx. | ||
| We're going to explore political thinkers from all across the map to see which ideas stand the test of time. | ||
| Right or left, Democrat or Republican, male or female, gay or straight, every single issue starts with our ability to discuss it and figure out what we believe. | ||
| If we can unite against the forces that'll silence us, we may find allies in places we | ||
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never thought we would. | |
| Joining me this week is a professor of political theory at Clemson University whose research | ||
| interests include focus on modern political thought, particularly the British origins | ||
| of liberalism, Brandon Turner. | ||
| Thanks for having me on, it's a pleasure. | ||
| So when I was doing research on you, you sort of focus on everything that I've been talking about for the last two years, so I fully expect this to be the best episode of the show that we've ever done. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Alright, so what I want to do first is, because you've got a great breadth of knowledge, I just want to name some people and I want you to kind of give me a little bio of them and why we should care about these people. | ||
| And in no particular order, although the first two were my personal favorites. | ||
| John Locke. | ||
| What do we need to know about John Locke and why is his writings and his thoughts relevant to today? | ||
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Right. | |
| So, I mean, Locke is often considered what we think of as the father of the classical liberal tradition. | ||
| Father or grandfather, depending on who you ask. | ||
| So, most famously in this particular tradition, he wrote the Second Treatise of Government. | ||
| So, this was written in the 1680s at some point, and the basic idea behind the Second Treatise Is that, you know, we live in a world that has a law of nature, a law of nature that governs it. | ||
| This law of nature is entitled, in fact, obligates us to things like to labor, the production of private property. | ||
| It obligates us to protect our natural rights. | ||
| It obligates us to consent to form a government. | ||
| So, in other words, government Based on the consent of the people all this all this good stuff But the real the kind of the crux of the second treatise and why it remains Such an important document and why it became so important in the 18th century is that Locke provides. | ||
| I think the clearest articulation of a right of rebellion or a right of resistance so the last few chapters of the second treatise and really actually I think the whole second treatise is shot through with the idea that Should a government fail to protect our rights, or furthermore, should a government itself violate our rights, we are not only entitled to, but actually we have a duty, a natural obligation, to resist that government and to potentially violently resist it. | ||
| So, it's the Second Treatise that becomes, in many ways, the basis of the ideas that That Jefferson articulates in the Declaration, inspirational for the French Revolution, inspirational too for anti-slavery thought in the 19th century in America and elsewhere. | ||
| So if you look at somebody like John Brown, somebody like Frederick Douglass, | ||
| I mean, Brown in particular articulated his case for slave rebellion, for widespread slave revolts. | ||
| He articulated in the language of Lockean natural rights. | ||
| So, I mean, that's why Locke's important in the liberal tradition. | ||
| He, in some sense, gives us the framework for liberalism as a system of natural rights and duties. | ||
| Yeah, so if we were to look at 2017 and we see, you know, #theresistance | ||
| and all of these people that are really against Trump, I think some with legitimate criticisms, | ||
| I think a lot of it, as I say every week, is sort of just kind of hysteria | ||
| and an inability to accept the election and all that, but the tradition of just sort of fighting | ||
| against the government, that in and of itself is pretty healthy, right? | ||
| I'm not talking about burning the whole thing down and all that, but that in and of itself of just standing up for what you believe and all that, Yeah, I mean, it has a kind of mixed... it's a mixed bag in some sense. | ||
| On the one hand, there are these great historical moments. | ||
| Again, I would say that... | ||
| The 19th century abolitionist movement would be an example of it. | ||
| You even see echoes of this in the Black Power movements and Black Panthers and all that kind of stuff who insist on being armed at all times. | ||
| If you look at John Brown, for example, John Brown used to actually, he actually, he created and he carried around with him this document. | ||
| It would have been a new constitution for a new state in the image of John Brown. | ||
| And he, in that constitution actually, one of the requirements is that Both men and women would be not required but encouraged to go about openly armed at all times. | ||
| And the assumption is that if you don't present yourself as a kind of as a potential threat, if you don't say, listen, don't push me around, right? | ||
| Don't try to me as it were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if you do, I'm going to I'm going to bite back, basically. | ||
| Brown feared and I think many people in this tradition fear that I mean tyranny is just gonna be an it's just gonna sort of slowly Make its way in right if you don't if you don't make it known that you're not gonna be pushed around There will come a time when you'll be pushed around Yeah, do you think we've kind of headed in that direction? | ||
| Because we sort of are and it's why I do the show the way I do it We've become sort of just a dumb down Populous we don't realize what our natural rights are and what natural laws and all that I mean, it's a stark doctrine. | ||
| It requires a lot. | ||
| Actually, the term that often gets bandied about in this tradition is, it's a kind of a manly liberty. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| When I talk to my students about this, we'll run through the lock and a lot of them will be on board. | ||
| They'll tell me, this is great. | ||
| These are ideas that I was brought up with and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| So I ask them quite pointedly. | ||
| I say, listen, it's great that you're enjoying this. | ||
| It's great that you feel inspired by this. | ||
| But let me ask you, if tomorrow morning you woke up and on Twitter you found out that Trump had suspended Congress. | ||
| He just sent them home. | ||
| And, you know, he just, you know, he decided that, you know, Congress has had a good run, no longer is useful. | ||
| He'll be the voice of the people here on out. | ||
| So he's just kind of sent them home. | ||
| And maybe he suspends the Supreme Court too. | ||
| And he just says, listen, for a little while, I'm going to run things. | ||
| On my own, you know, with the help of my staff or something like that. | ||
| In that case, I think everyone would recognize this as a gross violation of a number of different doctrines. | ||
| And yet, which one of you, how many of you are going to take up arms and march up to Washington and do something about it? | ||
| And I suspect that the number is relatively few. | ||
| Does anyone raise their hand and say, yeah, I'm on it? | ||
| You get a couple. | ||
| I mean, you know, undoubtedly, you know, I do teach in South Carolina, so there is a certain tradition in these sorts of things. | ||
| So you get a couple of hands. | ||
| But for the most part, I mean, no. | ||
| Revolution is expensive. | ||
| I mean, it has a huge opportunity cost. | ||
| You might die. | ||
| People have projects, have things they want to do. | ||
| And actually, if you read the Second Treatise, Locke's very aware of this. | ||
| I mean, Locke lists all the reasons why revolution is extremely rare. | ||
| It's difficult to get the people riled up to the point where they're actually willing to take up arms and defend themselves. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that right now we're also at a strange precipice where there's a certain percentage of people who have this distrust of Trump or think that he's illegitimate or whatever or Russia or all that stuff and then there's another percentage of people who think that our security services and the NSA and the FBI and the CIA that they've all become politicized. | ||
| So in a weird way, we have two parallel movements that are both sort of fighting the system. | ||
| I'm not even sure which one I think is better or more legit. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so the question of legitimacy is a very tricky one. | ||
| So, I mean, I would say this, that despite all the rhetoric, and we see this rhetoric all the time, I mean, you turn on Twitter, not just the The people with the blue checks. | ||
| I mean, you know, this doesn't mention at all the people who comment are the people with the blue checks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But even the, you know, the kind of rhetoric coming out of, I guess, respectable opinionators and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| I mean, really the question of legitimacy is coming up more and more. | ||
| I think it has previously. | ||
| And so, the question of legitimacy is a very big question. | ||
| It's a fundamentally different question than, right, is the government being run by people that I don't like? | ||
| Is the government headed in a direction that I don't like? | ||
| Do I find the government in some sense hostile to my interests? | ||
| Do I feel that economically I could be doing better if the government would get out of my way? | ||
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I mean, these are... Those are all sort of old school, healthy things to talk about. | |
| Well, they're questions of policy, right? | ||
| Or they might say they're political questions in some sense. | ||
| But questions of legitimacy are something else entirely. | ||
| So questions of legitimacy are literally the power that's being used over me is beyond, this is power beyond right. | ||
| It's at some level fundamentally illegitimate and I may need to and I may in fact be obligated to violently resist this. | ||
| So I mean we do, so in other words we have this kind of rich American tradition of resistance that goes back to the revolution. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Men like Patrick Henry who, you know, fought against a standing army, you know, fought for local militias because local militias would be more useful in killing tyrants and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| We have the second men. | ||
| In other words, we have this kind of rich liberal Republican tradition that says, listen, at some point you need to be able to defend yourselves. | ||
| You need to be able to be a kind of an individual of force, right? | ||
| This individual capable of bearing this manly conception of liberty. | ||
| And yet on the kind of the underside of this, right, is Waco and Ruby Ridge, white nationalist movements and all this kind of stuff, and Oklahoma City. | ||
| It's a dangerous doctrine. | ||
| Locke called it his peculiar doctrine. | ||
| It's troubling once you really kind of dig into it and you start to question, right? | ||
| Ultimately, if individuals are the arbiters of what is and is not legitimate, then who's to say you don't get some individuals with bad judgment who make bad calls on that? | ||
| And also it seems like if we ever rose up violently against the government, and we know the government, we've seen tanks on our own streets and all these armored vehicles and cops that look like soldiers in war zones and all that kind of stuff, it almost seems that even if it was a legitimate reason to do it, it could never end well. | ||
| And I guess that's really the little X factor of this whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, so this is very interesting. | ||
| It's very interesting to me the way that Locke's doctrine in particular emerged at a political moment where something like armed resistance by a regular and ready population could be in some sense effective. | ||
| So Locke's writing during a time of several failed plots to assassinate monarchs, the Rye House plot of 1683 comes up a lot in this capacity, the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. | ||
| But, you know, that was in the 17th century. | ||
| And so today, I mean, you know, the government, as it were, the government, if we're thinking about these terms, has tools at its disposal that are just beyond our wildest dreams. | ||
| Now, there are obviously limits to their capacity for destruction. | ||
| We see this in places like Afghanistan. | ||
| And if, listen, if America, if Appalachians are willing to kind of hole up and in the holler and just kind of see how long they can hold | ||
| off. I mean it could be a potentially long protracted rebuttal, but for the most part, right, the | ||
| government's playing with a stacked hand as it were. And so in other words, I wonder | ||
| how helpful the language of legitimacy is, particularly when, and this is the other thing, I mean that | ||
| so Locke's writing in the 1680s, and this is before we had sort of regular elections, | ||
| regular peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| So in other words, now if we don't like a governor that we have, we don't like a president, we don't like a congressman, whatever, we can just elect someone else. | ||
| We can vote next time. | ||
| And I think, so in other words, there's a kind of an outlet there. | ||
| There's a pressure valve that gets released every once in a while. | ||
| Which is why, and the question of legitimacy, which is why if you focus, if you're focusing on something like the establishment or the deep state, we see these terms a lot, these are permanent entities. | ||
| They're not going away. | ||
| They're not susceptible to being voted out of office. | ||
| They seem to have sort of wormed their way or entrenched themselves in our lives in ways that can only be dealt with through some kind of armed resistance. | ||
| And so that to me, that makes it a more troubling sort of If you think that no matter how many elections come and go, this particular interest, this malevolent interest, will never leave, then you might be willing to take up arms. | ||
| That's particularly interesting at the moment because the phrase deep state nobody said publicly. | ||
| You literally, I mean, I hear the phrase at a Drunk party or something somebody, you know, one of my more crazy political friends would say deep state this or whatever now It's become mainstream that that there are these vestiges in the government that exist that are I mean, how real is that? | ||
| I mean now we're going we're going slightly off track here, but I I'm voyaging someone out of my realm of expertise here. | ||
| But I think there's a couple of things going on. | ||
| So on the one hand, in the 20th century, we do get, you know, in America, we get this, what you might call the science of administration, or the science of bureaucracy. | ||
| So particularly in the first half of the 20th century, there was, and this is attached to the progressive movement in a number of ways, there was this idea that In some sense, the systems of political organization that thrived in the 19th century have kind of run their course. | ||
| Now, we have at our disposal, we have this new thing called political science, and we have sociology, and we have economics, right? | ||
| We have these new sciences of the social sphere that can help us, in some sense, gain control over the, just the chaotic mess that can be life in a mass society. | ||
| And, you know, we can make, in other words, we can make public life legible in some sense. | ||
| We can make it controllable. | ||
| And so we established this, you know, huge federal bureaucracy. | ||
| The explosion in the size of the executive branch is a facet of this. | ||
| So we do have, I mean, when you teach, I occasionally teach American government, and you do basically have to teach four branches of government, you know, your traditional executive, legislative, and judicial. | ||
| There's this thing called the administrative state or the administrative entity. | ||
| It's this huge thing. | ||
| It employs massive numbers of people. | ||
| It generates laws. | ||
| It adjudicates disputes between parties to these laws in ways that you actually would think it runs as a kind of government. | ||
| So if you look at the Federal Register, for example, this huge body of law that's produced primarily | ||
| through these executive bureaucracies. | ||
| And so you can think of that as a kind of permanent, sitting, and not particularly democratic state. | ||
| So it works in some sense through the powers of the president. | ||
| But for the most part, this is a kind of a permanent bureaucracy | ||
| staffed by sort of permanent bureaucratic officers. | ||
| So there's that part of it. | ||
| And then if when you when you take that when you take the kind of bureaucratic administrative state and you apply it to defense issues You generate things like the NSA the kinds of things that we did after in the wake of 9-11 Then you've got a kind of different entity now You're talking about I mean, you know, the CIA has been around for a while the FBI has been around for a while But now you're talking about a massive entity Which is not only not transparent, but very hostile towards efforts to make it more and more transparent. | ||
| This is where Snowden comes in, right? | ||
| And questionably politicized at this point. | ||
| It's difficult even to tell to what extent it's politicized. | ||
| I know people who've worked for some of these agencies and they seem like Very nice people. | ||
| They seem genuinely dedicated to keeping America safe and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| I don't think they see themselves as participating in a political project on one side or another. | ||
| But it really is difficult to tell, particularly today, if it turns out that there is some You know, Russian-Trump connection or something like that. | ||
| It will certainly look like this kind of standing defense apparatus, in some sense, contributed to the downfall of the sitting president. | ||
| So, I mean, in terms of precedence, right? | ||
| In terms of like, is every president from now on going to have to deal with a kind of hostile, permanent defense, bureaucratic apparatus? | ||
| I mean, that I think is, that's a problem. | ||
| Right, so on one hand, if there was some connection and that's what took him down, then that would be viewed as good. | ||
| On the other hand, the idea that this semi-secret thing that transcends administrations would be the very thing that I think John Locke and many of these other people we're gonna talk about would fight against because they didn't want that giant monstrosity. | ||
| That's true in a number of ways. | ||
| I mean, it's true at least in the sense that We can't check this power, right? | ||
| They've almost become a sort of power unto themselves. | ||
| And from now, I mean, I think what you'll see eventually is a kind of equilibrium between presidents and this defense apparatus where, you know, the funding, you know, we'll keep the spigot open, as it were, in terms of funding and leeway and getting you your, you know, your warrants and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Under the agreement that you don't try to delegitimize our presidency. | ||
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Right. | |
| So in other words, I think if this happens with Trump, it might be it'll probably be the last time it happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it is troubling. | ||
| I mean, this is this is it's not a particularly democratic institution. | ||
| Yeah, and it's also one of those things that, I mean, we could spend five hours now just going down that rabbit hole and seeing where we get on the other side, and I don't know that we'd come up with anything that would give anyone anyone great comfort, right? | ||
| So let's move on to some of these other people. | ||
| Probably my favorite political thinker, John Stuart Mill. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Talk to me about John Stuart Mill. | ||
| Right, so with Mill, you jump up a couple hundred years, you know, Mill, also English, He's actually a career bureaucrat himself. | ||
| He worked for the East India Company his entire life. | ||
| Mill's most famous for his book On Liberty, which, I mean, based on the themes of your show, is a particularly apt text. | ||
| I mean, Mill's kind of a funny liberal in a number of ways. | ||
| He's not much of a rights theorist. | ||
| He's definitely not a natural rights theorist. | ||
| I mean, he's avowedly utilitarian. | ||
| The nonsense on stilts thing was Bentham's description of natural rights, but nonetheless, Mill's not gonna... | ||
| Mill is not going to justify a kind of widespread resistance on the basis of racial rights being violated and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| So for him, liberty is justified precisely to the extent that it is to the long-term interests of humankind or something like that. | ||
| And so in a lot of ways, I mean, liberty is something that you sort of, as a civilization, Mill would say, or as a people you sort of grow into, you have to grow to the point where the free exchange of ideas will benefit you, broadly speaking. | ||
| And he talks about this in the foreword on liberty. | ||
| But just generally on liberty, on liberty just gives the case for why we ought to tolerate, and by tolerate I mean tolerate like not just ignore someone but right confront someone with ideas that we find deeply offensive and Deeply troubling and yet nonetheless allow them to say yeah, I'm glad you made that distinction though because the word tolerance even has become yeah Politicize these that's right. | ||
| So I mean there's tolerance and there's apathy. | ||
| Yeah, we tend to mistake the one one for the other I mean tolerance particularly like religious tolerance when Locke was writing about religious tolerance and I mean, the demands for this were high. | ||
| I mean, it was a demanding doctrine. | ||
| It says, listen, there's your neighbor. | ||
| He might be engaged in religious practices that you think, you know, not only are they condemning him to hell, but they might actually suck you down. | ||
| Those are high stakes. | ||
| Today, we're like, oh, you know, this guy eats that food and he eats that food and he wears that dress | ||
| and I'm just not gonna pitch a fit about it. | ||
| But so Locke would say, "Listen, we gotta tolerate people with offensive views | ||
| "for a couple reasons." | ||
| So on the one hand, it might just be the case that they're right and we're wrong. | ||
| So we're the majority, we're 99% of the popular opinion of this particular issue. | ||
| And then you have this one guy who won't shut up and insists that we're wrong. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is the Socrates case, right? | ||
| So I mean, it might just be the fact that he's actually right and that we're gonna be made | ||
| better off through interacting with him on this. | ||
| Yeah, and that's a pretty healthy way to view someone, right? - Yeah, right. | ||
| That your opponent's intentions might be good, might be right. | ||
| You might be wrong. | ||
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That's right. | |
| You might be wrong, which itself is a very demanding doctrine. | ||
| But in that case, it's clearly justified to let him speak his mind. | ||
| If you're remedied of an error, of being in the wrong, then you're made better off, and so it's justified. | ||
| Or it could be, he says, it could be that the truth is maybe split between us. | ||
| So we hold most of the truth, we the majority opinion, we are mostly right, but the other side might be right in some different ways, or the truth might be somewhere in between, in which case we're going to come to a better understanding of the issue through a kind of interaction. | ||
| But the most interesting case, though, for Mill, that he makes in On Liberty, is what if the 1% is actually wrong? | ||
| Like, objectively wrong. | ||
| What if we had a machine that could tell us with 100% certainty, you guys are totally right about this, this person really is a crackpot. | ||
| She has no idea what she's talking about. | ||
| Should we tolerate that view? | ||
| And of course, we can think of parallels for this all over the place. | ||
| I mean, so if I'm a Jewish community in Skokie or whatever, should I allow Nazis to walk through my streets and protest and all this kind of stuff? | ||
| I mean, we know Nazism is wrong. | ||
| We know that anti-Semitism is wrong. | ||
| We know all these sorts of, these are horrendous views and hold no place in polite society and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| So, should we prevent them from speaking out and saying, never mind. | ||
| Bill says, no, even in that case, you're actually made better off through interacting with these particular views. | ||
| You're given a chance for your views on a particular matter to become, in some sense, more alive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To become better. | ||
| And I see this all the time. | ||
| So, I mean, when I teach something like Locke or when I teach Mill or whatever to students today, I mean, a lot of my students, I mean, these are good 20-year-old kids, they have the right views on most things. | ||
| They know that human beings should be treated equally and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| But if you press just the slightest bit, if you say why should they be treated equally, what sort of doctrinary view is it based on? | ||
| Is it based on a kind of natural equality? | ||
| In other words, once you start poking around the edges of this view, you know, they kind of, they tense up a little bit. | ||
| They're not really sure, in other words, they have the right views, but they don't know, | ||
| they don't know why, the right reasons. | ||
| They don't really remember why or how they came to these particular views. | ||
| They hold them in a kind of shallow or sort of hollow sort of way. | ||
| And so for Mill, interacting with someone who pushes you on these things, | ||
| interacting with someone who genuinely does hold wrong views, | ||
| gives you the chance to reinvigorate your own views on particular issues. | ||
| I mean, that's the basic argument of Von Leopardy. | ||
| So he basically gave the original argument against safe spaces. | ||
| Really, right? | ||
| I mean, he said, let's do this. | ||
| Let's do this and see what happens. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's some slight differences, right? | ||
| So in other words, You know, I think he's saying tolerate views, interact with views. | ||
| I mean, there is this, it's a very kind of positive vision of what we're capable of doing through dialogue and through discussion. | ||
| And I think it's a conception of dialogue and discussion that many people don't really believe in anymore. | ||
| I mean, I think very, very few people are willing to kind of To say, you know, I believe that genuinely, through dialogue, we're all going to be made better off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think today more people are willing to say, actually, some people might be harmed by this particular kind of dialogue, or some people might... We're only just going to entrench ourselves even more deeply in the views that we already have. | ||
| So, in other words, there's a sense in which Mill's view, it's an empirical doctrine, right? | ||
| It's subject to testing. | ||
| I mean, we can say, listen, it doesn't work, or there are certain contexts in which Fighting like this actually makes things worse. | ||
| Twitter, I think, is a good example of a place where... I mean, on Twitter, I am generally skeptical that better views are being arrived at. | ||
| I mean, I think there are certain things about the context of Twitter that prevents that kind of dialogue from happening. | ||
| You're saying we can't solve everything in 140 characters. | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| Is that what John Stuart Mill would have said? | ||
| No, and I think we make it worse a little bit. | ||
| Because, I mean, on Twitter, There's no... You don't interact with people on Twitter, right? | ||
| You interact with strangers in some sense. | ||
| You interact with objects. | ||
| So you're on Twitter and you post something and someone else puts a nasty, snarky comment. | ||
| And you're like, well, that's just another whatever. | ||
| That's another SJW or another MRA or whatever. | ||
| And so you don't have... There's no reason to engage with them. | ||
| You have a script and you're going to go off that script. | ||
| They have a script. | ||
| They're going to go off that script. | ||
| We're just reenacting this. | ||
| I mean, it's almost like a game. | ||
| It's like a video game. | ||
| It's a street fighter game, so they're gonna choose this character, | ||
| I'm gonna choose this character, I know which combos work against this | ||
| and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| So in that case, I think Twitter almost militates against a better understanding of higher understandings. | ||
| Yeah, and I feel like that's happening across social media, | ||
| although Twitter is a particularly good example 'cause it's a constant snark battle. | ||
| It seems like what's happening everywhere, even if you look at your Facebook feed, | ||
| where, as I talk about all the time, I mean, people defriend people | ||
| for having an alternate opinion, or somehow you're now a bigot, | ||
| you know, your mom's a bigot suddenly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
you know and and all of those are the all that i think about our grandmothers | |
| That nobody wanted to know. | ||
| So part of this is just, we're entering a strange phase just because of technology, because really the most important thing is to do this. | ||
| This is what they had the luxury of doing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There's a sense in which argument, particularly if argument fits into the liberal tradition, it does require a particular context. | ||
| It requires an engagement with a subject. | ||
| If you don't think that the other person is capable of changing their mind, if you don't think that you yourself are capable of changing your mind, in other words, if you don't think that the other person is anything other than the product of an ideology, the product of class position, the product of their gender, the product of whatever it happens to be, then it was really kind of pointless to argue with them, right? | ||
| I mean, you're just, I mean, you're, it's like trying to get a Mac to run a PC program or something like that. | ||
| It's just not going to happen. | ||
| The hardware isn't there. | ||
| So if you don't regard your interlocutor as a subject in some sense, as someone who is capable of changing their mind, or someone who's capable of entertaining different ideas, or someone who is... | ||
| People, in other words, of what we would think of traditionally, in a very traditional sense, as being rational, being susceptible to reasons, then we do have to wonder what it is that we're doing. | ||
| Isn't that true bigotry? | ||
| Well, it is, right? | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| I wouldn't go so far as to call it bigotry. | ||
| I would say that there is, that we're encouraged to think about people in these ways in a number of different, from a number of different directions. | ||
| So you see something like this in what we think of traditionally as the Marxist tradition. | ||
| So in the Marxist tradition, we are all of us We are, you know, consciousnesses that are formed by our position in the class struggle. | ||
| So the ideas in our head, all of our ideas, our ideas about religion, our ideas about sex, about marriage, about children, about work, about all this kind of stuff, these are determined by our position within a class structure. | ||
| So when we tell someone, oh, you're being very bourgeois, this is exactly what we mean. | ||
| We mean that you are very much a product of your economic position, we would say. | ||
| So in that case, we do have to wonder, if it's the case that I am just merely the outcome of a process that's already been predetermined, in what sense am I really engaged in a dialogue? | ||
| So we see that position in some camps on the left, but we see it too on the right. | ||
| There's an affinity, for example, in libertarian circles for evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology. | ||
| And I'm not crazy about this, for very similar reasons, right? | ||
| So the emphasis on signaling and all this kind of stuff, it says, listen, when I'm engaged in argument, I'm not actually engaged in argument, I'm actually trying to convince you of anything. | ||
| I'm not treating you as a subject and I myself am not a subject. | ||
| What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to improve my position in in a hierarchy. | ||
| And so I will use whatever tools I have at my disposal, whether it be moral outrage, | ||
| whatever kind of strong signals I can send to other people around me that indicate, | ||
| in some sense, my superiority to you. | ||
| We see a ton of this these days. | ||
| So in other words, and the internet, I think, encourages that kind of behavior. | ||
| But both lenses, though, I think the Marxist lens and the evolutionary psychology lens, I think it discourages us from treating other people as, again, as subjects. | ||
| As saying, listen, I don't care what class you're from, I don't care what your position is in the evolutionary structure, something like that. | ||
| I think that you're capable of being persuaded. | ||
| I think you're capable of having a conversation. | ||
| And I'm willing to sit down and talk these things over. | ||
| So, I mean, I think it's In other words, we have a lot of tools at our disposal these days for writing off everything that we see around us, for reinforcing our own views of our own rightness. | ||
| They're on both sides of the political spectrum and I think that we're well suited to identifying and distancing ourselves from those. | ||
| Yeah, we could keep going there, but let's move on. | ||
| Alex de Tocqueville. | ||
| So, 19th century French thinker. | ||
| I mean, we usually teach de Tocqueville in American political thought courses, but he's actually French, and actually in many ways his concerns were very French. | ||
| So, I mean, his primary work, his masterwork, is the two-volume Democracy in America, which he wrote after having a kind of extended stay, an extended tour of So there's a lot of great stuff in there. There's a lot of | ||
| great stuff about American associational life the way that Americans | ||
| They practice a unique form of democratic liberty in that list there, you know, they're organized in these small | ||
| towns But the small towns themselves are really in some sense | ||
| their communities and their active communities So if they need a bridge built if they need a church built | ||
| or whatever it happens to be they get together They say we're all there are you know, we we | ||
| We are the people that are capable of doing this. | ||
| There's no one coming to help us. | ||
| We can't apply for a blockade grant or something like that. | ||
| We want to build a church, we're going to do it. | ||
| And so they build up what Robert Putnam would later call a form of social capital. | ||
| And they lived free in that sense, and Tocqueville is very enthusiastic about this, about the way that Americans organize in this way. | ||
| But for the most part, what Democracy in America is, is it's a kind of a, I mean, the way I see it is it's kind of a long meditation on what you might call the fact of democracy. | ||
| So, Tocqueville himself had a kind of aristocratic background. | ||
| His concerns, you might say, were aristocratic in nature. | ||
| He was interested in, in some sense, diagnosing and coming to understand This great new sweep, this kind of torrent, I think in the opening he compares it to a kind of a river that's flowing through the West, right? | ||
| That all these old aristocracies, this old way of living, this is being sort of washed away. | ||
| And in its place is coming this new thing, democracy, by which he means, you know, egalitarianism, he means a number of different things. | ||
| And so he's just got all these interesting chapters on the effect of democracy on things like On marriage, on family size, there's a chapter on the effect that democracy and democratic norms have on the size of headstones for when people die and things like that. | ||
| How big should they be? | ||
| Exactly, how big they'll be. | ||
| So for him, in many ways, it's a kind of a sociological critique of what democracy is going to mean for our political institutions, what it's going to mean for individual liberty, What it's gonna mean for some... I mean, I think really what he's worried about is some sense of national greatness, in other words. | ||
| And for him, the Americans did it right, and he worries very much that the French did it incorrectly, they did it wrongly, and that they're gonna pay for it down the line. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that if he was here today, he might think that America has actually started to do it wrong? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so... Because when you talk about, you know, liberty and things of that nature, it does seem like we might be going more of the French route in certain... | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, in the second book in particular, he has a lot of talk about what he calls soft despotism. | ||
| And soft despotism is something that worried him, that he thought would be a kind of a, something that was uniquely well suited to a democratic country. | ||
| And so the basic idea of soft despotism is like, listen, is a democracy going to accept some Right. | ||
| know, a tyrant who comes in and makes them work long hours and does all this | ||
| kind of stuff. No, he's not, they're not going to accept that. They're not going | ||
| to accept a kind of traditional form of tyrant who just, you know, enriches | ||
| themselves at the public expense and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| What they're going to accept is a soft despot, a despot who comes in and says, "Listen, | ||
| you don't need to, you know, to build your own bridges, for | ||
| example." | ||
| You don't need to provide for the poor in your own communities. | ||
| I'll do all this stuff for you, right? | ||
| We can just kind of centralize this sort of thing. | ||
| I'll take care of it. | ||
| It's much more efficient if I do it anyway. | ||
| I'll take a lot of this kind of responsibility off your hands. | ||
| And for Tocqueville, he worried that this would have a kind of innervating effect. | ||
| on people, that instead of going out and building that bridge or building that church | ||
| or whatever it happens to be, instead of going out and interacting with each other | ||
| in communities, building up trust, solving problems together in a local way, | ||
| that we would instead, right, if we wanna build a bridge, we might come together long enough to fill out | ||
| an application for federal grade and then send it off. | ||
| Right, so basically we'd outsource the very things that make us a community, sort of. | ||
| That's a really good way of putting it, actually. | ||
| Yeah, so that I think is his fear, is that we've, you know, abdicated, basically, these powers, the powers of self-government. | ||
| We've said, listen, we don't, we're tired of governing ourselves in some sense. | ||
| These are, some of these decisions are, these are great responsibilities. | ||
| Some of these decisions we don't particularly like anyway, we don't like making, and so we'll just sort of hand them over and live in a softer and more comfortable sort of way. | ||
| Yeah, for the people watching that would say, well, what's the problem with that? | ||
| Why is that a problem? | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| Right, I mean, there's a sense, it's an active question. | ||
| I mean, there is, that is an open question, I think. | ||
| Right, so it's an open question in terms, so today, you know, we've got these amazing TVs, and we've got these amazing video games, and we've got these amazing everything, and there is a certain sense in which, listen, if If what we are building in the future is this kind of what we in philosophy would call a kind of a heat on machine, right? | ||
| So we just kind of plug ourselves into a pleasure machine. | ||
| What's wrong with the pleasure machine? | ||
| Like what's wrong with just being happy all the time? | ||
| Particularly if these more sort of rugged individualist kind of decisions if These responsibilities are in some sense unhappy responsibilities. | ||
| I don't want to have to build this bridge. | ||
| I've got other things I want to do. | ||
| I've got a job. | ||
| I've got kids. | ||
| I've got video games. | ||
| I want to watch the NBA. | ||
| Whatever it is I want to do, I don't want to go out and build this bridge. | ||
| So in other words, what's wrong with just being as happy as we can be? | ||
| And if happiness means, in the way you phrased it, outsourcing these responsibilities, then what's wrong with that? | ||
| Well, I did see WALL-E, the Disney movie WALL-E, and I know if you outsource all those things, you become just basically a fat blob, you know, drinking soda and whatever. | ||
| Did you do research on me? | ||
| Because you've mentioned video games and basketball now, and I think you're just looking over here. | ||
| Actually, in the dressing room, there was an old-school NES sitting on top of a baseball. | ||
| How are your skills, by the way? | ||
| On the NES? | ||
| They're pretty good, actually. | ||
| Well, it depends on the game. | ||
| Sports games, I can do sports games. | ||
| All right, we've got 15 minutes of baseball. | ||
| After this, maybe we'll stream it for the people. | ||
| All right, we touched on this guy already, but I think this is probably the person that I think is most confused in modern discussion, Karl Marx. | ||
| When people talk about Marxism, I feel like they have no idea what they're talking about. | ||
| And especially, as you've mentioned, conversation on Twitter can often be crazy. | ||
| You see this, people calling each other Marxists and Marxists, they have no idea what they're saying. | ||
| So let's go back a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, so it's a huge topic. | ||
| I mean, you could spend your entire academic career, your entire life, going through Marxist thought. | ||
| I mean, it itself, it's contained in these huge volumes. | ||
| So Capital, his great work, that was only volume one of what became three volumes, which itself was only one-eighth of this kind of broader project that he thought he was working on. | ||
| So you're saying you can't get that all out in one tweet? | ||
| Well, there are days when I wish that Marx would have just had Twitter, actually. | ||
| Listen, I have 3,000 pages, but I can break it down into one thread on Twitter. | ||
| And that's just one work. | ||
| I mean, he was unbelievably productive, remarkably productive over the course of his life. | ||
| No, we bandy about the term Marx today in strange ways. | ||
| So, I mean, somebody like Bernie Sanders, right? | ||
| People are talking about democratic socialism. | ||
| We love throwing out these polls to millennials and saying, do you like capitalism? | ||
| Do you like socialism? | ||
| And then we act surprised when they say socialism. | ||
| Well, if their interaction with socialism is something like what Bernie Sanders is offering, there's nothing terribly socialistic or Marxist about what Bernie is about. | ||
| So, I mean, Bernie is a fairly old school redistributionist. | ||
| Does Bernie Sanders want to destroy the state? | ||
| No. | ||
| Does Bernie Sanders want to destroy the institution of private property? | ||
| No. | ||
| Bernie Sanders just wants to, in many ways, actually wants to reinforce the state. | ||
| He wants to use the state to redistribute wealth from those who have too much to those who have less. | ||
| I think you can have all legit criticisms of that, but that's not destroying the state, that's an interesting distinction. | ||
| It's not destroying the state, that's actually tightening the screws of the state. | ||
| I think there's a distinction that has to be made when we talk about the left and we use the capital L, we tend to conflate many, many different attitudes. | ||
| Political attitudes, economic attitudes. | ||
| I mean, so, you know, in terms of textbook definitions, when we think of socialism, we think of public ownership of the means of production, so factory, so worker-owned factories, but also just industries being run in what we think of as the public service or something like that, or to public ends. | ||
| And then full-scale communism is the complete abolition of private property. | ||
| None of those things, I think, are really on the table. | ||
| I mean, so I think in his younger days, Sanders talked about nationalizing banks or something like that. | ||
| But, I mean, for the most part, it's pretty tame. | ||
| I mean, if you look at Venezuela, you look at Chavez, you look at things like that. | ||
| I mean, that's what socialism looks like. | ||
| I mean, this is, these people are more serious. | ||
| Socialism with a capital S. Yeah. | ||
| Bernie's just, I mean, he's paddling a kind of welfarism, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| I always see people saying that you can't look at Venezuela because it doesn't give you the right example of socialism. | ||
| The socialists always say that because it didn't work out the way they wanted it to. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, the 20th century is a pretty long advertisement against what we think of as socialism. | ||
| I mean, a lot of that stuff has to be teased out. | ||
| So, I mean, we have a very difficult time of separating what we may think of as political or economic philosophy from the rise of the nation-state, the development of large-scale states and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And these processes, they're absolutely intertwined, but they are distinct. | ||
| So I think in Russia, I mean, a lot of what you had was going on there was absolutely this unbelievably pernicious application of Marxism in a variety of ways. | ||
| And I think a lot of 20th century libertarian thought offers good arguments as to why socialism will always look like that. | ||
| So in other words, this wasn't an accident. | ||
| This is how it's always going to play out, and here are reasons for that. | ||
| So if you look at Mises, if you look at Hayek, they make that case. | ||
| And those are really good resources. | ||
| But at the same time, I mean, the development of the nation-state itself tends to be a fairly bloody process, particularly when we talk about processes of modernization and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| Whether it be, I mean, if we think about World War II, right, an unprecedentedly bloody conflict, unprecedentedly bloody Can we pin something like World War II on Marx? | ||
| I don't think reasonably we can. | ||
| What can we pin it on? | ||
| I'm not really sure. | ||
| I think a lot of these processes are sort of broader, mostly material, world historical processes that came to fruition in a particularly awful way. | ||
| But when it comes to somebody like Marx, I mean, I think, you know, there's a number of things. | ||
| So there's Marx the Economist. | ||
| So Marx the Economist drew largely from classical economics. | ||
| He read a lot of Smith. | ||
| He read a ton of David Ricardo, James Milne, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And he attempted to, in some sense, synthesize the great political economists. | ||
| And he attempted to, I mean, the way that I like to think about what Marx was doing was he was attempting to describe I mean, he would say dialectically. | ||
| I want to say that he was attempting to describe the experience of living in a commercial or bourgeois society. | ||
| And so for me, I think what's most interesting, I think the kind of work of Marx is that liberals should pay the most attention to, classical liberals should pay the most attention to, is his thoughts on On what it's like to live in a commercial society, on what it's like to work in a commercial society. | ||
| When he talks about commodities, for example, and the ways that we tend to organize our lives around commodities, the ways that we tend to commodify many things in our lives that maybe ought not to be commodified. | ||
| In other words, there's a kind of a, built into it, there's a kind of almost an existential critique of life within a modern capitalist society that I think, there's no reason, I think, for classical liberals to just say, oh, this is coming from Marx, Marx was the Marx of Marxism, Marxism is bad for these variety of reasons, therefore we'll just throw everything out together. | ||
| I think with Marx I think we can actually get a lot of purchase, or we can begin to understand a lot of the cultural and artistic critiques of capitalism that we've been dealing with in the 20th and 21st centuries. | ||
| So basically you don't have to buy the economic theories to understand the critique of just sort of the human philosophical tenets of it. | ||
| So take something like Tinder. | ||
| He wrote a lot on Tinder. | ||
| That's the swiping one. | ||
| There's a couple ways of looking at Tinder. | ||
| You look at Tinder and you say, oh this is awful. | ||
| There's something unnatural about this. | ||
| There's something just really messed up about people swiping left or right, treating potential life partners essentially as the way you would look at Fresh produce in the supermarket, right? | ||
| Like, oh, this one's bad, this one's good, whatever. | ||
| I mean, there's something a little weird about that. | ||
| And so you're put on the kind of a Horns of Dilemma. | ||
| So you can either say, listen, there's nothing weird about that. | ||
| Isn't it great that we can, you know, conduct, that we can lower the opportunity cost of dating or something like that? | ||
| Listen, and the fact that people are doing this suggests that it makes them happy. | ||
| And who are you to say they shouldn't be happy and all that kind of thing? | ||
| And we're often kind of thrown onto that side of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whatever kind of commercial behavior people adopt is good just by virtue of them adopting it. | ||
| That's that pleasure machine you mentioned. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| In other words, liberals lack a really strong footing to critique this kind of behavior. | ||
| Anytime people critique other people's behaviors and practices, anytime other people begin to rank different ways of life, we begin to think things get a little thorny, and we want to shy away from that. | ||
| and the other side of the dilemma is saying, oh, there's something wrong about it, it objectifies | ||
| members of the opposite sex, or, I mean, depending on if you're, whoever it is you're shopping | ||
| for, right, it objectifies them, it does, you know, it trivializes these meaningful | ||
| relationships, it does this and that, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And all that stuff, I think, is really powerful, and people get that. | ||
| I mean, when people hear that, it moves them in some sense. | ||
| And I think we cut ourselves off to all of these methods of thinking about the way that | ||
| we live now because we're so intent on keeping the economic side of things, because we're | ||
| so intent, essentially, on denying that there's anything wrong at all with any of the behaviors | ||
| and any of the practices that we've adopted in commercial society. | ||
| So we're basically afraid to judge because that would be against our sort of liberal | ||
| position. | ||
| This is a very old dispute within liberal thought. | ||
| It actually goes back to the question of toleration. | ||
| Conservatives have criticized liberals for a very long time precisely because they treat apathy as toleration, because they mistake indifference for toleration. | ||
| You're not actually tolerant of different ways of life because you're completely and utterly unable or unwilling to judge different ways of life. | ||
| I don't think liberals are really committed to that. | ||
| I mean, using the coercive force of the state to enforce certain ways of life, I mean, that's one thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But being able to have a conversation about what sort of practices you want to adopt, what sort of practices do you think your children ought to adopt, these sorts of conversations, in other words, I mean, we set ourselves off from the kind of conversations about The nature of the good life that communities used to have. | ||
| I mean, that people used to say, you know, listen, I think this way of life is better. | ||
| I think this way of life is more meaningful. | ||
| I think what you're doing here in this particular case is wrong. | ||
| I think it has these effects and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| I mean, we really try to shy away from that as much as we can and I'm not sure that we're always Better off for it. | ||
| So that's a perfect segue. | ||
| I've got a whole bunch of other names here, but let's put that aside. | ||
| Because when you sat down, we immediately mentioned a couple other people that I've done some shows with from Learn Liberty, and Steve Davies came up. | ||
| And I said to you that when people, probably the number one thing that I get asked is, why do you call yourself a classical liberal instead of a libertarian? | ||
| And I've said a few times that if I sat down probably with, who would you say is probably the most preeminent libertarian thinker? | ||
| Today? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or just give me somebody you like. | ||
| Yeah I mean so I mean I mean online I mean it tends to be the economists who dominate this conversation so Brian Kaplan who you had on a couple weeks ago runs a very successful blog. | ||
| Tyler Cowen I put in that camp I mean so somebody like Jason Brandon has gotten a lot of publicity lately for his book, Against Democracy. | ||
| So, I mean, we're shifted out of, I guess, what you might think of as being the 20th century libertarians, Hayek and Friedman and all these kind of guys, and we're moving into, I guess, a new generation of thought. | ||
| It tends to be dominated, I think, by economists, but not necessarily so. | ||
| So the question that I get is, well, what makes you a classical liberal as opposed to a libertarian? | ||
| Now, I sat here with Brian Kaplan a couple weeks ago, and he really, in my opinion, goes really far on that libertarian route, right? | ||
| But I fully enjoyed the conversation, and I don't agree with him necessarily on some pacifism stuff and some open border stuff and all that. | ||
| All good. | ||
| But I told you that Steve Davies gave me the best explanation of classical liberalism. | ||
| So I'm going to link people to two things for now. | ||
| It's going to be Steve Davies and whatever you're going to say right now. | ||
| What is the difference between a classical liberal and a libertarian? | ||
| Classical liberalism, if I can get my students to reproduce Liberalism is the political ideology of individual rights and limited government. | ||
| If I can get them to reproduce that, I'm happy. | ||
| That tends to be enough for me. | ||
| But how is that different than libertarianism? | ||
| Well, so libertarianism is a relatively big tent. | ||
| So libertarianism was in many ways, it was a political movement first, as it were. | ||
| Libertarians include, I mean, Brian's an anarcho-capitalist, I think. | ||
| I don't know if you talked about that in the session or not. | ||
| So it can go, the Brian Kaplan's anarcho-capitalists I mean a variety of different sorts of anti-state socialists all the way up to Bill Weld essentially. | ||
| I mean it's a it's a relatively big ten in that sense. | ||
| It's a political movement that I think the idea behind libertarianism seems to be something like reducing both the size and scope of the state. | ||
| So it's in some sense it's a political project first. | ||
| It tends to really want to resist being attached to some larger moral or cultural doctrine. | ||
| Whereas liberalism I really do think that in some sense liberalism was linked up to some conception of the good life, some conception of rationality, some conception of a work ethic. | ||
| Right, so in other words, I think classical liberalism extends a bit further down, as it were, from the political than libertarianism does. | ||
| Yeah, in a weird way. | ||
| Is that the flaw of both of them? | ||
| That libertarianism became a political party first, so it maybe didn't have the philosophical underpinnings of classical liberalism. | ||
| Classical liberalism, which was based in philosophy first, maybe doesn't have the The root to become a political party, at least in modern-day America? | ||
| God, that's depressing. | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| I would say this. | ||
| When we talk about classical liberalism, this is a function of the way that we talk about ideology. | ||
| So in other words, you look at Locke, you look at Hume, you look at Smith. | ||
| None of these guys, even as they produced the liberal tradition, none of them knew they were liberals, right? | ||
| So in other words, we look back, we said the set of ideas, the doctrines that were produced by this general set of thinkers, this canon, we'll call it, we'll set the lines here, we'll say anyone within this, this way of thinking, we'll call it liberalism. | ||
| And there's many ways in which, I mean, if you take even people as chronologically close to one another as Locke and Hume, I mean, they disagreed very strongly on a number of different things. | ||
| So, Hume is not a natural rights theorist. | ||
| Hume is extremely shy on the right of resistance and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And yet, I think we would say that both of them contributed to something that, looking back, we call the liberal project. | ||
| So, liberalism, I think, tends to be much, much broader, much, much bigger than libertarianism. | ||
| I mean, I would say that today, both major political parties Well, ten years ago I would have said both major political parties in America would fit within the tradition of liberalism, broadly understood. | ||
| So, I mean, very few people are running around today saying we ought to suspend, you know, rights of due process. | ||
| You know, we ought to suspend free speech or something like that. | ||
| Very few people are offering what I would consider to be real alternatives to liberalism, whatever those alternatives might be. | ||
| They might be theocracy, they might be communism. | ||
| I mean, in other words, we seem to have in some sense settled on the idea that individuals have claims against the state, that individuals ought to be as free as possible and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And so we, in many ways, we're kind of working out on the margins of that particular view. | ||
| Libertarianism seems to me as a kind of a smaller political doctrine within that broader thing that we call liberalism. | ||
| Yeah, it almost seems to me that if the classical liberals, which I do think are the next political movement here, we should just hijack the Libertarian Party. | ||
| I mean, it's such a freaking mess. | ||
| Why not just grab this thing? | ||
| At least they have some of the institutional stuff, right? | ||
| And grab that and go. | ||
| Who would you say are the, in American political history, the politicians that have been closest to real classical liberals? | ||
| I think the two that probably pop to mind for me would be JFK and New York State Senator Patrick Moynihan. | ||
| I think probably the most two. | ||
| Who else? | ||
| Or do you even agree with those? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, in the liberal tradition, I mean, so generally I would say, you know, the founding period, these guys, I mean, so somebody like Jefferson minus the whole slavery business. | ||
| I mean, Jefferson at least- But he was freeing the slaves at the same time. | ||
| Well, he at least, I'll put it this way. | ||
| I mean, he articulated the ideas that would absolutely be seized upon by somebody like Frederick Douglass. | ||
| I mean, Frederick Douglass saying, listen, In this great speech he gives, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, where he says, your founding documents are great, they're beautiful, and yet at the same time, what could be further than reality than your founding documents? | ||
| So in other words, I would say that just generally men like Madison and Jefferson, not only were they consistent with what we think of as the classical liberal tradition, but in many ways they contributed to the classical liberal project. | ||
| In the 20th and 21st century, that's a tougher question. | ||
| I've always thought that, so I'm actually, I grew up in a town called Marion, Ohio, and in Marion, Ohio, we have the Warren G. Harding presidential home. | ||
| Actually, he ran the Marion Star in the newspaper in town. | ||
| I gave tours there for years. | ||
| But Harding's idea of normalcy, so Harding was president after Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| People forget that the Wilson presidency was, I mean, I guess we were reminded of this every once in a while, but it was an absolute mess. | ||
| We're talking, I mean, just unbelievable American casualties in a completely pointless war. | ||
| Economic catastrophe of a number of sense. | ||
| And Harding actually ran on what he called, and this is actually where we get the word normalcy, the return to normalcy. | ||
| He was only president for a couple years. | ||
| He died in office. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't great president by anyone's, by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| But just the idea of a restrained role of the presidency, the president as a kind of a steady hand on institutions, that I think is relatively consistent with the liberal tradition. | ||
| I think for me, a president, for me, a president becomes a threat to the liberal tradition | ||
| when they see themselves as leading some kind of movement, as being in charge of a vision, | ||
| as speaking for the people in some meaningful sense. | ||
| And this is very much what the progressive era was about. | ||
| So you see this in TR, you see this in Wilson, the idea of the president being, | ||
| in a kind of strange sort of way, the president in being a single person, popularly elected, | ||
| the president can then be the kind of the voice of the people and the president can, you know, | ||
| carry the big stick needed to deal with the entrenched interests in Congress | ||
| and big business and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I mean, this was the progressive vision and I think you see a lot of that rhetoric today on both with Trump and also with Sanders. | ||
| Yeah, so Trump, though, is a particularly interesting case of this, right? | ||
| Because he obviously is that. | ||
| He thinks he's the guy in the populace and all that. | ||
| And at the same time, he doesn't care about the social issues. | ||
| So there's a nice classical liberal feeling of live and let live there. | ||
| He's trying, I think, you know, even this regulation thing where he's going to strike down two regulations for every one new one. | ||
| It's gimmicky. | ||
| It sounds like a game show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But there's a nice scaling back of the state there. | ||
| It doesn't sound like we're going to have a lot of adventurous war. | ||
| All of these things that I think are basically within the tradition of classical liberalism, but he has that other piece. | ||
| So how do you place him? | ||
| Because no one, I think, has a good, full, holistic understanding of the guy. | ||
| Well, I mean, because in a lot of ways, there's very little of him there, right? | ||
| I mean, the classic line, but Trump believes whoever the last person he talked to. | ||
| He doesn't seem to be a terribly ideological figure. | ||
| He, in some sense, intuitively grasped, in a way that a lot of demagogues historically have, he intuitively grasped, in some sense, what Whatever you want to call the people. | ||
| I mean, it was a very particular set of people. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about Rust Belt Appalachian voters. | ||
| I mean, the real red states and also, I guess, out West. | ||
| He intuitively grasped what it was that they wanted, what they wanted to hear. | ||
| And a lot of this didn't have anything to do with policy positions. | ||
| A lot of it was just You know, listen, these establishment types have been screwing you over for however long, and I'm going to be the one who comes up here and does something about it. | ||
| I mean, he was the ultimate outsider in an age of outsiders. | ||
| I mean, there is something a little tiresome about this constant, you know, we need outsiders in Washington, we need outsiders in Washington, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| But nobody did that quite as well as Trump did. | ||
| And I mean, so just in the places that I grew up in Ohio and a lot of my family's from West Virginia, I mean, I could almost immediately, once he began talking, I could say that they're going to love this. | ||
| Where they're kind of, they're tired of being looked down upon and all this kind of thing. | ||
| Now, when it comes to classical liberal tradition, my own view, I think that Trump is an unmitigated disaster from the classical liberal perspective. | ||
| I'm not saying he's a classical liberal. | ||
| I think he's maybe done some things that we can sort of tolerate, but I don't think he has a political philosophy. | ||
| He definitely doesn't have a kind of a clearly articulated political philosophy or political ideology, but he's very good at symbols. | ||
| He understands symbols quite well. | ||
| The wall is a really good example. | ||
| I mean, the wall is not a policy position. | ||
| Will it actually curtail immigration? | ||
| I see no reason to think that it will. | ||
| Most immigrants apparently come over on planes, they overstay visas, they do a number of different things. | ||
| Will it have any effect, in other words, on this thing, immigration? | ||
| Even immigration itself isn't really a policy question. | ||
| The average person, their view on immigration is not informed by statistics. | ||
| I mean, they don't know that net immigration from Mexico is negative. | ||
| They don't know any of this kind of stuff. | ||
| It isn't real to them as a policy or as an empirical question. | ||
| But they do understand insiders and outsiders. | ||
| And they do understand what the wall represents in some way. | ||
| So the wall represents a reaffirmation of the American identity, or the idea of America. | ||
| And in particular, it represents that reaffirmation by reaffirming the boundary between what is America and what isn't, who is America and who is not. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason we don't put the wall on the northern border. | ||
| I mean, it's, in other words, the implications are very clear. | ||
| But Trump grasped that intuitively. | ||
| He knew what the wall would mean. | ||
| And at some level, it doesn't matter if the wall ever gets built. | ||
| For Trump, the wall was that symbol that he needed to brand. | ||
| I mean, it was just a big four-letter word that he could sear into the brains of every American. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| It worked tremendously. | ||
| But it's a really good example of the way that Trump was able to seize on this language, to speak this language without any of the other sort of stuff that you would think would matter. | ||
| I mean, you know, Hillary Clinton had policy positions out the wazoo, but I mean, Nobody wants those. | ||
| Yeah, but nobody cares, which is probably a function of technology and attention spans and all the rest of it. | ||
| Part of it was policy positions. | ||
| She wasn't in a variety of ways. | ||
| I mean, part of it was policy positions. | ||
| I mean, she wasn't in a variety of ways. | ||
| She wasn't a great candidate. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, so for me, the troubling thing about Trump is partly to do with this | ||
| idea of the wall. | ||
| I mean, to the extent that in some ways the cultural politics of the right have crowded out any policy positions that they that they might have. | ||
| So it's not just the walls, the regulation thing is another example, actually. | ||
| So the two, for every new regulation, two of them get scale back. | ||
| So again, it is kind of gimmicky. | ||
| And there is this kind of individualist, libertarian conception. | ||
| We don't want regulations, we don't want rules, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And yet, at the same time, I mean, it's gimmicky in the sense that pretty soon they'll just figure out that they just put three regulations on every single letter. | ||
| So on the one hand, it won't work. | ||
| Right, there's a math thing. | ||
| And on the other hand, I mean, so it's not clear to me, though, that what libertarians and classical liberals ought to be doing is just a kind of A sort of whole scale reduction in the state. | ||
| So, you know, a lot of these, you know, you get these reports, X number of institutions have no, he's not making these appointments and all this kind of stuff, and these jobs just aren't going to let them. | ||
| It's not clear to me that in the void left by whatever these institutions were, that whatever's going to come in there is going to be conducive to individual liberty. | ||
| I mean, there's a sense in which, you know, when chaos is introduced, when there's a certain amount of disorder, Very rarely is it that something like an ordered liberty is the result of that. | ||
| Usually it's whoever has the loudest voice wins. | ||
| So I'm afraid at this point, I'm afraid of the loudest voices. | ||
| And I'm afraid of the ways in which this kind of brute force approach to scaling back government is going to allow those louder voices to... | ||
| What do you make for the argument that I basically buy? | ||
| Now, I voted for Gary Johnson, very begrudgingly. | ||
| You were the one. | ||
| I was the one guy. | ||
| I should be judged accordingly, by the way. | ||
| And he's a perfectly nice guy, and I've had him on the show, and I've chatted with him privately, and he'd be a great guy to have dinner with, but was a pretty terrible candidate. | ||
| But what do you make for the argument that I hear people say that Trump's win, forgetting political philosophy, forgetting virtually everything you've said here, that it just shook the system in a way that no one else could have shook it. | ||
| So if you believed that we had a real problem here, you know, between a state that was growing and NSA and taxes and whatever, foreign policy and all of this stuff that just seems to get bigger and bigger, That he was the only sledgehammer to that. | ||
| Because I think there is some legitimacy to that. | ||
| It doesn't mean that what's going to come out on the other side is going to be any better. | ||
| And you might be right that it's just going to bring on louder voices and that this could be the beginning of the end of the republic and all of that stuff. | ||
| But do you think that there's a legitimacy to that line of thinking? | ||
| Oh no absolutely and be clear I mean these now we're verging into the territory of stuff I mean I you know when I when I say I think I think Trump is this I think Trump is that I mean I want to emphasize that this is what I think in other words we're talking about extremely complex systems I mean I think it's very difficult if anyone who says they know what Trump is gonna bring about anyone who says they know this is what's gonna happen that's what's gonna happen I mean is is you know either speaking from an ideological position or it's just trying to get clicks I mean, so in other words, I have relatively strong views about Trump, and yet I still hold them weakly enough I could be proven wrong. | ||
| And this is an interesting, this is an intriguing line of thought, this idea that the American government has kind of taken on this kind of autopilot position, where it only grows, it only gets bigger, it never ever recedes, it never scales back, and that the only thing that could ever bring about the scaling back would be a kind of Catastrophic moment right so in Trump within this case would be that you I think you sent the sledgehammer Yeah, so I'm sympathetic to that to that view and there's and if you look at history, right? | ||
| I mean you can look at a number of different events Kind of great historical you tend they tend to be wars right or whatever that on the one hand they tend to be Terrible when they're happening and at the same time because they kind of clear out space for innovation to take place they kind of clear out space for people to think about I guess I worry about the short term. | ||
| In other words, I worry about a large-scale war. | ||
| a long-term beneficial effect. | ||
| And so I'm skeptical of that line of thinking, but I could definitely see how it might happen. | ||
| But I guess I worry about the short-term. In other words, I worry about | ||
| a large-scale war. I mean, I worry about this idea of America being about walls. | ||
| I worry about this kind of thing in the short term and I worry that in some sense we're producing a culture of the right that is going to be hostile to individual liberty for a very long time. | ||
| I mean, I worry about all that stuff too. | ||
| And just as I said all throughout the election, his moral compass. | ||
| I mean, if this guy gets into a Cuban Missile Crisis situation, which way is this whole thing going? | ||
| One other piece of this related to Trump, what about the cult of personality when it comes to... | ||
| All these political philosophies that we're talking about. | ||
| Here we have a guy that's really based on that and not the political philosophy. | ||
| How should we view that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Very warily. | |
| The idea of a charismatic leader, right? | ||
| I mean, most of the great destructive movements of the 20th century were led at some level by a great charismatic leader. | ||
| And I want to be super clear. | ||
| I'm not saying Trump is Mao. | ||
| I'm not saying Trump is I mean, we can see this. | ||
| I mean, presumably you have people on your Facebook feed that watch Fox News or do whatever, and when you go home and you talk to people and There seems to be this sort of broad willingness to, listen, the media itself, they're reporting stories that I have no reason to believe anymore. | ||
| That the, you know, the kind of the mainstream narratives that are not even from the media, but from the universities, that I'm getting from Facebook, that I'm getting from all these sources. | ||
| I have no reason to believe that these are true anymore. | ||
| These have been, in some sense, the curtain has been pulled back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I can see that there is some big E, the establishment, right, that has been kind of feeding me these lines for years and years. | ||
| And now for the first time, right, Trump was the one who pulled the curtain back. | ||
| And I can trust him. | ||
| He has access to all these things. | ||
| After all, he's president. | ||
| I can trust him as an authority, not only as an authority in terms of the sort of legal and political authorities that he's been trusted with as president, but I can trust him to shoot straight in some sense. | ||
| And so once you dig your heels into that position, you kind of close yourself epistemically off from everything else, That's bad. | ||
| I mean, there are very few examples historically where that has turned out well. | ||
| Does that show you how far we've come, I guess, in the wrong direction in a weird way? | ||
| Because even right now, as we're taping this, and this is gonna go up in a couple days, but as we're taping this, this whole story about Susan Rice broke and this unmasking of the names and all that, and immediately I saw on CNN, there were like three things immediately. | ||
| Don Lemon, who's been on the show, who's a friend, But the more they did that, the more I was like, wait a minute, there probably is something here. | ||
| other CNN guy said the same exact thing, and then I think a third CNN guy, | ||
| I think maybe it was John King, saying this is all nonsense. | ||
| Something, I'm loosely quoting them. | ||
| But the more they did that, the more I was like, wait a minute, there probably is something here. | ||
| So that our trust in the fourth estate now is so broken, that that adds another piece into this whole equation. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a real mess. | ||
| In some sense, I think it is a function of technology in the sense that what Twitter and what everyone having a camera in their pockets, what they've allowed us to do is to kind of peer behind the curtain in a number of ways. | ||
| I think you can look at something like police brutality in a similar sort of way. | ||
| So, I mean, we'd always kind of known that particularly if you were black in America, right, that interactions with the police could go south pretty quickly. | ||
| But now that everybody has a camera that's always on in their pockets, we're seeing things that we just cannot believe. | ||
| And once you see the frequency of these sorts of interactions, once you see the sheer injustice of how easy it is for police who do this kind of thing, how easy it is for them to get off and all this kind of stuff, I wonder how widespread is this? | ||
| Like, I mean, how long has this been going on? | ||
| I haven't known about this. | ||
| In other words, you begin to look at this thing, right? | ||
| You begin to look at American policing, you begin to think this institution, | ||
| which even 10 years ago, I had some modicum of confidence in, | ||
| I thought was a reasonably just institution. | ||
| Now you begin to think this is just, this is a house of lies that I've been told my entire life. | ||
| And we've, with alternative media, I mean, we're told the same thing. | ||
| So you were on the Young Turks at some point, it's another democracy now. | ||
| I mean, just YouTube, the way that YouTube offers alternative narratives, | ||
| I mean, we have always had alternative publications, Mother Jones and Reason and all this kind of stuff, | ||
| but now we have a million of them. | ||
| Now we have entire channels which are dedicated, Fox News being a good example, which conceive of themselves as providing an alternative narrative to what's going on. | ||
| And so suddenly, right, we're not going to go back to where whatever Walter Cronkite was accepted as. | ||
| I mean, that was what was in some sense true. | ||
| This was a kind of a common epistemic world that we all lived in. | ||
| Now we're all kind of fractured and off in our own communities. | ||
| That I think is a real problem, and I don't see, I mean for right now it doesn't seem clear to me how that's going to be pieced back together again. | ||
| How we're going to be able to begin to start agreeing on very basic facts. | ||
| Was the president wiretapped or not? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's almost as if whatever happens over the course of the next six months, we'll be unable to answer that question in a way that's, I mean, that's a basic empirical question. | ||
| Right, and the hysteria machine and the outrage machine adds to that, so it's not just the technology of it, but when Trump said that thing, when he tweeted that thing about the wiretap, I saw it and I didn't jump to comment immediately, because I was like, let me see what happens here. | ||
| Now it turns out that Obama probably did not order it, but something did happen, and this is where then the truth becomes subjective to everybody, because if you're only reading Media Matters and Mother Jones or whatever, you're gonna get one thing, and if you're only reading Fox and some other, Breitbart or whatever, you're only gonna get something else, and then we just end up I mean, these publications know, I mean, they know what their job is, right? | ||
| So the thing comes out and their job is spin, right? | ||
| Their job is to say, listen, this is clearly, this is the position that we must take. | ||
| And so we must find the facts that conform to this particular position. | ||
| And, you know, whatever arguments, whatever kind of backflips we can perform to get into this, I mean, all the better for us. | ||
| I mean, it's just gonna, people are gonna keep clicking on articles, they're gonna keep watching The news and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| So in other words, you're right in that on the one hand, it seems like our kind of shared world has become fractured, but the people who are doing the fracturing, they have very little incentive to stop. | ||
| In fact, they have every incentive to keep fracturing. | ||
| To keep saying that it's us and only us who can offer you the truth about what happened. | ||
| It's us and only us who can offer you the analysis that's going to cater to what you want to hear anyway. | ||
| I mean, ultimately, I think that's the other kind of part of all this, is that we don't want to hear... I mean, if you watch Fox News, you don't want to hear what they're saying at the Washington Post. | ||
| If you read the Washington Post, you don't want to hear what they're saying at Fox News. | ||
| It's uncomfortable for you. | ||
| These are unpleasant experiences, and if we can ultimately, I mean, down to the last click, cater our online experiences, why would we introduce discomfort into our And this actually goes all the way back to John Stuart Mill. | ||
| John Stuart Mill described this as it's a painful experience. | ||
| Disagreeing with people is painful. | ||
| Coming to the realization that you might be, heaven forbid, wrong about something, this is unpleasant. | ||
| I'm glad you brought it back to that. | ||
| Just to wrap everything up here, it's sort of a nice bow on all this. | ||
| Is there a moment, do you think, in the last 20 years that we got much worse at that? | ||
| Because it does seem like it's all gotten worse, and I don't know if it's just the technology part. | ||
| I know that's obviously a big piece, but do you think anything else maybe culturally happened or something? | ||
| In America, does it have something to do with 9-11? | ||
| I mean, I'm just throwing things out there. | ||
| Do you think there was something else, too? | ||
| I think for the most part it would seem like a slow creep, right? | ||
| I mean, these It seems like it's a dripping, right? | ||
| It's a constant dripping, drip, drip, drip. | ||
| Every morning you log on and it just kind of reinforces the positions that you've already taken up. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I mean, for me, the moment in which I guess the politics became fractured in a way that I previously wasn't aware of, and I was just I was a kid at the time, but was probably during the Clinton impeachment scandal for a variety of reasons. | ||
| It was the way that Gingrich was able to organize resistance against Clinton for the first time. | ||
| They adopted this kind of outsider pose. | ||
| I mean, Newt Gingrich is still trying to describe himself as an outsider, as a drain the storm type. | ||
| I mean, it's absolutely insane, actually. | ||
| The guy's name is Newt. | ||
| He's a former Speaker of the House, and yet, drain the swamp is his refrain. | ||
| The irony is thick. | ||
| But for the first time, I mean, in that case, it seemed to me that there was That these partisan affiliations, that in some sense the break was fundamental, that they were occupying different spaces, different worlds, and that any compromise between these two parties would be viewed as a betrayal by loyalists. | ||
| Now, I mean, it's very, very easy to say that, no, that's always been the case. | ||
| Politics has always been that way. | ||
| Look at Reagan, look at this, look at that, whatever. | ||
| But for me, anyway, that was the fundamental moment in which I said, these two groups Something has happened here. | ||
| And again, it was the cultural politics that the right adopted, I think, in the late nineties that proved particularly pernicious. | ||
| And it's not as if cultural politics are only on... that we only have right cultural politics. | ||
| Both sides have these things. | ||
| But it was that point, and I think the Internet does amplify this to a certain extent. | ||
| We're not interested in policies, but we are interested in symbols. | ||
| And we're interested in symbols with cultural cachet. | ||
| And when we talk politics now, we talk in terms of I mean, for example, just take something like... | ||
| Take a US soldier, right? | ||
| So if you're on the right, you tend to refer to them as troops, right? | ||
| Support our troops, right? | ||
| I mean, for whatever reason, we've just sort of gravitated towards this word troop. | ||
| You just don't hear the term troops as often, I think, somewhere like Mother Jones. | ||
| They tend to be soldiers in some sense, for whatever reason. | ||
| I mean, you would think this difference... Imperial death soldiers, I think, is what they call them. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| I mean, you think that the difference would be utterly innocuous. | ||
| I mean, they're literally synonyms. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And yet, for whatever reason, when you hear the word troop, a different kind of cultural image comes to mind, a different kind of symbol comes to mind, versus when you hear the word soldier. | ||
| And I have no idea why that's the case, but it's almost as if we've begun speaking different languages, depending on which cultural group we feel like we belong to. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So final question to wrap this all up. | ||
| I mean we could do this all day, but I got two more interviews. | ||
| So for all the people that hear you, that hear these ideas of classical liberalism, I'm thrilled that for the little bit that I've been doing the show these last couple years, I feel like the phrase classical liberalism has come out a little bit. | ||
| You hear it now in mainstream. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| It's coming around. | ||
| So for the people that want conversation, that want To not just impugn their intellectual opponents and that actually want conversation, all that stuff. | ||
| What's the best method? | ||
| You're around a lot of young people, you're teaching this stuff. | ||
| What is, just because I get tons of email about this, what do I do if I want to be in the conversation and not smeared and maligned and all that stuff? | ||
| What's the best way to march forward with this stuff? | ||
| That's interesting, actually, and just based on the conversation that we've had, I mean, I would, in some sense, stay off of social media. | ||
| Because, I mean, at some level classical liberalism is a difficult doctrine as an individual, I think. | ||
| I mean, it says, listen, at some level you're responsible for your own views. | ||
| At some level you're responsible for exercising individual judgment. | ||
| You aren't going to be just sort of spoon-fed a series of ideological signifiers that you can latch on to whenever you need them. | ||
| You're going to have to adjudicate. | ||
| You're going to have to read. | ||
| You're going to have to think. | ||
| You're going to have to be the kind of person who's capable of being responsible enough to be free. | ||
| And so I would say, you know, yeah, argue all you want to, debate all you want to, discuss all you want to, but I would do it in a way, I would do it in good faith. | ||
| I would assume that whoever it is that you're talking to, that they have something to offer. | ||
| That they're capable of changing their minds. | ||
| That they're arguing with you in good faith. | ||
| That they aren't merely running through a script of views that they already hold or something like that. | ||
| And that you assume the same position. | ||
| That you say, I could be wrong about this sort of thing. | ||
| I haven't read everything. | ||
| There are limits to my own understanding. | ||
| And I'm willing to explore those limits. | ||
| So the burden's on us. | ||
| We got the work cut out for us, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what freedom, at some level, is about. | ||
| It's that you as an individual are responsible for making your own way. | ||
| I think that's a fitting ending to this conversation. |
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