America’s Cold Civil War

well good evening everyone thank you all so very much for coming to this event that is co-hosted by the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation I'm Arthur Miller I'm the Associate Director of the Kenneth Simon Center for principles and politics here at the Heritage Foundation nothing could be more banal than to say once again in a grave an exasperated voice that we're a polarized nation all the TV people ceaselessly talk about political polarization and the need for bipartisanship but this formulation is a hopeful one because it implies that our ossifying national differences are reconcilable not with ease they say but not with too much pain either yet it's entirely unclear that compromise is always possible just one example of this look at the deadlock over abortion where the underlying question is whether there's a soul or not and it's for this reason that the polarization diagnosis is almost always disingenuous and evasive it's disingenuous because each side thinks compromise will come from the other side and it's evasive because it looks at compromise only in terms of small time policy matters in fact the more we talk about polarization in this way the more polarization seems the more polarized we seem to become for an avoiding confronting the real causes of our division each faction grows more and more dissimilar over time seeks to gain supremacy over the other and ceases to see the other side as fellow countrymen some of the solutions offered by our nation's professional stalkers are playground prescriptions we need more face time with each other or dialogue more national therapy it is deep disagreement ever settled this way if you today admit just how vast is the divide within our nation and this is the very purpose of tonight's panel first comes the diagnosis over our real divisions then we will address how we got here and last we'll try to figure out what can be done at this point our panelists are first Michael Anthony who is lecture and research fellow at Hillsdale College and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute second is Christopher Caldwell senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and last is David as rad director of the Simon Center and the AWC Foundation fellow at the Heritage Foundation each will speak for about ten minutes then Ryan Williams president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books will take over to handle what I hope is an interesting discussion thank you I've been asked to make the case for the existence of the cold Civil War that's what I was told to do and I think I'm actually the wrong person for that just in the sense that to me it's totally obvious in self-evident like you need me to make the case for the cold Civil War I can't persuade you you are an ostrich you are a flat earther I mean you might as well get a geologist to come in here and try to explain you that the world is round but I'll do the best that I can so I think I came of age I'm you see the gray hair I'm fairly old 49 years old came of age and when this was all starting when America was still kind of American and normal and recognizable and all these strange things were happening in my late teens and college years and stuff like that for instance the Boy Scouts were still all boys then but the cultural left was was working on it they picked this fight sometime in the late 80s it was raging through the mid 90s and the Boy Scouts now have decided that I don't know that they've yet changed their names it might be like fast-food restaurants you know that used to be Kentucky Fried Chicken now it's just KFC you're not supposed to ask what the initial stand for maybe somebody'll just be BSA and no one will remember what the B stood for gay marriage was just kind of starting to be a thing then but still very controversial I think it actually got launched as a serious effort when Andrew Sullivan who was then the editor of the New Republic wrote a cover story arguing for it and this was in the mid nineties early to mid 90s but it was still okay for Democratic politicians to say I have nothing against gay people I just think that this is an unwise as a matter of public policy so for instance Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act sometime in the mid 90s when he was president and that was not considered wildly controversial California passed a ballot initiative essentially ratifying the same thing in the in the 21st century and that was considered it was a little edgy but it was not passed with a narrow margin of error and Barack Obama in running for president somehow felt that he had to be against this in order to be electable nationwide now it took him about four years and he came out and he said that his views had evolved and so on shows you how things how fast things move and now it's of course we know because of the Supreme Court has a lot of cultural a cold civil war issues are settled in that to quote Abraham Lincoln in that eminent tribunal who would have thought but it became humongous right in 2015-2016 that the question of which bathroom could be used will become a matter of national policy and debate and we can kind of laugh about this and find it a little silly but there were actually some kind of disturbing epiphenomena from this because I remember for instance reading and a letter to the editor by a woman in New York New York her from the Upper West Side had to be signed anonymously because she feared the repercussions of what would happen if her name were nowhere she said my daughter is like 11 or 12 or something and is in a swim program a competitive swim program and you know at an Upper West Side public or semi-public pool and men now just go into the bathroom to change because they claim to be women and they just like to watch the you know girls change and no one will do anything about it and this is horrifying and of course the the wise and good public opinion said shut up lady you're transphobic you're just bad and then I'm just gonna mention a little-known one but it's part of this right does anybody he's just his name Cecil the lion ring any bells in here so Cecil the lion was an actual lion with a mane and a tail and claws and all of that and there was a some dentist from Tennessee or Kentucky or anywhere some bad place some red place went to Africa and paid money to hunt and got a hunting permit and did all the proper things and he killed Cecil the lion which is what you do when you go hunting with a permit and it became a national story and the man's life was ruined over this basically there's a lot of people in this country who really hate hunt and hunters and they thought you're an evil person and they boycotted his dentistry became a national story all of that was yet another example of I would say the cold Civil War so I guess my next point is this is all really elite driven to borrow a phrase I think read America essentially you know the one side just wants to be left alone wants to kind of live the way it's always lit hunters want to hunt and so on Boy Scouts want to go or the Red Boy Scouts in any event want to go and start campfires with boys only and the blue the blue side is the aggressor I would say in this cold civil war and they will not tolerate that you will not be left alone we know better we're gonna make you live our way if you don't like it it's further proof of how evil you are now Trump is of course a great example of the cold civil war finally sort of breaking out into national politics because his election represents many things but one of the things that does reflect is the revolt of the Reds it's a reaction of being told over and over again what to do and not liking it and I would say the reaction of the Blues to that election is also telling in that they've not been able to accept it the sort of shock and inability to accept it proves that they're absolutely convinced and their virtue virtue virtue and rightness and just say look you know it's like it's it's like deciding the question of heliocentrism on the democratic election you can't do that it's a matter of scientific fact and so on and so to not accept that it's a kind of proof that you're insane crazy perhaps evil and I would say the you know we got some interesting news over the last couple of days Friday the Muller report was handed in and we get the bar letter and now we're seeing how it shakes out and so on but that the whole Russia story is in a way a manifestation of the blue inability to accept even a temporary setback in the cold Civil War well there's got to be some other reason why this happened it can't be that people are in legitimate revolt so this was a you know a foreign power engineered this they've refused to accept the outcome of a democratic election and and they used the power I mean there's no really doubt about this anymore if there ever I don't think there was they before during and after this whole fiasco they've used the power of the state and of the media to overturn the results of that double democratic election and once this was all exposed as a fraud they've doubled and essentially tripled down and said no no they've come up with a million reasons why they think it's all it's all still true and it'll all be proved as long as we get the full report or something you know something's going to show it we also have another I think example I'm going to bring it up even though because it's recent it's kind of telling right just justice for Jesse let's put it that way right so we see a guy now the the initial hoax is itself an example of the cold Civil War and then all these sort of these hoaxes are meant to demean entire classes of people in this case I don't know how many people voted for him something like 60 million or maybe more than that it's he's essentially I mean when he says these are guys with wearing Magga hats saying this is Mogga country's basically trying to settle guilt on this entire class of people so that's a provocation in the cold Civil War and having you know 16 felony counts brought against you maybe that's too many maybe it's too few I don't know but having them all dropped at the same time in an obviously corrupt transparently corrupt manner with political connections playing is a sigh as an example to me of one side of the cold civil war rallying around and defending its own the other side doesn't really seem to do that very much but we can leave that for another day and and since this is true I'm gonna bring this up the name of George Soros has come up a few times he gave four hundred eight thousand dollars to this particular prosecutor i Soros has been a Bugaboo of mine for a while but specifically bring it up now because my mother is a fairly a political person I would call her a moderate or centrist Democrat Sam Houston was the governor as the only man who have ever been governor of two states I don't know that this is true but I think it's true my mother is the only person who was ever the DA of two different counties in California and she called me one day during that last year and said I'm very upset you need to do something about this what mom George Soros is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat all of these dis non party non partisan races all of them by the way to defeat all of these district attorneys in California some of these are very good people I've known from a long time they're very apolitical and just get your friends to do something about it I said I'll work on that but this isn't I mean that kind of money in races that we're always highly in except in the big cities San Francisco in LA and these are highly a political races you just try to elect the type of person who would administer justice the best now outside money is coming in national money to nationalize and completely politicize these races all in one direction to elect the left most possible candidate there's another example I think of the existence of the cold civil war and my time is quickly running out so I I guess I'll conclude by saying one of the things that defines which side you're on is what opinions you hold I thought I was clever about five or six years ago and I thought I was pointing in term opinion morality wasn't that clever because some guy had already beaten me to it and his phrase was virtue signaling but he meant exactly the same thing your moral worth is not determined by what you do the totality of your accomplishments how well you behave toward your friends and family how well you meet your obligations and so on it is determined by what you believe or not even necessarily what you believe just by what you profess I hold this opinion and especially I hold it publicly and I wave it like a flag I am there for good we see that all the people who hold the right opinions are on one side of the cult civil war they're the aggressors in my opinion and in a double standard applies where they have a lot more leeway to do things that used to be considered immoral but then are now considered you know lesser tier and morality at best but definitely trumped by the opinion so if you really want to know here's the glues I will leave you with the question how does this end in places like California it ended with a complete triumph of the the blue left but that's because the the right-center right the red center-right I guess could pick up and move to some other part of the United States what happens when the blue left runs the whole country and everything as the are all the red supposed to move to Canada I mean there's a lot of hunters up there maybe they'll be welcomed some of them Canada has a history of welcoming disaffected Americans going back to the Vietnam War maybe there's some hope there but I don't know that anybody's really thought this through but I do know that right now the blue left is not feeling magnanimous or that that you know it's time to slow down because we've consolidated a lot of victories their foot is on the pedal pretty hard and they're having fun and they're gonna keep going and I for one feel a little bit of trepidation about what comes next all right I'm glad I'm glad my gasps that question about how does this end I'm I'm a little bit uncomfortable talking about a cold civil war for reasons that I'll explain you know maybe I could start by talking a bit about Abraham Lincoln now people might not realize this about me but I am the fourth leading expert on Abraham Lincoln on this entire panel and but I you know when I think about a cold Civil War you know I think about Lincoln's house divided speech that he made during his Senate campaign against again Stephen Douglas in which he said a house divided against itself cannot stand and and I think it's probably living as we do in the wake of the 1960s we tend to look at that as a message being kind of a kind of a simple message like we all really ought to try to be nice to one another but what what he was saying is you can't have a you can't have one country with two constitutional logics and that and that was what he said it's the point that Mike was was getting at you can't it's either going to be all one thing or all another and I the reason I'm reluctant to use the term cold civil war is not necessarily that don't think it's accurate but I think of the reception of Lincoln's speech at the time he was widely accused of wanting what he said he was only describing and actually once you once you put a term like that into play once you talk about a about a cold civil war once you talk about a house house divided people do tend to view things through that that logic so it's sort of a grave thing to do and and and and so I stress that I'm I'm trying to be only descriptive when I when I when I when I describe these things but I think that if you want to look for the beginnings of this I think the 1960s are a good place to look and I think that that a lot of our divisions the seriousness of the divisions I'm not talking about political disagreements which are always there I'm talking about disagreements on the fundamental principles disagreements about questions like who belongs in my country with me you know questions like that I think it begins in the middle of the 60s with the legislation that you have there and what happened in the 1960s is that you got a new style of legislation let's say a new style of thinking about how the country was constituted which was kind of at odds with the old style and I think the archetype of this type of legislation is the 1964 Civil Rights Act and what it did was it actually cast doubt on the on the question of whether whether the Constitution was being faithfully executed in the in the United States and it gave people it gave a new force in politics a way of overruling what a lot of Americans thought of is the normal way their country operated now this I don't think is a matter of I don't I don't mean to question the aims of the 1964 Civil Rights Act but I think that it created it and dynamic that that created a lot of the problems we have because what it did was it permitted it permitted people to over turn settled law in the country it first of all it D legitimized settle settled law in a lot of the country and enabled people to overturn it and to create new law by suing and so this was an alternative way to to legislate actually and if the culmination of this process you have game gay marriage which which Michael mentions where there wasn't really even a feint at trying to bring this about by my legislation this was all done through it was all done through litigation now how is this a problem it's a problem because when the legislation of the 1960's did not deliver results immediately it was buttressed by by other measures things like affirmative action and speech codes and these became vital to the project of transforming the country and there was so much of this and there was so much precedent moving its way through courts and so much writing of rules from the federal government that you had a body of you had a body of political thought that and and and law which took on the shape of a constitution and in fact it was kind of a rival Constitution and it was about fundamental things because in the last 50 years or so the rights won in the 1960s have come to be really fundamental to Americans ways of thinking about themselves so you know a conservative would look at the new dispensation and say you know my gosh you know someone just got sort of disciplined at Bowdoin for putting a sombrero and a drink and someone said it was was cultural appropriation and what what is this what what kind of country is this we were living in and the stony response of people and authority is you know I'm sorry are you going to try to reverse the achievements of the last 50 years just so you can put a sombrero and you're in your margarita so we're talking on two different bases you have it and increasingly the Democratic Party has become the party that defends the constitution of 1964 and the Republican Party has become the the party that defends the constitution of 1788 of 1787 and 1788 so that I think is the situation that we're in and it does not tend to lend itself to compromise but I'll let David carry on from there thank you I've been is it on yes I've been given the fun task first of all of going up after Mike and Chris which is a tough act to follow and also in telling you how we're gonna win this cold Civil War in under 10 minutes I'd like to address what I see are the two central questions here the first one is what would victory actually entail and the second one is what would it take for us to win let's start with the first question I think you can define victory in one of three ways the first one would be victory ie we win they lose the second would be permanent ceasefire little live-and-let-live and the third one would be secession we go our way they go there's now a victory I think is obviously the most desirable outcome in the simplest possible terms it would mean that America is once again a conservative nation it would mean the exact opposite of what we have today namely progressive cultural hegemony it would mean that America would once again on or motherhood and fatherhood it would mean that we would honor excellence in all domains it would mean that we would be once again a constitutional republic it would mean that we would not tolerate illegal immigration of any kind or any violations of the law for that matter there would still be a left and a right in America and Democrats would still win elections and let me reassure my liberal friends but although we would no longer worship at the altar of superficial diversity the rights of all Americans would be secured under equal laws that after all is the promise of America but we on the right would set the limits of acceptable political discourse our piety not theirs would be sacrosanct now I know this sounds appealing but I think it's somewhat fanciful I just for once have absolutely I can't think of a way that we get there I think it's worth keeping it in mind as a possibility if only to Kindle the imagination after all this is what the left does right these big bold inspiring visions think about it FDR put out his second Bill of Rights in 1944 75 years later it's still not implemented but it gets them all worked up I think therefore in the shorter term we should set our sights not on defeating the left but on compelling it to moderate itself that is get them to embrace the live and let live ethos which they once preached so under this scenario we would still have red states and blue states we would still have blue cities and crimson towns what we wouldn't have our progressive zealots who are hell-bent on using the coercive power of the federal government to impose their vision of the good on every last county in America both the left and the right would embrace federalism and pluralism Texas could be Texas and Vermont could become Sweden you pick you pick the issue life marriage carbon taxes school choices Medicare for all the minimum wage you name it we would let 50 flowers bloom if not more the right as Mike pointed out is already largely there the goal is to compel the left to get there too now there is a problem with this solution is that in the long run it raises the problem of are we still going to be a nation what if we become more and more different from one another and this points to the third so-called solution to the problem of the cold civil war which some on the right and now with the election of Trump some on the left you think is desirable namely secession now I don't think that would be a victory I think it would be a disaster it would mark the end of these United States of America I also would like to remind any possible secessionist in the room that once you let that genie out of the bottle you can't put it back in and what was once a great and mighty Republic that spanned a continent would be reduced to an ever-growing number of petty and squabbling countries and think by the way of how China would welcome and view this development what we need to do then I think on the right is focused on the second option we need to compel the left to become more tolerant and to accept pluralism now you'll notice that I use the word compel because I think we are well past the point of dialog and reasoning with them there are still open-minded liberals I know many but their voices are drowned out by the intolerant fanatics who hate us Ian Tuttle once wrote a line in a National Review that I'm very fond of he said progressives have chosen an ideology of total warfare they aren't satisfied with compromise they aren't satisfied with surrender they aren't satisfied until they're roaming the conquered countryside shooting survivors how then do we force them to compromise well I think we need two things we need the will to fight and we need the means to fight now many on the right including my three fellow panelists and Arthur already have the will to fight they get it they understand that the conservative project today is not a conservative project it's a counter revolutionary one the problem is that many others on the right especially amongst the intellectuals seem content to fiddle while Rome burns unlike the political scientist that Leo Strauss made fun of there excuse by two facts they do not know that Rome burns and they do not know that they fiddle they see no need for the right to rethink its strategies after a century of successive progressive revolutions they refuse to see that almost every major sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the left if we are going to win this cold civil war we need everyone on the right to fight with the same intensity and have the same clarity of purpose that the left has we need to galvanize the right and here I must give a shout out to the left which have helped radicalize many a young conservative after Kavanagh covington Smollett the molar hoax and now small at a second time so for that we should thank them but that is not enough because a galvanized right still needs institutional centers of power from which to mount a counterinsurgency and here is the real challenge we face we got loads of ideas of what to do about the country the problem is all of the major institutions of American political life are controlled by the left the media k12 higher education the arts Hollywood Silicon Valley fortune 500 companies large chunks of the administrative state large parts of the Protestant and Catholic churches there's basically one major institution in America today that is not completely controlled by the left and that is the military and even there the top brass has shown itself quite eager to go left with the left social engineering so what can we do well there's one thing we can do and we still do which is to win elections the problem is that we don't know how to wield power very adeptly once we're in office I mean we need to learn how to better how to govern better so take for example the incestuous relationship between the federal government and the R&D departments for the left our universities not only do they get tax-exempt status not only do we subsidize anyone who wants to be indoctrinated thereby giving them loans we also channel another 40 billion dollars a year into research large chunks of it that goes into supporting complete nonsense social justice work research in the humanities and the social sciences and we've been talking about this since Buckley wrote God and man and Yale and I've done nothing about it we need to go after the universities and here I think Trump should do to them what he did to the media he should humiliate them he should ruthlessly expose the charlatans and discredit them and then his administration should develop an aggressive plan to force them via federal dollars and regulations back to their original purpose of promoting enlightenment he put out a recent executive order last week which is a step in the right direction but a lot more needs to be done in this area as in many others conservatives need to think through how to better use the formidable power of the modern administrative state to counter the left now I want to make thing one very clear this does not mean abandoning a commitment to limited government it doesn't mean returning to the orgy of spending that was big government compassionate conservatism during the Bush years the end rule has to remain the reconstitution ization there you go I said it of the federal government it does mean though recognizing and here I quote Mike in the latest issue of the CRB that the United States is not now and has not been for some time a constitutional republic I'd like to end on a gloomy note that I think however should give us some hope the left needs the post Cold War the real Cold War holiday from reality to continue indefinitely progressivism is basically a luxury of a bored safe and prosperous people who have lost touch with necessity and who face no serious threats 9/11 it turns out did not awaken us but you know what will the rise of China and the impending fiscal crisis what happens if China overtakes us economically what happens when the Treasury needs to decide do we service the debt or do we issue Social Security checks we will once again then live in a world of real constraints and real threats and that I think will do more to discredit the left and vindicate the right than much of what we can do in the meantime thank you well I was excellent first I want to thank David and Arthur and the Heritage Foundation for hosting us here tonight and to thank you all for for joining us I just wanted to say a few words by way of advancing further understanding of this topic and also flogging flogging the magazine The Claremont Institute publishes I got a kind of snarky response to our invite for this event from one of our former fellows from a couple years ago he'll remain nameless but he said well what mike wants names of course offline them his point was well come on guys is we're supposed to be bold or we can't win he said come on guys I mean we don't have the other side of the cold civil war represented here what are you guys doing and my response to that is that David and Arthur and I did all this on purpose of course we thought as you probably gathered from those remarks that to understand this problem and the depth of it on the right is a more pressing need after that we can maybe start talking to the other side about David's plan for disarmament I just point you to a couple of essays Angelo Kota Villa in 2017 wrote in the Claremont Review of Books an essay called our cold civil war angeles frame for all this is the ruling class in his frame for the last 20 years the ruling class versus the elites and those elites are very much a bipartisan affair according to Angelo and Trump was just the latest the election of Trump by a bare electoral majority was just the latest in the American people's or a substantial part of them their rejection of the establishment rule that's been instantiated over the last few decades which Chris Caldwell touched on just a bit I'll point you all as well Chris has a book coming out next year keep an eye out for it it's kind of a political history of the US since the late 60s and it will be excellent I'm sure the other essay would be Charles Kessler and in Primus maybe half a year ago maybe sooner I forget our cold civil war and the two constitutions Charles's frame and it's partly what he's been writing out for long writing about for a long time is that the living Constitution that was stood up at the turn of the 20th century plays a big role in our divisions over our divisions in the cold Civil War and I think Charles's longer-term frame can accommodate and encompass Chris's arguments about our turn since the 60s and then finally I do have to mention because it would be ungrateful if I didn't you all should read David azor adds identity politics essay he wrote for the Heritage Foundation published just a couple months ago it's essential reading I think to understanding the modern left and without understanding we can't really proceed intelligently in this whole affair so with that I'll say just very briefly if any of you want to respond to each other and then we'll open up for questions I've just a couple of hello okay a couple points first of all I don't think Caldwell is right when he says that he's the fourth most accomplished Lincoln scholar on this panel as res from Canada that's all I have however I will say in David's defense I'm very glad that I wasn't given the task of explaining how we're gonna win cuz I don't know that I could have handled that one incredibly and then I I'll make this one point about one of the things Chris said and I I don't mean this really as a criticism I just want to and I doubt he's gonna disagree I just want to kind of make the point to fill in the context he's totally right about the turn away from legislation to the judiciary the turn to the courts the overuse and the mendacious and harmful use of litigation completely get that I just as I said I doubt he's going to disagree with this point but suing can be okay for the right reasons it can actually be useful if the purpose of the lawsuit is to force the government to live up to actual constitutional principles that is what the court system is for that's ultimately what judicial review is for I mean the supreme example of this is Plessy and the litigation launched of course by the civil rights movement before it became what it is today but you know the great work that Thurgood Marshall and his army of lawyers did was not to expand rights in a new direction that couldn't be won legislatively it was to say and it was in defense of rights that were already enshrined not merely legislatively but also constitutionally and also you know being a claremont trained person I would say the only reason they're in the statute in the Constitution is because they exist by nature and those lawyers were fighting for something that was real that was being unjustly denied by statute or in some cases by statute in other cases by an unwillingness or an inability to live up to the statute and then the last one I'm just going to throw another dart as her ads away when he says oh well large parts of the administrative state are on the electric side and large parts of the mainstream and the religious institutions in the churches and large parts huh can you just I don't know I want to know what the small parts are that aren't can you just do you name one or two names of some administrative state body that isn't on the wrong side of this or some mainstream Protestant church or you know I mean I guess this apart from a couple of little rump Catholic sects se CTS ladies and gentlemen that that aren't on the wrong side of this I'm curious I just meant to say that there are still professional civil servants in the government and not everyone is a politicized zealot who is trying to undermine the will of elected representatives I mean I'm not going to give you percentages but from what I've gathered from friends who've served in administration civil servants come in one of three varieties kind of what they should be with the progressives envisage competent punctual doing their job useless lazy and on fireball and then zealots and the zealots concentrate yes and the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ or the EPA but I mean they're not all corrupt is what I meant to say no and actually I think I'm person up here that it's worked in the federal government more than once no less I ran across a lot of you know the ideal the archetypal civil servant as you described they are kind of everywhere I guess my point was more there's no institution no they are there they're all over the place they're always outnumbered and there's no institution within the federal government certainly not that you would call part of the administrative state properly so term that isn't completely corrupted by this ideology and the people who don't follow it and do what they're supposed to do are few and far between and they're kind of outliers and maybe even outcasts well if I could I'd like to I would like to second Ryan's recommendation of Angelo coda villas work which is deep and extraordinary and he's got he's he's written a number of books in his in his career but I agree this book the ruling class was it called the one that came out just before the elections of was 2010 2010 yeah yeah that's a doozy and so well you know cold civil war is it is an interesting metaphor I think class war is another interesting metaphor and and and this configuration that we have in this country is is is it's replicated in a lot of European countries and I think that a particularly interesting instance of it is is brexit where there's a there's a if I may allude to George guilders article in the in the latest CRB no not the George Gilder I'm sorry Kristen Mews I beg your pardon I mean Chris DeMuth is a Chris DeMuth article in the latest CRB where he he talks about the tendency of Congress to give up its prerogatives and hand them over to somewhere someone else we obviously have that in this country but in Britain in in Europe it has tended to be a hand over to the European the British people decided in a referendum they don't want that but the Parliament now is trying to find a way to undo that that referendum so there is a real this if you want you can call it a civil war if you like but the class were element is just as is just as important a final thing I'd like to say is that I think it's very interesting David's idea of a live and let live option where you know Texas could be Texas and and Vermont could be Sweden I think we have that we still have a vestige of that of that situation but it also goes to show why immigration is such a big issue in this country right now because I would analogize to the country before the Civil War when we were adding states and the fear of each side in what was then a cold Civil War was that the other side was sort of bringing in reinforcements and that the strength of the other side was being was was what was growing day by day and that gave the confrontation an element of desperation and I think that that that that that immigration as an issue plays that role in our politics today thank you we have some time for questions down here in the front please wait for the microphone okay great thanks this was very good I really appreciate it so I do think that you had multiple sides represented here and I think it might be a generational thing so I have really two very related and quick questions mr. Caldwell had a theory of what went wrong it's the 1960s and I think he implicitly or explicitly tried to stave off what perhaps mr. Antin or mr. Ezra might say as as their own theory which as you said it's not it's not the Civil War but maybe it is kind of the Civil War because David's live-and-let-live sort of theory is kind of the Copperhead sort of constitutional theory that may not be feasible so I guess my question is to the two of you is do you have a theory of what went wrong and relatedly on the generational point what do you do perhaps David and others with in the generational scheme with donors that are gonna continue to give to educational foundations they still want their name on chairs what do you do about that put them on some different chairs it would be my first suggestion so as to what we're wrong if you'd asked me that question ten years ago maybe no probably not five years ago certainly 20 years ago I would have said with this totally straight face Machiavelli by which I would have meant modernity written law it's all baked into the early the premises of early modern philosophy and it takes centuries and I play themselves out and so on and we are where we are because the 60s don't just happen in the 60s there's got to be a route to that right I mean in it and then I doubt something although we've seen a ton of change in 50 years since the 60s I don't think stuff like that comes about I think deep intellectual currents take longer that's play out I have become more sympathetic in the intervening decade or two to Nick and to the other early moderns and so I'm a little bit more doubtful whether we can be that simple but I do think there are currents that at least go back to Rousseau and maybe earlier than that certainly two or so and two that this sort of you know the RET rational stores has been that wave of modern thinking that gets you to the sixties if you want to know where I think the the deepest currents of it are in American context there's no 60s without original capital P progressivism which emerges in the late 19th century now as her heads bristling over there because he's gonna say Anton you this is you being you know a sort of wrote Claremont guy again and not giving the progressives their due no I've come around on that too I give them their due to some extent on public policy they were way better than we've given them credit for in so many ways and and as I have heard it said I won't say by whom when you rather live with Teddy Roosevelt's progressivism than with today as well of course we all would right but their theoretical critique that they made the analysis of that and how it devastated the constitutional order and corrupted elite thinking in the United States I don't you it's hard to separate that from their policies and the damage that it did and there is no 60s without that so we have to at least go back to there on the philosophic theoretical side yeah although I'm not sure this you need to have a 60s after the progressives I mean you could have had the New Deal in the Great Society went out I don't mean I need to have it but that this the it it didn't necessarily lead to it but the sixties don't happen without it I guess that's what I mean that I'm less sure of but I I just think that the sexual revolution identity politics feminism environmentalism or one set of a new left are one set of animals and then you know kind of pre seventies big government traditional redistributionist faith in experts progressivism is another kind of animal I guess my response to that would be what they share in common and where I think that is very difficult if not impossible to disentangle is what they they just decouple morality from nature right and they decouple elite thought intellectual thinking they decouple philosophy from nature so whatever you want to say about Machiavelli and Locke and Hobbes and Spinoza and Montesquieu and so on and all of the regimes that they inspired and the practical people they inspired the idea that you know there is no nature there is no human nature we have nothing to learn from it morality has is not derived from it that would have they would have laughed at you they would have laughed at that whereas by the time you're getting to the the early progressives and certainly by the time you get to the 60s they're laughing at the idea I mean they're hostile openly hostile to the idea and they laugh at the assertion that there's a connection well I don't want to monopolize the whole so we I don't entirely agree but we can continue this later this is also on the live-and-let-live you remember four or five years ago in Indiana passed its rifra legislation and you know the left went crazy with a tremendous amount of pressure from corporations and the NCAA as well does the fact that these national organizations and large corporations are full-on with the identity politics progressivism render the render that linen let live sort of state based forms impossible I don't know if it renders it impossible but it makes it more complicated and I just want to point out one that let others answer that your precise question but one of the reasons to see that Indiana case as an example of a cold Civil War is precisely the actions of the corporations that you mentioned in the hypocrisy of it so one example because it's really tells a lot right Tim Cook CEO of Apple was absolutely happy thrilled eager excited to punish Indiana for that and to and to signal his virtue worldwide I am punishing Indiana for being on the wrong side of a question but I'm still gonna do business with Saudi Arabia which has a 50 billion times worse record on this precise issue why because he wants to wage war on that side of the colt civil war and the Saudis and the Saudi people in the Saudi ruling class the Saudi royal family from there just not combatants in the war he doesn't really care what they do it's all about sticking it to the enemy in the context that he sees of the war he's fighting I think that's right and it's I I think it's wrong to describe these corporations as going crazy as if what we're talking about is a is a cultural matter I don't think it's a it's a I mean I they do have cultural beliefs Tim Cook might be an example of one who does but one must remember that federal government does regulate these companies and they're very they're very almost all of them are vulnerable to unfavorable regulations unfavorable antitrust rulings and if if if a White House is willing to express its policy preferences to these these companies there's their hands are somewhat tied so there I'm afraid they're they're not actually acting that crazily or irrationally interesting combination of just real quickly everyone should read this Spectator piece called wool capital I think that's the time from a week ago maybe so it's a dual at least I mean it's the sort of trajectory of our culture at the moment and the leadership has decided that good HR is kowtow into this new way of understanding but also he read in this piece and the spectators it's amazing it's really driven by the Millennials who are at the bottom rung of those companies now so in the UK they have reverse mentoring where millennial leads around a you know and old and teaches him the proper way of thinking it's really remarkable yeah I I think that is right and that's why it's not I don't know that I so I have to disagree maybe a little with Chris or supplement this um yes they're all afraid of federal regulation I worked in some pretty big you know companies into the fortune 50 so fairly large for a while I got to know these organizations and the sub organizations within them that police this stuff reasonably well yeah they're afraid they're not afraid of but they yes they are afraid of and they want to satisfy the younger people within their companies but there they also they're doing this for their customers which sort of demanded or at least their loudest in most vocal customers demanded remember also if you're publicly traded well what are you dealing with all the time you're dealing with the financial press and you're dealing with the analyst community all of whom live in Manhattan all of whom have the same you know they're on one side of the cold Civil War they have the same set of no matter how rich they are in fact the richer they are the more they think this way and there is so there might be this large blob of public opinion out there that thinks this is kind of crazy but they don't matter and they don't have any way to register it they don't have any way to hurt your stock price where's everybody who does matter everybody who cannot affect your stock price everybody who can affect your reputation and everybody whose approval you desperately want thinks about it only in this way and so that's why you played to that side I there have been a lot of us I gave up this foolish indulgence long ago but there were a lot of us who thought for a while this is really dumb how do you make money by pandering to the stupid type of sentiment that has to hurt the bottom line eventually this will hurt them and they'll wake up and realize they're alienating people you know for instance Colin Kaepernick became incredibly unpopular by leading the kneeling protest and that didn't really go well for the NFL Nike signs him to this whatever deal and they you know stand for something even if you lose everything and everyone thought well this is it Nikes gonna blow up it's all over they finally alienated all of Middle America hahaha the backlash is he arrived right no sorry the backlash did not arrived all the woke right and good praised Kaepernick praised Nike the stock price rose their reputation Rose have worked out great for everybody this is gonna go on people just be prepared for it and there are structural reasons why it's gonna go on and why and they not only don't pay a price for doing it they reap benefits from doing it so David do you think the corporate focus is a bar to your federalism solution I want to make clear mark I'm there are enormous obstacles to realizing you know my second-best arrangement and I only had 10 minutes so I fully recognize the problem and I'm you know on a good day somewhat pessimistic find you so overarching a conversation about the cold civil war is civil war and I haven't to me vault sort of addressed well how do we how do we deal with this and can we do it and so on but I would like to know what you think we can expect to happen with another ten years twenty years do we just go on indefinitely hating each other or does a situation of itself necessarily get worse or better or what what are we looking at well I think that the my guide in all things like this is the Graham XI formula pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will but I am like I say you know I think the that this is a very interesting question about about Lincoln in 1858 about what he thought was going to happen and what he you know whether he is to be blamed for putting this conception into play I think you know the thing I think as David said I think that all of us sort of know how to behave to minimize risks socially if nothing changes but the danger is that we'll hit a recession or some sort of sort of some foreign crisis or something that you know or some accident that that sort of changes the the nature of the thing that would be my worry there live an unpredictable thing this sort of thing that you can't really plan for right so I will make the following analysis on love Lincoln and without stating a conclusion or an interpretation you can all draw from it whatever you like it seems to me that what Lincoln was trying to do in 1858 59 60 61 and let's say until march of 61 was precisely live-and-let-live right we're going to interfere with you in one respect only which is and not even interfere right it's not even an interference if we have the votes to prevent slavery from expanding into the territories that will be a democratic code it will be an expression of the Democratic will we realized that in a large portion of the country doesn't want it but sorry you got outvoted Chris mentioned the you know the issue of bringing in new states to upset the balance a couple things about that I'll try to be quick Ryan but first of all that was a lot different then than it is now just in that they were bringing there was a policy right up promis-- of 1850 that for every UI you a dot you led in states to at a time right one free one slave to keep the balance in the Senate and the compromise of 1850 upset that by admitting California as a free state only one state no counterbalance and without a rule California up until the Civil War uh informally honored a tradition of always sending one pro and one anti-slavery senator this is by the time the North had so outgrown the south and population that the house was lost the house there was no chance that the South get out vote the north in the house they had they had to keep parity in the Senate and Lincoln's policy was we're gonna leave you alone everywhere except we're gonna prevent the expansion of slavery in the territories the interesting thing about house divided speech is the one line at the top when he talks about placing slavery in the course of ultimate extinction you never said that line again ever in the rest of his life presidency campaign ever it was so alarming to the South that he got the message across as to what he really wanted he said if all we have to if we can prevent the spread of this it will eventually die without bloodshed and we won't have to interfere in the South in any other way and that was unacceptable so it seems to me that we've been talking about the progressives and the sixties and what's happening now and what seems like we're forgetting a decade right which is the eighties where conservatives did a mass political power 49 states right went from Ronald Reagan not so very long ago so it seems to me that we had power and then we failed to Train that power in any meaningful way on these captured institutions that David is bringing up so I guess the the the more practical question would be we still hold some amount of political power how do we avoid making the same mistake as we did in the 80s where we had a lot of short-term political victories but long term cultural and institutional failures to do anything about the problem and we find ourselves in fact worse off than we were before the counter-revolution succeeded here's where I actually grow a little more pessimistic like as david says because i think that a lot of what happened in the 1980s i think that that ronald reagan was a much more consensual president than then it appeared i mean i mean i think that his rhetorical style could be quite polarizing but in fact if you think of the 60s as a new as having introduced a kind of an embryonic new constitutional order i would say that the politics of the nineteen of the late 1970s you know of the period let's say between Richard Nixon's resignation and Ronald Reagan's election was so a boil with conservative let's say with the conservative rebellious nnessee that that all simmered down when Reagan came to power and I think that what Reagan did was that he found the resources to honor both constitutional traditions that he he totally respected the settlement of the 1960s in a way that those who voted for him had not expected him to do but he also became the president of pre 1960s America through generous tax cuts and things but that was the beginning of serious deficits and it required it was not a self-sustaining program and I think the difference between now and then is that we we now we're running out of the leeway to pursue that kind of uniting type of politics in the middle thank you so my name is Steven Taft here um I I think I mean it's fairly obvious to all of us really that what's just as important if not more than what we do is what the other side is thinking and doing and it can it can often seem you know if you look at things like the Russia collusion idea or the plots of Hollywood movies or just the sort of cultural narrative the left is telling that they're more afraid of us than they need to be like they they give off that impression like we're this great menacing force there's some old white guy down in a basement somewhere who's controlling everything you know maybe it's Cheney or whoever and they're there their only hope is you know these good-looking people in these Hollywood movies sort of saving the day and so and and then some of you alluded to how you know chaos or political instability or recessions is almost a to our advantage because you know then people have to tighten their belts and all and so what I'm wondering is you know looking ahead could they be could the Left be pushed to a point where they come to an accommodation with us because they're actually somewhat afraid of us that if they push us things might actually get out of hand and more to our advantage or is all of that basically not really sincere and do they actually think victory is is theirs in the end if they just sit back and relax yeah I don't think they're afraid of us at all I think they're having a tantrum because they thought the final victory was going to be 2016 or shortly thereafter and they're just brats upset at the delay but they do expect final victory and they expect it pretty soon and you know in the meantime they're having trouble like children waiting for the lollipop until the end of dinner they want a right now you do have to admire one of my friends was having at a dinner this week I won't say with whom but the president of a very very big progressive think tank in DC and that woman was despairing over the state of the power of conservatives in America because we have the White House and the Senate and one thing I admire about them is they're kind of relentless merciless aggressive boldness like this green New Deal thing is unbelievable temerity no but I mean you laughs we'd never do anything like this I mean to put forward a document like this you don't even bother with the details these grand visions to radically transform the country and then you plow forward they never rest as soon as they've won on something they take up the next cause and they press it like it's Armageddon I mean there is a zeal to them that is I mean well I mean admirable in a circle in a certain sense that we tend to lack in part I think just because we don't invest in politics the religious fervor that they do right and that's just a question of temperament I mean I think that we think way too people tend to think way too ideological about politics the the you know the so-called right and the so-called left are not simply mirror images reflected across an axis there are different cultures and and and I think the left is generally a much more political culture than the right and so you get issues like for instance let's look at let's look at you know like let's say privacy and Facebook you know the most of the people involved with Facebook are on what you would call the left and yet most of the people with a plan to regulate Facebook or break it up or whatever are also on the left it's just and and and and and the people you would call on the right just aren't really paying attention so it's kind of Mark Zuckerberg versus Elizabeth Warren and what are Republicans are the right doing well they're doing something in a totally different sphere like maybe you know watching a baseball game or something yeah sir didn't wait impatiently oh right behind you thank you this is fantastic so David you said something that I thought was very interesting the right still wins elections but needs to learn how to govern better so I'm a huge believer in American exceptionalism I also am Not sure that the general sentiment of the public is something to be relied on however the alignment between the public's opinion of Congress at you know 10% 12% and American exceptional exceptional ISM feels to me like a huge misalignment so I'm just wondering do you have any thoughts on governing better and I don't care about left or right but that will build more confidence of the American people that an exceptional nation has an exceptional national legislature structural temperamental something I'm not sure I follow the question I'm saying it feels to me there's something that's wrong when the American public has so little confidence in Congress have you seen Congress recently I mean I mean if anything 10% is maybe a bit high no right and and so when you were saying that there's a need for the right to learn to govern better like ireally again just because the American public's opinion is low I doesn't necessarily mean that Congress is so broken but I'm asking what I what I meant by this is we and it's commendable on the right have this principled opposition to big government but the problem is is we have big government in reality so when they're in power they have no qualms about spending anything they want and issuing any regulations and putting any string in the world with the federal dollars when we take power we think it'll compromise our principles if we get entangled in the state so let me give you a simple I hope non-controversial example the neh I don't know depends what three four hundred million dollars a year subsidizing the humanities they have no qualms when they take over about sending it to their friends when we take over or like well we shouldn't be spending this money it's unconstitutional and it isn't but we have had zero success in phasing out the neh and so we don't want to taint ourselves by getting involved and as a result the holdovers are still there and even when weren't power the money still goes to their friends so either you get rid of it which would be my preference but if we're not gonna get rid of it and we have had no success in abolishing agencies eliminating programs in the past 100 years let's use it to our advantage not lose sight of the fact that in the long run we should get rid of it but in the meantime send it to support people who are actually doing real scholarship in the humanities rather than taking the principled position and it continues to support bogus scholarship in the humanities you know it's an interesting historical question when our last American Civil War started did it start when the south start its bombardment of Fort Sumter or didn't it start earlier when the south in several states refused to accept the results of the 1860 election and declared themselves separate now from the Union and so my question is aren't we really closer to a hot Civil War than you might think we just witnessed the left the Clinton campaign the Obama administration and the deep state refused to accept the results of the 2016 election first by switching several electoral college voters and then by this recently uncovered deep state failed coup attempt I mean aren't we really much closer to hot Civil War then you guys have been talking about I doubt it and that's the most optimistic thing you're gonna hear me say but not necessarily for optimistic reasons but just for practical reasons the way I analyze it you know it's hard to imagine any state right I mean first of all where does the hot and the starving people got to start shooting so who's gonna start shooting how many of them how are they going to be organized well if it's just you know some militias in the Rockies or somewhere the feds can squash them like a bug pretty easily and that won't even look like the beginning of civil war - it'll just look like and we'll be covered as and we'll be remembered in history as crazy rednecks somewhere decided to take on the feds get killed well let's move so you'd have to have some very large portion of the country a whole state one or two states or a bunch of counties in one state try to organize themselves politically to take that on I don't see anybody even beginning to do that in the least way once the noise starts to get made that this is what they're doing all of a sudden the entire conversation of the country will change as it changed when State started talking openly about secession in the event of a Lincoln victory in the run-up to the 1860 election and the conversation will the conversation having been changed so much the political dynamic will entirely change and you know the state that wants to do that or the counties may chickened out or the feds may find some way to shut it down or the surrounding populations may say oh I didn't realize we elected lunatics to the state legislature we better calm this down before the 82nd airborne comes in and occupies our state so it seems like to me like we're a long way I mean you know who knows but it seems to me like we're a long way off from that and I just don't I sense a lot of discontentment I sense a lot of people who want to be left alone they don't want to be ruled they're afraid of the feds they don't trust their institutions any more on all of that but I don't sense any since a that people are quite to that breaking point or be and this is decisive that they've done anything concrete to organize themselves in a way that would make hot civil war imminent anybody else want to touch that I guess not well thank you very much all for coming and join us for a reception ask the front desk [Applause]

Channel: The Heritage Foundation

Views: 185,769

Rating: 4.7049255 out of 5

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Id: 07xd4DYywlo

Length: 69min 59sec (4199 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019

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[u/Lamont-Cranston]

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Their motto is 'be evil.'

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Unspeakable evil.