Welcome back to the new thing. My name is David Barr and with me is always is my good friend Alex Prio. How are you doing Alex? I'm doing well.
How are you doing? I'm well. I'm well. I'm two days away from my last in-person class at University of Colorado.
And we're not for my enjoyment of teaching and parting my endless wisdom to students. I would be canceling class, but I'm feeling excited. Symmestra is almost done. How about you?
How are you doing? I heard you really quick. How are you doing, Greg? I want to hear what Alex had to say.
Greg, I wanted to ask you if you remember a few days ago on Twitter, Alex said, boy, I'm exhausted. Just a few days left in the semester, I have a stack of papers to grade, but I've decided to grade the students on the status of their souls rather than the content of their research papers. I thought that was Ron's. I don't think you can do whatever you want when you're on the way out.
But how can I judge their souls, but through their writing, the soul has to manifest itself in speech indeed. Well, that's what they have to. parading their papers is great. So if I'm doing it in the precise sense, yeah, you've left them.
I would praise it like that to these kids that get bad grades. That's what I'll say to the dean when they interrogate me upon seeing my Twitter feed. Greg, how are you doing? What's new?
Everything's great. And the semester, looking forward to some relaxation. Now is the semester winding down. It's nice and allergy season.
So that's great. Another reason to be tired. Fantastic. So who's our guest today?
Our guest today. Someone I ran into just a couple weeks ago when I was giving a talk up in Boston. He was sitting to my left and said, hey, why don't you have me on your show? You jerk.
And I said, yeah, of course, we'd love to have you on the show. Our guest tonight is Professor Mark Landy, who's Professor of Political Science at Boston College. He's also the Edward and Louise Peterson Professor of American History and Government at my little university, the Ashland University here in Ohio. Boo, boo, boo.
And we regularly have folks come from Boston College to speak here at Ashland. And Mark was nice enough to say it was the first time he was ever gone the other way when I was up there and gave a talk at the BC. Mark Landy, Professor Landy is probably most well known for his work on American presidency kinds of things. He wrote with Sidney Milka's presidential greatness from Kansas Press in 2000.
A series of articles on the presidency and other facets of American government. And tonight we're going to speak about his new book that's just come out with the University of Kansas Press called Keeping the Republic of Defense of American Constitutionism, which he's written with his colleague Dennis Hale. So welcome. It's good to see.
Well, it's great to be here. And it's funny that as much as I've got Ashland every summer for 20 more than 20 years. And I didn't really meet you until you came to Boston. Yeah.
And we get it off just dandy. So here we are. We're having a fun little bit. Mark, was this a pity thing to Greg give such a poor talk that you thought, look, oh, contrary, it was a splendid talk.
And it was very well received. And the audience was mostly these better undergraduates. And he reached them. So I'm proud of him.
Thanks, Mark. I'm proud to have him as my Ashland colleague. That's right. They're good students.
They're good students. And I asked great questions. Those were good. But they were good.
But how well remunerated are you by this position? Yes, I earn zero extra for my endowment. I'm not sure where that endowment goes, but it does echo the landy coffers that I can promise. Did they pay you in cheese like Greg?
No, well, partly they also give us buggy rides with the Amish as part of our remuneration. There are a lot of Amish around here. They come into town and they take us for buggy rides. And it's just great.
Yeah, it's a grand time. Tell us about your book, Keeping the Republic, a defensive American constitutionalism. I thought American constitutionalism was in great health. There's no so the Constitution.
Why do we need a defendant? Isn't it? Okay, well, it's attacked from two sides. You may think it's in great health, but the preponderant literati and Artiki Larky would disagree with you.
And we begin the book with a quote, The Constitution is broken and should not be reclaimed. This is a Harvard and Yale professor in the op-ed pages of The Times, The New York Times, The New York Times specializes in attacking the Constitution. It's really quite, as Gordon Wood said, they should be ashamed. But, you know, so we got riled up.
Dennis and I, you know, for me to do hard work, I have to be a little angry. Otherwise, I think I'm a little lazy. And this was just anger provoking. And it's forced Dennis and I, Dennis and I, by the way, went to Oberlin College together before any of you were born.
And now he's been my colleague for close to about 45 years at BC. So we were, we're basically chained at the hip. And we, you know, we, we, we think together. And we really had to first know angry about this, this litany of anguish, writing, the Constitution is broken.
It's paralyzing, undemocratic, obsolete. And this comes not only from law professors, it comes from political scientists and journalists and your general, you know, op-ed writers. It's just, it's a kind of contagion. And so we really decided that we would try to explain why the constitutional order is vital to our, to the success of our, our way of life.
And that was really the impetus. I should be honest. I should be clear, I was being sarcastic. Now, of course you were being sarcastic.
You were, I know you were just provoking me, which is, which is very good. I heard you're going so. You know, it's good about it with this book and it's different from, but perhaps maybe used in a similar way as West's vindicating the founders. That is to say, I think that people, young people, thoughtful young people and even older people sense that there is an attack on the founders or constitutional order, but they just don't have the arguments at hand to push back.
This is frequently, it's infrequently laid before them. And so thank you, David. That was really our, our motivation. I mean, we don't, I'm not sure.
There is a little new ground we break, but the overall purpose is really educational. Think about the constitutional order in the latter part of the book. Think about why, not just why it's under attack by silly law professors, but why the public has distanced itself. That's, that's much more serious, right?
The loss of sense of legitimacy of the Constitution, of any understanding of what the, well, of course, journalists don't help. They never discuss a Supreme Court case in terms of the constitutional issues at hand. They just talk about who wins and who loses. So there's really a lot of barrier that we're trying to, hurdles that we're trying to overcome, to agree that we're trying to push out of the way.
That's really what the book is designed for. And you know, we use these law professors as our kind of straw dummies. And I emphasize not the straw, but the other, the other part of it. And you know, the basic problem is the central error that they make is that they think that a large republic should be a simple, majoritarian democracy.
And you know, and very few people tell them that they're wrong about that. Wow, that's a really interesting point, Greg, or David, or guest. But give me a second before we get too into things. Can I take a moment to tell our audience about a very special educational opportunity from our sponsor?
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And now Greg, David or guest or maybe even me. What were you about to say? Our argument is not that the Constitution is anti-democratic, but that it puts it doesn't put barriers in the way of majoritarianism. It creates hurdle for the public will to overcome.
That's really the key to what restrains power in this country and what allows us to stick together. Because if we were just simply a majoritarian outfit, we would have fallen apart long ago. I have a small question and then a more substantive question. Your title, Keeping the Republic, is that a sort of homage to Ben Franklin's remarks at the end?
I'm not sure. We stole it from Franklin. We hope he really said it, but we don't really care if he said it. It doesn't matter.
It's not the legend. You know that story that he came out of the convention and he came across some woman on the sidewalk and she said, what did you create, Benjamin? He said, we created a republic if we can keep it. It's an astonishingly difficult task and it's not just Franklin that understood that, Lincoln understood it, expressed it perhaps better than anybody in the Lyceum Address.
It's a hard thing. Liberalism is a fragile idea. Mark, I'll go on. Sorry.
I just wanted to finish that point that liberalism almost proclaims a certain kind of mediocrity about itself. So to keep people understanding why it's liberalism that allows so many civilization to flourish, a large mass civilization to flourish, it's hard. It's hard. So we tried to lay it out.
David, you had a question. Yeah. So, but the medium through which you lay out these defenses is an academic press. So are you, are you, Sanguine, that kind of re-flourishing or a receding of the liberal order will happen through the academy?
Or I'm being kind of, I mean, I'm joking around, like, hey, why don't you just write it in the pages of Mademoises and to reach the popular audience? But, well, there is a back story there and it's not entirely, it's not a happy one. We don't, we don't throw red meat. There's a kind of moderate quality to this book.
Some of your Claremont colleagues won't like some of the nice things I say about the New Deal, for example. So there's no market. There's no trade market for moderation. That became clear.
No, my first choice would have been, you know, free press or Norton or, but it wasn't an option. It was not so easy to get this book published. And I think the reason is that for the trade book places, it was too moderate and for the academic presses, it was too conservative. But that's why it much covers it.
Kansas really stepped up to the plate. Also, we are on the New Thinkery, which will reach dozens of people, really expand, really expand the audience for the book. So, I'm shame. I'll talk on any forum.
Good. That's how we got you. Because I'm very sensitive to David's point. This is, this book is not going to revolutionize American public opinion, but it's...
I didn't mean that, Mark has to do. I apologize. I did not mean that as a slight doing thing. No, I understand.
Okay. Okay. I didn't take it as a slight. Okay.
See, because Alex is... What are you saying to me, Alex? I was just saying, I can't believe you would, you know, insult our guests here. I mean, no, no, I'm just...
No, I think it was a legitimate question. Yeah. Because it's not a monograph, right? It's not going to change the scope of the study of American political thought.
It really is a kind of pedagogical effort. And therefore, gearing it for the Academy is not so great. Now, I have to say we're giving talks at AEI and Hudson and the National Archives. So, that's a little better than these books usually do.
No, it's interesting. Yeah. And we welcome all opportunity. I welcome Dennis.
Dennis, by the way, you know, he's not here, but he's so much an equal partner in this effort. And he doesn't like to travel. I'll travel anywhere. But he's not even national.
I'm more of the sort of Mr. Outside of this project. So, this is a really interesting question, which is, you know, the regime was built to have a kind of self-moderating, internally self-moderating quality that since been eroded by various causes, and maybe we can go into some of the ones you did. Yeah, sure.
Sure. And then the question is, how do you inject moderation into an immoderate regime when, especially as you notice, I mean, immodoration sells? I guess you'd have to go on a rabbit attack of the rabbit or something like that. Well, it's a genuine problem that I don't sadly think I have the answer, but we just have to try.
I mean, you're going off to University of Austin. I think that's great. You're teaching people. David is publicizing things.
Alex is teaching people. What else can we do? I mean, if we had, I wish we had more, we could use tanks and bazookas. You heard that here, folks.
Mark Landy. No, but Alex, in a way, so Mark's point is interesting. The whole creation of UATX isn't itself a kind of positive step, right? If people decide to get probabilis.
Yeah, it's fabulous. And the civic institutes are fabulous. So there, a marvelous strategic decision was made. And I don't know who to give the credit to stop trying to reform the IVs.
Yeah, I mean, do the IVs, I mean, do the IVs and go build an alternative universe of scholarship and education. I wish I knew who the George Washington of that was. You know, it's crazy. I think about Strauss sometimes.
He had such an intellectual power in a pre-Nazi Europe. And then a lot of them decamp for the United States. And we get invigorated in a massive way. And in our little neck of the woods, political philosophy took one professor to launch a very, very interesting business.
I agree. I agree. I think that he did something remarkable. And then his best students have also done remarkable things.
So to get a bit more focused on your book and the specifics of it, you spend the first chapter, which is called America's Modern State, outlining the specific ways in which America is modern, though with some sort of goals borrowed from antiquity, but sort of directed in a kind of sensible way. I like this chapter because it felt like a sort of nice overview of the American regime with reference to its principles, but also history, both at the time of the founding and since then, I thought there was a really sort of, you managed to, you and Dennis, I should say, managed to, I don't want to say jump around, but balance various considerations as you were working way through. What are the sort of, what is the underlying sensibility of America as a modern state, but still sheet aiming for the higher goals of ancient? Okay.
So I, first of all, obviously, classic liberalism is so influential, right? I mean, we have, we talk about rights all the time. The notion of consent is so, is so fundamental, the idea of limited government is so fundamental, but this is such a powerful foundation. However, I think one of the things that we really want to show is that, as great as that classic liberal tradition is, in terms of its theoretical understandings, only Montesquieu is really a political scientist, and I think that's why the framers talked about Montesquieu so much, because I think they do get, he's really important in trying to say we really have to think through about institutions.
These problems are just too, you're not going to just wipe away all the predations against liberalism unless you have a magnificent institutional creation. So I want to get Montesquieu into the story, and then I think it's crucial to, and here of course I am a student of Tuckville and Barry McWilliams, the liberal founding is not the whole story. First of all, the colonies lived for well over 100 years without a constitution, and so many of the liberal, of the Republican understandings that help to sustain the constitutional order come out of that long tradition, and just like Tuckville, I don't want to ignore the appearance. I think that a certain congregational understanding of Christianity is absolutely central to this whole product.
Antiquity indirectly, this is not antiquity, this is antiquity. Yeah, go ahead. One interesting point you navigate, which is this might always be my question in trying to think through what the Constitution aims at or achieves, is in your discussion of the meaning of the blessings of liberty, which is, has this weight at the time but is sort of underdeveloped within the Constitution, itself. And I think you did a good job, and maybe this is a point that's worth repeating for the sake of our audience, but you do a good job of highlighting some of the reasons why they might want to be clear that they're aiming at something like moderation and prudence and these consequences, virtues, but why they didn't install a federal Department of Virtue education or something like that?
Well, okay, let me kind of take a step back and take a somewhat long-winded approach to that. I'll get to it. One of the things that we really stress is that the framers had to confront a civilization that was already in many ways highly formed, and they were smart enough to know they couldn't change it. Right, I mean, would Madison have liked the colonies, now the states to be less commercial, less materialistic, less conflictual in terms of religious ideas?
Well, he was no dreamer. One of the great things about the framing is how realistic these people were. Americans had already a kind of political culture. It was rambunctious, it was ambitious, it was energetic, it was also heavily influenced by community and religion, and those were the barbells they had to juggle.
And I think the more we worked on this, the more we really came to revere what they did at the Constitution and beyond, maybe Madison above all, but Hamilton, Adams, an underrated figure, a figure who I've really spent a lot of time working on is Washington himself, that there was a kind of deep political understanding that is almost just amazing to me. So no, but I didn't get to your question. Repeat the question. The degree to which you want to emphasize virtue or for such a case, Greg, you wanted to add something just a small point.
I mean, while we're always on the topic of the ambitious, but realistic component of the American Revolution and Madison's thought, what I thought you did really well in this chapter and also in the introduction is contrasted with sort of French democratic thought. So I mean, I realize that'll take us on aggression from the house, question about virtue, but like the ambition of the French democratic sort of movement, which didn't take its bearings from this realistic account of you have to take them in from where they are and try to remake man and as a result was much less successful. So I enjoyed that and I thought it was very helpful. Good.
Because I enjoyed it to it. Some of the editors would have liked to dig that out, and we kind of thought for that because we thought it was a great contrast. The unbelievable knife, these friends supposedly smart French thinkers and politicians that they could remake human nature. I mean, you hear some of that these days, right?
Maybe AI is going to remake human nature. I doubt it. Maybe I should be more afraid of it than I am, but the French really, they had certain kinds of ambitions that were very laudable, but they thought you could just break away from all previous understandings. It's just and most importantly that you didn't accept some concept of original sin.
I mean, this is why I this is why we attacked the progressives so so vociferously. They're not the only problem around, but they're the ones who most resemble the French. Yeah, on this question, really quick, a virtue didn't George Washington believe some of the state or at some point intend to found a university. He did.
He did. He was devoted like 50%. I know we have GW today, but if I wasn't, it wasn't GW. It was what became Washington and Lee.
Oh, okay. But wasn't his greatest idea for curriculum, something like 50% of the day spent on theoretical works like Montesquine, the other 50% statesmanship in action. No, he wasn't. He wasn't as he wasn't as learned as say, or Jefferson, but he had such an appreciation of learning.
And it was a great sadness to him that his crappy parents, particularly his mother, didn't see, she sent the older brother, Lord, because he got a little more complicated. Lawrence was only his half brother, but he got to go to England to study and George didn't. I always felt bad about it. And I think he lionized it.
It comes out in his farewell address where he emphasizes education. It's a little, his defense of our regime is a little different than that. There's much more stress on virtue, education and religion in Washington. People don't read the farewell address.
They don't read the fairly read the second half of it, which is about foreign policy. But the first half of it is just one of the greatest statements about what our country is all about. In defense of his parents, if your kid chops down a cherry tree and he's walking around with wooding, maybe education isn't going to be your first priority. It could be Alex, but if you read about his mother, he really had the mother from hell.
Oh, yeah. He didn't come to his inauguration. She never praised him. She was always, he didn't give her enough money.
This is the mother from hell, which proves that you can overcome your background. So we put a big stress on the accommodation of the whole constitutional order to the realities of modernity. These modern states are going to be large. They're going to be diverse.
They're going to be conflictual. They're going to be energetic and things you have to accommodate to that, even as you tried to preserve some previous profound virtues. Professor Landy, I was speaking with some students just yesterday, I was teaching, wrapping up my early modern global thought class, and some students expressed some dissatisfaction with modernity. And therefore, it's popular for these days to be post-liberalism and post this and all this stuff.
And what I tried to say to them, I hadn't read your paper. It would have been helpful this chapter of the book was I tried to express them that going back to people's times is unrealistic. Nobody wants to go back to an ancient polis. And what's realistic now in this day and age?
And I thought that another part of your chapter that was helpful was showing that you can't really survive as a small state anymore. I mean, if you survive as a small state, it's entirely at the pleasure of bigger states. What we're doing, you have to be enormous. There's going to be this economic machinery.
All these things are, it's just part, when you look at the alternatives available right now, that's what the founders were really doing. And try to figure out what kind of a regime would be best adapted to these circumstances. I don't know if some of these other folks just seem totally unrealistic in looking at alternatives. Well, I should tell you in this context, I'll tell you another kind of raison d'etre for the start of this project.
The book really kind of moved in some other directions. But I'm a student of Karen McWilliams, and so is Patrick Dining. And Patrick Dining wrote this Patuis book that ignored every important element of modernity. And I have to say, I took it somewhat personally because, you know, McWilliams is my godfather.
And that's part of why we wrote the book too. We didn't end up talking about him because his version is so luckily, I still a very minor eddy compared to these, so the progressive law professors and journalists. But I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, and I'll tell you, I came of a political age with some of those Dining-esque views.
And I'll tell you a great statement that I heard. It was at Michigan State at one of their science and technology conferences. And Werner Dannhouser got up and he said, yeah, oh, you guys, because there were a bunch of echo freaks attacking modernity. And I'm here because I have an artificial heart.
What's your story? I mean, and that really moved me. To turn your back on modernity is so cheap. And so also, you know, I think hypocritical, because these people, they don't go out and live on you.
In the 60s, people actually went out and lived on yurts. That's a good point. I give them more credit. Right.
These modern progenitors of those kinds of arguments, you know, have air conditioning. And electric cars. Electric cars. Don't give me stuff.
Don't get me started on electric cars. Oh, I love you. In their defense, they need modern air conditioning because of modern global warming. So I mean, I'm a bit more sympathetic to those lines of argument.
And so far as they point to the fact that to some degree, the liberal order can be self undermining. And there needs to be a kind of reinvigoration. I think this is some, at least a moderate form of this is pointed to in your argument, where you do show that it relies on something more than just sort of balancing a power. Right.
Oh, absolutely. This is the liberal order. And the liberal order is just too thin to survive on its own. It needs underpinnings of concern for mutual obligation and community.
That's why I'm so mad at the name. He takes ideas that I care, things I care about and just caricatures them. No, I I'll go back and say that again that human beings are complicated. And they really need a lot of reinforcement on their more, you know, the better angels of our nature.
We do have better angels of our natures, but it's so fragile. And it needs reinforcement. And per se, right, the liberal order doesn't give you that. What the liberal order gives you is a chance to cultivate these many of these things without the heavy hand of government.
That's, that's, I think it's as many virtues, but that's certainly one of the idea of limited government. Is it way of allowing people to cultivate the virtues that are needed to, to sustain this very difficult project? How do we cultivate those virtues within the liberal order? I mean, you mentioned Topeville.
Didn't Topeville sort of at least allude to some fear that I'll use some terms that you don't use, but that some of the things that some of the social capital will eat itself? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
He was worried. He was terribly worried. And of course, you know, I'm not saying that his, his way. Well, let's look at what he, what he endeared him to America, right?
It was the townships. Yes. The townships. And among the, well, I'm almost going to say, well, let's just say among the greatest virtues of the constitutional order and the most underappreciated, broadly speaking, is federalism.
Yeah, of course. Federalism is the key to somehow maintaining these terrific civic virtues that are hard to maintain. I mean, right, the states themselves, that's helpful because there's somewhat less heterogeneous and divisive the populations within them. That's not so true of the megastates, but, you know, life is, life is tough.
But mostly the states have done a more reasonable job of delegating authority to the localities. I mean, our locality to this, here, I'm going to say something happy. You haven't heard yet. Our localities are extremely powerful and extremely active, and they, you know, could be even better.
But it's still, I think, what distinguishes us from our sister republics who have many good qualities, like France, that we really still have some deep appreciation of the individual's ability to be a meaningful part of a relatively small whole. The lack of centralization, even here in Little National, Ohio, I mean, it's the first time in my life as an adult where I've lived in a small town. I know the mayor. Yeah, you know, I'm not here.
I mean, it's kind of remarkable. No, it's like, it's small enough to where you can know, folks, it's clear, like, I know, and I was friends, you didn't get that, you didn't get that at more head. I didn't know the mayor more and I was right. I took that back to your right when I lived in Eastern Kentucky, I knew the county judges, I knew the heads of the medical machines.
I was a pig and shit politically speaking, you would never have that kind of experience again. I'm talking about Kentucky is special. And you know, I don't want to deviate, I don't want to deviate the Constitution to my love of Kentucky. But but I did come to appreciate a lot of the Tuckfilly and principles in living in a small town.
We grew up in New York City, we always called it the city, like it was, you know, an oppressive octopus. When is I mean, I want to just ask Greg when he's going to run for philosopher King of Ashland, I feel like it's a nice competition. There are several philosopher things in Ashland. That's right.
It's the glory of Ashland is that it's a good company. I want to ask you, Mark, you're from, but maybe we'll get to that in the biographical section. Sure. I guess, I don't know, we can go for 35 minutes.
I got another question. What about the administrative state and experts? How does that fit into this? Because the money is so big.
It's a pretty constant bailiwick of the, legitimately, so it seems to me of the right, especially, but he's not elected folks who seem to be on the one hand very, very necessary, but on the other hand, sort of, you know, I sympathize with that critique. The best, there are great institutional thinkers who've done fabulous work. And I would stress especially Christa Muth and my colleague, Chef Melnick, who really dissected this thing. And Melnick doesn't like the term administrative state because it makes it sound too coherent.
But he's terribly troubled. And he is the best articulator. And so we have a chapter later in the book that is largely derived from the work of the Muth and Melnick. We call it, we talk about something called stealth government.
And that's largely about the abandonment of responsibility by the Congress. I didn't have to do it. It's the deepest problem, political problem I see in the country is the decline of Congress. And instead, because Congress is so incapacitated, so much power has devolved to bureaucrats and courts.
And again, the great, if you read Melnick on affirmative, well, in some ways, his deepest work has been on Title IX, where he just shows that this kind of run amok of title after all title, who can be against Title IX equal, you know, you're against it in Prince of God. It's destroyed college wrestling. Sorry, that's a minor equivalent. Oh, no, my son was a college wrestler, but it shouldn't have because that was just a misinterpretation.
Yeah, I know it shouldn't have. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, in fact, maybe we can even say Title IX is not so good, but the principle of a certain kind of principle is good. The principle is good.
A very good thing has happened in my lifetime, which is that girls aren't so much cheerleaders and growing long fingernails, they're playing volleyball and basketball. And this is a good, and so you see, I have some liberal, I'm a liberal. But Melnick shows how the agency would propose something far beyond what the law says, and then the courts would verify that. And then it might get back into a congressional committee who might then actually feed it into a renewal of the law.
He calls it leapfrogging. And I think it's a brilliant term for what happens. This kind of by by Congress ignoring what the agencies are doing, and by the courts, it really exacerbating what the courts often go beyond the agencies in expanding rulemaking and making life totally undermining the intent of, I think, these decent, decent principles. You see this in affirmative civil rights all the time, things that I quote stuff from Chris Caldwell's book about the absolute promise that Hubert Humphrey and some other senators made that there would be no affirmative action as a result of the 64 law.
And they made a, in the law, there is one minor piece of affirmative action, but it's only as it can only be invoked in return for demonstrated past discrimination. And that just, you know, the law still doesn't say anything much about affirmative action. And yet, look what we have. So this ladder, I actually want to tell the latter part of the book, because of this one thing that we do that I think is very unusual is to go so deeply into the framers and even talk about Hobbes and Locke and we don't talk much about enough about Montesquieu.
But we also talk about contemporary government, particularly this idea of stealth government is a big theme in the latter part of the book. And we do a kind of, we also talk about the New Deal and the Great Society to try to look at these seminal moments when some of these changes were kind of seeded. As I say, I'm a lot kinder to the New Deal than David's bosses are, but we're not so kind to the Great Society. And then we also have a chapter that I think you guys would love.
And this is really Dennis's chapter. He gives a kind of natural history of anti-constitutional thinking going all the way back to the anti-federalists with a lot of emphasis on even before of the pre-pro, some of the important pre-progressive, some of the idea, Garrison. And then later, the abolitionist, but not the Great Abolitionist Douglas. Frederick Douglas, not the other guy.
And he talks about Bellamy and a lot about Wilson and Crowley. He really wants to pave a kind of history of how this kind of thinking has always been there in one form or another. And I think it's important to recognize that. So I just wanted to more of a comment.
You referenced at one point Harvey Mansfield's teaming the Prince, the first chapter of which I think is just remarkable. But one of the things with the administrative state that just makes it so difficult is, you know, Mansfield points out that the nature of executive power to, you know, when it wants to sort of how it's good, it says, I'm the executive power. I've done this. When it wants to avoid blame, it says I'm just the executive power, blame Congress.
But the problem now is that who do you blame? Because Congress isn't doing anything. So you can blame the courts, which obviously is popular, especially from the left now that it's more conservative, but it was from the right when it was way more liberal. But now I guess all you could do is blame the deep state or something, but then you sound like a crackpot because there isn't a person.
And as you point out, it's not coherent. So it's strange. We've got the ills of monarchy where executive and legislative powers are combined, but without any accountability. And you can't point that they're throwing it.
It's just these. Yeah, I know. I know. It's a nameless faceless bureaucrats.
You see, but the real the real villain is the Congress, because why do they let the bureaucrats get away with this crap? I mean, why is it only the court? I mean, you read a lot of the court opinions and in many of the recent cases, the opinion, they're just terrific. And they really get the thing of the West Virginia case, in particular, the coal, what's in your coal case, where they really you know, Roberts just really shows what the administrative state is up to and how profoundly anti-constitutional it is.
But this the the the Congressmen themselves, I mean, I don't have a solution. We elect these jerks. We do. And they're not all on the left, God knows the jerks on the right have become an abomination.
But I worry, I worry, I really do. I have one last substantive question on this then before we break into some biographical questions by yourself. But maybe the second question makes more sense. I want to why is all this attack on the Constitution so popular right now?
But then my second question is the one I'm worse than. And it gets kind of circles back to what David asked a while ago. You point to the sort of how civic virtue is the bedrock against these kinds of issues. What if anything can we do to rein big rates of virtue in this country?
Is there I mean, I realize that's beyond our any of our pay grades, but maybe there's stuff we can do to at least bridge it. Well, I want to start with the positive that there is for the first time in my maybe in my lifetime, a serious effort to do it. Yeah, right. Of which we are we are all players.
But there's you know, there's now some really serious leadership and actual institutions. So I'm not as I don't want to over rate it, but it's you know, it makes me helps me sleep at night. We just have to keep pressing the arguments. We just have to and try to find try to you know, the idea besides the Congress, the other difficulty is the state of our parties that we've allowed.
I mean, you know, you live in Ashland, Ohio. There are so many sensible people out there. There's a world where there's a nice people. Even where I live in the bastion of vocation, most people are pretty sensible.
And that's nice. They're spoken to in ways that they passively accept. You see in their personal lives, they're not crazy. They raise their children.
As I say, it's an interesting comparison because in a way you'd expect it in Ashland, right? Because I'll say this probably more than I should share on our show, but I'll say so my little town's be conservative, but you know, I never my colleagues at the University are fairly liberal. I'm sure that some of itself identifies woke or whatever the positive version of that is. But it's amazing to me how conservative many of them are in their personal lives.
And they're personal lives. And so I'm like, how do you not see that that's like they take care of their kids, they send to a private school or a church, well, the public school's not good. If they like they it's it's stable to parent household, the mom stays at home, for example, in a lot of cases, they love the idea they can live in a town where they can live on one person one person's income. They attend church, you know, all these things.
I'm like, how do you not see that this is what should be replicated out writ large? But anyway, it is it clearly is a problem. The level of political education is so low. And Greg, I don't have a good answer for that.
Fair enough. Fair enough. Can I give the first biographical question? Yeah, sure.
Why have you not fled Boston so you can root for the Yankees in peace? Because boy, do I have an answer for you? You think people in Boston hate the Yankees? They don't hate the Yankees as much as I hate the Yankees.
I'm a Dodger. I was a Dodger fan. The only team I've heard when the Yankees is the Dodgers when they left me. They left me.
They did that. That was that's personal, buddy. You're dating yourself now because you're referring to Brooklyn Dodgers. Right.
They're the only Dodgers that ever really existed. This other team is, you know, some pigment of somebody's imagination. I have a fun story to my grandfather, who's from Georgia. We didn't have a team until the 60s.
So his favorite team growing up was a Dodgers as well. And then he said that my grandfather's a World War II veteran and he was a prisoner of war. I may have told this sort of for on the show, but they would send German agents in to try and spy on the POWs. And they said they could always sniff out the German spies because they'd ask about the Yankees.
And real Americans, not real Americans were pulling for the Yankees. That's right. That's right. That's right.
I mean, the Yankees were the team of the rich. And it comes that you can see it in the divide in Manhattan, the East side rooted for the Yankees and the West side mostly rooted for the Dodgers. Some people rooted for the Giants. And I could, that's okay.
Giants were a nice team. But Alex, I'm sorry, we have a very serious, it's almost like a religious war that you and I are involved in. I'm not a Yankees fan. In fact, I'm not even a baseball fan.
From you as a market, by the way, Alex grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. So that tells you a lot. See how he found out. That's really Yankees.
That's the time. That's the tennis and polo. Those are his sports. I'm more of the champagne and caviar set in Connecticut.
So I don't know if they like to poke for me from where from. So how did you from Brooklyn? How did you end up? Well, my family is all from Brooklyn.
But my grandfather made a huge success first in the butcher. But he was a butcher. He made enough money. Excuse me?
He killed a butcher. No, he didn't butcher people. Okay. I still was.
He did not butcher pigs. He butchered cows. But he was very successful. He's a very interesting man.
And he had some health problems. He retired young. And he made a good living as an investor in the stock market. And so they moved.
This was a big status thing. They moved first on the lower side in a tenement to a nicer part of Brooklyn. And then they moved to Manhattan. That's so I grew up in kind of privileged way.
I mean Manhattan was really. Where'd you go to high school in New York? Oh, you're going to love this. Okay.
I'm going to. I just want to see if you can ask him in England boarding schools, Mark. I didn't go to any New England boarding schools. My parents were on the left.
And they both were public school teachers. And my mother hated the New York City public school system. And so I went to this progressive elementary and high school with the wonderful name of the Walden school. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's very well known. Yeah.
And it actually suited me very well. And I got some really good education there and had a very good time. I was taught by a lot, you know, by very left wing teachers. But some of them were remarkably.
I got some terrific education there. So I was a child of the left. And I grew up on 96 feet in Manhattan. And that takes you to Oberlin, those ideological equibities.
And then you're intellectual biography. When did you get interested in the life of the mind in a serious way in philosophy in particular? Okay. So let me let me tell you, I'll take the long route if you have time.
We can't time though. I always loved reading. I was very interested in sports as a kid. And so I read the New York Post, which had a great sports section.
Still the best sports section I've ever seen. And it was a liberal paper in those days. And it had all these columnists. And I read them all.
Max Lerner, I don't know if these probably don't mean anything to you. But they had this one really eccentric, iconoclastic columnist named Murray Kempton. And I recommend him to all of you. And he showed me that politics was more interesting than sports.
He had such a interesting, as I say, iconoclastic under. He was the first liberal to ever talk about how talented Eisenhower was. And he defended the old Tammany Bois and the most common disapio against the progressives that were running against them. And I just all of a sudden this seemed interesting to me.
And I also, I did, I went to pretty good, you know, my parents read books to me. I like to read books. And then I also had a very good experience in high school. I had a French teacher who was a real kind of French intellectual type.
And we read Camus and Sartre and Freud and Marx. And that really turned me on. I just really liked it. I went to Oberlin because I didn't get into Harvard to be completely frank.
I loved Oberlin. Oberlin had the most marvelous government department, not just Kerry McWilliams, but he was my, he was really my intellectual godfather. He had, he taught political philosophy. He taught many different things, but American government.
And I, and you know, he was a character such that he, he was single. And he would love to invite, he developed a clique of students. This is, he was completely irresponsible guy, clique of students who would be invited over to the house to drink bourbon and listen to him. I learned more sitting around drinking bourbon and listening to McWilliams talk about politics and political ideas.
It was amazing. And so that was a big step. That was a big step. This is a name more people should know, right?
I mean, care. Well, you guys should be real influential. Yeah. You should read it.
You should read it. Like digression mark to just a minute or so on who he is and what one should start with. Oh, okay. Yeah.
I have strong feelings about what you start with because he was not, not all of his writing is of equal quality, I think. And I would start with his, he was really a great essayist, probably his greatest writing talent. And there's two very good collections of his essays were edited by one is actually edited by well, Susan McWilliams was involved in both of them, his daughter, who teaches at Pomona. I know it.
What's the Claremont school? McKenna? No, she doesn't teach him McKenna. What's one of the other ones?
Yeah, they're fun. Yeah. Very prominent one. Yeah.
Pomona, right? It's Pomona. She teaches at Pomona. So those essays are pretty self-contained.
You can really, you know, you can get a very good feeling about Kerry from reading those two volumes of essays. His big book was really his PhD dissertation. And it's called The Idea for Eternity in America. I just recently reread it for a panel we had at the Northeastern political science meetings.
It's a very mixed bag. It's a very mixed bag. I don't think he had fully intellectually matured when he wrote that book, but it has unbelievably good essays on the Puritans, Emerson, Hawthorne, The Row. If you skip the, if you're going to read for Turnity, I would pretty much skip the until he gets to the specific writers.
There's a certain 60s and also from my Straussian friends, I see a certain kind of loosey-gooseyness about the ancients. He loved the ancients. And if he wasn't, he was essentially a left winger, so he couldn't fully embrace the Strausians, but he and Harvey Mansfield were quite good friends. Right.
So does that take you to Harvard, Mark? No, it takes me to Eastern Kentucky to dodge the draft. Eastern Kentucky was so important to me because it really undermined whatever social democratic outlook I still had, because living up there in the mountains and being very friendly with a lot of ordinary people, I saw that welfare was so destructive. That's really when I learned to question my ideas.
The people who were working were cheerful and funny and charming and the people who weren't working were creeps. And they're all white, so there's no race issue here. That was very profound for me. Then I came to Harvard and didn't like Harvard much, and I didn't have the guts to study with Harvey Mansfield because I thought he was a right-wing lunatic until I heard him lecture, then I regretted that I hadn't studied with him.
But James Q. Wilson was a very powerful, James Q. Wilson really was one of the most powerful thinkers of his era. He just had a mind that was analytically unbelievably sharp, and he just wouldn't put up with with with with shibboleths.
He just wouldn't do it. So you know, if you studied bureaucracy with that book was amazing. I picked that up freshman year at a used bookstore. And because you know, I always hear my father complain about the bureaucracy, and that was such a fine accessible book too.
Yeah, I once introduced him at a talk when he was speaking at BC, and I said, James Q. Wilson is the greatest student of bureaucracy. And yes, I've read Max Vaver. Yeah.
My curiosity and colleagues tell me Vaver has lots of virtues, but as a student the bureaucracy that wouldn't give you a nickel for him. There you go. So Wilson was very, it was a little bit latent, because Wilson wasn't, at that time, entirely the nicest guy in the world. So I had some resistance to him but then he met low and he became a great guy.
I became friendly with him over the years, Wilson is big. And then I went job hunting, right? I had to get a job and had the choice of SUNY Buffalo or Boston College. Sam Bearer, my other great, a great friend and mentor in a way, but intellectually, Wilson was more important.
Bearer said, go to SUNY Buffalo, it's a very important school. I went to Wilson, he said, if you can have Bob Sigliano and Bob Faulkner as your colleagues, go to Boston College. Yeah, yeah. And I was just, you know, this really was not, not my choice really, you know.
It seemed a little day-class-a, and also, you know, my mother was worried that I'd be, you know, crucified. But that department's still very good, but there was something special when you had low and fall and Faulkner and Broul. When we would talk about it, yeah, we're, I'm 39, but Alex and Greg are in their early 40s. When we were undergraduates, Boston College was the fabled department.
I mean, it was just, we would all say, you were just kind of ignorant and silly with all those strawsians gathered in one place. I mean, it's amazing, but everybody there was good, right? The American is everybody. Well, the American has got better over time.
When I got there, the American is sworn so strong, but then we hired Hale and then later we hired, but see, Melnick, we didn't bring on until the late 90s. So I don't want to overstate how good the American was. But Bob Sigliano was kind of in both camps. No, the American was good because of Sigi and me and Dennis.
And then it got much better when we acquired Melnick and fear scary is good. So it's, the American is stronger now, but the theory was outrageous. And you also had a funny guy living to the side, but very related in Ernest Ford. Can you have any stories about him before we go to Lainey now?
Ernest Ernest, Ernest was an amazing guy. I just, I actually did get to know Ernest mainly in the lunchroom because he was teaching in the theology department. We didn't overlap in any real way, but he was just a man of unbelievable brilliance and wit. My God, he was so secular.
I always had to pinch myself at this man as a beast I'm talking to. And he did this incredible thing. David Lowenthal was already, I think, 70. And he had fallen in love with an undergrad who he then became a grad student of his.
And they decided to marry. No. They decided to marry. Well, you can imagine the shock waves that went through the surrounding world when this happened.
And he did jettison his wife, I mean, David Lowenthal was no saint. But so Fortin agreed to preside at the wedding. I was at the wedding. Wow.
And because she was Catholic. And... Well, he broke a number of rules. Well, exactly.
He's like, you know what? I would say solution, I've got a Strausian priest. Yes, Strausian priest. Ernest gave a homily that I never, unfortunately, I don't think it's written down.
It was perfect to somehow make some kind of sense and give some kind of blessing to this union. I really love Ernest Fortin. I'm not that familiar with his work and I don't pretend to have been a student of his. But you combine Ernest and Lowenthal and then my two favorites, Faulkner and Brook.
It was just, it was heady stuff. It was heady stuff. I missed him. I talked to him all the time, but he's in New Mexico.
So they did, and hail himself. And getting hail on board, and I just, we just talk all the time. And we found that we can write together because we have different sort of different talents. It's very much similar views and things, but the different talents.