I try to look nice for you, and I get no credit. Ask
not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for
your country. Mister Garbuchaw, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast
with Rob Long and Steven Award sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylyx,
and today we talked to Glenn Lowry about his new autobiography and more so,
let's have ourselves a podcast. If you want to characterize it as a
failure, I leave it to you. What I can tell you is that
we don't control the weather. You better believe that US Central Command Forces are
going to do everything in their power to make sure that this is back and
operational as soon as possible. America is a nation that can be defined in
a single word. How does foot him to put? Excuse me? Well,
Hello, welcome. I'm James Lylyx. This is his podcast number six
hundred and ninety four, moving inexorably to another number seven hundred. Steven Hayward
is sitting here for Peter. Rob is with us as well. We're going
to go to our guests in just a second. But I got to say
we're at a hard point here because the verdict isn't in, so we don't
know. And when the verdict does come in, we'll be back next week,
after which it will be chewed, digested and will be extremely old news.
It'll be the beef jerky as opposed to these about to be served to
Filly minual that it is now. I have no idea what's going to happen
to Andrew McCarthy says he's going to be found guilty. The instructions to the
jury seem to indicate that they can find him guilty of maybe showing up one
day and scratching his left ear lobe and therego he goes to jail. I
don't know, very briefly, like twenty seconds predictions, gentlemen, which time
may or may not bear out. I don't know anything about any of this
stuff, so I base it only on Annie McCarthy and then the few smart
lawyers I have follow on Twitter, which looks like the jury came back with
questions that seem to indicate they are looking for a way to convict. Yeah,
and Steven, you's right, Stephen, You're in Europe, where I'm
sure the cap are a buzz with this. Oh yes, and I'm trying
to watch it from afar. I mean, the first day with all the
questions and asking for the judges instructions to be read back. That sounds to
me like this is going to go a long while. And I went forrob.
I think that in the case that they do want to convict him,
but they're going to have to take their time to do it. I was
once on a jury that for a five week, very difficult trial for twenty
eight felony counts, and the guy's guilt was not in question, very strong
case, but it was very strange, but it still took us a couple
of days to work through all the charges one by one and come up with
guilty verdics on every one of them. And this one will be much harder,
I think. So it'll be studied for an awful long time and eventually
scientists, I think we'll be able to discern the likelihood of the likelihood of
conviction based on the number of veins popping in Robert Nero's forehead. It's a
metric we have at looked at before, but it's one that we should well,
you know, we'll get to that. There's a whole bunch of podcasts
in Ricochet that are smart and legally and Laurel Lee and all those other great
smart stuff, so you will go to them to get to the minute comments
and observations about what has happened. What we are going to do today is
give you the long view with a great man. And now we welcome back
to the podcast. Glenn Lowry the Merton P. Stultz Professor of the Social
Sciences and Professor of Economics of Brown University. He's the host of the Glenn
Show podcast. You can find uh you know, well, you know on
a substack and that Ricoshet dot complation might have heard something about. Glenn is
also the author of the newly published Late Admissions Confessions of a Black Conservative.
Glenn, welcome back to the show. Thanks very much. James introduction.
You say something that I'm sure raises eyebrows and it makes people lean in wanting
to hear more. You say, I'm going to tell you things about myself
that no one would want anybody to think was true of them. Well,
let's start. You want me to tell you something about myself that no one
would want anyone to think those two of them, Yeah, I think so.
I mean, you can leave some for the book. But you know,
having said that, we are curious, I mean killed a man and
Reno, just killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. I
mean, that's the you know, that's pretty well not quite. I was
a cocaine addict and had to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for two months
in my effort to stop using, which was fitful and went on over the
course of a year. I did eventually free myself from dependency on that substance,
but it was a real struggle. How did that change your attitude towards
addiction, because that's that's one of those things that's fraught in the discourse today
because of you know, what we've seen on the streets, the plank of
difficult drugs like fentanyl and the rest of it. People describe a moral responsibility
to them, some don't. I mean, how it has that shifted and
altered your your perspective on that problem that wein Well, I do have a
wealth of personal experience with how hard it is to actually get clear and stay
clean a day at a time and all of that. This is the school
of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. It's a personal struggle. It's a question
of self command. I don't have a big philosophical position on the basis of
that experience. I have sympathy for people who struggle with this problem, but
I'm also aware of the dangers of enabling and the fact that actually nobody can
do it for you. You have to do it for yourself at the end
of the day. But these are nostrums or platitudes. I don't have any
real wisdom for you on this, James, Well, you know, glad,
if I can jump in, I think you're understating your achievement here.
And I mean the literary style of your memoir I think is really quite extraordinary
because you not only combine some intellectual content. There's poetry. I mean you
go from poetry to quadratic equations in the space of five pages. But you
know, telling your personal story, you know, confronting you know, failure,
fear, redemption, doubts, professional success. Uh oh, I mean
there's several parts that robbed me literally to tears. You know, you're you're
young, with your son Alden for example. And in fact, I'll tell
listeners that if you if you're not grabbed by the preface, then the page
and the half glen about your father in the first chapter will make people not
be able to put the book down. Uh. And I'm reading all that
sort of the political and philosophical and other stuff. So I mean, you
weave together an extraordinary narrative that has this tremendousness. All right, there's my
dust jacket blurb. I'll stop about all that. Well, let me let
me comment, Steve, let me comment. I mean, first of all,
about the preface, and thanks James for mentioning it. I say,
I'm playing a game with the reader in that I'm the author of my own
account. This is my life. I'm telling you the story. I am
telling you the story of my life. You, if you're wise as a
reader, should be on the lookout for me manipulating my control over the narrative
on behalf of my own objectives. This is a game. Theoretic insight that
you know, if you're an economist, comes readily to mind. And therefore
I have a problem. How do I persuade you to trust what it is?
And I'm telling you about myself, and I make the observation that you
know I'm going to tell you stuff that is not really pretty and that's not
all that crediting to me at one level, but the fact that I'm willing
to tell it to you should win over your trust in me as a reliable
narrator, and I can use that. I can use that confidence that you
have. This guy, this scumbag, this miscreant, this complete failure of
a human being, isn't the same guy who's telling me about his failures and
his triumphs over his failures and so forth. And that's my effort to both
be truthful to the narrative of my life, but at the same time not
to leave myself completely discredited in the eye of the reader. And the preface
of the book, where I make this observation about the game, is meant
to foreshadow for the reader the fact that as you go forward, there's a
lot of stuff about Glenn Lowry's life that's not pretty, and that he's going
to be telling you about. Well, sure, I get all that,
but I've always known you're a great writer. I've been reading you for years.
But this cannot have been an easy book to have written, and it
what made you decide to really lay it all out there. It was not
an easy book to write, and I came to the conclusion that, you
know, I needed to come clean some of the stuff, the discrediting stuff.
Residency and a psychiatric hospital for drug addiction, having to withdraw from a
high level appointment in the government, the federal government because of a scandal with
a mistress and the accusation of assault, and a secret apartment, and all
that. The abandonment of my son Alden at birth and not really developing a
relationship with him until he was an adult. The failure to live up to
what I and others thought was my intellectual and academic promise as a young,
tenured professor of economics at Harvard specializing in technical economics and microeconomic theory, applied
theory, writing models and getting published in journals, and my embrace of another
kind of professional life as a social critic and public intellectual and a pundit right
of center, to be sure, but nevertheless not publishing in the American Economic
Review for a decade kind of thing. What happened to me at Harvard in
the early nineteen eight all of these different things. I wanted to come to
terms with these things for myself. I mean, there's a therapeutic dimension,
there's a kind of self knowledge dimension. One of my dear friends and colleagues
was the late great economist Thomas Schelling, who wrote about the problem of self
command, about the conflict of the game between two instantiations of the same individual,
one of whom would want not to use cocaine and the other whom would
spend his last dollar to get high, And how it is that one,
as an economic specialist or game theorist, can conceptualize that kind of internal struggle.
And I was very much intermortive that, both because I respect and admired
Tom as an economist, but also because I had struggled and come out the
other side of a struggle with addiction. But self command and self knowledge,
these are very closely related things. It seems to me that if you're not
willing to be honest with yourself about what's actually going on in your life,
what has gone on, what your failures were, what your fears were,
what you unrealized hopes were, What were the temptations to which you succumbed.
Why did you do that stupid thing that you did that costs you so much?
Why did you not take more care of the nurturing of the relationship with
your wife, or with your children. These kinds of questions. These are
questions I had in my mind when I began writing this book, to which
I didn't really know the answers. I'm not sure I know them now.
Ah. Well, that I have whole bunch of political questions for you,
I'm going to put off, But I have one last personal one that will
be of interest to Rob who's shortly to DeCamp to Divinity School. Part of
your story in the middle, and including, by the way, the wonderful
anecdote of being chewed out by Richard John Neuhouse, who I knew a bit
right. But part of it is you know the role of religious faith and
helping to overcome addictions. But then your admission that some lingering doubts have crept
in. It wasn't quite clear to me where you landed. It sounds a
little bit like the famous quote of the Latin Tertullian Right, who said,
what would I don't Lord help vow my unbelief? So say a little bit
about that, and if you can share with us where you've landed now.
So in the late eighties, when I was struggling with addiction, I came
under the influence of and allowed myself to be completely won over by the evangelical
fervor of a Protestant congregation somewhat charismatic and fundamentalist in its sensibility, led by
two African American physicians who had in effect abandoned their medical careers in order to
stand up and nurture the development of a new church in inner city Boston.
My wife, my late wife, Linda Linda Lowery, Linda Datcher Lowry,
the economist whom I met in graduate school and who passed away from breast cancer
in twenty eleven. We were married for twenty eight years. She and I
became members of that congregation early in its uh in its development, the congregations
development, and I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I accepted him as
my savior. I became a born again Christian. And it was a very
sincere and profoundly sustaining transformation in my life, and not just with respect to
drug addiction, and it involved embrace of the of the Christian worldview. And
I talked in the book about how nurturing that was, how glorious it was,
how beautiful at many levels for me it was, how compelling it was
but I also talk about doubts. I talk about whether or not I really
did believe that a man had been raised from the dead, and lives on
whether I could, as a modern person, as an intellectual, a PhD
from MIT, a scientist, believe in the supernatural claims, and I came
to have doubts, and those doubts not at me. I related in the
book an an Incident. It was the funeral of a dear friend who had
died in her early forties from a tragic viral infection of her heart that came
out of nowhere and took her in the blink of an eye. And of
my feelings about how it is that she was a member of our church and
how it is that the congregation dealt with her death. At that funeral,
it was a moment for me which crystallized some of those doubts, and I
let those doubts get the better of me. Now, I don't want to
tell everything about the book, but there was another dimension to the reasons why
I moved away from the church, which I talk about honestly in the book.
But my theologic doubts were genuine, and the sense of crisis that I
felt, oh can I believe do I really, really really believe that drove
me to seek console, and Father Richard John Newhouse, the late great theologian
who happened to be a friend of mine, opened his doors to me to
give me console. And I write about that in the book You asked me
where am I now? And I try to signal a little bit of my
agnosticism. I wouldn't call myself an atheist, but I also can't call myself
a believer. I'm a person who, based on my personal experience, but
also based upon my general temper and my sense of where our civilization is,
have great respect for the quest that people are on to ground their understanding of
the meaning of life and transcendent commitment. But I can't say that I unreservedly
embrace that commitment at this stage in my life. I'm an agnostic. If
you've got to put a label on it, well, Glenn as Rob,
you just describe yourself as an agnostic and not sure what you if you believe
it. You sound like a perfect candidate to be an episcopal bishop, because
that's that's what I'm going for here, you know. I mean, I
gotta say it's an absolutely beautiful book. And it's a beautiful book, and
it comes out kind of at the right time, I think, just culturally,
I just think it's really important and it's an important book for people to
read. It's also sneaky political. It is your least political, most political
book. Is that a fair thing to say? I can see why you
might say that. Yeah. I mean it's a personal story, but it's
also kind of an intellectual journey. Is that a fair thing? And I
mean it fits in a lot of categories of sort of American literature, and
one of them is the the way somebody grows and changes and gets ideas and
throws ideas away and then gets new ideas and then sort of emerges. Is
that is it? Am I? Is that fair? Or is that that's
very fair? That's very fair, Rob. I was going to call the
book changing my mind. Yeah, for a long time, because I thought
the book was mainly about well, I was a Riggan Conservative in the eighties
and and then I kind of lost my faith, not only my Christian faith
but also my neo conservative slash conservative political faith for a while. But did
I really lose my faith or was there another thing that was going on with
me. This is one of the stories that I'm working with in the book
What maybe I just wanted back in with the what I call the negro COGNOCENTI
with the public intellectuals on the left of black prominence who had ostracized me.
And some of these people who ostracized me were members of my own family or
lifelong friends who I'd grown up with, you know, and calling me a
traitor to the race and all of that. And maybe I chafed a little
bit at the ostracism that comes the loneliness of the black conservative kind of thing,
and I succumbed to that, you know. So anyway, I interrogate
the reasons for the shift, but I thought the thing was about the shifting
politics, and I moved left in the nineties, broke with many of my
conservative friends, reviewed some of their books acoustically, wrote obituaries of people whom
I knew were decent and wise and morally grounded people. I think of James
Q. Wilson, the late great political scientists, whom I blasted in a
review that I wish I could take back now after he died. Samy died
with blood on his hands because his view of the incarceration and policing problem,
and my view at that time of the incarceration and policing problem. Whereat odds
with one another. So I moved around, and you could make the book
about, you know, those kinds of political shifts. You lose friends,
Are you certain of your views? Do you question your motives? You know?
How do you process the struggle to ground your beliefs in an intellectually respectable
way, but also to acknowledge the influence that social and cultural currents and pressures
and conformity and whatnot might have on you. I thought that's what the book
was about. But that's not what the book. That's not the main thing
that the book is about. It's another thing that I can work with,
and I do work with in the book. But I thought, at the
end of the day, the book had to be about telling myself the truth
about my life and all it's aspects. I guess I feel like I guess
why I said political. I don't. I guess I don't mean capital people.
I've almost been culturally political, because I mean, look, I'm you're
a fancy professor at Brown University, You're a published academic, you have been
a public intellectual, which is a phrase because I hate but the only way
to describe what you've been for decades. You are not supposed to write a
book about changing your mind because in America, the way we are today,
we are not allowed to do that. We're supposed to wear the jersey,
and that's the jersey we're going to wear and die with. How hard is
it? I mean, I think I know the answer to this. It's
because I think I know you well and I not know it probably wasn't as
hard. But what advice would you give to other other intellectuals that you know,
fellow professors, authors, writers on both sides, when they're thinking,
hey, maybe I was wrong, but I don't want to say it.
I mean, don't you think that's part of what the problem we have right
now in the culture is that people, once they say something I'm on Twitter
or wherever, they just dig in. Yeah. I think there are a
lot of forces that unilitate in favor of doing so. You accumulate a kind
of social capital and your political identity, and there's an investment there. I
mean, what can I say that anything I say is going to sound self
aggrandizing. That's okay, I had the courage to admit that I was wrong.
Everybody should be here as courageous as me. It's twenty twenty four,
you're on a book tour. Let's do it. But I mean, I
mean, did you ever think to yourself, Okay, well, I mean
here's the reason people don't do it, especially if people who are sort of
public thinking public thinkers, is that that, well, you were wrong about
that, You're wrong about this now. People say that all the time.
I mean, I know a lot of people I know who are, like
a remark economists who have now sort of come to a slightly more i would
say, industrial policy friendly position in economics that I have not. And sometimes
when I'm talking to them, I'm thinking, well, wait a minute,
am I just being rigid and doctor naire or are they just being you know,
squishy on hard economics. I don't know if you know this paper.
I think it's Candice Pendergrass, the Chicago based Applied Economists Labor Economists A theory
of yes men, long stories. There's a nice it's a nice applied theory
paper. We're economist around here, so let me just you know. I
mean, the idea is you're in an organization and you're giving advice, and
your advice is noisy. You know, you get a signal, but it's
a noisy signal. You might be right, you might be wrong. If
you're really a low variance, high information source of advice, your advice will
be relatively stable over time. This is base you know stuff. I mean,
yeah, basically, the new observations won't cause you to change your estimate
of the unobserved parameter very much. You'll be a stable over time. Vascillation
indirectly reveals high noise in your signal. If your advice is shifting a lot,
you are expost fact or revealing yourself to be a relatively unreliable source of
information. And so you're going to be discounted in the organization when you try
to give advice. And that's I think a very nice economistic way of capturing
the thing that you just got through saying rob that you don't want to be
shifting around a lot, because people discount everything you say when they hear you
say one thing one day and another thing another day. And I think that's
right. If I'm reading the book, I'm reading the story, I'm reading
your story, and I'm falling along with you. As you go on all
these different little, you know, tributaries and journeys, right, one of
them is intellectual and ideological and political. It all makes sense to me because
it's coming from you, and because I think that's why I guess I'm trying
to think that political the personal part of this book makes the political part or
the intellectual part so much more easily understood and celebrated. And I just think
that's I don't think I've ever read a book that had quite has been quite
this such a great example of that of a thinking person's trip through his life
and his thinking, and so I just I think it's that's why I think
it's an amazing book. And I think I think everyone should be encouraged to
think about what book they would write just like this of themselves, because everybody's
got a story already had a little journey, and everybodys had a little trip
through you know, politics and culture. So my next thing is, I
think you should run webinars for money and have people, you know, right,
just do a writing workshop for people, because it really is sort of
an extraordinary exercise when people go through an ideological pull shift, and a lot
of us did it's either for a couple of reasons. It would seem either
a new set of new set of facts, new information that makes you a
reevaluate thought before, or a change in situation of maturation. People are more
likely perhaps to find themselves moving towards the center and gasp towards the right when
they find themselves married with a house paying property taxes all of a sudden,
and once you start to re examine your previous set of givens, in comes
doubt about everything else that leaches away the foundation until now you are seeing what
else is on the other side. And it's always it's exhilarating at first because
you have a whole new set of people to discover, a whole new set
of people to support you and welcome you into the fold and the rest of
it. But then, as you've said, you look back on what you
believed before and say, why did I believe that? Was I wrong?
And you have to know where to stop and fix yourself. Is it the
difficulty these days? Do you think is the difficulty in being of a mind
about say, the Constitution or basic facts about economics and finding that the discourse
in which we live is constantly constantly moving away from these ideas and pushing us
into you or I feel like an extremist because I'm a First Amendment absolute So
how much of the shifting culture was responsible for your changes in what you came
to believe? Why? I guess that's my question. Why did you switch
from this set of beliefs to that? Was it? New information? Was
a personal situation? Combination of the two life what Yeah, I'm going to
say a combination of the two given the alternatives on offer. So in my
specific case, I moved from right to left. In the nineties, I
became exasperated with my conservative colleagues on the race question. I actually agreed with
them about the bankruptcy of the civil rights vision. You know, Thomas Soul
being a source here, but he's not the only one. I agreed with
him that the discrimination mongering was really barking up the wrong tree, and that
the real problems had to do with culture and structure of internal life within the
community, various social developments that were impeding people from taking advantage of opportunities that
actually existed. I agreed about all of that, but and this was a
point in my life where I was maybe vulnerable I had gone through my Christian
conversion. I had gone through the public humiliation of the revelation of my drug
problem and the fact that I had to withdraw from the government job because of
the mistress that I was keeping in a secret apartment accused me of assaulting her.
All of these various scandalous things, and I had endured them. I
was vulnerable, was my guard was down, and I was looking for succor.
I was looking for comfort. I was looking for comradeship and collegiality and
things of this kind. There were personal things that were going on, and
I wanted back in to my community, which I defined, at least in
part in racial identitarian terms, and this was a factor that was weighing on
me. But I also was annoyed, disquieted a little bit by some of
the attitude on the race questions that I detected amongst my conservative colleagues who were
in I described in the book and my reading willing to basically settle for the
fact that the liberals have their heads up their butts. They're completely wrong about
this. All of their rhetoric and their demagoguery and whatnot is bad for the
country. And to help with them and not be admit it as I had
hoped they would be, as I thought of myself as being too, notwithstanding
the liberals error, remaining steadfast and trying to do something about the problems of
these marginal communities, and realizing that as wrong as the Liberals were, it
wasn't good enough simply to be right about them being wrong about about the social
policy questions. We needed to keep at it this kind of thing. You
know, Son, I was going to ask about that very point, because
you know, you wrote about a lot of friends of mine and you know
hears of ours, and I agree with you, by the way, that
they're quite wrong to abandon. By the way, hope is a primary Christian
virtue. So even no matter how bad things are, you shouldn't give up
hope that something cannon should be done. But then there's an earlier episode in
the book, and so reverse chronological order. You also have a passage where
you talk about meeting in the mid eighties and the White House with President Reagan
and Jack Camp and Bob Woodson and about you know, an agenda to do
something about south side of Chicago where you grew up, and you know,
the Bronx or wherever, and the big idea then, as I recall,
was enterprise zones, right, it was going to be you know, low
taxes, deregulation, and I never mentioned I don't know that you mentioned the
enterprise zone idea specifically, but I don't think. Yeah, but I've been
thinking for a while that was the big idea, and it all sounded great,
and then I don't think anything. I thought it was, by the
way, the conservative version of the Great Society's Model Cities program, and maybe
it has the same problems. I don't think it was ever tried, or
if it was tried, it didn't work. And I'm not aware of any
evaluation studies about why it never happened or why it didn't work if it did
happen, And there doesn't seem to be any successor to it, do you
know opinion either one of those or it seems to me that too many conservatives
are still where you saw them and criticize them for being in the late nineteen
nineties. Well, that was Jack Kemp, who's the guy I think of
as the most prominent political proponent of the enterprise zone idea, and it was,
you know, a low tax enclaves that would encourage capital to come and
locate and generate jobs in inner cities. And I'm not a historian of this
policy initiative. I don't know exactly chapter and verse how intensely it was tried,
although I know it was tried at least in pilot versions in some places.
And there must be papers out there that attempt to evaluate, but I
can't tell you what they say. I've never heard of any either. So
yeah, it was so controversy with ideologically, and it was met with opposition,
of course from the Democrats and from the black leadership in many of the
cities who didn't want to see conservative market oriented ideas get a fair shot.
So that's what I have to say about it. I mean, not all
conservatives threw their hands up and walked away and said this patient is beyond saving.
Let's move on to the next case. And Jack Kemp was one who
did not do that. Bob Woodson is one who to this day, God
bless him. He's well into his eighties now, he's been doing this his
whole life. Enterprise zones is a part of his general vision. This is
Robert Woodson of neighborhood enterprise, of people being able to grapple on the ground
in the communities with the leadership that they have and the resources that might be
supplemented by external but that are also indigenous to their social and cultural lives,
to do some things for themselves. This kind of idea, well, my
last question and involves two different ways to give Rob heartburn. Want us to
talk about your academic work on the cake eating problem, and then the other
one is you discussed toward the end that you you actually kind of like Trump
and are fond of him and like the way he insults the media and you
know acknowledges his faults. I don't want to go down the Trump rabbit hole,
because we have plenty here. But the specific question now is we have
all the survey data showing minority voters, especially a span next, but it
appears a considerable number of black voters who like Trump and are moving to the
Republicans. And this is without having just said a moment ago that there's no
real conservative program for the inner cities. What do you make of all that?
Is this real? What's driving this so quickly? On the cake eating
problem? That was an academic paper right about how to optimally over time use
a resource that's limited in availability when you're uncertain about exactly when that limit will
be reached. Problem that exam I can guarantee you well. As actual time,
which was the late nineteen seventies, people were writing down, you know,
little intertemporal optimization models of this sort of one kind or another. I
was trained mit Robert Solo was my advisor. This is the kind of work
he did and I produced. This paper was published in nineteen seventy eight in
the Review of Economic Studies. And you know, I'm proud of it.
But you know, the practical value of that kind of effort is is,
I think a little questionable On the Trump thing. I mean, what do
I know. I'm not a political guru. I haven't got polled dated at
hand, and you know empirical basis for anything I'm about to say, so
take it with a grain of salt. I think you have to consider the
alternative. I think the reason that there are emanations of increased minority, Black
and Latino support for Trump is because people are a remembering what Trump's presidency was
actually like for them on the economy and other things, and it wasn't that
bad. The pandemic messed things up, but it wasn't that bad and be
looking at the other side and Biden's pandering. I don't know who's advising him
and what makes him think that this is something that black people want to hear
that speech at Morehouse where he says, in effect, the hooded clansmen are
coming to get you, and I am the only thing that stands between you
and them. Why would you believe in this country? Why would you believe
in democracy? Why would you believe in free enterprise? Why would you believe
in the hope and the promise of the Constitution and whatnot? When you're being
gunned down in the street like the hero George Floyd, or when you have
to be ten times better than the next guy in order to get it.
Has he ever heard of affirmative action? You know? I think that people,
many people, I'm one of them, who are African American, don't
want to be talked down to like that. The other thing I think is
that inwards for Trump N I G. G E. R S for Trump.
That was on a T shirt of a rally in Atlanta some months ago
that I couldn't help but see one black guy running around with this T shirt
on because Trump had been arraigned in the Fulton County for this uh you know,
law fair uh initiative that Democrats have undertaken to try to keep him from
from being duly elected again president of the United States. I think, uh,
there are a lot of people who who are themselves skeptical about how the
rules of the game can be uh so construed as to unfairly disadvantage them,
who uh feel some identification with with the plight that Donald Trump has. That
that's speaking now out of my lack of expertise as a political commentator. I'll
speak for myself. Reading the book, it was hard for me not to
remember not to think of you now because you seem like you're having a lot
of fun. And I guess my question is, as an academic and as
a writer and as a professor in a big university, is it easier?
Is it getting easier or is it harder to be Glenn Lowry, You understand
what I'm asking that it feels to me like, you know, when we
say, oh, you know, teacher a Brown university, we think,
oh my god, that must be just miserable, But it kind of looks
like you're having fun. I'm okay. I'm okay in part because I don't
rely on dinner party invitations from my faculty colleagues. Here, I'm quite okay
taking my wife out to the restaurant. I'm okay because even though this is
Brown and Brown is a hotthouse of ultra woke sensibility in the faculty and in
the student body, it's not monolithically so especially in the student body. There
are kids here, and there are These kids are smart, as you will,
of course expect at a place like Brown, and they're hungry to be
exposed to argument, and they're tired of being talked down to and told what
to think. That there are a minority, to be sure, but you
know, we got a few thousand undergraduates here, so ten percent is a
pretty good number of kids. They fill up my classrooms, they come to
my office hours, they write me emails. I have relationships with these kids.
I didn't teach it last year, but the year before last and the
year before that, I taught a seminar on free inquiry in the modern world,
which I developed with the help of an undergraduate teaching us AS at a
brilliant young man who's now at Stanford Law named David Sachs is his name.
And you know, we read the Plato and we read John Stuart Mill,
and we read Milton, and we read George Orwell and we read Alan Bloom
and you know what I mean. We read, We read a lot of
stuff. We had twenty kids. There was a limit that were fifty applicants
for twenty seats in this seminar, and it was just a scintillating experience from
these youngsters who were hungry for, if you will, a heterodot's take on
some of the pressing issues of the day. So in other words, like
Robbie George at Princeton, I've found a niche for myself here at Brown,
I'm known as this particular kind of eyeball guy. But that's attracted to some
of the smartest kids on campus, and that's largely what keeps me going here.
Hunger is the word that I hope to hear. And you said it,
Hunger for something that is rooted, grounded, is not just another feather
blowing around in the winds of the moment. And you're teaching kids who went
through an extraordinary period in American history. They had the pandemic, the lockdowns,
and they had the reaction to the George Floyd death. I live fourteen
blocks south of where George Floyd died, and my city it is still struggling
to get back. And I am in a largely empty office because the pandemic
sent everybody home and everybody is content to stay there. So these kids,
well not kids, they are going to be adults. How do you think
as a as a whole if you look at them, if you apprehend the
totality of their zeitgeise, how are they? How are they doing? Are
they coming out of this stronger? Are they coming out of this regarding America
as actually a fragile place that can be sundered by riots and disease? And
is it in all the more need of strengthening and bolstering or how would you
say that they've weathered this extraordinary four years? Well, again, I'm not
an expert here. I go to somebody like Jonathan Hid. He's got this
book out now about middle stress on people in that generation. He attributes to
a lot of it to the effects of social media. I don't know.
My general surmise, though, is that they're troubled and they're not doing so
well. And I think maybe you can see a link between that condition of
these kids battered by the forces that you were calling attention to, and some
of this upheaval on campuses occasional by protests against the war in Gaza, where
you know, people are grasping on to something that they hope will be meaningful.
They're trying to find something that they can believe in. I don't want
to get us down into at this late hour discussion about Gaza that I don't
even have a point to make about it, except that we're talking about the
kids and what's going on with them, and I don't think one can overlook
he's acting out or disconnected from our general assessment of the temper of emotional life
in youngsters at the elite institutions. There's a lot to worry about there.
Well, they're lucky to have you, all I can say. Late admissions
Confessions of a Black Conservative and extraordinary story with lots of levels and details to
make you think and make you pause and make you be eager for the next
page. Lennon's been a pleasure as ever, and we look forward to the
next book. Whatever it is you can go through to ideological pull shift between
the next time we talked to you. We're just happy to read you and
happy to talk to you. Thanks very much, James, I'll be back,
yes, Thanks Glenn. Thanks guys. Well, I'm sure that you
have lots of things that you would have liked to ask Glenn, you the
listener, and I'm sure there's ideas in there in the conversation and in his
book you would like to discuss with other like minded people. I mean,
sure you can find somebody on the street that doesn't know anything about it,
and you know, the grab their lapels and tell them the the Gospel of
Glenn or oh, I don't know. It's too ridiculous to think that people
could actually get together in person and discuss these things, isn't it, Rob
Well, I mean you can get together in person. Of course, you
can also join Ricochet at Rickhey dot com and you can be part of the
conversation there. And you can also you know, get Glenn's podcast on our
super Feet if you just sign up for the super Feet. But we do,
as you know, as members of Ricochet, we do like to get
together and have meetups, especially in the summer. The summer seems to be
the time when people want to do it, although there's some coming up in
the autumn too. So let me just run down where are you if you
join Ricochet or if you're already a member, where you might find yourself this
summer in Cookeville, Tennessee. It's National Bourbon Day on June fourteenth, that's
about two weeks away. Stop break there. What's everybody's favorite bourbon? Steven
le Froy, Sorry, Scotch whiskey drinker. You're a American, Well,
I'll tell you I have a couple favorites. I am not a snob,
and that I love Makers. I'll drink Makers on the rocks pretty much.
Makers is fantastic. Uh, the old weller. I do like it's affordable,
and I mean it's expensive, but it's affordable and findable. I am
luckily, although not in the bourbon supply business, but only in the personal
enhancement business. To be friends with the family that makes the happy. Van
Winkle ben Winkle family, Julian ben Winkle and his wife and his son are
old friends of mine, and it does not they The first thing they'll tell
you is they don't have any to sell you or to give you. But
it's been a fascinating. It's fascinating friendship because you you learn a lot about
this incredibly interesting American liquup. So I'm I'm nash Bourbon day is a good
day. I have a bottle of Babby and I'm telling you that stuff and
some diet coke. It's just it's a fantastic drink. He wouldn't mind that.
I'm kidding. I'm send no letters and no letters. So there's a
National Review cruise coming in National Review Cruise is shipping off on June sixteen.
So if you're on that cruise, make yourself known to the other RICOSHETA members
because there's gonna be a bunch of rickshe meetups a board And I think,
I don't know for a fact, but if you've suddenly got this idea like
I want to go on that cruise, I think if you go to the
National Review website there might still be some some statements available. I don't know
that for facts that don't hold my feet to the fire on that. There
is a fourth of July weekend meet up in Fargo, North Dakota, fourth
July, fourth of July and Fargo, you're you're basically you're in James Lilex's
dream journal at that point, I know, and I would love to be
there, except I have a show in London. But everybody who is there,
remember before you go home, go to West Fargo. Fill up your
tank at R Jay's station. R Jay's Tsorrow. It's a gas station at
the edge of town. That's my dad's joint, and good gas all the
way. Let me put that a different way. You'll be filled up and
ready to go. I get your gas here. You. In fact,
I remember, early early in your early not in I don't know if it's
early in your blocking days, but certainly early in the days that you were
writing a blog and I was reading it. You sort of explained somebody was
complained, said, I think somebody said something like, well, you know,
the gas prices go up. Those gas station owners they just you know,
they they make bank. And you sort of like, very dispassionately,
although it was clear your rage was clear. You explained as how that business
works, and you said, here's what, here's here's here's what we make
the money. You go into the little store and you buy us, you
buy a die cope. That's how you make the money. Uh, And
so stop acting like we're Rockefeller, which I loved. Okay, back on
we get of July twenty six. So if you need a little more extra
time to sort of plan the German Fest meet up in Milwaukee, which if
I could, I could. I can't think of another. I can only
think of one, maybe one better place to have a German Fest, and
that's Louisville. And if the summer doesn't work for you, you can mark
your calendar for the weekend of October third. There's a meet up in Saint
Louis, which is gonna be great. Saint Lois is a great city.
And if none of those dates work, I mean, we're giving you a
bibe. None of those dates work. Here's what you do. Join Ricochet,
put up a post, say hey, how about a meeting? How
about a meet up here at this time? And guess what people are gonna
show up because Ricochet members show up, as they do, so yes,
do that, put it on a calendar, show up, or you know,
just join Ricochet and announce that you'd like people to come to your place,
and Ricochet members will suddenly appear, as if by spontaneous generation. They
will just emerge from the from the miasma and be fully formed as human beings
and wonderful boon companions and the rest of it. Before we go, we
should probably know something the war in Gaza that Glenn referred to, the United
States has made its efforts to solve the humanitarian crisis caused by AMAS doing what
they did in Israel then responding by building a peer, and the peer ain't
The peer was breaking into pieces and falling apart and just didn't do very well.
And I thought, is there an analog to this somehow in previous day?
And I thought, you know what it made me think of? It
made me think of the Jimmy Carter failed ready to get the hostages back,
you know, the helicopters crashing in the desert, the just sort of basic
technical know how that we assumed the government, the army had, the armed
forces have, and then finding out that all of a sudden there seems to
be some institutional rot that left us vulnerable and unable to do the things we
used to do. I mean, I can't blame Joe Biden for this unless
he personally approved that the schematics and made changes. But then again, it
is of a peace, isn't it. Well, I would just need to
be theolytical matter. I think that's exactly the that that should be. The
fear that is running ice cold through everyone in the White House right now,
is that what you look what, especially in a campaign year, it's not
so much about who signed off on the pier and whether the way, that's
not the issue. The issue is it symbolizes, it crystallizes a kind of
American impotence and incompetence, whether that's fair or not. That's that's the key
word, rob is the competence. By the way, I'm convinced that this
is just like the Afghanistan bug out. I'm convinced that some people in the
military surely told the White House this is a bad idea, here's all the
problems with it, and they said, we don't care, we want to
do it. And there does seem to be a race on now between whether
the government is largely more incompetent than it is the seafold that they don't tell
us the truth about they li to us right you know. I'm over here
in Europe where I was reminded once again that when the European Commission wants to
do a new power grab, they announced that today we're announcing two new competencies.
That's the word to use, competencies for fisheries regulation or sausage wrapping.
I think they're good at it. And you know, sparking to a bunch
of European friends that you know, if our government ever came out one day
and said we're announcing a new competency, three quarters of the country would burst
out laughing. But that's where we are today. And I mean, you
can look. I'll just give you one other example, well two. One
is the Biden Energy Program has promised us thousands of electric charging stations coast to
coast, and I think they've built seven seven seven. I think that's the
number, less than a dozen. And then second, going back to your
discussion a moment ago, James on gasoline prices in Fargo or anywhere. California
has announced a new solution to its high gas prices. And you'll never guess
what comes next. Tact rolls really control price control on refiners. They're going
to they're going to regulate them the refinery refiners' margins. And boy isn't that
going to work great? There's only two in California, right, I mean,
that's part part of part of the problem is that California has a special
gas brew right, Yeah, and they only make it in two places.
So this can you mention that. I mean, it's very easy to regulate.
You only have to just got to set up to My guess is eventually
Gaven news And is going to say that the state of California should refine its
own gas, which is going to mean the gas no longer has a price
control. It's twenty seven thousand dollars a gallon. Yeah, but I think
that's I think that is probably I mean, the two interesting things about the
Armed Services are history, right, is that after the disaster of Vietnam,
they a lot of the critics, like Seymour Hrsch who wrote depending on Paper
a lot a lot of the big critics ended up teaching classes at West Point
and the War College. They were brought into the system, into the organization
to sort of help reform it, and it reformed it, and they that
was an organization that actually took itself its failures very seriously. And after the
Desert, the Desert One, I think it was called Desert One, which
is the Jimmy Carter failed thing in the desert to liberate the hostages. They
did the same thing because it's there. It got a serious job, right,
so they got to succeed. And then you saw really not much,
not much after that. Whether you agreed with these or not, you saw
a very effective I mean the many invasion of Grenada under Reagan, which was
which was was useful. You saw that Reagan's bargaining position with the Soviets went
up because they understood that the American armed forces were not incompetent and not disorganized.
You saw the First Skulp, the Desert Storm, the first Gulf War,
which was sort of a cakewalk for the American forces. So it is
possible to turn the ship around you. It isn't. It isn't a foregone
conclusion that, you know, American might, American competence, and American strategic
power is on the decline. It just it just isn't working now. And
that I think if you're an American voter, your question is is it not
working now because this is the way it is. It's not working now because
you know, the Mediterranean seas are too rough, Or is it not working
now because there's derelict leadership at the top, and or misplaced priorities. Yeah,
well then, I mean, if you hang around Twitter and social media
and the rest of it along enough, you will see rampant examples of the
armed forces making us very aware of how socially correct that they are. And
it seems to be that they are concerned with elements of social policy that ought
to be utterly irrelevant to the job at hand, which is defending the United
States and inventing a lot of things that go to other places and blow them
up. But yet the push to assure everybody that they are inclusive is the
sort of thing that you know, flows from having administrations of a democratic nature
in power that if you have Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan, they're not going
to be particularly concerned about whether or not the rainbow flag is flying over the
recruitment office. And that's a whole sort of attitudinal shift towards the military as
a social program, as a jobs program, as a to one that says
it is an instrument for projecting American power. And you have to have somebody
that is confident about saying that as opposed. I mean, Joe Biden can
say what he wants to say, the Democrats can say what they want to
say, but we all know that they are part of a whole multilateral,
transnational idea that we should all work together, and the idea of sovereignty and
projecting individual national power is kind of uki, you know, in this handholding
come by a world whereas you know that Trump, a Reagan or the rest
of the guys are going to say, no, we're going to go to
alone because we're the best and we you know, we got this, we
got this thing going here, and we're going to keep it up. So
the fact that these incompetencies happen under somebody who is himself gray at the edges
and sometimes very very gauzy at the center does not bolster the case that the
Democrats are for square for national security. Just doesn't. So, yeah,
there's that. No, it doesn't. And luckily for his opponent, his
opponent whose biggest, you know, biggest weakness is his own mouth, is
kind of locked away in a courtroom and not able to remind us that he's
probably not an answer, not a very good answer either. Well, Stephen,
Yeah, Stephen, you remember four years ago when we had when World
War three started with Iran because we killed because he waxed Lane I mean that
that has been their mode forever than any assertion of America, any violent assertion
in order to defend American interest is the sort of thing that destabilized that that's
going to destabilize the world. That Donald Trump in a second term with somehow
destabilized the world more than it's done to itself into the last four last thing.
Maybe if we continue on the war in Gaza, we've seen another one
of those stories comes out where it's you know, appalling news Israeli jets put
barrel bombs into a nursery and then a week later the story is actually precision
munitions hit a Hamas control center in a tunnel. We have another one of
those with the refugee camp where they attacked I think it was a jeep.
They had some coordinates on it and there was secondary explosions and a lot of
stuff cooked off and a lot of people were killed. And is that narrative
still holding yet or are people just it never seems to the end, part
of the story never seems to take root in the ongoing narrative. Yeah,
so I actually expoke a couple of days ago they fairly senior member of the
Kanesset from Israel, and yeah, he told the story which has subsequently been
reported that the civilian deaths were actually the collateral of having blown up some ammunition
that was hiding in some of the buildings they targeted. So once again we
see Hamas using civilians and shields. But I think the bigger story right now
about the Rafa business is Biden. Everyone said, don't go in, don't
go into Rafa. Canivade Rafa, and I think they head in mind they
are going to be tanks and big urban warfare instead of It looks to me
is that Israel has been very cleverly enveloping the place and using special operations and
uncovering the tunnels, and they're slowly strangling off Hamas in Rafa in ways that
don't look like the big cataclysmic battle. So I mean they're ringing very clever
because they're enveloping Rafa without looking like they're doing so. And there we go,
well we will see. That's it for us now. It's been fun.
We appreciate you listening. We appreciate Stephen sitting in for Peter and Rob.
Of course, brother Rob, is is he still with us here or
is he here? We advise everybody to go to ricochet dot com and sign
up because the member feed is where it's at, as they used to say
in the sixties and seventies. And also to go to Apple podcasts, Apple
Music, Apple iTunes, go to that Apple place, the Apple you know
it is five stars, And so the more people can discover the podcast and
discover Ricoshe and I ensure that we're here for years to come. We're rolling
going to get better, We're only going to get bigger, and uh,
you know, we've all been with this operation for a long time and it's
one of the great joys in my life and we hope one of the great
joys of yours. If not, it can be ricochet dot com. I'm
James Lylyx here in Minneapolis to Stephen, to Rob elsewhere. We thank you
guys for showing up, and thank everybody for listening, and we'll see you
in the comments in Ricochet four point two next week. Glas