The Law & Liberty Podcast

The originalist majority on the Supreme Court is perhaps more open than ever to overturning what it considers to be bad precedents. In his new book, Carson Holloway argues that the justices should train their crosshairs on New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 decision that means statements about public officials are rarely considered libelous. He joins James Patterson to discuss the book, the history of free speech, and the future of originalism.

There is enormous pressure today for traditional conservatives (or anyone critical of progressivism) to write their names in the black book of the New Right and acquiesce to a politics of populist rage and federal overreach. Elizabeth Corey explains to James Patterson why she will instead engage in the quieter, more respectable task of cultural transmission and tending to her little platoon. Related Links "A Quiet Refusal to Compromise," by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty "Beautiful Losers," by Elizabeth Corey, Public Discourse "Interpreting the New Right," by John Grove, Law & Liberty

Why do presidents have the power to pardon, and how is it typically used and abused? Sai Prakash and James Patterson discuss the pardon power's origins in British law, its usefulness in ending rebellions, and the unfortunate tendency of more recent presidents to use the pardon power to reward friends and donors, protect underlings, or generate political support. Related Links The Presidential Pardon by Sai Prakash "The Personal Pardon Power" by Philip Hamberger, Law & Liberty "Is It Too Late to Recover the Founders' Presidency?" by Gary L. Gregg II, Law & Liberty

Law & Liberty senior writer John O. McGinnis joins the podcast this week to discuss his new book, Why Democracy Needs the Rich. Although they may be the focus of populist ire from the left and right alike, McGinnis contends that wealthy Americans play a vital role in counterbalancing majoritarian excess and serving as entrepreneurial "social prospectors" who can revitalize civil society. Related Links Why Democracy Needs the Rich by John O. McGinnis "Blessed Are the Rich," book review by James E. Hartley, Law & Liberty "Liquidate the Rich?" by John O. McGinnis "Mother's Milk of the Revolution" by John O. McGinnis  

Young Americans, and especially young men, are feeling economically disenchanted. As the national debt soars and interest rates remain high, the prospect of providing for a family (let alone buying a home) seems impossibly far off. Russ Greene explains part of the problem: "Total Boomer Luxury Communism," or a host of policies at all levels of government that generously provide for senior citizens while leaving the youth to pick up the tab. Greene talks about how we got here, what's needed to give millennials and Gen Z a chance, and why there's reason to be optimistic.   Related Links "What Is Total Boomer Luxury Communism?" by Russ Greene "Debt Politics" with Mitch Daniels (Law & Liberty Podcast) "What Social Security Should Do—and What It Shouldn't" by Sita Slavov (Law & Liberty) "Slashing Tax Rates and Cutting Loopholes" by Adam N. Michel (Cato Institute)

Law & Liberty is pleased to welcome our newest Contributing Editor, Luke C. Sheahan. To mark the occasion, Sheahan joined L&L Editor John Grove to talk about the central theme of his work: the freedom of association. They discuss the thought of Robert Nisbet, the relationship between civil society and the state, and the way the Supreme Court has treated association over the years.  Related Links "The West's Quest," Law & Liberty Podcast with Luke Sheahan "The Failure of Political Community" by Luke Sheahan Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet The University Bookman Why Associations Matter by Luke Sheahan Freedom of Association, Vol. I: In Theory, ed. by Luke C. Sheahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre Freedom of Association, Vol . II: Applied, ed. by Luke C. Sheahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre

Frank Meyer was the father of fusionism and one of the key builders of the conservative movement in the mid-twentieth century. That's despite spending his early years as a serious communist agitator. James Patterson and Daniel Flynn discuss the evolution of Meyer's thought and the impact of his legacy. Flynn's book synthesizes a large quantity of recently-uncovered material on Meyer, offering a more complete and nuanced picture than has been available heretofore. What lessons does Meyer's life and career offer for the conservative movement today? Related Links The Man Who Invented Conservatism by Daniel J. Flynn "A Soldier for Synthesis" by Rachel Lu (Law & Liberty book review) "Fusionism: The Only Game in Town" by Alexander William Salter "Conservative Fusion," a Law & Liberty Podcast episode featuring Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade, hosted by James Patterson

In his recent book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, John Wilsey looks back to the writing of Peter Viereck and other great conservative minds to understand what it means to live a worthy life in a culture gone mad. On the Law & Liberty Podcast, he joins James Patterson to discuss the difference between that kind of conservatism and a more reactionary extremism, as well as the centrality of free exercise to the American constitutional tradition.   Related Links Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer by John Wilsey

When environmental policies were first enacted, they were often supported by staunch conservatives like Richard Nixon and then-governor Ronald Reagan. Why do so many today now view environmental conservation as belonging outside the scope of conservatism? In his recent October forum lead, "A New Environmentalism?" Steven Hayward traces how conservation efforts quickly became hijacked by extremists and what a conservative approach to environmental policy could look like. He joins the podcast to talk about this piece and why he is hopeful for the future. Related Links October forum: "A New Environmentalism?" by Steven F. Hayward  

What is Christian Zionism? Is it, as figures like Tucker Carlson claim, a relatively recent development in America's cultural history, or does a general support for the Jewish state have a longer history in America? The answer partly depends on how "Christian Zionism" is defined, but in this conversation, Sam Goldman explains to host James Patterson why support for Jewish political aspirations is part of a long tradition of Christian philosemitism that reaches back even to America's colonial period. Related Links "Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Christian Zionism," Compact, Samuel Goldman God's Country by Samuel Goldman Tri-Faith America by Kevin Schultz  

The English-speaking world has long enjoyed free speech rights unheard of in other parts of the world. But where did this legal regime come from? And as partisan strife becomes more heated on both sides of the Atlantic, what does free speech's future hold? In his new book, Law & Liberty contributing editor Adam Tomkins argues that understanding the history of our rights is essential to maintaining a free constitution. He joins James Patterson on the podcast to discuss his book, On the Law of Speaking Freely, as well as several pressing current free speech cases in the United Kingdom. Related Links On the Law of Speaking Freely by Adam Tomkins "The UK's Speech Problem," by Adam Tomkins "From Heresy to Hate Speech," a book review by Helen Dale Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon Areopagitica by John Milton Adam Tomkins's Law & Liberty author page GB News v. OfCom  

For most of the twentieth century, conservatives argued for a strong Congress whose closer connection to voters could check the grand delusions of presidential administrations. Now, however, everyone seems to have opted for Wilsonian, top-down executive leadership. Philip Wallach explains how we got here, why Congress remains indispensable for republican self-government, and what sort of structural reforms could help it reclaim its place in our constitutional system. Related Links Philip Wallach, Why Congress (2023) Philip Wallach, "Choosing Congressional Irrelevance," Law & Liberty Yuval Levin, "Congress Is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be Weak," Commentary (2018)

Especially since the controversies of 2020, the commanding heights of American culture have been dominated by left-wing moral panic. In his new book, Adam Szetela analyzes this toxic mentality's influence on the publishing industry specifically. Many writers are either drafted into ideological crusades–or else become their victims. In this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, Szetela joins James Patterson to discuss his book and the sorry state of American literature.

From colonial times through the twentieth century, Western civilization became America's own cultural heritage, and it was always taught in schools and universities. Then, in the later part of the twentieth century, Americans turned on Western Civ. Why did that happen? What are the consequences for our culture today? What can we do now to recover that heritage? Professor James Hankins joins John Grove, editor of Law & Liberty, to discuss these questions in connection with his new book, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

Robert Nisbet is best known for his books The Quest for Community and The Twilight of Authority. Luke Sheahan joins the podcast to discuss a new edition of Nisbet's lesser-known but perhaps most important book The Social Philosophers, a sweeping account of the history of community and its treatment by Western political philosophers.

What is the future of DEI? Does it have at least some laudable goals, and are there better ways to achieve them? What do the American people really want when it comes to tolerance, inclusion, and discrimination law? The Manhattan Institute's Robert VerBruggen discusses all these questions and more with host James Patterson in this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Related Links "Fight Bias and Legalize Meritocracy," by Robert VerBruggen

America is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that broke out in 2020. Not only was it one of the most deadly health incidents in our history, the strategies imposed by central planners to contain its spread also inflicted countless costs on everything from the economy and education to social life itself. Stephen Macedo, an author of a recent book evaluating the pandemic's aftermath, joins Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch to discuss the price of the pandemic on this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Although they understand themselves as missionaries to the marginalized, woke elites use their ideology of oppression to protect their own privilege and social status. Contributing Editor G. Patrick Lynch discusses these dynamics with Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke, and a shrewd diagnostician of elite hypocrisy. Related Links We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi "Questioning the Oppression Olympics," by Jesse Smith (Review of We Have Never Been Woke)

Driven in part by the revival of a classic knit sweater emblazoned with an American flag, "Ralph Lauren nationalism" has emerged as a trope among online talking-heads. Well-dressed political scientist Samuel Goldman is also known for his sharp takes on menswear. He joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent article for Compact magazine that tackled the concept. There may be something to the Ralph Lauren aesthetic that captures an essential quality of the American character, Goldman argues, but it's not exactly what the highly-online chatterers think it is. Related Links "The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism" by Samuel Goldman

Neighborhoods are one of the most important human support structures, argues Seth D. Kaplan. Yet modern politics, economics, and social habits all seem aligned to undermine them. Discussing his recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Kaplan explains why neighborhoods are irreplaceable sources of human community, and why they are often in such bad shape today. "No government or philanthropic program can replace the benefits that the day-in-day-out love of parents and the continuous support of the community provide. Social services may address material needs and they may help mitigate specific problems after the fact, but they're rarely equipped to provide the care nurturing and targeted discipline that a supportive family and community deliver." 

Daniel DiMartino calls balls and strikes on the ongoing, highly partisan debate over immigration, legal and illegal. The border ought to be secure, and asylum limited to those who have a genuine need for it, he argues. But border policy ought always to bound by law. When it comes to legal immigration, according to DiMartino, we do well to avoid an economics of nostalgia and should welcome the kind of immigration that adds to American life. DiMartino also recalls a recent run-in with the residual cancel culture at Columbia University.

What Solzhenitsyn called "the ideological lie" was not limited to a single country, government, or movement. And it did not, unfortunately, die off in 1989. In his new book, Mahoney presents the lie as the replacement of traditional categories of "good and evil" with "progress and reaction," a change that ripples through political and social ideas in a way that opens the door to the replacement of truth by an imposed, false reality. Though we shouldn't pretend that America today approaches the kind of tyranny seen in the twentieth century, we should recognize that the totalitarian impulse is alive and well. 

The drive to pursue wisdom is engrained in every human being, right? Many have believed so. But in his new book, Ignorance and Bliss, Mark Lilla argues that a certain "will to ignorance" is also part of the human experience. Like Plato's Thrasymachus, many often want to throw up their hands in resignation rather than commit themselves to the pursuit of truth, creating a tension in human life that is sometimes reasonable and sometimes pathological. Lilla offers an explanation for this phenomenon, drawing on philosophy, religion, psychology, and history. He joins James Patterson to discuss the book.

"Christian Nationalism" splashes across headlines regularly. But there is no clear definition of it. Is it just an epithet? A concept used for partisan manipulation? A real trend in socio-religious thought in America? Smith, Hall, and Williams consider different definitions, which ideas might be lumped into the category, and how it relates to American pluralism, historical Christianity, and contemporary populism.

Philip Rieff adopted the categories and language of Freud, but reinterpreted them in a way that supported culture and the moral life. Batchelder and Harding have edited a new volume of essays on Rieff, who they argue is a key thinker for any attempt to diagnose late modern cultural life. They join host James Patterson to discuss Rieff, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan Sontag, and unimaginable depravities. 

Historically grounded assessments of the American republic's relationship with religion require nuanced thinking and an appreciation for ambiguity. Unfortunately, those qualities don't sell. So American history is replete with attempts to construct a simple narrative of a Christian nation or a wholly secular liberalism. Jerome Copulsky and Mark Noll join James Patterson to discuss Copulsky's book, American Heretics, which examines certain strands of religious thinking that, in one way or another, have sought to overcome the fact of American religious pluralism. 

A poorly worded tweet became a career-altering conflagration for Ilya Shapiro in a particularly egregious example of cancel culture. It prompted him to take a hard look at the state of legal education, which he now skewers in Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elite. He and host James Patterson discuss the book, the atrocious impact critical theory and DEI has had on our  law schools, and what the future might hold.

Anyone could be forgiven for not knowing much about Peter Viereck. The eccentric historian and poet was one of the first mid-century thinkers to robustly embrace the "conservative" label, but he fell out of favor with movement conservatives and has been largely forgotten. John Wilsey thinks that's a mistake. He joins Law & Liberty's editor, John Grove, to talk about Viereck and his unique conservative manner of approaching the challenges of modern life. Related Links John Wilsey, "Peter Viereck's Unadjusted Conservatism," Law & Liberty Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Winston Churchill Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited Peter Viereck, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment John Wilsey, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (pre-order) Claes Ryn, "Peter Viereck: Traditionalist Libertarian?" Law & Liberty Robert Lacey, Pragmatic Conservatism

Konstantin Kisin has emerged as a powerful voice opposing "wokeness" in part because he has a unique appreciation for what makes Western civilization special. He and Helen Dale discuss the current state of wokeness, his own engagement with it, and the politics of the US, UK, and Australia. Ultimately, the moment calls not just for diagnosing Western malaise, but also gratitude for all the West offers us, and optimism for its future.

In the wake of the 2024 election, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels joins James Patterson to talk about the one issue politicians all try to avoid: the national debt. Though we have an impending debt disaster, both sides of the aisle avoid the hard choices that will eventually need to be made. Today, Daniels worries, it may be too late for a soft landing. We chose not to find solutions, and we'll start living with consequences very soon. Daniels and Patterson also touch on the state of higher education, the election, and our evolving partisan dynamics.  Further Reading: Mitch Daniels, "The Day the Dollar Died," Washington Post Mitch Daniels, "I'm Talking to You," Law & Liberty (2022 Purdue University Commencement Remarks) Vance Ginn and Thomas Savidge, "Two Rules to Tackle America's Debt," Law & Liberty Samuel Gregg, "David Hume and America's Debt Disaster," Law & Liberty

The past five years have been tumultuous ones for elite higher education. Campuses have been rocked by plagiarism scandals, ugly and violent protests, and revelations about admissions discrimination that went on under the guise of affirmative action. Meanwhile, reformers are trying out new approaches, from civics institutes to more robust legislative oversight of public universities to brand new private institutions. How pivotal will these years turn out to be? And what strategies are most likely to revive the mission of the university? Law & Liberty senior writer James Hankins has hope for a higher-ed renaissance. 

When conservatives debate fundamentals, it does not take long for "fusionism" to come up. But it's not always clear what it is. Is it a philosophical stance or a practical coalition? Was it a historically contingent response to the Cold War or an integral part of any conservative disposition? An all-star panel joins host James Patterson to discuss and debate what fusionism really is and what the prospects are for its future. Charles C. W. Cooke, Samuel Goldman, and Stephanie Slade consider fusionism's origins in mid-century America, its culmination in the 1980s and its current status.  Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast. Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of political science and executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University. He is author of God's Country: Christian Zionism in America, and After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, and has written for many publications. He is the editor of FUSION. Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason and a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute. Related Links: Charles C. W. Cooke, "A Roadmap—If We Want It" (Law & Liberty) Stephanie Slade, "Is There a Future for Fusionism?" (Reason) FUSION: In the Tradition of Liberty, (Samuel Goldman, Editor) Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto

Human beings are flawed, finite creatures. But they are not problems to be solved, argues AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience. In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a "new humanism" that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly "touch grass."  Related Links: The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen) The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj Irony and Outrage (Dannagal Goldthwaite Young) "A Long View on Artificial Intelligence" (A Law & Liberty forum on artificial intellegence led by Rachel Lomasky) "What the Smartphone Hath Wrought," (A Law & Liberty review by Joseph Holmes of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation) Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She lives in Washington, DC.

As students head back to classrooms, host James Patterson welcomes education experts Frederick Hess and Michael McShane to the podcast. We are still finding the "new normal" after Covid lockdown shook our education system—and public confidence in schools. Too often, our schools are guided by ideas developed by policymakers, intellectuals, and administrators who are separated from the needs of the classroom. Ranging from cell phones in class to school choice, from gender theory to administrative bloat, the conversation points in hopeful directions, drawn in part from their recent book, Getting Education Right. Related Links: Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, Getting Education Right "Taking on the College Cartel," Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (Law & Liberty) "Opening Doors for School Choice," Frederick Hess (Law & Liberty) "A Unified Theory of Education," Frederick Hess and Michael McShane (National Affairs) Rick Hess Straight Up (Education Week) Old School with Rick Hess (Education Next) Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.  Michael Q. McShane is an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and director of national research at EdChoice, where he studies and writes about K–12 education policy, including private and religious schools and the politics of education.

On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, Helen Dale joins host James Patterson to discuss the rise of new sectarianism in the UK, political and civil unrest, and how the Australians performed in the Olympics. Helen Dale is a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. She won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, and read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. She writes for a number of outlets, including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette. She lives in London, is on substack at helendale.substack.com, and on Twitter @_HelenDale Show Notes: "The New Sectarianism" (Helen Dale for Law & Liberty) Helen Dale's Substack "The Sporting Genius of the English-Speaking Peoples" (Rachel Lu for Law & Liberty)

In a time of partisanship and dissention, can the Constitution provide the kind of unity we seek? Yes and no, argues AEI Senior Fellow and author Yuval Levin in his new book, American Covenant. The Constitution offers a kind of unity, but a limited one, that falls short of what many hope for. He joins host James Patterson to discuss constitutional history, our present social tensions, and what's wrong with our institutions. Notes: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation―and Could Again Law & Liberty symposium on Levin's book "Constituting Unity", a Law & Liberty forum led by Levin.

On the latest episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast, host James Patterson sits down with contributing editor John O. McGinnis and AEI's Adam White to discuss what the Supreme Court's latest rulings mean for the future of law in America. Show notes:  https://lawliberty.org/forum/constitutional-government-after-chevron/ https://www.amazon.com/Originalism-Good-Constitution-John-McGinnis/dp/0674725077 Law & Liberty Supreme Court coverage: https://lawliberty.org/emancipating-the-constitution-from-non-originalist-precedent/ https://lawliberty.org/netchoice-and-the-big-tech-scare/ https://lawliberty.org/jarkesy-rejuvenates-juries/ https://lawliberty.org/murthys-maddening-modesty/ https://lawliberty.org/a-loper-bright-future-for-statutory-interpretation/ https://lawliberty.org/a-specious-form-of-judicial-restraint/ https://lawliberty.org/moores-unrealized-potential/

On the first episode of The Law & Liberty Podcast, host James M. Patterson sits down with Richard M. Reinsch, who was the founder of Law & Liberty and the host of our original podcast series, and is currently a Senior Writer for the magazine. Listen to Patterson and Reinsch discuss contemporary trade policy blunders and prospects, the economic resilience of blue-collar towns, and Reinsch's new projects at the American Institute for Economic Research. Richard M. Reinsch II is Editor-in-Chief and Director of Publications at AIER. He is co-author with Peter A. Lawler of A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty. He writes regularly for National Review and Acton's Journal of Religion & Liberty. Further reading: Richard's writings at Law & Liberty AIER's The Daily Economy Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch's A Constitution in Full Philip Hamburger's Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.

Eliot A. Cohen joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss his new book on Shakespeare and power politics, The Hollow Crown. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law and Liberty and is hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org. Thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. But today, in fact, we are not left to any arbitrary leniency of a willful goddess of inspiration to get us going for this latest episode of Liberty Law Talk because our theme today is Shakespeare and politics, the stagecraft of statecraft, and even the statecraft of stagecraft when it comes to understanding the halls of power and those who would be in it. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting Fellow for the Independent Women's Forum. But importantly, for today, I am a partisan, wholly and devotedly, of all things Shakespeare. And joining me today is Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly counselor of the Department of State. His books include The Big Stick and Supreme Command. Thrice welcome, Eliot. What news on the Rialto, as we might say? Eliot Cohen: Well, Rebecca, first and foremost, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I lead a very odd life in some ways, bouncing between military matters at the moment, which is my professional expertise in one way, and then Shakespeare. It's odd, but it's nice to be back with Shakespeare because the rest of the world's pretty grim right now. Rebecca Burgess: All right. He provides us comfort and also much thought to chew on. So I thought, in this midwinter moment, when everyone is settling down in front of their fires, all sated with holiday cheer, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that all thoughtful people want, or are in need of, a good book and a good conversation. And voila, you have gifted us The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Just out recently by Basic Books. And so I thought we could use the next hour or so to talk about what Shakespeare teaches us about politics today or helps us analyze those in the halls of power. The characters within Shakespeare are always of interest, whether it's Henry V, whether it's Richard II, or whether it's Prospero. And I'm going to needle you about some you didn't put in there, including the prince from Much Ado About Nothing and that band of unserious statesmen, not statesmen yet, the princes in Love's Labour's Lost, who have to learn how to become serious statesmen. But I would love to start off by asking you: What has teaching Shakespeare and introducing Shakespeare into your syllabi at Johns Hopkins or others taught you anew about international relations, grand strategy, or politics? Eliot Cohen: Well, that's really a whole range of questions. Let me just start as a teacher. So, I'm about to become emeritus at Hopkins and shift over full-time to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I've had a 34-year career at Hopkins, which has been wonderful. The last course that I taught was for freshmen, and it was a freshman course on Shakespeare. And I have to say—it was just a wonderful way of rounding out a teaching career because what you see is how young people, who maybe have never really been exposed to this in a really serious way, they may have had an encounter with it in high school, but they're now at a stage where they can begin to appreciate it. You can see how it opens a world for them, and that's a delight. And it's, in a way, at a time when we could all use a bit of optimism—it's a source of optimism that you realize there's always going to be a new generation coming on, and they can respond to the classics very, very powerfully. So that's the Mr. Chips in me, if you will. I began ... I've always loved Shakespeare. I began thinking about teaching it after seeing Henry VIII, which is a play not often put on. There used to be some dispute about whether it was even by Shakespeare. I think most people think it is now a collaboration with another playwright named John Fletcher. And if your listeners will bear with me, I'd like to read the bit of the soliloquy that got it all started. So what's happened is Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII's chancellor, has just been deposed, and it's sudden, and it is a sudden fall from power. And here is what he says: "Farewell! A long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And,—when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening,—nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now has left me Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me." So my wife and I saw the play, and I was really struck by that soliloquy because my immediate reaction was, I know that guy. I mean, I've been in Washington now for well over three decades, and I've seen all kinds of things, and I was so taken by that, I took it ... I was meeting with a bunch of students who were all graduate students by the way, later on, and I said, "Let's talk about this." One thing led to another, and before you knew it, I was teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of students at a professional school of international relations. And I think the thing that strikes you, as you study Shakespeare from the vantage point that I have, which includes a fair amount of government service as well, is, first, how a lot of the fundamental predicaments of political characters just don't change. He also mentioned how there are phenomena that he captures that are still very much with us. You just need to learn how to do the translation. So, if I can give just one example of that. So, one of the plays that I have always enjoyed teaching is Coriolanus, which is about the great Roman general who becomes a traitor and comes to a sticky end. But, first, he's an incredibly successful general. The problem is he has no political sense whatsoever. I've known a few generals like that, actually, in my time. Rebecca Burgess: Zero political prudence. Eliot Cohen: Right. Political prudence is not their strong suit. But there comes a point where he's just been tremendously successful in battle, and they're about to make him consul, which is the thing he really wants—it's the honor he really wants. But he has to kind of go along with the people, with the plebs. Until they ask him to show his wounds, to take off his toga and see the scars of battle, and then he detonates, and everything goes downhill from there. And I was teaching this to a group of graduate students, including about half a dozen people who'd been in very hard places and done hard things in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I said to them ... So these are people in their late twenties, early thirties, some of them. I said, "Don't feel obliged to answer this question, but has anybody ever asked to see your wounds?" And the conversation just exploded. Rebecca Burgess: I bet. Eliot Cohen: Because, yes. I mean, psychological wounds, not physical wounds. And so I think part of what Shakespeare gives us is the ability to see things that are around us, much more vividly in a way, because he's abstracting us from our current context. I could go on, but let me pause there and see where you want to take this. Rebecca Burgess: Well, in every direction, of course. But on this particular note of showing wounds, I think it is of interest, and we'll probably touch on it later. I think it's inevitable that in the rise to power, or in statesmanship, how much do you have to show the work of statesmanship to be a successful statesman? Are you supposed to make it look easy? Are you supposed to reveal your trials and tribulations? And I think there's a difference, perhaps, between Shakespeare's day and ours, between that. It seems like, today, we emphasize the personal story of the politician. But is it any different than that showing of the wounds, or showing of the interior, if you will? Eliot Cohen: Yeah, we like people to show their vulnerabilities. But, the point that Shakespeare is making with the story of Coriolanus is we've always wanted our leaders to show their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Now, we've taken it to a pathological extent. So I'm going to just give an example. So when they finally do the memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, what do they do? They make a big point of having him in a wheelchair. In point of fact, FDR went to great lengths not to be photographed in a wheelchair because that was not the image he wanted to convey. To go back to Shakespeare, what you see is a lot of leaders who actually have all kinds of burdens, pathologies, and so on, and who do make considerable efforts to conceal them. Actually, Henry IV, the father of Prince Hal, who became Henry V, talks about that about how he tried to conceal himself. But the truth is, those things are always there. And I think one of the things Shakespeare shows us is, if you pay close attention, you can see what they are, which is a useful thing if you want to understand the people who are your leaders. The challenge that Shakespeare gives us, and the more I've read Shakespeare, and reflected on the more kind of diabolically cunning I think he is, he just gives you frequently little glimpses into a personality. And if you're not paying a lot of attention, you won't notice, which is kind of what the personality wanted. But what Shakespeare is going to do is say, okay, I will tell you the things you need to know, but you've got to watch carefully. And that's one of the things that Shakespeare can teach the student of politics, is the art of close observation. Rebecca Burgess: Well, so you already quoted Cardinal Wolsey's beautiful speech, it is so powerful. And it is from that point of vulnerability, a man who has realized that power is no longer in his grasp. Is this where we start to study power and those in power, from their vulnerabilities or the vulnerabilities inherent, or is it just one of many paths? Does it open up something, or are we missing something if we start from the standpoint of vulnerability? Eliot Cohen: I don't think that's where you start. This is Cardinal Wolsey at the end of his career, not at the beginning of his career. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Eliot Cohen: No, I think you look at all kinds of other things if you want to see how people actually get into the business of acquiring powers. The way I organized the book is I didn't go play-by-play. I began with one large section on how people get power, how they use power, and then, finally, how they lose it. Again, one of the things that's a bit sick about our current world, is that is where we want to start, with people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Not that you shouldn't pay attention to them, you should, but first you want to see, I think, what is it that makes them effective? What is it that makes them succeed? I mean, if you take Prince Hal, for example, who becomes Henry V ... Of whom, by the way, I have a very dark view, that is of King Henry V. Rebecca Burgess: You do. Eliot Cohen: A very dark view of this is Henry V, the Shakespearean character. The real Henry V, I couldn't care less. But you see him kind of having a glorious old time, hanging around with a bunch of lowlifes in the east cheap, in what's probably a brothel. And it's comic, and it's good fun. And here, again, you get to Shakespeare, the close observer. Actually, this is one of the ways in which Prince Hal is learning how to be a king, and that becomes clear, I think, later on in the play. But, again, you have to pay close attention if you want to see how this is going to feed into his ability to inspire people, to manipulate people, which he does a lot, and to rule. Rebecca Burgess: Right. The setting is, in fact, quite important for Shakespeare. I know you spend a little bit of time talking about how important, when you're talking to those who actually put on Shakespeare plays, they say that figuring out the staging, figuring out the costuming, sometimes is where they start from. It's not the secondary consideration, it is where they start from. For Shakespeare, the opening scene, the first scene, and the second scene of the first act, in fact, are always of prime importance. In Henry IV, it is so well done because you start in the halls of power before the king, and it's the exact same speech, the exact same dynamics that are in scene two with Prince Hal in the tavern. And so Shakespeare is telling you, here is politics high and low, here is England, for Prince Hal to figure out how to govern and rule England. He's going to have to figure out how to understand both of these on their own and how to tie them together. And I've always thought, gosh, darn it, that's so brilliant, how can we not do that, too? Eliot Cohen: Well, you're absolutely right. You always need to pay attention to how Shakespeare sets the stage initially. It's also very important, I think, to pay attention to the very end, where he'll occasionally drop this little thing on you, where, if you pay close attention, you go, aha. So at the end of Henry V, for example ... Throughout you've had the chorus, who is cheering Henry the V on and saying, "Oh, how can we possibly capture this guy's greatness in just this little theater of ours here, and touch of Harry in the night," all that stuff. And at the very end, the chorus says, "Thanks for being here. By the way, he died young, and his son was an infant, and all his conquests kind of fell apart. And we've talked about that before. See you later." It's just a couple of lines, but if you look at the end of that, of Henry V's story, you go, listen, why does Shakespeare put that in there? Why does he have to end on a two-line downer? And I think the reason is he's explaining a lot of the stuff that went before. One of the things that I talk about, I use, there's a technical term for it, it's what the Greeks called anagnorisis, where you suddenly realize the truth of your situation. That's what happened to Wolsey there, where he goes, I've been swimming on a sea of glory, and, poof, it's all gone. It happens to individuals, but it can happen to us as readers of Shakespeare and people who observe Shakespeare. I think if we read it closely enough, where you go, "Oh, oh, that's what's going on." But just to connect it to the real world of politics, that's very important too. I think one of the problems that we have when we talk about foreign policy, military affairs, and so on, is a lack of close attention to what's going on right before our eyes frequently. Governments, in particular, fall prey to this, and I've seen it firsthand, but I've also seen it in other places as well. You get caught up in government talking to itself, you get caught up in highly classified this and that, and you forget to say, "Whoa, that's right in front of me, that actually means something," and to pause and reflect on what it means. Rebecca Burgess: Right. And there's a timing aspect to that as well, right? And I wonder sometimes whether the pace of government in our daily life is just so frenetic now that we ... Unless someone is astute enough to carve out some time for themselves for reflection, the reflection doesn't happen. And the consequences of that, of course, as you just mentioned, we see all the time. But I've wondered about that, especially recently, since my own time in coming to DC, which has not been as glorious as yours, I'm still laboring in the analytic vineyard ... Eliot Cohen: It's still early yet. I'm towards the tail end, you're at the beginning. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Right, right. And we'll talk about that arc of power soon, so you can tell me the pitfalls to avoid. But I've wondered: Have we taken away the ability for our leaders, for ourselves, to have that moment of anagnorisis, of actually understanding the situation in front of us? Barring some huge kind of cataclysmic changing of the guard, which happened with Putin invading Russia, and then, of course, all the events on October 7th with Hamas and Israel. But should it really take something so profoundly catalytic for us to have these moments of, oh, the real world actually has changed from how we have been talking about it? Eliot Cohen: So, to get very serious for a moment, I just came back a week ago from eight days in Israel, where I'd led a small military and national security delegation to meet with a lot of people there high up. And they've just gone through this shattering experience. And, of course, one of the things ... I'm actually writing a piece about this for The Atlantic. One of the problems is that for the people at the very top they don't actually have time to process any of that. And the surge of emotions is such that you can't really expect them to process it. No, I think it's a very large problem. One thing I've always been struck by, and I made a bit of a study of some of the decision-making during the Second World War, it made a big difference that Churchill, when he would go to meet Roosevelt, would sail across the Atlantic, which meant that he would have three or four days where he wasn't checking emails, and he could think things through. And I think wise executives do try to carve out that time. I was, for my sins, I was a dean for a number of years at Hopkins. And one of the things that I learned, I said, I wanted to get an executive coach because the situation we were in was pretty difficult, and I wanted to get all the help I could get. She was a wonderful teacher and is now just a good friend. But that was one of the things she always emphasized, you've got to figure out a way to give yourself blocks of time where all you do is you think. And that's when I began taking really long walks every day and without headphones on, without listening to music, just long, long walks and I think it's a critical thing. And I do think that we've lost it in another way. I think a lot of senior political and military leaders don't have the time to immerse themselves in Shakespeare…I don't know, J. R. R. Tolkien, I mean something that is deep and fascinating other than what their day-to-day lives are like, and I think they suffer for it. Rebecca Burgess: So, to turn to the actual contents of your book, I love the taxonomy of power that you give, so essentially, your theme is power and the arc of power, and there's almost a little bit of a Homeric cataloging of ships in how you go about in acquiring power and exercising power and losing power. So, how does one acquire power? For Shakespeare, of course, there are three different ways, and you give us those. Eliot Cohen: So, the easiest way is inheritance. Now, of course, a lot of the plays that I use are primarily the histories, one or two of the tragedies, some of the Roman plays, but preeminently the history plays. And you might say, "Well, okay, fine, if you're living in a monarchy, of course, the crown prince inherits, but what relevance does that have to us?" Well, actually, it has a lot of relevance because if you stretch the concept of inheritance a bit, that's where it's not the case that you've... Let's take a particularly pointed case right now. If you become the president of Harvard, it's not because you've necessarily worked your way to the top in a difficult competitive environment. You've been picked and you enter into it. Now, in the past, it was the accidents of birth, I suppose, but it's not the same thing as building a business from scratch or building any kind of organization from scratch where you have acquired power, you've been selected somehow, which means that at some level for anybody in that situation, it's not something that you've acquired on your own. Rebecca Burgess: Figured out the mechanics of. Eliot Cohen: Right. And with all the learning and the scars that are associated with that, and inheritance is a fraught thing. The reason why Henry V is successful as a king, I think, is because even though he is inheriting the crown, first, the process is very difficult. He and his father have a terrible relationship. It isn't even entirely cleaned up at the end before Henry IV dies. But what Henry V has figured out is he actually has to earn this. And I think a lot of people who get picked for very high-level positions, one way or another, don't fully appreciate that. They don't fully appreciate that, actually, even though they have been selected, they still have to earn it. That's a very difficult lesson, I think, for lots of people. I then talk about how people acquire power by means, which might be somewhat underhanded, sort of maneuvering. And that's really the Henry IV case. I mean, there's a bit of crime there. He does kill his predecessor, but it's not simply a criminal seizure. It's some of the dark arts. And Washington, DC is filled with people who practice the dark arts. And the challenge there I think, is for people who often have used somewhat underhanded means to get where they are again, to establish legitimacy, and they too have to earn it. You have the third mode that I talk about is seizure, where it's basically a crime. It's what Macbeth does. He kills off his predecessor, and then... And, of course, the problem that he faces, which he recognizes, and he does it anyway, is that once you've seized power by murder, you have to keep on killing people. And there's a big difference between him and Henry IV, Henry IV maneuvers Richard II out of power. He later on has him killed, but that's a separate matter, whereas in Macbeth, it's straightforward. I mean, it's bloodshed. And there, too, people don't usually do that nowadays in organizations and bureaucracies by actually literally sticking a knife into somebody.  But if you hang around any organization long enough, sooner or later, you will see somebody turning around and finding a knife that has been planted in their back frequently by somebody they didn't expect. And then people are living with the consequence of a seizure powered by a coup. And I guess the larger point for all three methods is that... Actually, people sometimes think, "Okay, once I'm in charge, things are cool." No, that's when it all begins, actually. And you always have to work at ways, people find themselves always having to work at ways to make their power legitimate and to make it effective and to be able to hold onto it. Rebecca Burgess: That's one of the really interesting contrasts, I think. Similarities in contrast, as you mentioned between Henry IV and Macbeth, is when you get to Henry IV, Part II, Henry, now King Henry, realizes that the exact same arguments he used to oust his cousin, Richard II, can be used in turn against him. And how do you prevent that? So, he made appeals to competence. He made appeals to his own ability, to justice, all of these things. But in effect, it really came down to he had a greater ability and a greater kingly sway and that was what was legitimate, trumping the blood, trumping all of these things. And suddenly, he realizes, "Oh, there are these generals lords on my borders who are also very militarily competent who are winning some of these wars for me, and now they're looking at me, and they are discontented with me. How do I stab off suddenly?" And you talk about that legitimacy question and how that also affects Prince Hal. He, as prince in waiting, as king and waiting, it turns out that is the most dangerous position and most difficult to be in because he is an automatic threat to his own father. So he can't be serious around his father. So, from the perspective of the one coming up to power, how do you guard yourself against your own father so that you can get the foothold to establish rule? Eliot Cohen: It's a very common thing. One of the points I make in the book is that Shakespeare is fascinated by the politics of courts. And again, you might think, "Well, okay, we don't live in monarchies," or, I mean, the Brits do, but we don't. And even that is a different kind of monarchy for sure than it once was. But actually, if you think about any organization, it's a court. The guy or gal at the top is the king or the queen. There may well be a crown prince who's sort of designated. By the way, that's not always the case in Macbeth, and under Scottish law, the king can pick their successors. So it's not necessarily going to go down to his son. That's one of the issues that Macbeth confronts. You have various courtiers who might think that, "I'd actually be a much better king than the current king." There's usually a court jester or two. So that phenomenon, I've seen it in universities, I've seen it in the State Department, I've seen it in the Defense Department. It's universal. People live in courts. The other thing is the shadow, just to go back to Henry IV, the shadow of illegitimacy. The good thing about inheritance is it involves a certain kind of legitimacy, whether because you're the son or daughter of the king or because there's been some sort of formal process that everybody perceives as legitimate for the selection of the next CEO. When people have acquired power in not entirely legitimate ways, I think one of the fascinating things that Shakespeare shows us is it never goes away. So in Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, when Henry V is feeling sorry for himself, he's about to manipulate his men into thinking that he's one of them, which he isn't. He tries to buy God off. He says, "So I'm going to give lots of money to the church, and I've got people singing psalms. We're going to rebury Richard II." It's one of the reasons why I think he's such a creep. He is a guy who feels he can manipulate everybody, including God. But the main point here, I think, is he knows that what his father did was illegitimate, and some of the shadow of that falls even on him. Rebecca Burgess: Right, yeah. Well, I must admit to being one of those who are swayed by the rhetoric of the chorus, and I buy in, I buy in. Eliot Cohen: So here's the fascinating thing: you're not alone. I mean, I once did a test when I was teaching this to a bunch of my very bright students, and I kind of go through the whole litany of why I think... Look, he launches an unjust war. He is quite cruel in these show trials he does of the conspirators against him. He orders the hanging of one of his best friends. He is kind of deceiving his men about what he really thinks about them. He orders the massacre of a whole bunch of French prisoners of war. Again, Shakespeare just kind of gives you a little note about that, and then it goes on to the other stuff. And then he seduces this French princess, except it's also, there's a bit of a threat of rape in it. So I say, "There are all those things. Okay, now having said that, and thinking about the Agincourt speech, 'We few, we happy few.' How many of you, if Henry the V were to walk in here right now and say, 'Follow me,' would follow him?" Everybody's hands- Rebecca Burgess: All the hands go up. Eliot Cohen: All the hands go up. I should say, "Okay, teaching is dead. I failed." Rebecca Burgess: No, you're still doing the teaching. And then you say, "All right, and now, the next day, would you have regretted it?" Eliot Cohen: That also, again, this is part of Shakespeare's genius. If we look at our own reactions to some of these characters, that could be very instructive. I mean, the same thing with Richard III. He's evil. I mean, he murders his brother, he murders these two cute little nephews in the Tower of London. And you know what? We find him kind of funny and charming, and we like the fact that he breaks the fourth wall and he confides in us and he says, "Can you believe I'm getting away with this?" And against our will we go, "Yeah, that's pretty cool, isn't it?" And- Rebecca Burgess: See, he's an absolute creep to me. And I've always been like, "How does Anne fall for his wiles? How can that be possible? How can she be so blind? She hates the guy. She marries the guy. What is this?" Eliot Cohen: Yeah, but don't you have any friends who did that? Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Yes. I mean, I recognize the pattern, but it's not one I want to recognize. But so true. But back to a little bit of Henry, and I think this gets us to your next block of considerations, which is exercising power. Once Prince Hal becomes Henry—and side note, I have to thank you so much for not titling this book "Shakespeare for Situation Rooms and Boardrooms" or something like that, it kind of takes a lot away from it. So Prince Hal becomes Henry and he has to reestablish his kingliness, his fitness to rule in front of his people on this stage, the stage of monarchy, the stage of nations, of... Well, it's the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, more or less, or the pre beginnings of it. And so he has to make certain all of his actions are seen by his courtiers and the world amplified. He is on a stage, he can't get away from that. How can he not distance himself from Falstaff? Because Falstaff, well, "Banish me and all the world," all of those things. All being said, he is still, not from a political standpoint, he's a liability for sure. He's also not a good citizen, really. And something needs to be done about that so that the youth don't take them as an example. So, how do we square those responsibilities and personalize them? Does personal responsibility take second place to political responsibilities once you are in office? Eliot Cohen: Oh, I think you put your finger on it. I think part of what you're seeing there is the dehumanizing effect of power. One of the things that Shakespeare does, this is something I think I always felt, but I feel more strongly now after immersing myself in this, is Shakespeare shows us how the exercise of power burns away a bit of your humanity. For me, the brutal thing is actually in... So first, let's begin with the Falstaff, who is humanity on some level. We love him. He's a rascal. He's funny. He has no illusions. He's probably the most beloved of Shakespeare's characters. Well, there are two moments in which we see that Henry does have to break with him. I think you're absolutely right, although Henry has also learned from him because what Henry has learned from Falstaff is this is what normal people are like. Henry is not a normal person, and in fact, people like Henry cannot be normal, and most very successful political people are not normal human beings in a variety of ways. The way Henry does it, though, is quite brutal. I mean, he- Rebecca Burgess: Yeah, " I know thee not, old man: fall to..." Eliot Cohen: "I know thee not, old man." So this is at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. Falstaff is hoping to cash in his chips, and he doesn't just say no, these are the words that every teacher dreads to hear from a former student, "I know thee not, old man." I mean, it's completely contemptuous. And then Shakespeare reminds us in Henry V in the opening scene, we are indirectly told that Falstaff has died and that the king has broken his heart. Rebecca Burgess: Right.  Eliot Cohen: And you do wonder: Was the coldness in both cases necessary, or did it reflect something deeper about who Henry really is? Which is my view. But like I said, I just- Rebecca Burgess: But your view...Yes, yeah. Eliot Cohen: I just think it's- Rebecca Burgess: It is absolutely fair. I mean, I think it is all there. I just want to indulge my being rallied by the noble speeches, if you will. All right, so exercising power, I mean, so you break it down into inspiration, manipulation, and murder, so force, keeping oneself in power through these ways. But maybe why is it that everyone wants power? What is it that power has that people are willing to pay such high prices to acquire it and to have it and to hold onto it? Eliot Cohen: I'll fall back on a conversation I had in graduate school with a wonderful woman. She was a political philosopher, Judith Shklar, who was the first woman in the government department at Harvard. Who was, as a child, had been a refugee from the Second World War. And there was a group of us sitting around the table of a political philosophy class, graduate students, all of us, very ambitious. At one point, she turned to all of us and she said, "There are two reasons why you might become a political scientist: either you're in love with power, or you're afraid of it." She said, "I'm afraid of it," and looked at us. And I think it's... Ultimately, the craving for power means that there's something lacking inside you that you want to transcend or expand beyond. I think that the people I've known who are genuinely content with their lots in life don't want it and who have a sense of perspective. And that's why, I mean, we'll talk in a moment about why people leave power, but that's why the figure of Prospero and Tempest is so powerful. I mean, he knows he has to let it go if he's going to be a human being again. And it's why as people grow older, I mean, I know this, just feeling it internally, particularly if you've had a pretty happy life, which in my case I've had all kinds of satisfactions out there. You don't crave all the things that come with power and the responsibilities, the dehumanizing parts, you don't want it. I think when you still have these cravings, which haven't been internal cravings, which haven't been fulfilled in some other way, you do crave it. Rebecca Burgess: Side note because I don't want us to get too caught up in all the current relevance of Merchant of Venice, but that is one interpretation that a friend of mine and I kind of talked about with the ending of Merchant of Venice is: Why is Portia after brilliantly defeating all the legal minds of Venice, if you will, why is she content to go back to Belmont, this kind of made up fairytale place? And his response to me, and this is interesting, I'm the woman here, and he was a male professor, and he said, "Well, I think Portia realizes that the most important things are not going to happen in Venice. The most important thing is this little realm that she is able to control without having to disguise herself, all of these different types of things. But in the family life that she has created by choice, there is a refuge. Jessica, the daughter of Shylock, comes there." And I thought, "Well, that is interesting too, and it is true." But what about for those of us who, and you talk a little bit about this, of the students or of Cymbeline, the old courtier trying to keep the young princes away from the court? All they want is to experience the life of the court because hearing stories about it is not enough. So is this the tragedy of the ambitious young person who thinks, "But I need this realm and this stage of politics to meet my meaning?" Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Look, I think a noble ambition is a healthy thing. The desire to have the power to do some good with it and to have some notion of what that good is—that's an admirable thing. But I think, at the same time, it's important to know how it can be dangerous and how it's not enough simply to desire power. If you want somebody who desires power, it's Richard III. He has no idea what he wants to do with it, he just wants it. That's different from, I don't know, somebody like a Churchill who clearly wanted distinction, he wanted admiration. And if you want to get psychological, it does go back to his childhood, his relationship with his father and his mother, and all that. But in any case, with Churchill, it's clear he wanted to do something with it. And I think that's the critical thing, the critical distinction. I used to have students who you'd say, "Okay, what do you plan on doing after school? What would you like to do?" They say, "Okay, I want to make policy." To which my response was always, "Great. What policy do you want to make?" And I very rarely got a good answer to that. And at the end of that conversation, I would say, "You might want to go and have another think about why you want to... I'm not saying you shouldn't aspire to be Secretary of State. That's perfectly laudable. But why? To what end?" And I think as a teacher or as a mentor, that's the important question to ask. It's not to try to deflect people from the pursuit of power. Also, 'cause if that's in their nature, that's what they'll do no matter what you say, as Belarius finds out in Cymbeline. Rebecca Burgess: Right. So Coriolanus seems a little relevant here, too, because he seems motivated by honor and glory. Eliot Cohen: Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Rebecca Burgess: And so I think, particularly today, we have a very cynical view of power and those who approach power. And, of course, that's all imbued with truth. But on the other side of it, there's a nobler, if you will, aspiration in there, which is for honor and glory. And how do we square this, or how do we allow it? Or is it possible that there are some just motivated by that thirst? Eliot Cohen: Yeah. I mean, look, the desire for some kind of glory is a very important motivator for human behavior. For something like Coriolanus, it's success on the battlefield, for academics, it's getting to be a tenured professor at a major university. For other people, it's getting to be a CEO or maybe having a smashing podcast. But that, I think, will always be out there. The problem with Coriolanus is not only that he has zero political sense, but his desire for glory is coupled with contempt for everybody else. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: And I think that's the perilous part. And it has a profound naivete to it as well because the people that he honors, and one of the people who he honors, who actually turns on him, and that's Aufidius, sort of his rival soldier. He says, "A lion that I would be proud to hunt." he calls him at one point. Well, actually, there are a lot of problems with Aufidius that Coriolanus is not perceptive enough to see. So, that ultimately ends up as Coriolanus' real problem. Not his desire for glory, not his sense of honor, which is an entirely appropriate thing. It's more the narrowness of his conception of honor and glory and his inability to bear with other people. Rebecca Burgess: So, is inspiration in wielding power always manipulation? Eliot Cohen: I think it usually has some element of manipulation. It usually has some element of artifice. Churchill didn't just get up and give those speeches off the top of his head. He wrote them very carefully. He edited them, he chose his words very carefully. So, there always has to be an element of calculation. And if you want, you can call it an element of manipulation as well. But again, that doesn't mean it's evil. I think it's just in the same way that I'd like to think I was a pretty good lecturer. Lecturing is performance art. And- Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: ... if you don't think of it as performance art, you're not going to be good at it. And if it is performance art, well, you better think about the performance. You got to think about- Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Eliot Cohen: ... when you're downstage, when you're not, and all that stuff. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. I'm laughing because that was my moment of anagnorisis, if you will. The first day of teaching, I thought, "Wait, no one told me. No one told me that this is a performance as well." Eliot Cohen: It is. Rebecca Burgess: "And somehow, my brain has to be clicking at a high rate of speed here as well." And I remember thinking, "Oh, that's what makes a good teacher when they can combine those elements. Not just the knowledge, but the ability to deliver it with passion, so that bringing forward of your own personal connection with the text or the subject matter so that those in your audience are alerted that it matters." Eliot Cohen: Yeah. You asked me earlier what I had learned from Shakespeare about international politics. I think one of them is the importance of theatricality and of staging of performance. I thought more and more deeply about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, particularly in the early phases of the Ukraine War, where he put his skills as an actor and as a director to wonderful use in mobilizing his own people and mobilizing international support in ways that I wouldn't have expected. So theater really does manage. And the politicians who are not particularly good are the ones who don't understand that and don't work at it really, really carefully. Rebecca Burgess: And that can be at all levels. I know you mentioned LBJ and the types of suits he wore, and Reagan did that, too, in the opposite. He had a very fine sense of fashion, but as president, in fact, he wore larger suits that were less tailored. They looked a little bit more everyman, and that was an important part of being the communicator, the great communicator. Eliot Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's true of all competent leaders, whether or not they're good people, is they are thinking about those things. Rebecca Burgess: Right before we turn to the losing power part of this, on the question of honor, again, I think you mentioned this in your book, I don't think I'm just imagining it is that difference between Hotspur and Prince Hal in terms of honor and glory. And King Henry IV thinks, or seems to think, that Hotspur would be a better heir to him. And it turns out, in fact, that would've been a disaster because Hotspur, he only has the hotness of his passion in the moment and no forethought, whereas Prince Hal kind of does, which brings in that honor's apparently not enough to- Eliot Cohen: No, it's not enough. And I would also say I'm not sure that... Henry V says that he's hungry for glory, but I think his sense of honor is different from Hotspurs. Hotspur is a more genuine human being, he's a more lovable human being. And you see that in his interaction with his wife, and that's clearly a loving match. Whereas the only thing you know about Henry V and Catherine is, it's a seduction with an element of coercion in it. But for me, though, the thing that's interesting about that story is that Henry doesn't understand his own son. And he also doesn't understand what his kingdom needs. But you can understand why he, who is a very calculating kind of guy who has gone through a lot in order to get where he is but has always been sort of calculating, wants a bit of his opposite as his successor. You say, "I wish it was Hotspur. Was kind of bold and audacious, and he's fiery, and he's spontaneous, and he's unlike me." And it's one of those cases where it's a father wishes his son was something completely different. And maybe the truth is Henry V is even more calculating than Henry IV and arguably much more successful. And maybe at some deep, deep level, Henry IV knows that and doesn't want the rivalry there. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as all the Henry plays, the history plays are, is kind of charting that course from medieval England to post-medieval England and the modern age. But losing power, since we're on that stage, what happens when people lose power? Who walks away from it, and who simply loses it? Eliot Cohen: So one of the ways in which I think people simply lose it is they deceive themselves about how they got there and about who they are. And the classic case is Richard II, who really no longer knows who he is, once he's lost the kingship. When he's confronting Henry IV at one point, he's saying, "I've got this army of angels up there are going smite you down." And then he goes, "I don't have any friends at all." And he falls apart. I mean, he's a very interesting case because he is somebody who, once he's no longer king, there's no sense of who he is. He doesn't know who he is. And he says as much, which is quite remarkable, is that speech where he says, "I've wasted time and now doth time wastes me." Rebecca Burgess: Time wastes me. Eliot Cohen: And so, he's really quite a pathetic case. Somebody else who falls prey to her own magic is Joan of Ark, who I think is a figure really worth talking about than Henry VI, who attributes her successes to magical powers and other people attribute it to magical powers. But actually, if you look closely at the accomplishments that Shakespeare shows you, they're all very human kinds of statecraft and calculation and ruses of war and so on. And so, I've got a chapter there on people who convinced themselves of their own magic. And I reference Barack Obama, who I think was intoxicated and had people around him who were intoxicated by some sense of his magical powers, which, in retrospect, were very far from being evident. But in terms of people who walk away, the two archetypes that I give are King Lear and Prospero. So King Lear wants the trappings of office but without the responsibilities. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: That's the thing that's so striking about him is he's going to divide his kingdom. He still wants to be treated as the king in every possible way, including the difference he gets from his kids, the retinue, all that. And he doesn't realize that if you give up responsibility and authority, that other stuff goes away. Prospero is really a wonderful case because Prospero, who has all these incredible magical powers, decides to relinquish them. "I'll break my staff and bury it several fathom deep and deeper than the plummet. Ever sound, I'll drown my book.", his book of magic spells. And in the book, I said, "Well, why does he do that?" I mean, he's going to go back. He's been able to do all kinds of incredible things on this island because of his magical powers. Why does he make a big deal of relinquishing them? And the reason why is, I think, he realizes that the exercise of power on that island, that magical power, but most power is a kind of rough magic, is dehumanizing. And the hint, again, is just a little thing. But Shakespeare gives it to you, is at the very beginning of the play when he's going to explain to his daughter Miranda, how they ended up on this desert island, stranded there and so forth. He says, "Okay, it's time for me to tell you how this all happened, but first, help me take off my magic robe." So, there are two things about that. One is he realizes he cannot talk to his daughter as a father talks to a daughter while still being this all powerful wizard. But he also realizes he can't take it off by himself. He has to ask her to help him take it off. And so there's, I think, a wonderful insight there. And he is a different man at the end of the play. And it's not that it's necessarily a happy ending.  He's going to go away, and every third thought will be of death, but he's a human being. You see it in the way he treats the people who have been subservient to him, including even Caliban, who, at the beginning of the play, he's quite brutal towards. He's effectively saying, "Do what I tell you to do, or I'm going to torture you." And at the end, he kind of admits to the king with whom he's been reconciled and says, "Yeah, that guy's mine. I'm responsible for him." It's a very, very different tone. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. There's that whole, the shipwreck which he conjures up or the fake shipwreck. It doesn't quite happen. There's that interesting dynamic between him, who seems to be without empathy in that moment and sympathy, by the way, of watching the human drama, if you will, unfold. Which his daughter is just alive, too, and cannot distance herself from him. And she pleads with him. And so there's that, as you were saying, there's something about power that's potentially dehumanizing. You have to take that cloak off in order to remember, in a sense, why you exercise power in the first place in order to improve. Or I would say one ought to exercise power in order to improve the lives of those around one in one's state. But that's interesting. But back to Lear, I think Shakespeare gives us such a pointed commentary on that wish of Lear. "That's literal madness.", he says. Eliot Cohen: Right? Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Literal madness, now rage, rage against the winds as you're out of because there is nothing more foolish than to think that you can hold onto power but not have power. And that you're going to have a happy ending in that type of thing. Eliot Cohen: So often in Shakespeare, people deceive themselves, as in real life all the time. And that's why Prospero was such a wonderful counterpoint to him. At the end, he's not going to deceive himself, which means that he's not an entirely happy character. In the book, I draw the comparison with George Washington, who twice relinquished his power, both at the end of the revolution and then after his terms as president. And George Washington was not a happy man in either case. I mean, he had all kinds of troubles that he was facing, but he was an infinitely more human character than he might otherwise have been. And it's one of the reasons why he is such an extraordinary figure in American history and why we were so lucky to have him. Rebecca Burgess: Plutarch, which I'm, like, duty-bound to always mention Plutarch when I can, but he is arguably Shakespeare's greatest teacher. And in Plutarch, we learn, and in history, we learn that, in fact, the statesmen, the generals who have given most to their countries, often have the most unhappy endings. They're driven into exile, forgotten, banished, or killed. And there's this question of gratitude you might say, which is something that let Lear become so alive about. And gratitude from the point of, "I gave my life in public service. What have you given me? And now you're just going to take it all from me." But I also wonder about—but is there a little note of legitimacy in the people sometimes doing that? Because how else would those people leave or give it up? Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Or I think it's also sometimes you resent your benefactors, most of all. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Yeah. Eliot Cohen: But that's been no doubt. No. Look, I think that's, and Lord knows I've seen, and even to some extent, experienced cases like that where you've done an enormous amount of good. And your reward for that is going to be abuse. And I think that's why... And I'm not sure whether Shakespeare really fully conveys this, although maybe in Tempest, he does to some extent. One of the things that's really important for a powerful person to be able to do is really two things. One is first to take satisfaction in what you've accomplished, not in people's gratitude for it. That is a hard thing for people to do, because if you've been the center of... Eliot Cohen: ... for people to do, because if you've been the center of attention, you want that validation, but you're not going to get it. But the other thing is knowing how to walk off the stage. Again, it's a theatrical metaphor, isn't it? Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Eliot Cohen: It is really important to know how to walk off the stage. And there are a lot of people in the political world, in the business world, in the academic world who've never figured that out. Rebecca Burgess: There are certain presidents or former presidents of think tanks who couldn't stay in retirement and had to come back out, and then the issues that caused within, which is a separate question about founders versus rulers and governors, if you will. Eliot Cohen: Absolutely. Rebecca Burgess: But I think, also, part of it is just that desire to power is, in a way, an exercise of temporal immortality perhaps. And giving that up is the confrontation as Wolsey once again does and prosper of death. Eliot Cohen: I remember talking to one very senior official in the defense department, and we were talking about somebody else who was really clearly at the point where they should retire. And he looked at me, he said, "Eliot," he said, "You have to remember for so-and-so the next big job is death." Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Eliot Cohen: True enough. Rebecca Burgess: Well, I know we're kind of nearing the end of our time, but I wanted to go back to King Lear just for a moment because that play is just so complex. But it also seems to me that Lear, in addition to his sin of wanting to have all the trappings of power, none of the responsibility, mistakes the rule of a kingdom for the affection of a family and doesn't understand that he could force affection in a way from his daughters. But that making that the test of political succession is, in fact, one of the pitfalls, say at least of a monarchy. But it's beyond a monarchy. It's always the test of legitimacy from one's designated heir or not. Eliot Cohen: It means, I don't think he knew what the meaning of real affection is. He doesn't know it with his youngest daughter. He doesn't know it with the one nobleman who really is genuinely loyal to him, who he banishes but who sticks with him. I think, in many ways, he's a great example of somebody who has been corrupted by the exercise of absolute power in such a way that his understanding of other human beings has shrunk. And maybe that's one of the conclusions to draw: is you exercise power long enough, there's an initial period where the exercise of power can cause you to grow. After a while, the exercise of power causes you to shrink, and Lear has shrunk. And although Lear is one heck of a depressing play, the redeeming part of it is he's grown back a bit at the end. He's grown back not only in his ability to recognize who the people around him really are, the bad, but also the good, but who he is. That line where he says, "I'm a fun, foolish old man," well, that's what he is. Finally, at the end, he knows who he is, and that's not given to everybody. And self-knowledge is something that one should strive for. It's know thyself. In that sense alone, I would say Lear is an uplifting play. Rebecca Burgess: You begin your introduction in the book with a nice little anecdote about some people who see on the stage Goneril and all the rest of it. You know them, you've worked with them. I should have warned you at the beginning that I actually played Goneril once. Eliot Cohen: Oh, really? Oh, dear me. Rebecca Burgess: Yes, I did. High school, senior play. It was one of these things. I had no choice. You're given the role. And I thought, "Oh crap." And I will say, this is the fun of doing these things, of course, is we put on an excellent production, let us say. But for about two or three months afterward, there was a noticeable distancing of some people around me. Eliot Cohen: Now, was that because of them or because of you? Rebecca Burgess: Well, you know how effectively I've portrayed that role. Eliot Cohen: You're such a nice person. I can't believe it anyway. But I think there is a larger point there, which is particularly in the exercise of power, you're frequently playing a role, and after a while, you play the role, you become the role, and I think that's something that theater can teach you. And I've heard from professional actors that you play a character in a very serious way over a long season, it takes a while to deprogram yourself and to get that person out of your system. Well, for anybody who's powerful, something has to be an act. It just is. And you may become somebody who you weren't really, but I'm sure it was all about them, not about you. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. No one lost their eyes afterward. I don't have that- Eliot Cohen: I doubt you would go in for the eye gouging. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. It's a little too messy for my taste. But that lack of awareness, you've mentioned this a lot about Kloting, and I think it gets with Lear and maybe where we'll end up maybe about America today, which is those who grow up with power, those who spend a lot of time in power often forget how to wield power responsibly. And there's this lack of the effects of it almost, which you show with Kloting and how he is just cruel or just capricious in a way. And that's why, initially, I wanted to needle you a little bit about Much Ado About Nothing. You have this prince and his little coterie—they come back from a war, and they're supposed to be the statesmen, and serious, they fight wars. And instead, what do they do? They create absolute havoc by just being like, "Let's play with the lives of these lovers, these men and women." How are we supposed to square that? Or what happens? How do we not have that? How do we find the medium between frivolity, which can end in death? Thankfully, it's a comedy, it doesn't. It could have been an Othello ending there with Much Ado and the horrors of Macbeth. Eliot Cohen: That's a deeper question about how do you become a serious person? And I think the answer is you don't become a serious person through the exercise of power or through, in that case, being successful in war. You become a serious person in some other way, which is much more introspective or reflective. And that's, I think, what we're missing. We talked earlier about how people don't have time. Among other things, they don't have time to read Shakespeare. They don't have time to read the Bible, they don't have time to read Tolstoy. They don't have time to do, or they don't make time for themselves to do the things that ultimately would make them much more serious, and those things have to lie outside politics. And I think the people who do keep an even keel, it is because of the things that are outside politics. It's because of a husband or a wife or a relationship with parents or religious faith or a deep, airy addition. You can find it in many ways, but you're not going to find it in the pursuit of power. Rebecca Burgess: To bring it up to America in the twenty-first century, that question of seriousness, I could say throughout the plays, throughout your book, you mentioned the importance of rhetoric. And it seems like today, not only do we have unserious politicians, we have very poor, rhetorically skilled politicians. Eliot Cohen: Yeah, we do. Rebecca Burgess: Is this connected or do we put too much emphasis maybe today on rhetoric? Eliot Cohen: No, the problem is it's not that the opposite of good rhetoric is not no rhetoric. It's bad or misleading rhetoric. And I think in a lot of some of the tropes of our time on the right as well as on the left, you have slogans which are effective, which are rhetorically cheap. When you use the word rhetoric now, it means insincere speech. That's usually how people talk about it. What Aristotle meant by it was persuasive speech. And he thought that rhetoric was absolutely essential for the functioning of any democracy because it's how you make arguments about things that are really important. I think part of the reason for it, frankly, is just the decline of high quality education. If you look at a Lincoln or Churchill, very different masters of the English language, but both of them, they knew their Shakespeare, they knew their Bible. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Eliot Cohen: And that enriched the kinds of speeches that they gave and the way that they made arguments. I think with a lot of politicians today, they don't really think it's necessary. Maybe they've been intoxicated by emails and tweets and Instagram and all that, but they don't understand the power of a well-delivered speech. Even today, even with all of our distractions. I have very ambivalent views of the Biden administration on Russia-Ukraine in particular. And one of the things that continues to baffle me is why we haven't had a series of powerful speeches about why this matters. It does matter to us enormously, and it's not hard to construct the case either. This is not esoteric. So why not? Where is it? Rebecca Burgess: It seems like we've forgotten in America, perhaps because the system works so well for so long that when you have institutions that carry forward the leadership in a way that you didn't have in monarchies, you still in fact do need the leadership of particular individuals, presidents, secretaries of state defense, others who have the microphone, if you will, to make the case. And that seems what we are absolutely leading. Eliot Cohen: I think that's absolutely right. The Cold War, you had the clarity of its beginning. You had John F. Kennedy, you had Ronald Reagan. You then had a period when the world seemed like a very benign and unthreatening place. It gets a bit darker after 9/11, and President Bush made some speeches. And then, after that, the world did not seem like a dangerous enough place, and the consensus didn't seem in peril enough for somebody to realize that they needed to get up there and make the argument. And unfortunately, the world is now a much more perilous place. This past year, I've been in Ukraine, I've been in Israel, I've been in Taiwan, so two war zones and one potential war zone. It's very serious. There are absolutely echoes of the 1930s, but we don't really have a Churchill delivering the speeches that begin to wake people up in time. Rebecca Burgess: Nor do we seem to have a common language, if you will. And I know you've done work in civic education and the importance of deep something that goes back to the Edie Hirsch of the deep civic literacy or cultural literacy that allowed a Lincoln to do what a Prince Hall did, which is everyone in America had a copy of Shakespeare, high and low, those in power, just common. Lincoln himself taught himself through Shakespeare. We seem to lack some of those texts or core texts or core images that we can pull from today, which makes a book like yours necessary on Shakespeare and politics. Though in a perfect world, everyone already would know that Shakespeare was important and relevant to politics. Given that situation, where's the hopeful road, the path that we can take forward? Eliot Cohen: Well, I think, let's go back to where I started, those bright-eyed freshmen at Johns Hopkins University. They were wide open to what Shakespeare had to teach them, and many of them were in the sciences and that were engineering, things like that. And this was not central to their worldview. And that's always, by the way, been my experience when I've had students who are not from liberal arts backgrounds or from STEM areas, I never underestimate the ability of young people to absorb fresh experiences. You just have to deliver it to them. And I think you see institutions and movements out there that are doing this, but you've got a teacher talking here. I think the solution to this is more education. Education takes place in many different ways, in many different places. People have the opportunity to shape this in their homes, in junior high, in high school. The universities are a different proposition, and I worry a lot about the universities. But the truth is, I think the essential battles are actually fought a lot earlier than that. They're fought in junior high and high school. And that's where I think people should focus. And that's why I wrote those pieces that I've written about patriotic education. Rebecca Burgess: Hearts and souls of men, right? Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Rebecca Burgess: Well, like the chorus in Henry the V and like Puck in Midsummer's Night Dream, I have to draw this to a close and ask our listeners for their blessings and their patience and all those wonderful things. Right before I do that, I'd like to give you the last word. Do you have a favorite quote or speech or character in Shakespeare we didn't get to cover that you'd like to leave us with? Eliot Cohen: Yeah, I do. It's from Julius Caesar, and one of the characters that I like, and this will sound odd, is Cassius, who always gets written off as an envious conspirator, which I actually think is not true. Actually, I think Brutus has the weaker personality. Brutus is the one who's vain. Brutus is the one who doesn't want Cicero around in the plot because he wants too much attention. Well, guess what Brutus wants? And Cassius is a much more realistic guy, and there is an element of envy with Cassius. But at the end of the day, they're friends. And this is on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. There's this wonderful exchange. Brutus says, "And whether we shall meet again, I know not. Therefore, our everlasting farewell takes forever and forever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile. If not, why, then this parting was well-made." And Cassius responds, "Forever and forever farewell, Brutus. If we do meet again, we'll smile, indeed. If not is true, this parting was well-made." And it's a beautiful moment of reconciliation between two friends who had had a rupture. And the mirroring of the language, I think, captures that, and it captures an essential human dignity that, at the end of the day, they both have. And you know what? The guys who do [inaudible 01:17:10] don't have. Rebecca Burgess: It's a resonant ending, for sure. A resonant ending for this. And by the way, neither of us will exit pursued by bears. Eliot Cohen: Well, that's true. Rebecca Burgess: Well, thank you so much again, Eliot, for doing this and joining us and having this great conversation. It was a pleasure to have you with us today. Eliot Cohen: Rebecca, I enjoyed it immensely. Thanks for having me on. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. That was Eliot Cohen. I am Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us. Eliot Cohen: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.  

Eckart Frahm joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient Middle East and his recent book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire.   Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: "When time was young and world in infancy, man did not strive proudly for sovereignty. But each one thought his petty rule was high if of his house he held the monarchy. This was the golden age. But after came the boisterous son of Chus, grandchild to Ham, that mighty hunter, who in his strong toils, both beasts and men, subjected to his spoils. The strong foundation of proud Babel laid Erech, Accad, and Culneh also made. These were his first, all stood in Shinar land. From thence, he went Assyria to command. And mighty Nineveh, he there begun, not finished till he his race had run." Those are the opening lines from Anne Bradstreet's lengthy first of four poems on the earliest great empires called The Four Monarchies. She was no respecter for word economy. Her title runs The Assyrian being the first beginning under Nimrod, 131 years after the flood. A mouthful. Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World poet. She emigrated to Salem from England in 1630, one of a group of Puritan pilgrims, just as she arguably introduced Assyria to the New World. So today, we'll be steeped both in novelties and in the ancientness of things, also via Assyria, the world's first empire, being our main topic of conversation. And with that, welcome to a new episode of Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor for Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. Joining me today is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Previously, Frahm was a research assistant and assistant professor of Assyriology at Heidelberg. He has also worked on cuneiform tablets in the British Museum in London and in the Iraq Museum of Baghdad, among many other museums and other collections. Professor Frahm, so many welcomes. It's truly splendid to have you join us today. Eckart Frahm: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor. Rebecca Burgess: This spring you released a new book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire published by Basic Books. In an instance, I think of the Amazon algorithms getting things right. I chanced upon your book because, for my own research on empire, I'd been ordering probably a library's worth of books on Persia, Greece, and Rome. Also on Egypt by German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann. And thankfully or coincidentally, you begin your account of the rise and fall of Assyria with a very dramatic story of a bloody encounter between Assyria and Egypt during the reign of Esarhaddon that results in the capture of the Egyptian crown prince, much of the royal harem, and with enormous amounts of booty being taken back to Nineveh, then Assyria's capital on the Tigris River in Northeastern Iraq. Before me, cities, behind me, ruins is the inscription that encapsulates this classic imperialist behavior, rather reminds me of the Front Toward the Enemy warning on Claymore mines. But from that story, you weave a very richly textured account of Assyria as the world's first empire whose legacy in fact is the idea and form of empire, however protean you reveal that form historically to be. And it seems to me that in putting archeological artifacts, cuneiform text, and historical scholarship in conversation with Persian, Greek, Roman, and importantly biblical texts and attitudes, you set out to do at least three things with your book. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong later. The first is to brush away the cobwebs of history from the picture of who and what Assyria was. The second to create an audience for the centuries-long silent voices of Assyrians themselves, who we can now hear in their own words. I thought that was a very lovely image that you opened with of these long silent voices suddenly being able to speak again. And third, to reveal precisely that Assyrian legacy to the world of empire and the surprising modernity, if you will, of what's been called the first half test of the history and the relevance of that age to our own pandemic, great power competition age. As you weave in so much of this cultural history, I hope our conversation can touch on, not just the politics, but the deep cultural echoes that have concealed as much as revealed Assyria throughout history, from Herodotus to Shakespeare, Rossini, and Lord Byron, to perhaps the particular staging of Adolf Hitler's suicide with his wife and dog. And to Saddam's very kitschy, anonymously published 2000 romance novels inspired by Assyrian warriors and queens. And with that, the almost beginning. What is the surprising anti-imperial origin story of Assyria as you put it? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. When you hear of Assyria and you know a little bit about it, then you usually think of Assyria as this great imperial power, this militaristic, geopolitical entity, and that is what it will eventually become. But it is indeed quite remarkable that initially, Assyria is almost the opposite of an imperial state. In fact, there is no Assyria at the very beginning. Assyrian identity starts off at the little sort of town on the Tigris, some 60 miles or so south of the modern city of Mosul, the city of Ashur from which Assyria of course eventually gets its name. This is also the name of the Assyrian state god worshiped there. And it really is just a small place initially in the third millennium, largely dominated by southern powers. Remember we are here in Ancient Mesopotamia where writing, and cities, and all these things were for the first time invented in a way. But this happened primarily in the south, in Southern Iraq, in places such as Uruk, or Ur, and so on. And during much of the third millennium, the city of Ashur was probably largely dominated by those southern powers. Actually, we don't have particularly good evidence for this time. But when for the first time sources allow us to reconstruct life at Ashur, and Ashur, so to speak, really enters the stage of history. It is a small city that doesn't receive its wealth from war, but instead from trade, from long-distance trade. So this is something quite striking. While in the south, a number of city-states and territorial states seem to be engaged in almost perpetual warfare with each other, Ashur stays away from the fray. And instead, merchants from the city of Ashur engaged in long-distance trade, mostly trading tin from the East, and textiles from the South, and also made in Ashur itself by women from the city trading this for silver in Anatolia. We have a lot of evidence for that from a place named Kanesh in Central Anatolia, some 24,000 clay tablets. This is the type of document on which much of the reconstruction of Assyrian history actually rests. They are almost indestructible. Fortunately, these people didn't write on paper, papyrus, or parchment, which wouldn't have been preserved, but on clay. So we have these texts on there. And what these texts reveal about the city of Ashur is interesting that at this time, this is a city not ruled by powerful kings, but rather one which has something kind of akin to a mixed constitution in the way Polybius has described it for Ancient Rome that is, you do have a kind of dynasty of hereditary rulers. But rulers isn't even the right word. And these people weren't allowed to be called kings, and their power was very much restricted. So they were allowed to put their names on texts, temples, and things like that. But there wasn't even a palace. They didn't even live in a palace. There wasn't a royal court or anything. And they shared the little power they had with two additional institutions. One was the city assembly, kind of a popular assembly of free male citizens. So of course, Ashur too included women and slaves. Probably not that many slaves, but still there were slaves, who were not part of this. But nonetheless, I mean, an almost democratic institution that would, for instance, deal with legal matters. And there was also the institution of the so-called Limmu, as it is called in Assyria and it's often translated as Eponym. On one hand, this was the individual after whom individual years were named. And that indicates that this Limmu was in office only for one single year. He was selected by lot, probably from the leading families of Ashur, certain aristocratic dimension to it. This idea of choosing politicians througha lot has actually just saying that in the sidelines received some interest by modern political scientists who are not particularly enchanted with the quality of the political class these days, and believe that we too might profit from such a process. Anyway, they do this. So they have these eponyms in place who are in charge of the city hall, where taxes are determined, rates and measures, and things like that. So these two institutions compete with the institution of the ruler, was not called a king. So it's actually altogether a political situation that seems really remarkably modern in many regards. Rebecca Burgess: It seems more accurate then to say that Ashur was a city-state, and one that predated Greece. So perhaps Herodotus is not quite correct or needs a correction, an outside correction when he, in his account, rather binary account of Greece where everything is liberal, and free, and the barbarian other, which is very intriguing. But also on that note, I was struck by your invocation or your quote of an inscription from a stela that was erected near the Step Gate, a structure in Ashur where justice was administered, precisely about this question of justice and royal rule. So the quote is, "May justice prevail in my city. Ashur is king. Erishum is Ashur's steward. Ashur is a swamp that cannot be traversed, ground that cannot be trodden upon, canals that cannot be crossed. He who tells a lie on the Step Gate, the demon of the ruins will smash his head like a pot that breaks." It's very direct and very dramatic. But there seems to be a direct linkage of the divine royal power and justice and even nature, the physical world of nature. So you touched on this a little bit. What can be pieced together of the dominant understanding of justice in relation to the ordering of society at Ashur, and everything from the religious cult of Ashur to the lack of palaces that you mentioned? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I mean, this being a Law & Liberty podcast, it's of course absolutely right for you to ask the question about law and legal practices. And yes, you're right. There's this text that talks about law being administered at the so-called Step Gate, which is near a place where later the ziggurat, the temple tower would be located. At this time, probably it wasn't yet there, and where this popular assembly would actually come together and deal with these matters. It was not something that was solely handled by a very small group of elite members, but it was really all these free individuals, apparently. They were in charge of administering law. And it seems, based again on documents from Kanesh, as though in this location near the Step Gate, there were a number of stelæ inscribed with actual law. We haven't found those. So altogether because all these early, well, layers are very deep down. The site of Ashur haven't really been reached by archeologists. Most of this is known from this other place on Kanesh. But what we learned there is that those stelæ included laws such as, for instance, that no one, no merchant in Ashur was supposed, on punishment of death actually, to sell gold to anyone from Babylonia or from the Hurrians, who lived around the city of Ashur. So this sort of economic protectionism in place, and gold was apparently considered primarily a medium for storing wealth rather than for exchange. Exchange was actually handled through silver. So silver was the money of the ancient that he is including. The money in this earlier Assyrian history. So this is just one example of those laws inscribed on those stelæ. Now, the people of Ashur were not the first to have the written law. Written law is actually an invention from Ancient Mesopotamia, and it started not that much earlier. So these laws would be from the 13th century, perhaps BCE. The earliest written law that we actually have documented is from Southern Mesopotamia, from the reign of a king by the name of Ur-Nammu, whose law code, the Ur-Nammu Law Code is from roughly 2090 or so. And we see already with that law code, and then later with famous law codes, such as the Laws of Hammurabi, which are the most well-known laws from Ancient Mesopotamia, that these laws often have some monumental dimension. So the Hammurabi Laws, some of your listeners may know that they are primarily known from a large stele with an image of Hammurabi receiving insignias of power from the Sun God, a stele that is now in the Louvre in Paris. And there are some 300 laws inscribed on it. So what the people of Ashur have in place with this law is nothing that they invented where they came up from it first, but they too participate in this legal discourse. And this law is guaranteed in a way. This is what this inscription that you mentioned shows. It's guaranteed and execution is supervised, well, by the God Ashur. And this inscription says something else, namely that Ashur is the actual king. I mentioned that the hereditary rulers of Ashur were not allowed to use the title king. That title of king is reserved for the God Ashur. So with that, in addition to these earthly dimensions of governance in Ashur, you also have a divine dimension. There's an almost theocratic element to it. And to a certain extent, we might be able to talk about it a little later. This conception of Ashur being the actual king of Assyria remains in place. You also quoted these strange statements about him being a swamp that cannot be traversed. So in very nature, that's very unusual for Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, otherwise, the gods have anthropomorphic dimensions. They behave and look like human beings. They participate in all sorts of events, and wars, and have families. Ashur does not really. Eventually, he gets these things from other gods, but he's very malleable. He's in a way a god without qualities almost. I mean, that's actually quite convenient as Ashur undergoes some major transformations over time. The god too undergoes these transformations and becomes a more warrior-like deity. Initially, it isn't that at all. But when Ashur becomes a more belligerent state, then the God Ashur too assumes the qualities of a warrior god, and so on. Rebecca Burgess: Well, speaking of those transformations and that gravitation towards more belligerence. So there's around the 14th century BCE, which you identify as the proper birth of Assyria. You note how Assyria kind of abandons its more peaceful mercantile ways and embraces policy of military expansion. What transformations are occurring internally in Assyrian political and social institutions that are prompting this? And who are those peoples and kingdoms that Assyria is now seeking to dominate? Eckart Frahm: Yeah, the big difference really is that now in the 14th century, you suddenly actually do have a king, and I would say, of Assyria, because this is now actually becoming a territorial state. But first and foremost, there is now a king. There's an individual who bears that title, which in Assyrian, Babylonian as well is Shahu. And the first for whom this title is attested is a king by the name of Ashur-uballit, who was probably instrumental in the transformation Assyria undergoes during this time. Unfortunately, this happens in the wake of, well, a kind of dark age. Dark, primarily because we do not have too many sources. And so, it's actually somewhat difficult to establish exactly what prompts this very significant change that takes place. But we do see the outcome. And the outcome is that there is now this king. We actually have fragments of a coronation ritual from a little later, but probably already in place, at least in similar form in the 14th century. And in this coronation ritual, you still have this notion of theocracy. There still is the priest shouting to everyone during the coronation of the king, "Ashur is king. Ashur is king." Twice, actually. So there's this notion that Ashur remains king. But then, there is also now a kind of earthly counterpart. And that is, well, the king of Ashur at this point. I mean, this Ashur is king is reminiscent of medieval coronation chants such as, "Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!" Christ is victorious, he rules, he governs. But there too, of course, it's in the context of a king being put into office. And that's the case here as well. And the god through the priest then asks the king of Assyria to expand his land. So Rapesh Matka is the Assyrian. So there is a divine command to the Assyrian king in this coronation ritual to expand the territory of Assyria. So a kind of proto-imperial mission is expressed here for the first time. And that is what these kings from this period onwards actually do. Very much in contrast to the so-called Old Assyrian period about which I've talked before. They now go on campaign almost on an annual basis. And the King, sort of starting in the 14th century, expanded primarily first into the North and the East, so that cities, such as Nineveh and Arbela, which later on would become emblematic urban centers of Assyria, were included in this territory state. This is kind of the core area of Assyria. It's marked by this triangle of cities with Ashur in the south. Nineveh, opposite of the modern city of Mosul in the north. And in the east, the city of Arbela, which is modern Erbil in Eastern Iraq. But then, they also expanded to the West. So towards the Levant, especially towards a region known as the Khabur Triangle, a very fertile area and a tributary of the Euphrates River, where they sort of create a second center of power, thereby really becoming, I mean, one of the major players, political players of this time. And they also became interested in the South. They engaged in numerous wars with the Babylonians. This is another sort of light motif of Assyrian history, this preoccupation with Southern Babylonia. The Assyrians acknowledged they received a lot of their culture and their religion from there. The relationships are very much like that between Rome and Greece in this, and also in other ways. But they also want to kind of politically dominate Babylonians. The Babylonians are not too keen on that. So there's the beginning during this period of a constant set of conflicts that are very charged because of the emotional nature of the relationship between these two places. So all these things essentially happen now and remain major features of Assyrian foreign politics for centuries to come. Rebecca Burgess: And it seems like as Assyria is barreling towards empire, one of these classic problems shows up, which is suddenly you have military leaders and heroes who can take away from the authority and rule of the king. So how does Assyria, one, how do they keep their military commanders and heroes in check? And how do they keep informed about the security threats on their perimeter? What kind of storylines should we be having in mind as we're seeing the king seemingly lose some power in regards to some powerful court officials as they're on the brink of empire? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. We see that, for the first time, this conflict between the king as the absolute ruler and someone competing with him for power. Well, you see it for the first time essentially sort of in the 13th century and the 12th centuries BCE. When a viceroy, that's his official title, was implemented as the Assyrian representative of Assyrian power in this Khabur area, began to try to gain his independence. So this western part of the kingdom, I wouldn't call it an empire yet, and the eastern one. The eastern one is the core one. That's where the actual King has his residence still in the city of Ashur at this time. But during this time for the first time, you actually see how in the West, this viceroy is trying to gain more power. There are conflicts. So rush through the history now, because it's impossible to really talk about all the details here. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Eckart Frahm: What happened around 1100 or so is, and especially around 1000, is that Assyria underwent a major crisis like all the states in the Levant and in the Middle East at that time. It's often linked to the famous Sea Peoples who, well, invaded Egypt around 1177 BCE. Their arrival was probably prompted by factors such as climate change that led to further migrations. At any rate, Egypt is under pressure. Large states such as the Hittite Kingdom disappear entirely, being destroyed in the wake of attacks by marauding migrants it seems, and the details aren't entirely clear. And it takes a little while until this chaos reaches Mesopotamia, which is located further east, including Assyria, but it does reach Assyria. And so, around 1000, Assyria is really limited to its core areas. But unlike most other politics in the area, the Assyrian dynasty, most importantly so, stayed on. So there's never an interruption in the dynastic line. Actually, the dynastic line remained in place uninterrupted under the late 7th century. So for about 1000 years, which is really quite remarkable. And that means that when the dust settles... In Assyria, especially the Arameans who attacked, well, the various Assyrian cities and so on. When those Arameans begin to settle and when it seems precipitation increases again, and therefore, the agrarian output becomes again more abundant, the Assyrians are the first to profit. And it is then in the 9th century BCE under kings such as Ashurnasirpal II who moved the political capital to a new place, the city of Kalhu, its central Assyria, and his son, Shalmanesar III, that the Assyrians first regained their former territories. And then, under Shalmanesar even moved beyond. So for the first time now they really also campaigned on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. They go find Anatolia and so on. But they do not yet annex any of these places. And what happens in the wake of Shalmanesar's reign is that a number of nobles, so-called magnates, the great ones in Assyrian provincial governors, and especially military officers who have control over armies in border areas again begin to seize power at the expense of the crown. Now, many of these people at this point seem to have been eunuchs. And that, of course, is for a reason because the kings want to avoid exactly a scenario where those guys start to create dynasties of their own. And that has essentially been successful it seems. So we have not really any evidence for any of these people really sort of forming family dynasties. But we do see that for much of the first half of the 8th century, they call the shots. So there are now people, especially this general by the name of Shamshi-ilu, who is all over the place and who has inscriptions written in his own name rather than that of the king, who usually before had a kind of monopoly on this kind of memorialization. And so, we see these people really gain a lot of power. This discussion within the scholarly community and whether this really should be considered, well, a crisis or whether the agency that these people had might not also actually have contributed to Assyria in the long run actually profiting becoming, especially in economic terms, more powerful. And I think that latter point of view certainly has a certain legitimacy. But there will be a crisis eventually in the mid-8th century. Rebecca Burgess: So that crisis you note, it's curious what happens instead of Assyria collapsing in on itself. In fact, it embarks on a hundred-plus years of imperial dominance. So Assyria is now an empire. How does it remain so successful? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. If I may perhaps just say a few words on this crisis, because it is indeed very surprising that after the crisis, Assyria suddenly gained this enormous power. And because this is actually one of the new points in my book, and also perhaps resonates with our own time. I would like to just say this, between 765 and 745, Assyria undergoes a really difficult time. And I believe one reason for that is a plague. So what we see is that hardly any campaigns are undertaking anymore. The army stays at home. We have a number of sources that tell us that. And there are actually rebellions against the king. That's two mentioned in the Assyrian sources. And I believe that a major cause of all this was actually epidemics. Because important chronological texts on Assyria tell us that there were at least two bouts of, well, plague, epidemics ravaging Assyria at this time, so during this period, things really didn't look very good. And then, suddenly with the year 745 and the rise of a new king by the name of Tiglath-Pileser III, Assyria suddenly expanded massively. By the end of the reign of this King, it ruled over all of the Levant almost, has conquered significant parts of Israel, for example. It has expanded to the East. It rules over Babylonia twice as large as it was before. Tiglath-Pileser also annexed many of these places, that is, he turned them into Assyrian territory, taxed them rather than just extracting tribute. So this is, in my view, when Assyria becomes an empire. And then, of course, the question is, well, how is that possible considering that before there was this really pretty disastrous crisis? And I would say, well, what we see here is that... I mean, history is not determined by laws. I mean, you can adapt if the challenge is not too big, at least. And here I would say what Tiglath-Pileser does is he adapts, he compensates for the loss in wealth and also in labor. Lots of people probably died. By conquering new places, extracting their wealth, and then also deporting literally hundreds of thousands of people. So the Assyrians are always deporting people from other places, bringing them to new ones where they would serve as a labor force. But under Tiglath-Pileser, the numbers increased dramatically. And I think he does it in order to make up for the losses that Assyria had suffered before. I also think that probably this epidemic had also affected other places in the area which would have made it easier for Tiglath-Pileser to conquer these places. Also, it's clear that, of course, the disaster cannot have been that bad, that no troops were there at all anymore. But I think there was a real crisis, and what Tiglath-Pileser does when he kind of invents the idea of empire, creates the first empire, in my view at least. The world's first empire is that he reacts to the crisis. Rebecca Burgess: So empires are synonymous often with conquests, militaries, and armies. So I'm wondering if we can spend a little time talking about the military. Here, the Assyrian military, how they organized it, and how violent it was, or any Assyrian tactics, or behaviors actually were in their relation to their enemies on the battlefield. We have, of course, through history. And as you point out, it might be a little bit of a blackballing of Assyria in this regard. Maybe they weren't as violent as they are portrayed. At the same time though, there are some indications that they could be pretty violent. If I remember right, there may have been some indications of cannibalism, also frequent skinning of enemies, and public display of the flayed flesh. And then, of course, the boast of Sennacherib. And I know I just said that wrong about Babylon, that he had dissolved it in water and annihilated it, just reminds me of course of Rome and the sowing of salt in the fields. Yes, if you could just explain maybe a little bit about the military in this area. Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I mean, this is a question I think is important and it needs to be addressed when you talk about Assyria. So just a few words about the army. Of course, the army was an extremely important institution in Assyria in the first millennium. Without the army, it wouldn't have been possible to conquer all these different areas. Well, it included a standing army stationed in the capital under the control of the King. But of course, it would have been impossible to just go out, and with this fairly small army to do what the Assyrians eventually managed to achieve. So there were also army contingents, army units elsewhere, in the provincial capitals. Assyria at this time was organized into provinces. In the end in the 7th century, I think roughly 70 provinces or so. Each of them had a capital with the provincial governor and all those governors also had to entertain army units. So when a king would go on a campaign, he would gather up those army units as he went along. And the Assyrian vassals, that is kings or formerly independent kings, who were clients of the Assyrian kings, too, had to provide army units. The Assyrians were very open to, including in their troops, specialists from other places. For instance, the Assyrian chariotry was made up, to a significant extent after the conquest of Israel in the late 8th century, by contingents of chariots from Samaria in Israel, so the capital of Israel at that time. And there were other such foreign components of the Assyrian army. Of course, the Assyrian army went on campaign, would often act in violent ways. And the Assyrian kings described this violence with a great deal of detail. What I would say here is though that, first of course, the Assyrian kings are not the only ones. Somehow though there's a lot of focus on those Assyrian inscriptions when it comes to descriptions of islands. But for instance, when you look at inscriptions and images from Ancient Egypt from the New Kingdom, you see too how soldiers heap up large amounts of hands and penises of slaughtered enemies before Pharaoh. So Egypt is not just of nice dancing girls depicted on the walls of some tomb. You have violence being very aggressively marketed in a way in Ancient Egypt as well. And of course, violence was also simply used by everyone in the ancient world. I mean, up to today, of course, violence is something that is being implemented by most states at some point. When you compare, let's say, the behavior of the Assyrians with that of, let's say, the Romans. My feeling is that the Romans probably were actually more violent. So what's also important I think is that we might be a little bit misled by those royal inscriptions. The royal inscriptions focus very much on violence. And it is the question of why they do that. I mean, some have argued, well, deterrence. However, many of these inscriptions were not really accessible to enemies. So my feeling is more like they were set up often. I mean, in Assyrian cities, of course, they were consumed by the Assyrian elites. So one of their main purposes may have been sort of to immunize those who were expected to go to war with respect to using violence so that they wouldn't be afraid of doing so because this is of course one of the big problems. When you have an army, you must make sure that the army is somewhat willing to engage in killing. We also know, of course, that the Assyrians often preferred diplomatic solutions over violent ones. So if there was a chance to talk an enemy or a rival into submission, they would certainly go for it. When you look at the situation in Jerusalem, as it is described in the Bible, the attack by Sennacherib, whom you mentioned. Sennacherib is his name. You mentioned in 701 he attacked Jerusalem. And in the Bible, you have a story of how the chief general talks to people there, and says, "Okay, just give up. And okay, we will deport you. But we will do so peacefully and we'll settle you in some nice place where you have your own fields, and gardens, and everything will be great." And of course, this is propaganda, but that's also important to keep in mind. I mentioned the deportations. Of course, deportations are acts of violence. No one wanted to be deported. These were acts of body snatching, but these were not genocidal acts. So what is important, and this is really a big difference, let's say, from modern states such as Nazi Germany or so. Sometimes the Assyrians are compared to those, and I think that's problematic. The Assyrians had no interest in mass killing. The Assyrians wanted a labor force. They wanted people to be able to pay taxes. They also needed anyone, I mean, to be of a certain religion, or ethnicity. So they had no prejudices at all in this regard. They wanted a well-run efficient state. And for that, they needed people, on one hand of course, to be obedient. And so, deportations would make sure that, well, local loyalties would be dissolved. And they wanted these people to be able to do work, mostly in agricultural work, but also construction work, wherever they were needed most. And so, they sent them to these places. So many of the Israelites were deported after 720, the famous biblical story of the 10 lost tribes. I mean, these tribes are not lost. They actually were settled in different places inside and on the margin of the Assyrian empire, including in Media, and also in construction sites. For instance, in Khorsabad, where Dur-Sharrukin, where this king Sargon build a new capital. And that's where we find them mentioned. And occasionally we have texts, for instance, about these people from Israel on the Khabur River and Gozana, where they are part of the local community and seem to live quite nicely. So again, I want to idealize it. This is not, I mean, how things should be obviously. But I think it's important to, not to exaggerate the degree of killing and make clear that, again, it was important for the Assyrians to have actually a large population for the Assyrian kings. Rebecca Burgess: Right. That question of the propaganda of violence or of strength and the relation to the directness of publicizing a violence that they may not have actually done, at least to that extent, in practice. It made me wonder about that because, of course, as you note, you don't find any of these royal inscriptions where they admit their weaknesses. No king wants to admit their weaknesses. But then, that was an excellent point you made. And I do a lot of work around veterans and militaries in society. Well, that's one of the questions that always is, how do you enable your soldiers to be able to be effective on the field? But then, how also can you enable them to come back within society? This question of the social sanctioning of violence in particular areas. And that's a very interesting point of this also being in play there. So thank you for mentioning that. But another kind of aspect of this question of violence I wanted to ask you about. It seemed as though it was tied maybe to some of the specific Assyrian beliefs about the dead, and some of the practices in relation to the burial of the dead, and their treatment of ancestors. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I don't know if violence in particular would be linked to it, but I'm very happy to talk briefly about Assyrian beliefs about the netherworld, and perhaps about one particularly exciting case of where the burial did not occur and the consequences for Assyria, but also beyond. So in Assyria, just like in Babylonia and Mesopotamia in general, I would say, beliefs about the netherworld were quite similar to those of the Greeks and the Romans. So unlike in Egypt, the netherworld was considered a place that wasn't super attractive, where you would drink water rather than wine, and eat bread rather than cake. Of course, there was a very strong belief you needed to be there. What was very, very problematic was if you were not properly buried, and your ghost roamed around anywhere, that would be a threat to anyone left behind living. And of course, it would also be a very unhappy fate for the dead. So what the Assyrians usually did, was they buried their dead in subterranean vaults. If they had enough money to have a decent house, under their houses. So in places like the city of Ashur, many houses were found with these vaults, basements were essentially skeletons in their closets, where once a month at least the children would go down and make a small sacrifice to their parents or grandparents and ancestors. So this is how this worked. And for Assyrian kings, it worked actually quite similarly. Only that their tombs were apparently much more lavish. None were found undisturbed, but we know where those tombs were located. They were the royal tombs. I mean, were located in Ashur in the so-called Old Palace, where the Assyrian kings continued to have a kind of temporary residence even after the capital, the court had moved to other places. First at Kalhu, and later on actually Dur-Sharrukin and Nineveh. So the idea was to bury your king there once he dies. But on one occasion, in the year 705, King Sargon II – the one who actually deported those Israelites along with Tiglath-Pileser – Sargon went on a campaign to Anatolia to a land named Tabal from which he would not return because the army was defeated, the king was killed. And what's worse, the body of the king could not be retrieved. So it disappeared. Somehow it was taken away by the enemy. And that was clearly considered a really problematic issue. And you can sort of see that a whole discourse unfolds among the Assyrian elite about what this all means. If something like that happens, the idea is here then the gods must be displeased. And there's actually a text from later times in which Sennacherib seeks to establish the nature of the sin that Sargon must have committed, and so that he was killed in this rather terrifying way. It's also interesting that Sennacherib then moves away from the newly built capital that Sargon had just created in Dur-Sharrukin, and creates a new capital at Nineveh and great expense of course. So clearly, he doesn't want to be in the shadow of this king who died under these very problematic circumstances. And we see, for instance, an Assyrian scholar. We have a lot of information on these scholars, intellectuals, and so on, copy the 12th tablet of the famous Gilgamesh Epic on this occasion. And in this 12th tablet, Gilgamesh and Enkidu talk about the fate of those who die. And the text ends with people who die on the battlefield and cannot be buried. So clearly, this is in reaction to all this unhappiness about the death of Sargon. At the same time, you can see in Israel that, of course, where Sargon is remembered, I mean, he has just conquered Israel and he has been aggressively trying to bring Judah, the Southern Kingdom, under certain control as well. He is not very much beloved. And there in Isaiah, Isaiah 14, we find a kind of mocking that's related to his king. So their fun is poked at this king who was so haughty, and who climbed up the highest mountains, and was this great man, and was then though brought down, and not even buried. Buried away from his tomb as the text says. And here, I mean, what one can then sort of see is the strange ways, well, sometimes religious ideas develop. There is one line in this text, in this Isaiah text which reads something like, "How have you fallen from heaven? Oh, Day Star, son of the dawn." I mean, this statement is of course meant here as a metaphor, but later on was taken literally. Jesus says somewhere in Luke, I think Luke 10 or so that he saw Satan fall from heaven. And the fathers of the church took this up, combined this New Testament passage with the passage in Isaiah 14, and said, "Okay. In Isaiah 14, this is actually a reference, well, to Satan, to the devil." And this Day Star, son of dawn, was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, as he has fallen as light-bringer, and in the Latin version of the Bible as Lucifer. So quite literally, I mean, at least one name of the devil. So here you see how some poor certain king who happens to fall in enemy country, and his body cannot be retrieved, becomes an archetypal model for the devil in the later history of the evolution of this theological idea of absolute evil. Rebecca Burgess: The etymological transliterations, if you will, are absolutely fascinating. And there's so much. We could do a whole podcast just on the Bible, the Torah, and Assyrian history. You've mentioned a little bit of the interactions between the Assyrians, Sennacherib and his father, and both kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And I know we need to kind of move forward because there's so much to talk about with Sennacherib. I want to talk about his wife and the role of women. But just have to note that how could we not talk about this and mention that famous episode that Lord Byron later dramatized with his spectacular poem with its opening line of, "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." It was just so memorable with the destruction of Sennacherib. And it's an episode that Herodotus seems to mention in book two where he describes the defeat more in terms of field mice and once again pandemic. So it's kind of again two things that you have mentioned about these competing narratives of things that are happening. But I'm wondering if we can move towards this question of women and some of these powerful queens. Sennacherib's wife, Naqia, seems to have been extraordinarily powerful in her day. And she seems to have enjoyed ginormous influence over her husband and actually to have exerted power. And she's the only one to have left a building inscription in royal style, for instance. What does her story reveal about the role of women in the Assyrian Empire and her possible connections to the unraveling of that empire? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. So Assyria from the beginning is fundamentally a patriarchal society. So men are the ones who call the shots to a significant extent, but women have a lot of agency as well. And that was already the case in the Old Assyrian period when the city-state of Ashur engaged in this long-distance trade. All these husbands were away, of course, trading on Anatolia, and their wives were sitting at home in Ashur and were managing the household, and were managing the production of the textiles to be sold, dealing with the children, and essentially dealing with everything. So we have lots of letters written by those women, who were quite clearly literate, an important thing to keep in mind. They complain with their husbands about things not being quite right and the way they should be, and make very good suggestions of what should happen. So often enough, we were actually the ones who played an instrumental role in making all these things work. But you asked about politics. And yes, even though the Assyrian King List is an important document about this Assyrian dynasty that was in office for such a long time, it's called the King List for a reason because it only includes the names of male rulers. It is very clear that women in various periods played very significant roles. One very famous is a queen named Shammuramat, an Assyrian who was sort of active around 800. She was the mother of King Adad-nirari III, who was probably minor when he became king and went on campaign with or for his son. This is mentioned in the inscription. And later becomes the model for the famous Greek femme fatale, Semiramis, who is a sort of archetypal, oriental female despot, fascinating. I mean, licentious, all of sorts of things. In many regards, a Greek projection of course. So everything the Greeks thought was wrong in these, but also fascinating because it, of course, put into question weak narratives about male superiority. But the best evidence for this power of women actually does come, as you mentioned, from later times from the reign of Sennacherib and his son, Esarhaddon. Esarhaddon who ruled from 680 to 669 BCE. This is the time when Naqia, his mother, really seems to be an extremely important figure in many, many instances, really making the important decisions. So, she probably is instrumental in Esarhaddon actually becoming king. He is actually a younger son of Sennacherib. Naqia somehow manages to make sure that he succeeds Sennacherib. Naqia has actually received certain prophecies along with her son about Esarhaddon becoming king. And then once he is king, as you mentioned, she writes about herself building a palace for her son. We also have a number of letters written to her by members of the Assyrian elite. Some are about sort of traditional female activities such as sacrificing to gods and being engaged in the cult. But there is also a very interesting letter by a general from Babylonia—at that time, Assyria ruled over Babylonia, talking about the need to repel the Elamites, so about to take a bridge. And that letter is addressed to Naqia. It is not addressed to Esarhaddon. Why is that? Probably because Esarhaddon seems to have been in very bad health for much of his reign, and he seems also to have been depressed. So he spent days and days in the dark. And his scholars would write him and say, "This is not how well you as a king should act. After all, you are an image of the Sun God. And the Sun God comes out every morning, and you need to do this as well." But he doesn't, and he doesn't eat, he doesn't drink. So, this may be one of the reasons why Naqia is so powerful. I personally wonder, and I can't prove that, whether there might be something else. This is the time when the Assyrians have just, for the first time, really encountered, well, in somewhat major ways, the Arabs. So they have been engaged and traded with the Arabs, but also in battles against Arab tribes. And the Arabs are, well, a problem for Assyria because they are extremely flexible. Of course, they move from one place to another. Their cities, they have a number of cities, are protected by hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert. So it's very hard to get there. What is particularly striking is that, during this time, we learned this all from the Assyrian inscriptions and not from any other sources. We learned it from the Assyrian inscriptions. They are ruled by women. So, those Arabs actually have queens rather than kings. They had a few kings, but most of these rulers were actually women. And they are not just playing cultic roles. They are really there when campaigns take place. They're the ones who call the shots politically. And I can't prove it, but sometimes, well, an empire doesn't only sort of influence its periphery—it can also be the other way around. So the periphery influences things in the center. And I wonder whether these encounters with this Arab gynecocracy, this rule of women, may not have encouraged at least attempts by women in Assyria to do this as well. And Naqia is not the only one. Later on, we have others. Naqia, by the way, then imposes loyalty oaths on all the people in Assyria when she fears after Esarhaddon's death. She must make sure that Esarhaddon's own success, Ashurbanipal, is really accepted as the new king. And so, it is Naqia in whose name these oaths of loyalty are to be sworn. So there's another example of really having a lot of power. Later on, during the reign of Ashurbanipal, a sister of the king is negotiating between Ashurbanipal and the then king of Babylon, a brother of Ashurbanipal who has defected. So she's sent there to negotiate. There are literary texts about this, which are quite interesting I found in Egypt. So again, a woman charged with a very important diplomatic mission. So clearly, women, especially in the 7th century BCE, did play a big role in Assyrian politics. Rebecca Burgess: That is very fascinating. I'm very glad that you brought up Ashurbanipal. For anyone paying attention living in San Francisco, his statue is in fact right in front of what was the former Main Library in San Francisco. And this brings up a really fraught but interesting and fruitful conversation. And you do spend some time with this, is shows how, in this figure, we see the combination of how beauty and learning can coexist with cruelty and sadism. And how, from our perspective today, we can look at this figure and think, "Oh, look at this wonderful Renaissance man. This king who loved learning and wanted to gather all this knowledge, he's just like us." But at the same time, he was a very cruel man. Probably would not want to be our friends. So what is the lesson, if you will, from the figure of Ashurbanipal? Eckart Frahm: I mean, I would answer with the German philosopher Waler Benjamin having famously quipped, "There's no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." There's some truth to that, I think. This is what you can really observe when you look at Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal reached the age of the height of Assyrian art. When you look at reliefs from Ashurbanipal's palaces in many way, this is remarkably beautiful. Especially these reliefs where the king hunts lions. The depiction of these lions and other animals is very naturalistic. This is extremely artful. And, of course, you mentioned it—for us, the modern sort of Assyriologist is particularly important. But in general, of great significance is the fact that he created the first universal library. So he created a library at Nineveh—some 30,000 tablets and fragments were found there in the mid-19th century, still providing kind of the basic stock of what we know about Babylonian in literature because he collected everything, not just from Assyria, but also in particular from Babylonia. So he does all these things. And yet, at the same time, when you read his inscriptions, you encounter a man who is spiteful, who is really brutal. And yes, they were all kind of brutal, of course. But you have the feeling, whereas other kings just did deserve, as a matter of course, that they occasionally would inflict violence. Ashurbanipal is an almost sadist pleasure in describing this violence in great detail. So enemies are forced to grind the bones of their fathers, and then harness to chariots. They have to draw, and things like that, so they're bound together with beards, and dogs in the city gate. You see Ashurbanipal banqueting with his queen and what seems like a very idyllic scene at first glance, drinking wine sort of in a little vineyard at Nineveh. But when you look closely, you see that the head of one of his greatest enemies, the Elamite king, probably Teumman, hanging down from a tree. So it's this ambivalence. I mean, I think Ashurbanipal is, of course, usually really presented, well, in the counts of the Assyrian history as the apogee of Assyrian power. And in some regards, that's correct. But it also is a turning point, I think, because towards the end of his reign, with his reign, Assyria was now in charge of Egypt, in charge of Babylonia, and Elam in the East was conquered. At no other time was the Assyria as extensive as it is under Ashurbanipal. But towards the end of his reign, he lost a lot of territory. And it's, again, very hard to determine the causes. I mean, the question of what brings about the fall of the Assyrian empire is one of these big questions, of course, that will never be answered in such a way that everyone will agree, I think. But I do believe that Ashurbanipal's failure of leadership on some level played a role. Ashurbanipal sort of, I think, made the mistake that he put these professions of greatness that all Assyrian kings were usually providing. So they were the greatest scholars, and warriors, et cetera. But Ashurbanipal, unlike the other kings, he put these professions to a series of public tests. So he really sort of had an arena built, and then slaughtered lions before an audience at Nineveh. And I can't imagine that this was not somewhat ridiculous. I mean, the lions were probably sedated or something. And then, he was well protected. He claimed he was this great warrior, but he also, it's clear from a number of inscriptions, that he actually did not go to war at all. He hated it. He stayed at home. There was a very convenient prophecy in which someone had seen the goddess Ishtar telling the king, "No, just stay home, eat, drink, and make merry, and the rest I will do for you." This is a tradition that's later associated with the figure of the Greek Sardanapalus kind of caricature of Ashurbanipal as an oriental despot. And in many ways it is again a caricature, but there's also some truth to it. He claims to be this great scholar, but when you look at what he actually wrote, the letters that he exchanged with some of the scholars, they explained the most basic things. And people may have noticed. They may realize, well, this guy is actually claiming all these great things, but he doesn't really do anything. And it may have led slowly but steadily to a loss of grip on the part of this king. And well, as time went by with very weak kings following him, eunuchs taking over. This was then probably one of several reasons, of course, leading to the fall of Assyria around 612 by the hands of the Babylonians and the Medes. Rebecca Burgess: That self-inflation of his own scholarship reminds me just a little bit, and it's, of course, not to the same degree at all as these accounts of Napoleon writing to Josephine and telling her all about music and schooling her in music, and his own opinions are just quite terrible. It's kind of amusing. Of course, Napoleon was a military genius and all these other things, so he did have some things to brag about, I guess you could say. So now, we're at this moment of collapse. And you mentioned that there is this big historical mystery that Assyria falls, and it's an event rather than Rome, a protracted process of decline, sudden, abrupt, and brutal. And of course, there are these notes throughout of a rhyme between Rome and Assyria. And what I thought was interesting or noticed was that Assyria kind of stood, if I'm getting it right, to Rome as, say, Rome stands to America often for us today, or even for the British Empire, is this kind of cautionary tale or morality tale of, look what happened here. Let's not do that kind of thing against the wall that we look at. But Assyria, in a sense, has a different cultural legacy. There is that legacy, but it has much more of a legacy. And I wonder if we could turn to some of those questions of the legacy. And we have Xenophon's account. He's marching through where Assyria was, and maybe not noticing some of that. And then, there are other instances throughout the culture. And I mentioned Shakespeare and Rossini at the beginning. There's the opera. In Shakespeare, it's the very hilarious little scene between the weavers, the weavers play, where King Ninny's tomb shows up in A Midsummer's Night Dream. But coming up to today, you end with a discussion about the cultural legacy of Assyria and something that happened with the war in Iraq and ISIS in 2015. And I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Eckart Frahm: Yeah. I would say there are probably three legacies left by Assyria. So one is the idea of empire. The Assyrian Empire came to an end between 612 and 609, but the idea of empire lives on. And there was a successor empire right away, the Babylonian Empire. And the kings of that Babylonian Empire, most famously Nebuchadnezzar II, who brought the Jews to exile. They used the imperial toolkit the Assyrians had created. So provincial organization, specific types of bureaucracy, taxation, and a mixture of direct indirect rule, the mixture of diversity in ethnic, linguistic, and religious terms, et cetera. All this is characteristic of Assyria. The way they manage the empire is not completely taken over by the Babylonians. A few things they do differently, but they take many of these things over. And when the Babylonian Empire came to an end in 539 BCE, after some 70 years or so, a larger new empire, the Persian Empire, took over. The Assyrian legacies may be even more pronounced, because what we can see when we look at the Persian or the Achaemenid Empire is that, for instance, when it comes to art, the Persians follow much more the Assyrian model than the Babylonian model. And there's an entry from Cyrus in a cylinder inscription from Babylon, the first inscription and the most important inscription he left altogether after the conquest of Babylon in 539. He singles out the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. So, Assyria really is very much of the model empire for the Persians. And then, the idea of empire, that's the medieval idea of the translatio imperii sort of an empire moving on from one iteration to the next. Of course, as this happens and as time goes by, the image of Assyria fades away a little bit but it is the very first element in this long chain, I think, and that is important. So this is one important aspect. Another one is the stories told about Assyria. I mean, particularly the stories told in the Bible. We briefly talked and we didn't really talk at length about Sennacherib at Jerusalem, which is absolutely fine. But this is a very long story told there in great detail. And for the biblical authors, Assyria really clearly also is the first empire. And it is a great problem, and they talk a great deal about it. They provide us with the names of many of the kings, and they're quite accurate in some cases—even princes and so on are mentioned. Assyria for the Bible also is, I think, important in that the idea of autocracy that empire represents is adopted and used to create a new revolutionary image of God. So rather than the king who is in charge of everything, it's suddenly God. This is a complex process of this evolution of monotheism and is not just something that comes out of the encounter of the Israelites with the Assyrians. That would be too simplistic. But I do think one important element in that story is actually this transformation of the Assyrian royal ideology into a religious idea of divine omnipotence. So this is the second important legacy. And the third is what? And that brings me perhaps to the end of your question. I mean, what you find on the ground. I mean, you rightly said that the fall of Assyria was more an event rather than a process if you compare it to Rome or so. And indeed, it was a dramatic moment. I've called it the First World War. These many wars wage between 616 and 609. It involved the Babylonians, the Medes, the Egyptians, the Chaldeans at some point, the Urartians, many others. That was really, really drastic. And it ended with the great Assyrian cities all massively destroyed, so Nineveh was gone and Ashur was. But then of course, it's also important to keep in mind that not everything was entirely gone. I mean, there were lots of shards, but they were still there. And for instance, in Ashur, where everything had started, Assyrians also continued at least for quite a long while. So for instance, we have Aramaic inscriptions from Ashur from the 2nd century AD, so some 800 years after the fall of the city, where people still talk about worshiping the god Ashur and his wife, Serua, just like these 800 years earlier. So somehow the temple of Ashur survived, the worship of Ashur continued in Ashur, and not everything was entirely gone. And we also see how as eventually Christianity takes over Northern Iraq, how Christians in this area begin to identify with the Assyrians. So there are stories, for instance, about the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, converting to Christianity from a chronological point of view or rather sort of strange assumption considering that you would from 705 to 681 BCE, but there you have it. And you have other stories about some Assyrians being involved in Christian ideas. And you have, I mean, especially then since the 19th century, a very strong sort of Neo-Assyrian identity. Assyrian Christians in that area consider themselves the descendants of the Assyrians. And you mentioned the statue of Ashurbanipal in San Francisco. This was something that was created by a member of the Assyrian community, of course. So there is some continuity in fact in place. And it is, therefore, all the more regrettable that in recent years, I mean, essentially since the 19th century, these Christian communities have really suffered a great deal from persecution and attacks by a variety of different people and are now dispersed all over the globe, essentially. There are still some people in this place near Mosul, or in the [inaudible 01:03:43], or in other areas originally part of the Assyrian kingdom. But most of these Assyrian Christians now actually live in Europe, and in the United States, or some centers like Chicago or so. And it is, of course, also extremely regrettable that, as you mentioned, ISIS, many of these Assyrian sites, such as Nineveh or the Palace of Ashurbanipal II in the city of Kalhu, were assaulted by ISIS and dynamited or destroyed in some other ways in the past year. So this, of course, was all extremely pressing to observe. Yeah, in this regard, things have not gone well certainly over the past years. Rebecca Burgess: But as you note there, in no way am I condoning such destruction, of course. But you also note that in fact it has revealed some new things. As you mentioned, there are all these layers and they go down so far. And in not wanting to disturb some, of course, with respect, you don't touch it. But by some of this destruction, there have been some new discoveries made. And I think throughout, your book is actually quite hopeful, which stands a little in contrast to many of these types of books about empire, which often are these languorous cautionary tales. But before I get to the final, final question about the hopefulness that you have found, both perhaps for Iraq today, and for perhaps Israel and Arabs. I had this one more complicated question. One of the other stories that is in the background of your book is how other empires, later empires, the French-British Empire, in fact, we owe to their imperialism much of the uncovering of the Assyrian Empire and this archeological excavation and learning, which it's a difficult question, right? How should we feel about that? Is it not a question of feeling? What is the kind of intellectual stance to think about how we rely on other expressions of power and imperialism to uncover these legacies of knowledge? Eckart Frahm: Yeah. This is a difficult question. You're right. You're absolutely right. Rebecca Burgess: You can give a short answer, and we can- Eckart Frahm: The rediscovery of those sites. I mean, rediscovery should be in quotation marks because sites like Nineveh were never entirely sort of lost. People there knew this was the Ancient City of Nineveh. It was a place where the tomb of Jonah was, for instance, located and things like that. But the rediscovery, let's say, of traces of the actual Assyrians of the cuneiform tradition, the decipherment, this was very much largely a Western project in the 19th century. And it just so happened that this was the time when Western Imperialism was at its height. It is important I think also to remember, of course, that at the time, these sites were part of the Ottoman Empire, and neither the British nor the French nor anyone else was a colonial power there. So, the British and French individuals were usually actually quite small numbers of people who did those excavations and had to negotiate with the local pastures. It was very complicated. And okay, they may have cheated them occasionally, but they were also of course on the part of the Ottoman authorities permissions given to them to excavate things. So this is the reason why so much of this stuff is now in the British Museum or in the Louvre when we talk about Assyria in particular. It is of course, however, in the long run, a problem that in many places in the Middle East, sort of thinking about Ancient Eastern history has been perceived as a Western preoccupation, and it shouldn't be. And it is, therefore, of course, extremely important that in places like Iraq or Syria, where local identities are also grounded in the ancient past. And that is, of course, in fact what some of the dictators of recent decades have started to do. I mean, Saddam in particular has done this identifying, to some extent, especially with Babylonian kings like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II, but also sort of playing with the Assyrian legacy. And here, again, the problem was of course considering Saddam's extremely problematic legacy in terms of human rights, and so on, that others might have then taken that as a reason, in fact, just not to endorse any of this. And for ISIS, of course, it was... I mean, there were all sorts of reasons to destroy these sites. I mean, they wanted to, of course, annoy Westerners. And they knew that if they killed any local people, this would not actually get them the same types of headlines as when they actually started to blow up some Assyrian bull colossi or reliefs. And they were right. Unfortunately, this is how it went. It got a lot of traction when this all happened. So yes, you're also right, though, of course, that maybe, I mean, six years ago or so, I would have been much more pessimistic. I would've thought, okay, this is the end essentially of everything there. But it's actually quite striking in what shorter period of time, for instance, in Mosul, which was completely destroyed. Things actually have been turned around, at least to a certain extent. The city is now in a better shape, much better shape again than it was after this complete destruction after liberation in 2017. And in fact, new excavations have taken place. ISIS itself, I mean, while claiming that it would destroy all this stuff because it was idolatrous, et cetera, of course, also sold things from those sites excavated and sold it on the antiquities market. But for that, they created tunnels underneath one of the mounds in Nineveh. And those tunnels have now been explored by archeologists from the University of Heidelberg. And they have uncovered, for instance, a new throne room with two thrones. One is probably that of Esarhaddon, and the other one, we don't know. Either it was that of Naqia, his mother, or it was of his successor, Ashurbanipal. Very interesting question. So exciting new stuff is indeed coming out. And that's the thing. I mean, you think things are, it's all over, and then it goes on. So another colleague of mine, Karen Radner from the University of Munich, has now started excavations at Ashur, which is under threat from a dam that's being built of inundation with all sorts of problems, of course. I mean, she has been able to pull it off along with Iraqi colleagues and so on. I, myself, have been in Baghdad last year. I mean, it hasn't been super easy, but I was able to go to the museum, work in the museum, and look at texts from Ashur that were excavated there when I was the epigrapher on this occasion in 2001 and disappeared during the chaos of the post-invasion period, 2003, et cetera. But they were retraced, and so I was able to study them again, where I tried to sort of work on those. Now, it's what I have to do the next month and get them out next year. So yes, things go on. And it could be that it goes the other way around, that there's another massive crisis. I think everything is unstable, of course, not just in Iraq, but all over the place. But there are also opportunities. And I think all of one can do, especially when you're a scholar, is use those opportunities out there. And I think what is really important is that, first, we need to make sure that local stakeholders are being involved in all these endeavors. So Iraqis themselves, of course, are extremely important, and they need to be in charge of these places and need to endorse them. And it is interesting that the destruction at Nineveh, these attacks on these bulls when you listen to the audios, the people speaking in Arabic and saying why they are doing it. These were not people from the region. These were the people somewhere from the Gulf. And I've heard from colleagues and friends from Mosul that they're very much opposed. And many people in Mosul were not happy about what was going on. So people on the ground often actually do feel like this is their stuff and they want to preserve it. And so, again, there are, I think, opportunities to enhance collaboration, to explore this world even more. I mean, there are lots of very interesting questions that remain unsolved, and I would be very curious to know more about them. Rebecca Burgess: We touched on only a tiny portion of even what you cover in your book. I mean, you have given us a legacy to think about just as Assyria gave the legacy of empire to the world to think about and explore further. Final, final question. What is the most hopeful thing or one note of hope that you uncovered in writing this book? Eckart Frahm: I don't know if hope is the right word, but I would say- Rebecca Burgess: Optimism? Eckart Frahm: If you want to take something away from it. I would say one thing that I have tried to highlight is that, it's not a good idea to essentialize culture. I mean, it's a bit an unusual book for me to write. I had to also leave my comfort zone, and think about early history of Assyria. And by my primary interest is actually sort of more in the first millennium. But what I discovered of course was then how much it changes. I mean, we talked about it a great deal. And I think it was a good idea that it is, initially, Ashur has this mixed constitutions, these democratic elements, and eventually it becomes this autocratic state. So things can change. And there's this idea Hegel and particular pointing this out that the world's spirit in order to come into itself had to leave the East where everything was autocratic, and monolithic, and flow to the happy world of the Greeks where everything was free and great. I mean, I don't want to downplay any of the despotism and so on that you can, of course, find in those regions over extended periods of time, but it doesn't have to be like that. So you can find historical precedence for very different types of societies. I mean, this is something that I think is important to keep in mind. Don't essentialize people. And then also, again, what I said when I gave you my previous answer. It looked some six years ago as though we would never be able to go back to Iraq. And now, there are quite a few very ambitious projects collaborating with Iraqi colleagues, who are actually quite open-minded about this and trying to uncover the ancient history of this place. It's always good I think if identities are not based on only one thing. So if it is Islam, that's fine. But if it's something else too, I think that's great and that's important. And so, that's what I would hope for, that multiple identities can thrive, whether in the East, in the Middle East, or elsewhere in the world. And I would also say, I mean, the Assyrian Empire of course is perhaps interesting compare also to... I mean, today you mentioned it, empire has a bad name for good reasons, I would say. And most sort of "empires" wouldn't define themselves as empires, but you still have imperial structures in place in various ways. I mean, what I would say is when America, United States... I mean, some 10, 20 years ago, my book would have received greater attention because empire was the big thing. I mean, it was endorsed for many years. Rebecca Burgess: Yeah. Eckart Frahm: This has, of course, changed enormously. But the United States is still, I would say, in terms of communication, internet, et cetera, it's the number one sort of empire, so to speak. Everything works through the United States. And this is something the Assyrians were very good at. Royal roads, communication networks, et cetera. You have the aggressive nature of the Assyrian Empire as you see it play out right now. For instance, with Russia's attack on Ukraine, clearly also an imperial war. And you have a certain commercial aspect. The Assyrians always, even during imperial times, encouraged trade that you find perhaps in China, which has its own sort of specific imperial tradition. So all of these different aspects of imperial power. I mean, neither of them draws on the Assyrian model. But the Assyrian model, the first empire gives us all of these already gives us sort of stuff to think about when we think about our own world. Rebecca Burgess: Right. The rhymes of history. Eckart Frahm: Right. Rebecca Burgess: If you will. Since you mentioned Hegel, of course, I have to make this analogy at the end. You have been an owl of Minerva for us, giving us so much to think about and great insight and wisdom. And thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Frahm. Eckart Frahm: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed your last comparison. Rebecca Burgess: Well, good. Well, good. Once again, that was Professor Eckart Frahm from Yale University discussing his book, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. And this is Liberty Law Talk. And I'm Rebecca Burgess. Thank you for joining us. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.  

Comedy writer Graham Linehan joins host Helen Dale to talk about cancel culture, comedy, and his new book Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Helen Dale: My name is Helen Dale, and I'm Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. With me today is Graham Linehan. Graham is the writer and creator of multiple beloved British sitcoms, most famously Father Ted and The IT Crowd. With so many star-studded successes to his name and multiple BAFTAs—including a coveted lifetime achievement award—one would assume his place in the nation's comedy firmament would be assured. Well, it was—until it wasn't. Graham Linehan was one of the first prominent people in the UK to raise concerns about gender identity ideology (in 2018). He did so using the only tool available to him at the time, a Twitter account with 900,000 followers.    Over the next five years, Graham's career was disassembled. Not only was he abandoned in his hour of need by people he'd worked with for decades and known for longer, but current and future projects were also cancelled, including a completed West End musical based on Father Ted. Given his literary gifts, he's fought back with a book, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, released last month in the UK and coming to US shores soon. Tough Crowd is both a wise and amusing guide to writing funny things for television and an account of the madness that has overrun the arts and universities throughout the developed world in the last two decades. Thank you for joining us, Graham. Graham Linehan: Thank you for asking me. Helen Dale: You were—until a Comedy Unleashed show featuring you at this year's Edinburgh Fringe was also cancelled—probably the most cancelled major figure in the UK. All the 2023 Fringe did was make your cancellation into a national scandal. You talk about the wider cancellation in Tough Crowd, but for obvious reasons, you don't discuss what happened at this year's Fringe. What's it like to be cancelled on this scale? Graham Linehan: Well, it's a destabilising thing for a comedy writer because when you're a comedy writer, you want to be an observer of human frailty and confusion and all the other comically negative things about humanity. And so when you're in my position, I'm now no longer outside things looking in. I am at the centre of a story. I am a figure who is incredibly divisive and scandal-ridden, and it makes even thinking about comedy somewhat difficult. I mean, in terms of coming up with a new idea or a new show—for the last five years, six years, I've been basically firefighting trying to protect my reputation, trying to rebuild it—and you can't really write comedy when you're in that kind of state. You're in a kind of constant fight or flight mode. So yeah, it's a very destabilising and upsetting place to be, but I just have to live with it now. Helen Dale: Has there been any sense since the book came out…It's only been out for a few weeks now, three weeks now. Has there been any sense of... Are more people starting to talk to you now, apart from the sort of obvious media and publicity around Tough Crowd being released? Graham Linehan: Well, it's an interesting thing because when you bring out a book—and this was actually part of my plan—I did think of it as a two-stage plan. The first stage was the book, but also the interviews that followed it because there were lots of things I couldn't put in the book because they didn't fit thematically to each chapter or it was simply too much information. And I thought I would use the interviews to fill in the rest of it for people. But it's an interesting thing. I get two types of interviews.  The first is what I'm getting here, which is being interviewed by people who know the issue, who understand the points, who understand what's happened to me. And the second is what you might call the more mainstream interviews on TV and national TV over here—in the national press—which is usually with people who sort of understand the issue, but really are just kind of reporting on my Wikipedia page rather than anything that's actually true about me. So far, it's been okay. Just before Edinburgh, I was ambushed on TalkTV by someone who simply did not understand the issue in the slightest and was responding to the portrait that's been painted of me by others in our profession. But yesterday I had an interesting one. I appeared on Times Radio, and even though the interviewer was taking the usual tack—which is making me apologise for either things that I didn't do or things that have been misreported—and for once, he actually gave me a chance to respond. So, I was able to put the points as clearly as I could, and I'm hoping that will just go on. Helen Dale: Well, that's something at least. I should just note here that some of the questions in this show were provided by subscribers to Liberty Law Talk and to my Substack. I did this last time, in my previous podcast, and it was very successful—that podcast was with Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater. And so I've decided to do it again. Subscriber questions are of course mixed in with my questions, and you don't necessarily know which ones are which. However, this question is from a subscriber. Do you think most other comedians in the industry who didn't support you are scared to speak up, or do you think they're true believers? Graham Linehan: It's a very good question. It's really hard to know. What I find extraordinary is that even people I was extremely close to don't seem to understand the issue. I heard recently that Adam Buxton—who was a very close friend of mine when I lived in Norwich, and our families hung out with each other—and you would think someone so close would make a special effort to find out exactly what the issues were and to approach them in a serious way. But no, he's platforming people who engaged in harassment against me, and he's allowing people on this show to smear figures like Posie Parker. So I think there's... What you might call it is a kind of protective ignorance. It's like, I saw an interesting thing today: two people interviewed who were at a Hamas march, and were kind of pretending they didn't know about the October 7th attacks. And I think it's a similar thing going on here. They don't know about this stuff, but they deliberately don't know about it because knowing about it to the extent that they would have to do what I do and protest about it means they might lose their careers. So it's a kind of a faux ignorance, if that makes sense. Helen Dale: It's a very interesting take on the idea of pluralistic ignorance or preference falsification. It's like people are participating in those willingly. Graham Linehan: Yes, I've never heard those terms, but I will start using them because they sound like exactly what I'm talking about. Helen Dale: Preference falsification is when everybody says that they believe a thing, but the majority of people saying it don't actually believe it, and then there are revealed preferences—where what they actually believe tends to be shown at the ballot box. So, they vote in a different way from what they say. Graham Linehan: Yes, that's one thing I've been doing for the last five or six years is trying to find a way that people can safely make their complaints or their worries known. But it's very difficult in this world where we're always on a... I mean, that was one of the other reasons why the theme of audiences goes through my book. I think one of the things we did that we didn't realise we were doing was, we decided to step on a stage.  The internet is a stage—and we all decided without really knowing what we were deciding to do—to play out our lives to a public-facing audience. Once these movements started to make themselves known—the gender identity movement is obviously the one I'm fighting—but there are many others out there. Everyone realised, I think simultaneously, that it's a little bit difficult to be a political person if you're on a stage. You can suddenly have tomatoes or rotten fruit thrown at you. And I think it's made, and this sort of goes back to the earlier question, I think it's made many people very, very shy. Shy in a way that's actually harmful, shy in a way that means that they can... One of the things I put in the book is that I always thought the Holocaust, another Holocaust, would be impossible in a connected world because you wouldn't be able to build the concentration camps, you wouldn't be able to commit atrocities because too many eyes were on you. And instead of that, what we have is a situation where the people committing the atrocities are filming it themselves.  It's like I heard an interesting thing about CCTV cameras in crime-ridden areas. Apparently, they had a very good short-term effect. The cameras would go up, and the crime would just disappear. But then, after a few weeks, when everyone got used to them, these places would simply resume their old kind of character. And it's just so strange. I just think that the effect of everybody having a camera, everybody being able to spy on everyone else, has been not to suppress bad behaviour, but to amplify it. And my rosy view of what the internet would bring was completely decimated. Helen Dale: A lot of Tough Crowd is devoted to Twitter, or TwitterX as it appears to be now, and how it ensnared you. And I found it a fascinating part of the book I must say. I've since heard you talk about—and you've touched on it here—how social media produces a type of digital panopticon. I'd be grateful if you could outline some of your thinking on this here. What has this done to us and how is it playing out? Graham Linehan: Well, I think the main thing it's done is it has turned us all into Stasi operatives. I've been reading a lot about the Stasi recently, and I believe it was something like one in four or one in five people in East Germany were Stasi members. So that kind of speaks to a... What's the word? People seem to be predisposed to spying on neighbours. People seem to be predisposed to being an informer, being an operative, being a kind of member of the religious police, you might say. Unfortunately, Twitter has just allowed us all to take this role to report on our neighbours and friends for thinking the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and making the wrong joke. It's one reason why I think comedy is in a really bad place at the moment. There's a famous quote by a comedian over here who said, "the joke that will destroy my life is already out there." And what that means is that, let's say this comedian enters into a contentious debate. It can be about anything, not even as contentious as Israel, Palestine, or feminism. It could be about football. Well, the enemies of that person will be able to simply do a search through that person's timeline to find a tweet that uses a forbidden word or says a forbidden thing. And again, this forbidden thing might not have been forbidden at the time the person wrote it. It's just forbidden now. And so what you have, again, sorry to use all these references, but there's a quote I think by Cardinal Richelieu who said something along the lines of, "give me three letters by any man and I will find enough to condemn him." Which means that it's the interpretation that's the killer. What you say is one thing, but the interpretation applied to it can be used to destroy you at any time. And unfortunately, comedians are particularly susceptible to this because their whole existence, their job depends on them being able to walk a very fine line between what's acceptable to say and what's not acceptable to say. So again, if there's an enemy of this particular comedian out there, he has the power now to destroy that man's or woman's life. So that's what I mean by panopticon. Helen Dale: What do you think will happen to British comedy in the future, near or far? Do you see any future where there is diversity of thought allowed in the wider industry? Graham Linehan: I think so because I think in the end, people will follow the money. I believe that Disney in the States, it's now very easy to... There are no queues, there are no long queues at Disney. That might've changed recently, but this was the last time I checked at Disney World because people are so disgusted by the propaganda that Disney is pumping out. And you can see as well the popularity of shows like South Park in their recent attacks on Kathleen Kennedy that have just really struck a chord. I think Cartman has the line—which he plays Kathleen Kennedy in it—and he says the line, "Put a chicken in it and make it lame." And it's a very funny way of looking at what's going on. There's this concentration on things that do not make for good stories, forced diversity, again—the lack of diversity of thought.  These things don't resonate with audiences who are themselves diverse. When you get a diverse audience, they're not looking to see diversity. They're looking to see things that connect them to a shared humanity. And these stories have been told down through the years for centuries. And yeah, sure, some of them are out of date and some of them have creaky opinions and so on. But replacing those creaky opinions with modern-day creaky opinions, it's no substitute. So I think that eventually people will... I think what you'll find is that companies like Netflix, companies like Disney, they will suddenly get sick of losing money and their shareholders will take over. And I think at that time, you'll find people actually actively seeking out comedy that is challenging and confrontational and exciting. Helen Dale: I've heard you comment to the effect that writing Tough Crowd made you feel like a comedian again. Do you have any comedy work or more creative work in the pipeline? And if so, how can we support those projects beyond buying the book of course? Graham Linehan: Ooh, that's a good question. I think, no, you know what? I think buying the book is really the only thing I need at the moment, because what I need to do, what I really need is to feel a sense of safety in terms of my financial situation. It's really hard to write comedy when you're worried about where the money is coming from. So if the book kind of takes off, and if people realise that it's not just me whining about being cancelled, there's a lot of stuff in there about how to write comedy and comic observations in themselves. If that does well, then once I feel that the rubber hits the road on the sales, I'll be able to just start thinking about the next project. But at the moment, my whole existence is spent trying to overcome the devices that are in place to stop the book from selling. For instance, WHSmith isn't stocking it at the moment, which is the big retailer over here for the… Helen Dale: Are you in Waterstones? Graham Linehan: We are in Waterstones, and with Waterstones, it's a shop-by-shop basis. From what I've been told, every shop is the subject of a power struggle with the kind of people who would be offended by the book and the kind of people who just love books and want to sell them. So it's up to individual shops, whether they hide it in the stockroom or put it out on display. But yeah, it's a tough one. But I have- Helen Dale: Have WHSmith even told you why they're not stocking it? Graham Linehan: They're even refusing to answer emails. Helen Dale: Oh, wonderful. Graham Linehan: Yeah. But we were expecting things like that. And I think also they would be very clever just to try and not have any controversy about it and keep it quietly hidden because these types of things, when they try and suppress a book, it's a bit like, I don't know if you remember the episode, but it was an episode of Father Ted where Ted and Dougal protested outside of a cinema, and all they did was drove people to go and see the film. And I think these activists within every organisation are beginning to get wise to that phenomenon. And quiet cancellation is the order of the day. So yeah, I'm just trying to fight that and trying to raise awareness of the book as best I can. Helen Dale: In Tough Crowd, you observe at one point that you love audiences, and this is a direct quotation for listeners. "They're smart, they keep you on your toes. The reason so much content is so bad at the moment is because the audience is being edged out of the relationship." I know what you mean, and I think Liberty Law Talk listeners will know as well, but what does this look like? Because I'm assuming your comedic antennae must start to twitch when it starts. Graham Linehan: Well, it kind of speaks back to what I was saying earlier. It just looks like a box ticking. When you see a cast that's made up of one black person, one white person, one Asian person, my antennas start to go up that I'm being lied to. And I feel like for me, a show like The Wire is a much more honest and kind of meaningful attempt to get black faces and black folks' voices on screen because it speaks to a world that's hidden, that's very uniform and it feels truthful in the same way Reservoir Dogs feels truthful. It's like basically five or six white men on screen the whole time, but it feels authentic. It does not feel like these guys would be feminists or would be great kind of battlers for race relations. They're just what they are. And I think those stories are just as valid as every other story. And I think that what you will find—and this is what I mean when I say audiences are being edged out–—is that a black audience would love Reservoir Dogs just as much as they would anything else. It's a very funny joke. I can't remember who said it, but he said... Oh yeah, it might be Shane Gillis, who's an American comedian, and he was talking about slavery movies, and he was talking to his black friends and he said, "Do you guys like these movies?" And his friends were going, "No, no, we thought these were for you." Helen Dale: That's so true. Graham Linehan: Yeah, so it just feels like... When I cast The IT Crowd, the central comic figure in it is Moss who is played by Richard Ayoade, and I just responded to him as a human being, as a person, and it kind of gives you what you might call a natural diversity to the cast. Helen Dale: And also he's the nerdiest nerd nerd who ever nerded. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Which gives another twist on it that's also useful. And also, again, it's truthful; because I was talking to the commissioner at the time who asked me to do it, and he said I find a lot of these IT guys are usually... Are often, sorry, not usually, but often Black or Asian or whatever it happens to be. So it kind of feels right. So when I see a show where they are forcing something and they are pretending that something is a, I don't know what you would say, a kind of truth. They're pretending that something is truthful and it's not, that's when I think the audience's alarm bells go off and they don't even know it. You can watch something and feel slightly unsatisfied by it and not really realise why. And it's because at some level, you're being lied to. Helen Dale: Do you have a favourite comedic period or era, and if so, why? Graham Linehan: Oh, that's a good question. I really love the whole... I mean, feel very, if I could go back in time and be in one place, it would be on the Bilko writing team. That was Phil Silvers, Mel Brooks, and I think Sam Simon was on it. Woody Allen I think was in there. And I just think that it felt like... I mean, you look at Bilko and it was shot in the fifties and so on, and yet it's really authentic. It's rough. Again, it's diverse, but truthfully so. Yeah, I just think that must've been a wonderful time to be around. Also, it was a time, I guess, when Jewish comedy was really being installed in the American consciousness, and I think that Jewish comedy and the voice of Jewish people became the dominant comic voice over the next 20 years. I'd love to have been at the start of that. Helen Dale: Yes. And I think a Jewish-Irish collaboration would've been very interesting. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Helen Dale: Following on from the Twitter issues we were discussing earlier, you talk in your book about your old Twitter persona in the form of the conflict you had with Markus Meechan, who's better known as Count Dankula. Yes. He's a comedian, too, hence the name. How did that incident help open your eyes to left authoritarianism? Graham Linehan: Well, that's a good question. It was around then that I started realising that the words fascist and Nazi were being thrown about way too liberally. And I kind of fell under the spell of it and became just another node in a network passing on received wisdom that I was getting from other left-wing people. And after that, I kind of thought, well, if that wasn't quite true, then what else is not quite true? What else have I been unthinkingly copying and pasting, copy and pasted opinions? How many of them did I have? And I did look at many other things, and I won't go into them because when you go into them, people say you're denying X or denying Y. But I did think, well, I do have to now look at everything with a lot more scrutiny, serious scrutiny, and I need to start thinking about these issues carefully. Because for me, in the last few years, the black-and-white version I had of politics–which was very much left as good, right as bad–has been incredibly stress-tested. And I've found it lacking in lots of different places. So my thing now is to try and find people who are genuine, honest, brave, and telling the truth as best they can tell it and try and lose all the previous delineations of left versus right. One thing I found absolutely inspiring was a brilliant Zoom kind of round table of black voices who were all talking about police shootings. And it was absolutely fascinating, and suddenly, it revealed to me that the one thing they pointed out was that the big problem with police shootings in America is not racism. The big problem is the fact that everyone has guns and police are terrified. I'd never thought of it along these terms before. And of course, when you hear it like that, it's not like a right-wing view that guns are a problem. It's a left-wing view, and yet you never heard it really expressed because the overwhelming tide was coming to the conclusion that–if a tide can come to a conclusion–that the police were irretrievably racist, or I'm not sure what the word is there, but they were just kind of institutionally racist. And seeing this round table of these black conservative voices made me realise, oh, it is a lot more complicated than that, and it's not helpful to drill down into one particular way of looking at the problem. A more holistic approach is what's always needed. So yeah, what I did to Mark, and I've apologised a few times for it now, kind of joining in with his- Helen Dale: Note to readers: Graham also apologises to Markus in the book as well. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. I didn't realise that he was a kind of a canary in a coal mine for that kind of Stasi desire to punish and to destroy that I subsequently became a victim of. Helen Dale: Because I will make a little observation here, and it's one that I can't prove. So I'm just putting it out there, and it's perhaps worth doing some more research and thinking about for both of us later. But I do think that the Count Dankula incident may have contributed to the slowness of conservatives in coming to your aid when you were being monstered. Graham Linehan: Oh, very possibly true. Helen Dale: Because what it was is you had a—and I say this as being someone on the Tory side of the benches, for what it's worth—among the relatively small group of Tories who are also reasonably successful artists, you had a reputation as a canceller. Graham Linehan: Yeah. Helen Dale: And I think that had roots with Count Dankula. Graham Linehan: That's absolutely fair enough and can't... All I can do is keep moving forward and trying to figure out what's going on. If there's one excuse I'll give myself is that, although I don't want to, but one of the things you realise the longer all this goes on, is that people do go into silos and their opinions and their beliefs are framed often by who they choose to follow on Twitter. And also they don't want to fall out with the people who they follow on Twitter. So I mean, I may look like I have strong opinions now, but I'm also influenceable. And when you're in one of these silos, it's very hard to break out of them. It was only, in fact—possibly one of the only positive things that have come out of all this—is that I have broken the head of the silo. I mean, I'm in a few silos now, but I like to think that they are pretty varied and questioning and sceptical, but I'm always kind of checking myself and making sure that I'm not just following along or I'm not just repeating information that I've heard somewhere else, that I'm looking into things and coming to my own conclusions. It's all you can do really. Helen Dale: This question may seem like a bit from left field—it's from a listener, but I actually think it ties into the politics point, about conservatives having a view of you as a canceller. That was nothing to do with the view that we might've had of you as the person who wrote Father Ted, The IT Crowd, or did all these other things, that kind of thing. And it's another political question, another question from a listener. What is it with the Greens and gender woo? They never talk about conservation anymore. Graham Linehan: It's so true. I don't know. It's very weird. The Greens have been particularly bad on all this. They have gone mad. Do you know, one of my early theories about gender is that I feel that the success of Brexit and the success of Trump slightly drove the left mad. They suddenly realised they had no power. They had no power in the real world. The real world saw what they believed in, saw what they wanted, and said, "Nope, we don't want either of those things. We don't want any of those things." And what happened was they retreated to an area where they felt they did have power. And this happened to be women's rights. Because even among right-wing people, a lot of the discussion around women's rights is dismissed as a culture war issue. And if you can dismiss something as a culture war issue, it means that committed people like the Greens can wreak absolute havoc while everyone else just ignores it and treats it as trivial. So what we've had is this movement growing and growing and growing, causing untold damage to young people and their bodies and their minds and their sanity while what you might call mainstream voices simply ignored it. And so the powerlessness that these groups felt when Trump and Brexit prevailed was able to be kind of... They were able to redirect their energy into something where they felt they did have power. And now, gosh, what is more powerful than giving hospitals the advice that they shouldn't use the word mother in maternal advice? What is more powerful than getting to destroy a fundamental word in the English language? So yeah, they just retreated into their little worlds, and they started behaving like tin-pot dictators. Helen Dale: I have to say I did have the reaction expressed somewhat differently because obviously when this first started emerging, I was still in practice. And so it was very much not on my radar because the legal profession is quite conservative, but I could see it in the distance. And it was just the sense of, this is bonkers. Surely people are going to wake up to this. This is completely mad. And if people weren't speaking about it seriously on the tellybox or whatever it is, we would all be laughing. This would be like, and I have to say, like the Pythons were doing, which was John Cleese's observation in your book. I thought "This is so bonkers. People are just going to start falling about the place laughing." And they didn't. Graham Linehan: Yes. And one of the big problems we've had in fighting this is that people simply don't believe it's true. John Cleese had to be convinced that the story of Laurel Hubbard was true, who I think now holds the New Zealand record for women's weightlifting, took it off two indigenous New Zealand women and he's a man. And I think that for many people, it's a combination of things. First, not taking women's sports seriously. I think a lot of men outsource their opinions on women's rights to their wives. And because this is a kind of a middle-class movement, the movement, the gender movement, a lot of the women who are telling them–I've said this before, but I've heard it from a lot of people, the phrase, a lot of men, I've heard the phrase–"My wife says it's not a problem." And these are people who are in the media, in theatre, in publishing. These are well-off people. And of course, their wives don't think it's a problem because their wives won't need a shelter or a rape crisis center, God willing. So they don't see it as an issue. So I think what happened is it has just flown under the radar for a disastrous amount of time. And every time men stuck their head in and they saw one of these extraordinary outrages committed against women, they either thought, "well, it's not true," or "it's not a problem because my wife is fine." So, unfortunately, it's still a very male-dominated world. Men dominate the media and every other area. So they've just been merrily fiddling away while Rome burns, and it's just gone as far as it has because it's never received a kind of serious attention from the people who we expect to give it serious attention, politicians, news media, it's just not seen as an issue. Helen Dale: There's the thing, too–where they talk about men outsourcing–middle-class men outsourcing their opinions to their wives. There is this element, and it's something that I've noticed over many years, that a lot of straight women struggle with solidarity. And so it's quite easy to set them off very nastily against each other. And that's how you finish up in a number of areas, you notice the sort of the loudest trans enforcers, pro-trans enforcers tend to be young women. And a number of Jewish people have pointed out, in the UK at least–I don't know about other countries–but certainly in the UK, that the plurality of people tearing down posters of Israeli hostages are also young women. That leads me to the next question I want to ask because you write about the importance of chivalry towards the end of Tough Crowd, which is something that many feminists dislike, but that most normal people see as necessary. I'm coming out of the political right, so we tend... We're not feminists, we tend to think it's a silly ideology, sort of in it's fighting biology, basically. So a lot of feminists don't like the idea of chivalry, but I think it's actually necessary for the reasons you give in Tough Crowd. And much of that argument that you make, which I found very compelling, came from your late dad. So to what extent was your dad not only an influence on you, but also representative of the good side of Irish Catholicism? Graham Linehan: Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. He was just plainly good. He was so genuinely good in every area. He was driving people to the hospital. He was volunteering at Special Olympic events. He was just plainly good. And I think that many of the things we associate with these things, like chivalry and so on, just came naturally to him. We seem to have intellectualised ourselves into a position where–and I think this is another thing that kind of gave rise to the trans movement–where we fooled ourselves into thinking that women were exactly the same as men in every way. In fact, I remember saying to my son, "Well, women have a disadvantage in sport because their bodies aren't as strong and they're not as tall, their lung capacity is smaller, their reach is shorter." And he was blown away. He was blown away by the concept because he had been fed this line that there was no discernible difference between men and women. And that was one of the ways I kind of sold him on the idea of chivalry. But Dad didn't need explanations. Dad just knew it the way that human beings do know it. And unfortunately, the internet has come in and has kind of separated us from our instinctive human understanding of these issues. So yeah, just basically we disagreed on a lot of things. And as I said in the book, he once used the words "the gay agenda," which I was so mortified by because I'd heard it thrown around a lot by homophobes and so on. But again, good would always win out with him. And when the marriage equality vote came along in Ireland, he voted, after a discussion with me, he voted in favour of it because really, in the end, he couldn't do anything mean-spirited. I know there are arguments against marriage equality and some of them from gay people and some of them are compelling, but he would see these images that were being heavily played of gay couples getting married, and he just thought, "Yeah, how can I stand in the way of people being happy?" So yeah, he was such a good man. And also, the way he treated my mom was very... It had a big effect on the way I kind of feel about women. And he remains a model for me. Helen Dale: You're very, very fortunate. I think, I'm not a psychologist, I'm a lawyer, but I think one of the things that has stood you in good stead through all of this–through five years and nearly six years now of nonsense and the extraordinary attacks you've had on you and finishing up nearly destitute and that kind of thing–I think the figure who has sustained you is actually your father. That's how it comes to me anyway. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. He's something to aim for, something to aim for. I wouldn't quite like to be quite as self-sacrificing as he was. He would go to church every day and don't think I could manage something like that. But yeah, he's a good thing to reach for. Maybe sometimes, even if you can't quite get there, it's still a good thing to reach for something. Helen Dale: The question about your dad provides me with a lead into something more general, and this is where I want to, I hope, bring the two halves of both your book and this podcast together in one place. When you were writing Father Ted, Ireland's Catholic Church was still very powerful. Listeners, I strongly recommend the lengthy section in Tough Crowd where Graham discusses the care he and his co-writer took to ensure that Father Ted didn't rely on Irish stereotypes or mean-spirited religious mockery. The show only featured a single joke about Ireland's clerical abuse scandals, for example. Because of that Irish Catholic history and its complexity, I've wanted to ask every Irish person I know this question but missed out on asking Helen Joyce in the last podcast because Maya was there as well, and we had so much else to discuss. I should say I've had a wide variety of answers to it from my Irish relatives and so I want to know yours.  Why is Ireland so woke? Graham Linehan: There's a few things going on there. First of all, I believe there is some kind of tax break. That means a lot of Silicon Valley companies have moved to Ireland. So Silicon Valley is basically ground zero for a lot of these ideas. The same people who are writing the code for these platforms are the people who are calling themselves non-binary and embracing this movement. Another thing that's happened is it's a reaction against the UK. The UK is seen as–there's always been a bitterness–in Ireland. Sometimes, it takes quite harmless forms like the rivalry between our football teams or sports teams and so on. But other times, there's a real resentment at what Ireland suffered at the hands of England. So when, for instance, the UK became known as TERF Island, there might've been a kind of backlash against that and a feeling also that Ireland also had to make up for its sins in the past against women and gay people. Unfortunately, as happens so often in history, it's a complete overcorrection. And Ireland has gone back to putting women under the thumb, but just in a different way. So yeah, there's a number of things going on there, but those are definitely a few aspects of it. Helen Dale: Yes, I've just had some very interesting responses to that question, and I do want to buttonhole Helen Joyce on a public recording at some point and ask her, why is Island so woke? One of my relatives–who still lives in County Cork–did make the point that part of the problem was that one of the voices objecting to the trans treatment of women was coming from the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church had previously–in the clerical abuse scandal–told so many lies people didn't want to believe that they might now be telling the truth. That was one version that I've heard from an Irish relative. Graham Linehan: That makes sense. That makes sense, yeah. Helen Dale: But I think it's a number of things. It's not monocausal. Graham Linehan: Yes, yes. There's a couple of things. There's a kind of perfect storm of things going on. And Ireland, as well, it always has this kind of scrappy attitude to itself and to the world, and adopting something that's so contentious and so counterintuitive, there's a feeling, "Oh, we're marching into the future and our little country is doing it better than anyone else," and stuff like this. And it would be admirable most of the time, but on this, unfortunately, again, it's just led to women being put under the thumb of a new sacred class. Helen Dale: Because that's got real power in Ireland, the power of the... Because my memories of Ireland are all through my relatives and from when I was a child as well. And I can still remember visiting the Republic and going to Dublin and getting a very strong sense of: this is a very conservative country and priests and cops are the people who run it.  And then suddenly it wasn't. Graham Linehan: Yes, yes. Well, one of the things that people used to say about Father Ted is that someone said—this is in the book—someone said it was Ireland's punk. And one thing that the show did do was show people you are allowed to laugh at silly people. No matter what they do, whether they're priests, policemen, or whoever it happens to be, you're allowed to laugh. And I think it was a bit like lancing a boil. I think a similar thing is needed with this movement, but at the moment, I have no idea how I would approach it. This is an incredibly silly movement. I think actually one of the big problems with this as a movement is that it's so silly that it's almost impossible to parody. It's almost impossible to do- Helen Dale: Apart from that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian: Loretta. Graham Linehan: Yes. Helen Dale: That's the only thing I can think of. That film came out in, what, 1979 or something? Graham Linehan: That's right. Yes, absolutely. They figured that out very quickly. Then, of course, there was Rick in The Young Ones, but- Helen Dale: The Young Ones. Graham Linehan: ... as I was saying to someone recently, if you did The Young Ones now, it would be four Ricks. You wouldn't have the dynamics that you need for a comedy because everybody would be speaking in this monotone way. But that's simply because I'm a 55-year-old man. I am not as attuned to the personalities that are around at the moment in terms of writing a sitcom about people that young. In fact, one of the things I did want to do was graduate from writing comedy to teaching other people how to do it or to producing stuff because I do think that it's a young man's game. I think young people are funnier in general than older people, simply because they have a novel way of exploding certain things that have become calcified in everyone else. Helen Dale: One of the things you brought out very well in Tough Crowd—and it's really well worth reading for anybody who's got ideas about making it in this industry, never mind all the wokery—it's just how much work is involved. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah. Helen Dale: All the script development, all the read-throughs, and then you only get one shot with a live studio audience. If it turns to crap, you're stuffed—that kind of thing. Graham Linehan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's an interesting thing. The book went through a similar process in the sense that it may be easy to write something, but for it to be easy to read, there has to be a process. It has to go through a process. It was interesting writing a Tough Crowd and reading one bit, and the next paragraph doesn't seem to flow naturally from the previous bit. You have to rethink either the previous paragraph or the next paragraph to make that flow happen. Sometimes things would—good scenes or good moments would naturally fall out of the book—because they didn't have that flow. That's the art of it. Everything has to flow. When people come to the end of a show, a sitcom episode that they really love, it's almost like time hasn't gone by. They just started laughing and the next thing it's over. That's what you're aiming for, but you can't get there unless you are really disciplined in feeling the show on an audience level. Feeling it on an audience level means that you sometimes have to disappoint the writer in you or you have to ignore the writer in you. You have to meet the audience halfway. That takes work. That takes work. It's a question of feel. I know it's a cliche, but you do have to kill your babies a lot of the time. Funny moments, funny scenes, they can disappear because they just don't fit. When we had DVD extras, when there were DVDs, we only once put on a deleted scene. As soon as we put it on and it went out, I realised that was a huge mistake because part of the art of it is making people think that the show or the characters or whatever, they are just getting on with their day. That it's not written, that it just kind of exists. It was… Helen Dale: They emerged fully formed into the world, basically. Graham Linehan: Yes, along with the story. That the story is just telling itself. When you show deleted scenes to someone, you're reminding them this is all artificial. This is a series of decisions. They don't care. They don't care. One reason I think that movies about movie-making are never a success is because people don't really want to think about that. They want to think that the stories they're watching are real people experiencing things in the way that they naturally should be experienced. I think that one part of the art of writing, creative writing, not just comedy writing, is what you don't show people. Because if you don't show them the failed experiments, and you don't show them the jokes that don't quite fit, they just think you're a genius. Helen Dale: It's funny. My father was very far from being a comedian of any sort—but one of the comments he made to me when I was young and showing some talent myself as a writer—and dad used to say when I gave him a draft or something that subsequently was published in a pretty decent outlet, he just said, "People don't want to see the man behind the curtain, Helen." Graham Linehan: Yes. Yes, that's it. That's it. Especially when it turns out to be someone like me. One thing I noticed—and it took me a while to get used to this—is people don't give a damn about the writers. They don't even know the writers exist. The sad lot of the writer is that when you do your job particularly well, then you are writing yourself out of the relationship. It's the reason I think Tarantino didn't become as great a writer as I always thought he would become. For me, he's always too present, even to the extent of putting himself in entirely inappropriate roles in his own films. Helen Dale: Yes, it's not like Hitchcock with one tiny little scene, what is it, going into the pet shop at the beginning of The Birds or that kind of thing. Graham Linehan: In Django Unchained, he played an Australian! It's like, oh, my God. I think to become the writer that you want to be, you have to be able to disappear from your own work. I came to terms with that as soon as I became the centre of the story. Helen Dale: Yes. This is just leading into the final question now. This is one where I have had a few go-rounds publicly with different people I've interviewed or spoken to. I did ask Helen and Maya this question. It emerges out of something that is flummoxing a lot of people right now. It not only takes in things like queer theory, but also the decolonization narratives that have been used to justify Hamas atrocities in Israel, which we've all seen. That's the background to this. In Tough Crowd, you talk quite a bit and accurately about the extent to which these mad ideas escaped the lab of American academia and colonised vast swathes of the internet before getting their claws into the UK and European Union. I think it's fair to say that the universities are cultures of our broken wings now. You live in one broken wing, which is the creative arts and comedy. The other broken wing is the universities. You've talked quite a lot in this interview and in Tough Crowd about one way we can resuscitate the arts. What do we do about the universities? Graham Linehan: Well, I think one of the most important things to be done is to simply…I think basically queer theory has to be treated like any other ideology that was found to be corrosive and dangerous to humanity. I think queer theory is an absolute busted flush. It may make sense when you're sitting around having thought experiments in a college dormitory, but once you apply it to real life, it's a disaster. It's leading to incredible unhappiness and confusion. It has to be treated like a rot that just needs to be cleared out. I think that it's fraud. The Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay experiment where they handed in all these fake papers, including Mein Kampf. They actually got a chapter of Mein Kampf and sprinkled a bit of feminist language over it, or queer theory language, and it was published by a feminist magazine, a feminist journal. There has to be some way of addressing this problem of the fake body of knowledge that has been created by fraudulent academics quoting each other. That's what it is. Helen Dale: Because that's all it is. I mean, the hoax that you mentioned, the Pluckrose, Lindsay, Boghossian hoax— which actually happened back in 2018 before this story became all-consuming in 2020—but they showed the extent to which entire academic journals—for which taxpayers were paying an absolute fortune, by the way, because all of these systems are all state-funded—and they were just full of nonsense. You could get nonsense published in there if you used the right nonsense words. Graham Linehan: I was talking to someone else about this today. One of the worries that I have is that we are in such a state of chaos at the moment with the Palestine-Israel thing, queer theory, etc. I saw a thing today, I don't know whether you saw it, but a man calmly got out of traffic and walked up to a Just Stop Oil type protest and just calmly shot two people. Helen Dale: Yes, I saw that, but admittedly, in a South American country where they tend to have more violence. Graham Linehan: Sure. Helen Dale: But even so, it's still very worrying. Graham Linehan: Yeah, the look on his face—someone pointed out you didn't see any rage on his face. You just saw a feeling of exhaustion. I think people are becoming exhausted by the chaos. Unfortunately, when people are exhausted by chaos, they tend to look for a strong man. I'm worried that, as I often say, the strong man better be a nice person because if he's not, then it's a very fertile time to grow a fascist leader who will just say, "Well, I'm sick of all this stuff. We're going to take care of it." What we need is a popular but not undemocratic approach to cleaning up the universities, and cleaning up the various worlds that have been taken over by such concepts as queer theory and critical race theory. I'm just worried that if it goes on much longer and the chaos these disciplines are engendering in society go on, then something's going to give. We're going to see more of these guys, like the bloke who got out and shot those two people. I'm scared of the strong man coming along to sort all this stuff out because we might find ourselves in an even worse position than we're in now. Helen Dale: On that somewhat sombre note, our time has come to an end. Tough Crowd is available in all the usual places except WHSmith—which Americans don't have to worry about—in all the places you normally buy books. I have put a link to the US Amazon page in the show notes to this so Americans can purchase it without having to spend more money than they wish to by having to change it all into pounds. It's also—there's an audible version as well. Graham, did you read the Audible version? Graham Linehan: I did, yes. Helen Dale: You get Graham's dulcet tones reading his book if you buy it on Audible. Ladies and gentlemen, you've been listening to Liberty Law Talk. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Graham. Graham Linehan: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.  

Justin Shubow joins host Rachel Lu to talk about the importance of beautiful government buildings and the possibility of a classical revival. 

Rebecca Burgess is joined by Frank Cogliano to discuss Jefferson, Monticello, and the Jeffersonian legacy.  Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: We know this outline from every nickel we've ever handled, it's part and parcel of America's iconography, the pillared domed home Thomas Jefferson built on his mountaintop outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and named Monticello. Jefferson called his self-designed creation his "essay in architecture," but it is not just a thought-provoking essay in building materials and lines and perspectives, it's an essay in American political and social thought, not to mention America's political history. Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I'm a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, and a visiting fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. For the next 30 to 40 or so minutes, discussing Jefferson's Monticello on the 100th anniversary of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, is Frank Cogliano, Interim Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Cogliano is a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as the University Dean International from North America. He's a specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States and is the author or editor of nine books, including Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy and Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson's Foreign Policy. Welcome, Professor Cogliano. Frank Cogliano: Thank you, Rebecca. I'm thrilled to be here. Rebecca Burgess: Wonderful. And I should have asked you if you're coming from Scotland today or from Monticello, Charlottesville. Frank Cogliano: I'm coming to you from Charlottesville today, I'm pleased to say. I'm spending the current year here in Charlottesville at Monticello, directing the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Rebecca Burgess: Could you tell us just a quick little background about what the International Center for Jefferson Studies is? So many people know the building, Monticello, the home, but don't know that there is this whole study center. Frank Cogliano: Yes, I'd be happy to. So Monticello is the home, as you say, that many people will be familiar with and hopefully they've visited. But Monticello is much more than the house; and it's owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and run as a museum by the foundation. But the foundation has several other arms to it, if you will, one of which is the International Center for Jefferson Studies, which is located in another historic home, about a half mile or so beyond the main entrance to Monticello at a place called Kenwood. And the International Center for Jefferson Studies will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year in 2024. And it was set up to be a center for scholarship and research and to encourage scholarship and research into Jefferson and the world that Jefferson inhabited, not just on Jefferson himself, although we do a lot of research in that area, but also on the American Revolution, the era of the American Revolution, the history of plantation slavery. As I say, the world that Jefferson inhabited and helped to shape. For 30 years, the center, through promoting scholarship, both internally within Monticello but also externally through fellowships for scholars from all over the world, promoting conferences, promoting publication, and helping new scholars publish but also senior scholars, has really helped to shape our understanding of Jefferson and his time. And in so doing, has led... I mean in the past 30 years, and I hope we'll get to this, there's been a real kind of efflorescence of studies about Jefferson in his time, and I think ICJS and, in particular, Monticello generally has played a part in that. Rebecca Burgess: Don't worry, we will definitely get to the 30 years of efflorescence, as you call it. A wonderful word, wonderful image. So we'll probably go a little bit chronologically here, but I did kind of want to for our listeners start out by just saying the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has two twin pillars of its mission: preservation and education. And I'm hoping that our conversation touches on both, but really on the education element because it has become so vital towards America's understanding of Jefferson actually through the decades, through now a century as we are at the 100th anniversary this year. And it includes, as you mentioned, the other historic home, Kenwood. There's a fascinating presidential history that extends beyond Jefferson through Lincoln to the Civil War, obviously, to FDR in World War II, and that's a wonderful story as well. But if we want to start maybe at the beginning of the kind of conceptual question here, the history of presidential homes and estates, including most especially those of American Founders, often are stories that are just as rich and complex and interesting as that of their original owners, and they often reflect the larger history of the American nation. This is especially true with Monticello. Many are not aware, of course, that unlike in Europe and America, the homes of the Founders or presidents are not owned by the federal government nor fully funded by taxpayer support. They don't necessarily have continuing grants even from the NEA, the National Endowment of the Arts, or the National Endowment of Humanities. So it's really been up to private individuals and foundations to protect and preserve them. So Thomas Jefferson's Monticello has a very rocky few years or decades or beyond decades after his death... His heirs had to sell his estate after his death to settle his debts with the infamous story of the public auction of enslaved individuals on the front lawn. And Monticello passes out of the hands of the Jefferson family. Can you give us just a little bit of that story of what happened after the death of Jefferson, happens before this American Jewish family, the Levy family, comes into the picture? Frank Cogliano: Sure, absolutely. And you've done a very good job of summing up the kind of big picture, so thank you for that, Rebecca. As you say, Jefferson died on, many people will know, on the 4th of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as did John Adams. And Jefferson died in debt. He was in pretty extreme debt for a number of reasons, which we can discuss if you like. But that debt resulted in his heirs having to sell his estate, which was Monticello, but also, as you referenced, his human capital as well, the people he enslaved. And so more than a hundred people were auctioned on the west portico. So you mentioned the nickel. It's the nickel view of the house, the house that one sees on the nickel today and has for decades. That view on those steps, more than a hundred people were auctioned in January of 1827, and the home fell into a state of disrepair. It passed through the hands of several local people in the decade immediately after Jefferson's death. And then, it was purchased in 1836 by a man named Uriah Levy, who was an officer in the United States Navy from New York. And Levy was unusual. He was one of the few Jewish officers in the Navy at that time, and he was a reformer. He was a sort of social reformer. He campaigned against flogging in the Navy, for example, as a punishment. And he bought Monticello because he admired Jefferson's commitment to freedom of religion. This is where I think Levy's own religion, the fact that he was Jewish in a majority Christian country at that time, was really important. So he bought it as a home, and really he used it as a summer home, but he also bought it and sought to preserve it as a monument and as a tribute to Jefferson's commitment to religious liberty, which was one of the things enshrined on Jefferson's gravestone here on the mountain top. And the Levy family owned Monticello for longer than the Jeffersons did. They owned it for almost a century, for about 90 years, throughout most of the 19th century. It's a complicated history because Commodore Levy, Uriah Levy, as he's called, died in 1862, and he sought to leave the house for the United States at that point. As many listeners will be aware, and undoubtedly you're aware, there was a small matter of the Civil War going on in 1862, and Monticello was in Virginia. So, there was some debate about whether it was in the United States or not at that point. So, leaving it to the United States was a complicated question. And eventually, there was a series of lawsuits, and again, we don't need to belabor this history, but the man who comes to own Monticello is one of Uriah Levy's nephews, a man with the wonderful name of Jefferson Monroe Levy and Jefferson Monroe Levy owns the house basically after the Civil War down to the early 20th century, he served as a congressman at one point, but when he eventually sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, then the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which is the foundation established in 1923. Rebecca Burgess: If we could just maybe have a little tangent there about that whole Civil War moment and Levy trying to gift it to the United States and the United States refusing Monticello and why he wanted to offer it to the United States, to be a home for orphans of naval officers. I think this is very interesting. And, of course, just the bloody reality that the fields around Monticello, that area of Virginia, is the side of the bloodiest battlefields. Frank Cogliano: There was a lot of fighting, as you know, in central and northern Virginia during the Civil War. So you are right. Commodore Levy's wish to create a kind of an orphanage basically at Monticello for the children of naval officers was again in fitting with his kind of reformist impulses, but it was completely impractical. And he knew that at the time, during the Civil War. That plan or that ambition or that aspiration, I should say, didn't bear fruit. What's interesting I think, and you made reference to this in your introductory comments a moment ago, is the fact that most presidential homes are not owned by the United States government. And although presidential libraries, which are often but not always at presidential homes, are homes run by the national archives, again, there's often a kind of quasi-public-private dimension to this. But with the homes themselves, especially in the 19th century, the preservation of these homes was not seen as something that the government should do. And the best example in the mid-19th century, so shortly before Uriah Levy died in 1862, is Mount Vernon, and of course, Mount Vernon is bought and preserved for the nation by the organization that owns and runs it to this day as a museum, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association doesn't take any money from the federal government and runs Mount Vernon as a preserved and maintains Mount Vernon as a museum. And that was the model that emerged in the 19th century. And that's very much the model that the founders of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation have in mind when they buy the house from Jefferson Monroe Levy in 1923. Rebecca Burgess: And there was also an unfortunate note, if I'm remembering right, of antisemitism about the Levy family owning a Monticello, which in part prompted... Or maybe not prompted their sell of it, but it made it difficult. And there were public letters and op-eds basically saying, "How could a Jewish family own this thing that is American?" Various different attempts to get either the government or some other entity to own it. Could you give us a little bit of that story? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that's an unfortunate part of this story. And you're right. And of course, between approximately 1890 and the early 1920s when this foundation is created, there is a period of mass immigration to the United States, mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. And so whereas most immigration to the United States, voluntary immigration that is, prior to that period had been from Northern and Western Europe and the British Isles, this so-called New Immigration was mainly from, as I say, Southern and Eastern Europe. And many, many millions of those immigrants were non-Protestants. Many were Catholic, but a large number of them were Jews, and they were Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. And there was, as we know, a kind of backlash against that so-called New Immigration that culminated in a rebirth of the so-called second KKK in the 1920s. So there's a great deal of antisemitism kind of in the air in the United States in the early 20th century, especially in the early 1920s. As you say, there was a good deal of criticism of the Levy family, despite the fact that they saved Monticello and were the caretakers of Monticello, basically saying, "They're not really worthy of owning this iconic American site, this site that kind of represents what the United States is." Sometimes it was explicitly said because they were Jewish. Other times it was left unsaid because frankly it didn't need to be said. In our current vernacular, it was a dog whistle that everybody understood. And at one point, Jefferson Levy said that he would not sell the house under any circumstances because of this. He eventually acquiesced and sold it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923. Many of whose members, I should say, original members, were themselves Jewish. And so the debate about Judaism or the association of Monticello with Judaism, it's a deep history and it's an important history and it's an American history and it needs to be remembered. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Once again, these historic homes of presidents and especially Monticello, is so tapestried, I would say. Maybe that's not the right word, but it's the best metaphor I can come up with, which is how interwoven with so many different facets of the America story, the religious liberty, the education, the political, the social, the questions about slavery and race, and the dichotomies that we have had with professing certain ideals and aspirations, and then how we have failed or succeeded in achieving some of them. And this gets to, I think, maybe Jefferson himself, of how complex of a character he is intellectually, politically, and, of course, definitely privately. He had so many public personas. He is a young Virginia land owner, colonial elite, and Virginia State delegate. Importantly, of course, I have to say this: a member of the House of Burgesses. This is how I tell people in Virginia how actually to pronounce my last name. It's the one state where you see the light bulb click. "Oh, okay." Rebecca Burgess: ... That you see the light bulb click a bit "Ah, okay." It's not a hard G. Anyway, but then of course, he's also Virginia Governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and Ambassador to France, US Secretary of State, Vice President, President of the United States, founder and architect of the University of Virginia, a founder of the United States. Which story is told at Monticello of this public persona, this man? And when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation was officially incorporated, how did they choose one of these personas or just the whole man and how did they go about stating what their purpose was with this foundation and what they hoped Monticello to be? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that's a small question. Thanks. Rebecca Burgess: You're welcome. Frank Cogliano: And as you say, it's a pretty full CV he's got. He did a lot of things. I think when the foundation is originally established, Jefferson's reputation was actually at a low point. So Jefferson's reputation has risen and fallen over the past two centuries since his death. He is in a low point after the Civil War, down to about the '1930s, really the '1940s, I would argue. And the reasons for that are complicated. To some extent, it's just the ebbs and flows of history. He's slightly implicated because of his association. He's tainted with secession. There's a hint of secession in some of his writings in the '1790s when he was the main author of the Kentucky Resolutions and suggested that states could nullify federal legislation they didn't like. And so I think it's slightly unfair to hold him responsible for a civil war that happened a generation after he died. But there's an association there that doesn't help him. And his reputation is at a low point. I don't want to overstate this because he's always had admirers, men like the levies, like those men and women who helped establish the foundation in the early '1920s. But he's at a relative low point. But the founders of this foundation, it's a terrible formulation, forgive me, are committed to what we might call the tombstone legacy. So for people who visited Monticello, you'll know despite that amazing CV, there are three things on his tombstone, author of the Declaration of American Independence, as he puts it, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Founder of the University of Virginia. And that tombstone legacy, if you will, I think neatly encapsulated for all the things he could have said. He didn't say I was a two-term president. He doesn't put the Louisiana purchase on there. It's a very elegant summation though, because what you have there is a commitment to... So let's break these down. In terms of the Declaration of Independence, you have a commitment to political independence and really, small are Republican self-government. Basically, we should be able to govern ourselves. That's what the declaration stands for. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the first time in American history that we have a separation of church and state and one of the first times we get it in modern history and globally. And that's a commitment to freedom of thought. And separation of church and state is about protecting the state from the church and the church from the state. But it's also a commitment to freedom of thought. And Jefferson famously says, and this is one of my favorite lines of his, in the notes on the state of Virginia, "It doesn't bother me whether my neighbor believes there's 20 gods or no God, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." And so that's an important legacy there. And then finally, in the founding of the University of Virginia, we have a commitment to education as the way you perpetuate those first two things, which are the point of having society, right? So political independence, Republican government, again, small arm, we're not talking partisanship here, freedom of thought and education is the silver bullet, that's how we get it done. So that tombstone legacy is really what the foundation is committed to in its early years. And it's about, as you said, preservation as well as education. And so the first thing they've got to do is they aspire to restore the house to the way it was in the early 19th century, excuse me, when Jefferson was living there. So the house you visit today approximates the way it would've been in about, I don't know, '1819, '1820. And so they have to remove a lot of the modern furnishings and the modern decor because the levies and others have lived there in the succeeding century. But they're really committed to this vision of presenting the house as it was when Jefferson was living there in retirement. But they're crucially, with regard to your question about education, interested in conveying, I think in those early days, that tombstone legacy as being what Jefferson stood for. Rebecca Burgess: Right. So in terms of education or presenting the house as a... So I earlier used the quote, it's a Jefferson's quote that it's an essay in architecture, but it's an essay of Jefferson's thought as well. And so uncovering that through the tour and the objects there. So as you mentioned, you have the physical objects that need rehabilitated, and that's its own interesting question, and maybe I'll start there before getting to how the foundation starts thinking about the house tour, which becomes the pivotal or central encounter with Monticello. So how do you in the early '1900s, start going about trying to find these household objects that may have been Jefferson's. And along with this, which we haven't really mentioned, where is Jefferson's family, his descendants or any of the descendants of the slaves circulating in this story? Do they have some of these objects? Are they coming forward? Are they happy with this direction? Are they staying away because it's a place of pain and suffering for them? Frank Cogliano: Well, okay, that's another big set of questions. Thank you, Rebecca. So let me try and address them. So in terms of restoration, initially, what they do and the work is done by a husband and wife team, a lot of the early work named Fiske and Marie Kimball and the Kimball's are both... Well, Marie Kimball's a curator, and Fiske Kimball's an architectural historian. And they seek to restore the house. And they basically take the view that anything that wasn't Jeffersonian shouldn't be in the house. And so initially, what happens after the foundation buys, is the house is actually pretty sparsely furnished because there aren't that many things that are immediately Jefferson era or Jefferson related in it initially. And then the curators at Monticello just do amazing detective work over the next century tracking stuff down. And they contact descendants. And in the first instance, mainly white descendants. And I'll get to black descendants in a moment. Mainly white descendants in the first instance who say, "Oh, I'm a descendant and I've got this china that I think came from Monticello." And they spent a lot of time really, really carefully tracking down the providence of goods that are brought to their attention. And because Jefferson was such a meticulous record keeper, because we do have accounts of how Monticello was furnished, they had material to work with and they spent a lot of time trying to track that stuff down. And they do an amazing job. And if you visit the house today, it's got a lot of Jefferson's stuff in it. Sometimes, they had to give people bad news saying, actually that desk you have is not Jefferson's. And it was bought at Sears and it came from Sears in '1905. And so they have to give people some bad news and they also have to negotiate with people about whether they'll loan stuff to Monticello or sell it and so on to the foundation. But he folks who work here did, especially the curatorial staff, have done an amazing job of restoring the interior of the house. And the house you visit today, apart from its aesthetic appeal, it's beautiful. Also, it's pretty accurate. And so if you visit, just to give one example, they've got a substantial number of the books in Jefferson's library. So what they've done is where possible, they found Jefferson's actual books and acquired them. In other cases, because Jefferson was a meticulous record keeper, we know the books he owned, including the particular editions he had. And so where they haven't been able to get Jefferson's copies, they've got the equivalent first edition, the relevant edition of the books he owned. So the library you see when you visit the house today is a very accurate recreation of Jefferson's library. And the books that are behind glass are actually the ones that Jefferson owned. The others which are still rare in themselves, are the equivalent editions that Jefferson owns. So that's one way to illustrate the point. As far as descendants are concerned. So white Jefferson descendants, many of whom had inherited Jefferson-related furniture and Jefferson's possessions, were happy to collaborate with the foundation. As far as the descendants of those enslaved at Monticello, including of course, some of whom were descended from Jefferson himself, there's less material artifacts have survived because those people, their fore-bearers, were not allowed in most cases or did not inherit material from the original house. On the other hand, what they took with them, and there's a project at Monticello that falls within the International Center for Jefferson Studies now, called Getting Word. It's an oral history project. What they took with them was their own experiences and their own family traditions of life at Monticello. We have to remember, Jefferson didn't live at Monticello alone. There were approximately 200 enslaved people there at any time throughout his life. And so in fact, this is one thing that I often remind people of. It's a predominantly black space when he lives there. It's a site of black history in America. It's not just Jefferson's home. And so they take their memories and family traditions of their associations with Monticello with them. And the Getting Word project, which has now been operating for three decades here, is tracking down the descendants of people who were enslaved at Monticello and collecting their family traditions. And it's amazing how consistent these are. These are people scattered across the United States and in some cases, across the world. But the family traditions and the oral traditions within those families about the life at Monticello and their fore-bearers are a remarkable resource, but also remarkably consistent. And I'll give you one example that's really, really exciting, if you'll indulge me for a second? Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. Frank Cogliano: So one of my colleagues up at Getting Word, the current director, a young scholar named Andrew Davenport, his team got a call a few weeks ago from a Ph.D. student at the University of Northern Kentucky who basically said, "Hey, I think I've met somebody you need to talk to." And it turned out it was a gentleman in question who lived in Cincinnati. He's an older gentleman there who had in his possession he's descended from one of the enslaved people at Monticello. He's descended from the Fossett family, Joseph Fossett at Monticello. He had in possession his fore-bearers freedom certificate and a letter between two people, again among his fore-bearers, family letters within his family from the '1840s. It's the first letter we've ever encountered, ever discovered between two people enslaved at Monticello. And this gentleman in Cincinnati had them in his possession. He's an older gentleman, as I said. And Andrew had to go out to Cincinnati to meet him and photograph these documents, interview him, and add another interview to the Getting Word archive. But we're still making new discoveries among those, the descendants, both white and black, who lived and worked here. And that's one of the most exciting things about the work at the foundation. Sorry, I'm getting slightly away from your original question, but it's such a great story. I'm happy to share it. Rebecca Burgess: Right. And Joe Fossett himself is a very fascinating figure. If I remember right, he's one of the slaves who was sold during that public auction who returns before his death. Am I right? Frank Cogliano: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Rebecca Burgess: And he has this interesting, and it's... Well, it's very interesting for me. And I guess here I should have said, I am a member of the young advisors of the Thomas Jefferson Monticello Foundation, which is a group that they pulled together in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the founding of America, the Declaration of Independence in '2026. So I am involved in Monticello other than just pure intellectual interest and love of America and American history and American Founders. But anyway, if I remember right, the Joe Fossett story is so interesting because it brings up this question of slaves who saw Monticello also as their home. And that question of home and returning to home and the ability to return home and how that adds a wrinkle into the complexity of this place called Monticello and race relations. Frank Cogliano: It does. It does. So the metaphor I like to use is that the mountain has two sides. And so we talked about Jefferson's gravestone a few minutes ago, and as I said, when the foundation was first established a century ago, that was the main focus. We remain committed to talking about that legacy. It's incredibly important. It's the reason we're here, frankly. It's the 250th of what we're celebrating in two years time, right? Or three years time. It's that legacy. However, so if you stand on the steps on the West Portico, if you're standing on those steps, and I had the privilege to speak from there a few weeks ago, and it's an incredibly powerful place. It's the place where Jefferson organized races on the west lawn for his grandchildren. It's the place where 50 to 60 new citizens take the citizenship oath every 4th of July now. It's the place where Franklin Roosevelt spoke on the 4th of July, 1936. It's the place where those people were auctioned in '1827. So it's an incredibly powerful place. And you can look in one direction, you can't see it, but if you look several hundred yards away in one direction is Jefferson's grave. Several hundred yards away, approximately the same distance in the other direction is the East Road burial ground where people who were enslaved at Monticello are buried. Not all, but some of them and their descendants. And the point I would make is you can't have half a mountain and we now have to pay attention, and we do. And we want to pay attention to both sides of the mountain and both of those... So that spot and the- Frank Cogliano: Mountain and both of those. So that spot and the kind of two sides of the mountain that are represented by those two graveyards are incredibly important. And they are important because Monticello is America writ small because if they will... if you will, they're a metaphor for the country in my way of thinking. So that's how I like to think of it. And I think we now tell both of those stories because those stories are so important. They're also interlinked. We have four accounts, four life accounts from people who were enslaved at Monticello. Memoirs or autobiographies and so on. Rebecca Burgess: Okay. Frank Cogliano: Each one of them mentions the Declaration of Independence. They don't mention that they love Jefferson. I mean, it's too much to say, "Hey, I loved my enslaver, or I loved my father." It's a complicated history, right? But they do associate Monticello with, these people who were enslaved here, was the Declaration of Independence. So to some extent, I would argue in response to people who say, "We need to..." I don't like this phrase, cancel Jefferson, whatever it is. Well actually, at least the testimony we have from some of the people who were enslaved here, and they don't speak for all of them, of course, but the anecdotal evidence we have is the part of Jefferson's legacy they identified as important. And the reason they associated with Monticello, despite the fact it was where they were enslaved, is the Declaration of Independence and its premise... and its commitment to equality not fulfilled in Jefferson's lifetime, not entirely fulfilled in our lifetimes. But that's the takeaway. Rebecca Burgess: And I think you can argue that it is only respect, true respect for us to acknowledge that the Declaration of Independence, in their own words, played a large role in their association with Monticello and how they thought of Monticello. Maybe not lived reality, of course, as you were mentioning, but if it wasn't so important to them that they themselves mention it in their accounts- Frank Cogliano: Right. Rebecca Burgess: ... we should respect that and not cancel their own affiliation with that document, I would say. I've been thinking about this. You've mentioned the tombstone legacy and how it doesn't mention such amazing things as the Louisiana Purchase or the Lewis and Clark expedition, and yet the house itself in a way almost has that legacy. You enter in, and that first room is this almost museum of America. It has all of these artifacts, taxidermy, hides, horns, bones that were found throughout America. There are, if I'm remembering, it had a bison skin, which is decorated from North American Indians. And so in a way, the house is its own legacy or testament into America. And if you could tell us about the development of the house tour and how that has over the years really deepened into, instead of just pointing out this artifact, that artifact, this room, that room, tries to tell the story of the various storylines in residence of Monticello, and moments... and political moments, and political theory moments of the house. Frank Cogliano: Sure. I mean, Monticello isn't just a museum today. It was a museum during Jefferson's lifetime. He had a lot of visitors and tourists who came through, and came to see him. And he recognized that. And that entrance hall that you referenced was decorated, especially with indigenous artifacts. But there's a map of Africa. There are various maps, there are fossils. And when people were kind of cooling their heels in the entrance hall, they were meant to learn a bit. And to a very real extent, that legacy continues today. And you are right. The primary way that the Foundation communicates information to visitors is through the tour. The tour of the house, but now also what we call the Plantation Tour. There's a tour of Mulberry Row, where the enslaved people lived and worked. There are architectural... sorry, archeological tours as well. But the tours are the main way that the Foundation communicates with the public. And one of the things I liked is that I have a huge amount of respect for the tour guides at Monticello. They're very, very highly trained. They do a lot of reading, I can tell you that. And they're really put through their paces before they're allowed to give tours to the public. And one of the things I say, because I like to speak to the guides, is their work reaches far more people than the work of people like me. We write books that come and go and... You know? Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Frank Cogliano: Get read by our mothers, maybe, and that's about it. Right? Rebecca Burgess: Or just by one academic library. Frank Cogliano: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Rebecca Burgess: Yes. Frank Cogliano: One only needs to get one's royalty statements to realize how unimportant we are. Rebecca Burgess: About this much. Frank Cogliano: But they reach so many people, and it's incredibly important what they do. And the house tour is about 45 minutes, and they have a huge amount. It's a complicated place. It's a complicated legacy, as we've been talking about, to cover. And the tours evolved a lot over the years, and it's become, I think, more subtle and nuanced. They deal with matters of race and slavery. They deal with Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings. There's a real challenge on the house tour, which is you're trying to... or they are trying to convey ideas with objects. It's too easy to say, isn't that a pretty painting? Rebecca Burgess: Right. Frank Cogliano: Because it is a pretty painting, or, look at that architectural feature. But what they're trying to do, and they do supremely well in my view, try to say, okay, what does all this add up to? What does it mean? What was Jefferson trying to tell us in decorating his house as he did? But as I said, a crucial element to this, I think as well, is, and I can't urge this enough for people listening to this, don't just take the house tour great as that is. Make sure, and it's included in the ticket, you take the plantation tour too because the people who give those are amazing. And you get a fuller idea of what was going on at this mountaintop and the sense of it not just as the home of a really, really important individual, but a community, and how it operated. And that's conveyed by the tour. And that's the way the Thomas Jefferson Foundation engages in the work mainly of education to hundreds of thousands of people every year. It's the most important thing we do. Rebecca Burgess: Right. And I should just say to our listeners as well that the guides not only, as you put it, are put through their paces, but they're given research time every week, where they are not just encouraged but required to continue their learning and encouraged to explore their own interests in Jefferson. And so there's actually not a script, one common script that they're given for their tours. And so you can go five different... 10 different times to Monticello and get a different tour emphasizing different things. One can be very much about the Declaration of Independence. One can be very much kind about the tinkering, knick-knack aspect of Jefferson the explorer, if you will. And another can be very much about the life of the enslaved, or his family, and the complicated relationships there going on. So that, I think, is always valuable to emphasize and to highlight and clarify because as we're living in very polarized, polarized times and how one presents a story from history, it's impossible to say every single aspect and every single nuance in, as you mentioned, 45 minutes. And there's also a suspicion that there's... brainwashing is not the right word, but a script that is meant to be shoved down people's throats. And that's really not the case going on. And it's a very difficult thing for presidential museums, homes to do this right now, or historic places to try and tell their story with truth and accuracy, but also nuance. But to go a little bit further down the road of this educational aspect, as the Foundation in those first decades of the 20th century gets its feet underneath it financially, and is able to restore the house and get more visitors, they're also working on revitalizing that... a scholarly image of Jefferson. And the Great Depression is happening suddenly, and they're still able to pay off their debts, and raise this interest of Jefferson. And suddenly, biographies and books start showing up about Jefferson. And meanwhile, FDR, President FDR comes along just around the time that discussions are being held in D.C. about a memorial in D.C. And he is very pivotal in changing the nature of that memorial into a Jefferson Memorial. I was wondering because was that 1943, so we're not quite at a hundred years there with that, but if you could tell us a little bit about that story, and the FDR, World War II connection with Thomas Jefferson and Monticello? Frank Cogliano: Sure, sure. So FDR was a great admirer of Jefferson, and as I said a few minutes ago, he visited Monticello. He actually visited this area a lot. The house I'm sitting in, Kenwood, was the home of... They didn't have the role of chief of staff then, but he was the equivalent of Jefferson's... sorry, FDR's chief of staff, a man named Edwin Paul Watson. And Paul Watson was a close confidant of FDR's. And so FDR came here a lot, but he spoke at Monticello on the 4th of July, 1936. So FDR was a great admirer of Jefferson. And in 1943... 1943 was the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth. Jefferson was born in 1743. And then as now, in the approach to that, people said, we ought do something about this in the same way we're saying about 2026. How are we going to celebrate this? And FDR was a very strong advocate for the building of what's now the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C., including picking the quotes that are carved in the memorial. And of course, that memorial was built during the Second World War, and FDR believed that Jefferson was the kind of apotheosis of the values for which the United States was fighting, and its allies were fighting in the Second World War. Jefferson, the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth and the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial on one hand can be seen as of their time, but that also marked a kind of change beginning... I mentioned a few minutes ago that Jefferson's reputation was kind of low before that. The comeback starts during the Second World War and particularly after the Second World War. And what we see is... A couple of things help account for this. First of all, because of the Second World War and then the subsequent Cold War, those values for which Jefferson... or with which Jefferson identified, that tombstone legacy, let's say, suddenly seem really important. Right? We're not blaming him for the Civil War anymore. Instead, we're saying, actually, this is what we're about in the fight against fascism and then the contest with the Soviet Union after the Second World War. So we get that. Also, one of the things that starts... There's another kind of monument that started in 1943, which is the publication of the papers of Thomas Jefferson. You can actually see... You can see them. Our listeners can't, on the shelves behind me. So the Princeton edition of the... the modern edition of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Julian Boyd, begins in 1943. It's still ongoing. We're nearly there at the end, but we're going to get there hopefully soon. But that makes Jefferson's writings available to scholars, which is going to energize scholarship in the second half of the 20th, or in the middle decades of this 20th century, and continues to this day. So we get that. So that's the kind of big-picture stuff. And we get publications like Dumas Malone's... the first volumes of Dumas Malone's six-volume biography of Jefferson. The first volume was published in 1948, the last one in the early 1980s. So we get this... as I say, this efflorescence of Jefferson scholarship. I do think the Foundation plays a role in this, especially in the latter part of the story, with the creation of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. I'll get to that in a minute. However, we also have this key connection: the Foundation endows a chair, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation chair in history at the University of Virginia. So Dumas Malone holds it, and then Merrill Peterson, then Peter Onuf, and currently, it's held by Alan Taylor. And so what we have is Jefferson scholars at UVA, Jefferson's university, who really energized the study of Jefferson, both through their own publications and through their supervision of Ph.D. students or advising of Ph.D. students. So what we have is an infrastructure around Jefferson that emerges supported by this Foundation, but... through funding that chair, but also when we get to the '90s, the creation of the place where I sit today, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, which through its close links to UVA and particularly UVA Press has served as a home for scholars and scholarship, but also helped those scholars find a venue to publish in. And so there's been a kind of infrastructure, if you will, it's not an accident. There's a reason that Jefferson Studies has boomed over the past 30 years. In part, those foundations were laid in the middle of the 20th century. But the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has helped build on those mainly through ICJS, but not only its association with UVA and elsewhere. Sorry. That's a lot. Rebecca Burgess: No, it's all good. And we wanted to get to this, as you mentioned at the beginning, talking about these last 30 years and how fruitful they have been. And you mentioned the international aspect of it. We are so inwardly focused, famously or infamously, in America on ourselves and on our own, but what does it look like coming from the outside? What other country... What are they looking to Monticello and to your center for about Jefferson? Is it... and the relation to the Declaration? Is it all in relation to the Declaration? Or are there just multiple different... you know? Frank Cogliano: We're back... We're back to the two sides of the mountain, Rebecca. Rebecca Burgess: Okay. Frank Cogliano: As you know, academic historians and one of the real jewels of the crown of American historiography since the Second World War has been the development of the historiography around slavery, slavery and race. And we're the best-documented plantation probably in the world. And so we attract a lot of scholarship in that area. But we also attract a lot of scholarship on the tombstone legacy. So I will give you an example. At the moment, this is a random example, but I think it's indicative. We've got several fellows here at the International Center working on a variety of topics. And by coincidence, one of them is a woman from the Netherlands who's working on the relationship or the interaction between the French Army and the Americans, Jefferson and Washington, during the War of Independence. The other, we've got a Danish scholar here, who's coming to us from a house museum in Denmark where... Frank Cogliano: ... here, who's coming to us from a house museum in Denmark where they are struggling, unsurprisingly, in the current moment to reckon with their history with race and slavery. And she's here studying this from a museum studies standpoint to say, "How have you dealt with this?" And obviously, we've got generations of experience dealing with questions of race and slavery. We've got another scholar here from Oxford who's writing about Jefferson's relation with Condorcet, the great philosopher in the French Enlightenment. These just happen to be this month's fellows. Next month's fellows will be different. We've got a long-term fellow here from the University of Richmond who's working on a really interesting project about religion in the Northwest Territory in Ohio and relations between Indigenous people and the Shakers. It's everything and anything, but those just happen to be our current fellows. But to illustrate, we happen to have a good crop of international fellows at the moment, so I think that as an answer to your question, or a way to answer your question, is just that random sampling. Rebecca Burgess: Right. Jon Meacham has said that experiencing Monticello is as close as you can get to having a conversation with Thomas Jefferson. So, in a way, bringing those international fellows to Monticello is... Well, I think that's a really neat thing. Frank Cogliano: I agree. Rebecca Burgess: But a little on that note and on the question, you brought up the Northwest Ordinance, which we could have a whole other podcast on. It's one of the forgotten documents, I think, of America's freedom and really needs a lot more attention paid to it. But something that struck me is that when Jefferson started to build Monticello and his father, that was the frontier, and that is the western divide, if you will, and they're looking out on this vast expanse, and they're looking ahead. Jefferson has always struck me as being full of optimism and then, of course, having to get his nose rubbed in the sand of reality as he becomes president and realizes you do need a manufacturing class, you can't just have these farmers if you want this type of free society, various different aspects like that. But as we're all looking forward to the 250th anniversary, thinking of Monticello still as a frontier of scholarship on Jefferson and on the declaration and its role. Where is Monticello wanting to point us to, if you will? What types of conversations, what conversation with Jefferson is Monticello hoping it can open our eyes to? Frank Cogliano: I think... We have a lot of discussions about this internally, as you can imagine. I think we, and maybe I'm speaking for myself here more than the foundation, but I've been privy to these discussions. We really want to center Jefferson in the discussion of the 250th. But in so doing, we need to do so with care for both. It's a complicated legacy, as we've already discussed. But what we're really talking about is it's the 250th anniversary of what? The Declaration of Independence. And so, just like those enslaved people who make that connection between Monticello and the Declaration, I think we've got to do that ourselves because that's the core document, that's the foundational, that's the mission statement for the United States. And that's the reason we remember Jefferson, and that's the reason this place is so important. All the other stuff follows from that, and all the other stuff requires our consideration. The other aspects of the Tombstone legacy, as I call it, the other side of the mountain, when we deal with, "Okay, hold on a second, Mr. All men are are created equal. What about the 607 people you enslaved?" That's not a small question. You talked about the frontier. "Hey, whose land was your house built on?" These are important questions we have to talk about, but they all follow from, it seems to me, that foundational moment and that foundational document for which we are all indebted to Jefferson. And this is why I don't like talk of cancellation. I don't like zero-sum arguments where it's got to be all one thing or the other. The past is complicated, the present is complicated, and people are complicated. Jefferson's definitely complicated. But I think the message and the centering of the declaration and Jefferson's authorship of the declaration is the real message and the takeaway for the 250th, which the word is, Rebecca, semi quincentennial. Rebecca Burgess: I know, I know. See, you knew I was avoiding using that word because it's such a tongue-twister. I always take the easy route and just say the 250th. Frank Cogliano: No, most of us are doing that. Rebecca Burgess: Semiquincentennial. I just said it, but your words make me want to ask this question of you because I think I already know the answer, but I think it's helpful to raise the question for our listeners. Is then Monticello actually a museum? Is it a shrine, is it a memorial? Is it all of these things, and or is it something else? Frank Cogliano: I think it's all of them. I think it's a museum, but I don't want people to think, "Oh, it's a dusty place you shouldn't go to." I think it's those three things, but it is a shrine. It's a shrine at Jefferson, but it's also a memorial to the people who were enslaved here. And we mustn't forget that. And we've dedicated a new commemorative site in the past few months that names those who were enslaved here, the names we know. We've left space for those we don't know, which is telling. So it's all of those things, but I think it's something else. Again, I think it's a place where Americans can come together and have difficult conversations. Frankly, the conversations we're presently unwilling to have or unable to have, because its one of the few places... Because of the great sort, and because we all bowl alone, we basically talk to people we agree with. We've sorted each other in the red and blue, and we don't talk to each other, we talk past each other. Not here because hundreds of thousands of people come here. I love talking to people in the parking lot and saying, "Hey, where'd you come from today? And why are you here?" If they want to engage me, sometimes they just say hello and keep going. But what's fascinating to me is they come from all parts of the country. I don't want to make any presumptions about what their backgrounds are or what their beliefs are, but this is a place where we can also... It's always been a place of having hard conversations. Jefferson liked to have hard conversations. Crucially, you also believe they ought to be conducted with civility. And I think we need that. Rebecca Burgess: And with wine. Frank Cogliano: Yes. That helps. Rebecca Burgess: No, no. Good fair. Okay. Along those lines, to final, or as we approach the end of this conversation questions, and before I ask you about the book that you are currently writing on Jefferson and George Washington, do you have a favorite story or quote either specifically related to Monticello or to Jefferson that is not necessarily well-known, but that just encapsulates for you some of either the richness, the complexity, or the joy, the wonders of this "essay" of America? Frank Cogliano: Shared one of my favorite quotes, the one about, "I don't mind if my neighbor believes there are 20 Gods or no God." That's a favorite from the notes on the state of Virginia. You got to love, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness " is a quote, and "All men are created equal." And women, I would add. But I also like in the context of what I just said. One of my favorite quotes, and Jefferson himself struggled to live up to this, but I think it's an important one, is, "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy as cause for withdrawing from a friend." And I really like that quote. That's my current favorite. I mean, he's got some great ones, but that one has really stayed with me as I look around in the current moment. And I think if we all thought about that, that might be good. Sorry, I'm sounding preachy now. Rebecca Burgess: No, no. I was just going to say, immensely relevant for us today. And so, you are writing a book on Jefferson and George Washington, and you claim that it is the first of its kind. Can you tell us what this book is? It's coming out in the spring. I think that our listeners will be very interested in this book. I know I am. Frank Cogliano: It's coming out- Rebecca Burgess: More people than I will be. Frank Cogliano: I think the publication date is February 20th, and it's called A Revolutionary Friendship. It's about the relationship between Jefferson and Washington. Jefferson and Washington had a 30-year relationship that was mainly amicable. I mean, one of the things I'm looking at in this book is their friendship, and it's ebbs and flows, because, as many people will know, it ended badly. They were estranged at the end of Washington's life and they never reconnected because Washington died soon after in 1799 I think we've made a mistake and projected that back and looked for this throughout, and I just don't believe that. I mean, one of the things I did, I set out to read their correspondence in order, starting at the beginning and going to the end. And it's just simply not so that they hated each other throughout their lives. They actually collaborated quite closely on a number of things, and quite productively, and quite happily. But they did differ politically and they differed over significant things, and I talk about that. But I talk about their relationship born of the revolution and eventually destroyed after the revolution and how and why that happened. And it's not a metaphor parable for our time, but I do think it might have something to tell us in this time. I'll be launching it here at Monticello on February 17th, right around President's Day, and you're all welcome to come. Rebecca Burgess: Oh, I'll try and get myself there. Well, Jefferson famously died on July 4th, 1826, and he was full of foreboding about the violence he saw, of course, ahead. But he had optimism too about the American project and the project of freedom and equality that he had tried so hard to enshrine in the Declaration of Independence. So as America looks ahead to the 250th anniversary, and you've kind of answered this, but how can Monticello help us to reengage with our nation's aspirations and complicated legacy? Frank Cogliano: I think it's a place where we need to talk about this stuff. We have been doing that for the past century. We need to be at the center of a public conversation. We have a unique opportunity here because the eyes of the country and the world will be on this place because of its association with Jefferson, and we have a unique opportunity to help engage in, I think, a project of civic education to talk about the core values that we all still share as citizens of the United States. Rebecca Burgess: Well, thank you so much, Frank, for that, for joining us for the Hopeful Words, and a happy 100th birthday to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello, and of course, gratitude for all of those whose study American political thought and history, for the work and the help that the foundation has given us the past 100 years and in revitalizing recapturing, relearning who Jefferson was. So thank you again, Frank, for joining us. Frank Cogliano: Thanks, Rebecca. Here's to the next 100 years. Rebecca Burgess: Yes, exactly. Cheers with some wine again. All right, so that was Frank Cogliano the Interim Saunders director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. I am Rebecca Bridges and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thank you for joining us today. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

James Patterson is joined by Rita Koganzon of the University of Houston to talk about the Amish, the Satmar, and democratic education. Brian A. Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening. James M. Patterson: Hello, you are listening to Liberty Law Talk, the podcast for Law & Liberty. Today is September 29th, 2023, and my name is James M. Patterson. I'm a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, a fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy as well as the Institute for Human Ecology, and President of the Cicerone Society. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanted to make a brief statement of mourning for Dr. Ellis Sandos, who died on September 19th this past week at the age of 92, New Orleans native, father of four, 10 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, but people who are familiar with Dr. Sandos listening to Liberty Law Talk may know of his incredible contributions to the work of classical liberalism and political philosophy, including his edited volumes called the Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730 to 1805. These are two volumes of the most important sermons that helped shape the politics of their day, as well as reflect on the beliefs and standards for constitutionalism held by outstanding religious leaders of the period. He was also the founder of the Eric Voegelin Institute. Many of the people you'll hear on Liberty Law Talk were participants in Voegelin Institute panels, including today's guest. Before we move on to her, I just wanted to read from the foreword that Dr. Sandos wrote in 1994 for the first volume of the political sermons. "Liberty is thus an essential principle of man's constitution, a natural trait which yet reflects the supernatural creator. Liberty is God-given; the growth of virtue and perfection of being depends upon free choice in response to divine invitation and help in cooperative relationships. The correlate of responsibility is that liberty is most truly exercised by living in accordance with truth. Man's dominion over the earth and the other creatures, his mastery of nature through reason, is subject to no restraint but the law of his nature, which is perfect liberty. The obligation to obey the laws of the creator only checks his licentiousness and abuse." Dr. Sandos will be missed, and his contributions are many. And now, I'll move on to today's guest, Dr. Rita Koganzon, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston. While there, she teaches political theory and American politics. Her research focuses on the themes of education, childhood authority, and the family and historical and contemporary political thought. Her first book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, Childhood Education, and Early Modern Thought, examines the justifications for authority over children from Jean Bodin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wow, that's a pair. And explores how and why Locke and Rousseau departed from their absolutist predecessors by refusing to model the family on the state by nonetheless preserving authority, even extreme authority over children within the family, for the sake of liberty of adults. She's working on a second project that focuses on education from the early republic in the United States through the 20th century. But today, we're talking about something a little different. We're talking about her recent presentation at the 2023 American Political Science Association, as well as two things that she's published recently on Judaism and religious liberty. The first is The Satmar Option, which she published for the summer 2023 edition of the Hedgehog Review, and her outstanding chapter from the book Religious Liberty and Education. It's titled Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life: Yeshiva Education Versus Liberal Education Theory. Dr. Koganzon, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Hi, thanks for having me. James M. Patterson: Sorry for the long preamble, but I'll give you now plenty of time to describe this central insight that really has stuck with me since your presentation on the difference between what you refer to slightly paraphrasing here as the kind of Amish paradigm for religious liberty and religious minorities versus what you call the Satmar option. So who are the Satmar, and how are they different from the Amish? Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, the Satmar are a Hasidic religious group. They are from Hungary originally, but they sort of crystallized, actually, in New York after World War II, the survivors of the Holocaust came and sort of reconsolidated the Hasidic group, and they were led by a rabbi. And they now live mainly in Williamsburg and in this independent community in Upstate New York called Kiryas Joel. It's kind of complicated to define what exactly Hasidic Judaism is or how it is analogous to certain kinds of Christianity because the ecclesiology of Judaism is not really the same as Christianity. So people will often say, well, this is a sect, which I guess is fine as a description. I don't know that they love it so much, but it's a sort of Hasidic group that follows this particular rabbi who actually has passed away. And now they have a problem with figuring out who they're following exactly. And so they're different from the Amish in a lot of ways, namely that they're not Christian. But in terms of the political question, there's been a kind of treatment of religious minorities in American constitutional law, and also, I think, in American public opinion, that is very sort of Christian-centric in terms of the way we think about religious descent from the mainstream. And so the Amish are a kind of radical form of religious descent from the mainstream in that they don't want to live what we would consider a modern life, that they reject a lot of modern technology, that they reject living in cities. They live in their own rural communities that are based largely on agriculture. And so they look very different from sort of modern Americans in this respect. And they maintain a certain kind of separation from mainstream, secular, modern, whatever appellation you want to use, Americans. And so then the question with them becomes, okay, well, when there are sort of generally applicable laws passed in state legislatures or by Congress or whatever, are they required to follow them if somehow following these laws would obstruct their ability to practice their religion? And this comes up in the 1972 case, most famously Wisconsin v. Yoder, where the question is if there are compulsory schooling laws in the state of Wisconsin, which are facially neutral, and they require everybody to go to school until they're 16, do the Amish have to comply with this if for them going to school until they're 16 would potentially disrupt their ability to remain in the Amish faith? And in 1972, the court decided that they don't have to comply with these compulsory schooling laws because they're a sincere religious minority and they have a First Amendment free exercise right to, in a sense, be exempted. Although that's not the technical legal understanding of what's happening here, that is the practical effect of what's happening here. They're exempted from these compulsory schooling laws. They're allowed to pull their kids out of public schools early. And as the Amish put it, in this case, they're going to give them an Amish education at home, essentially an agricultural education and an education in their community. And so that is somewhat controversial, I guess. But as far as public opinion goes, that's acceptable to Americans becomes the basis for a lot of subsequent homeschooling legislation and other sorts of exemptions from public schooling. And the thing about the Amish is that they're very, I think, admirable to Americans in a certain way. They resemble kind of what America looked like at the founding or sort of what we imagine it looked like at the founding. And the important thing from the court's perspective is that they're self-sufficient in the sense that they don't rely on any government assistance. And not only do they not rely on any government assistance, they actually do not contribute to or draw from Social Security. And so there really are very sort of distinct from the government. And so what I'm calling the Amish paradigm is a way of thinking about the terms of religious liberty as a kind of contract in the United States. And so what the Amish offer a model of is this kind of contract between the majority and a dissenting religious minority where the majority, in a sense, is willing to let the religious minority have some autonomy over its own internal government and be sort of less beholden to the federal government or the state governments, or maybe beholden is not the right word, but maybe something more involved with, regulated by. That's key. Secular government in exchange for their self-sufficiency. And they're not calling on these secular governments for assistance. And I think that has been sort of the mental model that we hold for justifiable religious exemptions from generally neutral laws, regulations, and things like that. And the challenge that the Satmar posts to this is that they're urban. They are not self-sufficient in the sense that they're not an agricultural community that grows its own food or anything like that. They live in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, or in a suburb in Upstate New York, in New Jersey, in other very densely populated places. And they do receive government welfare and transfers. They receive a sort of direct aid like SNAP benefits and things like that. They also receive aid for schooling and things like that because they qualify for Title 1 funds. It's hard to say that they're poor. The issue is they have a lot of kids so even when they're working and they make an income, it's very hard to support eight kids or 10 kids on a single income or even both parents' incomes. And so they often qualify for federal and state poverty funds because those are based on family size. So they pose a different kind of dilemma, I think, for us because then the question is, well, how far are we going to allow them to practice their religion, especially to the degree that their religion is in conflict with mainstream norms when at the same time they are sort of reliant on federal and state aid. So they're not self-sufficient, so shouldn't we have some sort of control over them? And this comes up very saliently in the last few years. There's been a conflict in New York City because they run their own private school system, and the allegations of the New York Department of Education and the New York City education bureaucracies that they are not doing a sufficient job of educating their children, that they don't teach enough secular subjects, that they don't teach English. The Satmar speak Yiddish. And so should the state and the city governments be allowed to intervene in their school curricula and change them or bring them up to date or mainstream them, however, you want to think about it, on the grounds that this is a violation of their children's rights and we're paying for those schools? That's the other salient thing. So that's what I see as the contrast. There's a kind of vision of a very self-sufficient, almost sort of noble agrarian group who's practicing a divergent way of life in the United States. And we're sort of willing to forgive that so long as they don't depend on us or ask us for anything. But that's not really a common model of how religious descent works in America anymore. Most people don't look like the Amish. They look a lot more like the Satmar. They're doing something out of the mainstream, out of the ordinary, but they are pretty much integrated into American society and are sort of entangled in government institutions and also are often recipients of transfers. James M. Patterson: The subject of the Amish as a kind of exemplar reminded me of one of the worst movies I've ever seen called For Richer or Poorer with Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley, about a man and a woman from New York who retreat from a scandal to live on Amish country. And there's a kind of a rediscovery of what it means to be authentically human by living among the Yoders, which is, of course, one of the people in the Wisconsin v. Yoder case. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, I think that's just an extremely common Amish Mennonite surname. They're not all related. James M. Patterson: Oh, okay. They're not related to fictional people. Dr. Rita Koganzon: No, it's an extremely common surname. So you've been to UVA, right? If you drive just north of UVA, there's a great children's farm market thing called Yoders, where they have a petting zoo and everything. Those people aren't related, either. James M. Patterson: That is actually a great recommendation. If you need to stop off with your kids, please go there. They were goats on a giant contraption that they'd built. It's incredible fun. And the food is amazing. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah. James M. Patterson: We are- Dr. Rita Koganzon: Unrelated Yoders. James M. Patterson: We are not endorsed by Yoders, but we will gladly take any shoofly pie they will send our direction. We have just a real rich chapter here, and there's a lot that I want to talk about that Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life. The thing that you point out first in this chapter is that the preoccupation that many post-Second World War liberals had was with the possibility of a Christian theocracy. You say here, the 1980s, 1990s, "Fear of Christian theocracy can no longer reasonably motivate our considerations when so many of those asking for considerations are not Christians." So this older understanding that even by the nineties seemed to be pretty antiquated remains more or less enshrined in our laws. So, talk to me a little bit about what that liberalism was and why it was so preoccupied with this particular case of Christian theocracy. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, so I mean, the rise of the religious right and the election in 1980, I think sort of set off panic bells among many people on the left, that suddenly there is this insurgent movement of right-wing Christians who basically had not been heard from for a long time. I mean, not that they weren't there, they just weren't politically involved in the 1950s and 1960s. They started to become more politicized in the 1970s. And this takes a lot of sort of liberals, especially academic types, by surprise, and they become very worried. And so if you think about Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, that's a response I think is written in the early eighties, is a kind of fever dream or fever nightmare of what she thinks might happen if these people were really to come to power. And I mean, they came to power through Reagan, but they were just part of a conservative coalition that included obviously many other parts. And so the Wisconsin v. Yoder decision starts to look kind of nefarious or ominous to the left, and then there's a second decision. I think this is just a circuit court decision. It doesn't go all the way to the Supreme Court called Moser v. Hawkins in the early eighties, which deals with or involves a group of what we call fundamentalists, whatever that's supposed to mean, who are challenging the secular humanist curriculum of their public school. Their argument is that actually secular humanism is its own religion, and it's being imposed on us evangelical Christians as though it were neutral, but there's actually nothing neutral about it. It's a replacement for our religion, and that's a violation of our religious liberty. They lose. The court ends up saying that this kind of secular humanist curriculum is not religious, but they make a really important point. Their political theorists, especially people working in the tradition of John Rawls, take this seriously as a real problem, that there are these people who think that even neutral secular education is a form of religion. There's a lot of writing done around Wisconsin v. Yoder and Mozert v. Hawkins in the 1980s and 1990s by this kind of Rawlsian tradition of liberal education or democratic education. They're very concerned about, for them, the real question motivating a lot of this is: How can we neutralize religious rights? How can we prevent them from taking their kids out of schools entirely and homeschooling them into some kind of fundamentalist theocratic regime to promote such a regime or from developing their own schools that are going to promote this? Because their fear is that sort of the civic fabric is going to be rented by these people's children who are educated in this really insular fundamentalist type education and who are going to grow up and come out of it basically ready to overthrow the liberal, republican regime of the United States. They write lots of theories of education, political theories of education that are mainly about how to constrain these sorts of people. What sort of public education is required and necessary so that everybody gets the same civic foundation implicitly/explicitly so that they don't become fundamentalist theocrats when they grow up. James M. Patterson: The term that you use and that's used among the people that you cite is the word autonomy. The autonomy standard is, as you point out, not neutral. Even though you may not, I think, necessarily identify with the Hawkins case or its results, there is all the same kind of, I don't know how to put it, kind of acceptance that the religious right did have a point, you say. Although the autonomy aimed at by liberal education reports to give children a neutral or broad selection of lives, it is neither neutral nor broad in reality but highly normative and narrow. Although childhood exposure to diversity is intended to expand our liberty and capacity for independent thought as adults, it actually undermines the development of the very virtues necessary to exercise such independence. In fact, you point out later that this kind of education is really only beneficial to secular would-be elites, and the rest, more or less, have to suffer in silence. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, so I mean, the way that these political theorists who are concerned about the rise of right-wing theocracy or religious theocracy try to theorize this problem is to say, well, the kind of education that everybody needs is an education for an open future or an education for autonomy. That if we set this as a standard, we're sort of guaranteeing that nobody can get this kind of theocratic fundamentalist education and get away with it. The idea of autonomy is that you should have the kind of education that allows you to continually revise your understanding of the best way of life. That if you're sort of locked into one understanding that shows that you're not really autonomous, that you're hetero autonomous. In order to facilitate that, we need to expose you to diverse ways of life as a child as part of your education so that you can sort of rationally choose among them. That's the sort of prevailing assumption of this kind of theory that if you were exposed to a diversity of ways of life, then in a sense, your insular fundamentalist parents don't have the kind of control over you that they can sort of determine how you turn out because you're going to have the resources to decide for yourself. I think that's sort of intuitively appealing to liberals. I mean, not just on the left, but just liberals broadly that that's the case because sort of how public education understands itself or what it understands itself as doing often. The argument that I make is that there's an assumption buried there that constantly revising your way of life, or at least frequently revising your way of life, demonstrates something about your virtue, but in reality, it's very costly to do that in adult life. You have to think about, okay, well, you have a religion, but you reconsider it. You leave your church, and you leave all the social connections there and all the social capital that you've developed there behind. You have a career, but you decide you want to do something else, so you've got to retrain, that's also very costly. You have a marriage, and you decide, I actually would like to live a different kind of life, goodbye to my family. We can see the costs involved there. I mean, that's a kind of extreme example, but that's sort of part of the autonomy that they want to develop in people. When you think about, well, who can best afford that kind of life where you're constantly changing things around, and there's a lot of costs involved with those changes, the answer is basically people with elite educations, people who are white-collar professionals who make a lot of money and who just have more money to absorb these kinds of costs with. Whereas, for the vast majority of people, the idea of moving around all the time, of changing up the way that you live, changing your career, changing your family can be really just devastating. It's not clear that you can always recover from this and that you have the resources built up to be able to absorb those costs. In that sense, it's not a neutral way of life. It's a way of life and a kind of ideal of the best kind of life that is really suitable only for people or maybe mostly for people with elite degrees in elite professions with a high degree of geographic and social mobility, who are able to absorb the costs of making frequent life changes. Then, for other people, the good of staying in one place is rooted in being tied to your family or being tied to a community. Those look to people from Yale and Harvard as being tied down and having no choices. The kinds of capital that you build up that way can be very important for supporting you throughout your life if you don't have the other kinds of capital that the people from Harvard and Yale have, literal financial capital, educational capital, and so on. James M. Patterson: A very strong passage, one of the ones that I marked with multiple stars, which means I have to talk about it, liberal theory has no answer where neither choice causes harm, the choice being between eating pork and not eating pork, but the child needs answers about the best way of life. A negative standard like the harm principle does not suffice. Absent authoritative guidance from parents and teachers, the child will either make his choices on mere whim or find other perhaps salutary authorities who are less skittish about comprehensive worldviews to guide his choices.[BS1]  This is a summary of the kind of education you're describing is very bleak and you actually point to some ambivalence, maybe I'm misreading you on this, but with some ambivalence to the Satmars having an answer to this problem that liberalism creates. Maybe address if I'm right about the ambivalence, but also how stark the contrast is and the kind of education you get in a yeshiva. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, I mean, the kind of education you get in the yeshiva varies. The schools that are currently under investigation or were under investigation are kind of extreme versions of Hasidic schooling, and a lot of it has many more secular elements. What's in question here is you have a very Jewishly rooted education. It's an education rooted in Jewish law, often it's taught in Yiddish, and it emphasizes what we would call in the secular world, Jewish values rather than secular values. It gives you a very clear picture of the best way of life as this community sees it. Liberal theorists tend to view that as coercive because you're given this picture before you really have a chance to think through what for you would be the best way of life. I think the problem is that the assumption here is that the child is this rational thinker, is constantly working through the possibilities when another possibility is simply that you're creating children who don't really have a lot of, what you're not reinforcing in children is sort of the virtues of self-control and the sort of ability to stick to a decision because you're in fact, encouraging them to do the opposite, to constantly sort of change their mind or reconsider. One possibility is that actually in childhood, it is better to have a concrete vision of the best way of life that is given to you authoritatively. I mean, children don't see it otherwise. They see it as being sort of imposed on them, but then they also can come to like it. It doesn't foreclose the possibility that in adulthood you will change your mind, that you will simply see this way of life as either impossible for you to follow or at least very undesirable and that you can leave. All of these communities within liberalism, we require all of these insular communities to have rights of exit as liberal theorists call them, right? That you can leave the Satmar, you live in New York City, just move to another part of New York City and try to start your life anew, secular, or maybe less observant than the Satmar. There's a lot of different options. Whereas, the public school view or the way that the liberal theorists would like public schools to work is to not privilege any possible way of life to say that all ways of life are basically good unless they're criminal. Unless they violate the harm principle and that it's really up to a seven or eight year old child to make their own decision, but they don't have the resources to do that. They end up not necessarily in a better place than somebody who is given a more rigorous Hasidic or Satmar upbringing and gets to adulthood and either decides that they want to stay in this community or decides that they want to leave. In one way or the other has been given a much more, I think, complete sort of moral education than the kind that these liberal theorists are advocating for, which is largely a kind of abdication of making any claims about morality or about the best way of life out of this kind of defensive fear that if we say something is the best way of life, then we're, of course, prejudicing ourselves against other possibilities that could be equally good. The irony, of course, is that religious ways of life are not equally good because they're heteronomous. Really it's hard to, I mean, there is a kind of smuggling in of value judgments here. The value judgments tend to be against religious orthodoxies because religious orthodoxies are not open to non orthodoxies. James M. Patterson: I've done some work on the Catholics side to this history of education and religious liberty. It's funny how parallel fundamentalist Protestants and now apparently the Satmar are to the same experiences that Catholics had, right down to Catholics complaining that public schools adopt what Dagger John Hughes, a bishop in the 1830s called "nothingarianism," where there's sort of a dogmatic imposition of vaguely humanitarian beliefs that would only encourage people to become atheists. That way of constructing a kind of implicit dogmatic teaching in a school is actually quite a flimsy one for most students. I think you have a very strong, probably very controversial take on this in the chapter, namely that Yeshiva education for Hasidic Jews is actually really great when it comes to living in a contemporary social life. The Hasidic adolescent is in a stronger position to seriously engage with diversity than the secular one who's exposed to a superficial parade of possibilities that hardly challenge his own weekly rooted preconceptions very deeply. He has not a naive personal preference, but 1,000-year-old tradition to weigh against the alternatives. He must also weigh the serious social and economic consequences of resisting the secular mainstream against the deep disapproval of his family and community if he joins it. These are very high stakes, and that's why there's much more to the question whether to eat or not eat pork is this sort of development of the character of the student and their ability to maturely and almost independently make these decisions that purportedly secular education supposed to provide but doesn't afford. What is it about this 1,000-year-old education that is so bracing? Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, so I think there, I mean, I'm not actually singling Judaism out for this. It happens that Judaism is this 10,000-year old tradition. I mean, the Hasidic sects are not thousands of years old, but they're following Jewish law, which is thousands of years old. What I'm trying to say there is that there's a criticism from liberal theory that if you give your kids this kind of insular education where they don't have exposure to diversity, they're not going to be able to reasonably weigh the alternatives, because they're going to be so biased by the experience that they had in their upbringings that they won't be able to take seriously any alternatives. The point that I want to suggest here is that when you are a religious minority in a regime where the majority is very visibly lifestyle, everything economically different from you, it's really hard not to notice that. The presumption of liberal theorists is that these kids are simply oblivious, or that these people are totally oblivious to the fact that they are extreme minorities in a society that functions very differently than their communities do. I mean, that may be more true to some degree for the Amish because they actually live physically isolated, often from larger communities of secular Americans. That's not really true of Hasidic Jews because they live in New York City. It's really hard not to notice in New York City that you look really different than all these other people on the street. It's true that the community can provide a lot of supports to make it feel normal to be Hasidic. That's not a problem, but it just seems not to be the case that for an extreme minority of this kind, that you would never consider the alternatives. It is precisely because there's so much at stake with this question of the right of exit, of leaving a community for any individual who does it. You have to really take on a totally different way of life, and often you have to cut off connections with people that you knew in your childhood. I mean, that's a very serious life decision. For them, the question of how will I live is kind of constantly presented to them on the streets of New York City in a way that it's not to the secular student who is told, "Well, there's lots of different ways of life. They're all like ..." A student who is told, "Well, there's lots of different ways of life. They're all pretty good, and there's some that are really just beyond the pale, so you shouldn't consider those." But then you end up with a situation like Buddhism, right? All of these kinds of secular people decide to be Buddhist for a while. And there's no cost in that because it's kind of fake, and it's part of this mainstream one of the new age options for life. And you can pick it up and discard it without any changes to your existing life. And so the idea that you're autonomous because you're choosing these sorts of things, you're choosing to do yoga, you're choosing to attend a church, now you're choosing not to attend a church, these are all very low stakes decisions, and it's not clear that you seriously understand the valence of different ways of life. Whereas to be an extreme minority like the Satmar and also like the Amish, and to contemplate leaving that community is to contemplate the question of different ways of life and different understandings of the good life really seriously because there's a lot of cost. James M. Patterson: Yeah. You can see in that description you just gave how the approach to autonomy favors elites, especially people with a lot of money, because the decisions are low stakes if the money you spend on them is relatively disposable. So, for a particular kind of person, you can go to a sort of rich kid, Bali, hippie commune and get high on ayahuasca, and then you'll be able to leave after you get sick of that. And I don't know, go work as a vice president in your father's software company or what have you, whereas others who don't have those options instead simply consume media of people engaging in those options. And all of that has that kind of shallow consumer model of religiosity that it seems very foreign to what the Satmar are dealing with. So there is a kind of history of litigation or of problems with the establishment clause that the Satmar have confronted. One of these includes the 1994 case Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumets. So, what's the story behind this? This is sort of where the Satmar first start to, or at least the Hasidic communities start to really come into conflict, right? Dr. Rita Koganzon: Well, they come into conflict once they try to create a town. So this is actually described really nicely in the book that I reviewed for the Hedgehog Review called American Shtetl by Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers. And they give the kind of extensive legal history of creating Kiryas Joel. So, there are kind of two problems with the First Amendment that these sorts of groups face. One is the free exercise clause, which is the Amish issue with taking your kids out of school, being exempt from a generally applicable law on the grounds of free exercise. But once you try to set up a town that is populated entirely by Satmar and governed by Satmar, this raises a question about whether that violates the Establishment Clause because you're not supposed to have a religious government in the United States. And there are some interesting precedents for this. There's like this ashram in Oregon that tries to do this too, and there's shut down. But what happens? So Satmar grows, they need space, they have a lot of kids, and the Rebbe approves the purchase of this land in, I think it's Monroe County, it's next to the town of Monroe, outside of New York City, and they start developing it and building on it. And they immediately come into conflict with their neighbors because they want to have really high-density housing. And this is a suburb of New York City, and people have single-family homes, and they're single-family zoning. And they're like, "Why are you building these apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere?" And there's a kind of sense of, do we really want to have this group of very strange people who live in a totally different way and don't really talk to us living in our town? And so there are all kinds of conflicts with the town of Monroe that actually lead to Kiryas Joel becoming independent, they break off and become an independent municipality. So, the first set of conflicts is actually just creating Kiryas Joel as an independent municipality rather than a kind of subdivision of the town of Monroe. And then, as an independent municipality, they have no public school because they all send their kids to the private Satmar yeshivas, but they also have a problem, which is that they have some kids who have special needs and are not going to be well-educated in the conventional yeshiva. And so, the question is: Where do we send our kids with special needs? Should we send them to the public school in Monroe where they're not going to get a kind of Jewish special needs education, they're going to get the public school special needs education, or can we create our own special education program in Kiryas Joel that is intended to serve only students from Kiryas Joel. And that's the basis of this conflict. So they start doing this, they create their own public school. It's a public school designed entirely for kids with special needs and only open to the residents of Kiryas Joel, who are probably 99.9% Satmar. I don't know. There might be somebody who's not Satmar living there. And does that violate the Establishment Clause because are they creating essentially a religious public school is the question? So this goes all the way to the Supreme Court and the Court decides against the school district that this is a violation of the establishment clause, that they are creating essentially a religious school, and that they can't go forward. If they do go forward, they just find other ways around it. And the interesting thing about this decision, as the authors in American Shtetl note, is that it sort of signals the beginning of a shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence about the First Amendment towards sort of allowing the state... I mean, in this case, they didn't allow the state to get involved in religion. But after this, you start to see a lot more cases where the state is allowing more of what they call entanglement between government and religious groups. And at this point, we are at a point where there's a possibility of even starting religious charter schools. So Oklahoma has started religious charter schools, and I think that's going to be litigated, but it's not thought that that's totally beyond the pale. And there's a lot more government involvement in religious schooling and government funding for religious schooling. And so the argument that the authors of that book make is that this is sort of the beginning of that shift and that the Satmar plays an important role in kind of provoking that shift because, and part of the reason has to do with the fact that they're not the fundamentalist Christian bogeyman, they're Jews, they're a minority. They pose no threat to the majority. And I mean, one of the things that's interesting about Satmar, in contrast to the fear of Christian fundamentalism that motivated liberal theory for a long time, is that Satmar does not want to take over America. They have zero interest in governing non-Jews. So you could always have... Christianity is an evangelical religion. Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Christianity is a majority religion. So even though there are sects within Christianity and there's a lot of sort of conflict within Christianity, there's always the possibility that Christians want to actually take over and they want to govern, and that's their real goal. And that when they're asking for these exemptions and things like that, it's part of the strategy for some larger long-term takeover. But you can't really assume that that's the case for the Satmar because their goal is not to govern any non-Jews and probably not really any non-Satmar, although that's a little questionable. So in that sense, they're interesting because they don't pose this threat, this political threat. And the question of exempting them from generally applicable laws or whatever, or carving out exemptions for them from regulation is not one where you can plausibly ever say that their goal, they have some larger scheme, a long-term scheme to use these little exemptions and carve-outs to gain power and take over. And so it's really just a question of tolerating pluralism and how far we're willing to go in tolerating pluralism. James M. Patterson: There's a town in Michigan called Hamtramck, which has become majority Muslim, primarily from Bangladesh, and they have an all-Muslim city council that recently banned the use of pride flags in the city. The response from an LGBT activist and a former mayor was, "There's a sense of betrayal. We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you're the one doing the threatening." There's a sort of presumption among autonomy-based liberals that because they're defending religious minorities, the religious minorities support autonomy-driven liberalism, and this just doesn't seem to be the case. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, there's a sort of limit to this in the case of the Jews, which is that they're not trying to grow and take over, but there is a kind of analogous problem. So Ramapo County has this problem in which there are a lot of Hasidic Haredi Jews living there, and they won a majority of the school board seats, but they don't send their kids to the public schools. And so there are all these accusations that they're defunding, that they're basically using the public schools to divert money into their private school system, that they're defunding the public schools, that it doesn't make sense for them to be on the school board of school system, which they don't even support and which is competing with their school system. And so I think there was a whole series of podcasts actually about this controversy. But yeah, I mean, there are ways in which it's clearly going to come into conflict with secular government. If you create local majorities, you could have enough people to win school board seats. You could have enough people of your religious group to win city council seats. At a small sort of local level, you could take over the secular government. And then what's going to happen to the people living there who are not members of your religious group? And what are the obligations of this dissenting religious group to sort of respect the now minority rights of the non-religious residents of this area? James M. Patterson: So the review has, and you told me this story as well, I think you may have even told it during your presentation for your paper, has this account for how the Satmar were actually able to essentially game the system for welfare benefits for low-income people. And they did so by more or less hacking an entitlement program, an entitlement program that was designed with the expectation, as it turns out, an expectation that I think you would agree liberals did not really imagine, that poor people would have low levels of social capital, but if you engineer a poor people with high levels of social capital, they're actually able to sort of work against the original intentions of this welfare program. So, explain exactly how this works and why it was such a source of outrage. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, that's a great story. So there's kind of two objections to the Satmar currently that sort of arise from their difference and their minority status. So one is their schooling and the curriculum of their private schools. And the other one is that they're welfare sponges. And so they do receive a lot of government transfers. The main reason for this is that they fall below the state poverty line often, even though they're working and have an income because they also have a lot of kids. And the poverty lines are determined by family size, but they also have, on occasion, been convicted of fraud for gaming the system, as you say, for various government transfers. And that's the reputation that they have in New York City. So you talk to New Yorkers about them, and they're like, "Yeah, they do all this fraud." It's always hard to prove the fraud. So I think there's probably less conviction, but when there is conviction, the New York Times is very happy about it, and they write about it. And so they wrote, I think this was last year, about this case in which one of the Hasidic Yeshivas in New York in Brooklyn had come up with a scheme where they would pay their teachers, they would sort of sign contracts with their teachers where they would pay them just enough that they would be below the threshold of qualifying for supplementary welfare payments. So basically, they would be paid a certain amount, and then they would still be able to apply for other forms of welfare. I'm not sure exactly what forms of welfare, but they would be able to apply on an individual level for supplementary transfers, and the school would make up the difference in supermarket coupons for kosher grocery stores. And so you would be getting a salary, which was money, supermarket coupons, and then you would have to go out and apply for welfare to supplement your salary. And this was discovered, and this was described in the New York Times, and this is a kind of bargain that it's really hard to imagine anybody else in New York taking, right? I mean, imagine you're given a job offer, and they tell you, "Well, we would pay you 50,000, but instead, we're going to pay you 25,000, and we'll give you 10,000 more in supermarket coupons, and then you can go apply for welfare and the government will cover the rest." That requires a really high level of social trust to accept such an offer. Most of us would just be like, "Please give me the money, or I'm not going to work for you," because we don't have the social trust that we're working for an employer that really has our interest in mind. We just think we're being scammed. In a way, the way we've structured welfare has kind of had this individualistic assumption that families will only use it when they really need it, that there's a kind of shame associated with using it, that they're not going to use it as a kind of tool of advancing their group because there's no group involved. But the Satmar have way fewer scruples about using government funding. Their idea is that the government is giving people money, and we qualify for it, so why shouldn't we be recipients of it just like everybody else? And part of that has to do with the experience that they had in Williamsburg in the 1970s and '80s, where there was a kind of ethnic patronage system of welfare where different groups were sort of trying to get their share of what the city was giving out, and they were part of that. And so they don't have the same kind of objection that it's immoral or shameful to receive government benefits. They think this is something that's being given out and we qualify for it, and so why wouldn't we take it? Plus, they're much better organized in taking it. And so they have this ability to use welfare in these ways that are very difficult for other groups to do, to have a kind of organized employment system that simply incorporates welfare payments as part of the expected salary that you're going to make. And I think another element of this that's really interesting, and we're thinking about, especially for people who are thinking about how to design welfare, right, it's like, well, how would you prevent this fraud? Right? Well, you would have to, in some way, prevent people from qualifying on the basis that the Satmar qualify. So you have to change the rules in ways that would affect everybody. Are you going to impose, for example, child caps for the receipt of welfare transfers, right? So if you have more than four children, we're not going to pay you. But that seems outrageous. And so it's very hard to think about how to redesign the welfare system in a way that would prevent this kind of high solidarity community from taking advantage of it. James M. Patterson: Reading the Times' coverage of Hasidic welfare fraud, one gets the distinct sense that the reporters would be more relieved if all the public money that the Hasidim received was fraudulent then, except that so many of them are actually just poor. For them, it seems, poverty has not been as fatal to flourishing as it has for other Americans. It has not led to any of the social pathologies typically associated with it. This confounds the typical sociological explanations for these negative outcomes, which identify poverty as their root cause. In this respect, Hasidim confounds the right to since it more successfully models, in actual practice, the corrective or even alternative to liberalism that Christianity often inspires to be. Really just incredible stuff in this review. So, I have a couple more questions before you go. One is specific, and the other is going to be the most exciting one for me. But I'll start with the more specific one, which is what's the deal with this paragraph about those who are criticizing all of the Satmar being also Jewish? Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah, well. So, the difficulty of having an open discussion of this is that with religious minorities, there is a social fear of criticizing. So you don't want to be accused of antisemitism. And a lot of Gentiles just don't have any idea what Hasidism is, who the Satmar are, and so they just view this as a weird foreign people dress funny, eat weird food, right? I mean, they're kind of on the level of other foreigners to a lot of American non-Jews. Whereas Jews feel a kind of personal stake in this question because these are our co-religionists and they represent us, and they represent us in ways that maybe we don't want to be represented to the majority. And so the question about the Hasidim and where they fit in has long been a kind of subject of intra-Jewish warfare where the Gentiles have kind of stayed out because they don't want to be accused of antisemitism because they really don't understand anything about what's going on. And they view this as just another weird minority group. America's full of weird minority groups, and there's no real interest in singling these people out. And so the history of especially these legal battles over the Satmar, over Kiryas Joel, and now the Hasidic Yeshivas in New York City, if you look at who the main players are, many of them are Jews. And there are Jewish plaintiffs and Jewish defendants, and the lawyers taking these cases are Jewish. And because for the Jews, it's a much more sort of salient question of their own identity. What do Jews look like in America? Do they look like Satmar, or do they look like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And who is supposed to be the sort of representative of our people to the larger American population? So there's a kind of identity conflict that motivates some of this, right? And I think that that plays out. Oftentimes, the Hasidim will accuse the secular Jews of this kind of version of antisemitism, which is just like, "You hate us because we represent something more orthodox than you, and you're afraid that people will see you in us." And I think there's some truth to that. But I do think also that there's just a larger clash of visions, which is that secular Judaism for the second half of the 20th century really had a pretty cohesive constitutional vision of liberalism that does not tolerate the Haredi and the Hasidim in the way that they want to subvert the First Amendment by their lights. Where their view is that there needs to be a strict separation of church and state precisely because the Jews are a permanent minority, and they will never stand to benefit from any kind of effort to scale the wall between church and state because they're always going to be persecuted. If any other religious group gets hold of state power, which is much more likely given their numbers, the Jews will always be in a very weak and endangered position. And so the best position, this is what Judith Shklar calls the way of thinking of the permanent minority, the liberalism of the permanent minority, the best and safest position for a group like the Jews, which does not aspire to and likely never will be a majority, is to create a constitution, which creates a lot of defenses against state power, especially defenses against religious groups taking control of state power. And I think that that clash of visions is in some ways much more salient than this question of, well, are secular Jews just embarrassed about being connected to people who look like the Satmar, who wear the black hats and the big robes and things like that. I mean, I think there's some of that there, but that's not the main motivating thing. I think there's a real fundamental clash of constitutional visions. James M. Patterson: So, the Kiryas Joel lost their decision, but we've seen some major decisions that have expanded not just religious liberty on public grounds but also access to public money. This is like the Trinity Lutheran case and the Kennedy v. Bremerton case. So the thing really that sank into me when you were presenting was that The Satmar Option is now increasingly the model that not just the permanent minorities like the Jews are adopting, but also sort of stationed minorities all over the United States because this sort of autonomy-based liberalism has been able to preserve such a control over mainstream education, that the length of time has actually produced lots of different religious minorities pursuing their own ways of doing things. And the result has been that they've created a constituency that seeks out, especially after these decisions, all kinds of access, and the way that the Haredi had been able to, and the Satmar has been able to. And have in mind here Catholic traditionalists because that's just the world that I'm more familiar with, but for example, graduate programs will actually request that graduate students in theology go on Medicaid. That way, it's easier for them to cover other expenses for the graduate students. And here in the State of Florida, they've started to disperse multiple thousand dollars in grants to families for them to attend whatever schools they want. And the result has been a massive increase in attendance of more traditional Christian schooling and homeschooling options. So the thing that was so important to me about your presentation is that The Satmar Option that you're describing, framed by this permanent minority status and sort of putting away the Amish as the exemplars, really does introduce an entirely new paradigm for religious liberty cases in which the issue is not merely non-interference with religious practice, but also qualifications for access to entitlements. Is this really what you see as the future here? Dr. Rita Koganzon: Yeah. I don't know. I don't like to say I'm predicting the future. It seems to me that the Amish model is really anachronistic. I don't know that it was ever really exemplary demographically, even in 1972 when the Yoder case was decided because most people don't live like the Amish in the United States otherwise, they wouldn't be so strange. But certainly now, there's just the idea that people who are religious dissenters are going to separate themselves out and go live somewhere where nobody will see them, and they will see nobody is just not the way that religious minorities live in the United States, and it no longer seems to reflect the assumptions that they have. And you can see this definitely in the homeschooling movement, the shift, because in the 1970s and 1980s, when homeschooling started to become politically viable, and people were lobbying for changes to state laws that would allow them to take their kids out of public schools and not be subject to compulsory schooling laws, the whole argument is about removal, removing your kids from these influences, teaching them at home, the right to teach them at home to be able to sort of shield them from the larger influences of the mainstream culture. Now, all the homeschooling battles are about inclusion. They're about whether homeschooling students have a right to play on public school sports teams, right? Do homeschooling students have a right to use public school resources in a kind of pick-and-choose way without attending those schools without being fully enrolled? And so you can see the sort of shift in momentum from do we have a right to take our children out and keep them away from this system? To now, what are our rights to participate in this system on a kind of piecemeal basis or on an à la carte basis? And so you see, the shift in that momentum is indicative of where, in general, religious descent is going. It's not so much about how far can we recede or remove ourselves from the mainstream to how far can we participate in the mainstream without being subjected to violations of our religious freedom because of government regulations that restrict certain services on secular grounds. And so, in that sense, I do think that the momentum is shifting a lot more to sort of putting pressure on state, municipal, and federal government entities to be able to provide resources either in terms of school sports, welfare transfers, school funding, things like that to religious groups, and on what grounds can they provide those resources without violating the First Amendment. But the assumption is they will provide those resources, and it's just a matter of hammering out how they can do that without violating the First Amendment versus to what degree can we remove ourselves from all government entanglement. James M. Patterson: The Satmar Option, Hasidic Judaism, The Future of Religious Liberty, the Summer 2023 Essay, and the Hedgehog Review, and the chapter in Religious Liberty and Education, Pork Eating is Not a Reasonable Way of Life, Yeshiva Education Versus Liberal Educational Theory. Thank you so much for coming on Liberty Law Talk, Dr. Rita Koganzon. Dr. Rita Koganzon: Thank you. Brian A. Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.   [BS1]I think this is a quote - maybe ask JP?

German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk joins associate editor Rachel Lu to discuss his book The Identity Trap.

Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater join host Helen Dale to discuss transgender activism, civil rights law, and Forstater's recent discrimination lawsuit. 

Avik Roy joins host James Patterson to discuss Freedom Conservatism, its "Statement of Principles" and the broader political and intellectual environment.  Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening. James Patterson: Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today is August 18th, 2023. My name is James Patterson. I am a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University. A fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy in the Institute for Human Ecology. And president of the Ciceronian Society. With me today is Dr. Avik Roy. He is the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank improving the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder, using freedom, innovation, and pluralism. Roy's work has been praised on both the left and the right. National Review called him one of the nation's sharpest policy minds. Well, the New York Times, Paul Krugman, concedes, "Roy is about as good as you can get in this stuff. He actually knows something." That's high praise. Roy also serves as the policy editor at Forbes on the advisory boards of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And is a senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center. He's advised several presidential candidates, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. Roy was educated at MIT, where he studied molecular biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Roy, welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Dr. Avik Roy: It's nice to be with you. Please call me Avik. James Patterson: Oh, okay. Yes, Avik. So the reason for our conversation today is because you are one of the principle movers behind the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles, as well as a broader effort to articulate a freedom conservatism. So for the readers and listeners at Law & Liberty who are not familiar with freedom conservatism, why don't you explain to them what this project is? Dr. Avik Roy: Sure. So a bunch of us have, over the last many years, I'm sure including many devotees of this podcast and of the Liberty Fund and of Law & Liberty, have watched with dismay as there has been a rise of authoritarianism, not just on the left, but on the right around the world and in the United States. And I think in the initial going, obviously many of us hope that this would be some temporary eruption that would eventually fall aside as people realize that authoritarianism is not something that Americans really want. But as time has gone on, I think it's become clear that the people on the right in particular who like the rise of authoritarianism, who are inclined, who believe that it's a good thing, it's a salutary development, have succeeded at moving beyond merely trying to align with Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies at times, and instead try to build a permanent movement around authoritarianism. They call it national conservatism, by which they mean that the classical liberal movement is too nice; it's too willing to engage in toleration of multiple points of view. And that what we really need is an authoritarianism of the right to combat the authoritarianism of the left. And last year, in 2022, the national conservatives got together and created a statement of principles with 10 planks that they published at their website. They have conferences twice a year, usually one in the US and one in Hungary or some other aligned location. And they have created an organized group of young people in particular, Capitol Hill staffers, people out of college, for whom this is the only kind of conservatism they've ever known. For those of us who are older, we take for granted that classical liberalism is a central part of the 20th-century conservative tradition and 21st-century conservative tradition. But for the nationalists, if you're just graduating from college now, you're 22 years old, 21 years old maybe, you were just entering middle school when Trump went down that golden escalator. So, you're not aware of any other form of American conservatism. So, young people growing up today have had the impression that if you are to be a conservative, if you see yourself on the right or right of center, and especially if you see yourself as an opponent of the left, that nationalism and authoritarianism are the philosophies you need to adopt. And that trend, in particular, has become very concerning. It's also become very concerning that a lot of politicians on the right have concluded that the way to win a Republican primary in particular, whether it's running for president or running for Congress or state legislature, is to adopt these nationalist authoritarian positions because they see that as the base of the party. It wasn't that long ago that the Tea Party was the base of the party, a group of people who were seen as being constitutionalists, people who wanted the government out of their lives. That's been replaced by this new theory that the base is nationalistic and authoritarian. And so you put all these things together, all these different trends, and a bunch of other people felt that this was a great concern, "We need to do something about it." And that the first step in doing something about it was to put together our own statement of principles. Now, obviously, we have the advantage that others in the past have also created statements or principles. The most relevant one for us was the Sharon Statement, which was signed by a group of people at Bill Buckley's house in Sharon, Connecticut, who ended up creating Young Americans for Freedom, a young organization of libertarians, individuals, and conservatives. And they put together a statement of principle that we took as our core inspiration. But our goal was to say, let's create a statement of principles ourselves that, while it takes inspiration from the Sharon statement, is adapted to the political and policy challenges of our time. And also, it evolves and iterates upon that statement of principles in certain ways and allows us to articulate a different form of conservativism than nationalism. And also allows us, by gathering a bunch of signatories, to start building that movement. A group of people that are willing to put their names on a piece of paper and say, "Hey, I'm standing up for these principles." And thereby, if I look around and I see other names on that list, you know that these are people who are aligned with you, who are your friends, who you can reach out to and connect with, and we can start to build our own organization and network of people who advocate for the role of liberty and freedom in America once again. James Patterson: I agree with the concern about the interest in authoritarianism. For Law & Liberty, a couple of years ago, I noted the growth of the Francisco Franco appreciation threads that had emerged in social media. Strange. But the people who often write these threads or are participating in national conservatism conferences, paying attention to the publications and other media that come from national conservativist sources, one of their mantras, one of their rhetorical questions rather is what has conservatism conserved, here meaning fusionism? There's an answer to that question, I think. What is your answer to that question? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, boy, we could spend a whole hour on this topic. But I think I would answer it, I would flip your question to its inverse in a sense, which is that the national conservatives believe that America is lost. It's a profoundly pessimistic movement. They believe that the things that made America great are no longer present, that America is lost. Now, why do they believe that? Why do they believe that America is lost? Now, we could come up with lots of things that, in terms of trends in the United States, we think are negative if we wanted to look at the pessimistic side of things, right? The amount of money that the government spend has gone up. The size of the Federal Register, the compilation of all the regulations at the federal level, has gone up. The deficit and debt have gone up. So there are things like that that are not great. There are things like entrenched and aggressive political correctness, as we used to call it, and now people call it "wokery" or "wokism." That's not just in educational circles but in corporate settings as well. So those are the kinds of things that the nationals point to and say, "Hey, America is lost." Now, there's something that some will say out loud, and others will not say out loud, which is arguably the core animating concern that they have, which is not so much those things, though those things I think all of us would agree we don't like about the state of America today. But the reason why they say America is lost is because of demographic issues. That is what you hear that some of the nationals say in their own settings and their own journals, and again, particularly the most frank and blunt and open ones who don't worry about any pushback they might get on this topic. They say the biggest problem with America is that America is increasingly a multi-ethnic, multiracial society. That's something that they believe will help drive America to lose its fundamental character. That America, in order to preserve its fundamental character, needs to be a white ethnostate. And that's why immigration policy is front and center, not just in the United States but in nationalist movements all around the world. Skepticism of immigration, not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration. And this is really a core point, a critical distinction; I think most Americans don't like illegal immigration, but most Americans like legal immigration. They believe that since almost all of us are descendants of legal immigrants, we understand the role that immigration has played in making America this dynamic, great, prosperous country. So many of the greatest companies and successes we've had, economically and otherwise, scientific achievements, our athletic achievements, come from the people who have come to America from elsewhere. This movie Oppenheimer is in the theaters as we're recording this podcast. I mean, much of our ability to win World War II and develop nuclear weapons came from immigrants, people who left Europe, who were being persecuted because they were ethnic minorities. And so those are the things that have made America great and continue to drive America to greatness in many ways. There are a lot of good things that are going on in America. We are still the most innovative country in the world. We're still the cultural leader of the world. We're still the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We're still a country where basic freedoms like being able to say what you want. Yes, there are people who are trying to push back, there's cancel culture, there are all these issues. But fundamentally, we have the ability to record this podcast and say what we want to say. And yes, there are others who don't like it when you say what you want to say, but we are still basically a free society. And yes, there are things to improve about that free society, but we are not doing as badly as the nationalists think. And the reason why the nationalists say that we're lost, already lost, because this is a demographic issue, that, well, America is already not American, if you think America should be a white ethnostate, and that's why they lean towards authoritarian ideas because they know they can't persuade a majority of the electorate to go along with reformatting America as a white ethnostate, most Americans don't want that. And so that's why they veer towards these anti-democratic, anti-Republican ideas of what America should be in the future. James Patterson: Well, the freedom conservatism principles have a lot of continuity with what used to be called fusionism, which is the older version of conservatism that really was part of the original sort of conservative movement following the Second World War of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank Meyer. And that was regnant during the Reagan years and really had a lasting influence through the George W. Bush administration. Do you see freedom conservatism as a fusionism 2.0, or is it a new stage of conservatism that's meant to reckon with the things that you just mentioned? Dr. Avik Roy: I think it's both, right? For the listeners who are not familiar with the term fusionism, let's just make sure that we're describing it. So, you could say there are two forms of fusionism. There is the, you could say, coalitional fusion. So, the American conservative movement of the 20th century was a coalition of people that included libertarians, classical liberals, social conservatives, anti-communists, and a lot of people in between. And that coalition won the Cold War and did a lot to make America the preeminent nation in the world in the late 20th century when we defeated the Soviet Union. There were people in that movement who would've said, I'm not a... And there's a second, is what I'm getting at, there's a second form of fusionism, which is what Frank Meyer, in particular, was known for, which was trying to actually come up with a philosophy, a political philosophy that incorporated both classical liberalism and social conservatism into a single philosophy. And his argument was that in order to be truly virtuous, if you're a social conservative and you care about virtue, one must live in a free society because it's only through freely choosing virtue that you can actually be virtuous. If someone's forcing you to be virtuous, you're not really being that virtuous. That was Meyer's argument. And so the thing I'm trying to make clear by getting into all this, the etymology or taxonomy, is that the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles is open to both kinds of people. So there are signatories to the document who are libertarians, classical liberals. There are signatories to the document who are social conservatives and foreign policy hawks, who wouldn't think of themselves as fusionists in the Frank Meyer sense of the term. But there are also people who are signatories to the documents who are fusionists. So it encompasses both kinds of fusionism, is what I'm trying to say. James Patterson: Awesome. Yeah, I was originally... I'm sorry, an original signer of the document. And I don't really consider myself a libertarian, but I thought the language was capacious enough to address people who share your concerns about the emergence of national conservatism and its attraction to this or even endorsement of this oddly authoritarian approach to the American republic. So what do you think is the cause for so much interest in this alternative vision, this national conservative vision? You mentioned earlier that part of it is youthful ignorance. Is that everything, or is there more to it? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, I do think that if you're the kind of person who's gone to college in the last seven years, it was really 2015 when this Yale Halloween incident happened that things really started to change. Jonathan Haidt wrote an interesting article, I believe for The Atlantic, where he traced some of this to the rise of Instagram and some of these other relatively newfangled social media tools, where things really started to change, and the cancel culture really took off. And so I think there's a cohort of people who come out of that environment who've been radicalized in the other direction. Right? So if you're in an environment where you're told you are a fundamentally guilty and inferior person because you are a white male, a heterosexual white male in particular, then you're radicalized in the other direction and you feel frustrated because to the degree that your elders are telling you, "Hey, you should believe in freedom and let different sides coexist." That doesn't seem sufficient when you feel like you're being extubated. So I think that's part of it. I think also there's a degree to which Trump's victory in 2016 was an opportunity for, what you might say, bandwagon jumpers to kind of say, "Hey, here's the new wave." The new hotness is to be a nationalist because Trump is at least instinctively a nationalist. I wrote in a piece for National Review recently that I made the argument that, look, almost all of Trump's domestic policy success came from freedom conservative principles, his tax reforms, his judicial appointments, his deregulation initiative. Those are all freedom conservatism policies that were executed by freedom conservatism acolytes. But to the degree that Trump has tried to break from that Bill Buckley/Frank Meyer consensus and say, "No, we should be against free trade. We should be skeptical of immigration." Now, actually, I should parenthesize this because Trump is not actually against legal immigration. He produced a plan in 2019, an immigration reform plan that would be about securing the border, but actually reforming legal immigration so we were improving the quality of immigrants we were getting to the country, in terms of high-skilled immigrants who can really contribute to the country's economy. So, his immigration plan in 2019 was pretty aligned with what a lot of freedom conservatives believe. But there were plenty of people who saw in Trump an avatar for a nationalist agenda, some of whom believed it from the start, who were always nationalists, you could say. And then others who were perhaps persuaded or converted to become nationalists, because they believed that this was the way of the future, this is the way things were going to go. And I think that's a mistake because I don't think that nationalism is the wave of the future. And I think that most Americans, the vast majority, particularly young Americans, are not okay with a nostalgic movement that believes it can recreate the demographics of the 1930s. James Patterson: With the politics of the 1930s, too. At least in European politics. So, I've noticed that there's almost no real interest from Trump himself in national conservatism. It just seems to kind of pass him by. It's a funny thing where they're appealing directly to him, and he spends most of his time trying to get crowds to cheer for them. So what are some of the principles of freedom conservatism, and especially, how do you see them operating in political institutions or having policy implications for 2023 and beyond? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, there are a couple of things I'll say. The first thing to say is that the document makes it pretty clear that the most important thing that freedom conservatives stand for is individual and economic liberty. That's not only core to freedom conservatism; that's core to America. To go to your question from before, which is what is it that we're trying to conserve? What freedom conservatives are trying to conserve are the principles of the American founding, which is that the government exists to secure the liberties of the people, not the other way around. And that is the, in a sense, you could say the core contradiction, but also the core distinctiveness, the core creed of the United States. Which is that the tradition of America, the one that we seek to conserve, is the tradition of individual and economic freedom. That's what America was founded on, with the notable asterisk and exception of slavery. And that is the principle that those of us who believe in those founding traditions have sought to expand and apply to the circumstances that we're in today. The nationalists don't believe in that tradition. They want to import the Hungarian or continental European nationalism, which is basically that your country is a collection of people who are genetically linked to each other with a common language and a common religion, and that's it. That's what a nation is. And there are nuanced versions of nationalism that are not completely incompatible with freedom conservatism. And I wouldn't even call them nationalist; it's more like that's just patriotism, right? For example, you can believe that the United States should seek to advance the interests of Americans, whether it's in foreign policy or in economic policy or anything else. And the way to do that is to expand liberty. Right? It's economic freedom that has made America the wealthiest and most dynamic and most prosperous country in the world, the one with the most social mobility and the most opportunity for people from humble beginnings to do well. Those are the things that bind us together. One can have a very robustly pro-American and patriotic philosophy, and yet not be a nationalist in the way that we've described nationalism. And so there are people, I think, in that way, you can look at the statement of principles that we've put out and the statement of principles the nationalists have put out and say, well, I agree with the majority of both of these statements, so which side am I on? And there have been a number of columns and articles that have kind of been in the zone, saying, "Well, I don't want to really take a side here or I think there's merit to both, so I'm going to just kind of sit this out." And I think the mistake there is that if you are not trying to conserve the American founding tradition, that's a core moral issue. Right? The core fight that really matters is do you believe that Americans should be trusted to live their own lives? That families should be trusted to raise their children in the way they see fit? If you don't believe that, and the nationalists in certain places in their document don't believe that, then that's a problem. That is a clear area of distinction. And so, where does this come down in policy? There are areas, I think, where there are pretty clear examples of where we have policy differences, in areas where there's more of an overlap or where people who are signing the freedom conservative document may have different views. One example of this is immigration. So, on immigration, there's a spectrum of views. I would suspect–I haven't pulled every single person who signed the document on this—but I think if you were, and it's safe to say, that if you asked signatories of the freedom conservative statement, where do you stand on immigration, you'd see a range of views. On one end might be a hardcore libertarian who says that the freedom to immigrate and emigrate is fundamental to freedom, "I believe in open borders." There are going to be people who ideologically believe that. I think there are others, probably the majority, who would say, "I'm for immigration overall, I'm for legal immigration, but America has a right to decide who enters the country and who stays here and who works here. And so we need to have a robust system of legal immigration, but secure our border against illegal immigration." When you go over to the nationalists, it's kind of the other half of that debate, where they're saying they're very skeptical of immigration overall. They believe that circumstances may often require a full moratorium on immigration. And what's important to talk about there is that while that's what they say in their statement, if you actually read what they write in their own journals, the speeches they give at their own conferences, their view of immigration is much more hostile. You hear rhetoric like, "Immigration makes America dirtier." Immigration, again, despoils America's ethnic homogeneity and racial homogeneity. A lot of comments of that sort. So while the national conservative statement is carefully worded to maybe mask some of these darker elements of the nationalist movement, it's clear that that's a big thrust of theirs. Another area I'll highlight where there's perhaps the most room for disagreement among the freedom conservatism is foreign policy. Obviously, if you're a purist libertarian, you take a Washingtonian view of skepticism about any and all foreign entanglements, the more Reaganite types in the freedom conservative movement would say, "Look, America's role as a leader of the world is really important. And while we don't have the resources or the willpower to be running the rest of the world militarily, we certainly, our leadership of the world, is very important to our freedom and security in the interests of America. And so we should have an internationalist position," not necessarily what we now call neo-conservatism, the very aggressive nation-building type approach. "But at the very least, we should recognize that there's value in having allies. There's value in America securing trade around the world through the power of our navy," et cetera, et cetera. So that's an area where you might see some disagreement. So we've been criticized for having a statement that sounds like it could mean a lot of different things on foreign policy. But I think that that reflects the range of views appropriately so. But really, most importantly, creates space for this Reaganite foreign policy, where Reagan did not go around trying to basically rebuild nations around the world. He didn't invade the Soviet Union. But did he fight the Soviet Union in every way short of war? He certainly did. He tried everything he could to defeat the Soviet Union peacefully. He didn't just say, "We're going to ignore what's going on in Eastern Europe." He cared about liberating Eastern Europe. So there's a range of views there. So those are some of the areas where there's a diversity of views. I think where there's real alignment and where there's real, one of the things that I think is really interesting about the Freedom Conservatism Statement is there are three areas in the document where we mix explicit commitments about what this movement is trying to achieve from a policy standpoint. So there's three places where we say we commit to X. The first is we say, we commit to deploying economic and individual freedom to reduce Americans' cost of living. This is something that is a problem. I mean, there are certain aspects of American life that are less expensive or inexpensive compared to what they were in the past, particularly food and clothing. But housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education have gotten far more expensive because the government has gotten involved in regulating and subsidizing those products and driving up the price. And that's a big problem for social mobility in America. And I think one of the things that drove Trump's election in 2016 was the fact that people who are on the bottom half of the ladder, people in the working class, feel like their prosperity is slipping away because of the rise in cost of living. So I think it's really important for freedom conservatives, and the signatories agree, that it's important for the freedom conservatives to show that if you are a working-class American who feels economically insecure because of various things going on in our economy, that the freedom conservatives are looking out for you and we're fighting for you, and we are working on developing solutions to the problems you have. And that the national conservatives, to the degree that they claim to have any solutions at all, would go in the other direction, make things worse for you. So that's commitment number one. Commitment number two is the commitment to a constructive approach to reducing the debt in the deficit. So this is something that's completely ignored by the national conservatives, and frankly, by President Trump when he was in office, he dramatically increased the deficit in the debt. And has argued passionately that the deficit in the debt don't matter, and I'm not going to do anything about it, basically. And so this is incredibly important, because young people, people coming out of college today, the deficit in the debt are going to be the dominant problem, economic problems that they face because we're entering a situation where in six years, five to six years, we're going to be paying more on interest on the national debt than we pay for national defense. And over time, that problem is going to get worse and worse. It's going to lead to decreased economic growth, higher inflation, and a bunch of other problems that are going to make America gradually weaker and weaker. And that, to me, if you're a young adult just entering the workforce or getting through college, this is the crisis that the nationalists and others of these new waves of the right, the post-liberal right, they just don't care about it. And so it was very important to us to make a commitment, not only to prioritize the national debt, but to say, "We're going to commit to developing an agenda that can reduce the debt and the deficit and try to secure the prosperity of future generations." So that's commitment number two. And then commitment number three relates to racial equality. And this is something that we've gotten some questions on. So we say in the statement of principles that we're adamantly opposed to racial discrimination, either for or against any person or group of people. But we also recognize that the legacy of slavery and segregation is still with us and that there's persistent inequality of opportunity for those who are descendants of the victims of slavery and segregation. And that we, the freedom conservatives, commit to trying to deploy the principles of individual and economic freedom to address that inequality of opportunity. And so we've gotten some questions like, "Well, that obviously means you just want to discriminate against white people, right?" It's like, no. No. What it means is, for example, universal education savings accounts. Today, we have a system that's in part a legacy of slavery and segregation, where where you go to school is determined by where you live. And that was a very convenient system in the segregated South, because it meant that if you lived in a segregated part of town, you went to the segregated school with inferior resources, and that protected the all-white areas of town to have segregated schools in that part of town, right? And while segregation is illegal today, the geographic segregation is still extant in a lot of these places. And most importantly, it means that people who live in, whatever your race is, if you live in a poor part of town, the quality of the schools and the quality of your community, it can be more fragmented and fragile as a result. And so education savings accounts is a race-neutral policy that says, "Hey, we're going to let you get the best education you can find. We're going to give you the resources that everybody else has, and then you go out and find the best education you can find with that money, whether it's Khan Academy, whether it's a charter school or a private school or private tutors, or whatever you want. And let's liberate you from that school that you were stuck in by the old system." And so that's an example of a policy that's pro-freedom, pro-choice, pro-innovation, but it also has the disproportionate effect of addressing this inequality of opportunity, not just for poor Black kids in formerly segregated communities, but also poor white kids and poor every kid. Right? So it's not a racial policy, it's a racially-neutral policy. And there are so many examples of that. If you actually focus on policies that address the inequality of opportunity for low-income people in general because the descendants of sex slavery and segregation are disproportionately low income relative to non-Blacks, you're going to disproportionately help them, but you're also going to disproportionately help low-income white, low-income Hispanics, low-income everybody. So these are policies that are racially neutral, but that also address the inequality of opportunity that was a consequence of slavery and segregation. I think one of the real distinctions between the nationalists and the freedom conservatives is that this is something that we're committing to doing. We recognize that inequality of opportunity, for those who, again, descend from this system, is a real problem. And the nationalists say, well, tough luck, basically, "We don't care about that problem, it's not important." James Patterson: And not only is it good in and of itself to establish programs that benefit people with a history of segregation and slavery, but also, as they're benefited by those programs that provides common goods, right? Knock-on effects of their improving economic and social standing. So it's very strange. But I think it speaks to this issue, you've hinted at it and said it a few times, this sort of zero-sum, sort of sense of the American economy or this over American benefits or the country itself. Dr. Avik Roy: Let me just stop you there, because I think it's a great point you just made, which is that this idea of a zero-sum world in which there's a fixed set of spoils that we're divvying up, that is basically one way to think about the difference between the nationalists and the freedom conservatisms. And if you're a freedom conservatism, you understand that you can grow the pie. You can grow the pie through economic growth, through trade, through innovation, through ingenuity, through immigration. But all these things can lead to a greater pie and more prosperity for everyone. And the nationalists don't believe that. They don't believe the pie is growing. In fact, they believe the pie is shrinking, and that in a shrinking pie, you have to redistribute the spoils in ways that favor your tribe over everybody else's tribe. So I think that optimism versus pessimism is a really key element of all this. James Patterson: I agree entirely. It's often geographic too. I live in Southern Florida, and, I mean, the accelerating growth in most aspects of the economy here is usually best demonstrated by the number of hiring signs and windows, and wage signs and windows. And so when I read things like the introduction to Patrick Deneen's regime change, talking about how America's in a pit. I'm like, "Not here. It's great here." Dr. Avik Roy: And it's important to understand that there are places, like I live in Texas, the same thing. Texas is booming. People are moving to Texas every day. There are help-wanted signs everywhere. There's optimism, people are happy, people smile. There are places in America where that's not true. I think it's important when everyone has a strong disagreement with somebody else to really try to think about why they disagree. What are their strongest arguments, what are their best arguments? What are they seeing in the world that they're responding to? Let's take them at their best and take the most sincere and credible arguments that the other side has. And I think there are communities that are being ravaged by the decay of communities, the Bowling Alone phenomenon, the opioid crisis, right? And that's what a lot of people are responding to. Where Deneen goes wrong, tragically wrong, is that he blames this on individualist intellectuals. It's because these professors and theorists and elites who support individual autonomy, it's because of that that these poor white people in Ohio and Pennsylvania are killing themselves with fentanyl and not getting married and things like that. That's the kind of thing that only an intellectual would say. Intellectuals, of course, are often in love with their ability to shape the world through the power of their pens and keyboards, but that's not actually what happened. The thing that's, it's actually a less facile and harder thing to confront, but an important thing to confront is that one of the big reasons why... there's a couple of big reasons why marriage and family had broken down, not just in America, but around the world. The most important reason is technology. So, technology produced oral contraception, which started to separate the sexual act from procreation in a way that was not practical prior to oral contraception. And then secondly, there were the technological developments of things like laundry machines and dishwashers and other tools that meant that if you were a family of four a hundred years ago, you had to have a division of labor where there was one breadwinner and one homemaker because it wasn't practical to manage a household without having someone at home to do those daily tasks, unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to perhaps hire housekeepers and nannies to do all that stuff for you, which of course, very few people were. Today, with all this technology we have, there isn't as much of a need. There's of course, still a need for parents to be present for their children. But in terms of those homemaking tasks, technology has made it easier for us to do those tasks in a way that isn't as time-consuming. And that fact enabled women to enter the workforce, something that the nationalists really don't account for. They say, "Well, it's all these intellectuals with their left-wing ideas that led women to start working." No, it was actually the fact that you had women who had, thanks to technology, a lot of free time, and they wanted to use that free time productively because they had brains and abilities. And that's something that has been good for America, broadly speaking. Yes, there are challenges alongside it. But the nationalists basically are saying, "Well, we don't like this, we don't like the society, so let's get rid of the liberationist intellectuals." I mean, you're not going to get rid of the liberationist intellectuals; number one, there are lots of them. But most importantly, they don't contend with the fact that a lot of these social trends are structural. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about them, that we should be complacent about it. We absolutely should be thinking hard about how to rebuild communities that have been disrupted by a lot of these social trends. We should be thinking very hard about that. But it's just facile and simplistic and frankly wrong to say that the reason why these things are happening is because there are intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who think it's a good thing for people to have a tonic. James Patterson: Well, what's next for freedom conservatism? I think we have a good beat on what it's for, what policies it has in mind, why it's ideas, at least in my view, are true and better than those of national conservatism, more of the left. So, where is all of this headed? Dr. Avik Roy: Well, I think there's a bunch of elements to it. The first is, of course, we've been grateful for all the attention the document has received in the press and elsewhere, and we continue to be open to new signatories. So if you're somebody who's active in the liberty movement and connected to an institution, whether you're at a think tank or a journalist or some other organization that's involved in the movement in some way, and you're interested in being a signatory, we're still collecting signatories, you can go to the about page at freedomconservatism.org and sign on. We are having a couple of in-person receptions for signatories at a couple of conferences, including the FREOPP conference in November (the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunities). Freedom and Progress Conference in November, in Washington. We are going to continue to stay in touch with both signatories and other people who subscribe to our Substack newsletter to keep them up on activities. And a lot of the goal here is to build this network. To build the network, to have members of the network be able to get to know each other, to learn from each other, both in person and otherwise. To follow each other's work. We have a Twitter list that you can also find on our website, where you can follow all the free-con signatories. And the goal is to start building a network where we can, as the national conservatives have done to their credit, they've done a great job of organizing, they've done a great job of, again, building this network of hill staffers and campaign staffers and things like that, that go out and the activists who go out and try to spread the nationalist gospel. And we need to do that, too. We need to renew our efforts to raise the rising generation of freedom conservatives to evangelize their peers and their communities on these principles. So, a lot of it is going to be trying to provide those resources for people. Try to flag and promote the work of freedom conservatives. To just give an example from recently, a couple of days ago or yesterday actually, as we record this, Samuel Greg wrote a great piece for Law & Liberty about free trade and an explicitly realistic approach to free trade, elaborating on what we talk about in the statement of principles as free trade with free people. So that's an example of something that, here's a guy who's elaborating. So if you want to know, okay, what does this mean, free trade with free peoples? And of course, his opinion is his opinion alone; he doesn't speak for the other 200 signatories. But to create that dialogue and that discourse where those of us who are signatories and other aligned people can discuss these issues and flesh out these ideas, so that it's not just a couple sentences that sound vague, but actually a very detailed set of policies that we can discuss and debate and get behind. I think that's important. I think one thing that's really valuable about this effort is you start to see presidential candidates, other politicians look at this and say, "Hey, I'm a freedom conservative. How can I tap into this network to staff my campaign or staff my office, or just learn from various people who are aligned with this movement, so I can generate better ideas for reforming the country?" So all of those things are elements of what we're trying to do over the next 12 to 24 months. James Patterson: Dr. Roy or Avik, as you'd have it, thank you so much for joining us on Liberty Law Talk. Dr. Avik Roy: Well, thank you as well, and thanks to the Liberty Fund for all the important work that the Liberty Fund does to advance these principles. Brian Smith: Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Yonatan Green joins host Rebecca Burgess to discuss Israel's legal system and the reform proposals that have been generating controversy in 2023.