Speaker 1: Well, whiskey, come and take my pain, my moneys, my ry,
Speaker 1: oh whiskey.
Speaker 2: Why think alone when you can drink it all In
Speaker 2: with Ricochet's Three Whiskey Happy Hour, join your bartenders Steve Hayward,
Speaker 2: John Yu and the International woman of Mystery, Lucretia. Where
Speaker 2: the slap it appen?
Speaker 1: David?
Speaker 2: Ain't you baby? On the show taps? Gotta give me
Speaker 2: and let that why?
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to this new experimental version one point zero
Speaker 1: of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour on Substack. I believe
Speaker 1: this is the first time we are recording live on
Speaker 1: the substack platform, rather than using entities hosted and created
Speaker 1: by the People's Republic of China, so advances every day.
Speaker 1: It's a great way to start out the new year.
Speaker 1: I'm joined by my co hosts Steve Heywards. Steve, where
Speaker 1: are you? What are you doing? What's on that misbegotten
Speaker 1: T shirt?
Speaker 2: You called? It's a Reagan Library T shirt? I'll have
Speaker 2: you know. Oh, you just just traced yourself as usual.
Speaker 1: And Lucretia, where are you? And what is that lovely
Speaker 1: sweatshirt you're wearing? To open the new.
Speaker 3: Year, Blado's Cave Search and Rescue Team that's pretty cool.
Speaker 4: I'm not a big.
Speaker 3: Person on wearing shirts and things that say things or
Speaker 3: advertise things, but this one was so cool I had
Speaker 3: to make an exception.
Speaker 1: Is uh now, Lucretia that sweatshirts open to so many
Speaker 1: different interpretations? I mean, would you say that John Rawls
Speaker 1: is the head of the search and rescue team?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: My god, I would never say that.
Speaker 5: I was about to say, John, But the of that
Speaker 5: T shirt is obviously lost on you because you're going
Speaker 5: to be the first person to be rescued by it.
Speaker 2: And you just pro and you just what.
Speaker 1: Well, the great opening to the year and listeners and
Speaker 1: those who've joined us live and I see they're growing
Speaker 1: and growing already. The insults pour it on Steve not
Speaker 1: fitting into the and to the mobile version of the
Speaker 1: sub stack, which requires you to love at it vertically
Speaker 1: rather horizontally. Very good, mister Fennel, I love it. Keep
Speaker 1: him coming.
Speaker 2: Oh he's the one to talk. Never mind, Okay.
Speaker 1: We decided to spend the very first episode of the
Speaker 1: two hundred and fiftieth year of the American Revolution and
Speaker 1: the Declaration of Independence by talking about the American regime.
Speaker 1: If that's what you want to call it the declaration
Speaker 1: of independence revolution where it sits within this broader debate
Speaker 1: we are having right now in the worlds of political
Speaker 1: theory and constitutional law and everyday politics about whether we
Speaker 1: are in a post liberal age. So I thought this
Speaker 1: would be a great way as the host for this
Speaker 1: first episode to kick off the is it sesquid centennial year?
Speaker 2: Semi quinn It's it's it's semi quin centennial. It rolls
Speaker 2: right off.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, I got it wrong. All I know is
Speaker 1: that the Washington Monument on July first had a great
Speaker 1: display on it to kick off the two fiftieth. So oh,
Speaker 1: Steve was just frozen, drinking, making himself larger and not
Speaker 1: fitting in that little box. So now he's unfrozen. So
Speaker 1: let's start off by asking first, I think we'll start
Speaker 1: with Lucretia, what is in your mind liberalism and why
Speaker 1: is it under attack?
Speaker 3: Now, well, I'll let me start with the first one. Liberalism,
Speaker 3: in the most basic sense, actually means liberated from politics.
Speaker 4: That's what liberal. You are liberated when you are liberal.
Speaker 3: That's what traditional classical liberalism means in the most fundamental sense,
Speaker 3: and it means that in a way that is that
Speaker 3: not really all that important, that classical understanding of it,
Speaker 3: except that when you say liberated from politics, it means
Speaker 3: that politics that you have a sphere of autonomy, a
Speaker 3: sphere of privacy, personal autonomy into which the government does
Speaker 3: not and should not intrude. That's really what we see
Speaker 3: when we look at lack a classical liberalism. So if
Speaker 3: we start with that idea, our founders are considered classical
Speaker 3: liberals in the sense that they believed that government should
Speaker 3: be for in the first place, proscriptive, not prescriptive as
Speaker 3: the classicals would have had it right, meaning that laws
Speaker 3: are in place to prevent you from doing things that
Speaker 3: you shouldn't do, rather than to guide you to do
Speaker 3: those things that you should do. I know Steve's looking
Speaker 3: at either he's stuck or he's thinking I'm being oversimplifying here,
Speaker 3: but I think it's important to keep it kind of simple,
Speaker 3: and so our founding father's classical liberalism builds on the
Speaker 3: basic notion of natural rights. Natural rights being those things
Speaker 3: that human beings possessed prior to antecedent to any society,
Speaker 3: social structure, or government, and government then exists, it's instituted
Speaker 3: for the sole purpose of protecting those natural rights, which
Speaker 3: unfortunately are insecure. They are not non existent absent government,
Speaker 3: but they're insecure absent government. And so that leads to
Speaker 3: all of the things that we find in our wonderful
Speaker 3: Declaration of Independence, that claimed of the self evident truth
Speaker 3: of human equality. That's how we know we have natural rights,
Speaker 3: because no human being is born so superior to any
Speaker 3: other that he or she's the ruler over others. That
Speaker 3: means we are all our own rulers. That means we
Speaker 3: have the natural right to life, liberty, property, the pursuit
Speaker 3: of happiness, and that government is instituted again just for
Speaker 3: the purpose of securing those rights. And it is that
Speaker 3: understanding which we think of as classical liberalism, because it
Speaker 3: is in fact a recognition that government isn't the end
Speaker 3: all and be all right.
Speaker 1: Steve that well, yeah, let me stuff up with Steve.
Speaker 1: That definition. Is it so capacious that it would conclude
Speaker 1: Justice Kennedy's decision and Obergefell upholding gay marriage as much
Speaker 1: as it would uphold Richard Epstein's utter defense to the
Speaker 1: limits of property rights.
Speaker 5: Is a no to the first and probably yes to
Speaker 5: the second. No to the first because the problem with justice.
Speaker 5: Kennedy better stated in the famous Mystery of the Universe
Speaker 5: clause right, which was what was that in casey?
Speaker 2: What? What case was that? In one of the other?
Speaker 1: But over a fella is the culmination?
Speaker 5: I think, sure, exactly this in the Universe clause it says,
Speaker 5: what is something like every individual gets to find their
Speaker 5: own theory of the meaning of the universe. It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 5: And so in other words, rights become detached from nature,
Speaker 5: which is an important point. I thought for a minute, Lucretia,
Speaker 5: your first sentence threw me, and then you recovered. I thought,
Speaker 5: at first you said liberalism is the what do you
Speaker 5: say that the individuals detached from politics?
Speaker 2: I thought, oh, my.
Speaker 3: Goodness, no, no, no, yes, I get I think that.
Speaker 2: I thought politics liberate, that's it, liberated from politics.
Speaker 5: I thought you were about to go full Carl schmid
Speaker 5: on Us with that opening, which come back to me.
Speaker 5: But I do it a little simpler, John, which is
Speaker 5: what we call classical liberalism, although it's not really clascle.
Speaker 5: We can say in some ways not if you think
Speaker 5: the classics of antiquity, but it's lock and mill right.
Speaker 5: So we see in a few points I say, it's
Speaker 5: you know, a government by consent, individual, natural rights, property,
Speaker 5: and then also you know democracy, although that's gotten very sloppy,
Speaker 5: but you know, he was big for parliamentary supremacy, which
Speaker 5: was representation right. And then John Stewart Mail is what
Speaker 5: he's the tribune of radical individualism. You know, everybody can
Speaker 5: pursue their own self chosen ends, with the only limit
Speaker 5: being you harm somebody else.
Speaker 2: Right. So then we talk about now the big hot
Speaker 2: new thing is post liberalism.
Speaker 5: And I'm sort of interested that this is having such
Speaker 5: a moment because most of the arguments being made are
Speaker 5: not brand new. They've been around a long time, and
Speaker 5: they've come from both the left and the right. At
Speaker 5: the left relief forever because they hated Lock. That's Caral
Speaker 5: Marx hated Lock right, and the progressives hated Lock, and
Speaker 5: some conservatives, starting with Burke, hated Lock right. Burke said
Speaker 5: locke second Treatise was and I think on the quote
Speaker 5: is the worst book ever written. But what Burke had
Speaker 5: against it wasn't so much natural rights and so forth.
Speaker 5: I though Burke's poblematic. He didn't like the right to revolution,
Speaker 5: as it's explained in Lockey in terms. He thought that
Speaker 5: that doctrine of natural rights was an invitation to revolution.
Speaker 5: And there are people as early as say the French
Speaker 5: thinker Joseph de Maistra, who said that Locke should be
Speaker 5: implicated as the real cause of the French Revolution, not Rousseau,
Speaker 5: which is the way I think that we do right. No, Luke,
Speaker 5: I completely agree with the creature that that's wrong. I'm
Speaker 5: just saying that this is an old argument from the right.
Speaker 5: And then there's more I say. I think more interesting
Speaker 5: versions like I went and justed off for the first
Speaker 5: time in thirty years Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community, you
Speaker 5: know book for the fifties, where just remember that what
Speaker 5: the liberals have been saying for a while, going back
Speaker 5: to at least Lewis Hart's We've lost community. This individualism
Speaker 5: is terrible. We've lost community and belongingness and togetherness. And
Speaker 5: I think I've used this once before, but it's a
Speaker 5: long time ago. Lucretia will remember our great late friend
Speaker 5: John Weddgreen who said communitarianism is just a chicken shit
Speaker 5: word for Socialism's I've always liked. I think it's absolutely right.
Speaker 5: I'll stop there. We can go through particular points of
Speaker 5: all this as we go. But that's liberalism. It's not
Speaker 5: clear to me exactly what postliberalism means. While there's a
Speaker 5: few people we can grab a hold of, including our
Speaker 5: great friend Adrian for mules.
Speaker 1: Let's move on then, and I think both of you
Speaker 1: agree that the Declaration of Independence again which we're celebrating
Speaker 1: the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this year, is
Speaker 1: the expression of classical liberalism, maybe one of the finest
Speaker 1: expressions of classical liberalism, very much inspired by John Locke,
Speaker 1: and under attack these days for both the left and
Speaker 1: the right. And we've talked a law I Think on
Speaker 1: the podcast us about the attack from the left through
Speaker 1: the who I Think is symbol which is symbolized by
Speaker 1: the sixteen nineteen Project and the idea that the Founding
Speaker 1: was aimed really to preserve slavery. I just read or
Speaker 1: listened to Gordon Wood, another of my favorites but not yours,
Speaker 1: say that this is the sixteen nineteen projects. It's not history,
Speaker 1: it's more like political propaganda. But it's also under attack now.
Speaker 1: The Founding is under attacked from the right, from post liberals.
Speaker 1: And so let me ask you both I'll try my
Speaker 1: own definition of post liberalism, ask you what you think
Speaker 1: of it. Postliberalism is, and then most importantly your response
Speaker 1: is when we come back after this ad break, hopefully
Speaker 1: for the micrib welcome back back, everybody. I hope the
Speaker 1: last commercial forced everyone to experience pangs of hunger and
Speaker 1: to rush out to McDonald's, use your gift cards on
Speaker 1: the app, and they automated robotic chiosks to order your
Speaker 1: pre formed spam. Phil A I love it makes me
Speaker 1: hungry just thinking about it. So my looking at the
Speaker 1: works of Patrick Denin who's a professor at Notre Dame,
Speaker 1: and Adrian Vermule, a good friend of mine who's a
Speaker 1: professor at Harvard Law School, in their writings, which are
Speaker 1: advanced this idea of a common good conservativism in denise
Speaker 1: case or a common good constitutionalism in Mule's case, they
Speaker 1: both argue that the classical liberalism that both of you
Speaker 1: have just described has failed. It has failed, I think,
Speaker 1: in both of their views by destroying the institutions and
Speaker 1: communities around which traditional society was formed. That the liberalism's
Speaker 1: quest to unleash individual autonomy has resulted in the decline
Speaker 1: of the family decline in religion, upswings in drug use
Speaker 1: and aimlessness and welfare, and that liberalism because it has
Speaker 1: no superior moral values that people should follow. As Lucretia
Speaker 1: put it, it doesn't have a system to make you
Speaker 1: do things, and only tries to impose a negative liberty.
Speaker 1: The postliberals say that this lack of a morality has
Speaker 1: led to the collapse of our society, and they would
Speaker 1: argue that we have to return to a understanding of
Speaker 1: politics or understanding of constitutional law that allows for the
Speaker 1: imposition or that they would say imposition sounds too promotion
Speaker 1: of positive morality in the citizenry. I think that's why
Speaker 1: I think I'm trying to be fair. I'm not being
Speaker 1: trying to.
Speaker 4: Be fair John so well appreciate.
Speaker 1: Let's start with Well, let Steve has a quot he
Speaker 1: wants to read, and it's a standing both standing between
Speaker 1: Steve and the quote. Is that someone's standing between me
Speaker 1: and the chief.
Speaker 5: Yet, Yeah, don't get in a way this will be
Speaker 5: an analogy free segment least. Well, First of all, two
Speaker 5: quick things. One is I think we ought to put
Speaker 5: it this restate what how you open John?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 5: You know, at the bi centennial in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 5: there was this one little leftist effort called the People's
Speaker 5: bi Centennial Commission to trash the Founding, and it was
Speaker 5: Jeremy Rifkin and a bunch of no names, and you know,
Speaker 5: they got some attention, but not much. This year, we're
Speaker 5: going to see a ton of it from the left,
Speaker 5: you know, the sixteen nineteen project you mentioned. But then
Speaker 5: at the same time we're going to see challenges to
Speaker 5: the Declaration from the right. And so, for example, we
Speaker 5: mentioned Deneen. I came across this quote from Denean from
Speaker 5: a speech he gave recently, where he said, I'll do
Speaker 5: some quotes here. We don't need a return to the Founding.
Speaker 5: He said that conservatives are supporting a philosophy of pro
Speaker 5: offlicacy and hubris and the Founding is another quote here,
Speaker 5: a highly tandentious and abstract understanding of America that rests
Speaker 5: on libertarian wish casting about the Founding. So we're gonna
Speaker 5: hear that from the rights saying, you know, we really
Speaker 5: we shouldn't be.
Speaker 2: Looking back for help to the Founding and all the
Speaker 2: rest of that. Now common good.
Speaker 5: I've got a lot of points, but I'll just make
Speaker 5: this one and turn it over to Lucretia. It is
Speaker 5: true that common good under liberalism is set to represent
Speaker 5: merely the sum total of individual preferences, uh, and and
Speaker 5: that or or the sum of political accommodations we make
Speaker 5: through the bargaining of our legislative process. And I think
Speaker 5: that's mistaken. I think the founders did have an idea
Speaker 5: of the common good, and and uh, you know, and
Speaker 5: that's what.
Speaker 2: Can be and should be recovered. And I'll stop there.
Speaker 2: I have a lot more observations, but that's my opener.
Speaker 3: So I want to I want to sort of take
Speaker 3: it back and blame Steve a little bit from his
Speaker 3: opening for the pro First of all, John Stuart Mill
Speaker 3: has nothing to do with what our founder's understanding of
Speaker 3: classical liberalism was and the idea that those Europeans can't mill.
Speaker 3: All of those people have messed up modern people's way
Speaker 3: of thinking. That's problematic, But the real problem John gave it,
Speaker 3: I thought an excellent sort of a summary of common good, constitutionalism,
Speaker 3: common did whatever. Those things are just silly failures to
Speaker 3: understand what's really happened here in America. The founders had
Speaker 3: classical liberalism, which did indeed put the emphasis on the individual.
Speaker 3: But there's nothing in the Framers, in the Framers thought,
Speaker 3: even in the things that they put together, that dismisses
Speaker 3: the idea that virtue and a virtuous citizenry is necessary.
Speaker 3: The reason we have lost, for instance, communities, those associations
Speaker 3: that Topevill talked about, you know, so brilliantly, and how
Speaker 3: they were in many ways the genius of America. The
Speaker 3: reason isn't because of you know, some emphasis on individualism
Speaker 3: and the Framers, it's because of progressivism. It's because of
Speaker 3: progressivism that says, first of all, there are no such
Speaker 3: things as natural rights, human beings are not equal, but
Speaker 3: that we don't want voluntary associations. We want everything done
Speaker 3: by the government. And when you've got I mean, you
Speaker 3: take away the allegiance people have to churches, to their communities,
Speaker 3: to their neighborhoods, because you replace them with governmental programs,
Speaker 3: you replace them with the idea that government doesn't need
Speaker 3: to be watched against, it doesn't need to be guarded against.
Speaker 4: It's a good thing.
Speaker 3: Think about the stupid team ges stupid comment, and one
Speaker 3: of the last things that came up, we don't want
Speaker 3: we don't want this to happen. We want PhDs making
Speaker 3: our decisions in the government. We want elites making decisions
Speaker 3: in the government. I know a lot of PhDs.
Speaker 4: I am one.
Speaker 3: You don't want us making decisions there. Oh, anyway, that's
Speaker 3: another struct the idea that that smart people will be
Speaker 3: public spirited and are much more. I guess you could
Speaker 3: say put the preferable to those community associations.
Speaker 4: That's all because of progressivism.
Speaker 3: That is a an aberration from the founders.
Speaker 4: It is not a necessity from the founders.
Speaker 3: And it took decades of progressivism to destroy the ideas
Speaker 3: that the founders put out there. It wasn't that they
Speaker 3: were in and of themselves inherently destructible. It was a
Speaker 3: massive and quite successful effort on the part of progressivisms
Speaker 3: to progressive. This ex progressives to destroy the American founding.
Speaker 3: And that is the thing we need to be talking
Speaker 3: about every single day in two hundred and twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: So there's one way to understand what you're saying, Lucretia,
Speaker 1: is that the common goood constitutionalism or postliberal idea is
Speaker 1: an overreaction to the perversion of liberalism that occurred during
Speaker 1: the progressive era. So progressive era attacks the founding As
Speaker 1: you say, they have quite a bit of success, for
Speaker 1: you know, about sixty years, seventy years, it starts to recede,
Speaker 1: I think in the eighties, but it's made a comeback
Speaker 1: under Obama. But the reaction is we need of post liberals?
Speaker 1: Is we need another American revolution, we need to overthrow
Speaker 1: you know, whereas you could just say, I think what
Speaker 1: Creatia's point maybe is why isn't why isn't the proper
Speaker 1: response just to return to the founding principles of our
Speaker 1: revolution and constitution. Don't need to have a holy new
Speaker 1: revolution and overthrow the liberal regime in America because we've
Speaker 1: gone of course? Is that fair? And then, Steve, what
Speaker 1: do you think?
Speaker 3: I'll respond quickly, Stephen, and let you have a lot
Speaker 3: to say about what I said. I didn't even know
Speaker 3: if it's an overaction, it's just a failure to understand
Speaker 3: the importance of ideas.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 3: Steve had a great line he wrote in and we
Speaker 3: had an email chain going back and forth between the
Speaker 3: three of us, and one of the things he said
Speaker 3: is these common good constitutionalists have this idea that maybe
Speaker 3: they can replace whatever with a kind of Catholicism, and
Speaker 3: he said they should understand it's going to be Protestantism
Speaker 3: if we ever get common good something. I'm actually much
Speaker 3: more concerned that we get Islamism.
Speaker 4: If you want.
Speaker 3: Collectivism, if you want community, if you want all of
Speaker 3: those things, the most powerful ideals out there right now. Obviously,
Speaker 3: if you've been watching the horror that is New York
Speaker 3: City in the last two days, we don't have to
Speaker 3: worry about Catholics taking over this country, despite what Candice
Speaker 3: Oman thinks.
Speaker 4: We have to worry about Islam.
Speaker 3: And I believe that in my heart of hearts because
Speaker 3: to the extent that we have destroyed a belief in
Speaker 3: any kind of supreme being or something greater than themselves.
Speaker 3: It has left many, many people out there desperate in
Speaker 3: the search for meaning, and Islam is a very powerful, ugly,
Speaker 3: but compelling thing to turn to. That's why you see
Speaker 3: all these dumb twits putting on their he jab, you know,
Speaker 3: the Redheads. I saw one of the things that the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty six things we need to do in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty six, we need to ban Gingers from becoming Islam.
Speaker 4: Sorry, go ahead, I'm done.
Speaker 1: I'm in personally not really terribly worried about Islam becoming
Speaker 1: the state religion of the United States.
Speaker 2: But Steve go ahead, Well maybe certain local communities it might.
Speaker 5: But well, first of all, I think I think I
Speaker 5: have a book titled suggested Lucretia, which is dumb twits,
Speaker 5: and they're dumb tweets.
Speaker 2: I think that's a nice ring to it.
Speaker 3: But dude, it doesn't work anymore because now they're exes.
Speaker 5: Okay, all my exes, we'll figure something out there. There's
Speaker 5: a country song to behalf of that.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 5: First of all, John, I am for a counter revolution
Speaker 5: if it involves toppling Woodrow Wilson's statues everywhere.
Speaker 4: But that's not what they want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 5: So, first of all, I do think I'm not sure
Speaker 5: if you meant to imply it or not. I don't think, say,
Speaker 5: Adrian Vermule or I and Patrick Denin are calling for theocracy.
Speaker 5: I mean the word to use is integralism, and I'm
Speaker 5: not sure is it actually ism like environmentalism.
Speaker 2: Not really.
Speaker 5: What it means is we should integrate, they think, and
Speaker 5: because they're Catholics, are of Catholic social teaching, which has
Speaker 5: always been very political. Going back to UH you know,
Speaker 5: the common good and social justice as it was understood
Speaker 5: rightly by the Catholic thinkers a thousand years ago. Okay,
Speaker 5: I get all that, uh, and have some sympathy with
Speaker 5: the concepts. The problem is it's built on our distortion.
Speaker 5: I'll restate what Lucasia was saying and do it this way.
Speaker 5: Some of the critiques made of liberalism is that, well,
Speaker 5: it ignores virtue. Virtue has either disappeared or been fully privatized,
Speaker 5: in which case it's not really public virtue at all.
Speaker 5: That's Alistair McIntyre's attack on liberalism. For example, I've already
Speaker 5: mentioned common uh uh common the problem of the common
Speaker 5: good in liberalism being reduced to just to some total
Speaker 5: of individual preferences. In other words, there is no there
Speaker 5: is no real concept to argue about about what is
Speaker 5: the best regene right, it's you know, whatever whichever way
Speaker 5: are individual choices and political compromises take us to. And
Speaker 5: that's also attacked from the left as well, and that
Speaker 5: rootless individualism that was the complain of people like you know,
Speaker 5: Russell Kirk and others. So my problem is is, all right,
Speaker 5: what is postliberalism, what does it look like? What are
Speaker 5: the doctrines, what are the institutions there, It's beyond vague.
Speaker 5: This is just sort of a complaint. And I'll say
Speaker 5: lastly that all those complaints about the lack of virtue,
Speaker 5: that there's no view of the common good implied or
Speaker 5: contained in the American Founding or our documents, seems to
Speaker 5: me completely wrong. And there I just refer listeners to
Speaker 5: what I think is the classic work of the last
Speaker 5: couple of decades, and it's Thomas tom West's book on
Speaker 5: the Founding, whose title is escaping me right now. I'll
Speaker 5: try and find it for the show notes. But he's
Speaker 5: written a very comprehensive treatment about why virtue, the common
Speaker 5: good rightly understood by the classics, and the place of
Speaker 5: the individual and our social connections was very richly contained
Speaker 5: in the American Founding, and we deliberately rubbish that in part. Sorry, Lucreche,
Speaker 5: I'll just defend myself briefly the reason to mention Mills
Speaker 5: to associate with the founders, but he is a key
Speaker 5: turning point in defending what happened to the liberal tradition
Speaker 5: in the twentieth century. And so today, if you know
Speaker 5: college campus is to extend they even try. They start
Speaker 5: with Mills on liberty as the first text of how
Speaker 5: to understand liberalism and the liberal tradition. And we love
Speaker 5: his free expression ideas mostly, but that is also a
Speaker 5: deflection that sets the stance for the progressives.
Speaker 2: I'd put it that way.
Speaker 1: I was wandering around because I was looking for that
Speaker 1: book of West's yes, something like, well, there's one vindicating
Speaker 1: the founders as one version, and then there's another one Steve's.
Speaker 3: I want to say, so Tom West, teacher, my teacher,
Speaker 3: Steve's teacher, Perry Jaffa. I'll probably get it wrong. Steve
Speaker 3: so helped me out with the quote. But it was
Speaker 3: our Founder's government limited the ends of government. It did
Speaker 3: not limit the ends of man. But when we talk
Speaker 3: about the ends of man, and it is not that
Speaker 3: sort of oh what would it be, just this as
Speaker 3: anything goes kind of idea, the stupid thing said by Kennedy, your.
Speaker 4: View of the universe.
Speaker 3: Now, the ends of man are still available to us.
Speaker 3: Through studying philosophy, through studying reason, through studying nature, we
Speaker 3: discover what it is.
Speaker 4: That makes man happy.
Speaker 3: And you know, Joffa's best example of the proof of
Speaker 3: that is that the Declaration claims to or makes the
Speaker 3: claims that when we exercise our absolute natural right to revolution,
Speaker 3: By the way, I don't want that to slip by.
Speaker 3: When we exercise that and we institute new government, we
Speaker 3: do it according to what our safety and happiness the
Speaker 3: alpha and omega of human life, safety and happiness. It's
Speaker 3: a purely Aristotilian statement. The it's not just our safety.
Speaker 3: It's not just a sort of how Besian we're going
Speaker 3: to make sure that we're not, you know, constantly in
Speaker 3: fear of awful, horrible, violent death. No, it's our happiness.
Speaker 3: But happiness is not idiosyncratic. It is defined by man's
Speaker 3: nature and by nature's God. And what the last thing
Speaker 3: I'll say about this, Steve, is the reason that we
Speaker 3: don't want to substitute some kind of Catholic integralism or
Speaker 3: any of those other things. You're right that a thousand
Speaker 3: years ago Catholic social justice had some really wonderful things
Speaker 3: to say. That was in the days of theocracies and uh,
Speaker 3: you know, god divine right of kings and monarchies. What
Speaker 3: our founding did was say we're going to separate those things.
Speaker 3: They can be teachable moments and all of those other things,
Speaker 3: but they're not going to be part of our public
Speaker 3: policy that we are not going to turn to Catholicism
Speaker 3: or Episcopalianism or Okay.
Speaker 1: Okay, we got to take we got to take a
Speaker 1: break before you listen to the religion, Lucutie. So so
Speaker 1: let's let's let's just pause there. Let me ask you
Speaker 1: all to address this next question when we come back,
Speaker 1: which is I take the post liberals to be saying,
Speaker 1: so you make the appeal as Lucretia just did, to
Speaker 1: the Founders and their views. Steve just pulled out Tom West,
Speaker 1: whose book is called Vindicating the Founders. Well, Post Liberals,
Speaker 1: their argument is, suppose the Founders are wrong. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're just appealing to them as a source of authority,
Speaker 1: doesn't actually inform us about whether they're right or wrong.
Speaker 1: And I think, to put the best face on the
Speaker 1: post liberals, they are just saying we should return to
Speaker 1: classical views of politics, to Aristoltelian views of mixed regimes,
Speaker 1: and as Steve said, trying to the poll us the city,
Speaker 1: molding people into a vision of where they follow substantive virtue.
Speaker 1: So let me leave you guys with those thoughts, those
Speaker 1: questions and then we'll justin them when we come back
Speaker 1: from this next break. I'm not sure. I'm sure McDonald's
Speaker 1: has now dropped us as an advertiser after my praise
Speaker 1: of it as a spam related so I'm guessing that
Speaker 1: this will next be some kind of commercial for guns
Speaker 1: or ammunition. Welcome back, everybody again. We're on the first
Speaker 1: episode of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: where we felt we'd kick off the new year and
Speaker 1: celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American
Speaker 1: Revolution and the Declaration of Independence by trying to address
Speaker 1: some of the deeper issues rather than current events, which
Speaker 1: is our want, and talk about this movement of postliberalism
Speaker 1: and his criticism of the Founding and so, Steve, why
Speaker 1: don't you pick us up? I think I, right before
Speaker 1: the break, asked a series of questions reaction to Lucretia's praise,
Speaker 1: which I share of the Founders. But the post liberals say,
Speaker 1: but the founders were wrong. Look at the terrible social
Speaker 1: statistics that you can look at in our society right now,
Speaker 1: the rise of illegitimacy, the decline of families, lack of
Speaker 1: religious belief, growing levels of addiction, and welfare people not working.
Speaker 1: They claim this is all a result of untrammeled personal
Speaker 1: autonomy and personal decisions unaffected by government, and they call
Speaker 1: for a return to classical understandings the purpose of government.
Speaker 5: Well, so, first of all, we were going fast. Let
Speaker 5: me get the actual book titles down right. The west
Speaker 5: book I'm talking about is that I can show what
Speaker 5: to viewers. Here is called The Political Theory of the
Speaker 5: American Founding. Subtitle Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral
Speaker 5: Conditions of Freedom. I think this book is the comprehensive
Speaker 5: reputation is written ten years ago of a lot of
Speaker 5: the postliberalism we hear now because earlier book you mentioned
Speaker 5: John this is like twenty years ago called Vindicating the Founders.
Speaker 5: Subtitle here is raised Sex, Class and the Justice in
Speaker 5: the Origins of America. This was a pre refutation of
Speaker 5: the sixteen nineteen project and all of its cognates both.
Speaker 5: I highly recommend Rush Limbaugh read this book and couldn't
Speaker 5: shut up about it on his radio show when it
Speaker 5: came out, and round back around two thousand, I think
Speaker 5: it was Let me pick up three things here, and
Speaker 5: by the way, listeners, you should know that we're going
Speaker 5: to be periodically revisiting how this debate over the declaration
Speaker 5: unfolds as we approach July fourth. So I think several
Speaker 5: of these will one actually stop and spend you know,
Speaker 5: half an episode or more, And one of them concerns happiness,
Speaker 5: what is meant by the pursuit of happiness?
Speaker 1: And maybe you know all what, We're going to have
Speaker 1: a conference at the spring.
Speaker 2: I was just about to mention that we're going to
Speaker 2: do a conference and we may.
Speaker 5: Get, you know, multiple shows out of the content of
Speaker 5: that second religion. I think, Lucretia, I think you will
Speaker 5: agree that your summary of that was maybe too summarized
Speaker 5: in this sense again and in the whole whole episode
Speaker 5: that goes through the so called separation of church and
Speaker 5: state in some order, but I mean, it's a short placeholder.
Speaker 5: You remember John Adams famous comment that how's it go?
Speaker 5: The Constitution of America is made for a religious people
Speaker 5: and it's not fit for any other kind. And you
Speaker 5: think it was George Washington Bright and so that should
Speaker 5: be laid out I think.
Speaker 2: In a patient of tail. The third one, though, is
Speaker 2: so John, you're.
Speaker 5: Questioning to get directly to it the criticism of postliberals,
Speaker 5: but not just postliberals, is that one way it's put
Speaker 5: is that modern natural right, modern liberal tradition lowers the
Speaker 5: sites it's built on the low but solid ground of modernity.
Speaker 5: That's one of the famous phrases.
Speaker 2: And Leo S.
Speaker 5: Fauss had I think the best phrase of all for
Speaker 5: some of this. He said, Locke in liberalism because it's
Speaker 5: a materialist. Here, I'm an attacking you, John, because you're
Speaker 5: a defender of materialism.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 5: The problem with materialism and what someone a simpler mind
Speaker 5: like Russell Kirk would say is rootless individualism is it
Speaker 5: would generate. And his phrase was the joyless quest for joy.
Speaker 5: I think that's a great phrase, and I think that's.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but the quest for joy is not joyless.
Speaker 1: I enjoy it all the time. Who these idiots, Well,
Speaker 1: these are philosophy professors. Of course they have no fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you see you look at I mean, one way
Speaker 1: you could go aft. This is what do we hear
Speaker 1: about these days? Oh we're so polarized. Everybody's mad, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody's angry and grumpy. And by the way, I think
Speaker 1: that is on purpose by progressive So they like that
Speaker 1: because it allows more opportunities for the government to intervene
Speaker 1: in our lives. So that's a that's a feature, not
Speaker 1: a buve for them. So they complain about polars it's terrible.
Speaker 1: So they're really saying is if we're polarized, we're going
Speaker 1: to manage your lives. And if we're not polarized, it's
Speaker 1: because you agree with us. It's heads wind tails you loose.
Speaker 1: That's how this argument works.
Speaker 5: But I do think there is something about that the
Speaker 5: whether Trauss or anybody else, or even some of the
Speaker 5: more sensible liberals like Wilson Kerry McWilliams, who is Patanine's
Speaker 5: teacher at Rutgers, they're saying there's something unsatisfying about liberalism.
Speaker 5: And you know, the complain about materialism has been around
Speaker 5: a long time in various vulgar and simplistic ways.
Speaker 1: Can I just interrupt just for a second. So Daneen
Speaker 1: went to Rutgers, so he had to spend four years
Speaker 1: in Camden and Trenton. So as a Philadelphian, I now
Speaker 1: understand why I wants to destroy civilization as we know,
Speaker 1: and it moved to a more primitive society without technology
Speaker 1: or medicine. Right, of course, anyone who has to live
Speaker 1: in New Jersey for that long would have such a
Speaker 1: pessimistic views from you.
Speaker 2: Okay, starting to interrupt, Steve, go ahead, I know.
Speaker 4: I'm not okay, So.
Speaker 3: Answering your question in the simplest way, I would ask
Speaker 3: Deneen or I actually did ask Bermule, and he had
Speaker 3: no answer for me other than some sort of appeal
Speaker 3: to bureaucratic vaticans bureaucracy. That's a long story. We don't
Speaker 3: have time for here. But here's the real point.
Speaker 1: Can I just pause there and just put the setting
Speaker 1: for people?
Speaker 3: Will?
Speaker 1: I'm sure talk about this later. But last year, Lucretia,
Speaker 1: Steve and I went to the University of Milan with
Speaker 1: Adrian Vermule and we had a panel sponsored by a
Speaker 1: great friend of ours, Alis What do you call Alessandro?
Speaker 1: I don't know if we want Amandia, who's a professor
Speaker 1: of political theory at the University of Milan, Catolica. They're
Speaker 1: great university in Milan, and I just want the listeners
Speaker 1: to imagine in their minds, uh, what it was like
Speaker 1: for Lucretia and Adrian to have cocktails sitting next to
Speaker 1: each other it was I had a video, I would
Speaker 1: have copped immediately, oh yeah, or put it on steps back.
Speaker 1: But we did have that event, and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 1: I guess as we talked about it throughout the year.
Speaker 1: It was an epic confrontation. But Lucretia, sorry to interrupt,
Speaker 1: go ahead, So he responded. He responded by praise of
Speaker 1: the administrative state. Yes, if I remember the you criticized him,
Speaker 1: and I believe Adrian criticized you for your attachment to
Speaker 1: outdated eighteenth century ideas of natural law, which he agrees
Speaker 1: our nonsense on stilts, to use the famous Bentham phrase.
Speaker 1: And then he said, if that the administrative state right,
Speaker 1: the agencies can be relied upon to guide us and
Speaker 1: make the right choices.
Speaker 4: Well, and I think John, that you're correct. I do
Speaker 4: want to go back to the earlier point, but.
Speaker 3: I want to say that that I think that that
Speaker 3: the way you just framed that is the administrative state,
Speaker 3: properly constituted the only answer to our societal and political ills.
Speaker 3: And I see a lot of good people out there
Speaker 3: kind of writing that. You know, we've got to embrace
Speaker 3: the administrative state.
Speaker 4: We just got to do it right.
Speaker 3: We've got to embrace government regulation and those sorts of things.
Speaker 3: So I agree that that's a really important point. I
Speaker 3: want to make it much simpler for a moment, and
Speaker 3: I want to say, Okay, Adrian, okay, any of you
Speaker 3: other people tell me what it is about the Founder's
Speaker 3: view of human nature that you think they got wrong. Now,
Speaker 3: the first and most important point about that is that
Speaker 3: the human nature that the Founders described and then used
Speaker 3: as the basis for all of their political theories, they
Speaker 3: believed it was permanent, that human nature did not change.
Speaker 4: It did not change. And because it.
Speaker 3: Does not change, we may never understand it fully. But
Speaker 3: our quest should be first and foremost to understand nature,
Speaker 3: human nature, our place in the world, all of those
Speaker 3: nice things that philosophy does, and especially political philosophy. But
Speaker 3: if it doesn't change, then our quest is to know it.
Speaker 3: What is most important about our current situation is across
Speaker 3: the spectrum, with very few people in the middle getting
Speaker 3: it right.
Speaker 4: Only getting it right.
Speaker 3: Is that there is no such thing as human nature,
Speaker 3: and that human nature is maliable and it can be
Speaker 3: made into anything you want it to be.
Speaker 4: That's, of course Marxism and communism.
Speaker 3: But it also seems to be to some extent these
Speaker 3: people on the right who want to deny that there's
Speaker 3: a fixed and unchanging human nature with which.
Speaker 4: We must.
Speaker 3: With which we must take account and take into account
Speaker 3: in order to form a political society.
Speaker 4: That's good. Now, you could argue, I think.
Speaker 3: That the political society we formed, maybe it wasn't so great.
Speaker 4: But you have to start by saying either yes or no.
Speaker 3: The founders were right there that there's a permanent, unchanging
Speaker 3: human nature that we can know, and then you can
Speaker 3: argue whether or not their political system they put together
Speaker 3: is consistent with that. If we believe Abraham Lincoln, there's
Speaker 3: none of these problems that Deneen or mule ever, he
Speaker 3: believes just the opposite. That the materialism built into our
Speaker 3: political system, the protection for natural rights for property, the
Speaker 3: belief that human beings should do everything they can to
Speaker 3: maximize their own individual talents and propensities. All of those things,
Speaker 3: according to Jefferson, gave us the best and freest country,
Speaker 3: the best regime in the history of the world. I
Speaker 3: don't see these people actually taking up Lincoln's view of
Speaker 3: the matter.
Speaker 1: Bring it on. Let me first, art of Steve Tubai.
Speaker 1: I think that should share some of the things, share
Speaker 1: some of the views you set out. I think they,
Speaker 1: like the few set out in the Federal's papers, would
Speaker 1: think of man as fallen. I would think that man
Speaker 1: is not perfectible. I don't. Maybe I'm misreading them, but
Speaker 1: I don't think the post liberals are like the Marxist
Speaker 1: and that they think human nature is malleable. Don't they actually?
Speaker 1: I mean, if there are Aristotelians, aren't they really Aristotelians?
Speaker 1: And if they are, and don't they right? I think
Speaker 1: that human nature is unchanging too, but that society has
Speaker 1: to be more interventionist to stop people from right doing things,
Speaker 1: harming themselves. And that's also in the Federal's papers, although
Speaker 1: the government they designed is not as strongly interventionist.
Speaker 5: Well go ahead, Steve, sir, well, can I introduce a
Speaker 5: new vector in all this? Because and so let's remember
Speaker 5: that that Adrian Vermule directly and openly in his book
Speaker 5: on Common Good Constitutionalism saying I'm inspired by Carl Schmidt.
Speaker 5: And now the left goes crazy, and some people on
Speaker 5: the right, you know, our good friend Phil Magnus is
Speaker 5: on the warpath against people like Vermule, people who cite Schmidt,
Speaker 5: and Okay, Smith's right, But here's the But here's the
Speaker 5: thing about Schmid. It's not just him, but he's the
Speaker 5: one who put it most forcefully in the thirties when
Speaker 5: he briefly joined the Nazi Party, right, a big air
Speaker 5: in his part, But he said, the problem with liberal
Speaker 5: momocracy is it's.
Speaker 2: Weak, and it's inherently weak.
Speaker 5: And it will not be able to defend itself against
Speaker 5: challenges from you know, communism or fascism. That was early Schmidt,
Speaker 5: and I think that he is. I think there's a
Speaker 5: lot to be said for his critique, which is very
Speaker 5: dense and difficult. So you look out the world now
Speaker 5: and what do you see In Europe? You talk about
Speaker 5: democracies unable to defend themselves, and increasingly, I think we're
Speaker 5: now seeing it in the last few weeks here in
Speaker 5: this country. You know, things like the welfare fraud in Minnesota,
Speaker 5: which may be a nationwide phenomenon. Right, we're now starting
Speaker 5: to wake up the possibility that welfare fraud and abuse
Speaker 5: is not a small amount of money. It's a huge
Speaker 5: amount of money that's really exploded in the last ten
Speaker 5: to fifteen years beyond his previous dimensions. How come we're
Speaker 5: not able to fix this? How come that we've totally
Speaker 5: failed that something is big. Not to mention our failing
Speaker 5: education systems, defending the border until Trump came along, you
Speaker 5: go on a long checklist of how our democracy is
Speaker 5: showing the same kind of weaknesses European democracy. And so
Speaker 5: that's part of their critique is that look this, uh
Speaker 5: you know, never mind uh for now the particular challenges
Speaker 5: about the neglect of virtue and the common good, but
Speaker 5: democracy itself is now a matter that's in doubt.
Speaker 3: Why no, no, not you said anything you said was wrong.
Speaker 4: It's just so stupid.
Speaker 3: I mean again, it's because the founding fathers built welfare
Speaker 3: into the constitution.
Speaker 4: They built in you know, come on, I mean that.
Speaker 3: It's it if you cannot separate the abomination that was progressivism,
Speaker 3: and it's an incredible influence on our political situation. If
Speaker 3: you cannot do that, you you don't deserve to talk
Speaker 3: about what the the uh what kinds of solutions there
Speaker 3: are to our our current problems. You can't talk about
Speaker 3: the problem with fraud if you don't recognize that a
Speaker 3: our elites who govern us are incapable of doing anything
Speaker 3: out of the public interest. I mean, that's a stupid
Speaker 3: progressive idea. And again, if you don't think it's serious,
Speaker 3: look at Katenji and you know the fact that she
Speaker 3: wasn't impeached for saying that is proof that we don't
Speaker 3: take that seriously enough. The idea that you've still got
Speaker 3: CNN and all those other people somehow trying to to
Speaker 3: what would the word be, cover up for or dismiss
Speaker 3: or distract from the fraud going on by Somali's in Minnesota,
Speaker 3: because first of all, it might be racist, and second
Speaker 3: of all, all the money is actually being funneled back
Speaker 3: to Democrats, and Democrats have to you know, succeed no
Speaker 3: matter what I mean, the idea that we could criticize
Speaker 3: the founders in the midst of all of these things
Speaker 3: is going on just makes these people just seem stupid
Speaker 3: to me. They're not intelligent, they don't have answers to anything.
Speaker 3: They're looking at the wrong problems and offering the wrong
Speaker 3: solutions to the wrong problems, and right in the house
Speaker 3: to say it drives me crazy.
Speaker 1: Let's take the break here. And before we do, also,
Speaker 1: we got sent in a longish version of fan mail
Speaker 1: by our friend Phil Munos at the University of Notre Dame,
Speaker 1: who hearing that we were going to discuss this topic,
Speaker 1: sent us an essay he's drafting where he made the argument.
Speaker 1: Yet another problem with postliberalism is that they portray the
Speaker 1: Founders as believe. And I think Lucretia is making this
Speaker 1: point of portray the Founders is believing in untrammeled autonomy,
Speaker 1: and he actually says all of the rights are subject
Speaker 1: to the idea of reasonable restrictions, that itself also comes
Speaker 1: from natural law. And that's his effort to save the
Speaker 1: Founders from his common good constitutionalist friends. So well, let's
Speaker 1: talk about that when we come back after this break.
Speaker 1: One of the friends of the podcasts, Phil Migno, is
Speaker 1: a professor at Notre Dame, taught Like the Three of
Speaker 1: You at the Claremont Graduate University, programmed Like the Three
Speaker 1: of You by Harry Jeffer At All You all, Mark
Speaker 1: March and Lockstep. As far as I can tell, I
Speaker 1: just like to loong because you guys go to good restaurants.
Speaker 1: So Phil says, you know, Phil, Phil's effort to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, respond and this, at least in this piece
Speaker 1: which he's working on sent to us is to argue
Speaker 1: that the I guess his argument is that the common
Speaker 1: good constitutionalists or this pro postliberals, uh make a straw
Speaker 1: man of liberalism, that they pretend that justice Kennedy's you know,
Speaker 1: you know, the right to pursue whatever you want to
Speaker 1: is the meaning of liberalism. The garment should get out
Speaker 1: of the way. Yeah, that's not real liberalism. His argument
Speaker 1: is the kind of liberalism that conservatives should depend is
Speaker 1: the ones, as you said, rooted in natural rights and
Speaker 1: that that view has a significant restriction, which is that
Speaker 1: you can exercise your natural rights so far as they
Speaker 1: are reasonable. Still to me that I don't hear you
Speaker 1: guys answering the question that I put to you those
Speaker 1: how can you tell that your view of natural rights
Speaker 1: is superior to the moral view that the common good
Speaker 1: people are selling? So you can in the crew to say,
Speaker 1: you know, the Founders are right. Why are these people
Speaker 1: so stupid not agreeing with the Founders and they just
Speaker 1: say the Founders are wrong. I think it's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting they say they're wrong because of the consequences, right,
Speaker 1: because of the statistics that we're seeing in society. What
Speaker 1: is your response to that? Phil I mean, I would
Speaker 1: think they could say, back to Phil, well, that's what
Speaker 1: we've been doing all these years. Liberalism, as interpreted by
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court, rights are subject to reasonable restrictions. They
Speaker 1: they for many years and continue to restrict Second Amendment
Speaker 1: gun rights to reasonable restrictions. We're going to get a
Speaker 1: comment from Lucretia on that. I believe that still doesn't
Speaker 1: tell I still doesn't answer their fundamental attack, I think,
Speaker 1: which is, why should we think the Founders Even if
Speaker 1: Lucretia's right about describing why they thought, what they thought,
Speaker 1: and how they thought, but maybe they were just wrong.
Speaker 1: They need prove it well that their view is Look
Speaker 1: at all the social problems we have today, they would say,
Speaker 1: that's again, that's that's so simplistic.
Speaker 3: They're not caused by the Founders, They're caused by the progressives.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, Steve, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Well, oh, I mean, first of all, Phil is the
Speaker 2: goat when it comes to understanding how religious liberty should
Speaker 2: be understood in American guest socialism.
Speaker 1: Although he's ultimately wrong about its judicial application.
Speaker 2: But well, well we'll have to be.
Speaker 1: Because Philip believes that the courts ought not to recognize
Speaker 1: exceptions for religious groups from government regulation.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, we are we back to those Smith versus employment.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, he's a big fan of Smith. He's the
Speaker 1: last existing fan of Smith versus Yeah. All right, but
Speaker 1: we will. I'm sure we'll have a whole podcast this
Speaker 1: year about we should do that religious liberty and the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court and well maybe we'll have fill back.
Speaker 4: I think we should.
Speaker 3: In fact, actually, John, I just want to say this,
Speaker 3: and in case the listeners out there who contacted me
Speaker 3: on on X and we went back and forth because
Speaker 3: they were actually asking some really her spicacious questions about
Speaker 3: religious liberty and trying to understand what it is which
Speaker 3: courts got us where we are and so forth. So
Speaker 3: I think it would be wonderful for us to do
Speaker 3: that one of these days. Sorry, editorial comment.
Speaker 1: We could also have a reader's mail bag episode, which
Speaker 1: everybody all the other podcasts seemed to have on this
Speaker 1: last week. I was so bored, See John, I don't
Speaker 1: care what they think. I don't understand why we are
Speaker 1: to broadcast our views to them, but we are. So yeah, Steve,
Speaker 1: go ahead.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, let me see if I can
Speaker 5: do this very briefly. It's important to understand. I know
Speaker 5: Phil understands it's important to understand that for the Founders,
Speaker 5: the idea of natural rights in the classical liberal tradition
Speaker 5: and religious influence were reciprocal and mutual properties. In other words,
Speaker 5: you take, by the way, this as much in my
Speaker 5: mind right now for reason I'll come to. Maybe you
Speaker 5: think of George Washington's famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation
Speaker 5: at Newport and what's at seventeen ninety four whatever it was,
Speaker 5: when Washington's president, and he's said, you know, you now
Speaker 5: have the same natural rights as everybody else, because it's
Speaker 5: your right of conscience.
Speaker 2: I'm paraphrasing badly.
Speaker 5: And but he adds that so long as you or
Speaker 5: anybody else, he's really saying, demean themselves and respecting everybody
Speaker 5: else's rights, we're good. And that differs from say, what
Speaker 5: did Britain have? They have the Toleration Acts. Right Toleration
Speaker 5: Act of seventeen eighty eight says we're now going to
Speaker 5: tolerate nonconforming religions. We won't throw you in jail anymore
Speaker 5: for being an Anabaptist or whatever the heck they used
Speaker 5: to do. In Britain, they still had religious tests for
Speaker 5: public office in Britain until well into the nineteenth century.
Speaker 5: So the point is, and now I do remember Washington's words,
Speaker 5: is it now no longer that toleration is spoken of
Speaker 5: as though it's by one group of people allowing some
Speaker 5: other group of people to enjoy their natural rights, I
Speaker 5: mean of religious liberty. So we've lost that sense of
Speaker 5: the reciprocal and mutual nature of religious liberty and our
Speaker 5: other civil liberties. Footnote here read Jefferson's Statute for Religious
Speaker 5: Freedom in Virginia. What's seventeen eighty six?
Speaker 2: I think it was?
Speaker 5: Now why that this is all very much on my mind,
Speaker 5: and this is a brief diversion, but I'll just plant
Speaker 5: it here for now. In the last ten days or so,
Speaker 5: or maybe last two weeks, I've noticed something from the
Speaker 5: groper right online and you know, the followers and Nick
Speaker 5: Fuentis and stuff. They're saying, Judeo Christian tradition is a
Speaker 5: modern formulation. It's a post World War two thing because
Speaker 5: our response to Holocaust America is a Christian nation, full stop.
Speaker 5: And I just think this is wrong, theologically, mistaken historically,
Speaker 5: but also being done in very bad faith. I can
Speaker 5: see where this is going and it's really got me worried.
Speaker 5: I'm really quite upset. I'll stop there. I have sequels to.
Speaker 2: That, but I'll just mention that, yeah, I agree to
Speaker 2: really quickly.
Speaker 3: I want to say, I read something that Tucker Carlson
Speaker 3: somebody else had quoted, and what we should not, what
Speaker 3: we need to do, is blame Jews for the fact
Speaker 3: that we have only fans that we have, you know,
Speaker 3: young men doing nothing but porn. It's not Islam's fault.
Speaker 3: We should be embracing the uh, the moral strictures of
Speaker 3: Islam and recognize that there's no such thing as Judeo
Speaker 3: Christian values, that Islam and Christianity are actually much closer.
Speaker 4: It just scared me to death.
Speaker 3: All you've got aside, because that deserves much more conversation
Speaker 3: than we have time for now. I just I would
Speaker 3: go back for just a moment and say, what you
Speaker 3: have to do, actually, John, is look at what it
Speaker 3: is that human nature is. You do have to decide
Speaker 3: for yourself, and in a free society, those kinds of
Speaker 3: decisions deserve to be debated. They deserve to be openly debated.
Speaker 3: I would argue John, that you who claim not to
Speaker 3: believe in natural rights, come to the same conclusions as
Speaker 3: you and I almost always agree on outcomes on some
Speaker 3: of these things.
Speaker 4: I mean, certainly on the important things.
Speaker 1: And I don't tell people that street.
Speaker 3: There is a reason, and that's because even though you
Speaker 3: say you're not convinced, you're not. You didn't find our
Speaker 3: friend Phil's uh reasoning all that telling I don't know
Speaker 3: that you disagree with the outcome. And so part of
Speaker 3: what I'm I guess I'm trying to say, and I'm
Speaker 3: not doing a very good job of it, is even
Speaker 3: the outcomes themselves are an indication of whether or not
Speaker 3: the views of the founders were right. And what I
Speaker 3: would say the problem with these post liberals is not
Speaker 3: that they're looking at outcomes that we have today and
Speaker 3: determining that they're bad. Most of the time I agree
Speaker 3: with that. They're they're putting the blame in the wrong place. Again,
Speaker 3: They're asking the wrong questions and thereby giving the wrong solutions.
Speaker 3: I believe if you if human beings go back to
Speaker 3: the question of what is human nature really? Do we
Speaker 3: have freedom of conscience? Are that is the human mind free?
Speaker 3: As Jefferson told us, If you start asking those questions
Speaker 3: and get below all of the nonsense. Then I think
Speaker 3: you actually can move forward. Marxism looked at some of
Speaker 3: those questions cave a very different answer, and that seems
Speaker 3: to be much more compelling in our in our modern day,
Speaker 3: I get the idea that we want to push back
Speaker 3: against welfare state, or at least make the welfare state
Speaker 3: a more efficient thing, you know, different things that postliberalism
Speaker 3: wants to do.
Speaker 4: Those things I understand.
Speaker 3: I don't like the fact that that, you know, young
Speaker 3: men would rather watch porn than actually have sex with women,
Speaker 3: which will excuse me for me, I don't mean to
Speaker 3: be crude, but that seems to be a major problem
Speaker 3: in our society today. I think all of those things
Speaker 3: are our genuine problems. The question is, if you're going
Speaker 3: to find the solution, you have.
Speaker 4: To ask the right questions. Does that make any sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So John asked one question we have to try to answer,
Speaker 5: so let me try and do it. And maybe process
Speaker 5: was a question because I've probably well the question was.
Speaker 2: The question was, how do you account for the decay
Speaker 2: that we've seen by all the social measures you think of?
Speaker 5: And uh, and doesn't that imply I'm not sure you
Speaker 5: meant this, John, But doesn't that imply that the founding
Speaker 5: was defective. That's what a lot of the post liberals says,
Speaker 5: our founding was defective. Right, Well, look, I mean I
Speaker 5: think there's a couple of things to be said about it.
Speaker 5: One is, again the founders, I think we're pretty clear
Speaker 5: on this that the our system of republican government could
Speaker 5: not survive unless the people remain virtuous. However, you want
Speaker 5: to understand that. That's a long subject. But they understood that.
Speaker 5: And I think this is overbroad. What's that?
Speaker 2: And Lincoln did too, right, and and this is overbroad.
Speaker 5: But a lot of our a lot of our troubles
Speaker 5: can be traced to the decline of individual virtue and
Speaker 5: and also institutional corruption. And but the broader question it raises,
Speaker 5: which I'm not going to try to answer, but say,
Speaker 5: this is the broader question is uh, this gets back
Speaker 5: with the classical question. But this, I mean the ancient
Speaker 5: Greeks who first thought about politics seriously, right, is there
Speaker 5: any political system that can survive a long time? Can
Speaker 5: you point to any example of a political system that
Speaker 5: has not failed? Eventually, this brings up the people say,
Speaker 5: are we following Rome? You know, the client and fall
Speaker 5: of the Roman Empire. They got a thousand years out
Speaker 5: of it. Not that well, okay, But the question is,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, our founder thought that they were
Speaker 5: building something that would last, the new order for the ages, right,
Speaker 5: And one question is what is it about human nature,
Speaker 5: the defects of the selfishness of human nature, the defects
Speaker 5: and laws of human nature very much on the mind
Speaker 5: of the founders that make it inevitable that even a
Speaker 5: well constructed constitutional order is going to have its crises.
Speaker 5: We came through some of them before. But you know,
Speaker 5: there's nothing guaranteed about all this. So it's one thing
Speaker 5: to go to fight off the left about this. It's
Speaker 5: dismaying right now that we have to fight off some
Speaker 5: of our friends on the right at the same time.
Speaker 2: I'll just conclude there. We can say a lot more
Speaker 2: about all of that, but there's a broader question than
Speaker 2: just the particular Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3: And you're going to disagree really quickly. I'm just going
Speaker 3: to say Lincoln warned about exactly that, and he said,
Speaker 3: if we did not continue to venerate the founding, because
Speaker 3: it really you know, the whole idea of taking every
Speaker 3: single citizen through the arguments of the Federalists and so on,
Speaker 3: is probably not.
Speaker 4: But we need to have a.
Speaker 3: Certain political religion which venerated the founding. And again, if
Speaker 3: we had never had progressivism, I know that it's silly
Speaker 3: to talk that way, but might we not be in
Speaker 3: a much better position if progressivism had not become the
Speaker 3: dominant ideology in our country? And could we not still
Speaker 3: be in a place where we were we had a citizen,
Speaker 3: a citizen ree who understood the principles of the Declaration,
Speaker 3: who understood that they needed to be virtuous. You know,
Speaker 3: let me just give a silly, silly example. In places
Speaker 3: like San Francisco, they they in California in general, cashless bail,
Speaker 3: making certain kinds of theft not really a crime at all,
Speaker 3: and then people were absolutely surprised that crime skyrocketedt doesn't
Speaker 3: that teach us a little bit of something about human nature?
Speaker 3: And is that any different in twenty twenty six than
Speaker 3: it was in seventeen eighty seven? And so I do
Speaker 3: think it's possible to have real understanding about human beings
Speaker 3: and what is necessary to push them in the right
Speaker 3: direction so that they can in fact be virtuous citizens
Speaker 3: mostly self governing. Okay, sure, when you have a shoplifting
Speaker 3: is no longer illegal to essentially you have people who
Speaker 3: will who is still not shoplift. How do you get
Speaker 3: those people? How do you get those people? And those
Speaker 3: are the questions that I know that people like vermil
Speaker 3: want to ask those questions, but they're not asking them
Speaker 3: in the right way. They're just saying it's all the
Speaker 3: founder's fault for its radical what it was it the individualism?
Speaker 2: Well, no, that's wondami.
Speaker 3: But okay, yeah, I know essentially they're saying the same thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's call it to a halt. We're at the
Speaker 1: hour mark and we should allow people to get on
Speaker 1: with failing to meet their New Year's resolutions. So nobody's
Speaker 1: getting to the gym, I'm sure already. But let's close
Speaker 1: with our usual Babylon bees from Lucretia.
Speaker 3: Okay, most of my Babylon bes are Somali related, so
Speaker 3: I'll try to pull a few others.
Speaker 4: I'll start with this one.
Speaker 3: Speaking of New Year's resolutions, Planet Fitness offering convenient new
Speaker 3: two week membership for New Year's.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 3: Waltz announces eight billion dollar grant to Somali company to
Speaker 3: investigate fraud. The funniest thing about that.
Speaker 4: Though, it's stupid ass.
Speaker 3: Snopes got on there and said, oh no, no, this
Speaker 3: isn't really true. This is this was false news put
Speaker 3: out by that satire Christian website Babylon Bee. So Snopes
Speaker 3: actually called it a lot. God those people. I'm gonna
Speaker 3: I'm gonna do a little editorializing here for just a moment,
Speaker 3: changes a bit. The Babylon b Nope strike that the
Speaker 3: Three Whiskey Happy Hour would like to inform Tim Waltz
Speaker 3: that we are now a functioning daycare in Minnesota. Right,
Speaker 3: I know, Okay, last one man achieves American dream of
Speaker 3: working hard and paying taxes for fifty years so he
Speaker 3: can fund fradulent Somalie daycares.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not funny, Okay, right, that's true. So always drink
Speaker 1: your whiskey neat and buy more books. It's Steve, How
Speaker 1: is AI going to welcome in Happy New Year twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm in apart from format just to give you
Speaker 5: my new Year's resolution and to get revenge for you
Speaker 5: for the way you've gone after us in this episode.
Speaker 5: My new Year's resolution is to give up all forms
Speaker 5: of positivism, legal, logical, philosophical, the whole bit. And this
Speaker 5: is one resolution that I am positive I could achieve.
Speaker 2: So there, Well, that's.
Speaker 1: A great way to start off the youth, Steve, and
Speaker 1: as you choose to violate all the traffic laws when
Speaker 1: you drive. Okay, everybody, it's been great to start the
Speaker 1: new year with all of you. And thanks to everybody
Speaker 1: who watched on the sub Stack live stream, we have
Speaker 1: hit triple digits for the first time. I hope we
Speaker 1: can going and see you. We will be back next week.
Speaker 6: Thanks sometime, right, okay, bye bye.
Speaker 2: Ricochet joined the conversation.