Michael Anton on Montesquieu

Welcome back to the new thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me is always my good friend, Alex Prive. How are you, Alex? Doing well, David.

How are you? Happy birthday to your son. Thank you. And again, turn six.

You told an entire town of Wilmington, North Carolina, which was pleasant. And how are you, Greg? I'm fine. I like you're done with funding introductions.

You're good for an Alex and Greg. But it's good. Yeah. Still nice beer.

You can't call you what it usually calls you, which is daddy. That's right. That's a good start to the show. Are you guys watching on summer vacation now?

Greg, I think he's never on vacation. He always seems to be under the wire for something. I do too much work. Yeah.

So really like to put you on the spot since Cornell is so interested in your whole life training for the listeners. Where are you in the translation? I have one and a half books roughly translated. I'd like to get the second book translated.

The summer polished it up and then maybe try and send it to the proposal. And then that's when we hold pangle at gunpoint and that's right. I was thinking feathers and tickling, but yeah, same idea. Hence what he's into.

So today we have Michael Anton, who's a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, but also my colleague and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. His latest book is the stakes America at the point of no return. We brought up Mike on the show with Manseo. I made a joke about Harvey having one best dressed trowcy and for 80 years running.

But then he corrected us. I don't know if this was recorded or after. And he said, no, when Michael Anton got on the scene, I started getting second place. That said, we're here to discuss modest use considerations on the cause of the greatness of the Romans and their decline.

And I think we should also have some considerations on the causes of the greatness of Michael's sartorial decisions and its decline. He says he always wears a Hillsdale shirt everywhere and seen one, I think you said, or I can run on him. No, I had one on it. I built some water on it.

So it looked insane. It was just dark from what I would have been that, but I changed my shirt. Like how many suits do you own? I don't know.

Oh, okay. And then I was keeping mine. I used to be a daily commuter to an office building in Manhattan. No, no, that's right.

And in Washington, I fell back in Brooklyn, Washington, New York for more than 20 years going to an office by days a week. So there was some cause for it. Now I'm a college professor. And so I can wear linen and summer and tweeds in the wear.

And I still wear a jacket and tie or tie or tie or tie or tie or I still need a suit for public appearances. But I'm not, you know, I don't have the same demand for it. And then I used to plug it in. I mean, obviously it's like, I just, maybe I, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Greg is always, Greg will always text Alex and I. So hey, I have this question on suspenders, you know, email Mike Anton. I was like, I don't want to bother him. He's really busy with this stupid ask question.

He's like, no, please. And so of course we sent you an email and you were kind enough to respond. That's right. That's right.

I mean, quick with a very good advice. I need a good name. It's an easy question. There's really only one brand is Albert Thurston, made in England for, I don't know, 10 million years.

The only one I consider might be Trafalgar, which are US made, and they're quite good. I think Thurston's are here. Yeah. The only other question I have is I need a Navy summer glazer.

We'll talk about that one. Yeah. So today, as Alex mentioned, where Mike's here to discuss a book, he's also written an article on it some years ago for interpretation, but it's a Montescuse considerations on the causes of the greatness of the Romans and their decline. We're using the David Lowenthal of Blessed Memory translation.

It's a kind, it's a short book. It's peculiar. It's 23 chapters who's first published in Holland in 1734, but anonymously. So I'd love to hear from Mike on why he thinks Montescuse made that move.

And it's, became on the scene, it's sandwiched between the publication of the Persian letters and the spirit of the laws. Just another quick thing before I kick off with a brief overview is there is no kind of preface to their book. There's no introduction, like in the spirit of the law. So it's hard for one to gain at least a cursory orientation.

It just launches into a seemingly straightforward but a dumb rated history abroad. Is that fair? Mike? Yeah.

Although it's less a history that a philosophic account, remember, it's considered. So it has an unusually long title for Montescuse. Considerations on the causes of the great, not just considerations on the greatness and their climate on the causes of the greatness of the Romans and their decline in French, I would call this very 13 words. Persian letters is two words, depending on whether you want to count a little bit of a separate article or a little bit of one.

Both of those are much shorter titles. Both of them are longer books. The spirit of the laws is a massive book. I think the Cambridge University Press translation that all of us I assume use is clocked in over 700 pages about 750 Persian letters somewhere between 200 and 300.

As you correctly said, this was about almost exactly midway between the publication of the two. Paul Ray, a colleague of mine at Hillsdale and Historian, but sort of both Historian and a political philosophy professor as well, has done the research and he has determined, and he proved this to my satisfaction. We put it this way, looking at the secondary sources that he marshaled. We want to see how to plan to write a book called Reflections on the Universal Monarchy in Europe, which would have had three parts.

And this would have been one of the parts. One of the other parts is the section on the English Constitution, which made it into the spirit of the law. Now long chapter, I want to say book nine, I can't remember exactly. On the committee, it's very long for, do you know how the spirit of the laws is some of those chapters are a paragraph, some of them are a sentence, right?

This one is long one, it's 12 pages or so. And then the centerpiece, which would have given that book its title, Considerations on the Universal Monarchy, Reflections on the Universal Monarchy, Europe, he never published. And the reason was, according to Ray, which seems plausible to me, that it was too obviously a kind of anti-French monarchical track. That is to say, not anti-French monarchy per se, but anti-its present and especially immediate past practices and its temptations to expand its power to gobble up and incorporate into itself into the monarchy as much of Europe as possible, along with the sort of Carolingian dream or even the dream of the Roman Empire having united Europe under one of government.

And much as we thought that this was heuristic, doomed to failure and bad for Europe were it to succeed. And but then he thought apparently that he had been a little too outspoken, too obvious what he was going for, that the French authorities would, and much as he was, we know he got into a lot of trouble in his life for some of the things he published. He was he was, to speak inachronistically docked, tried to publish things and honestly he never got away with it. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, he was always caught in his books for Van. So, I mean, the two that he tried to publish pseudonymously or anonymously. So he just buried the universal monarchy. It existed in his papers, it's been found, it's you can get it now, but he never published his lifetime.

He wrote the spirit of the laws with great care, as he says in the preface, you know, he says basically this is in the preface of the Spirit of the Law's famously, this book may appear to be disorganized, but you know, don't judge it by your first, I'm not quoting exactly, but you don't judge it by your first impression. Look for the design of the author and the design of the work. You know, he's basically saying, I have an intricate plan here. It's all thought through just because you don't see it at first, doesn't mean it's there.

It's a golden thread, isn't that what he says, something like that? Like there's a golden thread that goes through anyway. Sorry. I don't remember that.

I just remember that. I just remember that. Michael only says, I will read you know, in chapter two, right, it's going to have a thread. So there's no preference, as you said, to the consideration.

None at all. Instead of a preface in a way, it has that unusually long title, right? It is kind of the preface. It's consideration.

So, a reference to thinking, considerations on causes, an imminently philosophic topic of the greatness grandeur and French of the Romans, of the Romans, of the particular people, but of the most successful, and we may say, long of a sort of long-witted single people through various regimes of the entire world, or at least of the Western world, and their declines. So, he's going to tell you the rise in the fall. He'll tell you kind of a whole story. And he's told in chronological order, he begins at the beginning, he ends at the end.

So, he begins basically at 753 BC, he ends at 1453 AD. But it's not history. It isn't a count of, it is considerations of causes. There's all kinds of things that he leaves out, right?

He doesn't tell you to leave the full story. It's a bit like the spirit of the laws in that even though no single chapter is quite as short as some of the, you know, the little almost epigramatic chapters in the spirit of the laws, many of them are very short, and the paragraphs are very short and terse. And we know, and I found this very clever. This is super stressing to me, but this is a stressing podcast or whatever.

We know that he counted the paragraphs because in one footnote he references, he says something like, see the 17th, I leave you all in terms of what that might mean, paragraph of check. So, he tells you one time that the number of paragraphs is significant, you're supposed to go back and look at yourself and look at it. So, then you realize I have to count them all. So, they're all kinds of people.

Like he's, and his paragraph breaks, they're very long paragraphs. These paragraphs, just, you know, some of them are one sentence or two. It's very clipped. It's very terse the way it's written.

So, it's clearly not meant to be a substitute history to livey or to any modern account, let's say a century later or a century and a half later, you know, Momsons, monolithic, and for how many volumes Momsons it is, or given or something like that, given writing a little earlier than Momsons, a little bit later than Momsons cute. It's meant to point you in certain directions. One other kind of thought, I've tried to figure out, you know, actually I found a book on the history of footnotes. He believed somebody wrote such a book.

Well, I'm glad they did. Not that I read the whole thing, but it's unusual in that this book is footnotes, right? Most political philosophy before this time has no footnotes at all. I couldn't prove or establish that this is the first book of political philosophy.

This is, but no, I'm not really sure. It's certainly one of the very earliest. And to me, what I compare it to is Machiavelli, who never footnotes anything. Now, this book is very similar on the surface to the dysparsis, right?

Machiavelli's dysparsis, which is all about the Romans, which even though it purports to be dysparsis on the first decade of Pius' Liddy, meaning the first 10 books. So, basically, Rome from the founding up to about near the outbreak of the first, of the first cuticle, which happens in the liddy second decade, which is lost. We don't have it. And then it picks up again what we have in book 21, the outbreak of the second cuticle, right?

Machiavelli, in fact, covers the entirety of Rome history, talks about it. So, everything he draws on not just Liddy, but Plutarch, Casa, to Salas. You name it. Every just diocasius, Abi, you name it.

Every historian you ever talked about, or every ancient source. And Machiavelli, not just often, but constantly quotes or borrows from these sources without telling you, forcing you to find what he's talking about. You might not even go out looking for his source because you may not even recognize that he's quoted a source or that he's referring to a source, unless you have this massive reading of classical history kind of already in your head. And you'll wait a minute.

I remember that story. It's in political, it's in political, right? Machiavelli does a little bit of the work for you by constantly putting on his stuff. And he says, no, go look at it here.

And then you go look at what he says to source, and he's changed something, or he's left something out, or he's spotted a little differently. So, in that sense, it's a slightly easier book than the discourses. He nudges you in the right direction to find the sources and to find instances or indications that he's playing you sometimes, which I find kind of helpful. One of the other things that's amazing about the footnotes is just the overwhelming extent of this guy's reading.

You know, there's a line somewhere in Strauss. I think it's in What is Political Philosophy, but it's in one of the essays where he talks about Marx and Nietzsche, as we're liberally educated to a degree to which we cannot even hope to aspire. It's a liberal education and responsibility. Oh, it is.

Okay. It's wonderful. Towards the end. Right.

And so I'm like, okay, that's a despair. And you see, well, like, but we read this coming from Strauss too, is way better educated. Right. And I think like, okay, I've read pretty much all of the sources that I can realize.

And I think I know something about classical history. You read, you read, lots of views, footnotes, and there's he's citing authors and sources. I haven't even heard of it when I first picked up the score. I got to look them up, see what source he's citing.

I have to figure out if some of these writers even are. It's so immense. I mean, he read absolutely everything. I just don't know how one human mind could find the time to do it, much less retain it, much less get something out of it, right?

Really derive lessons from it. It's astounding and impressive. Yeah. Butterworth made that same.

Do you remember that Greg during that seminar? He made the exact same point with the spirit of the laws. In fact, you're counting chapters. Like, I don't know if you've heard the conversation between Crystal and Mansfield on the spirit of the laws, who's probably their last conversation, where he talks about a numbering chapters.

He kind of lays bare some interesting things. Well, I am reading right now. This is not entirely off topic. I can say this.

I don't think I'm breaking a comment. It's already gave me the nanny church's next book. I've been reading it. It's a book I'm Machiavelli, most of which I have read before because most of it has been published somewhere.

That's so he's very smart the way he does it, right? The Machiavelli's virtue, a great book. The bulk of it was published somewhere. And I know he had a long term plan of how he was good.

Stressed in this too. How he was going to put it all together into a book. In what order it was going to be and it was going to have a beginning, middle, and end of all that. But in the meantime, let's get them into journals and keep going.

So most of what's in this new book, which will be called Machiavelli's effectual truth has been published before. But there's a gigantic book within a book, chapter eight on Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which alone runs to about 125 pages of manuscript. Maybe it might even be 140. I'm on the internet chapter now.

I haven't gotten through it. It's the best thing ever on Montesquieu since Pangol, and maybe he's already in lo and lonathol himself who also wrote the whole chapter on the history of political philosophy. They wrote a really great, but very, very difficult article on book one of the spirit of laws in the APSR in 1959 or 61 or something. Get that, you haven't.

But this thing from Harvey is going to change the world. Probably not, but it'll change the people's approach to the Machiave scholarship. And I'm sure he must, I haven't seen that conversation. I have a sort of allergy to crystal these days.

I wonder why. But I'm sure that Harvey is drawing on his research for that chapter in making this card. Oh, yeah. He says that explicitly.

So you mentioned that this book is not meant to be read as a straight history. It is a kind of philosophic treatment of that history. And that's obviously revealed in the title considerations on the causes. And even draws a lot of attention to the causes probably most notably or earliest in chapter nine, which has the title two causes of Rome's ruin.

And if I can just read a brief paragraph from that he gives, I mean, I guess it's in the middle. I don't think it is, but he says this is on page 92 in the loathol translation, Rest in Power. He says the following, he says, if the greatness of the empire ruined the Republic, the greatness of the city ruined it no less, I think that in a way gets to the heart of his thesis, right, which is that you think that the causes of the greatness of the Romans and their decline, that these might be separate causes for each, yet he pretty clearly indicates here that the ruin of the Republic was caused by the greatness of the empire on the one hand and the greatness of the city so that in a way that it's the same causes or there's a nexus of causes, some of which caused the greatness and the decline while some of them only contribute to the greatness. So I thought maybe we could just spend probably most of the episode of a bit of time talking about what the causes are of the greatest order, the cause of the first time if I recall this correctly, the first time he uses the word cause but not in the title, but he's in the text.

He says the triumphs were the principle cause of the greatest city came and the triumphs were, okay, let's back up one second, right, it's not a history. In fact, the book presumes that you basically know the history of Rome. So Mázquez either probably is a combination of a couple of things. One is he just thinks an educated person in his time, knows everybody studies Rome, he has that famous sentence in spirit of the law, where he says, one can never leave the Rome, they're just around it, they're, and especially in his day, elite education, aristocratic education was totally dominated by classical learning by the Romans.

So he can presume from an educated reader of certain, you know, intelligence that they know Rome. He can also presume or hope or expect that if you're going to study this book with care, you're going to look at this but not, and you're going to go to the sources and you're going to learn Rome because you want to understand, you can't learn Roman history from this book, it's a little, it's two-tersons to ever come back. So the triumphs were the main cause. They were, as we know, victory parades awarded to a successful general, general's a bit misleading because Roman didn't have generals away, we understood it.

They had annually elected councils who were both local leaders and military leaders at the same time. So real division in the Roman Republic between two. In fact, you could even say that the military aspect of being a council was more important, superseded to political aspect of being a council, right? And if you won a great victory, you were awarded a parade through the city in which you carry behind you or in front of you as the case may be, but capture the spoils.

This was considered the very highest honor of the city, you could be so, and you were only a council for one year. And so if you wanted to try it, you had to get out there and be a fight, right? In Machiavelli, I was tempted to say make clear, but they never really make things super clear. But they lead you to figure out that Roman diplomacy, and in fact, Mosty is actually reasonably blunt in chapter, sorry, which one is it?

The six, the conduct Romans pursued to subjugate all peoples. He's actually quite blunter than Machiavelli, and even in a way more cynical, not in terms of clarity of thought, but an expression about how completely duplicitous Roman diplomacy was, how tricky they were, how they pretended to be pious, and to always honor those, but always look for loopholes and found ways to keep conflicts going or start new ones, precisely so that as he puts it somewhere, I think in the second passage of his earlier recording, ambition never lost the moment, right? So he's calling it like the triumph is the main cause of the greatness, because the triumph was this super carrot dangling in front of human ambition that all of these great officials and calls so desperately wanted that it spurred them to grand action. So the title of an article that I gave mention, I called it the, I refer to the book as a case study in the cycle of regime, right?

So this is a theory that all over classical philosophy, perhaps most famously, or most, if not concisely, kind of fully developed in Polytheus book six, right? That necessity sort of spurs of people to be greatness, it just spurs of people to virtue, your poor, your vulnerable, you might get killed any moment, you have to cultivate the virtues and become strong and tough, but it becoming strong and tough, then you start winning, and in winning you get rich, you get complacent, and people can no longer threaten you anymore, and then you start to think there are too many threats, and the virtue that brought you this power and this wealth turns to the wish to indulge in wealth, right? The kind of softness. And one of the themes of this book is that the Romans were subject to this no less than any other people, what made them different, or what set them apart, is for how long they resisted that decline, right?

Not that they resisted forever, but what he's saying in the passage you quoted, I think, is not unique to the Romans and his judgment, but it's maybe best exemplified by the Romans. They became so strong and the wealth poured in at a certain point, even they could not resist the allure of that wealth. So, and one other interesting thing is too, that chapter, that's chapter 9, there's only 23 chapters in this book, so he's already talking about decline in the title of chapter 9, look how early the decline begins. So let me just say something quickly about the structure of the book, 23 chapters, that means the central one, if I have my math correct, it's chapter 12, somebody creeping on wrong there, it's the one on Caesar.

Now another interesting aspect of it, so he makes Caesar the center in the hinge point of the book, which makes that the most of us who know Roman history, right? This is the transition for Republic to Empire, right? This is the kind of hinge point of history. The book also he speeds up and slows down how fast he goes, and with a, he goes very quickly at the beginning, he goes very quickly at the end, slows down toward the middle until you get that Caesar chapter, chapter 12, it only covers two years, only covers about two years, and then he starts speeding up again, and by the beginning he covers about 250 years, covers the entire period of the king, just like the look on of Livy, the entire period from the founding of the city to the expulsion of the park, and a little bit of else.

At the end he covers, as I reckon, was something like 700 years from sort of the middle or late Byzantine all the way to the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks and 14th degree, right? But because he makes very clear the decline of the Romans begins, we know, we start thinking the decline is like, you know, 280, maybe the death of Marcus and Commodus going down into the Colosseum, and he puts it much, much, much earlier. I'm looking for it, there's a passage, and I think it's even earlier than that. So chapter 9, two causes of Rome's ruin.

Yeah, here it is in chapter 7, in chapter 7, the end of chapter 7, we're very early in this poetry chapter, he says, it was then that Pompeii, so this is the 13th paragraph, Pauli, page 81, it was then that Pompeii, in a rapid succession of victories, completed the splendid work of Rome's reign. So Pompeii, who precedes Caesar, who precedes, you know, dictator for 10 years, dictator for life, assassination, the second triumvirate, the battle of Actium, Octavian becoming Augustus, becoming the first console and all this crap, all this stuff that we think of as the end, he says it was all over with Pompeii, right? That's much earlier than any traditional or historical reckoning or conception would have you. So the philosopher's telling you there was something rotten in the state of Denmark that coined it in after a phrase, long before the average, not even the average, but the above average, the educated reader thinks there was.

Oh wait, Mike, is he playing fast and loose here? Or is this a kind of shock to the system for the educated reader? I mean, most people say, I think this is still true, not a whole lot of Strauss'ings anymore, but it was an unorthodox interpretation when Strauss Rothow thought some Machiavelli published in 58. And he says that for Machiavelli, the peak of Rome was about the victory in the Second Kingdom War.

It was all downhill from there. So the battle of Xab and 202 BC, we think Rome has a lot of glide path up, right? It's got another 300 years, at least maybe 400 years of great strength. And in conventional terms, it does.

The territory control keeps going up. The size and power of the army keeps going up. The wealth keeps going up. I mean, it keeps going up up and away.

But something that Machiavelli is examining, something in the soul of the people, the political virtue of the people and of the state itself, the city itself is going down from that period on. And that there was something inherently not merely risky, but almost inevitably degrading about moving beyond the unification of the Italian peninsula and perhaps the major central med islands, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, going beyond those boundaries. That really, once they went into Spain and started to fight the Carthaginians in Spain and then subjugated, my first made allies have subjugated a lot of Spanish tribes, the Cal Tiberians. That was when they first decided to put foreigners under the yoke and not let them go.

And that, well, actually, that's a bit much because of course they did it to the say-bines and the Latin's and these were all foreigners. But these were these were togated peoples in the Roman church. They were togated peoples in the Italian peninsula. They were the Romans getting the Latin language from the Latin's knowledge from themselves.

So it's only a trust in its own. There's a kind of commonality that makes the Italian peninsula unifiable in republican terms that once they go outside those boundaries in Strauss' interpretation, Machiavelli, which I agree with, leads to a dark place. And Montesquis seems to be making that same conclusion. He's making it just a little bit more openly and boldly than Machiavelli does.

Because Machiavelli has a- this is one other thing. If I didn't learn it from Ray, he certainly drew it out for me and reinforced it. So I owe him for this insight. Right?

Machiavelli has a kind of dual purpose in that he wants to seem to be praising Rome, but he has to criticize Rome, but he does the criticism so kind of subtly and overtly that most readers miss it and they think of the discourse as just a monument to the glory of ancient Rome. And why can't we get that back in the take that? And that's what Machiavelli says at the beginning. Strauss is really the first commentator to come along and really show how Machiavelli's ultimate judgment of Rome is negative.

Montesquis much more open about his negative judgment of Rome, both in terms of the consequences the Roman conquest of the ancient world had on mankind. But Machiave's also much more openly negative of ancient virtue generally. And the harshness it requires, he's a lot more sympathetic to Christianity than Machiavelli is openly and covertly. Mansfield really does draw this out in that great chapter of his forthcoming book as how his criticism, his criticism, his pretty deep misgivings of ancient virtue, which he seems to praise.

And he is obviously impressed by this kind of extraordinary, unselfish, I should say, dedication to the common good, which could prevail in the ancient republic at its best. And the unity that allowed these ancient republics to do things that are unimaginable and more pluralistic if you want to be positive or advised if you want to be negative society, that make those kinds of things unthinkable cause astonishment in us when we read about them. But these all had serious downsides, I think which both thinkers were aware of, and that interestingly, which Machiavelli, who is the more radical, and if you want to say cynical of the two hides to a greater extent, then Machiavelli, who is the more moderate, and perhaps less cynical of the two draws out more, makes a little clearer to the reader. Well, I mean, if he's more supportive of Christianity, that might explain why he's more willing to be explicit about it.

Can we return to the question of the truth? I think the idea, he's not ultimately supportive. He's less dismissive and he's willing to sort of get it, it's due, that is to say, he thinks it had positive effects on the soul of man. Like, Machiavelli in Strauss shows that Machiavelli was actually as much as much as, Machialli seems to delight in examples of ancient cruelty so long as it was successful in advancing the common good in certain ways.

So he'll praise somebody like Apopically's. He'll praise these shocking deeds. He praises the severity of Manly and Storquatus in executing his own son for insubordination, even though he's son won the little skirmish that he violated orders and became a fight. And Strauss shows that in the end, Machiavelli actually sees the downsides of these things, but pretends like he doesn't.

Machiavelli is much more willing to say, it's good that we have Christianity to stop in the soul of man, because these things really were atrocities. But he doesn't really ever take on. And I think it doesn't disagree with Machiavelli's basic criticism of Christianity in the way it divides the soul, what it does to earthly politics, the division, which of loilties between this world is the next time a temple prince and spiritual prince, all that. So he doesn't reject that in total.

He's a lot more sympathetic to its effect on the individual soul in the way it's smoothed over some of the really harsh practices that antiquity, that were very common in antiquity, because he says at one point, this isn't a much later chapter, in his praise of Christianity is in a way expressed more in the negative about the ancient, right? That he says that the Romans, he says they made sport of human nature in terms of the way they treated their children in particular and their slaves. That he doesn't cite here, but he's perfectly in keeping with what he means. Like, manly has taught quite a spell, felt completely justified in killing his own son, both as a military commander, hey, you're in sport and as a father, you can't, I own you, you're mine, you mess with me, I can kill you.

That's just unthinkable for under Christianity and must be said that particular part, that's an advancement toward a better understanding of human nature and toward justice. Yeah, I mean, you get intimations, sometimes almost overt statements of Machiavelli in nature on Christianity, but on the question of the in this work, but on the question of the triumphs, because in working out the causes, he makes certain statements here, there's causes, but then he also focuses on Maxims, right? He mentions this specifically in the title of chapter 18, new Maxims adopted by the Romans, which queued me up to some of the earlier mentions of Maxims, but I want to specifically look at the triumphs because this, I think also connects to Machiavelli, I was really interested to get your thoughts on this. The triumphs seem on the one hand to have provoked serious study of the art of war, and he says at one point that so long as they were really committed to the art of war, they were fine, and that seems to be the key to their longevity, their great longevity, because even quite late in the work, he's saying, yeah, they were still committed to the art of war.

On the one hand, on the other hand, the triumphs also seem to encourage this, what you call an obsession with luxury and riches, right? It makes that sort of confident display of all that you've gained, right? Kind of turns what we would expect to be a sort of martial virtue or sort of manliness or valor into a kind of mercenary, it risks actually turning that. So the question is for the sake of what is the art of war?

So we don't understand the triumphs as having the sort of dual effect, is this the sort of hinge between how the causes of their greatness are also the causes of their decadence? I think that when we talked about doing this, we originally thought, well, maybe I can talk about Cyrus' idea, which I another book I love, and I asked, I plead unless you just want to say it, because number one, there's a lot of people who know that Cyrus' idea, a lot of them are not doing this, you should talk about them. And number two, I think this book, this one, it's a little much, it gets no attention, it needs to get some attention, so I can help join a one on which, right? But here's a theme that connects to one of the central themes to me in Cyrus' idea, which I read now all over the year, is what is virtue for?

Cyrus gives that famous, it's like a hinge point of the work, it comes very early in the work. Cyrus gives his famous speech to the peers, and he says, you know, gentlemen, friends, Romans, countrymen, our friends, persons, and countrymen, we've been practicing virtue for, you have to say how long, but it's been a long time. What have we got for? Nothing, we're all poor.

We just live here in this Persian state, nothing ever changes, and you know, yeah, we're virtuous, but so what, we've got nothing to show for. I think as Burl puts it in one of his essays, he tacitly treats the preservation of the Persian way of life as worthless, because what he would say in response, if you want to do is, we got something for it, we're still here, we've been here for 500,000 years, empires, rise and falsities coming up, we're still here, we're doing it the way we've always done it, one, jeffy and stability, or something, and Cyrus is like, no. And one of the themes and tensions in the rest of that book is they go out and they start kicking butt, and they start winning, and they're getting rich off of the booty and the plunder of others, but he still insists that they have to maintain the martial virtue, they've got to be moderate, they've got to be temperate, they can't eat a lot, and drink a lot, they can't, you know, and that tension between what are we doing this for, and when do we get the reward, builds and builds and builds, because there's a tacit understanding that as soon as you start to enjoy the reward, virtue will decline, right? Virtue is about self-denial, self-denial for the sake of delayed gratification, it's delayed for how long?

When did you start to cash in? And I think Motsky was dealing with the exact same theme, except he's looking at a real historical example, and I think his point here is the Romans were able, the reason they conquered the world, is that they were able to hold out longer than any other people in delaying that gratification. Mikey Billy puts it this way, you know, in one of the chapter titles of the discourses, the successful republics keep the public rich and the citizens poor, right? You know, the famous story of Cincinnati, right?

Everybody knows this, he's at the plow, he's plowing his own field when they come and announce him as dictator, and I think if I recall the passage in Livy correctly, you get to be dictator for six months, but there's a certain honor for resigning your dictatorship early because it isn't needed anymore, he goes off, he wins this war in 16 days, and he just goes back to the plow, like this is these are the old Roman virtues, it's not like I'm going to go out and I'm going to go to the W.E.F., I'm going to give speeches for corporations for old and saxes for 2 million a pop, and a year I'm going to do worth $50 million. Like, you know, the old Roman way was the poorer you are as a great man, the better. And I think once these points, that held for a very, very long time, and that's impressive, but the idea that they could hold it off forever as they conquered the world and it's all the wealth of the Mediterranean based important in to Rome, it was impossible. And eventually it broke down and you know, we got, we got, you think that one of the things that Montesquieu is trying to do is trying to figure out, because I mean, like the spirit, the spirit of laws seems to me not to be about virtue understood in that way, not about something else, it seems to be unleashing this inquisitiveness, right, funnily it's for commerce.

So he's trying to figure out a way to make something like the Roman Republic long living, but based instead of on martial virtue, and something else, I guess one thing is there seems to be a critique of luxury here and wealth of acquisition that you don't see in the spirit of laws, and you mentioned the cyberpidea, but in Zenefins other works, the ways and means for example, there seems to be this concessions to the life of actually making money, that's right, you see in the economic aspect of that matter, the private individual. I mean, I'm just, I think this is always, I mean, this is a consistent theme in the books you're talking about, which is there's upsides and downsides to both ways of doing right, right. The martial way to try to renounce money making preserves something like virtue better than the life of acquisition, but it will inevitably lead to acquisition and it will corrupt plus it has its downsides too, I mean, you know, the martial way leads to eventually will lead to unjust conquests, right. I mean, Cyrus is pretty big playing about this, the way we get more is we're going to go, we're going to steal it from other people, right.

We know how to fight, we know how to present a unified front and we're very virtuous and we don't get anything for it. He doesn't, you know, we're going to guess me for it by basically my depth, it doesn't use the word, but you don't have to read too far to visualize to figure out that that's what they're doing. They're stealing stuff from people, commerce is a way to get rich without stealing stuff, so in that sense, and without killing people, right, and without ruling other people, empirially, right. So they don't, none of these things seem to think that there's any kind of perfect solution that solves all these problems.

One thing I do think much to you in Machiavelli, early agree on, pretty confident in this, is that no one city, state, king, government monarchy, whatever it is, should ever rule the world again, or big parts of it, right. The best governed world is divided. It's got a lot of small, medium-sized powers, maybe some great powers, but too big is bad, too powerful is bad, and this is what the reflections of the universal monarchy in Europe was really meant to convey, and the problem was that it was directed at his own government, at his own monarchy, at his own country, and he thought that he, you know, Socrates or something, if he said it too bluntly, Machiavelli, that's to me one of the key insights that I learned from Strauss, and I think it was not appreciated before Strauss, is that Machiavelli is ultimately down on the Rome, right, because he thinks that the conquest of the ancient world was a disaster, and in part, he thinks that by laying bare how the Romans did it, he's giving away the secret so that nobody can do it again. The Romans did it by deception, but you see the deception coming, you won't be able, now this is another perennial problem, or this could probably debate forever, which is like, okay, if you're writing esoterically, to expose the secret, how do you esoterically expose the secrets of the normal fall of the day of the day, and you know, it's tough, but that's one of the reasons I pointed to that chapter in this book, where Machiavelli was much blunter than Machiavelli ever was, and how duplicitous the Romans were, and how cagedy their diplomacy was, so that like, don't fall, these are the basic tricks, I'm telling you what they are, like, it's, you know, you're gonna go to a magic show, and I give you a 90 minute YouTube demonstration of how all the cartridge worked out that I could do that, because I don't know, but like, we could do that, and then you won't fall for you, I think that's part of what they're trying to do.

There's a sense with Machiavelli in the prince, right, that in giving away the secret, he sort of inflates the power of his new political science and increases dependence, and where he directs that is, you know, more towards smaller republican rule, keeping the people happy and a kind of commerce in a way, right, just focusing on the material, well-being of the people, and if you can maintain that, good. Do you think what you said about... I just agree with it, I'd like to get the those weird chapters in the prince, 20 and 21, nobody ever knows what to do with that, right? It's like 11 policies that don't seem related, and it's another, if we want to get really super stressing here, it's another instance where 11 becomes 10, where you should list of 11 and then on examination, when you actually go through it, you know, lives two of them and 11 becomes 10, just like the list of 11 qualities, and 15 becomes 10 on reflection, because the first two melt together, right?

At the very end of 21, he does exactly what he's talking about, he says, you know, this is how you keep the people happy, you know, and I always just like to joke, this is Machiavelli channel, and we hear it in a foundation, he's basically like, don't tax him too much, don't regulate them, kind of leave them alone in their private industry, and you know, give them awards and stuff when they do something good, that's all you gotta do with the people, I'm like, I'm sitting there, I'm a director of economic policy, it's on Washington, big tech, like, that sounds great, man, low taxes, no regulation, the government's off your back, and what's probably gonna plaque, perfect, that's exactly what government should be, that's Machiavelli's domestic policy in like resenses, and that's about all he gives to domestic policy in the whole book, his post-free sentence. But do you think, but this is where I think the issue, I mean, coming from sort of late in the in the results of what these sort of commercial nation states really look like, it seems pretty clear that though, you know, imperial ambitions of states are far more temper than they used to be, the imperial sort of urge of sort of multinational corporations, right, in there is so bland, so you start to wonder whether this commercial solution isn't as sort of a bandular assessment. Yeah, that's a great question, I don't know what book we should, we would look at if we were gonna explore that, but right, according to Strauss, I think this is right, and Generate broadly speaking his school, one steam or intent of philosophic modernity is to take the inherently, we could call it ambitious or you call it tyrannical passions in certain men, Machiavelli would call it Gronday or the Great, right, that in traditional or ancient times, even medieval times, it's channel toward war and conquest, right, I want the honor and recognition in the Hegelian term, non-superiority that I beat you, take that passion which you can't get rid of, and instead of channeling into war and conquest, and channeling into commerce, right, well, maybe there's a couple of problems with that solution, one is maybe it's not exactly the same kind of soul, you can't just take it to jail, because the different kinds of soul goes into commerce when it's gone into war, but leave that one aside, let's say you can channel it in the same people, how is it, as you just said, right, what is it, and people who end up going into commerce just end up seeking moral domination and empire through the banks and through currency rather than by sword, and you end up with the same, a very similar problem, just through different means, none of them as far as I can tell seem to have anticipated that as a possibility, but as I think you're right to say, we're now living with it and we have not really contended with it in a serious way. Yeah, I mean, it seems like so often the choice is between, you know, you see this with people who want to go back to good old-fashioned Republican government in the U.S., it seems pretty clear that some of these measures, whatever measures you propose, are going to require a serious scaling back of the economy when you're addicted to growth, I mean, you'll hand over massive amounts of power, right, to those people, but it's interesting, because you see some people who are successful in business, they're just not satisfied with that, they want to go into politics, right, and then they have to deal with that, while some who are successful in business just want to extend their reach.

I think Jeff Bezos is an interesting example of this, so incredibly wealthy, but he seems to want maybe to dabble in politics a little bit. They all do, and I wonder if it's not a kind of purses honorum that, you know, I've conquered this world, but there's this higher world. At least they think it's a higher world, and I wonder if they're not thinking inachronistically, like, if there's, I've worked at the White House eight, two different types. So I've seen this thing from the inside, and my sad or any rate, I like to think realistic assessment of it is the president is just not in that power.

He's not nearly as powerful as you think you are. And if you're Jeff Bezos, if he were to ask me, he was, well, I'm sure he would ask me to advise and have a lot of things to tell him none of which he could follow. But on this specific question, I would say, Jeff, you're way more powerful and important now than if you're president of the United States. Yes, you'd be one of only 46 people that have ever attained the office, you'd be written about covered every day, you'd be flattered, like, would it really be a different kind of flat?

We'd be a different kind of trappings and all that stuff. And maybe just the difference alone is enough to motivate you. But there is, you're right, there totally is some more of politics, but I want to come up to that, or for these people, I want to know how much of that is just the sort of legacy. Well, if I went into politics, I could be like, pick some hero that you read about.

So I've read many times that apparently Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with Augustus, loves Augustus, you read all these biographies of Augustus, interesting stuff, not Augustus. But I want to, first of all, Mark, you couldn't be Augustus today by winning any elective office in the United States. You're better off reading about it, and you're more akin to his power where you are than you are as president, not to say that I would support Mark Zuckerberg as president because just be clear, I would not. But I wonder if a lot of the law of politics for these types of people is, they read a bio, I think this is an impressive person, if only I could do that.

But what they want to do can't be done within the system that they have. Now it's on, it's in part because they have drained so much power out of the political system and collected it in the private sector. It's like, well, wait a minute, you've taken the mojo out of this office and put it in your own boardroom. And now you want to go and get that office just because you want the extra trophy?

I don't know. I was going to say, don't you think it's on or left? That there's an honor won't attain in business. I think a lot of it.

I've talked to, so I've been in politics, I knew I had a corporate world, I've been around these types of people in my whole life. And I can tell you, it's very common to hear business big wig types say, I can't believe that that guy got elected or whatever. He's a total loser, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I just, I mean, here's a good example.

Mike Bloomberg, right? An all-conquering business type unquestionably was not satisfied. He always said, he famously said, he said this more than once, that aside from being the founder and CEO of your company, there are only three jobs worth having. One was president of the United States.

Second was secretary general of the United Nations. He goes to show it. He goes to show it. He's going to go to the third is mayor view.

So he became mayor view. And he loved it. I knew Bloomberg a little. I knew a lot of people around him.

I saw him alive. He was an omnipresent figure when I lived in New York. And I think he was a mixed bag as mayor compared to what they have now and what they had before now, though, he certainly was an Augustus to compare the clowns that have been running the city for the last 10 years. I guess it's 10 years, right?

Since the philosophy of here, not quite ninth, but already in half. But he wanted that brass ring. It wasn't enough for him to be worth $50 million to be the founder of Bloomberg LLP to be this. He had to have that thing.

You know, it's one thing to control the news is quite another to control the size of people's that's real power. But one, you know, it's kind of interesting with maybe we can bring this back to Montesquieu somehow. But it is sort of interesting. You know, in a stop, what makes this point about the presidency and spoke on the Constitution where he says, all of the sort of the trappings of power, the sort of ceremony and ritual surrounds in the Constitution surrounds the procedure for electing a new president and specifically, you know, the county of the electors and stuff like that.

And in fact, many of the amendments he points out are sort of devoted to just trying to get this right or to make this sort of ceremony. And I think he's trying to argue that the office is greatly over-inflated and intentionally over-inflated. I think for the purposes, like you say, it's attractive, right? It brings the sort of ambitious or tyrannically minded and then it sort of guts them of their abilities, right?

It makes them think they'll be more powerful than they are and sort of be fangsome. So I'm not sure that was always true. I think it's true now. But it's true in an odd way because the executive branch is more powerful than it's ever been.

When I say the president, I'm literally the president, right? The actual president and his staff try to get people to do what they want to do. Even a president, a hypothetical president, so I'm not aware of such a person never having actually existed who appoints whatever there are. It's kind of up to the president, named people of cabinet rank.

Let's say there's 10 to 15 cabinet members. Let's say every single one of them is totally loyal to his agenda. Then he has to send them out into agencies and buildings that they nominally run, of whom the very top sliver are loyal to. I mean, in a completely perfect world.

You're the president. You appoint cabinet. You have 3,000 roughly, Senate confirmed and or scheduled C appointees throughout the government. Let's say you back a thousand.

Every single one of those people is totally qualified for their job. They get confirmed. They're really good at it. They're totally loyal, right?

You're still going to have a bear of the time getting the executive branch to do what you want it to do. But in the name of the presidency, massive amounts of power has been invested in these executive branch agencies. And they can more or less do what they want. And the president finds it very, very hard to control them.

So you may think, I ran on a radical platform, dramatic change. Both Obama and Trump ran on a radical platform, dramatic change. I think both of them achieved some, but found it very difficult to achieve all. And that's a big part of the reason.

Now, it's different for Obama, because Trump was running into the whole system. Obama sort of was and sort of was. Obama was able to do what he wanted to do with it, aligned with the deep state. I believe that's a thing, having worked in it.

So you guys can quit with that if you want. And there was the overarching regime wanted. And he was not able to do what he wanted to do when it ran a fallow bit. Since most of what Trump wanted to do ran a fallow what they wanted to do, he was able to achieve quite a lot less.

But this office, which is Graham, I mean, Air Force One is Graham, the White House is Graham. You have Camp David. Everywhere you go, and it closes the streets for you, you were treated like a god in foreign capitals. Everybody around the world wants to come and meet you.

It's amazing how it ran. It's amazing how it really can inflate your head. But at the end of the day, what you're able to do is quite constrained. Before we go to the nail bag wrap, Greg, and Alex, I thought one of the reasons you chose to correct me if I'm wrong, but I sort of inferred that one of the reasons you were drawn to this work by Monos Eu was kind of related to your last remarks.

But I don't mind as you talks about administration being a substitute politics. And then sort of the main problem with Roman empires became a, there were subjects and not citizens and there was a class administration that people were in no way involved in their own ruling and being ruled in turn and there was a tillian sense. Yeah, you can speak just a little bit about the relevance of this work for us today. Well, that's actually another one of these great ambivalencies in the work, Amy Mochesky who thought that we'd have to talk about where he comes out.

But here's another area of agreement between the Enmaki Valley. So he said, I quoted this earlier, chapter seven, number 23 chapter work. The greatness is completed. It's all downhill from there.

So that by chapter nine, the title is already two causes of Rome's ruling. We're already, but the roller coaster has gone to that big hill and it's gone its way down. And yet, you remember the famous Mochesky Valley in Discourses book one chapter 10, he talks about the Golden Dot of the Antonites, the five good emperors from Nervid of Arches. And given speaks in almost the same terms, in fact, most historians will say that this period from about a hundred years, roughly let's say 80, 80 to 180, 80, was at the time of the greatest stability, peace and prosperity in Europe or in the Western world until the 19th or 20th century.

Like it never got that good again for almost 2,000 years. People had, if not rich, there was a thriving middle class. There was technology and infrastructure that had been in the world I'd never seen before and would not see again for a couple of thousand years. It was amazing.

And the flourishing of the arts. Rome, if we strats even, we love fifth century BC Athens and I suppose fourth to a degree, because of the flowering of the arts, the poems, the plays, the philosophy and all that. Rome is very rusty. It doesn't have any of that until the Imperial Age.

In fact, it has very little of that, even at the time of Augustus. You know, Augustus was famous, like, was, it's quoted differently depending on which source. Sometimes I found it the city of Wood, I left the city of Marvel, I found it the city of Brecken, I left the city of Marvel. Well, even the city itself is kind of dumpy.

The Rome that you see in a Hollywood movie like quote by these is the Rome of 120 AD, not the Rome in the movie that's supposed to be taking place in 50 BC or whatever, which would have probably looked like Deadwood South Dakota. I made that up, but you know what I'm saying. The all the great writers come later. We apologize to our many fans in South Dakota.

You know, all this stuff comes later. And there's an awareness of both these thinkers that if you're just an ordinary person who wants to go into business and have a nice daily life, that was a better time to be alive. But you had no say in the state, you were a subject non-citizen, your political involvement was essentially, you know, the effort to do what he wanted to you, the fact that you had good emperors who just didn't throw at you for the hell of it meant that you had a good life. But there was nothing in principle that protected you from any of this stuff.

And they both don't like that. They like the, what they want to do, it seems to me, is create a world or shape a world in which that kind of material outcomes is possible, but there really are rights and protections in the beginning of the citizen. And they can both exist at the same time. And they don't think that that's ever happened before in history.

And that one of the challenges or the aims of the modern project is to create that kind of world, if that's possible. And I would say, and this is the West Coast drowsy, you can be coming out, which you guys can away at will, is that actually did exist for a while in the United States? I don't think it does now, but it did exist for a while in the United States. A kind of broad-based prosperity, a government aiming at the common good and infrastructure that served all, no overweening power crushing because they're common man.

And actual rights that respect the certain oriness of the citizens and the local communities that the central government couldn't just boss around it will. We lost it, simply, but we had for a while. It's better than nothing, I guess. Since I'm still a classicist, I don't believe in human, the last forever, it's just a question of how long can you stretch it?

You look forward to your book on the causes of the greatness of the United States and for decades. Do you, I mean, it's interesting the way you put it there. Maybe this will be an interesting way to clarify your marks. You've talked a bit about how Machiavelli and Montesquieu are both critical of Rome, Machiavelli, much more critical than it seems on the surface.

This is just as inside and then it seems like the way that Montesquieu presents it, and you say, are you Machiavelli even more extremist, it was very brief moment in terms of the whole history. It was a brief moment of greatness, and the things started to go downhill much earlier than you think. And you said Machiavelli even goes back to the first cuticle. He seems to think that the victory in the second is the beginning of the end.

So it's easy to criticize, I think, Rome at this distance. But if we briefly had it, it seems like much more briefly than Rome had it, right? We briefly had it. And we're in our own sort of wealthy decline, right?

Similar to Rome. Although getting poorer by the day, don't look at your 401k statements. I wouldn't throw them away, but stick them in the file camera. I'd say, am I wacking you down the stick and look at the way?

You presume that we all have four. Well, you're all academics now, I'm sorry. Yeah. So anyways, the, yeah, so I just wondered to- I have a 401 not okay.

Sorry. So I just wondered to what extent then can we still look kindly upon our own regime, even at its principles, right? I mean- That is a question that I wrestle with a lot. So I don't want to speak definitively to it, in part because my thinking keeps evolving, but in part to be blunt, there's a company line that I'm supposed to do a year to.

And I do, just to be clear, I completely agree 100%. I'm not blinking SOS like to be a non-theodically, but I'm also an academic trained philosophy. So I'm supposed to be rethinking and changing my mind and revisiting. I'm revisiting and thinking it over.

And I did debate recently. I think it's online. Everybody watch it with Patrick Deneet Harvard and debating his basically his book, Why Liberalism Failed. And it was friendly.

I didn't find a ton to disagree with. I think that none of the disagreement with Deneet is convinced its liberal modernity. It's funny to me that Deneet, I thought, and I sort of mielled him on this and he didn't take the bait. He's just, he's actually a nice guy.

I'm a nice guy. But I said, you know, this is a kind of a strategy argument that Deneet is making. Like it all goes bad with modernity. I've read this before.

It's called natural writing history. And Deneet denies being a Strausian. I thought I'd get a rise out of him, but didn't work. Whereas, you know, he's convinced of that.

I'm used to being convinced it wasn't true. Now I'm ambivalent. More like, maybe, I don't know, hard to say. Because like I said, this did work for a while.

And I also have the jaffa in me, which is strong, says that modernity can't simply have been a mistake. It was in fact a response to circumstances. One of those circumstances being what we've talked about many times in Machiavelli emphasizes and Machiacute certainly emphasizes is the Roman conquest of the ancient world, the consequent destruction of the polis, the separation of civil and religious law, which can't be easily put back together. And in fact, for 2000 years, has never been put back together anywhere except in so-called Islamic Calipates, which don't tend to last very long.

I just came back from a long stay in the United Arab Emirates, which has Islam as an officially sanctioned religion, right? But does not recognize Sharia as the law of the land. I mean, there are a few countries that do that, but not in which you've called successful ones. And even the ones that are, you know, even Iran, which calls us off the Islamic Republic of Iran, absolutely struggles with uniting civil and religious law.

It does so, I wouldn't say half-heartedly. It tries to do it wholeheartedly, but imperfectly because of the difficulties. Even countries like Saudi Arabia are finding their moving away from this direction, right? There's certainly no Jewish community.

I mean, there are orthodox Jewish communities that try to hue to rabbinical law of the Torah, but there's no state, there are states that sanction and recognize it, but there's no state that supports it as the law of the state. So this cleavage of civil and religious law, which is fundamental, we all have read Fusto, Diculon, right? Every one of us have read it, right? This is one of the one universal of our secular.

He's got that book. We all have to read it more about 25, whatever. Right? Okay.

That, once that sort got that chord 2000 years ago, it's never been successfully stitched back together. That's one of the many fundamental things that the American founders and the earlier liberals confront that they have to find a new solution to. So when I hear this while liberal is in fail argument, I say, okay, maybe you got to tell me what you would do about that. And I've never heard a good argument that satisfied me.

I still think that whatever his false flaws, mistakes, yeah, and factor in the fact that I knew the man and I said three years with them and I learned from him. So there's personal affection and I'm biased by that. But whatever he got wrong, I still say you've got to tell me something better than what when I heard from Jappa, and you got to address every single point that he made about why the situation was unique and unprecedented and demands a new solution. I'm still waiting in age 52 for that answer.

Well, if you ever commit patricide, we'd love to have you to hear the new solution. So do you want to do some listener questions? Yeah, I'll do. Let's do one.

And then I have one in particular that I want to hear the answer to go first. Okay. And then just a very quick sketch, just Mike's journey to to political philosophy. We like to ask our guests that in a quick landing round because I mean, Mike, you heard this on some of the episodes we try and especially with older Straussons, you don't qualify for that yet.

Middle age, we like to kind of oral histories. We like to preserve people's stories. So this is from an energy lawyer, Peter Goode, who tweets that the energy complex. He says two questions from Michael Anton.

If Plato, Aristotle, or Zen, upon let Mike pick the one he likes, we're around to see the rise and fall of Rome. What would he say about the cause of the greatness in the Romans in their decline? I don't know that they would say anything that different from much as you. I mean, I think he's seeing this through their lens.

He's seeing it through the lens of their political theory and through the lens of the cycle of regimes. That's the basis of the article that I wrote for. We all know, Republic book eight is the cycle of regime, right? I mean, Aristotle treats the cycle of regimes and the politics.

Zenefan doesn't have a thematic treatment, but he seems to, in a way, the cycle of the idea is not a cycle of regimes, but it's almost like the two poles of politics. There's similar to aerosol, right? There's empire, greatness, and wealth, but no freedom. And there's virtue, liberty, but poverty, and a kind of stagnation.

And finding the middle is very hard. You got to pick one and if you go too far in one direction, as Cyrus takes the Persian regime, then decline is inevitable. So the idea, they don't think the Greeks would have said that the move from the tunic to the toga, I assume to the sartorial causes of the greatness and decline. That's a good point.

I need to write that down. I need to write it down. I need to write a book about clothes and I parody chapter 19 of the Prince, which talks about, you know, let's take somebody, somebody might be thinking of some Roman emperor, his faith disputes what I said. So let's run through them.

And I took the presidents from FDR through Bush, too. And I described why how to successful or unsuccessful presidency entirely based on how they based the wardrobe. Yeah. So this is another sartorial question.

This is a two part one from at Mr. W Bond, who's a doctor in the interest in political philosophy and also woodworking. First, he asked, have you commented publicly anywhere on Trump's tailing? As a man, no one's very stylish suits.

I can imagine you had much patience with the giant red tie. Yeah, I've been asked to comment on this many times, or one might say, baited, because what people are trying to do is I can say something I can comment on it a few times. I said, look, it's not my style. First of all, it's a bit uniform.

It's always a blue suit, a white shirt, red tie. I can't only wear a different tie, it's almost a red tie. Second of all, I like a different cut. I like a drapey or cut.

This is explained also in my book. He wears a kind of Roman cut. He wears Breony mostly a much more stiff shoulder, whereas I like the Southern Italian, the Neapolitan look, or the Anderson and Shepard look out of London, which is just a flam to yourself. Like a Jacob Reesmog.

I don't know who it is. Okay, I'll send you some. He's very, very well dressed up. The second one from Mr.

W. Bob. And he also continued on to say, I do believe Mr. President is watching this, nothing personal, but he does tie his tie too long.

It's not that they're too big, it's not that they're too long. They hang down too far. I thought that was an attempt to make himself look taller and to make his... He's already like 6, 2, 6, 3.

He was like, I don't know. That I'll explain off off here. I actually put it as... So, I'm gonna leave the next joke from last week.

And I go, this second one is, a Roger Stone called Alan Flesser, his sartorial mentor. He ended up looking like a Batman villain. Does this lead to any reflection on the relationship of mentor, protege, or teacher? I know Flesser and I shopped there for a long time.

And it does sort of depend on what you want to get out of it, right? I think Stone looks less like a Batman villain because of Flesser than because of the fake tan and the obviously bleach hair. If he corrected those two things, you would think that was a pretty elegant close, whereas the fake tan and the bleach tear, if you think that must be a kind of sleazy operator, that's my few cents on that. Good.

So, no fake tan and let your hair go gray. I like that, Michael. Run the same page then. So, Dave wanted to ask about your go idea.

Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So, I'm like, just really quick before we wrap up with the lighting round. What was your journey?

Not to where you are now as a teacher, but how did you... No. Yeah. By the bug.

When did that click-click over? Click to hear your high school. I couldn't tell you exactly how or why, but at some point, I just decided I have to read great books. I just have to read the great...

And I had read good books or important books or famous books because you just get a lot of what education is like today well, I should say that kind of teacher, but it's awful. It's awful, awful. Right. But like, and I actually have a kid in high school, but I sort of know, like, they're not a society...

Like, as much as we might despise going off to kill a modding or give me a break, read Badger Courage. You know, like, okay, these aren't the deepest books in the world, but, you know, I was reading that. I was reading Twain. I was reading this kind of stuff in high school.

And then when I was about 17, I just thought, no, there's even better stuff out there. Some of that I will credit to an AP English class in which we read Billy Bled, which led me to Moby Dick, which blew me away. I didn't read Moby Dick in class. I read it by myself, on the beach in Santa Cruz.

We read Plano Symposium. First Plato I ever read in an AP English class, which led me to read the apology. And then I... So I went off to college knowing I had two great books.

I took my first semester, a class in which we read the Gorgias, and that was with him. I don't know that anybody remembers this guy anymore. I didn't know who he was, but apparently he was a... Even at the time he was famous and had a big time, I didn't realize that the Englishman named Bernard Williams, so not Australian but one of these Oxford classes that he taught the Gorgias.

You know how blue... So, first of all, give it my freshman year of college, it's the fall of 1987. The University of America might give out in October of 1987. And my cousin and very close friend, but it gave it to...

You gotta read this. Now, it turns out he only read the first third. He got to the middle. And it's like everybody.

Yes, I don't know what he's talking about. And exactly what happened to me. I'm like, yeah, for me, actually, bad. Oh, Rocket's Terrible.

Because I had a roommate who was a violinist in the UC orchestra. So I'm already listening to classical music. And I'm like, this is great. And then I get to the new realization of the left and vice-versa.

I go, what? And I just gave it back. I'm like, okay, that was good. But I don't know what I'm talking about.

And then I bought my own copy and I reread the book on a cruise with my dad in Alaska in the summer of 1988. I just forced March my way through it. And that completely changed my life. But what...

And somewhere around that time, so Blue becomes a huge star. He's making all this money. So basic books is like, let's capitalize on this. We're on a second edition of the Republic translation.

And I bought that. And I remember reading it. You know, he talks about how students first confronted and they say, you know, if their reaction is, this is outrageous nonsense. He's like, I know I have that.

I remember that line in the introduction. My reaction to the gorgias was what of like white hot anger at soccer keeps. At 17 years old, I was like, you are a fraud. Everything you're saying is bullsh**.

CaliCly's has you by the balls. You need to admit that you don't know what you're talking about. That you're losing this argument. Everything you say is crap.

I mean, I was just furious at it. And I wrote this like full-nading paper about why soccer keeps us adducing a liar. And Williams thought it was hilarious. And I got a decent grade even though I know I was wrong about everything.

But it was that like passion and anger. I think that Blue captured like, we have this guy now. Like he's taking it seriously. Even though he's wrong about everything.

The fact that he's gotten so into it means that, you know, we can do something with that. And I just kept going and I looked up everybody that I could find. I just like kind of me entered my way through college taking this or that class that I thought was most closely aligned with whatever thing I wanted to learn. Ended up bouncing around through various men and having three majors to follow a weird long story.

But I sort of knew like, no, and then I figured out from Blue that like stresses the thing. So now what I do. And I ended up going to St. John's doing a master's degree, going to Claremont.

And there's many other steps and all as many people that I met and talked to. And thinking I would end up in academic and not ending up in academic. Well, I did. But not for a while.

Because Larry Arn, who was the president of Claremont Institute at the time, and where I worked the whole time I was in grad school, got me a job as a speechwriter for the governor of California and kind of kicking out of the nest. And I ended up ending in politics for quite a while. And then in corporate for quite a while and then come back into politics and then he ended up getting right back to the nest. But it was a long, weird journey with many twists and turns over the years.

You got bit by the Strassen bug at a distance. I mean, you didn't have some, I mean, for me it was like, oh, I'm a blur worth as an undergrad. And that would make sense. You know, as a student of Shauspik, you learned it through Bloom and then just got.