We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jishinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website as well. We are joined today by Jeff Paul.
He is the author of the new book Winning America's Second Civil War,
Progressivism's Authoritarian Threat, Where it came from, and how to Defeat it.
He is also a research professor in the Social Philosophy Center at West Virginia University.
Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having
me, of course, and before we started, you mentioned that this book
again it is called Winning America's Second Civil War has been on your list on
your agenda for more than a decade, some fifteen years. Can you tell
us a little bit about why that is. A lot of people maybe didn't
feel like we were in such a cultural emergency or a period of urgency until
maybe twenty twenty, but you say this has been on your mind for a
long time. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah,
when you go to graduate school, indeed, when you're an undergraduate school,
even though this was in my case a very long time ago. I was
an undergraduate in the sixties and a graduate student in the late sixties into the
early seventies. The first thing you notice, if you're in the social sciences
or the humanity is the disparity in political outlook between what you find in universities
and what you find outside of universities. And it's so dramatic that you wonder
how it came to be that way, or why it is that way.
So I was curious. And then a book came out in the early nineteen
seventies by someone with whom I became a close friend subsequently, and the book
was called The Divided Academy, and it was a massive survey underwritten by one
of the Carnegie Foundations of sixty thousand faculty members. And what it showed was
an extraordinary disparity between public opinion on political matters and the faculty opinion on political
matters, and they were exactly the reverse of one another. And as I
began to read more, sir, as time went on, and there were
tons of them being done in the seventies, eighties, nineties, this disparity
became ever greater. You may have heard of the Harvard Crimson now does its
own survey of its faculty, and the one in twenty twenty two reported that
its faculty, if they asked them whether they were liberal or very liberal,
or conservative or very conservative, the faculty, whether it was the engineering faculty,
the medical faculty, the physics faculty, or whether it was the political
science faculty, the faculty as a whole, characterized themselves as eighty percent liberal
or very liberal, one percent conservative, and zero percent very conservative. This
is very strange when you think about it. What accounts for the disparity between
the political outlook that one finds to be standard in the universities and what it
is outside of the universities. Indeed, the universities look like a secular church
of sort of a political church, a place in which only one point of
view is being presented at most institutions, with a few exceptions. And that
puzzle caused me to want to investigate, since no one could explain to me
why it was this way. Although I had been warned by one of those
who did this survey that all the indirect evidence suggested this way back to the
year nineteen hundred. This disparity has been the same and getting worse since nineteen
hundred. This didn't happen in the last ten or twenty years. It didn't
happen in the nineteen sixties with the New Left and SDS. It started way
before that. So I realized I had to read the history of the American
tertiary education system higher education. And I did that, And so the book
reports on that history, and I started in about eighteen thirty five and go
to the present. So and I found the exact point at which it flipped.
It didn't flip gradually, and there was specific reason why it flipped.
So let me just say a few words. If I'm going on too long,
please tell me no, not at all. This is also interesting,
okay, So let me tell you what the universities were like. Let's say
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ask you about that anyway. One of the most interesting arguments in your book.
You trace a lot of this back to Germany and show how sort of
was imported into the United States. So please continue right. The United States
was founded on a singular political philosophy a view that had never been announced in
recorded human history before sixteen ninety and has not been particularly persuasive since, but
it led to all of what we see in the United States, its freedoms,
its wealth, everything. The view was that all human beings have a
right of self ownership. They have a property right in themselves which comes from
nature, and that the right of self ownership therefore implies a right to liberty
with respect to oneself, and in addition, a right to the product of
one's labors. One can go about protecting these rights in one of two ways.
One can defend oneself and stay outside of government, or one can coalesce
coalesce with people who hold the same views that human beings have these specific rights
and form a government devoted to their protection and according to the natural right view
as described by the British philosopher John Locke, which became the central doctrine,
and that book became the central book for the Founders. According to Locke,
the only legitimate grounds for forming a government was to protect these rights, and
a government, therefore, if it is legitimate, is circumscribed in its duties
to the protection of these rights. And these rights are pre legal, being
pre legal. They are superior to any written law, including the Constitution.
One could go back to the Constitution because it's written, and one can look
at the exact, exact wording, and so on. The others. The
rights are conceptions. They've been put into the Constitution so that they're there in
written language, but they are pre legal, and one has them whether they
are written anywhere or not. So upon the Founding, of course, the
founders recognized before the Declaration of Independence, and began writing about this before the
Declaration of Independence, that this view was totally inconsistent with slavery, and that
slavery had to be purged. And so with a revolution and them not having
purged it, but it disappearing state by state, they still decided that they
had to have states like South Carolina and Enjoyed to participate in the revolution to
make sure it was successful, and not have Britain allies that were inside the
inside of this continent. Afterwards, there began this controversy which became intense in
eighteen twenty about slavery. It became so intense it could only be resolved by
military means, and that's the first civil law, and so that represented the
triumph of this view that there are natural rights and it is government's duty to
protect them. When they were defending themselves verbally, the Confederates, the defenders
of slavery, rejected these rights explicitly and said the individual has only duties that
are accorded by government, and government should be formed according to race, and
the Teutonic was a superior race, so it should be it should be superior
to the rest and issuing duties and orders and so forth. But that view
had been defeated on the field of battle. Ten years or so after that
First Civil War was completed, there began the preface to a second Civil War.
I call what we're going through now the Second Civil War. I'll be
more specific later. The preface to it began in about eighteen seventy five or
eighteen seventy six. Here's what happened. The universities in the United States,
mostly they were they called themselves colleges because they only gave baccalaureate degrees and a
few master's degrees. No doctoral degrees were given, with the exception of Yale
in eighteen sixty one, and it gave three or four teen sixty one.
But they weren't like what we think of as doctoral degrees today. Since the
faculty at Yale was comprised of people with bachelor's degrees and master's degrees, none
of them had doctorates, yet they were awarding doctorates. They were awarding doctorates.
In eighteen sixty one, in order to have genuine doctoral programs, the
universities concluded they had to have doctorates on their faculty and place the doctoral programs
in the hands of those with those doctorates. The only country which had had
doctoral programs had them and had had them for two hundred years was Germany,
and Germany had research universities, which the leading American colleges aspired to be,
and so they decided that they would hire Americans with German doctoral degrees as the
graduate faculty in universities which hadn't had a graduate faculty but wanted them so that
they could give genuine They could award genuine doctoral degrees give genuine doctoral training.
So the import of these Germans began in the mid eighteen seventies, particularly with
the founding of Johns. Hopkins University in eighteen seventy six, and continued from
there on. Columbia was a major participant in this I would say the two
leading participants were JOHNS. Hopkins in Colombia, then followed by the rest the
Ivy League colleges Michigan, Wisconsin, Berkeley, and so on. Now,
this was enormously successful in terms of what the presidents had intended the outcome to
be. That is, in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, in
the natural sciences, in medicine, it meant an enormous leapforward for American tertiary
education. But in the social sciences and the humanities it was ten steps backward
or many more, because the philosophy that was imported from Germany was the exact
antithesis of the founding philosophy. No one had rights, No one has a
right to self ownership. The nation is not essentially comprised of individual human beings.
It is rather itself an organism, and the human beings are only the
cellular components of the organism, who therefore have a duty to maintain, as
it is with all organisms, the existence of the organism. So if you're
in Germany or your duty is to preserve and extend the life of the organism
which is Germany. And so there are no rights. There are only duties.
Well. Who formulates the specific duties. It's the faculty at these institutions
and their allies. Outside the institutions. The principal ally are their students who
enter. What Germany had we have now in the twenty we had in the
twentieth century developed in the twentieth century the bureaucracy, the administrative state, the
fourth branch of government in the United States, which was created and by these
very people, specifically a man named good Now at Columbia and the Woodrow Wilson
at Johns Hopkins initially, which is where he got his doctoral degree. This
idea of a fourth branch which would not be elected, which would have extraordinary
powers, the powers effectively of making law, but they'd call them rules,
And that fourth branch would really be an expression of this philosophy in which the
superior person, not by virtue of being elected, but by virtue of his
superiority, can formulate rules while not being elected, can formulate rules which everyone
has a duty to obey. That given the faculty, the doctoral faculty that
came from Germany had an initial monopoly on graduate education as it was being founded
in the United States. They could train and hire their successors, and so
with each generation this initial Germanic philosophy became amplified. And the central principle of
that is that there is an elite which is superior, which can issue orders
which must be obeyed, there are no rights. And that has grown worse
year by year, decade by decade, from the mid eighteen seventies to the
present, and it has spilled over, of course, since college attendance has
been much greater, far greater in the twentieth and twenty first century than it
was in the nineteenth century, many more college degrees, many more people entering
college, and so on. It has in a since it has polluted the
rest of the culture, so that by the nineteen twenties journalism was dominated by
people with the same point of view. One of the early and eventually most
esteemed columnists in the United States, Walter Lippman, was one of the first
major American journalists who was the product of his system. Journalism by the late
nineteen thirties was nderantly they were members of the Democratic Party. I should also
say one more thing. The people initially with German doctorates could not identify themselves
by the term that the Germans used which was in Germany a good term of
characterization, but in America would have been a despicable term. They were called
state socialists and called themselves state socialists. In Germany, a number of state
socialists are cited by the Nazis as being the origin of their own views.
And so they were being trained by these people. And so when you read
both the Germans and the first generation of Americans, you can't tell which is
which if you just see English, because you can't tell who's been translated and
who's an American who doesn't require translation. So that that's what's happened. And
when these Americans came to came back to the United States, they needed another
term to characterize themselves and characterize their views, which differed from those of the
majority of Americans, a majority of academics when they came. When they re
entered the United States, the term they chose to disguise their views was the
name of one of Germany's parties, the Progress Party, and they called themselves
Progressive. That's where the name comes from. It comes from this generation that
was trained in Germany. And I should mention, in addition of the German
generation which trained this American generation is the same generation in Germany which trained the
Nazi Professauia. So they shared the same views that became national socialism in Germany,
but they used this term progressive to disguise what they were. After World
War One, the term progressive became an embarrassment because of its association with Germany,
and so they began to look for another term. The term they seized
upon was liberal, and they could use the term liberal as they chose because
they had a monopoly on education and that. The term liberal was then absorbed
into the media, into journalism, and then it was used to describe the
first thoroughly experience, the first experiment, let's say, full scale experiment in
progressivism, which was an FDRs New Deal. So that's what I would say
about how we got to where we are now, and I mean I can
say more, I guess. The only other thing I would add is that
what had transpired the university went out of sight of its trustees, its donors,
the general public, etc. Up until nineteen fifty. And what happened
in nineteen fifty was a young graduate from Yale wrote a book called Godman at
Yale, and his name was William F. Buckley, the founder of National
Review, and he exposed what was going on at Yale University. He didn't
know why it was that way. He talked about the homogeneity of the views
of economists there, which were the antithesis of the views that he expected to
be presented by the economics department, and he was appalled. His book was
excoriated by the press and by academics who reviewed it, but it was the
first glimpse the public got at what the universities that were educating America's children young
adults had become. Now Buckling never investigated how it got this way, but
that it was this way was an enormous revelation to many, and they began
to focus on doing something to reform the America's universities. But they've never been
reformed. This trends just persistent. Hello, thank you for listening to The
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That's actually what I wanted to ask you about, because that's just such a
such a fascinating history. In the book, you'll also talk about what can
be done. In fact that it's in the sort of title of the book,
winning Winning America Second Civil War, and you have some specific ways that
you think that war can be won. Could you tell us a little bit
about what should be done to reverse the guide let me say, let me
say two things before I get to the specifics. My view is that building
from the ground up, i e. Reforming the universities, reforming how we
make appointments to the Supreme Court, what criteria we use when we appoint someone
to the Supreme Court. Reforming state universities first by using certain devices and policies,
doing things like eliminating all federal support of universities, whether public or private.
Those kinds of things would hopefully have a long term beneficial effect. However,
I'm very concerned that we don't have a long term I think we've reached
a crisis point in the United States, and so I think it is very
important because I believe that Democratic Party has been thoroughly corrupted by what has transpired
educationally and then the media in the United States. If the Republican Party is
to get a majority in the United States, it can only be through something
that benefits, that has such benefits to the middle class that it can put
together easily elition of the majority of Americans. And therefore I've proposed a complete
revision of the tax code and the tax system that we have in the United
States as grounds for a new policy prescription for the Republican Party, and that
is a universal tax on the sales of everything to replace income payroll taxes both
for the individual and for businesses, the estate tax, the gift tax,
the capital gains tax, and so on, so that individuals would only be
paying about one percent on all purchases that they make, and that would include
the of stocks, bonds, and derivatives. And most of the revenue from
this new system would come from those transactions, the sales revenues that are gathered
from those transactions ninety percent of the revenue. And what we found I had
three columnists and myself working on this for two years. What we found is
going back over a ten year period in the decade for which we had a
lot of data going Before that the data was less reliable, and after we
didn't have data yet. So what we found was that this system, though
it might seem intuitively implausible, would raise more revenue than the current system.
To give an example, from twenty nineteen, which was the very first year
that we investigated, the money raised by the current system was about three and
a half trillion dollars, which fell short of balancing the budget by one point
one trillion dollars. Adopting this new system in replacement would have balanced the budget.
It would have raised about four point six trillion dollars. And we found
that to be the case for all ten years going back to twenty eleven and
through twenty twenty one. So because I believe had this been discovered what I've
discovered in this history that I've done, had it been recognized and discovered,
let's say around nineteen hundred, perhaps there could have been an immediate reform gone.
I think there could have been, because the trustees would have been outraged,
the donors would have been outraged, and so forth. But trying to
do it now the current conditions is very difficult, and I should specify that
it has been tried by many foundations, many organizations that I've been affiliated with
for seventy years now, But seventy five, I would say, and it
hasn't. It's had some successes, and I talk about them in the book,
but the successes were not sufficient to restore the trajectory of education to its
original character in the social sciences and the humanities. So I think that this
tax proposal, which I began to explore when I realized just how perilous the
current condition, and which we worked on for two years, is probably the
most important of the prescriptions that I give in that final chapter for how to
reverse things. All they want to do is keep you poor and stupid.
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or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and I'm curious if you are
optimistic there's an appetite to take up proposals like this and innovative specific do you
see you know as you survey the political landscape, ideological landscape, that there's
hope for people, serious people, serious legislators to take up these proposals and
really, you know, turn the Titanic around. The tax proposal is going
to take some work. I can't say a lot about it at the moment.
My group of economists is represented by one of the people is beginning to
share the proposal with some highly esteemed economists and we're going to have to see
how that goes, who have access to the media and so forth. We're
just going to have to see how that goes. It's too early for me
to report whether we've had any success with that. So that's in that.
That's what I would say about that. I would say immediately, I think
the Democratic Party, it's not it's everybody sort of ascribes whatever's happened over the
last four years to Joe Biden. But you could exchange him with many other
Democrats, and you would have had the same policies and the same outcome.
I then extremely important for the Republicans and for Donald Trump particularly to win this
next election. I think it's pivotal because I think if you look back the
last four years, in fact, if you look back to about twenty fifteen,
the behavior of the Democratic Party and it's supporters within what's everyone refers to
as the deep state and so forth, has been quite appalling. The use
of law fair which began, of course in twenty fifteen against Donald Trump.
This sort of thing's never been seen before. There have been elements of it.
There have been elements of this, and I think gives some examples from
both the Kennedy administration and the Roosevelt administration, but nothing like this, Nothing
like what we've seen and what we see here as an autocratic party is willing
to do most anything to acquire power. And I think the similarity between what's
going on here and what transpired in Germany under much worse conditions, the conditions
of the depression, are quite similar