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From Powerline blog dot com and produced
by Ricochet dot Com. This is the

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Powerline Show with your host Steve Hayward. Well, hi everybody, and welcome

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to this special, bonus classic format
edition of the Powerline Podcast Today featuring just

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Me all by myself. Now,
there's a reason for this peculiar special episode,

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and I guess it starts with an
article over the weekend in the Wall

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Street Journal that we had linked in
our Pick section on Monday from Karl Rove,

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who wrote a long article about how
things have been worse in this country

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than they are right now, and
he recalled the turmoil the sixties, the

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disruptions and panic and crisis of the
nineteen thirties and so forth, going all

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the way back to the earliest days
of the Republic. And I think he's

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right about that. As a general
matter, I've been saying for some time

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now that America is having a nervous
breakdown right now, and who knows how

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it's going to turn out. It
could get worse. But this brings me

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to some news that I don't think
I have shared yet with listeners on the

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podcast or in print on the Powerline
site. And the news is this,

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and I will connect it back to
the Carl Rove article. Presently, it

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turns out that in the spring,
starting in January, I am going to

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be the gay Lord visiting Professor at
Pepperdine University School of Public Policy. Now

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it's going to be a fun assignment. I'll say more about that in a

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moment. But the proximate cause of
this was the unfortunate passing of the permanent

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gay Lord Professor of Public Policy a
few months ago, Ted McAlister, who

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I'd known from my previous time at
Pepperdine and from various other places. And

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Ted's has left a big hole in
the program, as he taught several of

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the core courses and was a mainstay
of the public policy program at Pepperdine,

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which I hastened to add is one
of the most interesting and in some ways

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I think the best in the whole
country. And I'll say more about that

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in due course. But I decided, after talking with the Dean, Pete

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Peterson at the Public Policy School,
that it made sense for me to try

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and fill tents, very big shoes
in the spring and teach one of the

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foundational courses for first year students and
do some other things. So how does

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it connect to Karl Rove well A, Dean Pete kindly invited me last week

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to give the faculty addressed to incoming
students, which is a great privilege and

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an honor. And one of the
things I talked about in that address was

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exactly what Karl Robot said, that
the country has been in bad shape before,

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and that there are things in our
past that we should look at about

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how we came out of it and
so forth. But I decided to go

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beyond just that and give a more
wider range address about why the kind of

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education that you get at Pepperdine School
of Public Policy, or more broadly,

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the kind of education that our universities
ought to be delivering to students interested in

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politics and public affairs but generally don't. And so I decided to turn it

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into a podcast, and without further
ado, here is my address to the

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incoming students of the new class of
the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, a

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graduate program, and it involves,
i'll just say, taking students on an

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imaginary journey back to Germany in nineteen
nineteen. And so here we go.

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Thanks well, thank you Cejay,
thank you Dean Peterson for this kind invitation

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to both rejoin the community and to
be well. It's a triple honor for

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me to be here today. If
you probably don't know this, I've spent,

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as I put it, the last
seven years as an inmate at UC

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Berkeley, which has been interesting,
challenging, I like Gonzo assignments, but

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before that, I spent a couple
of years here. So this is like

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coming back to sanity and to what
I think is the most remarkable public policy

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program in the country. And I'll
explain why as I go, but I

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say it's a triple honor. I'm
the first faculty member that you're exposed to

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if you're an incoming student, and
I should make the disclaimer that my perspective

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today is my own. I don't
profess to speak on behalf of the faculty,

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although I think there'd be some agreement. We'll have to say. Second,

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it's an honor and also challenge to
be filling the large shoes of our

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late colleague Ted McAlister. He's not, just, by the way, a

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long time fixture here at the program, but I learned and some recent trips

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to Europe that a lot of his
work is well known among a lot of

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European thinkers, which I had not
expected, and no one can fully replace

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ted, but I shall do my
best. Third, and most importantly,

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and what I want to talk about
today is all of you will have your

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own individual reasons are coming here,
and I'm going to be interested in learning

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from each of you individually what those
reasons are. In due course, I'm

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going to be here, by the
way, in the spring, two or

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three days a week every week,
doing a couple of courses. The Core

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Roots course I'll be teaching, and
one other still to be determined. I'm

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doing some other things, and I
may drop in once or twice here during

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the fall, but at that time
I'm going to be interested in getting to

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know all of you. And what
I want to do today is illuminate why

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what you're going to do here is
maybe more important than perhaps you imagine.

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In other words, I'm gonna try
and amplify your ambition. Now, I

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just said, the public policy program
here is unique and the best in the

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country. Emily has already given you
some reasons why, and I like to

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start the banner over here see public
policy differently from here. Emily actually stole

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one of my lines. I like
to point out that the school of Public

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Policy maintains an equal emphasis on public
to go along with policy. Now,

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it's very important to learn a lot
of technical skills for policy analysis and policy

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formation. But a lot of graduate
public policy programs in the country, and

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I've visited a lot of them now
and study them, they do a lot

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of policy, but they've lost focus
on the public. It's become very fuzzy.

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And there are many reasons for this, but just one of them is

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hard to note today what public means
anymore. If you just think about our

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discourse, said the newspapers and the
political world at large, we don't talk

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about the public as much as individual
groups. We talk about groups, interests,

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regional variations, race, social class, gender, and so forth.

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And above all, what you will
hear the favorite term of the media and

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academia is that Americans today are deeply
divided and polarized never before, and so

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it becomes hard to talk about the
public as an intelligible thing. How bad

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is it, I'll give you one
data points. Much on my mind has

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been for a while. There's a
lot of survey evidence that shows that the

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American public as a whole has lost
confidence in our major institutions, both public

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institutions and private institutions, you know, banks, real estate, whatever you

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name it. So, for example, in the late nineteen fifties, when

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people like Gallops started asking the public, do you have high confidence in the

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federal government to do the right thing? That was the question was usually something

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like that. When that question was
first asked, eighty percent of Americans,

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nearly eighty percent said they had high
confidence in the federal government. Today that

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number in the same survey is fifteen
percent. And you can do the time

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series. They asked this every year. It's just been a steady downslope for

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the last five decades. What are
the causes of this? What happened?

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Are there remedies? This question and
ones related to it are very much worth

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keeping in mind over your next two
years here now, I've been arguing that

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our country has been having a nervous
breakdown for quite a while. Although we

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can't exaggerate this, and I think
you do want to keep it in some

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proportion because things have been worse in
some ways in my own lifetime for someone

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my age, A lot of what's
going on right now is a feeling of

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deja vu all over again. We
had similar kinds of instability and disruptions in

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the nineteen sixties when I was growing
up. If you read your history,

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you know we had political assassinations,
We had urban riots then weren't just for

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summer, but for several years.
We had a lot of civil unrest and

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almost forgotten these days except people whill
read to history carefully. Is in late

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sixties, in early seventies, we
had a wave of bombings. I think

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it was like three a day.
It averaged, many of them on college

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campuses. Many students were killed at
some of these bombings are maimed, including

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students at some campuses here in southern
California. And this is largely forgotten today.

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On the other hand, and we
don't have a lot of that now.

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We've we've fed some riots and a
lot of very disturbing things happening,

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but we haven't. Let's hope it
stays this way, seeing a revival of

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political assassinations and widespread bombings and so
forth. On the other hand, things

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may be worse in some other ways
today. I already made some mention to

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the polarization and divisions among Americans and
why this is maybe at or has reached

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a crisis point is that when Americans
see other Americans as utterly alien, it

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is hard for us them to be
common citizens any longer, and good luck

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making policy for that public. Now. It's often said that one of the

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best ways of perceiving your own home
or your own country differently or better is

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to go to another country. So
we were talking about narrative. What I

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want to do right now is take
you on an imaginary trip. Emily this

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morning took you to Uganda. What
I want to do is take you off

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for a few minutes to Munich,
Germany in nineteen nineteen, and I want

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to convey to you what was on
the mind of students then and why it's

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relevant to today. You know,
it's commonplace to say that Americans don't learn

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their own history very well. And
I'm guessing that unless one of you was

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a German language or German history major, you probably have no idea what Germany

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was like in nineteen nineteen, and
especially why Munich was the focal point of

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their difficulties. Everyone knows the disaster
that befell Germany, starting a decade or

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more later, but these early months
after World War One ended in November nineteen

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eighteen are crucial. So after World
War One ends in November of nineteen eighteen,

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Germany was in a dangerous and unstable
revolutionary situation the country as a whole.

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They threw out their monarchy of several
centuries. There was huge uncertainty.

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No one could form a government.
They didn't have a constitution yet, and

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the one they adopted was a bad
one. The economy was a shamble's food

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was in short supply, and there
was a real prospect of famine, like

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out of the Middle Ages, and
that was averted in large part because of

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the efforts of a heroic American you
will have heard of, named Herbert Hoover.

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But mass protests in the streets were
commonplace. To say there was unrest

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obviously then would be an understatement.
Now. Germany in those days and still

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to some extent today, has a
federal system that is similar in some ways

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to Hours and in Bavaria. There
were successive attempts to install a revolutionary government

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of some kind, but the various
iolutionary factions, and there were a whole

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lot of them, couldn't get along
with each other or share power. There

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were communists, there were socialists,
there were syndicalists, there were anarchists,

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there were radical labor union groups and
constant violence, and the whole project didn't

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take There were a lot of mass
arrests and sweeps by what was left of

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the German Army, people thrown in
jail without due process, without trial.

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One person who narrowly escaped one of
these sweeps later goes on a young corporal

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out of the army goes on to
write later in minecomf why these experiences alerted

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him to the possibilities of extremist politics. And there are other famous figures in

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German literature that were in the middle
of the sea, Mike Herman Hesse and

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Thomas mann So. In February of
nineteen nineteen, so just three months after

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the armistice, Bavaria managed to elect
or select somehow a man named Kurt Eisner

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to be their prime minister. He
was a socialist, a person of great

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charisma and ability, who might have
made a go of it if he hadn't

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been assassinated in the street on his
way to give a speech to a large

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public gathering that was already assembled to
hear him. And things spiraled down from

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there. Now, in the midst
of this grim scene, students at the

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University of Munich circulated a petition that
gained many hundreds of signatures, and they

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were asking the most eminent intellectual in
Germany to come talk to them about the

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present crisis. Why a petition,
because this particular figure didn't really want to

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do it, and they they had
to express to him through a petition that

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we think it's really important we need
to hear from you. And that figure

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was Max Weber. Now you may
know Max vaber Iff at all. He's

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still on some undergraduate syllabi for this
and that as the turgid and boring sociologists

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whose writings are an effective cure for
insomnia. And you wouldn't be wrong for

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thing that now, variety of reasons
I have to skip over for today.

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He was nonetheless the ideal person to
speak to the anxious German students of that

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time, and about those students you
know today we'd like to talk about diversity,

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but think of the spectrum of student
experience. You would have found in

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nineteen nineteen at the University of Munich. Many students were late teenagers entering college

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at the normal time, but there's
a large number of them who had had

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their education interrupted by army service,
or who had never started, and who

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are now entering the university in their
mid twenties, having survived the awfulness of

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the trenches in the Western Front and
so forth some of their time. By

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the way, it'd be interesting to
compare the reflections of those soldiers with a

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cohort I remember from more modern times. I got to college in the mid

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nineteen seventies and met a lot of
older students who were Vietnam veterans, and

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of course that war divided America as
none since the Civil War, and they

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often brought very interesting perspectives to the
classroom that today I think it's hard to

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recreate, even I think among veterans
of Afghanistan or Iraq. But again that's

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a story to think about some other
time. Most of these students, whether

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brand new or returning or whatever,
were lacked their fellow citizens, confused,

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conflicted, anxious, often depressed,
but ambitious and earnest and wanting to be

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politically active and engaged in rebuilding your
country. Many of them rushed to join

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the communists or the anarchists, or
some other violent revolutionary faction. On the

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other hand, or the other end
of the spectrum were a lot of German

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students with an attachment to Germany's historic
Lutheran Christian faith, and they thought the

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best political aspect to strike was pacifism. In fact, they openly welcome occupation

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by the French and British and Americans, thinking we should throw ourselves on them.

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Of the conquering allies who had not
yet gathered, remember to try and

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settle things at the Versailles treaty table
in Paris some month later, a treaty

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which, if you know you're the
sad history of the continent was botched.

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A lot of students were whipsawed going
back and forth a pacifist one day,

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almost literally the next day literally bomb
throwers and rioters. There was a high

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rate of suicide among students, some
of the Max Favor's own students. In

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other words, in the midst of
what was a desperate situation, students wanted

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max Favor to tell them what to
do and what to think about what was

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going on. The long lecture gay
was called politics as a vocation. And

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just to mention one contemporary figure of
prominence, and that's former President Bill Clinton.

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You've all heard of him. Of
course, still with us. He

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told The New York Times twice a
few years ago that the single most important

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or valuable tech he thought to someone
interested in serving in public life was Max

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Baber's Politics as a Vocation. Now
it's a very long lecture. It's almost

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twenty three thousand words long. It
must have taken two hours to deliver,

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And despite Bill Clinton's endorsement, I
don't actually recommend you try and read it

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on your own. For one thing, the first two thirds are deadly dull.

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I have a theory about why he
did it that way, and it's

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only if you stay awake the first
two thirds that it takes a sudden turn

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at the end and becomes personal,
deeply moving, and I think profound.

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A full appreciation of what he's after
requires knowing some of the specific people and

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movements of the time and the circumstances. And if you know these details,

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because he doesn't mention names, but
if you actually know the backstories we say

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in Hollywood, you come to see
that he has the agony of specific students

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very much on his own mind.
The very first two sentences of his lecture

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run as follows. Remember, he
was demanded to be almost like a command

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performance for the students. He said, this lecture, which I give at

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your request, will necessarily disappoint you. You will naturally expect me to take

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a position on actual problems of the
day. End quote. But then who

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goes on to say for several long
German sentences. Of course he's not going

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to do that, he says,
only maybe indirectly, will I give you

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suggestions as to what to do or
think? So let that think in a

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minute. What he's saying is I
don't have the answers you're looking for.

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I can't tell you what to do
and what to think. All I can

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do, to paraphrase, this long
treatise, is to alert you to the

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fundamental problems of political life that all
too often we think find their remedy in

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ideological programs, in ten point plans
of action, or simple institutional reforms.

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He doesn't think those are unworthy things
to consider, but he's wanting to say

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that, especially in times of crisis, the problems are deeper and harder than

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that, and you need to know
that. In fact, the central question

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of the lecture here, I'll quote
him again, is what kind of person

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must one be if he is to
be allowed to put his hand on the

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wheel of history. Now, I
won't try and summarize what's all in the

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last third of this extraordinary lecture.
I will do this though my practice here

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the last time I was here was
to occasionally have casual lunch time seminars over

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pizza. I think what I'll do, having heard about the student group this

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morning, is partner up with some
of the student groups to sponsor some of

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these and then you can get your
point if you come. And I'll go

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through this at some lengths or maybe
even take two lunches to do it,

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because it's worth discussion. But I
want to mention a couple siffics from it,

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just plucked not at random, but
selectively without full context, that I

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think help us orient us as we
go about our task in our classrooms here

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the next two years. I will
mention in passing by the way that Weber

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uses the term of vocation in the
title politics as a vocation in the biblical

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sense, as a calling from God, and not just the modern sense of

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vocations, just like profession. It's
a synonym for profession these days. Right

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now, he meant it in the
biblical sense, and he has many deep

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reflections along the way about the dilemmas
of Christian faith in the political realm.

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I'll share just one of them with
you. Quote. The early Christians knew

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full well the world is governed by
demons, and that he who lets himself

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in for politics, that is,
for power and force, as means contracts

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with diabolical powers, and for action. It is not true that good can

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follow only from good, and evil
only from evil, but that often the

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opposite is true. Close quote.
It's quite clear iness lecture and other writings

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that Vabor had read Machiavelli closely and
seriously and was shaken by it, as

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any careful reader would do. In
considering the shocking words of that shocking man,

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Novabor in nineteen nineteen sounded very pessimistic, and in his peroration at the

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end, winding up, winding up
to a very memorable ending, he says,

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not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of

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icy, darkness and hardness, no
matter which group may triumph externally. Now

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I pause here and say, nothing
is more common than people who follow modern

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American politics or politics anywhere, thinking
well, if my person or my party

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can just get in, everything will
get fixed. Fabor is saying, that's

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obviously too simplistic, no matter which
group triumph externally now to continue Now,

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then, ladies and gentlemen, let
us debate this matter once more ten years

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from now. Unfortunately, for a
whole series of reasons, I fear that

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by then, the period of reaction
will have long since broken over us.

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Theabor sadly died the following year from
the Spanish influenza, the COVID pandemic of

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its time, and didn't live to
see his pessimistic prophecy come true. It's

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curious to think, with his eminence, if he might have made a difference

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if he lived on. There's no
way to know. But I don't want

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to take away from this very brief
introduction that Theabor was a pessimist, counseling

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against hope or optimism, or suggesting
that despair is the only realistic attitude to

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have. If I stopped right here, that's what you might take away with

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what I've said so far. Are
to the contrary, And if we do

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have our leisurely seminars going through the
whole thing, you'll appreciate the other side

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of the story. Much of the
lecture makes the case not only for idealism,

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but it ratifies the indispensability or even
the necessity of idealism, a possibility

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of potentiality, and encouraging students to
enter the arena with hope and determination.

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The climax of his lecture is an
effort to rescue realism from the clutches of

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the cynics and the nihilists. His
purpose, and I think here I can't

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say the purpose of all faculty here
at the school was to get students too,

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as we'd say today, prepare to
step up their game. So one

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last quote from him, and then
I'll try to a conclusion. He says,

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it is very probable that little of
what many of you, and I

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candidly confess I too have wished and
hoped for will be fulfilled. Little,

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perhaps not exactly nothing, but what
to us at least seems little. We

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don't always get what we want,
to quote the philosopher Mick Jagger. But

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back to labor, this will not
crush me, but surely it is an

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inner burden to realize it. Keep
those first five words, This will not

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crush me like today. Likewise today
it's easy to be overwhelmed by the scale

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of our problems here and abroad.
Emily made mention that this quite well this

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morning, But paradoxically, I mean
another way of summarizing the point here.

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The beginning of wisdom is recognizing precisely
the seriousness of the situation and the kind

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of wisdom and persistence that's necessary to
match up with the times. So I'm

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constantly drawn back to this famous lecture
Max Weber, because I think by degrees

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what became the next world crisis finds
its parallels with our own time. Now.

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Maybe our present circumstances are not as
dire as Germany in nineteen nineteen.

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They're not, but they're no less
serious in their nature, and political things

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often turn on fundamental aspects of how
social life and political life work, and

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things can get worse if we're not
careful. You know, there are a

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lot of thinkers around these days who
draw parallels between modern day America and ancient

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Rome and its terminal faith. That's
why, to restate the point I made

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at the beginning about having only technical
instruction and policy, that is, to

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fiddle while Rome burns. So today
a large number of Americans, and especially

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younger Americans, that the surveys are
correct, have doubts about the goodness of

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our country, the fitness of our
constitution as mentioned, growing distrust of our

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leading institutions, and these rising doubts
about our fellow citizens. Hard to lead

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a public with these kinds of doubts
and divisions amongst us. Aside from particular

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issues that are all in our mind
these days, like crime, stagn economic

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prospects, alienation, you find on
a level of philosophy increasing defects about the

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great liberal tradition itself. Individual liberty
can seem empty and soul crushing. Social

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scientists and psychologists lately have made an
extensive case, or offered extensive evidence that

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the greatest epidemic of our time is
loneliness. This has caught the eye of

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some political leaders. Most recently,
the former First Lady and presidential candidate Hillary

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Clinton gave a big speech about this
subject three four weeks ago. There's a

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proposal in Congress right now for a
National Strategy for Social Connection Act. And

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it's not just an American issue.
Britain actually established a cabinet level Ministry of

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Loneliness a few years ago, although
I like a joke, that's just a

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place they put their new Prime Minister
they select every three months, right now,

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right? Or let me put it
this way, which will be irrelevance

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to our courses. Here do we
still hold these truths to be self evident?

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That all men are created equal and
are endowed by their creator with certain

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in alienable rights, among these life
liberty, in the pursuit of happiness?

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What can government do and what does
it not have the capacity to do to

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help us in our pursuit, let
alone ensuring that we achieve happiness? What

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was the thinking? What are the
principles behind the architecture and social order that

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flowed from that original resolve of seventeen
seventy six? You may have heard Churchill's

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old remark that democracy is the worst
form of government except for all the other

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forms that have ever been tried.
With the pervasive talk today about threats to

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democracy, those who wish it to
survive and prosper owe it to themselves and

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to their fellow citizens to inquire deeply
into the foundations of our democracy. Too

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often a day, it seems to
me to continue the metaphor we begin discussion

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with the roof and the windows and
neglect the foundations, or to put the

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question in a slightly different way.
One of John F. Kennedy's favorite quotes

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was from the great Christian writer GK. Chesterton, who said, do not

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remove a fence until you know why
it was put up in the first place.

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This is known as Chesterton's fence.
If that's all you remember, you

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can google it and pop right up
again. And so one of the unique

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elements of the program here is that
we look at the fence posts of our

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democracy and they ask the question,
why was it put there? What were

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the reasons for it? You know, these days all people point out oddities

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about our constitutional order, like the
separation of powers or the construction of the

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US Senate, all of which slow
down the government taking action and making new

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policy. Right, people say,
are you usually odd that Wyoming was seven

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thousand people has two senators in California, with forty million people has two senators,

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and then the filibuster allows a minority
to block things. Does this make

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sense? We're thinking slowly about why
they were built that way, and only

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then is it possible to devise thoughtful
new structures once you have appreciated what maybe

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the subtle wisdom embedded in those structures. And that's also the reason why the

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program here has a Great Books component. It gives the best portal into the

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forming of the thought of people who, by degrees shaped our democratic governments here

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in America and also abroad. Sometimes
today recurrence to the Great Books, which

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it can be harder to find.
By the way, it's sort of a

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fusty term. Sometimes some people think
it's obsolete. On the other hand,

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it was not that long ago that
what we so called, what were so

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called the mainstream political scientist, we
might say, understood the value this approach

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to civic education and policymaking. One
of my favorite examples from back in the

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sixties was the longtime chairman of UC
Berkeley's pre eminent political science department, Peter

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a person named Peter Odegarde, and
when he became president of the American Political

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Science Association, in his presidential address
he said the following, which I think

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still holds true today. He said
this, I feel like Mike Pencer,

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the fly buzzing trying to win my
head. If one is to argue that

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such training in the Great Books is
a poor preparation for practical politics, at

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least he mud must admit that it
did not seriously handicap Jefferson and mad Hamilton

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and other practical politicians who became the
architects of democratic government in the modern world.

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Indeed, one may well ask whether
the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,

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or the Federals papers could have been
written except by men trained in this

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way. We might well ask ourselves
also where in America we are today preparing

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the Jefferson's, the James Wilson's,
the James Madison's, or Alexander Hamilton's that

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our world so sorely needs like to
think that we're going to train some of

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them right here on this hillside.
We take that question very seriously here at

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the School of Public Policy, to
record at Churchill one more time. He

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said, the further you look back, the farther you can look forward.

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Like Vabor, we don't have all
the answers and won't tell you what to

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think. Unlike Labor, you will
not be disappointed. We will confront these

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kinds of questions with open eyes,
as leaders worthy of the title must do

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if they're going to be serious about
it. We think the future and survival

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of our country depends on it,
and I hope you will too. Thank

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you. Ricochet joined the conversation