All Episodes
Previous Next
July 24, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
53:54
Rachel Ferguson on the Racist Roots of the Managerial Machine | The TRUTH Podcast #56
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I see an important, friendly, but nonetheless existent rift brewing in the America First movement among fellow conservatives.
And the rift is this between what I call the protectionist or economic nationalist wing of our movement and the civic nationalist wing of our movement.
And I think that there's a lot of overlap in rejecting the historical neoliberal consensus of yesterday on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration, on this idea that the United States is just some economic zone, but instead to go into the reasons why we reject that historical neoliberal consensus.
A lot of folks on the right reject that consensus because they believe it is the job of the U.S. government to protect American workers and manufacturers from the competitive effects of immigration on labor and wages, from the effects of foreign products being imported into the United States and the prices that American manufacturers are able to command.
That's what I call the national protectionist wing, the economic nationalist wing of the America First movement.
That's different from what I call the national libertarian aspect of it, which is admittedly what I'm more partial to, which is the belief that the old neoliberal consensus caused an erosion of our national identity.
It caused us to be dependent on foreign countries like China for even our own military industrial base and our own pharmaceutical supply chains, which erodes the national security of the United States of America.
That's a different concern.
It's not a concern about economic protection of wages or prices.
But it's a concern about the national security and national identity of the United States of America.
The same goes for immigration policy for that matter.
One issue with our expansive immigration and even illegal immigration policies in the United States is that it has eroded the national identity of the United States.
I think we need heightened screening for the kinds of immigrants who are able to enter the United States of America based on their civic knowledge, based on their civic commitments.
I think we should eliminate dual citizenship as a category.
But that's a different way to address the immigration issue than to look at it through the lens of labor policy, which says that our sole or primary goal is to protect American workers from the effects of foreign competition when it comes to people who are willing to work for lower prices.
I'm not criticizing that view, but I'm noticing for now, I'm noting for now a distinction in what I see as probably a very important but beneath the surface right now brewing intellectual rift In our own America First movement, and I think that that movement is going to be stronger if we're able to air a lot of those differences and discuss them respectfully in the open, rather than trying to sweep them under the rug.
I gave a speech about this recently at the NatCon conference.
I do believe that you don't just tell audiences what they want to hear.
You tell audiences sometimes what they need to hear, or at least what your true beliefs are.
But coming out of that, I was really looking forward to a separate conversation on an adjacent topic, which we're about to have today, which is the idea of the nanny state altogether.
You know, we have historically the idea of a left-wing nanny state created by, you know, go back to FDR, go to LBJ, all the way down to the present, that was created in the name of helping certain communities in the United States.
Now, in this case, the left-wing version of this was directed at helping Black Americans or minorities.
And what we've seen over the 60-year project of the Great Society, the greatest misnomer of a policy agenda I think in American history, is that those very policies that were supposed to coddle and help and contribute to the flourishing of black Americans have actually had the opposite effect.
And it's been sad.
It's been a betrayal of the very people who were supposedly supposed to be helped by those policies.
I bring that up in the context of this discussion because I think conservatives would now do well to remember that we don't want to create a right-wing version of that left-wing nanny state.
What we should want to do, in my opinion, is to dismantle that nanny state and its regulatory apparatus and the administrative state along with it.
That's the defining fork in the road, I believe, for the future of the conservative movement.
Do we want to reform and reshape that regulatory state and that nanny state to help a different group of people, American workers and manufacturers?
Or do we want to dismantle that nanny state and its regulatory apparatus?
That's the camp I fall into.
Now, I think one of the ways we'll understand this for the future of the conservative movement is to look at actually where liberal policies, progressive policies, well-intentioned policies to help different groups of people, admittedly, over the last 60 years have actually failed to achieve their objectives on their own terms.
And it's in that hope, it's an advancing of that conversation that we have our guest today on the podcast, Professor Ferguson, who I'm welcoming for the first time.
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
And Professor Ferguson, I think I'd look forward to diving deep into your work, not so much on the future of the conservative movement, though we can go there too, but your study historically of how some of the policies adopted in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society over the last 60 years have actually contributed to not the flourishing, but even the diminishment of success in the black community in particular.
And your scholarship, I think, has been particularly illuminating, talking about the importance of potentially black economic progress and what that could mean and how that vision differs from the historical nanny state vision that's been foisted on much of black America from the progressive movement of the last 60 years.
So I've enjoyed reading your books and your articles and welcome to the podcast.
And I look forward to this conversation.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks for coming on.
So first, I wanted to at least give the audience a chance to understand your background a little bit before we get into the substance of this.
What brought you to the issue specifically of Black economic empowerment?
And how was that distinct from looking at economic empowerment more generally?
And what perspective did you bring to this issue in the first place?
Yeah, I've really been a member of the liberty movement all my life.
I did my PhD in philosophy, wrote my dissertation on property rights and the Scottish enlightenment.
And so I've been thinking about the institutions that undergird economic flourishing, you know, all my life.
And so as I saw the issue of race become very, very hot after Ferguson, I noticed that, you know, the classical liberal movement has so many insights on race and discrimination.
I had been hearing them all my years as an academic, and yet no one really sees us as a resource in that regard.
So I thought somebody's got to bring all of these insights together into one place and show that classical liberal economists and philosophers Have been working on issues of minority exclusion from property rights, contract rights, and other economic institutions for many years.
And what would you say are some of those insights that you think our movement has missed in that regard?
Well, you know, you mentioned LBJ and the Great Society.
I would actually go much earlier than that.
Let's start with capital P progressivism at the turn of the century, which was eugenicist.
This is something we downplay too much in our education system.
This is a movement that believed in a pseudoscientific concept of race, Put blacks at the bottom of that and decided that in modern life, this is capital P progressivism, right?
In modern life, life is too complicated.
And so we have to put experts in charge.
And what the experts are going to do is they're going to decide how to support the white Aryan male head of household and how to let other groups fade away.
What was one of their ideas to do that?
The minimum wage.
And this is totally explicit.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's right there in the economics textbooks.
This is how we're going to disemploy the undesirables and allow them to fade away.
You saw that theme of eugenicism then picked up in the Federal Housing Administration, who was trying to control who lived where.
They didn't want to extend mortgage insurance to black neighborhoods or to integrated neighborhoods.
They wanted black and white people to live apart, et cetera.
And so you see these ideas playing out very, very early, actually.
And what's interesting is that it's from the progressive side, right?
What was interesting to me is your point about the minimum wage.
I actually wasn't aware of that.
So historically, the logic that most ordinary listeners or Americans might have about the minimum wage is that it's designed to say that, hey, the workers who earn it deserve to be paid a higher price.
I think that's interesting.
Yeah, there's a wonderful book called Illiberal Reformers, which I highly recommend, where he goes through people like Kellogg, great economists, arguing in textbooks that were used across the country in 1906,
1908, saying, look, and I hate to even use this quote because it's so disgusting, but they said things like, since we can't chloroform them now, We can disemploy them by raising wages to such an extent that no one will hire them at that rate.
So if you're someone who speaks a different language who maybe the other employees don't like so much Someone with a disability, etc., you will be disemployed by this high minimum wage.
It was incredibly popular.
And we have to remind people how popular eugenics was.
John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson, you know, so many cabinet members, presidential cabinets, were on the boards of eugenics associations.
This was a very popular movement in the United States and Europe.
And this isn't like a long time ago for people.
We're talking about like one century ago, 100 years ago in the United States or less.
So say a little bit more about Keynes and Wilson.
I think this is a side of their history that we don't necessarily often remember.
This is fascinating to me.
When you say eugenics, that's a loaded word, right?
What do you exactly mean?
What were the views that they espoused or advanced?
And just be specific about which groups of people they were talking about in a way that we would find offensive today.
Yeah, sure.
At this time, actually, Eastern Europeans were a huge target as well as African-Americans and particularly the disabled.
We should never forget how they were included.
Keynes wrote a letter to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, in which he said, now that we've now that we've solved the quantity problem, we have to move on to the quality problem.
And he was talking about human beings.
So Keynes considered eugenics to be the zenith of modern science.
This was what we were going to do next to create a utopian world.
And so by purifying the races and getting rid of disability.
So that's a Keynes quote.
Now that we've solved the quantity problem, we have to address the quality problem.
What was the quantity problem?
Overpopulation.
Yeah, it's interesting how that works, right?
We have a fertility rate problem in this country, but it's not the one that he was talking about.
It's the opposite.
A fertility rate of about 1.6 in the United States today.
Yeah, of course.
Still to this day, you have young Gen Z people saying, oh no, you know, we can't have more children.
There's too many people in the world at a time when there's too few people being born.
They need to have more babies, actually.
So he was wrong on both counts.
So why do you think it is that, you know, a lot of the policies, and I suppose you could always have an independent justification to say that even if the originator of a policy had one intention, maybe the policy could be right for independent reasons.
In principle, it's possible.
But your point is these were actually not some sort of side statements that we're putting together and some patching together in some revisionist history.
These were indeed some of the goals of original progressive economic policy were indeed the same kinds of goals that informed their eugenic views.
Is that hyperbole or do you think that that's exactly on target for what their actual motivations were?
Like, was it a coincidence they were saying these things or were they actually inextricably tied to the kind of progressive vision that they advanced?
Yeah, no, I think that they absolutely intended, and you can just read their words in Illiberal Reformers.
He does a great job of unearthing all of that.
They absolutely intended to disemploy these undesirable groups.
And what was so strange about it is that they actually thought that if they did that, they would somehow just fade away.
It was a leftover idea from the late 19th century, particularly with Black people, that they would simply stop working and sort of fade out.
Because they would only work hard and improve themselves under the lash, under the whip.
It was just an incredibly insane concept.
And yet they believed it.
And I think it went on to really influence things like the Federal Housing Administration's redlining.
When we look at things like the way the federal highway system was built.
In such a way as to divide one ethnic group from another and build a huge wall between them.
Well, say a little bit more about that, about both redlining and the highway system.
I think these are usually arguments that are invoked, as you probably well know, by the modern left as a way of citing the historical systemic discrimination against Black Americans, which, true as it may be, misses where the origin of that came from, which was actually from the so-called progressive wing.
And say a word about why that counted as a progressive wing back then anyway.
Yeah, I think this whole sort of worldview of social engineering that we need to move.
Adam Smith called this the man of system idea, that we need to move people around like pieces on a chessboard.
It's a certain mindset that assumes that central planning works.
And so the notion that if we could just mow down what looked to us like a slum by putting the highway there, then we would solve that problem, right?
And it's absurd on the face of it.
Where are these people going to go?
They're going to go to a second ghetto.
And what have you just done?
You've mowed down all of the social capital that had been built.
Don't forget that in the 1950s and prior, Black America is socially very strong.
Most of the men are involved in fraternal associations.
All of the families are involved in the black church.
People are married and people are employed at a higher rate than white Americans.
Say that again?
That's shocking.
Yes!
No, of course.
Black women worked more than white women.
So in the 1950s, that's true.
Black women worked more than white women.
Right.
Of course they did, because they needed to.
They had to, in many cases.
But the civic ties were also pretty interesting.
Involvement in local fraternal organizations, churches, etc.
You would measure that engagement as higher amongst Black Americans than amongst other ethnic groups.
It was extremely high.
It was a huge part of Booker T. Washington's concept of self-help.
Self-help wasn't about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
It was about helping one another throughout the entire Black community.
And so through things like fraternal associations, people could meet one another to get To build trust, right?
To get no interest loans, to start businesses together, just normal networking activities that they were able to do among themselves.
That was extremely common in Black America at that time.
But when the highways came through, it means that they destroyed much of that and scattered it to the four winds.
Say how that happened.
Say how that happened.
So the notion of the federal highway system, Eisenhower saw some things in Germany that he liked in terms of getting tanks across the country very fast, but what he didn't necessarily think about is that handing millions of dollars to municipal leaders was going to create a political machine.
And within that political machine, the municipal leaders were able to decide where they were going to put these highways.
And we have records, on record, you can read this in the folklore of the freeways, of municipal leaders saying, you know, we could go through this industrial town and it wouldn't displace anyone, but instead, why don't we go through the N-word town?
Right?
Meaning we can clear these quote-unquote slums.
But here's the thing, Vivek.
From 1948 to 1966, black poverty was cut in half.
It was in the 80th percentile and it dropped into the 40th percentile.
And that's because with all of that social capital, they were riding the post-war wave right out of poverty, which means that those slums were actually upwardly mobile working class neighborhoods that were on the verge of breaking out.
And right at the moment that they were about to break out, we mowed them down with the biggest federal spending project in history outside of war, which was the federal highway system.
And this sort of predated even what we would think of as LBJ's Great Society.
Yes, it did.
Yeah, the Great Study sort of followed on this, but it was in the wake of this type of actual infrastructural project, federal government-directed infrastructural project, that had already planted the seeds for that demise.
And don't forget urban renewal, which James Baldwin called Negro removal.
Mm-hmm.
Another social engineering idea, right?
That we can knock down these neighborhoods and somehow these people will magically go someplace better.
And so it's this top-down central planning mindset that is so incredibly destructive.
And when you put billions of dollars into the hands of these planners, they will rework the face of the map of the United States of America in ways that destroys communities.
Well, look, I think this is actually fascinating in light of, especially some of the issues I've been focused on recently, I talked about it in some of my opening remarks just a few minutes ago, in that there is a rift even in the modern conservative movement, right?
Going in the direction of believing that we need that type of central planning, muscular state intervention, industrial policy to help certain communities in the United States.
And what I'm trying to sort out as we understand the history of how well the track record of that has performed, which you and I agree is probably a pretty poor track record, were a lot of these policies at least advertised or even intended with the goal of potentially helping and empowering those minority communities?
Or did it come from more of a place of actual just disdain and disregard for them in the first place?
That's interesting to just parse.
Yeah, I think that there was some language like that.
So, for instance, with the Federal Housing Administration, it was sort of, we're better off, right?
Whites are better off living with whites, blacks with blacks, etc.
A little bit of, well, these are slums anyway.
You know, these houses aren't in good condition, so they should be knocked down.
But you also have plenty of evidence that that sort of motivation was not sincere, right?
As you see in those municipal meetings where it's saying, this is our chance, you know, a little bit of rubbing their hands together.
And so I think that some of it was quite nefarious.
But I think it's good to point out that, number one, you can present it that way, and number two, people can believe that, right?
And they can be well-intentioned themselves in supporting it, thinking that they're doing something good for the community when, in fact, they are destroying what the community took decades and decades and decades to build.
Talk about those redlining policies.
People use that term a lot.
Sometimes people forget exactly what that meant.
This is right in the sweet spot of your area of scholarship.
Why did you walk people through a little bit about what that exactly was, as opposed to just having it be a word that's bandied around like it is today?
Yeah, the great book on this is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.
It's quite good.
And what you see is basically a grading of neighborhoods depending on their racial makeup.
If the neighborhood got a certain grade, it was excluded from the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance.
And what that meant is that basically it was impossible for the banks to extend those mortgages.
And so you have cases, and once again, remember, Black people are employed, they're married, they may not have huge incomes, but they are certainly capable of paying a mortgage.
So banks are ready and happy to make these mortgages in many cases.
And the FHA literally steps in and says, no, you cannot do it.
You can build this development and lease to them or something like that, but they may not get into a relationship of ownership.
I'm not saying that black people never owned homes at this time.
I'm just saying that this was a major obstacle and it affected many immigrant communities as well.
So just to get this straight, historically, the status quo pre the FHA stepping in was that, you know, the market was working, people were beginning to in upward mobile communities, able to take mortgages, buy a home.
But the FHA came in and said, no, no, no, we're going to actually grade these neighborhoods based on what different economic or social attributes, and say that in certain of those categories, they were going to limit the ability of banks to be able to make loans on the basis of that grading.
Is that right?
That's right.
And it hit both Black neighborhoods and integrated neighborhoods.
And remember that around factories at this time, you would often have sort of a Black street and an Irish Catholic street and a Polish Catholic street, right?
And so people weren't integrated on the same street, but they were often integrated in the same neighborhood.
That was already happening.
And then that was reeled back by the FHA. So organic integration was starting to occur in many places.
And this was putting a stop to it.
And to be clear, was that a soft form of this, where by grading it, it sent a signal to the banks that made them more reluctant?
Or was there an actual legal or regulatory limitation on the ability of banks based on the grade that the FHA gave them?
Yes.
No, it was a regulatory limitation.
So what's the justification for that?
I mean, if a bank otherwise wants to make a loan that it's otherwise making, but the FHA steps in and says, no, you cannot actually make a loan to somebody who's in a graded community, was it this idea of protecting against credit bubbles?
I mean, what was even the facial justification for that type of market intervention?
You know, all of the quotes that I've seen were quite explicit that it was racial.
It wasn't necessarily put in financial terms.
The notion was that black and white people would live more peacefully together if they were separate, if they were in separate neighborhoods.
Now, I may be missing a piece of information there, but that's what I've seen in official FHA documents.
And so that's fascinating.
On what government authority did the FHA do this?
Were there statutes that required them to do this, or did they just sort of take that as an administrative imperative that they just started to make through rulemaking?
Do you have a sense for that?
Yeah, I don't necessarily know all of the details, but it is interesting to think about the way that the FHA's actions mirror what we're dealing with today with the administrative state.
Yep.
Which is a bureaucratic institution that is sort of making law itself becoming, in a sense, a fourth branch of government that isn't in our constitution.
I think we saw the beginnings of that in the early 20th century.
What's the state of the FHA today, by the way?
I don't know.
I haven't kept up with that.
I did all the historical research.
You make me want to dig into that today.
Because one of my, as you know, for a long time it's been a hobby horse, but I think it's becoming more of a professional horse now, is really the dismantling of this regulatory state.
And one of the things that's interesting for the conservative movement, we can kind of go here, is two different strands where we might be missing the plot.
One is, close to your area of study, why conservatives have not been more successful in winning over Black support?
Maybe the last year or four years may be an exception to this, but over the last 20, 25, 30, 40 years, why is it that in light of the history of progressive destruction of Black economic progress, is it the fact that Conservatives have failed to pick up the black support that otherwise would have offered a different path than the very political movements that destroyed their progress.
Where do you think conservatives missed the plot?
Yeah, I think this is basically the main reason I wrote my book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, with my co-author Marcus Witcher.
Not only did we want to bring together all of these classical liberal insights on race discrimination, but we really wanted to give white conservatives a way to talk about our history of racial discrimination that aligned with their understanding, which we thought was correct, on economics, on the importance of private property rights, on the importance of contract rights, etc.
And the reception that it's gotten has been extremely positive from white conservatives.
I think that it's a way forward.
It's a way to talk to the Black community, who, by the way, is the most religious demographic in the United States, is extremely socially conservative, is highly entrepreneurial, not in any way socialistic, even if the most centrist in the Democratic Party, as well as Latinos, The further left you go...
That's an interesting observation, actually.
Yes!
People forget that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's very interesting.
And so we have a group of people here who, with a little bit of understanding and grace and intelligence on their history, we might be able to really win over to the conservative movement quite easily.
But what we've had is not a lot of interest in doing that, which is incredibly frustrating.
And think about some of the things I'm saying about the FHA or highways or urban renewal.
It sounds what we might call left-coded.
Like you said, these are things progressives talk about.
So what conservatives have done is they've given the topics over to progressives rather than saying, well, wait a second, what's our account of those topics?
Maybe we've got a better and more intelligent account that shows what was going on economically and in terms of social capital that we can present.
So I want to say to conservatives, stop backing out of all of the conversations that progressives are in.
Get into those conversations.
And offer the insights that we have.
So put yourself into one of those conversations, right?
Let's say you're with a group of modern, let's just say, limousine liberals who talk about the effects of conservative deregulatory policy that doesn't give a damn about American workers or Black Americans and how this is actually callous to minority communities.
Let's say you walk into that conversation, dinner table conversation.
What's the first thing you say to show up in that conversation and maybe bring some of those people along?
Yeah, I think a good way to start is thinking about the concrete.
I say, well, you know, my friend Shamed Dogen fought for 10 years in the state of Missouri so that African hair braiders could braid hair without having to go to cosmetology school for two years.
My friend Matt Paparaki at the Illinois Policy Institute fought for nurses who had turned their lives around after prison to be able to actually be licensed.
And work in the state of Illinois.
These are women, 1,200 new nurses that have come into the economy because of that work.
What about our Latino entrepreneur neighbors who are running tamales carts in the city of Chicago and the police are raiding them and turning them over until the Illinois Policy Institute was able to Let's legalize food carts in the city of Chicago.
Let's think about people's real lives.
Do you have to have a high school diploma to be a barber, to be a good barber?
No, but that's what the statutes say.
There's laws that effectively say in order to be a barber, you have to have graduated from a particular...
In some states.
And why is that?
Because the established businesses are cronies.
This is what Adam Smith warned from the very beginning.
As soon as you become established, you want to turn around and use your connection with the state to keep startups out.
So we have to be eternally vigilant against this abuse of regulation.
And people need to understand that just because something is a regulation doesn't mean that it's regulating anything that needs to be regulated.
It could just be a cronyistic effort to keep out competitors.
And that is what it often turns into.
Especially when those people have an influence in writing those very rules.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
So there's a deeper question here, which is, okay, there's this failure of, I think, the conservative, libertarian-minded, pro- I think that's a big part of what gave you motivation to be one of those people that actually rolled up your sleeves and did it.
But do you think there's also an element of human nature on the other side here too, which is just to sort of animate a different perspective here?
That even if you show up, there's something about just all of us as human beings, regardless of our skin color, but it applies to Black and Hispanic Americans every bit as much to anybody else to say that In the short run, you're always going to have a tendency towards going with somebody who's facially giving you the thing that you want, right?
So there's a lot of these regulatory hurdles, government-created hurdles that in the long run have certainly worked to the detriment, as you and I believe, to the Black community, Hispanic community, and the American community more generally.
But Nonetheless, when push comes to shove on who people are going to vote for or who people are going to gravitate to, there's something about our human nature that says, okay, but you're still the side that tells me that I still get to stay on welfare or collect a check or whatever a little bit longer.
So even though you could make all of these arguments as you elegantly do...
By making arguments of how this has actually hurt Black economic prosperity, for example.
Nonetheless, that there's a human nature element to this that's going to always be addicted to the short term or what you feel like you need to get to tomorrow as opposed to what you need to get to to get to next year.
Yeah.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think it's a very compelling argument.
And I think that the only way to respond is by going back into our Hayekian mindset.
If your listeners know who F.A. Hayek is.
I think they do.
Yeah, spontaneous order, right?
We have to go back to the notion of bottom up.
And so this is where, in the book, I talk about neighborhood stabilization and the neighborhood stabilization model of philanthropy, because what we have is bad charity that is driving out good.
And what that means is that people have become addicted to those goodies that they're receiving that are actually trapping them and keeping them in a situation in which they can't actually transform out of poverty.
And so the only option that we have now, besides trying to get rid of those, which are very hard to do, the only option we have now is to provide an on-the-ground alternative to people so that they can actually see a life without it.
That's the only way to go.
And so you have to pay attention to people like Bob Lupton in his book Toxic Charity and his work in Atlanta, or Bob Woodson in Washington, D.C., John Perkins or Brian Fickard's book When Helping Hurts.
You have to actually listen to the people who are working on the ground and hear what they're saying.
If the welfare state is having the terrible consequences that we know that it's having, let's not do the same things with our private charity, where we make people dependent on us, rather than helping them fight both the welfare state and toxic charity.
And become self-sufficient, independent, and dignified in their way of life.
And I truly believe that if you offer that to people on the ground, they will begin to see the trap that has been laid for them by the left.
You do believe, yeah.
Despite the innate human impulse or whatever, the equivalent of eating a piece of candy before you actually eat your meal, to use a father of two sons, right?
The analogy you might use in that context, despite that innate human impulse to go for the candy over what's actually good for you.
You think that that is surmountable if the right people are actually showing up to make the arguments and demonstrate through bottom-up alternatives.
You're confident that is sufficient to drive the kind of electoral and maybe political change that we would need in minority communities that on your argument have been voting against their long run interests for the better part of the last half century.
Yeah, let me give you a metaphor.
A friend of mine asked me, I do neighborhood stabilization work, and a friend said, how do you get these kids to join the program instead of running drugs?
I mean, you'd think that that would be so attractive.
I said, that's a good question.
So I went to my friend Lucas at Love the Lou in St. Louis, and I said, how do you get these kids to join the program?
And he said, the truth is, These kids have seen their older brothers get shot in the street.
These kids have seen their cousins go to prison for decades at a time.
They don't really want that life.
But here's the problem.
Whatever wonderful opportunities are out there for them, they are so far away from that isolated little couple of blocks that they have been living in, you might as well be offering them something in Japan.
What makes the difference?
The difference is someone coming and living on your street, on your block.
When that community garden starts and they're telling you you can be paid to run part of the garden, it's down the street from your house.
This is real to you now.
And so having something real like that Presents a true alternative to people who otherwise, you can say a lot of words, but it's never going to feel real to them.
So do you believe that It would be the right way to get there.
That would happen organically by simply rolling back the kind of government regulations and the regulatory state we've created that have created disincentives cumulatively over the years for the kind of bottom-up Hayekian revival that you describe.
Or do you believe where we are that's actually going to require some level of Governmental policy to foster the creation of that garden or that community center where people are able to gravitate.
What do you think the right answer is from where we are today?
I believe neither of those things.
So I absolutely think we need to roll back all of this, all of these perverse incentives, right?
All of this toxic public charity.
We absolutely do need to do that.
But the alternative is not fostering it.
With government efforts, because that doesn't work.
It's not in the nature of law to do the kind of work.
Law is, we might say, a cudgel, not a scalpel.
And these communities, everyone is different.
Every person is different.
Every community is different.
You can't use a cudgel.
It won't work.
But what we need to do is not just roll back the bad government policy, we need to check ourselves, because what we've done, as Marvin Olasky pointed out in The Tragedy of American Compassion, what we've done is we've imitated that form of charity, ourselves, this faceless, relationless, handout mentality that has had the same effects, and we've made people dependent on us.
And so we have to look at ourselves and the way that we go about doing charity in a more empowering, more dignified way, looking at poor people as people who have something to exchange with us.
They are not mere recipients, right?
These are people with something to offer.
And so we go in looking for opportunities to exchange, not to save a person.
And you would say that that's more of a cultural shift in the culture of philanthropy, quite apart from the realm of government itself.
We have a philanthropic industrial complex which is drunk on this handout mentality, and it's ruining neighborhoods just as much as the welfare state is.
So we have to check ourselves first and undergo that kind of paradigm shift.
And that's not really going to be done.
Certainly, you don't want the government involved in redirecting the way that philanthropic industrial complex works, but it's more of a cultural revival within the world of charity and charitable acts itself.
That's really part of what you're calling for.
That's right.
And this is totally conservative, right?
Because what are we saying?
We're saying the solution comes from civil society.
Civil society has to rebuild what's been lost.
Marriage has been lost in many of these communities, right?
The employment networks have been lost.
We've been separated by huge concrete walls called highways.
Right?
So employment networks have been lost.
There's a lot of sort of network poverty.
It's a kind of isolation that people are in.
And so we have to be so creative, so much more creative and so much more dedicated and committed than we are by running a coat drive.
Or having a canned food drive.
That's not how you actually help in a chronic situation.
That's how you help in an emergency situation.
But people who are impoverished in the United States aren't in an emergency situation.
This is a chronic problem.
And so we need to think about it in a totally new way.
And so you give the example of what not to do, right?
The lack of the canned food drive or the check-based giveaway.
What would be you painting your vision of, if we're running to an alternative, what does that alternative actually look like?
Paint it with all of the idealism that I know you have in things of your work.
What I think we have to recognize is that there are people already in the neighborhood.
Bob Woodson calls them Josephs.
You might think of them as anchors in the community.
They're already there working hard for their neighborhood, trying to save it, but no one's listening to them.
No one is empowering them.
And so as we go in as philanthropists, instead of thinking of ourselves as knowing for sure what this neighborhood needs and just dropping these so-called gifts on people's heads, It would be much better if we could find these people, they're not hard to find, bring them together, empower them, network them, finance them, spiritually support them.
And what we are doing is we're empowering them who are already trusted in the neighborhood, who already have all of the cred that someone needs in order to turn other people's lives around.
And we are investing in them and their vision of their neighborhood, which requires some humility.
It means that me, with my PhD in philosophy, I don't actually know what your neighborhood needs.
You know, right?
And I can bring the resources of the suburbs to you in terms of financing, in terms of jobs, right?
Other sorts of networks, mentorship, etc.
But you're actually the one with the solution.
I should be listening to you.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I like that.
I think there's an interesting question of how we create that attitudinal shift.
And perhaps that's exactly what you're doing.
First of all, first step to identify a problem is to actually name it.
And I think that's a big part of what you've done in your work.
And let me just say, there are organizations that are already doing this.
So the Chalmers Center, right?
Brian Fickard's book, When Helping Hurts, he starts the Chalmers Center.
They'll work with your mission board at your church.
True Charity is a wonderful organization that'll train nonprofits that want to flip that philanthropic model from hand out to dignified work.
And so this already exists.
You can go to the Bradley Donors Fund, if you're a donor, and make sure that your money is going to the sorts of organizations that are oriented in this way.
This is already happening, right?
It's just a matter of spreading the word and caring enough to change our own models.
So let's take a detour now back into the conservative movement, right?
Because what you call these are conservative solutions.
I think that's actually, in some ways, on the table, based on the direction of the future conservative movement, what that actually means.
So what you might mean is a classical conservative solution.
Yeah.
I think what we're seeing is a new strand of the conservative movement that actually is saying, no, no, no.
We're actually going to define ourselves based on Using those same kinds of resources that were directed at maybe helping minority communities to help everyday historical blood and soil, longer term, on the ground here, American communities, including white communities or others.
And I think that that's such a cautionary tale that you've told to suggest that even if this was going to be your objective of how you wanted to say, well, it's unfair that the government has so, in the last 30 years at least, dedicated its efforts to empowering certain groups of Americans at the expense of others, that we need to use those government tools to actually empower all Americans, like manufacturers or working class communities.
You're seeing this strain of this in the protectionist wing of the conservative movement.
What do you think that portends, where if you have the left that historically continues to focus on using governmental intervention and anti-state intervention to help their favored groups, and a conservative movement that now goes the other direction and says, you know what, we're going to use that same toolkit to actually empower our own preferred bases that have been ignored.
What do you think that portends in terms of the dynamic between conservatives and liberals going forward?
I think it's terrible.
And one of the reasons is, and there's good evidence for this, populist movements all around the world, which are becoming more popular, if you look at the receipts on these movements, the economic receipts, they're not good.
The outcomes of these policies are not good.
We can see it over and over and over again.
If you support that steel mill, right, and you protect steel so that you save that steel mill, what that does is it drives up the price of steel in such a way that your construction projects are canceled.
So you save a few workers and you harm seven others, right?
For every one you help here, you harm seven over there.
And so the outcome will not be good.
For these groups, but also it's not paying attention to the heart of the matter.
The loss of community, the loss of marriage, the loss of family, the loss of church attendance.
These sorts of cultural issues are not going to be solved by national industrial policy.
And they are what is at the heart of being able to flourish economically.
Because you can go into a different business, right?
But these sorts of problems are much, much deeper.
And so I think it's totally wrongheaded.
Yeah.
I think that part of the issue, and this is where I'm sympathetic to where a lot of these folks are coming from in their motivation, but maybe missed the plot in their policy recommendations, is that the historical, you can call it neoliberal consensus or classical liberal consensus,
Itself missed the plot in certain other ways that go outside the scope of the conversation we're having here, but had unforeseen effects of increasing US economic dependence on adversaries like China, which for independent reasons, you probably don't want an adversary supplying your own military industrial base,
or even your pharmaceutical supply chain, just in the scenario of conflict Outside of the context of economic trade, there's the situation of geopolitical conflict that creates certain national security liabilities that you otherwise weren't able to have.
You can think about it even in the context of immigration.
The United States, as I alluded to at the beginning, is not just an economic zone, but if you have the loss of cohesion where you have a sufficient number of people in the United States that don't speak the same language or don't know the first thing about the history or the founding values or even the rights that they enjoy in the United States, that that creates a certain loss of national cohesion.
And I think part of what's happened as I see it, from what I see it, is the understandable frustration with certain of those holes left in the neoliberal view, the reaction to that has been not to just correct for those issues, but to say, go far further and say, the reaction to that has been not to just correct for those issues, but to say, go far further and say, okay, we have a completely different vision of what modern conservatism
And this is sort of where I land is I think the future of our own movement, I say our movement, we're talking about the conservative movement, is probably a fork in the road between what I call the national protectionists and the national libertarians.
And I just think the discussion with you is so fascinating because you learn it from more of a progressive angle, the way in which that nanny state has so badly actually failed not only everybody, but the very people it was designed to protect.
That that could actually be a cautionary tale for the national protectionists and the new conservative movement as well.
And that's kind of one more reason, not just in convincing the left, but even in convincing some elements of what people might call the new right.
Not of the fact that the old neoliberal consensus was right on everything, but the fact that you would go in the wrong direction if you simply tried to embrace the methods of the left of government protectionism and anti-statism, that that doesn't work even for the very people you're supposedly trying to save.
And that's, I think, one of the underappreciated ways in which your work is particularly relevant for the conservative movement where we are right now.
Yeah, I think that this is one of the reasons why I moved away from using the term libertarian to refer to myself and trying to be a part of the movement to reinvigorate the term classical liberal.
Because classical liberalism historically has a minimal but very well put together concept of the role of the state.
And so the state is small, but you have the beauty of the constitutional order and the separation of powers and appreciation for all that that entails.
The importance of public goods are real.
Externalities problems are real.
And so you need the state to address those.
The term libertarian over time Started to mean something like anti-state, right?
No role for the state at all, which is never what I thought it meant when I took it on as a young woman.
And so now I say classical liberal simply to go back to that thicker, richer philosophical tradition That Scottish Enlightenment tradition that understood the importance of custom and tradition that overlaps so well with conservatism classically understood.
And I think if we can re-present that to conservatives, we can say, of course, there are reasonable limits on these things.
Don't let the pendulum swing so far the other way that you give up on the amazing riches that have come from, I mean, just wealth and flourishing that has come from the rise of global markets.
Yeah, look, I think you raise a great point.
I see my concerns about the rise of economic protectionism as a new form of identity on the American right, but one of my frustrations with what the libertarian movement, at least that label, has become Is that there is no vision for, even if we got to a place where the individual is so free of government intervention, okay, what then?
There's still the separate question of human flourishing, as you talked about a lot of the focus of your work, is how do you rebuild that through civil society?
Maybe even through philanthropy of the right kind.
Whereas I think the classical libertarian, or at least the modern libertarian view, is so obsessed at the margins with With really focusing only on the absence of state intervention, that it has no theory of the case for what comes after.
We're free of government in our hair.
What then?
How do we actually live purposeful, meaningful lives, both at the level of individual and community?
I think older versions of our classical libertarians, the Hayeks of the world, have been far more thoughtful about that more holistic vision that I think we have a little bit of a bastardized version of even the Mises or Hayek or whatever that remains for much more of a libertarian obsession have been far more thoughtful about that more holistic vision that I think we have a little bit of a bastardized version of even
As opposed to asking the broader question of once you've removed the state, at least out of my life as a citizen from limiting what I can do, how then can I actually build up as a citizen how I can live a flourishing life?
And so as much as I have my frustrations with the rise of economic protectionism and the conservative movement, I'm...
I think those are some of my frustrations with the label, at least with the modern libertarian label has become.
And in that sense, I think we probably share something in common, you and I in that sense.
Yeah, exactly.
And so as director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia Chicago, I mean, obviously that's a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod institution.
And what that means is that, you know, we see the relevance of institutions like the church.
like marriage, right, and family as so important to the flourishing of a culture.
And the wonderful thing about Black America is as much as they have suffered in this regard, the Black church tradition is a beautiful, stunning tradition with huge resources that can be reclaimed.
And so instead of just beating up on the Black community, which sometimes it seems like that's what conservatives enjoy doing, that sort of spirit of just, of being a good conservative by being willing to say everything that's negative about a community.
Instead of doing that, what if we went back to Douglas and Washington and the Black church tradition and Zoran Hurston, right?
And some of these amazing figures and said, what if we just reclaimed what we already had and that was taken from us by these terrible policies?
I think that would be a much more compelling And for what it's worth, I think even some of the people you mentioned there, I actually think are misportrayed.
Even the way the left-wing media would like to prefer to caricature some of those other voices, I think actually creates a reinforcing perception that's where conservatives are.
And my only view is if you put somebody else, if you put somebody in a box, that's the only place that they have to yet remain.
And so part of what we need to do, I think, maybe is just to shed a lot of these labels altogether.
I mean, what does the word libertarian mean?
It was very different under Hayek than what it means today.
What does the word conservative mean?
That itself is morphing before our eyes.
And instead, even talk more about the content of the country we want to create.
On one hand, we see a regulatory state that has harmed and impeded the flourishing of the individual and communities, Black community included.
But on the other hand, we also require sources of identity.
At the level of the family, at the level of the community, at the level of the church, at the level of your nation that we're missing today that may not come through a top-down government enforcement, but could actually emerge through a better version of leaders in civil society stepping up and filling that void, not through toxic charity, but through charity of the right kind.
And even through non-charitable engagement of the right kind.
And I think that sometimes I think, you just think about it outside of the realm of political philosophy.
I mean, labels, for me, whenever somebody tries to reduce me to a lane or a label, so like, what exactly are you?
It can feel very confining.
And I think it's no different for me than it is for most people that I think a lot of those labels in our modern politics have, I think, been confining rather than letting our own views be guided by the content of the actual country and vision we want to create.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, look, I'm grateful to you for your work.
I think you're an original thinker.
I think you are bucking today certainly a consensus that you illuminate by studying history.
It's amazing how that works is you look back 100 years and it makes you look at progressive policies through a different lens today.
But I hope this is the first of many conversations we continue to have.
I learned a lot from you today and I hope more people are able to learn from you too.
And not least of which would be people in the modern classical liberal or you could call it conservative movement to say part of what you need to do is actually show up and have the kind of conversation that you're having across the country because you might actually bring a lot more people along than you expect.
So thank you.
I appreciated you joining the podcast today and hopefully we'll be talking again soon.
Thanks Vivek, it was wonderful to be with you.
▲
Export Selection