From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the
Powerline Show with your host Steve Hayward. Well, hi everybody, and welcome
to this special, bonus classic format edition of the Powerline Podcast Today featuring just
Me all by myself. Now, there's a reason for this peculiar special episode,
and I guess it starts with an article over the weekend in the Wall
Street Journal that we had linked in our Pick section on Monday from Karl Rove,
who wrote a long article about how things have been worse in this country
than they are right now, and he recalled the turmoil the sixties, the
disruptions and panic and crisis of the nineteen thirties and so forth, going all
the way back to the earliest days of the Republic. And I think he's
right about that. As a general matter, I've been saying for some time
now that America is having a nervous breakdown right now, and who knows how
it's going to turn out. It could get worse. But this brings me
to some news that I don't think I have shared yet with listeners on the
podcast or in print on the Powerline site. And the news is this,
and I will connect it back to the Carl Rove article. Presently, it
turns out that in the spring, starting in January, I am going to
be the gay Lord visiting Professor at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy. Now
it's going to be a fun assignment. I'll say more about that in a
moment. But the proximate cause of this was the unfortunate passing of the permanent
gay Lord Professor of Public Policy a few months ago, Ted McAlister, who
I'd known from my previous time at Pepperdine and from various other places. And
Ted's has left a big hole in the program, as he taught several of
the core courses and was a mainstay of the public policy program at Pepperdine,
which I hastened to add is one of the most interesting and in some ways
I think the best in the whole country. And I'll say more about that
in due course. But I decided, after talking with the Dean, Pete
Peterson at the Public Policy School, that it made sense for me to try
and fill tents, very big shoes in the spring and teach one of the
foundational courses for first year students and do some other things. So how does
it connect to Karl Rove well A, Dean Pete kindly invited me last week
to give the faculty addressed to incoming students, which is a great privilege and
an honor. And one of the things I talked about in that address was
exactly what Karl Robot said, that the country has been in bad shape before,
and that there are things in our past that we should look at about
how we came out of it and so forth. But I decided to go
beyond just that and give a more wider range address about why the kind of
education that you get at Pepperdine School of Public Policy, or more broadly,
the kind of education that our universities ought to be delivering to students interested in
politics and public affairs but generally don't. And so I decided to turn it
into a podcast, and without further ado, here is my address to the
incoming students of the new class of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, a
graduate program, and it involves, i'll just say, taking students on an
imaginary journey back to Germany in nineteen nineteen. And so here we go.
Thanks well, thank you Cejay, thank you Dean Peterson for this kind invitation
to both rejoin the community and to be well. It's a triple honor for
me to be here today. If you probably don't know this, I've spent,
as I put it, the last seven years as an inmate at UC
Berkeley, which has been interesting, challenging, I like Gonzo assignments, but
before that, I spent a couple of years here. So this is like
coming back to sanity and to what I think is the most remarkable public policy
program in the country. And I'll explain why as I go, but I
say it's a triple honor. I'm the first faculty member that you're exposed to
if you're an incoming student, and I should make the disclaimer that my perspective
today is my own. I don't profess to speak on behalf of the faculty,
although I think there'd be some agreement. We'll have to say. Second,
it's an honor and also challenge to be filling the large shoes of our
late colleague Ted McAlister. He's not, just, by the way, a
long time fixture here at the program, but I learned and some recent trips
to Europe that a lot of his work is well known among a lot of
European thinkers, which I had not expected, and no one can fully replace
ted, but I shall do my best. Third, and most importantly,
and what I want to talk about today is all of you will have your
own individual reasons are coming here, and I'm going to be interested in learning
from each of you individually what those reasons are. In due course, I'm
going to be here, by the way, in the spring, two or
three days a week every week, doing a couple of courses. The Core
Roots course I'll be teaching, and one other still to be determined. I'm
doing some other things, and I may drop in once or twice here during
the fall, but at that time I'm going to be interested in getting to
know all of you. And what I want to do today is illuminate why
what you're going to do here is maybe more important than perhaps you imagine.
In other words, I'm gonna try and amplify your ambition. Now, I
just said, the public policy program here is unique and the best in the
country. Emily has already given you some reasons why, and I like to
start the banner over here see public policy differently from here. Emily actually stole
one of my lines. I like to point out that the school of Public
Policy maintains an equal emphasis on public to go along with policy. Now,
it's very important to learn a lot of technical skills for policy analysis and policy
formation. But a lot of graduate public policy programs in the country, and
I've visited a lot of them now and study them, they do a lot
of policy, but they've lost focus on the public. It's become very fuzzy.
And there are many reasons for this, but just one of them is
hard to note today what public means anymore. If you just think about our
discourse, said the newspapers and the political world at large, we don't talk
about the public as much as individual groups. We talk about groups, interests,
regional variations, race, social class, gender, and so forth.
And above all, what you will hear the favorite term of the media and
academia is that Americans today are deeply divided and polarized never before, and so
it becomes hard to talk about the public as an intelligible thing. How bad
is it, I'll give you one data points. Much on my mind has
been for a while. There's a lot of survey evidence that shows that the
American public as a whole has lost confidence in our major institutions, both public
institutions and private institutions, you know, banks, real estate, whatever you
name it. So, for example, in the late nineteen fifties, when
people like Gallops started asking the public, do you have high confidence in the
federal government to do the right thing? That was the question was usually something
like that. When that question was first asked, eighty percent of Americans,
nearly eighty percent said they had high confidence in the federal government. Today that
number in the same survey is fifteen percent. And you can do the time
series. They asked this every year. It's just been a steady downslope for
the last five decades. What are the causes of this? What happened?
Are there remedies? This question and ones related to it are very much worth
keeping in mind over your next two years here now, I've been arguing that
our country has been having a nervous breakdown for quite a while. Although we
can't exaggerate this, and I think you do want to keep it in some
proportion because things have been worse in some ways in my own lifetime for someone
my age, A lot of what's going on right now is a feeling of
deja vu all over again. We had similar kinds of instability and disruptions in
the nineteen sixties when I was growing up. If you read your history,
you know we had political assassinations, We had urban riots then weren't just for
summer, but for several years. We had a lot of civil unrest and
almost forgotten these days except people whill read to history carefully. Is in late
sixties, in early seventies, we had a wave of bombings. I think
it was like three a day. It averaged, many of them on college
campuses. Many students were killed at some of these bombings are maimed, including
students at some campuses here in southern California. And this is largely forgotten today.
On the other hand, and we don't have a lot of that now.
We've we've fed some riots and a lot of very disturbing things happening,
but we haven't. Let's hope it stays this way, seeing a revival of
political assassinations and widespread bombings and so forth. On the other hand, things
may be worse in some other ways today. I already made some mention to
the polarization and divisions among Americans and why this is maybe at or has reached
a crisis point is that when Americans see other Americans as utterly alien, it
is hard for us them to be common citizens any longer, and good luck
making policy for that public. Now. It's often said that one of the
best ways of perceiving your own home or your own country differently or better is
to go to another country. So we were talking about narrative. What I
want to do right now is take you on an imaginary trip. Emily this
morning took you to Uganda. What I want to do is take you off
for a few minutes to Munich, Germany in nineteen nineteen, and I want
to convey to you what was on the mind of students then and why it's
relevant to today. You know, it's commonplace to say that Americans don't learn
their own history very well. And I'm guessing that unless one of you was
a German language or German history major, you probably have no idea what Germany
was like in nineteen nineteen, and especially why Munich was the focal point of
their difficulties. Everyone knows the disaster that befell Germany, starting a decade or
more later, but these early months after World War One ended in November nineteen
eighteen are crucial. So after World War One ends in November of nineteen eighteen,
Germany was in a dangerous and unstable revolutionary situation the country as a whole.
They threw out their monarchy of several centuries. There was huge uncertainty.
No one could form a government. They didn't have a constitution yet, and
the one they adopted was a bad one. The economy was a shamble's food
was in short supply, and there was a real prospect of famine, like
out of the Middle Ages, and that was averted in large part because of
the efforts of a heroic American you will have heard of, named Herbert Hoover.
But mass protests in the streets were commonplace. To say there was unrest
obviously then would be an understatement. Now. Germany in those days and still
to some extent today, has a federal system that is similar in some ways
to Hours and in Bavaria. There were successive attempts to install a revolutionary government
of some kind, but the various iolutionary factions, and there were a whole
lot of them, couldn't get along with each other or share power. There
were communists, there were socialists, there were syndicalists, there were anarchists,
there were radical labor union groups and constant violence, and the whole project didn't
take There were a lot of mass arrests and sweeps by what was left of
the German Army, people thrown in jail without due process, without trial.
One person who narrowly escaped one of these sweeps later goes on a young corporal
out of the army goes on to write later in minecomf why these experiences alerted
him to the possibilities of extremist politics. And there are other famous figures in
German literature that were in the middle of the sea, Mike Herman Hesse and
Thomas mann So. In February of nineteen nineteen, so just three months after
the armistice, Bavaria managed to elect or select somehow a man named Kurt Eisner
to be their prime minister. He was a socialist, a person of great
charisma and ability, who might have made a go of it if he hadn't
been assassinated in the street on his way to give a speech to a large
public gathering that was already assembled to hear him. And things spiraled down from
there. Now, in the midst of this grim scene, students at the
University of Munich circulated a petition that gained many hundreds of signatures, and they
were asking the most eminent intellectual in Germany to come talk to them about the
present crisis. Why a petition, because this particular figure didn't really want to
do it, and they they had to express to him through a petition that
we think it's really important we need to hear from you. And that figure
was Max Weber. Now you may know Max vaber Iff at all. He's
still on some undergraduate syllabi for this and that as the turgid and boring sociologists
whose writings are an effective cure for insomnia. And you wouldn't be wrong for
thing that now, variety of reasons I have to skip over for today.
He was nonetheless the ideal person to speak to the anxious German students of that
time, and about those students you know today we'd like to talk about diversity,
but think of the spectrum of student experience. You would have found in
nineteen nineteen at the University of Munich. Many students were late teenagers entering college
at the normal time, but there's a large number of them who had had
their education interrupted by army service, or who had never started, and who
are now entering the university in their mid twenties, having survived the awfulness of
the trenches in the Western Front and so forth some of their time. By
the way, it'd be interesting to compare the reflections of those soldiers with a
cohort I remember from more modern times. I got to college in the mid
nineteen seventies and met a lot of older students who were Vietnam veterans, and
of course that war divided America as none since the Civil War, and they
often brought very interesting perspectives to the classroom that today I think it's hard to
recreate, even I think among veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq. But again that's
a story to think about some other time. Most of these students, whether
brand new or returning or whatever, were lacked their fellow citizens, confused,
conflicted, anxious, often depressed, but ambitious and earnest and wanting to be
politically active and engaged in rebuilding your country. Many of them rushed to join
the communists or the anarchists, or some other violent revolutionary faction. On the
other hand, or the other end of the spectrum were a lot of German
students with an attachment to Germany's historic Lutheran Christian faith, and they thought the
best political aspect to strike was pacifism. In fact, they openly welcome occupation
by the French and British and Americans, thinking we should throw ourselves on them.
Of the conquering allies who had not yet gathered, remember to try and
settle things at the Versailles treaty table in Paris some month later, a treaty
which, if you know you're the sad history of the continent was botched.
A lot of students were whipsawed going back and forth a pacifist one day,
almost literally the next day literally bomb throwers and rioters. There was a high
rate of suicide among students, some of the Max Favor's own students. In
other words, in the midst of what was a desperate situation, students wanted
max Favor to tell them what to do and what to think about what was
going on. The long lecture gay was called politics as a vocation. And
just to mention one contemporary figure of prominence, and that's former President Bill Clinton.
You've all heard of him. Of course, still with us. He
told The New York Times twice a few years ago that the single most important
or valuable tech he thought to someone interested in serving in public life was Max
Baber's Politics as a Vocation. Now it's a very long lecture. It's almost
twenty three thousand words long. It must have taken two hours to deliver,
And despite Bill Clinton's endorsement, I don't actually recommend you try and read it
on your own. For one thing, the first two thirds are deadly dull.
I have a theory about why he did it that way, and it's
only if you stay awake the first two thirds that it takes a sudden turn
at the end and becomes personal, deeply moving, and I think profound.
A full appreciation of what he's after requires knowing some of the specific people and
movements of the time and the circumstances. And if you know these details,
because he doesn't mention names, but if you actually know the backstories we say
in Hollywood, you come to see that he has the agony of specific students
very much on his own mind. The very first two sentences of his lecture
run as follows. Remember, he was demanded to be almost like a command
performance for the students. He said, this lecture, which I give at
your request, will necessarily disappoint you. You will naturally expect me to take
a position on actual problems of the day. End quote. But then who
goes on to say for several long German sentences. Of course he's not going
to do that, he says, only maybe indirectly, will I give you
suggestions as to what to do or think? So let that think in a
minute. What he's saying is I don't have the answers you're looking for.
I can't tell you what to do and what to think. All I can
do, to paraphrase, this long treatise, is to alert you to the
fundamental problems of political life that all too often we think find their remedy in
ideological programs, in ten point plans of action, or simple institutional reforms.
He doesn't think those are unworthy things to consider, but he's wanting to say
that, especially in times of crisis, the problems are deeper and harder than
that, and you need to know that. In fact, the central question
of the lecture here, I'll quote him again, is what kind of person
must one be if he is to be allowed to put his hand on the
wheel of history. Now, I won't try and summarize what's all in the
last third of this extraordinary lecture. I will do this though my practice here
the last time I was here was to occasionally have casual lunch time seminars over
pizza. I think what I'll do, having heard about the student group this
morning, is partner up with some of the student groups to sponsor some of
these and then you can get your point if you come. And I'll go
through this at some lengths or maybe even take two lunches to do it,
because it's worth discussion. But I want to mention a couple siffics from it,
just plucked not at random, but selectively without full context, that I
think help us orient us as we go about our task in our classrooms here
the next two years. I will mention in passing by the way that Weber
uses the term of vocation in the title politics as a vocation in the biblical
sense, as a calling from God, and not just the modern sense of
vocations, just like profession. It's a synonym for profession these days. Right
now, he meant it in the biblical sense, and he has many deep
reflections along the way about the dilemmas of Christian faith in the political realm.
I'll share just one of them with you. Quote. The early Christians knew
full well the world is governed by demons, and that he who lets himself
in for politics, that is, for power and force, as means contracts
with diabolical powers, and for action. It is not true that good can
follow only from good, and evil only from evil, but that often the
opposite is true. Close quote. It's quite clear iness lecture and other writings
that Vabor had read Machiavelli closely and seriously and was shaken by it, as
any careful reader would do. In considering the shocking words of that shocking man,
Novabor in nineteen nineteen sounded very pessimistic, and in his peroration at the
end, winding up, winding up to a very memorable ending, he says,
not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of
icy, darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally. Now
I pause here and say, nothing is more common than people who follow modern
American politics or politics anywhere, thinking well, if my person or my party
can just get in, everything will get fixed. Fabor is saying, that's
obviously too simplistic, no matter which group triumph externally now to continue Now,
then, ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more ten years
from now. Unfortunately, for a whole series of reasons, I fear that
by then, the period of reaction will have long since broken over us.
Theabor sadly died the following year from the Spanish influenza, the COVID pandemic of
its time, and didn't live to see his pessimistic prophecy come true. It's
curious to think, with his eminence, if he might have made a difference
if he lived on. There's no way to know. But I don't want
to take away from this very brief introduction that Theabor was a pessimist, counseling
against hope or optimism, or suggesting that despair is the only realistic attitude to
have. If I stopped right here, that's what you might take away with
what I've said so far. Are to the contrary, And if we do
have our leisurely seminars going through the whole thing, you'll appreciate the other side
of the story. Much of the lecture makes the case not only for idealism,
but it ratifies the indispensability or even the necessity of idealism, a possibility
of potentiality, and encouraging students to enter the arena with hope and determination.
The climax of his lecture is an effort to rescue realism from the clutches of
the cynics and the nihilists. His purpose, and I think here I can't
say the purpose of all faculty here at the school was to get students too,
as we'd say today, prepare to step up their game. So one
last quote from him, and then I'll try to a conclusion. He says,
it is very probable that little of what many of you, and I
candidly confess I too have wished and hoped for will be fulfilled. Little,
perhaps not exactly nothing, but what to us at least seems little. We
don't always get what we want, to quote the philosopher Mick Jagger. But
back to labor, this will not crush me, but surely it is an
inner burden to realize it. Keep those first five words, This will not
crush me like today. Likewise today it's easy to be overwhelmed by the scale
of our problems here and abroad. Emily made mention that this quite well this
morning, But paradoxically, I mean another way of summarizing the point here.
The beginning of wisdom is recognizing precisely the seriousness of the situation and the kind
of wisdom and persistence that's necessary to match up with the times. So I'm
constantly drawn back to this famous lecture Max Weber, because I think by degrees
what became the next world crisis finds its parallels with our own time. Now.
Maybe our present circumstances are not as dire as Germany in nineteen nineteen.
They're not, but they're no less serious in their nature, and political things
often turn on fundamental aspects of how social life and political life work, and
things can get worse if we're not careful. You know, there are a
lot of thinkers around these days who draw parallels between modern day America and ancient
Rome and its terminal faith. That's why, to restate the point I made
at the beginning about having only technical instruction and policy, that is, to
fiddle while Rome burns. So today a large number of Americans, and especially
younger Americans, that the surveys are correct, have doubts about the goodness of
our country, the fitness of our constitution as mentioned, growing distrust of our
leading institutions, and these rising doubts about our fellow citizens. Hard to lead
a public with these kinds of doubts and divisions amongst us. Aside from particular
issues that are all in our mind these days, like crime, stagn economic
prospects, alienation, you find on a level of philosophy increasing defects about the
great liberal tradition itself. Individual liberty can seem empty and soul crushing. Social
scientists and psychologists lately have made an extensive case, or offered extensive evidence that
the greatest epidemic of our time is loneliness. This has caught the eye of
some political leaders. Most recently, the former First Lady and presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton gave a big speech about this subject three four weeks ago. There's a
proposal in Congress right now for a National Strategy for Social Connection Act. And
it's not just an American issue. Britain actually established a cabinet level Ministry of
Loneliness a few years ago, although I like a joke, that's just a
place they put their new Prime Minister they select every three months, right now,
right? Or let me put it this way, which will be irrelevance
to our courses. Here do we still hold these truths to be self evident?
That all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain
in alienable rights, among these life liberty, in the pursuit of happiness?
What can government do and what does it not have the capacity to do to
help us in our pursuit, let alone ensuring that we achieve happiness? What
was the thinking? What are the principles behind the architecture and social order that
flowed from that original resolve of seventeen seventy six? You may have heard Churchill's
old remark that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other
forms that have ever been tried. With the pervasive talk today about threats to
democracy, those who wish it to survive and prosper owe it to themselves and
to their fellow citizens to inquire deeply into the foundations of our democracy. Too
often a day, it seems to me to continue the metaphor we begin discussion
with the roof and the windows and neglect the foundations, or to put the
question in a slightly different way. One of John F. Kennedy's favorite quotes
was from the great Christian writer GK. Chesterton, who said, do not
remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
This is known as Chesterton's fence. If that's all you remember, you
can google it and pop right up again. And so one of the unique
elements of the program here is that we look at the fence posts of our
democracy and they ask the question, why was it put there? What were
the reasons for it? You know, these days all people point out oddities
about our constitutional order, like the separation of powers or the construction of the
US Senate, all of which slow down the government taking action and making new
policy. Right, people say, are you usually odd that Wyoming was seven
thousand people has two senators in California, with forty million people has two senators,
and then the filibuster allows a minority to block things. Does this make
sense? We're thinking slowly about why they were built that way, and only
then is it possible to devise thoughtful new structures once you have appreciated what maybe
the subtle wisdom embedded in those structures. And that's also the reason why the
program here has a Great Books component. It gives the best portal into the
forming of the thought of people who, by degrees shaped our democratic governments here
in America and also abroad. Sometimes today recurrence to the Great Books, which
it can be harder to find. By the way, it's sort of a
fusty term. Sometimes some people think it's obsolete. On the other hand,
it was not that long ago that what we so called, what were so
called the mainstream political scientist, we might say, understood the value this approach
to civic education and policymaking. One of my favorite examples from back in the
sixties was the longtime chairman of UC Berkeley's pre eminent political science department, Peter
a person named Peter Odegarde, and when he became president of the American Political
Science Association, in his presidential address he said the following, which I think
still holds true today. He said this, I feel like Mike Pencer,
the fly buzzing trying to win my head. If one is to argue that
such training in the Great Books is a poor preparation for practical politics, at
least he mud must admit that it did not seriously handicap Jefferson and mad Hamilton
and other practical politicians who became the architects of democratic government in the modern world.
Indeed, one may well ask whether the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,
or the Federals papers could have been written except by men trained in this
way. We might well ask ourselves also where in America we are today preparing
the Jefferson's, the James Wilson's, the James Madison's, or Alexander Hamilton's that
our world so sorely needs like to think that we're going to train some of
them right here on this hillside. We take that question very seriously here at
the School of Public Policy, to record at Churchill one more time. He
said, the further you look back, the farther you can look forward.
Like Vabor, we don't have all the answers and won't tell you what to
think. Unlike Labor, you will not be disappointed. We will confront these
kinds of questions with open eyes, as leaders worthy of the title must do
if they're going to be serious about it. We think the future and survival
of our country depends on it, and I hope you will too. Thank
you. Ricochet joined the conversation