Speaker 1: It's the three Whiskey Happy Hour, the podcast dedicated to
Speaker 1: single molts and blended opinions with your hosts Steve Hayward,
Speaker 1: John You, and some mystery woman named Lucretia, along with
Speaker 1: the floating cast of regular guests. So pour yourself, adrom
Speaker 1: and settle in for another episode of one hundred Proof Conversation.
Speaker 2: I want to start today by first giving a shout
Speaker 2: out to our new voiceover artists for our introduction. It's
Speaker 2: Colin MacLean of Norwich, England, and I'll say more about
Speaker 2: him on our closing show notes at the end or
Speaker 2: in the actual show notes printed on the website. But
Speaker 2: for today, because John You is away traveling and doing
Speaker 2: his usual nonsense, we are delighted to have Phil Munio's
Speaker 2: from the University of Notre Dame joining us, filling John
Speaker 2: seat as the I guess sort of a legal andlst
Speaker 2: but generally just all around hail fellow, well met.
Speaker 3: Just seut of curiosity. How does John feel about that? Phil?
Speaker 4: I think we should all look like this, as you know,
Speaker 4: like an upgrade from economy to economy plus.
Speaker 2: There you go. Yeah, but we want to get the
Speaker 2: business class. But look, you know, we already hadn't mind
Speaker 2: having you on the show in John's place now and then,
Speaker 2: but it turns out to be really timely because you
Speaker 2: have just published an article that the kids these days
Speaker 2: would call a banger. I think it's your article in
Speaker 2: the First Things that just came to my mailbox three
Speaker 2: four days ago, maybe last week, I'm not sure, called
Speaker 2: the Founders and the Common Good, and it's getting some
Speaker 2: buzz I have noticed, which I think is you know,
Speaker 2: also significant and interesting. So the Founders of the Common
Speaker 2: Good you're taking on, you know, the post liberals, I guess,
Speaker 2: and the whole revival of the idea of the common good.
Speaker 2: And a lot to be said here. But I want
Speaker 2: for our listeners who are not schooled, and you know,
Speaker 2: as much as we try to educate our listeners in
Speaker 2: political philosophy and so forth, many of them are not
Speaker 2: well schooled. And some of the things that are so
Speaker 2: familiar to us and five levels deep. So I want
Speaker 2: to start out simple in any case, So why don't
Speaker 2: we do this when we say liberalism, let's start really simple.
Speaker 2: Liberalism is not, I always say, just tax and spend
Speaker 2: and big government regulation, not the Democratic Party platform. I
Speaker 2: understand why that's the commonplace word for it. But I
Speaker 2: mean it's something different and richer and deeper than that.
Speaker 2: So why don't you Your article gives a couple of definitions,
Speaker 2: So why don't you fill start out and give us
Speaker 2: your thumbnail definition of what is meant by liberalism when
Speaker 2: we're talking about it in these terms.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. I'm no substitute
Speaker 4: for John Yu and I love listening to this show,
Speaker 4: as you know, so it's real fun for me to
Speaker 4: be on. You ask what do I mean by liberalism?
Speaker 4: I mean the term. Different people use the term in
Speaker 4: different ways, And for a while I would distinguish what
Speaker 4: I would call classical liberalism, and I talk about the
Speaker 4: founders classical liberalism as opposed to modern liberalism, and people
Speaker 4: get confused, and what about political liberalism, you know, which
Speaker 4: by you know, contemporary democrats. So for the purposes of
Speaker 4: this article or with the post liberals called liberalism, I
Speaker 4: narrow it down to two kind of key elements. The
Speaker 4: first is that human freedom is wilful choice, and there's
Speaker 4: an implicit anthropology, or an implicit understanding of what human
Speaker 4: beings are. Human beings are creative, willful, beings. To put
Speaker 4: it in a different way, we are our own gods,
Speaker 4: We are creators, our own legislators, and so that some
Speaker 4: people say, you know, we need to author our own
Speaker 4: laws something like that, as opposed to play the role
Speaker 4: that our creator has authored for us, or accept the
Speaker 4: place that the creator has authored for us. Okay, So
Speaker 4: that's the first time liberalism that the human will, human
Speaker 4: desire is the fundamental attribute of human nature. And then
Speaker 4: the second attribute of liberalism, as I'm using it here
Speaker 4: is the role of the government is to be neutral.
Speaker 4: The purpose of government is simply to for as many
Speaker 4: people to let them author their own lives in whatever
Speaker 4: way they want. And the academic way of putting this
Speaker 4: is that the government is neutral towards competing conceptions of
Speaker 4: the good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I want to hold that thought, and I
Speaker 2: actually want to ask Linda to answer the question, is
Speaker 2: her stay liberal state in practice actually neutral? Hold that
Speaker 2: for now, because I suspect it. We'll summon forth an
Speaker 2: epic rant or not all promptu lucretia. Now I hold
Speaker 2: it for now. I want to dwell on that first
Speaker 2: point a bit about sometimes if I'm asked for a
Speaker 2: one sentence definition I will say liberalism, classical liberalis is
Speaker 2: the idea that individuals should be free to pursue their
Speaker 2: own self chosen purposes, which is will forless. It's as
Speaker 2: parallels yours. That's also John Stuart Mel. It's not original
Speaker 2: to me. I've just paraphrased him. But of course it
Speaker 2: does then imply if he just ended there, that there's
Speaker 2: no standard of judgment. All purposes are equal right, equally
Speaker 2: good or equally bad, because we've abandoned a judgment on
Speaker 2: good and bad. But then also, this is something lately
Speaker 2: I can't believe I've never thought of this before. I've
Speaker 2: been having a back and forth with Paul Gottfried, one
Speaker 2: of the famous old paleocons. I've come to like the
Speaker 2: guy a little more. Of course, he's very old now
Speaker 2: and he's mellowed a bit, and you know I mellowed
Speaker 2: when I was five years old anyway. And he points
Speaker 2: out that.
Speaker 4: Look, you're.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, it's because I never mind. Where was I
Speaker 2: going with that? Oh no, it was about how uh,
Speaker 2: if you're a progressive, or even worse, a tyrant, you
Speaker 2: really want people to think of themselves as autonomous individuals
Speaker 2: cut off from any other wider communities because it makes
Speaker 2: you easier to govern and tyrannize over right, And they
Speaker 2: said that's the one part of the liberal tradition that
Speaker 2: will Woodrow Wilson the Progressives actually wanted to keep. I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: I think he's right about that. I'm not which part, well,
Speaker 2: the part of you you want people to conceive of
Speaker 2: themselves as willful individuals, creating their own purposes, owing no
Speaker 2: obligation to any social community or even their own families,
Speaker 2: right their churches, their union halls, because it makes them
Speaker 2: easier for a large government to dominate. I think there's
Speaker 2: something to that. I'm not sure if they ever put.
Speaker 3: It in that I would probably that's a central tenet
Speaker 3: of Marxism. Steve it cut a little bit watered down,
Speaker 3: But of course the idea is that you everything in
Speaker 3: the state, nothing outside of the state, whatever the stupid
Speaker 3: phrase is. And one of the but but follow on Marx.
Speaker 3: Marx had the same idea that you destroy those communities
Speaker 3: and those relationships that that make people truly human, and
Speaker 3: then you replace him, of course, with a complete and
Speaker 3: total reliance upon dependence upon the state, and then you
Speaker 3: make people very easy to control and so I think,
Speaker 3: I guess what I'm saying is is that to the
Speaker 3: extent that progressivism or liberalism is just watered down and
Speaker 3: less and less watered down these days of socialism, communism.
Speaker 3: I think that that's absolutely true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I was trying to say something like that.
Speaker 2: I was just winging it. Let me do this. I
Speaker 2: want to read to you a couple of sentences from
Speaker 2: your first paragraph and then bring up an other term
Speaker 2: to be talked about a bit, and that term is
Speaker 2: common good. So here's what you wrote. Liberalism, so understood,
Speaker 2: is both relativistic and ultimately nihilistic. It makes the individual's
Speaker 2: will sovereign over reality. It denies the existence of a
Speaker 2: common good because it holds that there are no rational,
Speaker 2: intrinsic goods that human beings hold in common. The essence
Speaker 2: of man, in the liberal view, is willful individual choice,
Speaker 2: asserting one's view of oneself and of reality, and then
Speaker 2: shaping one's life in light of that positive worldview. That's
Speaker 2: the end of the quote you do. Before that quote
Speaker 2: the famous Mystery of the Universe class from Justice Kennedy,
Speaker 2: which i'll leave out for now. I wish i'd written
Speaker 2: that passage I think it's really good. But then I
Speaker 2: think it should be added that to the extent that
Speaker 2: there could be. I mean, maybe someone would argue back
Speaker 2: to you that the common good or the public interest.
Speaker 2: I mean this is something that I remembered at Irving
Speaker 2: Crystal and Dan Bell when they founded the Public Interest
Speaker 2: magazine in the sixty said they said something like, we
Speaker 2: don't think the public interest, if that's equivalent of the
Speaker 2: common good, is simply the sum total of private preferences.
Speaker 2: You know what's the common good just sort of lays
Speaker 2: a fair view. Let everybody pursue their private purposes, and
Speaker 2: it'll spontaneously order itself, in the libertarian view, into the
Speaker 2: best of all possible worlds. And so there's still no
Speaker 2: substance of view there. It's a procedural view. Is that
Speaker 2: a fair characterization or how do you I should be
Speaker 2: thinking about the term common good in the context of
Speaker 2: this current conversation going on?
Speaker 4: Well, you know the example I use with my students,
Speaker 4: and you know, I teach a notre dame. So this
Speaker 4: you got to speak the language they understand and.
Speaker 3: Which means what, by the way, not Christian Catholic doctrine.
Speaker 3: I'm to assume no, I know something, but it should
Speaker 3: be even more more fundamental here at Notre Dame.
Speaker 4: So what's the common good of the Notre Dame football team?
Speaker 2: Winning?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: No, So what's the good of the quarterback? You know? When?
Speaker 4: Is how in? And the quarterback doesn't have a good
Speaker 4: that is really can be comprehended or understood apart from
Speaker 4: the good of the team. When the team wins, the
Speaker 4: quarterback wins, but the quarterback's enjoyment or satisfaction or excellence
Speaker 4: in the winning uh is not diminished by the running
Speaker 4: back also winning. It really is a good enjoyed, enjoyed,
Speaker 4: experienced in common and that's part of a team, right,
Speaker 4: And it's it's it's a very simple way. It's not perfect,
Speaker 4: but it's a way of understanding the common goods. So
Speaker 4: common goods and sort of a technical definition or goods
Speaker 4: that when I enjoy it, if we have a common good,
Speaker 4: when I enjoy it, your enjoyment isn't diminished or decreased
Speaker 4: at all.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So, so healthcare, sorry to bring that up just off
Speaker 4: the top of my mind, is not really a common
Speaker 4: good because it's a scarce resource. And if I and
Speaker 4: if I enjoy it, you can't you can't enjoy. You know,
Speaker 4: if if if the doctors doing surgery on me, he
Speaker 4: can't be doing surgery at you at the same time.
Speaker 4: Whereas if the nation is providing defense for me, it's
Speaker 4: also providing defense for you.
Speaker 3: And I play Devil's advocate. Say that again, Yeah, I
Speaker 3: played Devil's advocate for a moment. By that definition, Sorry
Speaker 3: to do this family show, But since Minneapolis has recently
Speaker 3: resurrected this lovely institution, people gays who who hang out
Speaker 3: in and have public sex and public bathhouses can all
Speaker 3: be said to be sharing a common good, and one's
Speaker 3: sharing of it does not reduce the sharing of by
Speaker 3: another person. That's way. I don't really fully believe that,
Speaker 3: but I'm I really am trying to play Devil's advocate that.
Speaker 3: In fact, it's not just enough to say that that
Speaker 3: a common good is something that you and I can
Speaker 3: both enjoy without diminishing it for the other person. There
Speaker 3: is something more to it, and that's my point.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, sure, sure, I mean you can say
Speaker 4: that's a necessary but not sufficient common goods. So there
Speaker 4: are different common goods, right, So the common good of
Speaker 4: the football team is winning the real question is what's
Speaker 4: the common good of the political community, because that are
Speaker 4: not within the political community too. I mean this is
Speaker 4: this is part of the problem. People assume that whatever
Speaker 4: whatever common goods I mean there really are common goods.
Speaker 4: Whatever the common good is, the political community must aim
Speaker 4: at it. No, there's a political common good proper to
Speaker 4: the political community. But there are other common goods. There's
Speaker 4: a common good of the moon Yo's household and is
Speaker 4: for the moon Yo's household. There's the common good of
Speaker 4: the University of Notre Dame, which is separate. You know,
Speaker 4: it's a private school. It's its own thing. There's the
Speaker 4: common good of the nation. There's common goods within the
Speaker 4: church itself, right, and those are not So it's it's
Speaker 4: the real question is what is the common good of
Speaker 4: the political community.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so let's let's linger on this a little bit
Speaker 2: and bring in a constitutional dimension. Perhaps the first point
Speaker 2: is I'll just make this we don't have to discuss.
Speaker 2: If we can come back to it, is what is
Speaker 2: the common good? Let's use your football metaphor. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: want to win. Do you want the people on the
Speaker 2: team to be happy and play with you? Play the
Speaker 2: roles and so the team prospers together. But even that
Speaker 2: is controversial. You know, is it a run player or
Speaker 2: a pass play? You know, I want the ball, You're
Speaker 2: not giving me the ball often enough? Right, And now
Speaker 2: that's a you know, kind of simplistic analogy. But the
Speaker 2: point is that what is the public interest of the
Speaker 2: common good is inherently controversial. It's not just a matter
Speaker 2: of will we differ about what the good is? Right,
Speaker 2: that's arguing about justice. Right.
Speaker 3: What about instead, instead of using a football team as
Speaker 3: an example, let's use a w NBA team as an example.
Speaker 3: And I'm being very serious about that and purposeful because
Speaker 3: of course, winning obviously is not the only common good
Speaker 3: as defined by at least by the owners, by the
Speaker 3: organization itself, winning, the winning, making money off of winning,
Speaker 3: being you know, all of those things that we probably
Speaker 3: would attribute to a football team, whether a high school,
Speaker 3: college or professional. The WNBA kind of messes up the
Speaker 3: whole thing and just goes to show you how easy
Speaker 3: it is to take what should be an obvious common good.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm sounding like a good liberal here and turn
Speaker 3: it into something that you know, the people with enough
Speaker 3: power have have substituted something entirely different. And there's the
Speaker 3: heart of their argument. I think a faulty argument, by
Speaker 3: the way, But the heart of their argument is who's
Speaker 3: to say what the common good is? Right? That's what
Speaker 3: it always comes down to.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the nihilist and relevus part that Phil points out.
Speaker 2: That's the way I thought. I wasn't sure where you
Speaker 2: were going there. I thought maybe you were trying to
Speaker 2: sneak in a way to get me to admit that
Speaker 2: Sophie Cunningham has replaced Sidney Sweeney as the object of
Speaker 2: our affections on the shoe okay with.
Speaker 3: Both of them. I'm okay with both of them. Sidney
Speaker 3: Sweeney is a little more solid across the board, but
Speaker 3: Sophie Sophie's standing up as well. So good for them.
Speaker 3: And they're both beautiful, so you know me, I have
Speaker 3: a thing for beautiful blondes that are.
Speaker 2: I don't know why you knew this was going to happen, Phil,
Speaker 2: didn't you?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: No, I actually you know I had. What I had
Speaker 3: on my mind was Clay Travish offering a ten million
Speaker 3: dollar bet with a high school team versus the anyway, Sorry,
Speaker 3: I am not trying to tribute for anything like that. Phil,
Speaker 3: I'm just coming at you with what every argument would
Speaker 3: be by some dumb girl who actually took the time
Speaker 3: to read your article.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what we're that's what we're We're gonna get
Speaker 2: some question of what is the remedy for various problems?
Speaker 4: Let me let me get let me get two points
Speaker 4: in real quick. Okay, So that Steve's question was original
Speaker 4: question is you know what is the common good? And
Speaker 4: I and I use the football team as an example,
Speaker 4: and and here and then Linda, Linda points us to
Speaker 4: another dimension. So my first point is on Steve, my
Speaker 4: second point on Lucretia.
Speaker 5: Here.
Speaker 4: The first point is the football team clearly has a
Speaker 4: common good, Like there's a purpose. There's a purpose of
Speaker 4: the team. It's to win games. Now there might be
Speaker 4: other purposes, and you know, and if you really think
Speaker 4: about it, actually the real purpose of the football team
Speaker 4: is to develop the character of these men. And but
Speaker 4: but but look just in the simple sense that the
Speaker 4: team has an end, a t los a purpose and
Speaker 4: that's the's say, to win. Okay, what Lucretia and then
Speaker 4: introduces is with the w n B A is well, hey,
Speaker 4: but we're using it for other things to have a
Speaker 4: gender equality or whatever it might be. And that's to say,
Speaker 4: that's to admit there is a purpose. It's just saying
Speaker 4: it's not to win the games. It might be to
Speaker 4: make money or to social transformation or whatever. And so
Speaker 4: there's disputes about what the common good is. But my
Speaker 4: point with this point st brought up was why this nihilism?
Speaker 4: How's nihilism if there's no common good? Because the modern
Speaker 4: liberal position or the liberal position is there's only private goods,
Speaker 4: because there's only private wills, So there really is no
Speaker 4: purpose to anything, and therefore there can be no common
Speaker 4: good because common good and purpose or tilS are connected.
Speaker 2: Okay, I wanted to have a quick ad break here
Speaker 2: and then I want to come back and ask the
Speaker 2: second half of that question. So don't go, everybody, We'll
Speaker 2: be right back. All right. We're still working on this
Speaker 2: question of the common good, and I've got another question
Speaker 2: that's on the constitutional level. But first, Lucretian wants to
Speaker 2: play on a couple more aspects of this, and I
Speaker 2: have one more aspect of the current focus as well.
Speaker 2: So Lucretia go.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to go just a little bit deeper
Speaker 3: to something you said about that in your article. You
Speaker 3: said that liberals believe that creation has no purpose. And
Speaker 3: I don't disagree with that, but my tendency is to
Speaker 3: look at it just a little bit differently, and that
Speaker 3: is that the modern liberal, the modern leftist, whatever you
Speaker 3: want to call it, progressive, does not believe that, first
Speaker 3: in the first place, we are created. They actually and
Speaker 3: the role of the theory of evolution, the philosophical idea
Speaker 3: of evolution, is so critical here in the sense that
Speaker 3: one of the things, let me throw this at you,
Speaker 3: one of the things that evolution did was it made
Speaker 3: it possible to deny not only that there was a creation,
Speaker 3: but that that creation would have a purpose. Because if
Speaker 3: you can attribute all of life, all of the complexity
Speaker 3: and beauty of life, to the primordial muck uh, and
Speaker 3: then the rest of it's just a you know, a
Speaker 3: series of accidents, right, And so I think that that
Speaker 3: in and of itself creates its own set of nihilistic facing,
Speaker 3: the abyss and the absolute need to create your own universe,
Speaker 3: be your own gods, and then force that force that
Speaker 3: on others in order to have the comfort of knowing
Speaker 3: that it's something beyond that abyss that you can't face.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense? Again, I'm not disagreeing with the
Speaker 3: way you put it, but there's implications to the idea
Speaker 3: that modern liberals just don't believe in any kind of
Speaker 3: creation because that would in and of itself assume a creator,
Speaker 3: and that they deny.
Speaker 4: I agree, And you're getting you're digging much deeper into
Speaker 4: how did this form of liberalism arise? And I think
Speaker 4: you're pointing us way beneath the surface, and I think
Speaker 4: Darwin is exactly right, and it's the really the idea
Speaker 4: that it's all chance, it's all purposeless, there is no purpose,
Speaker 4: there are no ends, and.
Speaker 3: Which is again why the old Throsymachus way of ordering
Speaker 3: the universe just is the advantage of the stronger survival
Speaker 3: is the advantage of the stronger right, and so therefore
Speaker 3: it's very necessary, not just you almost lose that what
Speaker 3: the founding father saw is is a way to work
Speaker 3: out our differences in a way that would contribute to
Speaker 3: the common good. Not just because you don't believe in it,
Speaker 3: but because you can't. You have to be the stronger.
Speaker 3: That's how you survive.
Speaker 2: Well, my angle on this is maybe a little simpler.
Speaker 2: You know, I was startled when I started thirty years ago,
Speaker 2: pointing to all the data I assembled about how environmental
Speaker 2: conditions are getting better in America and all prosperous countries.
Speaker 2: Environmentalists would erupt into a rage. They hated that things
Speaker 2: could be getting better. Why because fundamental to a lot
Speaker 2: of environmentalists is the environmental apocalypse, the end of the
Speaker 2: world's coming. It's their secular eschatology. Now, similarly, you know
Speaker 2: these fights we've had the last several years of Obamacare
Speaker 2: requiring that little sisters of the poor include abortion services
Speaker 2: and their health care plans and so forth. Why the
Speaker 2: compulsion to mandate that? And I know they'll give you
Speaker 2: a wonky reason that's unpersuasive, But I actually think the
Speaker 2: deeper reason Lucretia hints at, which is the way I
Speaker 2: put it, is this way though, ways, I think they
Speaker 2: are offended, outraged, unnerved by people who actually believe in
Speaker 2: something that there's a basis in reality. It could be
Speaker 2: a transcendent basis if you're a devout religious person, and
Speaker 2: they have to be hostile to it, and that manif
Speaker 2: itself there for me, that's just you know, my rant
Speaker 2: on this.
Speaker 3: I agree and I want filter respond, But but that explains,
Speaker 3: for instance, the DOJ going after parents, at going after
Speaker 3: fundamental Catholics or Conservative Catholics whatever they call them, all
Speaker 3: of us after you know, preachers praying outside of abortion clinics.
Speaker 3: It explains all of it, Steve, it's actually a really
Speaker 3: good point.
Speaker 2: Now now the question.
Speaker 3: But I was going to let fil Oh.
Speaker 2: Sorry, yeah, I don't know if you want to tell me.
Speaker 4: So I agree. I mean, it's much like being on
Speaker 4: the podcast. As much like my experience of listening to
Speaker 4: the podcast. You guys say things that are perfectly reasonable,
Speaker 4: and then I wait for John to say something that
Speaker 4: irritates me.
Speaker 2: He's hard replacing that role. You know. It takes a
Speaker 2: certain amount of masochism in his way, and.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to play it a little bit, but I'm
Speaker 3: not very successful at when I agree with everything.
Speaker 2: But right, So, the further point about the common good
Speaker 2: you you prompted me filled with your observation that the
Speaker 2: preamble or he says to you, the government shall provide
Speaker 2: for the common defense, right also says promote the general welfare,
Speaker 2: not provide the general welfare. Well, now you then think
Speaker 2: about a couple of debates in the early Republic. And
Speaker 2: this is one thing we've lost just as a historical matter.
Speaker 2: I don't have to get too fear in philosophy on this.
Speaker 2: I think you may know that you know, New York
Speaker 2: wants to build the Erie Canal to connect the Hudson
Speaker 2: with Lake Erie. They asked the federal government, would you
Speaker 2: pay for this? And the Congress says, no, you pay
Speaker 2: for that yourselves. That's not the general welfare, that's just
Speaker 2: the benefit New York and New York commerce. And they
Speaker 2: did build it with private bonds from the State of
Speaker 2: New York. Okay. Oh, and then Article one says, all
Speaker 2: those powers of Congress that could you know, army and
Speaker 2: navy and so forth and build post roads oddly specific,
Speaker 2: but why well, it's a it helps facilitate a necessary
Speaker 2: federal function of delivering the mail. So you probably know
Speaker 2: the debates. It culminates in the famous Webster Hainey debate,
Speaker 2: and that argument was, well, how about we build just
Speaker 2: general road Joe for transportation, not just for the males.
Speaker 2: And you know it's going to connect a couple of
Speaker 2: states and open the Cumberland Gap, I think, and so forth,
Speaker 2: And you know the argument of the strict constructionists of
Speaker 2: the time was that's not in the general interests, that's
Speaker 2: not the general welfare, that's for just these particular states.
Speaker 2: And I think it was. It's been a long time
Speaker 2: since I've read this, but I think Webster's argument was
Speaker 2: you can construe it that way. But in fact, this
Speaker 2: kind of what was the Henry Clays what the phrase
Speaker 2: for Henry Clay's the American system he called it, or
Speaker 2: something This will knit the country together, even if it
Speaker 2: doesn't connect all twenty states, however many you had. It
Speaker 2: will help create and nurture a national identity and you know,
Speaker 2: more connection between the peoples of America, which I think
Speaker 2: is not a frivolous argument. There is a slippery slope
Speaker 2: to the welfare state, as we well know today, and
Speaker 2: now you know every spending bill has got money for
Speaker 2: the Daniel in a Way aquarium and Hana Lulu, and
Speaker 2: which is there's no way, there's no way that can
Speaker 2: be in the general interest. But so that clause has disappeared.
Speaker 2: But I think there used to be some constitutional rectitude
Speaker 2: about these matters that we've lost for all kinds of reasons.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you want to weigh in on
Speaker 2: that or not. But I was like to point.
Speaker 4: That that's a small story. I mean, there's a low
Speaker 4: co op, and that this is a few years ago
Speaker 4: that they were touting how they got one hundred thousand
Speaker 4: dollars for the federal government and they could expand the
Speaker 4: co op and add some more refrigerators and and you know,
Speaker 4: they're really proud of this. And and I asked, you know,
Speaker 4: one of the managers, you know, why should people in
Speaker 4: New Mexico be paying for us to have expanded refrigerators? Yeah,
Speaker 4: like we should feel guilty about I said, very So
Speaker 4: it's a very liberal place, so they you should feel
Speaker 4: guilty about this, not proud of them. Yeah, even like
Speaker 4: I who goes bizarre like are you against organic food
Speaker 4: and healthy food?
Speaker 2: And not?
Speaker 4: No, but why should other people have to pay for
Speaker 4: it subsidized?
Speaker 3: Remember that Eisenhower had to appeal to national emergencies to
Speaker 3: build the interstate highway system.
Speaker 2: Yeahs Defense Act? Right?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And asked and as was the the I forget what
Speaker 2: was called the Education Act that was passed after Sputnik
Speaker 2: also National Defense? Right? And yeah, James Q. Wilson, by
Speaker 2: the way, I was reading all your great quotes from
Speaker 2: James Wilson from the Founding and of course you know
Speaker 2: James Q. Wilson late in life he was obsessed, obsessed,
Speaker 2: essentially concerned with questions of character and moral virtue. So
Speaker 2: you now prompted me to think about writing an article
Speaker 2: on from James Wilson to James Q. Wilson on full circlect.
Speaker 3: That'd be cool. One of the things, Phil, I was
Speaker 3: just going to mention quickly, one of the things that
Speaker 3: that sort of popped up in my head was when
Speaker 3: I was reading your article this morning for the second time,
Speaker 3: was the we're so far from being able to consider
Speaker 3: something like a public virtue. I keep seeing these articles
Speaker 3: about how uh young wealthy.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: I guess gen x or is something one of those
Speaker 3: younger people people are all people are younger than me
Speaker 3: these days, who consider it appropriate, who consider it appropriate
Speaker 3: to go into whole foods and steal the choplift. I mean,
Speaker 3: never mind the the you know that the poor people
Speaker 3: and blah blah blah blah blah, but the wealthy people,
Speaker 3: young people are doing.
Speaker 2: This, that we are so far micro looting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess that's the term of micro looting. I
Speaker 3: couldn't remember, but I kept thinking that kept coming to
Speaker 3: my mind, like, how did we get so damn far away? Well?
Speaker 2: Can I can I pull it back to the general
Speaker 2: topic and encompass that question this way? By the way,
Speaker 2: for listeners that that brief reference. There's a great article
Speaker 2: in the Daily Wire out yesterday, I think, or maybe
Speaker 2: the fourth link to it, right, yeah, link to it.
Speaker 2: But it's called Liberty. Wait a minute, I got it here.
Speaker 2: It's called The Neutrality Myth Liberty Order and the Common Good.
Speaker 2: Authors Andrew Walker, who I maybe have heard of him,
Speaker 2: but I don't know him anyway, but a very good article.
Speaker 2: And again it's part of the buzz around your article, Phil,
Speaker 2: which prompts me to want to read another sentence from
Speaker 2: the next paragraph in it that gets us to, well,
Speaker 2: the recovery mode, I guess I'll put it that way.
Speaker 2: So here's the quote. It's shorter than the other one
Speaker 2: I read. Postliberalism's intellectual mistake has been to presume that
Speaker 2: modern liberalism's conception of the person is the inevitable, evolutionary
Speaker 2: outcome of the American political and constitutional tradition. Then your
Speaker 2: next sentence, this is simply not true. So expand from there,
Speaker 2: because I think you're absolutely right, and this is the
Speaker 2: nub of the problem. Is this a lot of I'll
Speaker 2: do it this way. A lot of young conservatives are saying, gosh,
Speaker 2: you know, all wokery and all the places that we've
Speaker 2: landed to now and people thinking it's okay to shoplift.
Speaker 2: They're saying that the American founding was defective because it
Speaker 2: was liberal or or it's proved an insufficient barrier to
Speaker 2: this kind of moral corruption of the regime.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let me.
Speaker 2: Put it.
Speaker 4: In language. Maybe that will be memorable to the demographic
Speaker 4: that I presume this show gaters too. Remember when Mary
Speaker 4: Ann Glendon wrote a book many years ago called Rights Talk,
Speaker 4: it was kind of a lot of conservatives were like,
Speaker 4: too many rights and why were we saying that in
Speaker 4: the nineties and everything, And because you know, free speech
Speaker 4: or the First Amendment meant new dancing right, so long.
Speaker 2: As they're paid the minimum wage, as Irving Cristel famously stated,
Speaker 2: right now, and you.
Speaker 4: Know, too much emphasis on rights, not enough emphasis on duties.
Speaker 4: And I agree with all that, of course, but there
Speaker 4: was actually a fundamental misunderstanding of rights in that earlier
Speaker 4: discourse and that rights were unbounded, that rights were merely assertion.
Speaker 4: And what I'm trying to do in this article, and
Speaker 4: I think we need to do more generally, is understand
Speaker 4: that rights are part of a moral fabric. The way
Speaker 4: I like to put it is natural rights. The exercise
Speaker 4: of natural rights are bounded by the natural law, and
Speaker 4: that's how the Founders talked about it. And the natural
Speaker 4: rights are part of the natural moral law. But the
Speaker 4: exercise of natural rights is limited by the natural moral law.
Speaker 4: So you have a right to free speech, but you
Speaker 4: don't have a right to lie about people not lible. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there are. So we think rights are trumps. That's a
Speaker 4: popular phrase, but that's actually a misunderstanding of rights. Rights
Speaker 4: aren't trumps. You have you have the you only have
Speaker 4: the right to do things that are reasonable. And what
Speaker 4: is reason but the the moral law of nature. So
Speaker 4: the rights are by their nature are bounded. But that
Speaker 4: requires a thick moral anthropology, an understanding of a natural
Speaker 4: moral law. Like our whole language of rights and liberty
Speaker 4: gets distorted when we lose that thicker moral they work
Speaker 4: in which in which was initially authored. That only makes
Speaker 4: sense when we try to understand it.
Speaker 3: So if you look at it from an ancient versus
Speaker 3: a modern point of view. For the ancients, it's not
Speaker 3: unfair to say that laws were prescriptive. You were free
Speaker 3: to do what the law allowed. And it is you know,
Speaker 3: common to say that we have a proscriptive or do
Speaker 3: I have it backwards? I always get this backwards. Whatever
Speaker 3: it is, we are, Yeah, we are free to do
Speaker 3: whatever is not forbidden by the law. Right we are
Speaker 3: not by the law in most cases. I know there
Speaker 3: are exceptions guided about how we should behave and about
Speaker 3: how we should conduct ourselves and so on, but one
Speaker 3: of that the reason for that, and I think the
Speaker 3: founders tried really hard to make it clear that this was,
Speaker 3: as you put it several times well in your article,
Speaker 3: liberty not license, when it became necessary to separate politics
Speaker 3: from theology to resolve the political theological question the way
Speaker 3: in which our founding fathers did, where your allegiance to
Speaker 3: your god could be in fact separate from your allegiance
Speaker 3: to your country. Because universal don't have time to go
Speaker 3: on all that, but most of our listeners are well
Speaker 3: acquainted with that argument. But if you don't have a
Speaker 3: god or gods that have created the legal order, and
Speaker 3: that thereby you can trust that you know, if I
Speaker 3: follow the law, I'm doing the just thing. You do
Speaker 3: have a kind of tension between obeying the law and
Speaker 3: perhaps what is right, what is a matter of your
Speaker 3: reasonable conscience, and so on, and so that creates, I
Speaker 3: think has created throughout the entire history of the American Republic,
Speaker 3: a kind of tension about exactly what your article is
Speaker 3: trying to resolve, and that is, how do we define
Speaker 3: the common good? How do we define how human beings
Speaker 3: exercise their natural rights in a republican form of government
Speaker 3: committed to protecting those rights, established to protect those rights
Speaker 3: in such a way that we don't let that liberty
Speaker 3: turn into license. And we do that again by appealing
Speaker 3: to a fundamental understanding of human nature defined for us
Speaker 3: by natural law and so on. But do you see
Speaker 3: the problem? Go ahead, I'm sorry, Steve.
Speaker 4: You have to have a creator moral framework. This is
Speaker 4: directly links with what you were saying earlier, right, I
Speaker 4: mean you could say, first, we have simply the laws
Speaker 4: given by God, and our duty is to follow the law.
Speaker 4: And then we have no God creates us, but he
Speaker 4: creates us free. But our duty is to freely follow
Speaker 4: his law in the natural moral law, and then we
Speaker 4: just have freedom without the natural moral law, and that's
Speaker 4: the degradation from liberty to license.
Speaker 2: Well, we need to go to a quick ad break
Speaker 2: because each of these segments is running along, but we'll
Speaker 2: continue the subject when we come back on the other side,
Speaker 2: So don't go away. Well, you know, Lucretia, I summarize
Speaker 2: what you just said a rather simplistic as usual way,
Speaker 2: which is, it's a long way from John Stuart Mill
Speaker 2: saying liberty is do whatever you want as long as
Speaker 2: you don't hurt somebody else, to what happens in Vegas
Speaker 2: stays in Vegas, which is where we are today. Right.
Speaker 3: That's but neither of which are what tenants I would
Speaker 3: live by.
Speaker 2: Of course they're completely unsound, but that you know, and
Speaker 2: we've touched on a little bit.
Speaker 3: But you're right, it's gotten much worse.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So anyway, you that paragraph I was just quoting, Philly,
Speaker 2: you go on and explain that what we call liberalism
Speaker 2: today and what the postliberals are trying to the common
Speaker 2: good conservatives are trying to overcome, departs from the founder's views.
Speaker 2: And then you conclude that paragraph with this sentence, which
Speaker 2: poses our question for this segment, rather than jettisoning to
Speaker 2: it again, rather than jettisoning American principles, we need to
Speaker 2: recover their genius. Now, the article goes on and really
Speaker 2: captures and expresses that genius pretty well. I was thinking
Speaker 2: practical terms, how do we go about that? What is?
Speaker 2: And I hate to reduce this to marketing and communications.
Speaker 2: That's you know, stupid at a certain level. But how do
Speaker 2: we go about that? I'm you know, we've been beating
Speaker 2: with this for a long time as academics and writers
Speaker 2: and so forth. But boy, it's hard to be optimistic sometimes.
Speaker 4: And I don't know. Look, I'm a writer in an
Speaker 4: academic so I don't know that credential prudential wisdom. I mean,
Speaker 4: two things come to mind. The first thing is there
Speaker 4: is some intellectual archaeology to do to say, hey, liberty
Speaker 4: properly understood is not license. Just making that distinction, you know,
Speaker 4: when I'm when I'm teaching these things in class, I mean,
Speaker 4: students immediately get it. They understand the distinct opinion license,
Speaker 4: but you got to give them that moral vocabulary. They
Speaker 4: immediately understand, Oh no, my write to free speech doesn't
Speaker 4: mean I can say anything. I can't lie about this
Speaker 4: my classmate and classmate and make false thing. They immediately
Speaker 4: know that, and so part of it is just reintroducing
Speaker 4: these common sense moral concepts and making sure when we
Speaker 4: say liberty, we know what that means. We also know
Speaker 4: that it doesn't mean maybe the other thing this is
Speaker 4: simply not to despair too much. A friend of mine
Speaker 4: likes to say nature always bats.
Speaker 2: Last yep, yep, yep. Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And look, we see modern liberalism, this idea of
Speaker 4: simple willful choice. We can do anything, there's no moral right,
Speaker 4: there's no moral wrong, there's no creator. We all know
Speaker 4: people who believe that. And we see that philosophy being
Speaker 4: adopted by the young, and we see the unhappiness that
Speaker 4: it brings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think, look, it's the changing of the
Speaker 4: changing of America. American society is going to be built
Speaker 4: through happy families and people wanting what is good, that
Speaker 4: natural human goods and people living ordered lives, and they'll
Speaker 4: be attracted to it. And so really, through the virtues
Speaker 4: of French and living well, living as well, we can
Speaker 4: one at a time, one person at a time. That's
Speaker 4: really going to be It's not the only thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what about no, let me before before we go on,
Speaker 3: Steve question about that again? You know there there's sometimes
Speaker 3: I have to turn off the news, I have to
Speaker 3: turn off stop reading things. I have to stop going
Speaker 3: on to any social media because I'm so overwhelmed and
Speaker 3: depressed about you know, that idiot in Michigan winning and
Speaker 3: AOC being talked about as a possible presidential candidate in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty eight and you know me Mandami destroying New
Speaker 3: York and Okay, so the Muslim guy won barely. He
Speaker 3: was supposed to win by twenty points, but he still won.
Speaker 3: People voted for him. I mean, come on, a lot
Speaker 3: of people. Seven hundred and fifty thousand people voted for
Speaker 3: that despicable excuse of a human being because he promises
Speaker 3: them things like medicare for all and defund the police
Speaker 3: and O they're stupid. Oh I'm a capitalist, but I
Speaker 3: just think, you know, just on. So what scares me
Speaker 3: is that there aren't enough good families and good people
Speaker 3: out there. Maybe I'm being a little too despairing here,
Speaker 3: but all of this is good and I'm I'm glad
Speaker 3: to see it. Happening. I'm also glad to see people
Speaker 3: like Trump. I'm gonna praise Trump for a minute saying, look, communism,
Speaker 3: would you get it? What's wrong with you people? And
Speaker 3: I think there's gonna have to be some fighting at
Speaker 3: that level for a while before we can go back
Speaker 3: to showing Hey, traad wives don't really mean that I'm
Speaker 3: gonna wear you know what do you call it, Margaret
Speaker 3: something or there? It means that I care about my
Speaker 3: family and you know, whatever it might be. I think
Speaker 3: that at the political level, at the societal level, there's
Speaker 3: some big battles that have to happen before we can
Speaker 3: get back on a road.
Speaker 4: To virtue public virtue. I agree, I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, Trump is is an interesting vehicle, right, you know,
Speaker 4: at least in his first term. Second term has been different.
Speaker 4: In his first term he was the most pro life
Speaker 4: president in our history, and we talked about the babies,
Speaker 4: talk about the baby. No second term hasn't been nearly
Speaker 4: as good. But no one would have ever thought, you know,
Speaker 4: Trump won would be you know, and look, the appointed
Speaker 4: justices of disagreements with some of our conservative justices, but
Speaker 4: they did overturn were oversus way another thing. Look, Trump,
Speaker 4: Trump is really the first color blind president. I mean,
Speaker 4: who has who has led the country to adopt a
Speaker 4: colorblind principle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we know, our.
Speaker 4: Fathers didn't even do They articulated it, but they couldn't
Speaker 4: do it. It's a remarkable achievement. You are right, Sorry,
Speaker 4: there's gonna be doing because of it.
Speaker 2: Well, our late you remember, our late friend Michael Yulman,
Speaker 2: who was very anti Trump, but he did say, and
Speaker 2: I remember he died in twenty nineteen, so he didn't
Speaker 2: live long enough, but he did say, if Trump actually
Speaker 2: changes judiciary and overturns roversus weight, I will lead the
Speaker 2: parade for his re election. And you know miss Mike
Speaker 2: a lot of times. Right, that was a great moment
Speaker 2: for him. But since you brought up the courts into Duciary,
Speaker 2: let me ask about that. I was going to bring up,
Speaker 2: you know, neutrality. I was going to queue up Lucretia
Speaker 2: to say, our state's not neutral. One of my one
Speaker 2: of the phrases I hate the most in our constitutional
Speaker 2: discourse is compelling state interests, which means whatever the elites want. Right,
Speaker 2: all right, leave that aside for another day. You have
Speaker 2: this very interesting passage toward the end. I'm just going
Speaker 2: to quote it here again for listeners. The Constitution was
Speaker 2: not design for judges to balance rights against competing state interests,
Speaker 2: or for judges to find in history and tradition how
Speaker 2: earlier generations of Americans protected rights. That's such a plausure.
Speaker 2: That's kind of a shot at you know, the way.
Speaker 2: Well really more leto I think than Thomas, certainly in
Speaker 2: the Dobbs decision. I think that's true in some other ones.
Speaker 3: Amendment, Go ahead, let.
Speaker 2: Me continue whatever might be said about these interpretive approaches.
Speaker 2: Both progressive and conservative philosophies of constitutional interpretation empowered judges
Speaker 2: to determine the contours of the people's rights, which is
Speaker 2: a departure from the founder's constitutionalism. I think that's absolutely right,
Speaker 2: completely sound, and so as much as we may celebrate
Speaker 2: recent decisions, the restoration of originalism, I think rightly understood,
Speaker 2: is woefully incomplete. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I got in trouble a few weeks ago at Nerdane's
Speaker 4: Religious Liberty Summit, full of look errors as you might imagine,
Speaker 4: and in great work, you know, fighting for religious people
Speaker 4: of all faith and you know, especially like the little
Speaker 4: sisters of the poor and these nuns who get picked on.
Speaker 4: And you know, my message to them was winning lawsuits.
Speaker 4: Filing lawsuits and winning is not the way to actually win. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, the real way to win is political, and
Speaker 4: that these laws which you're filing for exemptions from and
Speaker 4: trying not to get applied to your client. Actually what
Speaker 4: we really need to do is not have these laws
Speaker 4: in the first place. Yeah, and real self government is
Speaker 4: the people governing themselves exactly.
Speaker 3: Madison says, a dependence on the people is, no doubt
Speaker 3: the primary control on government. And my argument, I was
Speaker 3: thinking about this a lot lately with the Fauci nonsense.
Speaker 3: If somehow, you know, all of these different schemes maybe
Speaker 3: for actually holding Fauci accountable, somebody pushes one through and
Speaker 3: it goes to the courts and it ends up at
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court. It reminded me how incredibly what I
Speaker 3: don't even have the right adjective for it, so I
Speaker 3: won't try. Roberts was about the early early COVID when
Speaker 3: he had the opportunity to issue an injunction. I think
Speaker 3: it was against California, but there were several that would
Speaker 3: have stopped the nonsense being promulgated by either the executive
Speaker 3: branches or just public health officials, and he wouldn't do it,
Speaker 3: saying we are going to defer to the public health
Speaker 3: officials and the experts. This isn't, you know, for an injunction. Ultimately,
Speaker 3: I guess they came out okay. But the point was
Speaker 3: that the American people never should have tolerated that nonsense
Speaker 3: in the first place. And it certainly wasn't for Chief
Speaker 3: Justice Roberts to decide if I want to hold a
Speaker 3: religious service in my home. It's none of his damn business.
Speaker 3: It's not his, it's mine. And but the people have
Speaker 3: actually turned over to the courts the final decision making
Speaker 3: on what rights are, which they never should have done.
Speaker 4: Too often, I think we those who are in the
Speaker 4: political arena think if we can just get the courts
Speaker 4: and just win at the courts. I'm not there's no
Speaker 4: role for judges, and there's no role for courts, of
Speaker 4: course there is. But but think of I mean, what
Speaker 4: did COVID, What should have COVID taught us? Federalism is
Speaker 4: really important. Yeah, Governor Desanta's in Florida. He was great
Speaker 4: during COVID, and mine was pretty good. People moved there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, All Rightiana.
Speaker 4: Wasn't so bad. I was going between Indiana where I
Speaker 4: live in Seattle, where my parents lived at the time,
Speaker 4: I go into a different country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, yeah, Seattle is a different country these days. Okay,
Speaker 2: never mind that. Let me do last last big theme here,
Speaker 2: and I want to draw to a close for to day,
Speaker 2: and I want to quote from a different article in
Speaker 2: First Things on this subject from last month's issue. It's
Speaker 2: by this guy named James Wood, who I don't know,
Speaker 2: but he was reviewing two books about post liberalism, and
Speaker 2: he has this passage that I want to read and
Speaker 2: see if you think it is, what you make of it,
Speaker 2: if you think it's right, or and so forth. So
Speaker 2: here it goes. As Pierre Manon has argued, Christianity presents
Speaker 2: a distinctive political problem because the Church is a quote
Speaker 2: real universal community unquote, which claims all persons and therefore
Speaker 2: or thereby relativizes every political order. It's familiar stuff to us, right.
Speaker 2: Early modern political theory can be read, in part as
Speaker 2: a sustained effort to neutralize this rival. Thomas Hobbes resolves
Speaker 2: in scare Quotes this tension to the su through subordination
Speaker 2: by placing the church under the authority of the sovereign.
Speaker 2: John lost strategy is more subtle and more enduring. By
Speaker 2: redefining the church as a voluntary association concerned with inward
Speaker 2: belief and otherworldly ends, he preserves its formal freedom while
Speaker 2: stripping it of public significance. You think that judgment is
Speaker 2: you think that's right? I mean, is that the best
Speaker 2: way of putting it? Phil, Lucretia's shaking your hand, but
Speaker 2: you go first, Phil.
Speaker 4: Look, you could talk about the same phenomena in this way,
Speaker 4: and let me just use Locke, who's more accurate in
Speaker 4: this or more Germaine in this context. The most remarkable
Speaker 4: thing about Locke is actually Locke says the state must
Speaker 4: be concerned only with protecting our lives, our property. At
Speaker 4: one point he says our furniture. That the letter of
Speaker 4: toleration concerning toleration instans. But it's the state contracts, its
Speaker 4: jurisdiction and its sovereignty. And why well, another way of
Speaker 4: looking at it is to respect the proper authority and
Speaker 4: domain of the church. The state's not responsible for saving
Speaker 4: your soul? Why not? Well, that's the job of the church,
Speaker 4: So I would I don't know mister Wood either, but
Speaker 4: I would say, actually, there's a different way to look
Speaker 4: at what liberalism, this classical liberalism that Locke was doing.
Speaker 4: He's trying to say, you know, the state is only
Speaker 4: going to be concerned with common goods pertaining to this life,
Speaker 4: common political goods like the general welfare and national defense,
Speaker 4: the salvation of souls, which is obviously important. More important
Speaker 4: that is the proper domain of churches. And that's the
Speaker 4: resolution of the theological political problem that Linda was that
Speaker 4: Lucretia was referring to.
Speaker 3: Early everybody knows, and so, you.
Speaker 4: Know, I actually think these these architects, especially the founders,
Speaker 4: these architects of republican natural rights republicanism, to use the
Speaker 4: language of the Founders, they were saying, no, you, church
Speaker 4: authorities don't have political authority. But they were also saying, importantly,
Speaker 4: but we that have political authority, our authority is limited,
Speaker 4: and we're limiting our authority out of respect for the
Speaker 4: divine authority of churches. And the post liberals have forgotten
Speaker 4: that point. Limiting the authority of the state is done
Speaker 4: in part to recognize the more fundamental authority of the church.
Speaker 3: I would go one step further, about our founding fathers
Speaker 3: and say, I'm thinking of Jefferson specifically here that when
Speaker 3: you try to enforce some kind of religious belief, you
Speaker 3: make one half, he says, one half of the world
Speaker 3: fools and the other half hypocrites. You said, it's very
Speaker 3: well yourself in the article which Steve will link to.
Speaker 3: Part of the reason that you have freedom is your
Speaker 3: freedom of conscience, which, again Jefferson tells us as a
Speaker 3: natural right. It cannot be taken away. You can force
Speaker 3: somebody to pretend they believe in God or believe in
Speaker 3: a certain way but in action, but you can never
Speaker 3: change the real conscious about it. And so the it's
Speaker 3: simultaneously a freedom not to be coerced into believing or
Speaker 3: practicing something you don't believe, and at the same time
Speaker 3: creating the freedom whereby you can truly worship God in
Speaker 3: your own way, which again is a natural right. And
Speaker 3: did that mean that that was going to allow for
Speaker 3: atheists or Muslims or probably? Probably? And that's always attention. Also,
Speaker 3: where does freedom of religion stop and end all of
Speaker 3: the Steve wants me to be brief, I'm trying, But
Speaker 3: the point is I am trying, Steve, the point is
Speaker 3: is that the Founders came up with probably what was
Speaker 3: the best possible solution to that millennial old problem that
Speaker 3: you know, either the authority of the Church and the
Speaker 3: authority of this tied or if they're separated, which one's
Speaker 3: going to come out on top. And I think that
Speaker 3: their answer to that was pretty pretty sound. We've gone
Speaker 3: away from that.
Speaker 4: Of course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to let that be. We'll have to
Speaker 2: let that be the last word on this topic for today.
Speaker 2: But don't go everybody. We'll come back with a listener
Speaker 2: question and this week's cameo appearance from Henry Kissinger don't
Speaker 2: go away. So I decided, with all kinds of things
Speaker 2: going on in the world that despite the fact Marco
Speaker 2: Rubio is a great Secretary of State, we really needed
Speaker 2: to talk to the master of the subject from the
Speaker 2: last century. And so I got out my Ouiji board
Speaker 2: and I have contacted from beyond the mortal realm doctor
Speaker 2: Henry Kissinger. Doctor Kissinger, thank you for turning up on
Speaker 2: the three Whiskey podcasts.
Speaker 5: Well, frankly, I was already well rested, did.
Speaker 2: Right well.
Speaker 5: The thing is, with two major wars going on, I
Speaker 5: felt it was just too important a time to remain dead.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll come back to those two major wars. Let's
Speaker 2: start with the one that's most on the mind of Americans,
Speaker 2: and that's what's going on over in the run. I
Speaker 2: don't know. I can't figure out what's going on, and
Speaker 2: it increasingly it seems like Schrodinger's war. If you know that,
Speaker 2: you know Schrodinger's alive or dead. Cat. What do you
Speaker 2: make of this whole thing?
Speaker 5: Well, I think that the basic problem is that there
Speaker 5: are no really good choices that are left. And the
Speaker 5: problem is that you can cut off the straits of
Speaker 5: Hose with just a few rockets. And they tell me
Speaker 5: about these things called roans. What the hell is a drone? Anyway,
Speaker 5: you can knock out a huge ship with just such
Speaker 5: a device, And and this is a problem. As the
Speaker 5: major power in the world, we have always guaranteed re navigation,
Speaker 5: just as the British did before us. But we're but
Speaker 5: this is a problem. On the other hand, if you
Speaker 5: go and you try to wipe them out, then there's
Speaker 5: the problem of regime change. And and it's a big country.
Speaker 5: It's it's i'm told bigger than Texas, which I've been
Speaker 5: told is actually a state in our own union.
Speaker 2: Now, I remember one of your memorable statements back in
Speaker 2: the eighties when there was a war between Iraq and Iran,
Speaker 2: and you said, it's too bad they both can't lose.
Speaker 2: Is the solution this maybe to get Iraq to go
Speaker 2: back to war with Iran and with that solve our problem.
Speaker 5: No, I think I think that that now is being
Speaker 5: used by the Democrats. Did They would like both the
Speaker 5: Trump administration and the Iranians to lose, but if they
Speaker 5: had to choose, they choose the Trump.
Speaker 2: Right now, you mentioned two wars. I assume the other
Speaker 2: one you mean is Ukraine and Russia. And I don't
Speaker 2: know what's going on there except is my perception right
Speaker 2: that the Ukrainians have kind of turned the tables on
Speaker 2: the Russians by showing they can attack them more effectively,
Speaker 2: not only in theater, but deep inside Russian territory too.
Speaker 2: So what's your latest reading on this now what almost
Speaker 2: five years of fighting?
Speaker 5: Well, you have to be impressed with the Ukrainians, and frankly,
Speaker 5: I think that the Ukrainians are not only winning, but
Speaker 5: they've been the thing that's been missing and a lot
Speaker 5: of the discussion is that now crime is virtually cut
Speaker 5: off by the Russians. I think that the crimea which
Speaker 5: is the real golden portion here for the Russians. I
Speaker 5: think that they're going to to lose it. But the
Speaker 5: Russians are going to lose it. And the secondary effect
Speaker 5: of this whole war is that it is made clear
Speaker 5: that Russia is no longer a great power. The great
Speaker 5: power is China, and Russia is a subordinate power to China.
Speaker 5: Put PUDNT really can't get out of this war. He
Speaker 5: can't get out of this war and remain, as we
Speaker 5: like to say, above the grass.
Speaker 2: All Right, last question, Uh, you know, I refer to
Speaker 2: the wars on again. It's off again with Trump. If
Speaker 2: you or if I persuaded Trump to get out his
Speaker 2: Wuigi board, contact you for some advice. What piece of
Speaker 2: advice would you give President Trump right now on this
Speaker 2: whole business.
Speaker 5: Well, I hate to say. The first advice would be
Speaker 5: don't fight again in Vietnam. That would be my number
Speaker 5: one piece of advice. I think that I think that
Speaker 5: he probably needs to recognize that if he lets this
Speaker 5: for with Iran Dragon, they're in a position to create
Speaker 5: absolute hell for him. In October, before the election, so
Speaker 5: he has to do something that resolves it before then,
Speaker 5: and he can't simply back out, and that would leave
Speaker 5: the iraniance Witch control of the straits of hormones. So no,
Speaker 5: it's I'm afraid they say the first rule of digging
Speaker 5: holes is to stop digging, but the other rule is
Speaker 5: to to finish, to go ahead and finish the job.
Speaker 5: And I think that that's the big that's the big
Speaker 5: story here. The reporters are that they're trying to get
Speaker 5: a deal on the straits of hort moves, but frankly,
Speaker 5: I think it's going to be very difficult to get
Speaker 5: any deal on the nuclear material. They've just devoted the
Speaker 5: entire regime to building to building a nuclear so that's
Speaker 5: I hate. I have an appointment with my embalmer very soon,
Speaker 5: so i'll be I'll be leaving now, but I hope
Speaker 5: I've answered most of your questions.
Speaker 2: Well, someone likes to say, doctor Kissinger will just have
Speaker 2: to see what happens, and when it does happen, we
Speaker 2: will get out our UIGI board again and call you back.
Speaker 5: But that's debate, it is.
Speaker 2: Right. This week's listener question comes from Michael Lee, who's
Speaker 2: been a frequent commenter and listener and reader of all
Speaker 2: of our stuff. And he, by the way, describes himself
Speaker 2: as he says, he guesses a common sense progressive that's
Speaker 2: small P, not capital P. I'm not sure any means
Speaker 2: like progressive we think of Woodrow wilsoner today's progressives.
Speaker 3: I think he meant it as against what we said
Speaker 3: talked about last weekend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, he's start your progress and the common
Speaker 2: sense understanding. I think that's what he means. But he
Speaker 2: does raise well, he does include I'm summarizing a fairly
Speaker 2: long note he sent me, but that has some economic
Speaker 2: arguments about changes and the distribution of income that I
Speaker 2: think are significant. But I think also it's not the
Speaker 2: whole story about that. But never mind that. But what
Speaker 2: he's really interested in mostly is we're seeing populism of
Speaker 2: the right trumpets not cons post liberals, and a certain
Speaker 2: extent and populism of the left. Maybe this is a
Speaker 2: different way of thinking of what was called these days
Speaker 2: the horseshoe theory right, you know, the left and the right,
Speaker 2: or the far left and the far right, or at
Speaker 2: the same place. Certainly that's true of the Israel question
Speaker 2: these days. But he's thinking about, right, he just brings
Speaker 2: up globalization, de industrialization, the financialization. This part I think
Speaker 2: is right, that the gains and wealth for the last
Speaker 2: thirty forty years have been overwhelmingly achieved by the upper
Speaker 2: income groups. Right. I don't necessarily think that's unjust or
Speaker 2: a problem. But to the extent that the large portions
Speaker 2: of the public thinking you're being left behind or that
Speaker 2: they're stagnating, whether their perception is correct or not, it
Speaker 2: does become a political and social problem. So he's wondering
Speaker 2: what we make of this? Why are we seeing this
Speaker 2: kind of Maybe he's asking for an explanation of pop
Speaker 2: I don't know, but he he wondered he wants to
Speaker 2: hear from us on this subject of has populism replaced?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 2: You know, the party supposedly ideological. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: we have the populism of left and right competing with
Speaker 2: one another. Right now, Phil, have you thought much about
Speaker 2: these problems? I can't make f I have.
Speaker 4: I'm curious to hear that Lucretia was gonna come. Oh.
Speaker 3: I wasn't trying to anyway. I'm gonna keep it to
Speaker 3: a kind of narrow subset of that. Uh, you know,
Speaker 3: I think it was that LSA ED guy who said
Speaker 3: he's not a he's not against capitalism, against corporatism. Now, that,
Speaker 3: of course, to a socialist means any any concentration of
Speaker 3: wealth inside of some kind of business organization, kind of whatever.
Speaker 3: All of the things that the unions fought against and
Speaker 3: socialism fought against in the past. That's not what we
Speaker 3: have anymore. What we have, of course, are these large
Speaker 3: operations that are able, if not to have a monopoly,
Speaker 3: and I don't think they need a monopoly, but they
Speaker 3: are able, in fact, to continue to attain wealth. I'll
Speaker 3: keep it simple. Why because of government regulation, Because the
Speaker 3: mom and pop store can't you know, the mom and
Speaker 3: pop restaurant really quickly, Steve. I read an article this
Speaker 3: morning saying it wasn't Cisco's problem, Cysco, not the computer Cisco,
Speaker 3: that all restaurant food tastes the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The problem, of course, are all the regulations that make
Speaker 3: labor so expensive that restaurants have to buy chicken nuggets
Speaker 3: and already breaded this and you know, because labor is
Speaker 3: just too expensive. Now, that's a silly example of what
Speaker 3: I'm talking about, that all of these progressive ideas for
Speaker 3: advancing the interests of the of workers have in fact
Speaker 3: undermining everything. And that's why wealth is concentrating at the top,
Speaker 3: not because of you know, some sort of wealth and
Speaker 3: greeds and whatever. It's because of government interference in the
Speaker 3: economy in ways that benefit those who can who can
Speaker 3: overcome with their lawyers and their tax accounts and so
Speaker 3: forth all of the government regulations and come out on top.
Speaker 3: Well that's a simple answer, but yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Think there's a lot to that. I mean, look, you know,
Speaker 2: I used to marinate in regulatory issues and analysis, but
Speaker 2: I think that there's a political angle to this that's
Speaker 2: a better one. Michael Lee doesn't really bring up here.
Speaker 2: And one of them is, well, the globalization stuff that's
Speaker 2: cost us jobs. Well, I think, yeah, okay, there's there's
Speaker 2: a large element of truth to that. I think a
Speaker 2: bigger thing, though, is if so many of our big
Speaker 2: corporations now make more money from their global sales, right
Speaker 2: they operate all around the world, and Apple, you know,
Speaker 2: they make a lot of their money from selling their
Speaker 2: iPhones in China and everywhere else around the world. And
Speaker 2: so what does that mean? So great? Great for us?
Speaker 2: It's going to money flowing into American companies and for
Speaker 2: American shareholders and American pension plans. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: I think, and I can actually I'm not prepared to today,
Speaker 2: but I've over the years tracked all this. I think
Speaker 2: it was the CEO of PEPSI ten years ago or
Speaker 2: so it was talked very much about. It really revealed
Speaker 2: that they do not have an attachment to the American regime.
Speaker 2: They're not patriotic. They're they're not anti American, but they're
Speaker 2: not patriotic Americans the way US steel just think of
Speaker 2: the name, right, Bethlehem Steel, Ford Motor, right, General Motors.
Speaker 2: They operate all over the world, and so you know,
Speaker 2: I think their economic interest is not always aligned with
Speaker 2: the American national interest, and I think that is a
Speaker 2: serious political problem. And absolutely you know the way Wall
Speaker 2: Street look, I mean, and Wall Street has gone pretty
Speaker 2: far to the left. They surrendered immediately to WO create
Speaker 2: all the rest of that Silicon Valley has learned a
Speaker 2: rough lesson all this. I'm half tempted to vote with
Speaker 2: a stupid billionaires tax here in California, just to punish
Speaker 2: these people for two decades of stupidity supporting the people
Speaker 2: now want to do. Yeah, right, so anyway, but I
Speaker 2: think it is I'll just stop here and say that
Speaker 2: the phenomenon we called populism now goes back a long
Speaker 2: time and it is so protein and always hasn't and
Speaker 2: always will be that we're never going to get our
Speaker 2: hands around it, and so, as someone likes to say,
Speaker 2: we'll just have to see what happens. Phil, do you
Speaker 2: want to weigh in any of.
Speaker 4: That or Oh no, I mean I think there is
Speaker 4: both on the left and the right, And this is
Speaker 4: really just a dovetail with what Lucretia said, and it's
Speaker 4: consistent with what you just said, Steve. There is a
Speaker 4: perception that the wealthy, the connected, the elite, those in
Speaker 4: universities game the system for their own advantage. And it
Speaker 4: could be bankers, it could be academics, it could be
Speaker 4: big corporations or whatever, and that you're seeing both the
Speaker 4: populist on the right and the populist on the left
Speaker 4: are saying that's not fair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's actually some pretty good empirical work from these
Speaker 2: two political scientists I think are liberals. It's Page and
Speaker 2: Gillen's I think it's I forget their first names, but
Speaker 2: they've done your basic modeling and statistical analysis that is
Speaker 2: not always bunk. And what it shows is that the
Speaker 2: wealthy overwhelmingly get their preferences satisfied at in Congress, from
Speaker 2: the regulators and from congressional legislation and tax code. We
Speaker 2: know all that. And of course I always say, if
Speaker 2: you want to get rid of corruption high places, let's
Speaker 2: get rid of high places.
Speaker 4: Point right. I mean, the big government is going to
Speaker 4: advantage those who are connected, right right, and far more
Speaker 4: than the lobbyists. Yeah, the middleman all and let's be honest,
Speaker 4: the three of us traffic in the world of that.
Speaker 4: And and I'm at the University of nore name, I
Speaker 4: mean place is funded by the hackspayer dollars even though
Speaker 4: we're a university. So I think people are like, why
Speaker 4: should we be paying for you guys to take advantage
Speaker 4: of us? And that's the commonality, is right.
Speaker 2: All right, Let's do one last very quick break, and
Speaker 2: then we're going to come back and close out the
Speaker 2: show very briefly with our friends from the Babylon b
Speaker 2: to relieve our misery. So we'll be right back and
Speaker 2: now to relieve art misery, Lucretia will share with us
Speaker 2: the best of the Babylon b this week.
Speaker 3: So for for Phil in honor of Phil annoying Man's
Speaker 3: faith in God's plan is getting in the way of
Speaker 3: his political doomerism. Middle East expanded to include Michigan. Right
Speaker 3: if you were following any of the unfortunate in and
Speaker 3: out In Idaho, Business Democrats rest concern over increase in
Speaker 3: gun violence against active shooters.
Speaker 2: O man, Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3: Government runs stores. This is for John, who's not here
Speaker 3: in case he makes it on as a cameo appearance.
Speaker 3: Government runs stores to allow anyone to buy groceries as
Speaker 3: long as they have special sixty sixty six mark on
Speaker 3: hand or forehead.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna enjoy watching that debacle unfold. It's gonna take months,
Speaker 2: but it's just going to be complete detastarby anyway.
Speaker 3: Main Democrats explain they can either do no rape or
Speaker 3: no incest, but not both.
Speaker 2: This is you can't make this up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, it's crazy real quick. On Spain, Spaniards
Speaker 3: horrified to see their country turning into Minnesota. Spain turns
Speaker 3: to experience borders. Are Kamala Harris for help with migrant
Speaker 3: invasion and since I've brought it up, I'll end with
Speaker 3: and W NBA coaches stumped as to what the W
Speaker 3: stands for.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I saw that one too. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2: All right, let's get out today. Just two sort of
Speaker 2: lightning round questions for you, Phil. We because we're taping midday,
Speaker 2: we don't have our whiskeys out in front of us.
Speaker 2: But what are you drinking these days? What do you
Speaker 2: plan to drink tonight? Have you thought about it yet?
Speaker 4: I will hopefully have a nice class of California cab.
Speaker 2: With Yeah, yeah, okay. Then the other question is what
Speaker 2: are you reading? Are you reading anything interesting right now?
Speaker 2: Lis'sally grabbing you a book or an article or something.
Speaker 2: What do you what's on your reading list right now? Note,
Speaker 2: if you're like me, I know you're still I always
Speaker 2: have too many things, and I you know, I get
Speaker 2: all you.
Speaker 4: Know I am. I'm really diving into the Civil War.
Speaker 4: I have been reading Civil War histories. I don't know
Speaker 4: the military battles that much. I'm actually reading the classic
Speaker 4: The Battle Cry of Freedom right.
Speaker 3: Now, I'm reading the Lincoln's his book on Lincoln as
Speaker 3: Commander in Chief, McPherson, Right, McPherson's book, That's what I'm
Speaker 3: reading right now, Phil. It's really good too. So when
Speaker 3: you finish Battle Cry of Freedom, which is my absolute
Speaker 3: favorite book on the Civil War generally speaking, this one's
Speaker 3: really good. On Lincoln's Lincoln's His Very Short Course, a
Speaker 3: self imposed course on becoming Commander in Chief.
Speaker 2: Right, all right, all right, we're going to call it
Speaker 2: a rap for this week. Listeners, so remember always drink
Speaker 2: your whiskey neat, especially when you're listening to the three
Speaker 2: Whiskey Happy Hour, which is sponsored by the Civitas Institute
Speaker 2: at the University of Texas Austin, produced and hosted by
Speaker 2: Ricochet dot Com. And I want to add here at
Speaker 2: the end that the voiceover you heard at the beginning
Speaker 2: is from Colin McLean of Norwich, England, and you can
Speaker 2: read more about his voice work at the link I've
Speaker 2: supplied in the show notes and also the YouTube channel
Speaker 2: where he has I put. He goes to a lot
Speaker 2: of poetry. It's called the Healing Voice, and he's a
Speaker 2: lot of fun to listen to, and he's just a
Speaker 2: lot of fun to be around. And at some point
Speaker 2: I'll probably have a chat with him to include as
Speaker 2: one of our cameos at least that in any case,
Speaker 2: be sure to come back next week for another edition
Speaker 2: of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour. Bye bye everybody, Ricochet, Yes,
Speaker 2: Join the conversation.