Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist,
and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST, make
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Timothy Giglin, Vice President Government and
External Relations focus on the Family. He joins us to
talk about his new book, Stumbling Toward Utopia, how the
nineteen sixties turned into a national nightmare, and how we
can revive the American dream. Tim thank you so much
for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: It's a real joy. Matt, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Well, this is quite a book gets into a really
weighty subject and I think when you take a look
back at what was happening in this country a half
century or better ago, and really you have the antecedents
for that, and I know you delve into that as well,
but it really does inform where we are at today.
In other words, the more things change, the more they
stay the same. In fact, if we want to take
that a step farther, the worse in so many different
instances they get Let's begin here. How did you get
to such a weighty topic? Why was this something that
you thought? Because you are the author of many books,
You've been around the block a time or two with
these sorts of things and these weighty issues. But why
is this? Why did this become so pressing to you?
Speaker 2: You know, I worked for ten years in the US Senate,
and I worked for almost eight years in the White House,
and now sixteen years as one of the vice presidents
that focus on the family Matt, all of them here
in Washington, and across all of those years, not quite
four decades, but going on it, I've done a lot
of speaking, meeting, presenting, writing, debating panels, et cetera. And
if someone said to me, what is you know, the
most recurring question that people ask people who you interact with,
not just you know, your fellow conservatives, but progressives as well.
Are people who are otherwise, you know, non ideological? What
is the you know, what's the golden thread? And I said,
that's easy because with pinpoint predictability, left wing audience, right
wing audience, non ideological. When you get to the proverbial
Q and A or discussion or conversation, someone will say
something like, how in the world do we get into
this mess? And what they are referring to is not
only the spiritual crisis, which is profound in America, or
the cultural topsy turvinus, but they're referring to what they
view as a kind of historic polarization, polarity, a kind
of decadence that seems to filter through all of our
great institutions. And people are really concerned, Matt, as you
well know, by the way, if people are parents or grandparents,
they will always say they are particularly concerned because not
only do they not don't know what to do, but
they're very concerned about the country they're leaving their children
or grandchildren. And so, having heard this maybe a thousand
million times, I got on an air and I was
flying back from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I asked the steward for
a stack of what must be the world's tiniest airline napkins,
and I began to scratch out the answer to this question,
which became the book Stumbling Toward utopia. The answer of
how we got into this mess is the moral and
social revolution of the nineteen sixties and seventies. It was
radicalism in overdrive and it now permeates everyone of our
American institutions.
Speaker 1: That's interesting coming back from Tulsa, and I love that
this all begins. The genesis of this is on small
airplane napkins, along with the probably the small cookie or
the peanuts that they gave as well on that plane.
But Tulsa is the stomping grounds of my older brother,
an attorney and a very concerned conservative about the state
of America, who grew up in the seventies as I
did as a smaller child, and we saw already what
was happening in the seventies from what was happening in
the sixties. And I remember my parents at the time saying,
how did we get here? Why are we in the
mess that we're in? And so it happens with each
successive generation, and I too asked that question that parents
and grandparents are asking for my children. And you know,
my family feels the same way. What kind of world?
What kind of republic are we leaving our children and grandchildren?
Speaker 2: You know, I am really glad you phrased it that way,
because it becomes very personal, doesn't it. And what I
found in my research is the first part of Stumbling
towards Utopia. I found that we all didn't as a
nation wake up. And it was nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine.
You know, rock and roll, sex, drugs, rock and roll,
as they say. I write at length about all of
them in the book. I particularly focus on Woodstock, the
Age of Aquarius, etc. But what I found that in
my research is that there was a relatively small group
of extremely influential and powerful Americans at the turn of
the twentieth century in politics, in public policy, in entertainment,
et cetera, et cetera. And I delineate who they are
and what they were so upset about. Woodrow Wilson are
president nineteen twelve, had been the president of Princeton University.
He is the poster boy for American progressivism. He disliked
the Constitution, he disliked the Declaration of Independence. He thought
that the nation ought to be run by experts. How's
that for a lead flight of progressivism for you?
Speaker 1: How's that for foreshadowing? Because that is exactly where we
are today. The experts are, and of course we went
through this battle. And it's a good point because it
reaches back to much farther back than the sixties. There
were a lot of things I think that planted the
seeds of where the sixties would go, but none more
than that kind of philosophy from the so called experts,
that arrogance of expertise.
Speaker 2: If you will, you know, Roger Baldwin is precisely the
man you're describing. He is the founder of the ACLU.
He was a communist and he was extremely angry at
the American concept of justice. He was a disliker to
a very high degree of anything that was religious or
faith based, and he wanted to up in the American
legal system. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a
coterie of this kind of thinking, who was a racialist.
She was a eugenicist. She really had a profound dislike
for American Catholics. She held people who were not of
the white Anglo Saxon Protestant aristocracy and leadership class really
in fairly low regard. She particularly disliked, you know, legal
immigrants and what they were doing to the United States
of American John Dewey. You know, if you're upset about
American education, higher education, high school, and et cetera, John
Dewey is to blame. He's one of them. He was
a profound social engineer. He felt that American education should
not be you know, determined or defined by standards of reading, writing, arithmetic, science.
It was about creating the new citizen, the transformation of
the country through the schools. And you know, it's not
very long between the turn of the twentieth century and
the arrival of nineteen sixty six, sixty seven, sixty eight,
sixty nine. By that moment, it's a Charnel house in America.
It's a real profound revolution, no.
Speaker 1: Doubt about it. And you know, I don't want to
skip ahead too much because I think we have a
lot to talk about in that fertile ground of decay.
I think it led to the decaying of this republic
for many reasons. But I think about the examples you mentioned,
and the Thomas Woodrow Wilsons of the world, espousers of
things like eugenics, extremely racist individuals. They all had something
in common though they were all connected at some level
to the Democratic Party in this country, certainly to the
liberal movement that all said. At one point, the ACLU, however,
used to be an organization obviously disconnected from anything bearing
any resemblance to faith, religion, any of that foundational those
foundational things that are at the core of this public
But they used to at least be on the side
or position themselves on the side of liberty issues. What
happened to the ACLU now becoming an absolute token of
the liberal movement in America, I mean, not the classical
liberal movement in America, the far left and the Democratic
Party in this country.
Speaker 2: I love that question, because what you are seeing across
all of these really bad ideas is the emergence of
something that had never defined our constitutional republic and which
comes to be the light motif of the revolution of
the sixties and seventies. And Matt Frankly, I would call
it a kind of corrosive moral relativism. It's a kind
of kneehe that is championed by the way, not just
in highbrow culture, you know, at the elite institutions and universities,
the federal government, the Supreme Court. I mean I write
at length in Stumbling towards Utopia about the way that
the people were speaking about directly impacted the elites to
begin this transformation. But it filters down very quickly, doesn't
it to the creation of the sexual revolution. Here is
the emergence in the twentieth century, and I write about
Alfred Kinsey masters In Johnson, who are really in opposition
to the natural nuclear family, the concept of America. Whether
you were a Democrat or Republican, a liberal or conservative,
you know, it was about marriage, family, parenting, human life,
religious liberty, conscience rights, parental rights. You know, these were
uncontested dranks of our constitutional republic. And then you have
the emergence of someone like Hugh Hefner. I write about
the creating Playboy, you know, building on and giving credence
to the work of Kinsey and masters in Johnson and
selling the fortification of America and the abuse of women.
You know, through all of this kind of moral relativistic thinking.
It's a very very fast slide, you know, from the
kind of terrible ideas we're talking about to the dope,
smack and acid that results, you know, in things like
woodstock and so much else.
Speaker 1: What I don't understand is how much damage that time
period caused the seeds the fruits of the seeds that
it planted, of course at that time, and yet we
still have a problem. I think of it in the
similar context of all of these pro Palestinian groups, you know,
shouting for the actual genocide of Israel in Jews. It's
as if we are destined not to learn anything from history,
you know.
Speaker 2: I write in Stumbling Toward Utopia at length on something
that is now totally forgotten but which should be central
to our national debate. It's the port Huron Statement. And
as you know from reading the book, Matt, the port
Heuron Statement was a proactive blueprint for overtaking the universities,
creating something called the new Left, and using universities and
elite institutions to transform America. I write at length about
Saul Alynsky his book Rules for Radicals. It was the
small b bible of American progressivism. By the way, whether
you're a conservative or a progressive, all of us, at
one time or the other, maybe even as recently as yesterday,
have had conversations with progressives or those on the left
who will say something like, isn't it a shame that
we are so polarized? Isn't it a shame that these polarities,
this disharmony, seems to define the country. But as I
demonstrate in Stumbling Towards Utopia, beginning with Saul Olenski, but
many others who learned from him and similar thinkers, they
wanted polarization. They championed it. They made it a central
part of rules for radicals. It's rule thirteen. They knew
that by creating disharmony, chasms, and disunity, that they would
ultimately transform the United States of America. And here we
are in twenty twenty four, and we are beyond the
dreams of these early progressives and what they have imposed
upon our really remarkable country.
Speaker 1: And again, what did we see, of course in sixty
sixty seven was started earlier, but really exploded, of course
during the Vietnam War. You talk a great deal about
that using and how many times have we heard in
modern America, never let a crisis, a good crisis, go
to waste. That's not something that you know, the strategist
for Barack Obama came up with. These are time tested
lessons from the left that truly began in our institutions
of higher education back in the early to mid nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: I could not agree more. And that is so well said.
It's why in the book I deal at length with
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the creator and champion of the
Great Society. My friend, I went back and read all
of the early Johnson speeches, remarks, et cetera, on all
of the rhetoric of the Great Society. It's breathtaking, his
infamous speech at the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor.
Government is going to solve the poverty problem. The federal
is going to solve the city problems. The federal government
is going to solve problems in families, in schools. It
goes on and on, and then we have geysers of
federal cash. And yet by nineteen sixty five, I mean,
this is early in the New Deal. In the Great Society,
you have young demographers like Pat moynihan saying, wait a minute,
we've got twenty five percent of all Black Americans who
are now born out of wedlock. By the way, Matt
he called that a crisis in nineteen sixty five. That
number is now seventy three percent. It's fifty three percent
among Hispanic Americans and thirty three percent among native born whites.
The majority of babies born to women who are ages
thirty years of age and under are now born out
of weblock. This is a direct result in an area
of the lowest marriage and fertility rates in recorded American history.
This is a direct result of the moral and social
reference revolution that you and I are speaking.
Speaker 1: About, and it is devastating. It was devastating when moynihan
talked about it in nineteen sixty five. It is that
much more devastating today.
Speaker 3: Who is the Department of Home Win Security supposed to help?
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Speaker 1: Our guest on this edition of The Federalist Radio Hour
is Timothy Giglin, Vice President Government and External Relations, Focus
on the Family, joining us to talk about his new book,
Fascinating Look Back and really a look into why we
are here stumbling toward utopia, how the nineteen sixties turned
into a national nightmare, and how we can receive revive
the American dream. I want to go back to Lennon
Baines Johnson because I think it is a central focus
of your book what was happening during the Johnson era.
And he was someone who was a if you will,
prayed at the altar of FBR, prayed at the altar
of Woodrow Wilson. The great status, the great government can
solve anything and everything. He is the biggest reason, I believe,
you know, and others have picked up his torch. It
is the biggest reason LBJ and the great society why
we have the government that we have today. Why so
many people, mistakenly, as you have noted and you note
in your book, believe that government is the end all
answer to all things, from cradle to grave.
Speaker 2: You have so well said. I could not agree more.
And you know, I think one of the shocking things
to say, is that the direct impact of the sexual revolution,
which is often ascribed, you know, to carping on the
part of you know, traditional or conservative Americans, is really
such a national nightmare a result of all of the
ideas we're talking about, and it's become so acute that
of a sudden, and I find this extremely encouraging, that
of a sudden, very important thinkers on the center and
center left have of a sudden become people using empirical
research and data, speaking like many of the social and
moral and traditional conservatives of the last seventy years. In fact,
if you cover up the name and read the research
and the books that are coming out to document what
has happened in the social and cultural realm as a
result of the things that we're talking about, you would
be shocked to learn that they are some of the
most prominent liberal statisticians, academics, and sociologists in the United States.
I mean, I think it's now incontrovertible. I cite one
statistic that I think the listeners Matt will find jaw dropping.
In nineteen sixty among all young Americans, this is only
nineteen sixty, seventy three percent of young Americans were living
in a married intact home. That number by nineteen eighty
had dropped to fifty one percent. Think about and question yes.
By twenty fifteen that number was forty three percent. Now
we're in twenty twenty four. I think we have to
reconcile this and we have to ask ourselves is restoration possible?
And I believe that it is. I believe it very strongly.
Speaker 1: Interesting that you say that, because I do, and your
book focus is on it, and I want to take
some time to explore it. But the loss of faith
in this country, and I say that, I don't mean
that it was somehow mistakenly lost. I don't mean that,
you know, we just somehow got away from it. And
this is, as you mentioned before, you know, the push
from the institutions of higher education, our institutions in general,
to drive faith to its needs. How much of that
void that was really darting to be driven in the
nineteen sixties, the counterculture revolution, How much of that are
we reaping today?
Speaker 2: This is a major part of stumbling towards utopia. I
went back and I looked at the old Protestant mainline,
and for those of the rising generation, they may not
realize that overwhelmingly in the United States until the nineteen nineties,
it was by and large the Protestant denominations that were
the central kind of Christian institutions in our country, broadly speaking, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
et cetera, et cetera. And yet it was the progressives
who purposely targeted the seminaries and the churches, and the
goal was to remove broadly speaking Christian orthodoxy from the
seminaries and from the churches and to install a new
progressive theology. And the result has been a near total
collapse of what we used to call the Protestant mainline.
And what I do is I delineate in Stumbling towards Utopia,
what the national membership numbers were across the early nineteen
sixties and what they are today. And there is not
a single, not even one major Protestant denomination on the
old mainline that anybody would say is relatively healthy for membership.
It's been a complete and total hollowing out. And I
think that the impact for millions of people who looked
to churches for faith, guidance, for community, for nourishment, for continuity.
I think have one by one been rather stunned and
shocked by what's happened to what used to be a
very steady and important faith community and component in their lives.
Speaker 1: You speak of the optimism that you have, and I
want to touch upon the last year, twenty twenty three
was the year, of course, of determining who our next
candidates would be for president. I spent a lot of
time in the state of Iowa, where all of those
presidential contenders on the Republican side of course, basically lived
for the better part of a year trying to earn
the confidence in the votes of caucus goers in Iowa,
and I covered all of them. I covered a gentleman
by the name of a Vike Ramaswami. Quite a bit
you'vet and one of the core messages that he had
in his campaign that I thought caught a lot of
attention from the average Iowa and I think ultimately from
folks across the country is there is a yearning, a
longing for something bigger than ourselves. Because what the sixties
counterculture taught us informed us and where we are today
so much is such a self driven, self motivated society,
and that can sustain one only so long, and so
Ramaswami kept talking about this void people are trying to
fill with all kinds of things, everything as he mentioned
from you know, from the identity politics cult as he
calls it, the climate change cult, drugs, sex, pornography, all
of those things. And yet at the end of the day,
the lives are so empty. Is there a turning away
from that, a turning toward what made this country so great?
Speaker 2: In my estimation, well, I think you observed something very important,
and I think that you have synthesized and translated it
in a really powerful way. I could not agree more.
My great friend at Princeton University, Robbie George, wrote a
I think very important book called Conscience and Its Enemies,
and I remember reading this really extraordinary book, and the
narrative is that you have to ultimately confront the dogmas
of liberal secutarism if you're really going to ultimately confront
the major problems that are facing Americans and those in
the West. I could not agree more. The question is
how do we confront, address, and then turn back this
tsunami of liberal secutarism. And I believe very strongly that
there is no magic formula. I think that the only
way forward for the United States, if we are to
address this spiritual crisis, is not from a top down
program like the Great Society. In other words, I do
not think, Matt, that we're going to ultimately restore or
generate our country by the ideas here in Washington, DC,
or Wall Street or Silicon Valley, you know, or Hollywood
or Broadway or whatever. The imposition is of culture and policy.
And as I say in Stumbling Towards Utopia, I am
an inveterate optimist and I believe strongly that restoration, renewal,
and regeneration is possible. And I think in my role
that focus on the family, I'm already seeing it. I
think that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not want
boys and girls sports. They do not want men in
women's sports. Most of us were shocked and horrified to
see a woman boxed in the face at the Olympics.
That was a very clarifying moment. We have the first
major trans case at the United States Supreme Court that
will be argued late this fall early winter. So I
think there are seedlings that have been planted, and they're
good ones, and I think they're germinating already, and I
think that they confirm that there are millions of Americans
of goodwill who want something better and different. And I
believe very strongly that the rising generation of young people
has lived through a lot of brokenness and unevenness. They're
impatient for all the right things, Matt, and I think
they want something better, and I think they're going to
help contribute to the kind of restoration that we want
as a country.
Speaker 1: I think we see that with moms for liberty, parents
getting involved in parental rights, those all of those sorts
of things. And I agree with you absolutely. I think
it is a grassroots movement that is going to save
the Republic in so many different ways. I don't doubt
that for a moment. I do, though, do not want
to dismiss the challenges. How do you take on you
have another book on the subject as a matter of
fact that we can note here. How do you take
on generations of indoctrination going on in our public taxpayer
fund school systems that are teaching the values of turmoil,
of spiritual, social, sexual, economic turmoil of the nineteen sixties counterculture.
Speaker 2: Today, I think we're doing it. I think we're seeing
historic levels of school choice in the United States. I
think we're seeing historic levels of charter schools in the
United States. I think we are seeing historically high levels
of home schooling. Of a sudden, we are seeing faith
based schools who actually came through COVID quite well. They
opened much earlier, and their students are doing much better.
I think that we are seeing a host of things
in the education space. I think people who have never
thought about running for a school board, much less ever
attending a school board meeting, are of a sudden running
and winning in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Who would have
thought that a successful governor, you know, whose campaign was
down in the numbers, you know, would have so successfully
won and governed on the issue of parental rights and
parental involvement in the schools. I think that that was
a wonderful, defining moment for the United States.
Speaker 1: Indeed, and speaking of politics, we can't have this conversation
where we are in this time frame, this timeline without
talking about the big political questions of our day, and
that is centrally focused on the presidential election and who
is going to control government in Washington, d C. In particular,
I have heard from a lot of people over the
last several months in our conversations on this podcast about
the existential nature of this election of this republic, do
you believe that this is an existential election between Donald
Trump and Kamala Harris.
Speaker 2: I believe definitively that people of goodwill could definitely see
it through that prism. We are on an unexpected journey.
And who would have thought, in light of our wonderful
conversation today Matt and Uh, you know the profound failures
of American progressivism, that we would have a Berkeley Liberal, Uh,
you know who is running to be president of the
United States of America. Who would have thought, uh, that
that the man who has been dubbed a blue collar
billionaire right would would would be running against this kind
of Berkeley era liberal. I think it is uh. In
any ways, I think that this season in public policy
and in culture, uh is a defining, remarkable moment in
American history. It is not just another presidential election. It's
not even a time where we are understanding the historic
alignments of each of the parties. I think we're living
through a major realignment. And I think that as we
get the empirical data in the days immediately after the
pending election, not just in the presidential election, but in
the House, the Senate, the governor's races, the Baalid initiatives.
I think we have to be prepared to be very
surprised by the realignment in culture first and then in politics.
I think it's going to be very substantial.
Speaker 1: Couldn't agree with you more. And we will find out
in the coming days exactly where that line is in America.
I'm just praying, like I'm sure you are, that we
don't find that line violently, and again we shall see.
It's a fascinating book, a fascinating time, certainly in America,
a time that has been really front of mind for
such a long time because of its influences and what
it has done the nineteen sixties. I want to thank
our guest today on a fascinating book, Timothy Gigline, Vice
President Government and External Relations, Well Focus on the Family,
joining us to talk about his new book, Stumbling Toward Utopia,
how the nineteen sixties turned into a national nightmare and
how we can revive the American dream. Very interesting, sir,
Thank you so much for joining us in the Federalist
Radio hopp.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Matt. It has been a real pleasure.
Speaker 1: You have been listening to another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior correspondent at the Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers
of freedom and anxious for the fray. A four lasso
ar