July 1, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| The project that the New York Times was given a Pulitzer for this year of recasting the history of the United States in terms of slavery as the primary narrative, the 1619 project, seems to me just to be fundamentally, historically wrong. | ||
| It's a distortion. | ||
| This isn't to say that slavery didn't matter. | ||
| It just doesn't mean it's not important. | ||
| It's just that if you were to try to explain The significance of the United States to a visiting Martian. | ||
| You wouldn't start with slavery because that wasn't really an especially unique feature of the United States. | ||
| There was slavery and it lasted much longer in Brazil. | ||
| There were slavery and it was far harsher in the Caribbean colonies of Britain and other European states. | ||
| So what's the defining characteristic? | ||
| What's the thing that makes the United States distinctive? | ||
| It's not slavery. | ||
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[MUSIC] | |
| This is the Rubin Report and according to Big Tech, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| Reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell for notifications. | ||
| That's what the bell's there for. | ||
| And joining me today is a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Neil Ferguson. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be back virtually, Dave. | ||
| I'd prefer to be back really, but hey, it's the plague year. | ||
| It is the plague year. | ||
| You know, last time you were on the show, you flew in, you bolted from the airport, we talked as fast as we could for about an hour and a half, and then you bolted and left again. | ||
| So this must be very calming for you to be able to be at home and relaxed and at a computer, because you're a busy guy. | ||
| It is very calming. | ||
| I had not spent three months in one location for 20 years. | ||
| And I think I had fallen victim to hyper-mobility and hyper-globalization, where if I wasn't on a long-haul flight at least once a week, I felt there was something wrong with my life. | ||
| And having that all stop has been a real blessing. | ||
| Not everybody gets to work from home. | ||
| I'm one of the lucky ones who can. | ||
| And this has also meant more time with my family. | ||
| I think we all may have been suffering from some kind of collective FOMO as we flew from conference to conference, manically, and COVID-19 stopped the world and said, you can all get off now. | ||
| And for some people, it's been difficult. | ||
| For me, it's been literally coming home, but also metaphorically, because I'm back to the kind of life I had when I was a young academic teaching at Oxford with little kids. | ||
| And that was my life. | ||
| I read books, I wrote books, and I read stories at night, and I'm back to that, and it's great. | ||
| Well, as most of my audience knows, your wife is the magical, amazing, I'll let you add a couple other adjectives, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and you guys do have a toddler now, so you're, look at you, enjoying home life. | ||
| You're supposed to be a stodgy academic, and you're enjoying home life. | ||
| Well, we have, Two sons, actually. | ||
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I'll add the adjectives, shall I, Dave? | |
| Brave, beautiful, and brilliant. | ||
| Those are the three things that describe my wife. | ||
| And she's also a wonderful mother, and our two sons, one of whom is eight, the others two, are a constant source of joy to us. | ||
| And I'm just seeing much more of them, which is fascinating. | ||
| I thought homeschooling was an oxymoron. | ||
| And it turns out actually to work quite well, at least with some kids. | ||
| Thomas, who's eight, he's really been in some ways more engaged because he's had greater freedom to explore. | ||
| And I've been fascinated to watch him become a little autodidact and delve deeply into STEM subjects. | ||
| So yeah, there's all sorts of wonderful things that have come out of 2020, which is Paradoxical because it's been a horrible year for so many people. | ||
| Well, STEM subjects. | ||
| I thought STEM subjects were all racist and patriarchal and part of the oppressive machinery that is the West or something like that. | ||
| You're teaching STEM subjects to an eight-year-old? | ||
| Well, he's teaching them to himself. | ||
| Although I'm from a science background, my mother is a physicist and so is my sister. | ||
| I'm the black sheep of the family who wandered off into the dangerous terrain of the humanities and social sciences. | ||
| But Thomas is a young man with clear vision. | ||
| I think he's identified that humanities and social sciences are no longer the places to be. | ||
| And he's been studying microbiology with considerable zeal entirely at his own initiative. | ||
| Thomas also had the best insight about 2020 that I've yet heard from anybody. | ||
| He said, Dad, there are two pandemics this year. | ||
| I said, really? | ||
| What's the other one? | ||
| He said, well, there's obviously COVID-19, but there's another pandemic which is more contagious, and it's called WOCID-19. | ||
| And you can catch WOCID-19 from the internet, so it's more dangerous than COVID-19. | ||
| I think there's wisdom amongst the eight-year-olds, Dave. | ||
| They give me hope. | ||
| You know, most people make up what their eight-year-olds are saying, but I actually believe that Joran Ion's offspring said that. | ||
| You know, a lot of the Twitter warriors, they sit there pretending, you know. | ||
| It's only one of his many insights into this strange time. | ||
| I do think his generation's going to surprise people if he and his friends are anything to go by. | ||
| There's a kind of healthy skepticism, a sort of South Park quality to this generation, They are very different in their outlook, as far as I can see from an admittedly small sample from the Generation Z 20-somethings who are currently in various stages of anxiety and wokeness. | ||
| So I have a suggestion, which I'm sure it's impossible to do more than speculate about, because we can't poll eight-year-olds. | ||
| But I think Generation T, the kids who came of age during the Trump presidency are going to have very different outlooks, partly because I think they've been slightly force fed woke ideas at school. | ||
| And they do react like, you know, Cartman and Kyle and the kids from South Park, which I find quite encouraging, because at eight, I was a kind of instinctive conservative. | ||
| I think most eight-year-olds are. | ||
| You're kind of against change. | ||
| Even when your parents change the wallpaper in the living room, you're kind of against it. | ||
| And I noticed certain familiar symptoms in Thomas. | ||
| I hope it doesn't all go away when he becomes a teenager. | ||
| That would be awful. | ||
| Well, he's going to have to go through a phase. | ||
| I hate to tell you. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| Well, not necessarily, because in Britain we have boarding schools and you just send away your children the minute they become teenagers. | ||
| And then they hate the teachers instead of you. | ||
| It works remarkably well. | ||
| That's actually pretty clever. | ||
| All right, so we're gonna do something a little bit different than I would normally do if I was to have you on. | ||
| I wanna use the time with you to sort of celebrate America and celebrate freedom. | ||
| This is gonna be our July 4th special. | ||
| We're taping it a little bit before July 4th. | ||
| But because you have an interesting immigration story, your wife has an interesting immigration story, you are a historian and a proud American. | ||
| I thought you were the right guy to talk to about this. | ||
| But before we fully get into that, am I correct you've written 14 books? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I think it might be 15. | ||
| Is it 15 now? | ||
| Yeah, I think so, yeah. | ||
| That's a lot of books. | ||
| I don't even have a question to ask. | ||
| I just wanted to say it because it's an awful lot of books. | ||
| And as a guy that just wrote one, I just feel like you deserve some credit on that. | ||
| Well, the only consolation is I think that each one is easier than the one before. | ||
| So the first one is the hard one. | ||
| It's not like it's an art. | ||
| Writing books is more like building cabinets. | ||
| It's a sort of craft. | ||
| And once you've done it once, the second one is distinctly easier. | ||
| That's the good news. | ||
| There are people more prolific than I am. | ||
| And indeed, one of my heroes, the Scottish novelist John Buchan, regarded it as a kind of wasted year if he hadn't written the book, whereas I think my batting average is a book every two and a half years or so. | ||
| So, I mean, I'm not exceptionally prolific, but I did used to look around at certain universities where I've worked and marvel at how few books some of my colleagues were able to write. | ||
| I don't know what they were doing the rest of the time. | ||
| I live to write and reading and writing are the two things that I do with the greatest facility. | ||
| The thinking in the middle is the difficult bit. | ||
| You do the reading and then the hard bit is the thinking. | ||
| Once you've figured it out, the writing is a relatively straightforward part of the job. | ||
| All right, so between the personal story, the writing, and a little bit of the thinking, let's talk about freedom. | ||
| So first, I just thought telling a bit about your own personal immigration story would be kind of interesting. | ||
| You wrote a blog about it a while back, and I think that might be a nice way to set this whole conversation up. | ||
| Well, I've been working in the United States since around 2002. | ||
| I was transatlantic for a while, going back and forward very regularly. | ||
| And it took a while before I realized that when I was landing at Boston Logan, that felt more like coming home than landing at Heathrow. | ||
| There was a kind of gradual process. | ||
| I decided to come to the United States partly out of a sense that the action was here. | ||
| In my field, I was writing a lot of financial history. | ||
| I'd written the history of the Rothschilds. | ||
| The English, by and large, like their historians to do kings and queens, prime ministers, not bankers. | ||
| New York kind of got what I was doing more than London did. | ||
| And I was kind of toying with the idea of a move to New York University when 9-11 happened. | ||
| Now, the Scots have a propensity to march towards the sound of gunfire, and I was so pissed at the terrorists for attacking New York and so determined that they shouldn't in any way derail my plan that, in fact, almost immediately after The 9-11 attacks. | ||
| I said to NYU, look, I'm open to an offer if you're interested in a more or less faxed one back the next day. | ||
| So I resigned from Oxford and moved to NYU shortly after 9-11 and spent two happy years in New York. | ||
| Everybody should live in New York for at least a couple of years and and then move to Harvard. | ||
| So that was the sort of beginning of an American journey that that was intellectually captivating. | ||
| We went As you recall, very quickly from the terrorist attacks to the Iraq war and debates about American empire, which dominated the administration of George W. Bush. | ||
| Now, I'd just written a book about the British Empire, so it was natural to start thinking about those contemporary American issues. | ||
| But as I said, in that time, I was transatlantic. | ||
| I was very much the British historian in the United States, sort of a stock figure. | ||
| It was only gradually that I began to realize that my future was in the United States and that if I was going to live here and work here and not be a transatlantic bird of passage, then I should really go from being a green card holder to becoming a citizen. | ||
| And I did that almost exactly two years ago. | ||
| I just want to stress, I'm a legal immigrant. | ||
| So I jumped through the various hoops you need to jump through, held a bunch of visas, | ||
| and then became a citizen. | ||
| And it seemed to many of my European contemporaries like a crazy thing to do. | ||
| What, you're becoming an American under the Trump presidency? | ||
| Are you crazy in this time of disruption? | ||
| And my response was, well, yeah, part of the reason for doing that is the recognition that | ||
| you're not signing up for a particular president, you're signing up for the Constitution. | ||
| You're signing up for the ideals of the founders. | ||
| And as I've said often to Ayaan, I think we immigrants have a better appreciation of American freedoms, of the first principles of the Republic, better than native-born Americans, because we've seen some of the alternatives. | ||
| Now, for Ayaan, the alternatives were a great deal worse. | ||
| If you're a girl growing up in Somalia, there aren't really too many freedoms whatsoever. I grew up in Scotland, I grew up in the United | ||
| Kingdom, and in many ways you could say the United States is a sort of outgrowth of the British | ||
| Empire. So there's a less obvious contrast. But there still is a contrast, and I've been | ||
| aware of it ever since I was a kid. | ||
| Can you talk about that contrast? | ||
| I'm interested in that, either from a Scottish or a British perspective, to then come to America and see freedom or live freedom in a new way. | ||
| What types of things, at a granular level, did you feel? | ||
| Did you feel freer as a historian to talk about certain things, or was it just more about the American ethos, or what was it? | ||
| Those are great questions, Dave. | ||
| First, there's a little bit of romance to the United States, that you mustn't lose sight of. | ||
| If you're growing up in Glasgow, where it rains all the time, the romance of the Western, the romance of American music, the romance of American literature, these are powerful, attractive forces. | ||
| And so in the somewhat bleak Glasgow of the 1970s, you've got a picture of spotty teenage Neil reading Jack Kerouac, watching Clint Eastwood, and And listening to a lot of American music, I became a jazz enthusiast as a teenager. | ||
| You can see my double bass in the background there. | ||
| And that's American music par excellence. | ||
| So I think there's a romance piece to this that one shouldn't underestimate. | ||
| But there's an intellectual piece too. | ||
| I was steeped in the values of the Scottish Enlightenment as a boy, the ideals of Adam Smith, a very individualistic culture. | ||
| of 18th century Glasgow and Edinburgh. | ||
| But those values had really declined in their significance in Scotland. | ||
| Socialism had caught fire in Scotland in the early 20th century. | ||
| I had a great uncle who was a communist, many other people around us were diehard Labour supporters. | ||
| And those Enlightenment ideals of individual responsibility of the free market, they had all really faded. | ||
| To the point that the Scots hated Margaret Thatcher for espousing those principles. | ||
| Now, what's attractive to an immigrant like me about the United States is that in some places, not everywhere, but in some places you can still find those enlightenment values and they're being lived, they're practiced. | ||
| That's a very attractive feature. | ||
| I think it's also true that when a Scotsman comes to England, he's constantly conscious of his being Scottish. | ||
| The English are obsessed with class the way Americans are obsessed with race. | ||
| Everything is about class in England. | ||
| And the question is always, well, which school did you go to, really? | ||
| And can you just do something about that funny accent of yours? | ||
| So I never really felt wholly at home in England, though I lived for many years there in Oxford and Cambridge and felt much more at home as soon as I arrived in the United States. | ||
| The English believe in effortless superiority. | ||
| They think you should just sort of be born Superior. | ||
| Americans believe in work and they don't begrudge success. | ||
| And so if you're a kind of ambitious, hardworking Scotsman, this is a more natural habitat for you than England. | ||
| So for all those reasons, it didn't take long to feel at home in the United States, perhaps more at home than I'd ever felt in England. | ||
| There's quite a lot of Scottish in the kind of the foundations of this country. | ||
| And when Alexander Hamilton suddenly became a household name, thanks to Lin Manuel Miranda's musical, that was that was nice because he'd been a kind of hero long before he became famous again in our family. | ||
| My mother's name is Hamilton. | ||
| The Scots love to say they invented the modern world. | ||
| And so naturally, that includes inventing the United States or at least its its fiscal system. | ||
| So for their whole bunch of reasons, this country was always powerfully attractive to me. | ||
| I hitchhiked across America before I went up to university at the age of 17. | ||
| I actually reenacted Jack Kerouac on the road with considerable fidelity to the original. | ||
| So yeah, the American dream has come in many forms for me. | ||
| And and that's, I think, ultimately why becoming a citizen was exciting. | ||
| The whole process was exciting, even although it had its its surreal side to it. | ||
| Did you notice a difference on the academic side when you were with intellectuals, the way European intellectuals would perhaps talk about something versus the way Americans did, or maybe a different focus or anything like that? | ||
| Well, here I think there is a disappointment, which I need to admit to. | ||
| I came to the United States believing that American universities were the places where the biggest intellects had the biggest Uh, arguments and that that was part of the appeal of Harvard. | ||
| I, I admit there was this sense that Oxford and Cambridge had been the great universities of the 19th and 20th century. | ||
| But now in the 21st century, you really wanted to be at Harvard. | ||
| And I, I think over time it was a slow process. | ||
| I became disillusioned with the American Academy and I found that it was becoming less and less hospitable to the kind of Rambunctious free inquiry that motivates me. | ||
| And now I've reached the point where I look back nostalgically on the Oxford of the 1980s, where there was simply no question of your free speech being circumscribed. | ||
| On the contrary, in the 1980s, we kind of found ourselves constantly pushing the boundaries of what could be said. | ||
| As undergraduates, we found our professors were intellectually An extraordinarily diverse bunch. | ||
| There were the diehard Marxists, the kind of Eric Hobsbawm types. | ||
| And then there were the high Tories, the Jeremy Cattos. | ||
| And it was a tremendously enriching experience. | ||
| Academic life in the United States, especially in the last, I'll say, five years, as Jonathan Haidt and others have noted, has really, really been damaged. | ||
| by a culture of what used to be called political correctness, but I don't think that quite captures it, of fundamental intolerance, of a deep illiberalism, a deep hostility to free debate and free inquiry that is killing the great institutions of American academia. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I'm as proud as it could be of being an American, but I'm at the same time depressed By some of the trends that I see in the country today, because they seem so at odds with the first principles of American life. | ||
| Is it weird for you to see this spread across the world at the same time? | ||
| Because last year when I was at Oxford and I got to speak at Oxford Union, which I still, it sort of feels like a dream that I even got to speak there, but just being there and being around the hundreds of years of history and walking around and you feel this thing that you guys have, that we have much less of, obviously, because of the breadth of history, you feel this Generation after generation of caring about knowledge and history and all of these things. | ||
| And even just in the last couple days, I've seen these articles that Oxford, there are professors pushing to have more lenient grades for students of color and just the rest of the sort of what I would call intellectual rot that we've seen across these schools. | ||
| It must be particularly painful for you to see it happen at a place like Oxford. | ||
| I think so, although I sometimes get the sense that it's not that deep, the rot in Oxford. | ||
| For example, I was very pleased that the Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson and other leaders of the university dismissed, again, the calls to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes that stands in Oriel College. | ||
| Cambridge, I think, has been rather more inclined to appease these forces of iconoclasm. It is iconoclasm, the tearing | ||
| down of statues. And I know that I'm a conservative. When I see statues being torn down and a | ||
| little part of me winces, it doesn't really much matter who the statue is. I prefer statues to be built. | ||
| And I think Oxford has held the line there thus far. | ||
| But as is always the case, there are elements within any academic society that see opportunities in the ideologies of wokeness, see ways in which they can advance their own careers by championing these outlandish and illiberal ideas. | ||
| The great danger is that it becomes a norm That a university should be intellectually homogenous, that we should pursue every kind of diversity except intellectual and ideological diversity. | ||
| And I worry that eventually what has been happening at American universities will overcome the healthier forces in Oxford and Cambridge. | ||
| That's not to say that we couldn't do more at these universities to make them attractive to and appealing to people from minority communities and from the white working | ||
| class which is notably underrepresented at these places. But the mistake | ||
| that's always made in these debates is to think that the problem lies | ||
| with the universities rather than with the systems of education that simply | ||
| discourage students or make them unable to apply to elite institutions. | ||
| I've always said I believe passionately in educational opportunity and the social mobility that it creates. | ||
| My parents were the first in their families to go to university and what I see in the United States and in the UK are failing schools that don't allow talented young people, whether they're from minority communities or from the working class to get anywhere close That's what we need to fix. | ||
| And there are lots of ways of doing it, but one doesn't hear those discussed. | ||
| So I know we could spend eight hours dissecting wokeness and the rest of it, but I want to shift from it a little bit. | ||
| But I just have one other question on the woke thing, since we've treaded into those waters. | ||
| As a conservative academic, you were obviously, and we talked a little bit about this last time, on the outside of what most academic circles think is acceptable, even in historical, in history department. | ||
| Do you think that conservatives have a better defense against wokeness than liberals? | ||
| So, for example, John Haight, who I've had on the show, and many of the other academics that you know that I've talked to, that come from the more liberal side, I sense that they, although they're making good arguments, I don't think they have good defenses against this because of the sort of openness of liberalism, that it's being used against itself. | ||
| And I do sense that conservatism as a worldview, or as a philosophical lens, does have some protections that liberalism doesn't. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Well, it's true that we wouldn't be in quite this situation if it hadn't been for liberal professors giving jobs to progressive professors who then gave jobs to Marxists and cultural Marxists. | ||
| I mean, conservative academic, conservative professors, these are becoming oxymorons because there are so few conservatives left in the American Academy. | ||
| I mean, the figures are clear. | ||
| It's not like this is an old problem that we've always had. | ||
| Over time, the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans has risen steadily to the point that you can't calculate it in some departments because there are zero Republicans. | ||
| And I think that that trend Broadly is explicable because liberals felt that they should hire people to the left of them, underestimating the extent to which those people would fundamentally differ on the principles of, say, the project of historical scholarship. | ||
| It is not the goal of a history department to impose on the past The ideals of the progressives of 2020, that's the ultimate condescension to the past. | ||
| Conservatives have understood better, I think, the dangers and the tragedy has been that conservatives have been poorly organized. | ||
| I mean, the extinction of conservatives in, say, history departments isn't just the fault of liberals hiring progressives. | ||
| It's also that the conservatives did poorly when it came to the most basic organization that has to happen in academia, the patronage networks, getting your students into good positions. | ||
| I don't think conservatives were very good at that. | ||
| My conservative mentors were wonderful intellectuals, people like Norman Stone. | ||
| But Norman would not be remembered, I think, for his organizational skills, for his writing, certainly, but definitely not for his deafness at academic politics. | ||
| So it's partly, I think, because conservatives were rather too busy writing books. | ||
| And perhaps occasionally drinking bottles of wine and not working hard enough at the committee stages to make sure that the right candidates got hired. | ||
| It's interesting, and I think that right there almost explains everything happening in the world right now, that we let all these kids out after watching academia sort of crumble, and here we are. | ||
| But shifting from that, from a historian's perspective, what do you think that the average American Should know about the history of America that we don't know or that we underappreciate because, you know, we seem to live in a time where we're we're erasing our own history and we're taking down monuments and we're, you know, destroying the names of people that were flawed, but that were just people of their time. | ||
| Well, I think the the challenge here is that history is not it's not monochrome. | ||
| The history of any great society or state can't be told as a eulogy, nor as a kind of criminal indictment. | ||
| And the good historian of the United States, or for that matter, of the United Kingdom, acknowledges that there are debits as well as credits, that there's shadow, there's dark sides to the story as well as bright sides. | ||
| And this is a challenge that I didn't think was difficult. | ||
| When I was writing early in my career, I wrote a history of the British Empire, which included a chapter on the American Revolution. | ||
| And the book sets out very plainly the many stains on the history of the British Empire, including, of course, the central role of slavery in the southern colonies that became the southern states of the United States. | ||
| But the point of that book, and I'd make the same argument about the history of the United States, is that the benefits outweighed the costs, that the successes were more important ultimately than the failures. | ||
| The project that the New York Times was given a Pulitzer for this year of recasting the history of the United States in terms of slavery as the primary narrative, the 1619 project, seems to me just to be fundamentally Historically wrong. | ||
| It's a distortion. | ||
| This isn't to say that slavery didn't matter. | ||
| It just doesn't mean it's not important. | ||
| It's just that if you were to try to explain the significance of the United States to a visiting Martian, you wouldn't start with slavery because that wasn't really an especially unique feature of the United States. | ||
| There was slavery and it lasted much longer in Brazil. | ||
| There was slavery and it was far harsher in the Caribbean colonies of Britain and other European states. | ||
| So what's the defining characteristic? | ||
| What's the thing that makes the United States distinctive? | ||
| It's not slavery any more than if you looked at Western civilization broadly. | ||
| It would be true to say that imperialism is the defining characteristic. | ||
| Everybody did empire just as slavery goes way back before 1619. | ||
| All the way to ancient times. | ||
| And by the way, still exists. | ||
| There is still slavery. | ||
| There are slave markets where people are sold. | ||
| There are slave economies which rely on slave labor today. | ||
| So it can't really be true to say that the interesting thing, the thing you really need to know about the United States is slavery. | ||
| But the interesting thing about the United States is that it represented an experiment in governance, a radical experiment based on ideas from the Enlightenment and earlier ideas from the Protestant Reformation, it's fair to say. | ||
| And this produced an extraordinary constitution, which has stood up to all the stresses and strains of history since the late 18th century. | ||
| And understanding that peculiar constitution, that very distinctive document with its separation of powers and its careful preservations of individual liberty, that should be your top priority if you're studying American history. | ||
| Not to the exclusion of the bad stuff. | ||
| There's plenty of bad stuff that we need to study. | ||
| But I don't think we should be teaching young Americans from Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. | ||
| in which the negatives are constantly emphasized over the positives. | ||
| That just seems to me to miss the point of the American story completely. | ||
| Are you worried that the extraordinary pressures that we're facing right now between a pandemic, | ||
| between riots and protests, between polarization that really is off the charts | ||
| and then throw in social media, which is just gas on the flame. | ||
| Are you worried that those pressures could snap that project in a way that it hasn't been snapped before? | ||
| Or certainly in the last hundred years, let's say? | ||
| Dave, let me give you a somewhat surprising answer to that question. | ||
| I'd be worried if we weren't worried. | ||
| One of the things about this country that's very distinctive is that we're always worried that the Republic's gonna end We're always kind of fretting about the coming tyranny, the impending civil war. | ||
| And thus far, there's been one civil war and no dictatorships. | ||
| And that's kind of encouraging. | ||
| I think that's partly because we worry about it. | ||
| And I think it's a healthy feature of American life also to expect decline. | ||
| People have been predicting the decline of the United States throughout my life. | ||
| It was a preoccupation of Henry Kissinger, who's biography I'm in the midst of writing, in the 1970s it | ||
| seemed as if the United States was being torn apart by Vietnam, torn apart by its racial divisions, | ||
| torn apart by a president who had violated his oath of office. All of that we've seen before. | ||
| And I think it's part of the way the United States works that we're always expecting the | ||
| disintegration of the republic and the descent into civil war. | ||
| And I think we'll have to start being nervous if we stop worrying about that stuff. | ||
| But as long as we have my old friend Andrew Sullivan so fretful about the coming Trump tyranny that he doesn't quite spot the tyranny of the left until it's right up behind him. | ||
| I mean, that that's kind of the predicament that I think a lot of liberals and conservatives find themselves in, that they were so Indignant and dismayed by Trump back in 2016 that they slightly underestimated the rather more operationally worrying tyrannical tendencies of the radical left. | ||
| So yeah, I think we should keep worrying about this stuff. | ||
| And as long as we're worrying about it, we'll probably be okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does it also strike you as odd or maybe obvious relative to social media that when something happens here, that it suddenly happens everywhere? | ||
| I mean, we've all seen the videos now of literally police officers in London being hunted down by mobs. | ||
| That has nothing to do in any concrete sense with what happened to George Floyd. | ||
| And yet it seems like if there's an incident here, it's now exported everywhere. | ||
| I think future historians will wonder why it was that in the midst of a pandemic, which is far from over, Americans decided to have a debate about police violence towards African Americans. | ||
| Not to say that that's not an important issue to think about, but it seems an odd time to have that debate and to start debates about defunding the police when We should really be wondering what went wrong with the Department of Health and Human Services and CDC when they ought to have taken far better and earlier action to contain the contagion. | ||
| There's something strange. | ||
| It's a non sequitur that in the midst of this massive public health crisis, which has killed nearly 120,000 Americans and will probably kill another 120,000 before the end of the year, we're having this this debate. | ||
| But the second point I'd make is that The Internet has created a new kind of contagion. | ||
| As I said earlier, quoting my son, there are two pandemics. | ||
| And the second pandemic, in fact, predates the murder of George Floyd, because it's a pandemic of protest that you could actually see in Hong Kong, in Santiago, in Barcelona, in cities like Beirut last year. | ||
| And what is interesting to me is that the mode of protest is consistently the same. | ||
| The content varies from place to place. | ||
| But this quality of protest to go viral, styles of protest to be copied from Hong Kong to Minneapolis is really interesting. | ||
| I mean, historically, the police had better communications than demonstrators for most of the second half of the 20th century. | ||
| The police had walkie talkies and the demonstrators were lucky if they had megaphones. | ||
| But the smartphone has changed that and it's allowed protesters to really organize these acephalous networks where there is no obvious leader and actually have superior comms to the police. | ||
| So I think what's interesting about the great eruption of protest that we've seen in the last month in the United States It is that actually, it's in terms of its form, quite a close copy of the Hong Kong protests of last year. | ||
| It's just that the content's different. | ||
| And I think you can keep these sorts of protest waves going as long as people have viral video, as well as sort of tips on organizing a protest that they can simply download and apply to their own context. | ||
| That I think is the really interesting feature. | ||
| It's not the content of the protests that The same as in previous waves of revolution. | ||
| Here, it's just the form of protest that's the same. | ||
| The content varies from place to place. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| So you're saying you're not worried because we worry and then on the other hand, there is this other pathogen or virus or whatever you want to call it that really does make this something that we've just never dealt with before. | ||
|
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I think we've dealt with The revolutionary crowd before. | |
| It's just like the revolutionary crowd didn't have smartphones before. | ||
| I was fascinated by the way in which the Hong Kong protesters outsmarted the police there last year, partly by constantly changing the form of the protest, partly by not having leaders that you could just round up, partly by shifting away from violence when violence was alienating local people. | ||
| And I think we saw something of that happen. | ||
| Because in June, there was a period early on when the protests were quite violent, and there was looting, and that actually was quite unhelpful to the protesters' cause. | ||
| And then you saw a shift in the style of protest in many places. | ||
| So this shape-shifting quality of the crowd with smartphones is an interesting thing to observe. | ||
| I don't think it's necessarily a disastrous phenomenon, because in some contexts, these protests achieve successful outcomes. | ||
| You know, crowds aren't always bad. | ||
| There are even occasions when you can justify pulling down a statue, think New York 1776. | ||
| But my my sense is that on the specific issue that is being addressed in the United States today, which has to do with changing the way the police operate, there's a big disconnect between What is said by protesters, and indeed by Black Lives Matter, and what we know from good social science, the real problem is. | ||
| And I do think it's difficult for a crowd to read social science and arrive at actionable policy recommendations. | ||
| That tends not to happen. | ||
| Is that the biggest danger that we have going right now, that there's a certain set of people that it doesn't matter what the social science says, it doesn't matter what the facts say, that their ideology overrides all of that? | ||
| So this sort of goes back to what I was saying about our liberal academic friends. | ||
| It's like, you guys can make sound arguments all day long. | ||
| That's great, I love it. | ||
| I'll do it all day with you. | ||
| But that doesn't actually address the problem Because there's something else going on here that can't be rationalized out of. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think, you know, the case of Roland Fire illustrates many of the predicaments that we find ourselves in today. | ||
| Roland, who wrote some pioneering papers as a Harvard economist in 2016, published an extraordinarily important study showing that while the police did disproportionately shove, push and otherwise manhandle African-Americans compared with white | ||
| suspects. | ||
| They did not disproportionately shoot African-Americans. | ||
| And that finding was an extremely important one, since at the core of Black Lives Matter | ||
| was a claim that the police disproportionately use lethal violence against black people. | ||
| And it turns out not to be true. | ||
| But what became of Roland after that publication, he knew there would be blowback, and there was. | ||
| But what actually happened was not at all what he or I or his friends had expected. | ||
| What happened was that he was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee, white incidentally. | ||
| And then found himself sucked into a Title IX investigation at Harvard, which I think was actually a grave miscarriage of justice. | ||
| And it's hard to avoid the suspicion that if Roland's research had arrived at more politically correct conclusions that were more compatible with progressive narratives, perhaps that might not have happened. | ||
| I certainly think that there's something to be asked, some hard questions to be asked about why an African-American professor who It's something that's been on my mind for some time now, since the case against him was brought. | ||
| hand experience, has had first hand experience of police brutality. Why he should have ended | ||
| up being treated in this way by mostly white progressive administrators at the country's | ||
| most well known and eminent university. It's something that's been on my mind for some | ||
| time now since the case against him was brought. And I sense that ultimately we won't really | ||
| be able to arrive at a serious discussion of these issues, data based and also based | ||
| on personal experience, as long as Roland's been cancelled in the name of Me Too. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| So in a weird way, do you need the institutions to crumble so that something better can happen? | ||
| Like, it seems like we're sort of just in a slow crumble phase right now. | ||
| There doesn't seem to be any great institution, whether it's Harvard or the New York Times or a series of other things that we sort of all look to as the guardians of the republic. | ||
| They're all sort of crumbling. | ||
| Do you think they have to crumble to reset? | ||
| Or do you think they can actually Well, I think one of the lessons of American history is that, at its best, the United States creates new institutions rather than just gives the old ones makeovers. | ||
| I think one of the sad features of our time is that the Great plutocrats of our gilded age have not created new universities as their predecessors did in the late 19th century, but have simply given money to the existing institutions, in particular to institutions that already had tons of money. | ||
| And my recommendation to today's robber barons, or if you want to put it politely, titans of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, is just remember the examples of the Carnegie's And do some innovation here. | ||
| Build some new institutions. | ||
| You don't like what's happening at Harvard or Yale or Stanford? | ||
| Well, there's nothing to stop you creating a new institution because that's the American way. | ||
| What Tocqueville noticed, the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came to the United States before writing his great book, Democracy in America, was that Americans then did not expect The government to solve their problems. | ||
| They did it through associational life. | ||
| And for me, the most striking feature of this American story is this readiness for people at the local level to deal with problems locally, to build civic institutions locally, and not to expect The federal government, or for that matter, Harvard or the New York Times, to come up with solutions. | ||
| So I desperately feel a need for new institutions, and not only at the level of colleges. | ||
| I think we need new schools. | ||
| There's been some innovation in that direction in the charter school movement, but it's still really a drop in the bucket of what needs to happen to improve American secondary education, which is the real weakness that this country is burdened with. | ||
| So I think we just need to remind ourselves that in its original design, the United States was supposed to be A. decentralized with B. small government, C. a vibrant associational life and religious life, and crucially, a sort of constant formation of new institutions. | ||
| That was what you did if you'd been successful. | ||
| If you'd had the American capitalist dream, giving back involved more than just A new building at Harvard with your name on it, giving back meant a new university, something that hadn't existed before. | ||
| That's what we seem to have lost. | ||
| And I'm really struck by that lack of new institutions as one of the pathologies, one of the signs of our recent degeneration. | ||
| So you don't think that the Harvard endowment, which is worth, what, $40 billion, you don't think they need a couple more bucks? | ||
| Far be it from me to advise America's philanthropists where they should put their money. | ||
| But if they applied the kind of due diligence standards that they apply when they're making investments to their philanthropy, then I think they might at least think twice. | ||
| Because the return of an investment that you get from donating to an already established institution just can't be that high. | ||
| I mean, what real marginal impact does a million dollars make to Harvard? | ||
| Whereas if you were to use the money to create something new, the return on investment would potentially be far higher. | ||
| So I think there's a need for new institutions. | ||
| I think it would help revitalize, just as we should have new statues. | ||
| If you don't like the old ones, why not build some new statues rather than wasting your energies on vandalism? | ||
| One of my favourite sculptors, Sandy Stoddart, who's a great opponent of iconoclasm, built two wonderful, created two wonderful statues in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. | ||
| One is of David Hume and the other is of Adam Smith. | ||
| They're beautiful statues. | ||
| They stand in the Royal Mile. | ||
| Tourists assume they've been there for at least 100 years. | ||
| They're barely 10 years old. | ||
| And I think Sandy Stoddart could be well employed in the United States. | ||
| creating some beautiful new statues to whoever it is that we think should be the heroes of our time. | ||
| That would be a far better employment of public energy than the kind of vandalism that we see these days. | ||
| So since this is our July 4th week show, and I've got a noted historian on, | ||
| give me a little American history that maybe the average person watching this, | ||
| give me something, an anecdote, a story, a moment that the average person watching this | ||
| maybe doesn't know that much about, that they should know. | ||
| Is there something that sticks out to you as, boy, more people should know about that story, that moment. | ||
| Well, I suspect in a crowded field, I'd be bound to choose one of those episodes that really paved the way for the United States to become not just a hugely successful republic, more successful than any previous republic, but a great power, even a superpower. | ||
| The temptation for republics, historically, has always been, at a certain point, for the temptation's power to steer the republic to tyranny. | ||
| This very nearly happened during Harry Truman's presidency, at the time of the Korean War, when a heroic figure, Douglas MacArthur, Quarreled with Truman about the direction of the Korean War MacArthur actually was in favor of dropping atomic bombs on China to end the war and It came to a clash that to another Republic that might have been fatal think of the fate of the Roman Republic which ultimately became an Empire's the mighty figure of of Augustus ultimately | ||
| sucked the life out of the institutions of the Republic. | ||
| But I think that the showdown that happened then between Truman and MacArthur, Truman's successful assertion of the primacy of the civilian authority, is a hugely important moment in American history. | ||
| Truman was a great president in a whole range of ways. | ||
| He is best known for the famous line, the buck stops here. | ||
| But it stopped there in a very important way when Truman asserted the primacy of the presidency against a charismatic military figure who, when he returned to the United States at a ticker tape parade in New York, you watch the scenes of MacArthur's return at that time of crisis when it seemed he might make a presidential bid himself. | ||
| You realize that the United States was teetering on the brink of a Roman outcome, but pulled back. And I want to emphasize | ||
| that episode, which isn't well known, because you should always keep in mind the history of what | ||
| hasn't happened, what didn't happen, even if it nearly did. You have to keep alive in your mind | ||
| all the times that this republic might have have fallen from the path of democracy and the rule of | ||
| law. And I... | ||
| And remind yourself when you're feeling down, as some people occasionally do feel down contemplating our politics, that American democracy has never been a fairy story. | ||
| When Charles Dickens came to the United States in the 19th century, he was appalled by the viciousness of American politics, by its venality, by the rule of money, by the corrupt press. | ||
| We shouldn't tell ourselves that there's some golden age in the past that we've somehow lapsed from. | ||
| I think that's a very common failing that Americans have. | ||
| They're always telling themselves it was so much better in those good old days. | ||
| Pick a decade, the 50s, the 80s. | ||
| But I don't think that's the right way to think about American history. | ||
| I think it's better to realize that the Republican experiment, the experiment with this particular constitution was always going to be fraught with peril, that the founding fathers knew that somebody like Donald Trump would become president at some point. | ||
| That was why they designed the constitution the way they did. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton's very explicit about that in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere. | ||
| So I think as an immigrant, my advice to Americans is, Don't have this fantasy America that you keep failing to live up to, that you feel you've somehow missed, because it never existed. | ||
| There's never been that fantasy America. | ||
| There's always been an America teetering on the brink, with the separation of powers threatening at times to collapse. | ||
| And as I've said, with the temptations of empire periodically coming along and saying to the Republic, come on, be Rome. | ||
| Thus far, we've always rightly said no. | ||
| You're hopeful, my friend. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Immigrants are. | ||
| That's why we come here. | ||
| Remember, for all that Americans love to hate on themselves, this is still the number one destination for people who say they would like to leave the country of their birth. | ||
| And it seems unlikely to me that that would be the case if this really was the cesspit of racism that it's so often described as by progressives. | ||
| Right, I love the open borders crowd. | ||
| We'll also tell you that we're an evil, racist, patriarchal society, and yet everyone apparently should come here to share in the horror. | ||
| It's a slight flaw in the thinking, don't you think? | ||
| It is a paradox. | ||
| One thing that COVID-19 has done has been to remind everybody that borders matter and that the health and safety of citizens, in fact, depend on secure borders where people Coming even only as visitors can be monitored. | ||
| And that I think is one of the important and unexpected consequences of the pandemic that isn't widely recognized. | ||
| Ultimately, President Trump's arguments back in 2016 included the following, that borders really mattered and shouldn't be porous, and that China was a problem and a threat to our national security. | ||
| COVID-19 has illustrated both those points pretty well. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| Dare I ask a historian to make some political predictions? | ||
| Go on. | ||
| The only point of studying history is to understand the present and plausible futures better. | ||
| So are you going to punt that one? | ||
| I mean, what do you think is going to happen over there? | ||
| If you had to just sort of generally paint the next couple of months, where do you think we're at? | ||
| I think what's going to happen is what happened in 2016, that opinion polls and approval ratings will consistently predict a democratic victory. | ||
| And the media and the people who work on American politics will replicate the mistakes that they made in 2016 by looking ever more closely at polls and prediction markets. | ||
| And then they will get a very, very big surprise. | ||
| Because I sense from revealed preferences, as opposed to stated preferences, that the country is far from convinced that it should go down the road of open borders or defunding the police or a Green New Deal. | ||
| And the more they hear of those radical ideas from Democrats, the more upheaval they see in the streets of American cities, the more they quietly make a mental note. | ||
|
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To vote Republican on November the 3rd. | |
| Of course, I could find myself very badly wrong. | ||
| Anybody who makes a prediction about an American election in the summer is running the risk of engaging in a kind of astrology. | ||
| But let me give you a data point, Dave. | ||
| It's very interesting, and I've heard it from many different quarters, how many people have bought firearms in 2020. | ||
| You're looking at one of them. | ||
| And you're looking at one of them too, Dave. | ||
| In the month of March alone, the monthly background checks were double what happened on average in 2019. | ||
| Now, I'm going to call that a revealed preference. | ||
| I'm going to suggest that the months of May and June may also see elevated purchases. | ||
| One of the most sure predictors of a Republican vote in 2016 was if a household possessed a firearm. | ||
| Households without firearms overwhelmingly voted Democrat. | ||
| Houses with firearms overwhelmingly voted Republican. | ||
| I'm just saying that there are sources of data other than opinion polls that it would be prudent to look at at a time when people have all kinds of incentives not to be quite straight with pollsters. | ||
| Revealed preferences are the things to look at. | ||
| And my sense is that the mood of the country is not being well understood by the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN at the moment. | ||
| I don't think it's being well understood at all. | ||
| My nightmare, though, to take another stab at prediction is that we end up with a result like 2000, that we end up with a tie. | ||
| I worry that Joe Biden's a weak candidate and Donald Trump is in a recession, having not handled COVID-19 brilliantly. | ||
| They're both weak. | ||
| And in that scenario, You could imagine a 2000-like result, but with multiple states having their results contested because of controversies around postal voting. | ||
| And that would be the nightmare scenario for the United States, because it would not be resolved as quickly as it was, nor would the result be accepted by the losing side as quickly as it was in 2000. | ||
| So when I look into the crystal ball, I do find myself hoping for a decisive result. | ||
| Because a tie of that sort, I think would plunge us into weeks, possibly months of strife. | ||
| And it would be the perfect opportunity for America's enemies to make any move that they might've been considering. | ||
| All right, we can't end on this because you've actually been quite uplifting throughout and have a firm belief in America. | ||
| So you gotta bring me home on something positive. | ||
| Give me something here to bring it all together. | ||
| Well, I think, as I said, worrying about this stuff is probably the best way to prepare for it and divert a disaster. | ||
| There's still time, actually, to make sure that we don't have multiple contested results from states. | ||
| It's, as we speak, not yet July 4th. | ||
| In the same way, looking back, that we can learn from what went wrong in this country in January and February. | ||
| Remember, the real question for 2020 Is not did President Trump get COVID-19 wrong? | ||
| The real question is why the Department of Health and Human Services, which has an assistant secretary for preparedness, get it wrong? | ||
| Why did what we sometimes call the deep state fail so disastrously to get this right, despite on paper having multiple plans for pandemic preparedness and biodefense? | ||
| So I think we have the chance now To start learning from mistakes that were made back in January when we could have averted this great economic catastrophe just by learning from what the Taiwanese and the South Koreans did. | ||
| We still, I think, have the ability. | ||
| I don't think we've so lost our minds that we've lost the ability to learn from obvious mistakes of governance. | ||
| And we should learn from what went wrong in that pandemic, just as we should learn from what went wrong in some recent elections. | ||
| I mean, Think of some of the primary results that descended into farce. | ||
| We've got to make sure, by worrying about this issue, that we don't have an Iowa caucus writ large on November the 3rd. | ||
| You can imagine, you understand the internet as well as any public intellectual, Dave, you can imagine the chaos of conspiracy theories we could be confronting on November the 4th if there is uncertainty. | ||
| So, you know, let's do what Americans have long been famous for, Here's a problem. | ||
| Let's fix it with the can-do spirit. | ||
| That's what Europeans used to say distinguished Americans from everybody else. | ||
| Let's fix the problems that have revealed themselves in our pandemic preparedness and in our electoral system. | ||
| We've just got time to do it. | ||
| And it will be, I think, the perfect expression of the American way if we fix it just in time. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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