From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the
Powerline Show with your host Steve Hayward. In a just world, Phil Magnus
would have an endowed chair at Harvard or Yale or the University of Chicago or
someplace like that. But we don't live in that just world for reasons that
everyone knows. On the other hand, by not being in one of those
traditional academic jobs, Phil doesn't have to spend a lot of his time in
faculty meetings, on committees, creating papers, and teaching classes, and that
may help explain his prodigious output from his outpost as the director of Research at
the American Institute of Economic Research in Massachusetts ai ER. By the way,
are the people who brought you the Great Barrington Declaration about COVID, which has
been fully vindicated, despite the best attempts of Anthony Fauci and the rest to
demonize it and suppress, actually in censor the authors of that document. Now.
Phil is one of my favorite persons to follow on social media because he
drives a lot of people on the left absolutely out of their mind, and
in particular, he is I think more responsible than anyone for disturbing the reveries
of Nicole Hannah Jones and the other champions of the sixteen nineteen project with his
meticulous work showing their errors of fact and interpretation. I want to talk to
him about his most recent article in the Journal of Political Economy, one of
the premier journals of the field, along with his co author Michael mccaulvey,
called the Mainstreaming of Marx. And what's interesting about this article is it is
that Phil and his co author Michael discovered that Marx was a very marginal figure
through much of his life and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
and it was only the Russian Revolution that revived Marx and propelled him into the
fame as an intellectual leader of the left that we all have known ever since.
Now, for some reason, this was greeted with outrage by people on
the left and even a few on the right, and therein lies a tale.
In addition to walking through this subject, we talk a little bit about
neoliberalism, which is another puzzling phenomenon that began chiefly on the left, but
as also finding some followers today on the right. And that makes for a
very head spinning experience right now. And then finally we check in briefly with
what the latest is the sixteen nineteen project, which simply won't go away despite
its obvious flaws and bad faith. And so that let's turn to Phil and
have some fun, will Phil. It's great to catch up with you.
You are my favorite person to follow on social media because I don't know how
you do it. And it's my frequent joke that we need some clearly,
some robust, rent control because you're occupying so much space for free in the
hands of a lot of people on the left, but if you on the
on the right too. But let's start with this recent article of yours that
I know has been a long time in the making, just out in the
Journal of Political Economy, and it's an interesting proposition which summarize it this way,
and then you can correct me. It's that Karl Marx and Marxism was
largely unknown by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and only came
to prominence because of the rough Russian Revolution, which means it was kind of
a contingent thing that we that this guy emerged as the great thinker of the
left, and that seems perfectly sensible to me, but it's really upset a
lot of people. So anyway, why don't you go through what you found,
how you did it, and you know what listeners should know about the
article. Yeah. Absolutely, So when we see Karl Marx today, we
think of him as one of these giant figures of the intellectual canon, and
that's certainly how he's taught in universities. He's depending on what metric you use,
usually in the top two to three most assigned authors in the philosophical canon.
He's all over the English department, the sociology department, history, philosophy,
all of these major disciplines teach Marx as a significant, important thinker,
quite possibly one of the most important thinkers of the last two centuries, so
very very high levels of academic prestige and acclaim and attention that's paid to him.
Yet if you go back around a century ago, you go back a
little more than a century ago, so the turn of the twentieth century,
and Marx is a relatively obscure figure. Don't just take my word for that.
You can see that attested to on the political left web. Da Boys
writes that in his memoirs that Marx was almost never taught in the US universities
when he went through college in the eighteen nineties. You have prominent Marxists themselves,
like the Marxist historian Eric Eric Hobsbomb studies the number of copies of Marx's
books that were put into print in the nineteenth century. He finds it's only
a couple of thousand copies. He's not this huge intellectual giant of his age.
And I'd always been kind of curious in this question and thought of a
way to look into it, to see the pattern of dissemination of Marx's works
by tracking his citations over time, and very recently we've got to the point
where, you know, we call it big data. There are massive databases
out there that now scan millions, if not tens of millions of pages of
books. The most famous one, and almost were one's familiar with, is
Google Books, and that's the corpus that we're building around. And what they've
done is they've scanned like entire university libraries of books going back to the fifteen
hundreds. Various estimates, depending on what set you use and what language,
they now estimate that Google has somewhere between ten to twenty percent of all books
ever written have been scanned in some form or another into their library, so
it's just a massive database. And when they did so, they use text
recognition software to create this thing. They call it it's Google Ingram. So
many of you have probably use the Google Ingram viewer. It's a fun little
tool. You can see. You pull it up and say, when did
Albert Einstein He's the one that they use this their standard time when did he
start appearing in the scientific journals and become a famous figure? And Ingram measures
the number of times a name or a word or a phrase is used as
a relative percentage of all books that were in print that they've scanned for that
year, so he can see the levels change over time. I thought this
is a really neat tool. And what I knew about Coral Marx is in
his own lifetime there are really only two groups of people that pay attention to
them. One of them is fellow socialists on the radical fringe periphery of the
political spectrum. I mean, we're talking very very small groups of a radical
revolutionary active and in particular it's fellow Marxists. But it's you can fit them
in a telephone booth in that era, and then the second group that starts
to pay attention to him. This is a couple of years after readies.
As professional economists, they start to notice his theories, but one of what
they immediately do, and really the first major economists to take on Karl Marx
as a guy named Philip Wicksteed. He publishes a pretty devastating critique of them,
and over the course of about five pages. These were economists after the
event that we referred to as the marginal Revolution, where they figured out a
solution to the problem of value. Value is subjective based on decisions made in
the margin on the moment of the choice or the exchange, not the labor
theory of value, which is what Karl Marks built his entire system on.
So from about the mid eighteen eighties onward, economists read Dos Capitol and all
these other books that have been written by Marx. They track them down because
they're pretty obscure in that era. They read them and they thoroughly reject them,
saying this is an obsolete theory and I'm not just saying people on the
right John Maynard Keynes in nineteen twenty two or thereabouts Rights and essay and says
Carl Marx's Capital is an obsolete textbook of no interest to the modern world and
rendered obsolete pains. I mean, the giant of the economic left is saying
this about Marx's textbook. So that's really interesting. And you find multiple indicators
from the late nineteenth e ory twentieth century that every time economists consider marks,
they think, well, yeah, this is kind of crankery, this is
this is already forty years out of date. The theory doesn't really work.
They find internal contradictions, they find it cannot be mathematically acted upon. So
central planning is basically disproved on a mathematical level as well. And then by
you know, about the nineteen tens, every economist that considers it they view
it as like a curiosom of history that there was this guy that wrote a
really radical socialistic theory of labor economics, but nothing of it holds together.
And that's where things stood in about nineteen sixteen. Yeah, you know,
I think it was certain things come back to me now because I'm you know,
I gave up on Marx thirty years ago when I thought Marxism was over
after the Cold war ended, and now it's all come back in new and
different forms. But I think it was the British, the left wing British
figure R. H. Tawney who said once Marx was the last of the
schoolman, meaning the scholastics of the Thomas aquinas Erah, And I guess the
same reason, right. I mean, no modern economist I think thinks that
the medieval theory of the just price is something that could be calculated, holds
any sense, right exactly. And as Marx kind of reviving that in a
new Galian basis that yes, you might say, so, all right,
so what what what lenin comes along? Is it? That's almost that's simple.
Got a really interesting pattern. I'm looking at the ingram data that comes
out of the Google book scans, and you see Marx's name. It's just
kind of piddling along there for a couple of decades after his death, not
really growing in very substantial ways. It fluctuates year to year, and maybe
that coincides when a new translation came out and things like that. But he's
a pretty minor figure relatively speaking in that period, and then in nineteen seventeen
it just skyrockets. References, citations, mentions of Marx and other books just
take off. It's like overnight it triples, and then it goes off to
the races from there. So we track it out for about a decade after
nineteen seventeen, and you just see this clear upward trend. So I think
that's really interesting that Marx is suddenly this figure that everyone's talking about, and
he starts to surpass other prominent figures in his age. So when Marx is
writing and then the decades after his death, a fairly obscure economist today,
but who was much better known in that era as Henry George, right American
thinker. We don't teach Georgia's economics except in very specialized programs today, but
in the late nineteenth century he's a prominent figure and he cited a significantly higher
rates than Karl Marx. Well, Marx passes George shortly after nineteen seventeen.
Then he starts getting up into like Adam Smith, territory and some of the
more famous names that we do recognize. So what happens is we've got this
theory that Lennon through the Bolshevik Revolution, which is premised on disseminating marks and
acting out Marxist theory really put someone to the mainstream intellectual map and has been
off to the races ever since. So our big test, as we built
this database out of data, we mind out of Google Ingram for a two
hundred and twenty six other authors out of the intellectual canon, people that were
either contemporaries of Marks or going all the way back to the ancient world,
so Aristotle and Plato and stuff like that, And we calculated all of their
citations year by year and we fit them into a model computerized algorithm that's a
really sophisticated supercomputer type analysis. It's called a synthetic control model. And what
it basically does is that algorithmically fits all of these other authors. It takes
composites of their citations, is tries to find the other ones that track Karl
Marks between his death in nineteen sixteen, and it gets a very precise fit
line to that. It's a composite of several other figures that were his contemporaries,
weighted don algorithmically by the computer. The computer assigns the weight, so
it takes some of the biases out of that. And what you can do
is if you can create a strong fit line prior to nineteen seventeen. You
can project forward to what marks his citation pattern would have looked like had Lennon
Night on his way to Saint Petersburg or had ever staged the revolution. And
we find this, and you know, the two patterns are one is the
real marks is shooting off to the sky, It's like a rocket ship.
And then the regular, this counterfactual synthetic marks, it's just continues along at
this slow, steady, low citation, relatively niche kind of obscure figure face,
and you look at the composites of it and synthetic marks, the counterfactual
marks. It's actually composed of his other nineteenth century socialist competitors. Yeah,
it's contemporaries. It's Ferdinand Lassalle, Johann Carl Rodbertus. And you know I
mentioned these names your views, unless they're really into the history of economic thought,
they've probably never heard of these guys. Yeah, I mean right,
he'd rank down there with foyerboxes exactly that type of thing. Yeah, they're
there are specialists that study them today, but they're not the single most assigned
textbook and right in university courses. Right well, now, the odd thing
to me is, so this is a straightforward quantitative exercise. It's a lay
person can I mean, what you just said about your algorithm may lose a
few people, but the conclusion is pretty straightforward and easy to grasp. And
what's amazing to me is that a lot of your I wouldn't even call them
critics because they don't even engage the argument. But a lot of people on
the left are losing their minds over your argument. And I don't. I
have a theory ast why, which I'll share with you. But but what
what's going I mean, why why would that be upset at this? Who
cares? If leave the boost of marks? What's what's behind this outrage?
Right? Right? Well? Like a friend joke to me is this would
be again to a free market economist being upset that the inflationary crisis of the
nineteen seventies boosted Milton Friedman's citation, Right, guy, I hear that as
Yep, that kind of makes sense. Uh. It made Freedman very prominent
because he's one of the critics of the inflation. Uh. But yeah,
they the reaction was like this visceral gut um rage that burst out on you
know, of all places. It's on the Twitter sphere. They see the
paper, they kind of read the abstract, they object to the conclusion,
don't bother to really investigate the paper, and then we just get this uh
venomous often profane assault uh coming from these journalists Twitter types on the on the
center left and then uh to the far left in many cases, and they're
just raging and in fury at our results. It's like, well, how
dare they suggest that the great Karl Marx was fairly obscure prior to nineteen seventeen?
And you know, we never claim that nobody cited Marks prior to nineteen
seventeen. In fact, in the paper, we trace all these economists that
refute them. But he's a niche subject, and we also trace these competitors
that engage with them. So Robertis who's a composite donor to the counterfactual.
Not only was he like a contemporary, but his followers viciously feuded with the
other Marxists for who got to be the dominant socialist. And Robertus's followers accused
Marks of plagiarizing the theories or post value from them. So they hate each
other, but they're at the you know, they're contemporaries at roughly the same
segment of society that they're competing for the attention for. So we never claimed
that Marx was completely unknown. We just say he's relatively obscure. And they're
furious about this. And I think one of the reasons here is it gets
into some of the psyche of the post nineteen ninety one Marxist revival that we've
seen moving on the Academy through today. Yeah, okay, uh so,
yeah, so what happened in nineteen ninety one that was really like the nail
in the coffin that discredited Soviet state Marxism. It discredited the whole Leninist Stalin
Bolshevik experiment. Of course, the hundreds of millions of bodies that stacked up
in his wig didn't help that either, But it was a you know,
like a final note in a really bad chapter of human history. But the
Marxist today, if you ask them, they'll say, well, Lenin and
Stalin, we're not true Marxists here. That one's whole pot was not a
true Marxist. Castro was not a true Marxist. Now was not a true
Marxist. So every time a Marxist seizes power and commits mass atrocities. They
say, well, it's not true Marxism. And I think that you have
among intellectual leftists today, and these are the people that were outraged at the
paper. So it's a subset of Marxist today, but probably probably the ones
that are most associated with the academy and journalism. They are furious because one
of the implications of our paper is if Lennon is what puts marks on the
map, Lennon is now necessarily a part of their own intellectual heritage. And
they don't know. Yeah, they don't like that baggage. There's another subset
of the Marxist So it was a really curious reaction. We had like fifty
percent of Marxists and leftists, that's our paper, We're furious and how dare
you insinuate that Marx got his fame from Lenin This is an outrage. We
actually adhere to the pre Leninist march, which is the truth, well mark.
But then there's the other fifty percent, so which I guess with the
kind of the old school Soviet Marxists, and they're like, why is this
paper even published? This is uncontroversial we've known this for decades. Yeah,
well, you know my theory is U have a twofold theory which you,
as a more quantitatively orient and the person than me, may or may not
think is right or full. It's for the left. The two parts of
this, I think a lot of leftist academics are deeply intellectually insecure people.
I can say more about that going forward. But that connects to the bigger
problem point number two, which is what was that? Was it? One
of those French thinkers forty years ago had the book whose title I think translated
was from Mars to Jesus or Jesus to Marks. I mean, yeah,
for the modern I don't ever read maybe i read it, I don't remember
it now, but just the title vaguely in my head. You know,
Marx was the gospel, I mean literally the gospel for you know, for
lack of a better term, to the secular left. And to now say
that his prominence is owing to complete historical accident and contingency with someone of the
dubious legacy, as you just point out, I think it is shattering to
them. Yes, so, I mean that's my theory. And but then
I wanted to work the other side of the street, which is when you
first started. As I recall rolling out drafts of the paper and talking about
this, I think you attracted some fire from the right, from some libertarians,
and I'm like, what, So walk through that a little bit.
And as the theory there that some people on the right need a villain,
and if you downgrade marks from the pedestal the left puts him on, it
also deprives us of a villain. I mean, that seems stupid to me,
but I'm trying to figure out why anyone on our team would object to
what you're finding. Yeah. So I think there's two groups there. One
is exactly that there are people that think, well, Marx was the great
villain of the twentieth century, therefore he must have been a big deal.
Yeah. So saying that this is an accident of history just really kind of
takes the intellectual heft out of the adversary in ways that they kind of feel
like, hey, we've been wasting our time spinning our wheels. There's also
a subset of the libertarian movement. This goes back to some nineteenth century traditions.
Although they don't align with Marx himself, they view Marx as partially right,
as like having diagnosed the inequities of society and the injustices, and because
they see him as like an offshoot of the tradition that went in the wrong
direction, that also means to them that they're four bearers are had it wrong
to diagnose the excesses of the nineteenth century industrialization processes as something that was liberating
or libertarian oriented. So ye had elements of both of those. They saw
the paper and they were upset as well. Yeah, I've just thought found
that bizarre. Let's take a brief break right here to hear from our sponsors,
and then we'll be back with topic number two. Don't go away.
Let's move on to a related subject which also has the strange left right incoherence
to it, and that is the great term thrown around ubiquitously today, neoliberalism.
Yeah, so you know, neoliberal neoliberalism is I know, I think
I think maybe I saw one of your end grams about this. I think
some other people have done this too, showing that it's a term that exploded
into you starting in the mid to late nineteen nineties. It first comes to
site as an epithet by the left who don't like and what they mean by
neoliberalism is Reagan and Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Friedrick Hyaku, von mesas you
know, our political and intellectual heroes. I think, uh, and and
and and this. You know, it's definitely to call someone a neoliberal is
like for a conservative calling someone a Marxist or a socialist. Right. So
anyway, it walks with a little bit of the history of this, because
I know there's an earlier parts of all this, and then I also want
to get to the way it's emerging and being embraced by the right lately,
which is sad. The second question, give me your sort of quick summary
history of you know where the termy murders? Where does come from? Something
like that. Yeah, so I've got an article digging into the deep history
the etymology of the term. We're at birst of the scene, as you
noted. Uh, you can see this in google ingram again. So I
love playing around the data. It's early, not into like the mid nineteen
nineties that this term that almost nobody had ever used before suddenly becomes the thing.
It's the standard insult for everyone on the left to refer to anyone in
the free market tradition. And it turns out if you dig a little bit
deeper into that, there's a very specific reason. And the reason is that's
when the French philosopher Michelle Fuco his lectures which were recorded in the late nineteen
seventies, some of his classroom college lectures, they were translated and started to
peer in print, and in nineteen seventy nine he gave a series of lectures
on what he called the subject of neoliberalism. And this is, you know,
it's some interesting read, complex take on the subject, not quite the
dumb down version that you see today, but this is what gets everyone interested
in and it takes off in the nineteen nineties. Is clearly an aftermath of
Fuco being translated and people liking Fuco for other reasons. They find this and
aha, he's onto something. But the lectures themselves are about a much earlier
event. It's a conference that occurs in Paris in the nineteen thirty eight.
Yeah, the Walter Lippman Colloquium. And what Fuco had done, and he
had been digging through some artis he finds the transcripts of this conference in mess
and Hyak and all these other major figures of the interwar era free market scene
were at this conference, and during the course of the conference, they bantered
about what should we call ourselves as a movement. I think they sort of
end up on what we referred to as classical liberals today. But someone raised
the point said well, maybe we should call ourselves neoliberals, and they talk
about it, they debate it, and the conference ultimately rejects it. So
in nineteen thirty eight they talked to the term neoliberal, but they reject it.
And I'm reading this and I started digging and said, well why did
they reject this term? What turns out it has an earlier history. So
the conference proceedings have been printed in English, and I think some of the
original were in French. But they involved a lot of thinkers like Yak and
Mess that are native German speakers and come out of the Inna Austria as their
training. So I start looking in some of the older sources and ask the
question did neoliberalism have a prehistory in German language? And it turns out it
does. I go back to the nineteen twenties and start researching some of the
debates over free market and marginalist thought and you find out some something really interesting.
The first is that a group of Marxists in Austria started using the term
neoliberal to specifically refer to Mess as this term of pejorative derision, and they
said, he's a neoliberal, is distinct from a classical liberal. And the
gist of their argument was that mess had tried to revive the old liberal economic
doctrines from the successful assault that Marxism had made on it that was then ascendant
because of Vladimir Lenin. So bring this kind of full circle. They're saying,
classical liberalism predates Marks, Marks successfully proved it was wrong, and here's
this Mesas guy that's trying to resuscitate and bring life back into it. So
he's now the noilib rule figure. Neoliberalismus's is one of the permutations of the
term. And there are even articles that appear in the Marxist newsletters that say,
Ludwig von Mesas noia liberal. Yeah, using this as an insult.
So this is in the early nineteen twenties, and almost simultaneously, Mess has
this rival on the faculty at the University of Virginia of Vienna. University of
Vienna where he teaches that comes from the far right. It's a followed by
the name of our at marsh Spawn. I've never even heard of him.
I've heard of most of these people, but not him at marsh Spawn,
and they're they're like legendary rivals on the faculty, the guys that would would
get up and shout at each other in faculty meetings because they hated each other.
Mars Spawn's interesting because in several Mesas his later books he starts referring to
him as the Nazi philosopher At march So Spawn wrote one of the most popular
German language economics textbooks in that era. It was published in something like twenty
different editions, and the addition that came out in nineteen twenty four, it's
right as this insults being used, he adds a new chapter on the Noia
liberal school, the neoliberal school, and it's talking about his rival in the
department Mesas and talking about some other departments that were aligned with that, with
the free market thought. So it's it's really critical assessment and he popularizes the
term because this is one of the most commonly used textbooks. Of what it
comes down to is the pejorative originated in the nineteen twenties as a mutual term
of disparagement by the Marxist far left and the proto Nazi, proto fascist right
market guys in the middle. Yeah, so no wonder, you know,
Lippman and you know von Nieces and High wouldn't and others would not have wanted
to embrace that term for themselves in late nineteen thirties. By the way,
you probably know this. I don't remember which history of the mont Pellern Society
I read this in, but there was a whole account of that nineteen thirty
eight meeting. It was either Angus Bergen's book or the Steadman John's book.
I read them both, and they talked about how that was going to be
kind of that became ultimately the montpeller And Society. Yeah, after the war.
People returned after the war and right, right, but you know,
the war got in the way. But they were getting together in the late
thirties because look all around them they saw either New Dealism, you know,
mild socialism or hard socialism advancing everywhere. Right, Okay, um, you
know interesting intellectual history there, all right, So the term has been was
revived. Oh well, one quick side question here that since you've read it,
I've heard about those food collectures. I've never looked them up myself.
I have heard it said or claim now and then that he was expressing in
his late years before what he died in eighty three eighty four, he was
expressing some sympathy or interest in agreement that indeed correct libtarianism. Is that actually
in there, it's like food co started as a Marxist, took straight out
of the mid twentieth century Marxist tradition, and he starts to have some qualms
with that. And there's uh, one of his observations that he makes.
It's like, why does every society that claims to be built on Marxist principles
and in genocide? Yeah, he says, we need to be asking that
question. Is there something about Marxist ideas that always veer down the same path
of mass atrocity? Interesting? You know, to put a pin on this
for now, and we want to talk about this again someday down the road.
But there are a few people like my political philosopher friend Glenn Elmer's,
who were starting to say, you know, we shouldn't be so hasty and
rejecting FUCO in total, partly for this particular aspect, but partly for a
couple of others, and we'll leave that aside for now. I'm just curious,
since you've actually read through this, all right, let's so we know
how the left is using it. It's ridiculous. But in the last two
three years, I've noticed that a number of people on the right, series
people some friends of mine, are starting to use the term neoliberal in almost
exactly the same sense as the leftist do, which is now, it's one
thing if you don't like, you know, Swedish style corporatism or what might
be called state capitalism, and you know, the rent seeking, it's a
lot of what they are calling neoliberal economics is the kind of things the public
choice theory has been after for a long time. Okay, but I don't
know. This also bothers me a bit. It seems to me that I'm
not quite sure I even go to a question on this, but what do
you make of the fact that so many people, you know, on our
side of the spectrum were suddenly using the term the same way the left is
used it. This worries me. Yeah, it's a new trend on the
political right. Uh. You know, the mid twentieth century to the present
or very recent political coal is should have always been kind of the free market
libertarian economics had united with the anti communist strain of American conservatism. You know,
the famous version of was Frank Meyer's fusionism. William F. Buckley built
the philosophy around it. It's free markets and a free society of American values
that used to be the coalition of the broader political right. And what we've
seen in the last couple of the years is portions of the political right are
starting to jettison the free market component, the economic component, the libertarian component,
and they even some subset of them. They make the argument that economic
classical liberalism led the right astray, and we need to replace it with a
more robust industrial policy, tariff's trade protectionism, all of these packages of economic
intervention that are supposed to bolster up American towns and the rest belt and in
society. And their claim is that it's the free market economists that cause the
political right to be weaker at the polls and to lose elections, and that
they want to jettison. That's kind of a move to outflank the economic interventionist
left, and they'll say, well, we need an alternative industrial policy that
stops Bernie sanders By will capture the issue. So a lot of that's burst
out of the scene. And in the wake of that, they've also started
to attack a free market economists by using the same terminology that the Marxist left
does. So what you've seen, and this has been really pronounced. I
see even just the last few months. You can google it and you can
see in conservative leading publications they start ranting and raving about the neoliberals. Now
we need to jettison the neoliberals from the movement. And you start reading this
and it is almost word for word like a Marxist conspiracy tract. Yeah.
I mean, you even see that phrase used in some articles in National Review,
which I think would make William F. Buckley roll over in his grave.
I mean, I'm so old. I like to joke I'm now so
old. I get to begin a lot of sentences as I'm so old.
I remember and in nineteen eighty four, Walter Mondale ran for president on a
platform of industrial policy, and there was unanimous on the right that this was
just socialism, This is just a euphism for socialism. And so now I'm
asking some of my friends saying, so, you know, Mondale just died
a year or two ago, sweet man, personally, can he be the
Republican nominee for president now? Because I don't see a lot of details on
this. It's one thing to say it's wanting to deserve that. Yeah,
we've followed out the rust belt and become uncompetitive. I think it free trade
is an insufficient It's an aspect of the story, but it's not the whole
story, and therefore the remedies are very vague. It's just we need industrial
policy, all right, tell me in detail, what's that going to mean?
Subsidies, tax breaks, trade barriers and you know, okay, it's
very frustrating because it worries me when we give, even if indirectly and unintentional,
if we give a sucker and aid to the radical left. So I
don't know if you have any thing to add to that or not exactly.
I mean, it's I like it into the old Lord of the Rings problem
with the ring of power, or famously boromere gun Doors says, well,
why don't we use the ring to our own advantage? And I see some
elements of the right and say, well, the socialists one of all these
things, Well, why don't we co opt it and use the same thing,
and we'll win elections and then we can defeat them. And they don't
realize that they're basically putting us on the same path to economic intervention and destruction.
Yeah, I'm not sure it's a vote winner either. I mean,
it wasn't for Mondale. Okay, let's take another quick break here to hear
from a sponsor, and then we'll be back to talk about the sixteen nineteen
project. A third item here, Um, you have been an absolute demon
on the sixteen nineteen project from the first moment the ink drives at the New
York Times. And this is one of those jobs and I'm glad you're doing
it so I don't have to. But you know, Nicole Hannah Jones,
you drive her nuts on Twitter, which is fun. Even though she's blocked
you, I think, right, but she'll still she every a couple of
months or so rant about how horrible I am, because right, yeah again,
living rent free and congratulations and all that. But you have been watching
what she's got a documentary going on one of the streaming services, I think,
and I think one of the networks is who and then they aired it
earlier this week on ABC. Is that it? Yeah? So, I
mean, I don't know. We could go on a long time about all
this, and we don't we don't want to go on a long time about
it. But what are two or three you know, new things or things
are looking at are especially egregious aspects of the story assets in play at the
moment, well the major when if you remember, all the way way back
in twenty nineteen, when the original version of the project came out, Nikolehanah
Jones got pilloried in the press for this claim that the American Revolution was premised,
at least in a large part as a defensive action of slavery against the
British, that We're supposedly going to come in and free all the slaves or
something, right, and that this was as a weird claim, it was
not very well sourced, if anything, was based on a bad reading of
some very French history. And then a couple of months after the original came
out the New York Times, his own fact checker, who was a historian,
kind of broke her silence and says, I warned them not to make
this claim, and they didn't listen to me. Yeah, so it was
a bit of a scandal. It was all in the middle of the Pulitzer
Prize season, and the New York Times had to real quietly kind of walk
back the claim. They made some modifiers and said, well, only some
of the revolutionaries cared about slavery, and really watered it down. But Nicolehanah
Jones has never given that claim up, and what she's done ever since then
has tried to backfill and restore the original assertion by cherry picking bits and pieces
of the historical literature. And once you get in this new Hulu series,
the one that's showing on ABC this week broadcast a national audience, is the
very first episode digs in at the beginning and tries to resuscitate this claim.
And they go to colonial Williamsburg in Virginia as their location where they're filming.
So they're standing there and among all these historic buildings, and they have the
reconstructed Governor's Palace, the colonial British Governor's Palace. If anyone's been there on
a tour side, it's like the centerpiece of the whole park and they're sitting
there on the lawn of the Alice filming and one of the claims that she
has used to bolster this notion. The governor of Virginia, the last Royalist
governor of Virginia, is Lord Dunmore, and he's very famous for getting chased
out of Williams Byward. Basically, he tries to declare martial law in the
colony. There's there's just a very heavy set of conflicts. And what happened
is in November seventeen seventy five, he issues this proclamation that says, I'm
raising a militia to put down the revolt in the colony, and any black
person from a rebellious plantation owner who makes this way to my lines and joins
my militia, I'll give you your freedom. He tries to raise the militia
of freed slaves, offering them their freedom. So it's a military tactic.
And Nikolehannah Jones sees this and says, Aha, see, Lord Dunmore was
going to free the slaves, and this is what drove Virginia to revolt.
Of course, this is anachronistic. It turns out that the rebellion had already
been under way for the better part of the year. The Lexington Concourt is
April seventeen seventy five. This isn't until November. And what's even she doesn't
even have the chronology stretch, She don't even have the chronology. And I
guess even more. She's sitting at the on the grounds of the Governor's Palace
and Williamsburg and talking to this historian and they point at the building and say,
this is proof from that building there that this edict of emancipation was about
to be issued. But she doesn't tell you Lord Dunmore had been chased out
of the colony five months earlier by the revolutionary militius and was living on board
a ship out in the Atlantic Ocean. He had lost control of his colony,
and this is like his last ditch effort to try to retake Virginia.
Not only that, she doesn't tell you that Lord Dunmore himself is a slave
owner. So the first thing he does when he gets chased out of Williamsburg.
This happens in June seventeen seventy five. The militias are converging on the
city and they're furious at him, not because of slavery. They're furious at
him because he sees the colonies gunpowder stores. Yea, this is kind of
in the it's almost simultaneous to Lexington and Concord. He seizes the gunpowder stores
to prevent them from revolting, tries to ship them off in the middle of
the night, put them on a British warship, and gets caught. The
colonists catch them red handed, and they're furious and they start descending on the
city to hold him accountable, saying like, why are you stealing our gunpowder?
Well done? More flees in the middle of the night. In June
seventeen seventy five, he takes all of his money and all the valuables out
of the governor's palace and he takes all of the slaves from the governor's palace
that he owns and moves them to the plantation up the river. And over
the next several months he's sitting there on the ship out in the river,
British warship, and he keeps having his rowboat take him into his plantation house
so his slaves can serve him this fancy dinner with all the British officers.
This guy's actually like a really horrible uh person to make the banner here here
for emancipation. Uh. His whole goal was he wanted to re establish control
over the quality of Virginia so he could return to his massive slave plantation and
continue slavery. You know, facts are such inconvenient things, Phil, it's
the problem here. And but there's a there's a broader point of this.
And also like the like neoliberalism, and like your work on Mars, there's
a curious undercurrent I'll put this way from our team. And so you know,
you've gone on to broaden your critique in the critical race theory, and
yet there are I mean I've seen you made reference to this, and I
think I've seen little bits of this. There are certain people on them I
guess left libertarians we call them, who were unhappy with you for Yeah,
you know, being such a full throatic critique, a critic of the sixteen
nineteen project and the critical race theory. It's bound to right. What's happening
here? What's tell us about that? A little bit? Well, the
gist of it is, yeah, you have a segment of the libertarian left
and then other people that viewed as impolitic to raise these issues. And there's
a couple of things going on here. Part of it's because Donald Trump came
out against the sixteen nineteen project. Therefore, the never Trump component they can't
even be associated with anything that he has ever said, so they rejected even
though you know, I've never been like a big Trump person, kind of
view him as most presidents, is very claud and problematic politician. But at
the same time you have this segment and the argument always kind of devolves into
this weird you know, the old Stephen Colbert term truthiness. Yes, yeah,
it is real. Similar to that. They've decided that even though the
sixteen nineteen project is not factually sound, the cause that it's being argued for,
which is racial reconciliation, any equality, that they want the thing,
they say that's a just cause. Therefore we tolerate the errors in service to
the cause, because the sixteen nineteen project is supposedly on the right side of
the social currents of the moment in seeking justice. So it can we can
afford to let it slip up on the facts. You know, I could
I could credit that argument maybe if I thought that there was some chance it
would really lead to some reconciliation and racial progress, when in fact, the
effect, and I think the intent of a lot of it, it's exactly
the opposite. It's actually to stoke division. And you know, we'll see
how I'll be interesting to see what our left libertarian friends say if this reparations
idea gets some traction and they're actually real proposals put on the table um,
because that's what it's all Awards sixteen nineteen project is going for. Because the
other episode that ered earlier this week was the one calling for reparations, a
thirteen trillion dollar reparations package, right right, yeah, yeah. My prediction,
by the way, is that there's going to be a fight at the
Democratic National Committee or convention next summer in their platform if they have a bad
reparation I'll bet the movie. Yeah, they may not have a platform,
and the party's sort of drawing away from because no one really reads them in
to just trouble. But well, all right, I mean we uh,
this is plenty for one day. We could talk a long time deservedly about
income inequality. Absolutely, you've got the goods on pickany and z other episode
on that alone, and you know, Nanson McLean won't go away. That's
important. But let's get out with what do you? What do you?
What's your next big project or what are you working on right now that we
should keep our eye on. Yeah, So I'm continuing to study the citation
patterns and Carl Marks because he doesn't just go away after nineteen seventeen, Lennon's
put him on the map. Ask the question, well, what happens next?
And part of that you start to see his ideas get picked up to
what we now refer to as the Frankfurt School, the Western mark Sister.
All right, yeah, and that's what leads to things like critical race theory
today our outgrowth. So that tradition and you can see similar patterns and their
citations picking up U in the aftermath of Lennon putting Marks on the map and
then uh set some of the political and said the early in mid twentieth century.
So I've got a major project where I'm digging deep into that to see
what the data shows about the way that these figures developed and how do they
continue to influence the university today. Oh yeah, that that'll be a fascinating
inquiry because there's so many different nodes to this that I mean, you know
years ago, you know, I studied how Stalin starting the thirties cause these
great splits on the left and that lead all kinds of difference and interesting and
problematic directions. So I expect you will come up with something new and interesting
that we haven't thought of before. Hey, thanks Phil, this has been
fun. Absolutely, thanks for having me. Well, I could go on
for a long time with Phil, and we'll happen back again sooner than the
last interval between appearances, because he's done some terrific work refuting a lot of
the premises of income inequality that the left is obsessed with today. He also
thanks by the way that cats are more likely than dogs to be communists,
which is a prejudice I strongly agree with. But I hope if you do
follow social media, I have linked to Phil's Twitter address, and also I
put in a link to his new article on Mars that we talked about at
the beginning. It is behind a paywall, but some of you who may
have access to and through academic portals and things of that kind. We'll be
back on Saturday with another edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, but for
now, don't forget the milkle soft power dividend by everybody. Ricochet joined the conversation