We're back with another edition of The Federalist for Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on ex at fdr
LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course
to the premium version of the Federalist dot com as well. Today we are
joined by Jay Richards. He is the director of the Device Center for Life,
Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation. He's also a Senior Fellow
over at the Discovery Institute and is the co author of the new book Fight
the Good Fight, How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture
War. He wrote that book with James Robinson. Jay, thanks for joining
the show. Brings me with you. Yes, so, could you tell
us a little bit about the background story of this book. What made you
want to write Fight the Good Fight. It's a sort of practical book,
was it, Jay, Yeah, practically exactly right. Well, James Robson
and I said, just a little background on this. I'm basically a Catholic
academic that was taught at teaching a Catholic you for many years been at Heritage
about three years and my friend James Robson, this is a guy that did
evangelistic crusades at Billy Graham in the nineteen seventies and for the last twenty years
has had a show on Christian TV with his beautiful wife Betty, and we
just connected weirdly in coincidentally about thirteen years ago and ended up writing a book
together called Indivisible, making the case for why economic and social conservatism ought to
go together. Anybody's old enough to remember the debate when Barack Obama won the
presidency in two thousand and eight. The sort of story on the right afterwards
was that, well, we got to just get rid of all this social
conservative stuff talking about that. So we just thought that's a bad idea.
And so that's why I wrote this book together in twenty twelve, and it
ended up getting a lot of attention because that was kind of a hot topic
at the time, and James wanted to say so I would just reissue Indivisible
with some updates, and then I looked at it. I thought, it's
a different universe. It's on twenty twelve anymore. We got to do a
completely different book, and so that's actually what started this, but we wanted
it to be really practical so that it covers lots of issues that they say
in conservatives going to need to be conversant in from trade and the environment in
China to marriage and family and life. But it's also it reflects a discovery
that I've made, honestly just since getting involved in the gender ideology fight at
the Heritage Foundation. I mean, I've been involved in these kind of culture
and politics debates for a long time, and on almost all the issues that
I've been involved with before, or the people that I was working with are
sort of like me, you know, I Joe that if you're involved in
the pro life movement or you're involved in the debate over marriage, it looks
kind of like the Heritage Foundation internship pool, right. The gender ideology fight
is just nothing like that. Yeah, there's lots of social conservatives, but
there's also just lots of parents of no particular political or religious persuasion that have
been activated in the last two or three years. There are lesbian groups that
are involved because they're mad because there's boys in girls sports and in women's bathrooms.
They're atheist, evolutionary biologists who believe that biology is real and don't buy
this kind of gender ideology. Whoy. This is a completely different constituency of
people that I've for found myself in, and what I've discovered is that actually
we have a lot in common, even though until recently a lot of the
people that are involved in this fight would have thought of themselves as very much
on the left and not culture warriors and definitely not cultural conservatives. And so
that's this idea of an alliance of faith and reason that we're in a different
moment in which sort of mainstream culture, the commanding heights of culture are.
They're not just hostile to the concerns of conservatives, they're hostile to public reason
itself. They're fundamentally irrational, and in a crisis moment like that, there's
an opportunity for people that might never have thought of themselves as allies to come
together. Okay, So there's a lot of interesting points to kind of get
through there, Jay, because I wanted to ask, Actually, it's fascinating
you were talking about maybe reissuing that Obama era book, because one of the
things that's happened in the years since people started reconsidering the emergent conservative consensus after
Obama was elected. A lot of people think the twenty twelve Republican Autopsy and
everything that it prescribed. But one of the things that's happened is is fusionism
itself. And there's a nerdy conversation within the conservative movement. But this idea
that you're tying fiscal conservatism, national defense, and social conservatism together, and
that is the sort of essential fabric of the conservative movement that has come under
fire, particularly because of the tension between social conservatism and fiscal conservatism. Can
you speak a little bit to how you deal with that in the book and
as you've been thinking about these issues in some ways, Emily, I think
of what I'm just calling this alliance of faith and reason as what follows,
you know, let's say the kind of conservative consensus or coalition that formed after
World War Two and worked really, really well to win the Cold War.
It did a really good job of that, and I still think any serious
conservatism happen to integrate economic wisdom. We don't just get to jettison the law
of supply and demand or something like that because it doesn't poll well. It's
the same time, there's a particular type of radical libertarianism that just sees the
only political good is everybody getting to do what they want to do, which
actually is a really bad political philosophy. And so you've got to find some
way of kind of integrating these things. And my own view is, of
course, I mean, at the moment, the right is just the source
of a great deal of ferment. This book that James Jobson I wrote together
is a book written by two Christians that think the Christian faith has something very
specific to say about our life together and about politics at the same time.
We don't think, as speaking as a Catholic, I don't think integralism is
a great idea. I don't think that we're going to get a Catholic confessional
state anytime soon. Evangelicals, we're not talking about Christian nationalism, and I'm
not quite sure what anybody means by that, but we just thought, okay,
look, I actually everything the Founder's thought about this stuff is more or
less and are you right? The free exercise of religion involves being able to
freely exercise your religion not just in worship in church, but also to let
it affect your politics. That doesn't mean you're going to establish the nice and
creed and force everybody to adhere to it. And so I just think there's
actually a whole lot that can be resuscitated and retained of the American experiment,
and it's not dead yet. That's sort of my worry among my fellow Christians
that are sort of you know, new on the right is that they sort
of think, Okay, well, the American airman's loss, let's sort of
see what the next thing is. Now, what the next thing is a
different kind of conservative coalition? And that's still actually just now being built.
So interesting. And one of the reasons that's interesting is that again emergent conservative
consensus after President Obama, former President Obama was elected and Rodney lost the nomination,
you know, sort of like conservatives made peace with what your Mazzoni has
since described as the privatization of virtue. And I'm so curious based on this
book, Jay, some of the ways you think conservatives can persuade the people
that you've come into contact with, and the gender ideology, the anti gender
ideology movement, Yeah, and some of these new coalitions that you've described,
how can Americans become comfortable again? And even looking back to the Founders,
who have some great quotes on this, on you know, an unprivatizing virtue,
making virtual you a sort of public a public experience. Again. Well,
and so this is it's funny because if you look at the Founders,
the Founders believed, you, though they're generally, you know, kind of
various forms of orthodox and heterodox Protestant, for the most part, they still
believed in natural reason and the natural law. So they believed that certain moral
truths, like the truth that you shouldn't torture people for the fun of it,
or you shouldn't torment children for the fun of it, right, that
that's knowable by reason without revelation. The modernity, though, you know,
in the twentieth century, sort of constricts reason and says, well, moral
truths are just purely the result of revelation. That's crazy. Even if you're
an atheist, you know that murder is wrong. You surely know that better
than you know any claim from science or history. And so for religious folks,
we got to get used to knowing how do you make public moral arguments
explicitly moral arguments, without making arguments that are based on sectarianism or special revelation.
Because that tends to be what we Christians often do. We said we
if I'm going to make a moral case in the public square, that means
I'm going to make a biblical case if you're an evangelical, or I'm going
to appeal to the Church fathers if you're Catholic. No, there are moral
truths accessible by reason that can be the basis for our policy claims. I
mean, the truth matter is any public policy you advocate, you think it
ought to be implemented, and if you say ah, that is that is
the force of a kind of moral conviction. And so I just think that's
what's sort of unfortunate is that the very people Americans that ought best to be
able to do this have either not known how to do it or have been
sort of afraid to do it. But we're at a moment when I mean,
look, what is one of the most basic deliverances of natural reason that
is absolutely universal at every time and place in history and every religion and every
culture, is that there are males and females that they're out there, right.
This isn't something you impose they're just boys and there's girls. Everyone knows
the correctly right and now yes, and yet that's apparently this is an outrageous
claim that might get us pulled from YouTube. I mean, that's how far
gone we are. And in a situation like that, this is different notice
from saying, okay, well, if you really study embryology, you will
discover that human life begins at fertilization. That's true, but also very few
people have access to fertilization right. Very few people have access to a direct
inspection of embryology. Everybody has access to male and female. Now the commanding
heights of culture deny that we are in a different political and cultural situation than
we have ever been in before. That's scary, but I think it's also
sort of opportunity because we're getting to see, oh, you know, there
are these intellect, actual trains of thought that are about to drive our civilization
off a ravine. And now almost everybody has to see it, so that
parents that were engated in communities in Florida that weren't worried about all this culture
work stuff suddenly realize if I don't take charge of my child's education, they're
going to be removing body parts before they're eighteen. And I was talking to
another guest on the show recently about what we've seen come out of Europe.
And you're obviously very very familiar with what happened with Tavistock in the UK and
what happened at the what's happened at some of the Scandinavian gender clinics where you
have sort of these concentrated samples. You know, everyone goes through the socialized
healthcare system in these countries, which actually gives us an interesting window, and
we've seen a reversal in their cultures in these in those countries, and I
would argue, you know, we're starting to see at least something of a
reversal here if you're looking at polling all of that. So the first part
of that question, Jay would be do you agree with that? And be
what can you know people fighting the good fight here in the States maybe even
learn from that. Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, if there's
one benefit to having a centralized healthcare system is that you have all the data
housed somewhere. So in the case of Tavistock in the UK, I mean,
this was the one pediatric gender clinic in the country and they noticed that
from two thousand and nine to twenty nineteen, there was a forty four hundred
percent increase in the number of kids that were being referred to their clinic with
gender dysphoria. That's expensive if you start giving them cross sex hormones and puberty
blockers and you know, to say nothing of surgery. So they had a
kind of economic motivation to actually look, Okay, what's the evidence that this
actually helps kids? So we do this the same thing in Sweden, now,
Norway and Denmark and Finland, all countries, and no one thinks these
are sort of right wing religious countries, but they did have access to the
empirical data and they were open to it. Now, I don't have a
good explanation for why woke craziness seems to be seems to have gone to seed
more in the United States than a lot of these left wing countries. I
just don't have a good account of that. But there's no doubt about the
fact that these kind of what we call woke ideology. It just seems to
be its most extreme in the United States. I think the pediatric gender clinics
before states close all of these, I think they'll probably quit operating literally and
figuratively on kids because of civil suits. I think they're going to get just
sued into oblivion by lawyers that are representing the de transitioners. And so that's
how I think it's going to end, and it'll end in five years.
With the pediatric medicine, we still have to fight this toxic ideology and the
culture and in schools which tells kids that they could be born in the wrong
body and if they're uncomfortable with their body, they should change it. That's
a completely insane and toxic idea that's going to be a fight of a generation.
I actually think the gender medicine fight. The virtues of our system is
that it's fairly easy to sue doctors, and so for good or for real,
I think that's the way that part is going to end. So many
people have talked to in this space, and you're such a leader in the
space, and thank God for the Heritage Foundation and all of your work being
a leader in this space. It's been absolutely critical. But one of the
things I hear so oftener that I want to I'm just curious about is why
did we sort of miss this on the right. I don't think we did
miss it. I think on the right, actually people were sort of ringing
the alarm bells forever, saying this is going to happen, This is going
to happen. Although even as I talked to so many people who are doing
great work in the space, they say, you know, ten years ago,
I never thought that it would have gone this far, this fast.
So Jay, my question is sort of about that, you know, looking
ahead at how this can be fought. I feel like kind of dissecting what
already happened is really intructive to figuring out how to fight it in the future.
It really is, and I think it's actually a perfect storm. So
part of this was just a coalitional pivot on the left. If you think
about the human rights campaign over here, a couple of miles from from Hair
in twenty fifteen, o Bergofel happened. They had spent years trying to get
marriage laws and states that said marriages between a man and a woman overturned.
The Supreme Court did forum in twenty fifteen, and so you might say,
okay, well that you guys are sort of done here, right, go
ahead and do something else. They didn't do that. They already had a
plan in place to pivot to so called trans issue and their donors more or
less did the same thing as well, and there are some little I mean,
it sounds like a bad James Bond screenplay, but there are a few
trans billionaires that have helped fund this, so that that's part of the story
of what happened sort of in the left wing coalition is a pivot to this
issue very quickly. But I honestly, I don't think it could have happened
nearly as quickly as it has if it weren't for the technological capacity for ideas
to spread at the speed of light. And I'm talking about social media networks,
I'm talking about broadband connectivity and smartphones. I mean, the worst ideas
in the world. Until two thousand and seven, it can only spread at
a certain speed. But after two thousand and seven, that's the year that
the iPhone was first introduced. Within a few years, it was possible for
an idea to spread basically across the planet simultaneously. And so that's why when
we study the kids that get sucked into this gender cult, what we discover
is they very often are turned on to it initially by some social media influencer
that they are following, and then if they happened to me in a school
that's also giving them the conceptual categories in the curriculum. They're just absolute sitting
ducks. So it's almost tempting to say, Wow, this thing had to
be orchestrated from above. There was a little of that, but I honestly
think it was just as kind of spontaneous. It's like the first time we
had the technology logical capacity for bad ideas to spread. That's I think this
is just when all this happened. I think we saw the same thing with
the lockdowns during COVID. It wouldn't have been possible to lock everyone down on
the planet prior to twenty twenty because that's the first pandemic we had in which
we had access to kind of information as a disease vector, which is what
we have now. Yeah, that's really interesting. Again back to the conversation
about fusionism and how some of these corporations, and again Heritage has been really
good in the space, how some of these tech platforms or massive corporations and
actually, you know, another thing that you guys have been great about is
big pharmas and in this space, Jake, can you talk about that,
But also in that context of conservatives, limited government conservatives should be thinking about
the I guess, the economic rights of some of these big corporations absolutely.
I mean, here's long story short. You know, I've got a book
that came out originally in two thousand and nine called Money Greeting God, which
was really just an attempt to respond to religious Americans that were still believing clueless
things about socialism. And they have the same dumb thoughts that people had the
nineteen eighties before the Soviet Union collapsed. That was a concern right, Soviet
communism and nationalization of industry, that was a concern up until the collapse of
the Soviet Union. That is not the main thing I'm worried about now.
Barack Obama did not want to collectivize the farms. What we actually have,
the danger we have is a weird kind of blob in which you have a
fusion, a fusionism of the corporate realm, the administrative, a regulatory state,
and a nonprofit sector, which is often forgotten, so that instead of
thinking of these as sort of independent social spheres, which you've got a nonprofit
sector, you've got the corporate for profit sector, and you've got government.
You get a fusion of these things, a weird kind of collusive blob.
So that really what we're dealing with, our kind of chief adversary is a
type of corporatism. And it's complicated because it's tough, because how do you
separate this when you have a system in which the regulators of corporations go on
to be the lobbyists for the very corporations that they were regulating, or they
go on to be on the board of the corporation. I mean, this
is what happens in this town. And it's a much more difficult problem to
solve. But the first order of business is to understand that's what we're dealing
with. We're dealing with kind of a corporatist blob, and it has a
particular characteristic in the US. And then that's why you're dealing with in China
too. China is not the Soviet Union under Stalinism or in stalin it's a
kind of fascism in which the state is much larger and is and controls the
corporations. In the US, it's not always clear to me who's on top
and who's on bottom. Is it the corporation, is it in the case
of pharma. Is it the big pharma companies or is it the regulators in
the case of pharma. Do you have another component that haven't even mentioned,
which is the media. The media are completely bought and sold by the pharma
companies because they're able to advertise this stuff, and so they're terrified to actually
expose it. That's just more complicated saying, look, all those spheres you
thought were separate, the elites in those spheres, they're all working together.
That's more complicated than the kind of cleanness of Soviet Communism, which was kind
of easy to point out and identify. And what can Americans do? What
are some of the most powerful things Americans can do to fight the good fight?
Jane. Maybe in people's individual lives, maybe in their corporate lives.
I don't mean that sort of literal corporate, but in the sense that they're
part of groups, whether it's a church group, civic group, whatever it
is. What are some of the most powerful things people can do? I
mean, the first thing is to realize that we can win this, because
what I financially is that almost everyone on the run. It sort of feels
like, Okay, there's just nothing that can be done. The reality is
if you look on the issues now that the Biden administration has sort of committed
itself complete insanity, and immigration, which we haven't talked about it just a
completely open border on our southern border, and then just the madness of gender
ideology we've got. Depending on the poll, between seventy and eighty and ninety
percent of the public is with us on these things. And that's across political
dem graphics. And so the reality is this is only this. This stuff
can only persist if the vast majority of Americans with common sense don't learn to
work together. And unfortunately, what we would rather do is snipe at each
other. I mean you've seen it. You're on X right, I mean,
Catholics and Evangelicals will snipe at each other. Right, Why are we
spending our time on this? You know, we've got a bigger fish to
fry, And so, honestly, one we can win this. The other
side is completely insane. What they believe is contrary to reality, and we
can fight back and we can win. Individuals that know what they're doing,
like Chris Rufo, you know, actually freak people out on the other side.
And so I think half the battle is just realizing we can win if
we learn to work together on these things. And what does that mean for
you know, Republican candidates and obviously I mean this, and you know it
could mean the same thing for Democratic candidates. You know, what does this
look like translated into the kind of everyday politics, into campaigns? You know,
there have been some interesting campaigns run with the gender issue, for example,
with critical race theory starting to get a factor into them. How should
people and again actually that even applies to people on the center and on the
left who have had to push back on some of this stuff, how should
that translate politically? Well, it should translate into somewhat different coalitions coming together.
Now. I'm look, I am a convinced conservative, and so I
think liberals are wrong on things. But I also welcome any leftist or liberal
who shows moral courage and maybe even puts their career at risk in order to
defend you know, defend women's bathrooms. They're on the right, they're on
the right side on that issue. And what I have found is that there's
a kind of epistemic crisis that happens. I mean, imagine you're on the
left in California and all of your friends, your whole social you know circle
that you trust in your whole adult life, suddenly seems to believe that it's
actually a good idea to give kids sterilizing drugs and hormones to help them.
And you realize that's crazy and evil. But all of your friends don't see
this. That precipitates a crisis. It's not just that, Oh well,
I have this one policy disagreement. I can tell you what happens because I
know lots of these people. I say, my word, I could have
thought that too, but I don't. I wonder what else my friends are
wrong about, because if they're wrong about this, maybe they're wrong about other
things. Oh wait, maybe I'm wrong about some stuff. Oh no,
where did these ideas come from? I wonder if I need to rethink.
God, this is how this goes. And so you can get lots of
people now this is not true. Even four years ago, they refer to
themselves as refugees. They'll say, well, I was always, yeah,
a big leftist, but I've been abandoned by my Democratic friends, and I'm
trying to figure out what to do. They're in Flox and they're in lux
in a way that's different from Okay, I disagree with this particular environmental policy.
When you're talking about human nature and pre detecting children, that's the kind
of stuff that changes people's political affiliations. It can even change their worldview.
And so that's I mean, that's the kind of key message to this book
is that that's what's happening. And so we need a game plan and a
playbook for what kinds of arguments we need to make. And that's it's what
we try to do in the book, in you know, very short chapters.
Okay, here's a way to frame this argument. I even have a
we haven't have chapter on marriage. Look, I think natural marriage is true
marriage. But you're making those arguments with someone that you're already with on the
gender ideology fight. They're going to hear you in a different way than if
you had been making the same argument in twenty ten when they just thought you
were evil and hate good people. Yeah, that's fascinating. How do you
think of the without being too interniceen here, but how do you think of
the You mentioned the RUFO approach that I mean, he's been profiled in the
New Yorker. He really has become the sort of face of the conservative I
don't want to say backlash, I should say a position. But it's also
not even just conservative. I mean he's really been able to reach people,
you know, Californians for example, or absolutely in school districts, you know,
center school districts, even blue school districts. You know, you've had
so much experience in the conservative movement, and Chris really, you know,
says he's he's shaken up the approach. He feels like the approach was stayed.
Can you talk a little bit about that, Jay, Well, it
was stayed, But what is I mean Chris has thought this stuff was winnable,
right, I mean he's just thought, Okay, this is kind of
silly. And I mean anyone that's in Washington knows that there's a kind of
yeah, there's there's a type of country club conservatism which doesn't really want to
win, right. It wants a place at the table, it wants to
be the you know, it's happy to be the controlled opposition. Chris knew
that that was wrong. He also, I think he recognized early on that
we're in a different moment, and we really are in a different moment.
I'm just not just Chris I mean, he himself, you know, moved
from the left to the right slowly. But people like Brett Weinstein, the
biologist that was at Evergreen State right. That is just some amazing insights that
Tucker Carlson interviews. I think that the kind of simplistic way in which we
were dividing up the country left and right, these things don't quite hold anymore.
When I think about Brett Weinstein, who was very much on the far
left in a sense, teaching it a far left kind of experimental school,
and then the woke ideologues wanted to impose upon him a racialist ideology that he
disagreed with. What's happening is that those people have been alienated by their compatriots
on the left. And I think for conservatives the question is, okay,
how do we bring them in. It's not a matter of okay, let's
compromise all the stuff we disagree with. How do we create a coalition that
can and should include them, but that allows us to still maintain our integrity
and continue with our conservative political views, which is I think what we have
to do. This isn't a matter of let's find, you know, kind
of sort of neutral middle ground that's neither here nor there. It's a different
kind of coalition in which you've got a bunch of people that are fighting for
reality, social reality, biological reality, and then people who've given up on
it. That's kind of a different framework than just thinking some people want the
government to be big and some people want the government to be small. Yeah,
that is a great point. The book once again is called Fight the
Good Fight, How an Alliance of faith and reason can Win the Culture War.
That book was out February thirteen, so you can get your copy now.
We've been talking to Jay Richards and Jay, we appreciate your time and
all of your work so very much, my pleasure, so good to be
with you. You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist for a radio
hour. I Emily Kashinsky, Culture, I Regulate the Federals. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, he lovers of freedom and anxious for the Fray