Cruel Summer: The Fight to Preserve Freedom of Speech | The GoodFellows: Conversations From Hoover

[Music] it's Tuesday July 14 Bastille Day which will come up later on in our discussion and welcome back to Good Fellas a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns our format's a conversation Hoover senior fellows debate what's going on and what may lie ahead in these complicated times I'm John Cochran I'm an economist and the Rosemarie and Jack Anderson senior fellow of the Hoover Institution I also authored the grumpy economist blog I'm sitting in for our usual host Bill Whalen who's off this week this week we're very pleased to be joined by a special guest good fellow Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Victor is a prolific classicist and military historian his latest book the case for Trump was a best-seller in 2019 and it's now available in paperback Victor writes a syndicated column a column for National Review he's the host of the classicist podcast for Hoover and he appears frequently on fox news in his copious spare time he runs an almond and raisin farm in Selma California which has been owned by his family for almost 100 years a warm welcome to you Victor thank you for having me now let's meet the regular good fellows Neil Ferguson is the Milbank family senior fellow at Hoover Institution he's the author of 15 books and Counting most recently the square on the tower he writes a weekly column for Bloomberg News and you should watch his TV series based on that book Neal Ferguson's net world on now running a PBS high could see again Neal good to see you John good to see you too Victor and also HR Lieutenant General HR McMaster is the Hoover Institution squad and Michelle ajami senior fellow prior to returning to Hoover he served as the national security adviser to the president general McMaster is also the author of battlegrounds fight to defend the free world coming out this fall but you can pre-order it now hi HR I John Neil victory with you so Victor we got to get the elephant out of the room first thank you wrote the case for Trump two years ago and my times have changed in the last six months the president isn't doing so well in the fall in the polls Democrats are urging Biden to go big to grab the Senate and governorships as well so certainly it's time for an update how do you see the case for Trump now I think it's pretty much he's pretty much worried is the least about a week ago he was where he was in 2016 he was running about 12 points 11 12 to 10 points behind Hillary Clinton he closed up a little bit in mid-july and nobody thought he had a chance to win so I think poll wise he's about where he was some of the state polls he's a little bit better but we've never had anything like 2020 I think most people would agree that say in January 15th there was despair the Democratic primaries had not gone well Bernie and Bloomberg was the non-choice between Bernie and Bloomberg resurrected Joe Biden who had been discarded in the first initial primaries and then the kovat hit and then the lock down and then a May 25th protest and cultural revolution that ensued and I think all of that created a sense that the key swing voters were in a fetal position they just sort of said I want it all to go away and maybe if don't come just goes away it'll all go away and that seems to be governing the polls now but I think they're so volatile in 30 days we're seeing sort of I think I'm going to call them they called Pete Jacobin ISM that we're getting to the point where when you read this Harper's letter of 153 leftist luminaries or Barry Weiss being resigning today from the New York Times the Hollywood some of the actors have been vocal about they don't like the new racial demands put on them and I think Roz some of chiapas back to renting out his his real-estate empire and you know the low-hanging fruit of statues have been toppled and you're either got to go big with a crane and get mountain lush morristown stone mountain or you got to go into the absurd of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln so I mean what it sounds like you're saying is that the the battle has not been joined really neuro lion is campaigning from his front basement and and we don't really know what agenda policies or a message the president is gonna stress so I'd like to ask you sort of two questions on that where do you think the president will or should go in in his case to the voters for the election and that's the issue you just mentioned in the last election the polling showed after the fact that the great swath of deplorable felt pretty bad about where they had been consigned by our country's elites and I wonder how they are sitting out there in in the heartland where you live thinking about the the quick changes in our as you said revolution or at least attempted revolution well I think the answer your first question first very quickly I don't think it's going to work for him to rattle off his signature achievements I think hrs knows that from the foreign policy that that constructive realism did work pretty well when we were in a better position visa V China and Iran and other belligerents and the natural gas and oil production and little record unemployment for minorities and they caught me was doing well as you know John but that's all ancient history now and it doesn't do any good to rail like Achilles that's unfair that Agamemnon has always the status and you did all the work so he's got to quit that and he's got to focus he's only got a hundred and something days ten days or something and he's got to give us an agenda that goes beyond Magga 10.0 and i think some of them to be some of those recommendations or policies or agendas or trajectories have to be specific to the crisis we're in he's got us he's got to I think a point a group of people or have a vision of about the virus because we're going to have another one of these and it's going to be have to be far-reaching that we not only have to outline how we're going to bring back key industries that are essential in time of a quarantine and an epidemic but we're going to have to have a standard of quarantine you know red yellow blue green so it's not just ad hoc and we did that after 9/11 we're gonna have to have some national board of disinterested scientific experts that tell us what defines a case versus somebody who has antibodies versus the left out case the fatality rate etc except with it's all over the map today and it's a mess and then I think infrastructure I don't like the name you know spending more money for infrastructure but if it was targeted infrastructure that addressed some of these concerns I really do think that the high-rise mass transit dense population model that we were sold on during the Obama years is not a good model it's better to disperse the population work on the interstate freeway system reservoirs dams bridges roads finish out a lot of the incomplete transportation system to get the population more diverse I think he needs to talk about the dead I kind of like the old Simpson my Obama simpson-bowles Commission that he neglected and now's not the time to you know raise taxes but I think once we get back on her feet we got a know they thirty trillion dollars is not sustainable and it requires zero interest and that's not good either permanently almost and I think finally he's got to have an initiative that deals with the university that is you know I'm speaking as a member of our community of Stanford but I did for a life of me I don't understand why multi trillion-dollar endowments are tax-exempt the income from them when the institution is not any longer a political and it's that can be adjudicated in a variety of criteria and then I don't know Stan why the university has no moral hazard and promiscuously issuing these student loans to the tune of 1.6 trillion dollars and then throwing these branded graduates or semi graduates out on the market without any responsibility to see if they're I want to promise to you that we'll get back to universities and I want to encourage my fellow panelists to my fellow good fellows to jump in I'm not going to call on you guys I'm gonna count on you to be your usual assertive selves and jump in when you also want to get viktor going any anyone in there well John I agree with Viktor that it's much too early to write down from off I've been amazed at the number of professional commentators on American politics including in reputable newspapers or formally reputable newspapers who seem intent on making exactly the same mistake that they made four years ago on the basis of exactly the same data it's almost a perfect illustration of the definition of madness I caught one Washington Post journalist insisting that's on the basis of trumps approval rating he had absolutely no chance I was able to show him that he'd made exactly the same argument and be completely wrong four years ago I think the polling is also liable to be a bit misleading it's not been such a feature of American life but big it became a feature of British life in recent years that people became a little reluctant to admit that they were going to vote conservative to opinion pollsters and I suspect that we might be seeing some of that now I'm a big fan of revealed preference and I'm sure as as an economist you know what I'm talking about John when I when I look at what people are actually doing this year a couple of things leap out and it seems to me that they tell us a different story from the polls number one gun sales have soared June set a new record for background checks but it's been a pattern actually throughout the year and one thing we know from 2016 is that when a household owns a firearm it's quite likely to vote Republican in fact it's one of the best predictors of of a Republican votes that we have for 2016 so that's interesting to me I think that the scenes that we witnessed on television as one city after another seemed to plunge into disorder in the wake of the tragic death of George Floyd may have had something to do with that there was also a great econ paper that came out just the other day maybe saw it John which showed that social distancing had actually gone up in cities where there were large-scale protests because the majority of people had in fact stayed at home and were more inclined to stay home when there were protesters in the street hence no great spike in covert 19 infections after the protests I think it's worth remembering that the majority of people in those cities that saw protests were not protesting so there's something in that old cliche about the silent majority that I noticed the president is beginning to refer to I think we might just find that there is a significant proportion of people who've been genuinely shocked by events in American cities in the past weeks and I think that could that could turn out to be a real source of salvation for president from when we can agree with you that also we have a there's a lot that can happen in the next couple months and the Democrats can easily shoot themselves when we find a better metaphor the Democrats can easily line themselves with with views that are anathema to a large fraction of the electorate and if the cities turn into post 1968 apocalypse if we continue to see the immense numbers of homicides shootings going on in the cities the police not there the businesses shut down not do to covet but looted and gone even in the next couple of months that is certainly going to make a big difference in how things go going forward I would just quantify what Neal and both of you said we had a special congressional district not too far away from mark where I live and it was lost in 2018 I think by nine points and Mike Garcia I naval graduate from the many HR knew him he was a pilot in Iraq a pretty conservative mexican-american guy in a plus democratic district was down in the last poll he was down by nine and he won by eight he's gonna it was a special election there was one in Wisconsin there was a couple in a state legislature seats in Virginia the same nature the polls are funny the democracy Institute is a partisan Republican conservative polling group but they actually were one of the most accurate and they're independent more libertarian than conservative they had Trump even in a national poll last week and the traveler Republican state polls were the most accurate then they've got him equal in Arizona down six and in Florida and about down two or three in the Midwest so I think there's a lot of things that are in in fluid and if he frames the election not about Donald Trump's tweets or not about anything other than he's civilization and the alternative is anarchy in a way that Nixon did in 72 with McGovern and then you'll do pretty well and I think a couple of other considerations about what's going on and that is that we bill we've got kind of a peak I think viral spike and I think Scott Atlas has written pretty persuasively on elements about we've got kind of a peak I think economic problem I think it'll get a little better and I think the veranda peak sympathy with an Tifa and black lives matter a lot of these institutions like Hollywood the NBA the NFL the retired generals they've lost a lot of the empathy and sympathy and I don't see them coming back out and making persuasive arguments weixin Jordan so I think it still Trump's election to lose and I wouldn't argue remember that I remember in 1988 and I was a from a strong Democratic family and my parents were giddy because Mike Dukakis in August with 17 points ahead of George HW Bush and they were running went Newsweek said they went a Bush and then this was 88 and then they unleashed this hell boy called Lee Atwater and when he got done with Mike Dukakis it was pretty scary I mean he did the tank commercial he did the Boston Harbor commercial he did the Willie Horton commercial and that 17-point lead evaporated just like Jimmy Carter's seven-point lead did with Reagan and that was up in June May I think Carter was ahead and so it depends on how they characterize Joe Biden if Joe Biden at some point can't run a virtual campaign a virtual convention a virtual debate and he'll try but he seems non compos mentis to me and I don't mean that in a Buddhist ly cruel fashion and the more he gets out and if they get a guy like Steve ban and that is unprincipled and tough and mean and they unleash them and say go destroy him then who knows what's going to happen well 60 questions for HR actually John if I if I can waste them be given one issue that the really victor hasn't mentioned is China and and foreign policy more broadly and I do think that one of the key things that you achieved HR and the administration was to set a new course for a US national security strategy especially on the question of China and that has proved to be the key feature I think of this administration it's less and less plausible now that the old relationship with China could be resurrected because the Chinese are themselves so obviously committed to Cold War - and I wonder how far that's going to be an issue certainly I can't see how Biden can be credibly portrayed as tougher on China than Donald Trump by brightening during the Obama administration so H I what are your thoughts on the foreign policy aspects of this election I think just go back to one of the points Victor made at the outset I think what the vast majority of Americans want to hear are real proposals or are real solutions to the problems and I think that is is one of the one of the accomplishments of the Trump administration it has been to take a fundamentally different approach to chyna rejecting the assumptions that that were we were obvious by 2017 that are obviously false and that was primarily among those assumption was was that china having been welcomed into the international order would would it would prosper and liberalize its economy as a result and then liberalized its form of governance and of course in the co vid crisis has in many ways catalyzed the Chinese Communist Party's most aggressive behavior and I think in many ways convinced all but a very few Americans that that adjustment to policy was correct and I think even more than that what you're seeing today is that more and more of our like-minded countries allies in Europe and across an opah cific are joining us you just saw in the last couple of days the UK's now rejection of soirée you have the National Security Advisor and deputy national security adviser meeting with European allies today in Paris to talk about really not just soiree but the overall aggression of the Chinese Communist Party so I think this this is an issue that is beneficial to the Trump administration and and others could be as well I think if there's a follow up on on Victor's on Victor's recommendation for real solutions I think I think we can no longer afford to propose non solutions to problems and and and john cochran you you alluded to this already we had Roland fryer Victor on in an earlier in an earlier episode of good fellows and he pointed to his new research that whenever there is a police investigation that requires police to disengage for a period of time for a particular community guess what crime and murders go up in that community and we're seeing that that bear out today so of course defunding the police is not a solution to the problems set associated with police brutality and unfair treatment and and the horrors of George Floyd's murder so I think that the time is right for you know for it for President Trump before Vice President Biden come up with with real solutions it instead of catering I think to what may be they might believe are the predilections of their bases and so I just I just wonder what any of us think the prospects are let me use moderating polarization let me use this as the moment to pivot to our culture war as you notice that HR is always the guy who wants us to get together and sing Kumbaya and get along which a spirit which I really must say I admire in you so let's pivot to the big cultural event of the moment the what do you want to call it the cancel culture the Great Awakening whatever I want offer a few thoughts to kind of spur the discussion and let you guys take which of these in the directions you think are useful one you know we got historians and classicist here so I would like to know parallel episodes in history what you guys to comment public confession of sins the the ever-changing lingo you're supposed to adopt and the merciless bullying and exclusion of heretics I want us to remember that race is on the agenda right now but this was a climate inequality and gender war a few months ago and all those issues are gonna be back so let's let's keep our discussion on the the more general question which includes all of those I notice it's not just opinions simple facts may not be smoking any is spoken of any more like like murder rates or tons of carbon and degrees of heating get-get-get you cancelled we'll talk about university as I keep promising we'll talk about universities will get there but I'm struck to how this has gone through all of the institutions of civil society schools nonprofits corporations media the tech companies that now control our public discourse government NGOs are all in in the throes of this movement whatever we want to want to call it the left seems to be eating its own as the Harper's letter episode as the New York Times shows so is this the old left versus the new left as in the 1960s when the old left lost that the old left is doomed to lose this movement is clearly political it is about grabbing using and keeping power I don't think we should forget that and you're welcome to comment on episode so I brought those up as kind of directions to go because this is that this is like throwing this is like throwing up a big let's talk about it but let so Victor where do you want to go on this whole big issue and then I think you're right it is a cultural revolution and the dangers of a cultural revolution for the revolutionaries are is that they tend to be systematic holistic all-encompassing 360 so they're not just like the American Revolution this is more like the French Revolution when we're not yet to Year Zero or the calendar dates and all that stuff or the cult of the Supreme Being but it's my it reminds me of the Supreme Being but what I'm getting at is that as they expand they also delude and they offend another group of people so if you're not going to watch the NBA and you see the average salary is seven million dollars and a guy won't even get up for the national anthem then that's going to offend somebody if you call 911 and you get a busy signal that's going to offend somebody if somebody loves to go in the park and see manipul Sarah or likes a San Gabriel mission that's going to offend someone and that's what's happening is it dilutes it's getting the it's going to start to touch people and that's why the Democratic Party is is it's very scared about it and that's what happens with cultural well that being said they either consume their own or they dilute and they get a backlash but if people don't speak up against it then they create or transmit a false impression that they're the majority of like in that sense of them the red scarves during the malleus Cultural Revolution or the committee on for public safety in the French or more importantly maybe even the Bolsheviks so it requires people of good faith to stand up and say I'm not going to fire this person I'm not going to censor this writer I'm not going to tear down this statue without a democratic vote of the City Council and once that starts it will snowball and we'll see this thing as a sham but right now we're right at the peak and we're waiting for some a Robert Welch to come out and say I've had enough don't you have any decency and when that happens this thing will start to dissipate very quickly once the meet you got close to Joe Biden you know that thing was gone there was suddenly statutes of limitations and the Bill of Rights and constitutional protections and then we had the old boy she's lying she's a liar because it got it started to count and Garrison Keillor and and and we get into people in the liberal establishment that it ended so I hope that it can be pushed the end can be pushed along by people speaking out against it and that's why I think I'm not so optimistic as you are I mean look what's happened to climate if you want a job at a university you simply cannot publish papers that say facts contrary to and not just the idea that carbon causes temperature to rise the idea that climate change inextricably wound up with progress on social justice and climate justice and the entire rest of the green New Deal agenda there and and the institutions in which we live now force not just your silence force your speech Stanford is is announcing the diversity and training that's coming our way it'll be interesting to see I get lots of when I read about these things lots of people write me and say you know I don't dare say a word about this because of my job once the institutions are taken over I mean you said there's some nice cases where this thing ends up but there are cases where like the Bolsheviks we're a small minority is able to use this thing to take Oh at our run-ins with the university it's been lost for a long time and I just did during this period without getting explicit I've had some big run-ins with Stanford about trying to censor what I've said and come in yet the most we're the most in you're immune to this sort of thing if there's anyone you know what what matters the vast majority of people who don't well I think I think the key thing is for us to set the example we should set the example by the kinds of conversations we have on this show and the kind of scholarship that that whoever does I mean I think Victor's been a strong voice Neil you've been a strong voice for what are the conditions that lead to populism progressivism the interaction between those that's I've heard both of you speak on this I think Victor you gave a talk on this recently at the Reagan Foundation and and Neil you gave a talk on this at the boot camp last year here the policy boot camp about you know what are the conditions that lead to this kind of populism and and that interacts I think in many ways with progressivism and is is pulling us apart at least in the popular media and the popular perception but you know I do think and if Joe give you a hard time about this but you know a bit I think I think it's just predisposed into in this direction because of my experience overseas like seeing societies that are really divided and pitted against each other and how destructive that is and then also being part of an institution in our in our army in which people come with all kinds of backgrounds and guess what they come with all kinds of prejudices you know and they and and and and and and and predispositions toward one another and you see that melt away as they are become parts of teams they rely on each other the part of an organization where the man or woman next to them is willing to give everything including their own lives for each other and guess what they're not checking skin color no or anything else when you're in a fight and so I just think I hope that this crucible were going through and and Neil I think in your talk you said okay you're some really bad things that could look that they can lead to this kind of polarization I think you mentioned pandemic this is last year and and so I III I do think there's a prospect for bring us back together I'd love to hear your thoughts on this what can we do and what can we do in the area of reform specific recommendations what we do in academia speaking out I agree with Victor is the number one thing I mean you people are afraid to even empathize with each other I even allowed to do that anymore you're not even allowed to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and so I think that this is very dangerous the Harper's letter was amazing cuz it wasn't the content of a letter it's that I you may have signed a letter that somebody else was on the Twitter list signed and that causes you to be to be harassed out of existence okay on you made it sound as if we were going to talk separately about universities forget there is of course universities are precisely where all these problems arose we all live on campus now I think that was an Andrew Sullivan piece a few years back and on the day when he joins Barry Weiss in in walking out of of a liberal publication that could no longer cope with the strength and range of his views it's maybe not inappropriate to quotes him I do think we have to ask ourselves why it was that the universities which were of course liberal leaning back if you want to go all the way back to the 1950s then became progressively inclined the number of conservatives dwindled and the progressives then hard the Marxists and cultural Marxists it's been a trend across the country and indeed in the english-speaking world more generally the universities have become entirely unrepresentative of the ideological spectrum of the populations where they're located and it's not surprising that the media and the tech world and the corporate world have shifted in the direction of an increasingly intolerant liberal ideology of woke nurse it came from the universities and it simply spread out from those institutions so we can't really talk about these things separately I think what we are seeing is a kind of transformation of public life that originated in universities but I don't want it let's move on to universities but I don't want to under emphasize what I see as as why it's so important right now is that it has spread to all the other institutions of civil society starting with the schools your children cannot get through high school they they don't learn any Western civilization they learn you know that they don't all sorts of things that normally people learned in school so the schools have turned into indoctrination in a way and the tech companies yes the young people in the tech companies in the media have come out of universities and universities will always hotbeds of sort of whatever you want to call it ideas but it did not in the 1960s it didn't so permeate all the other institutions of civil society which is really where in a democratic society political control comes from you can afford to have universities saying crazy things as we did for 40 and 50 years but it didn't turn quite into the ideology of a partisan politics until it takes over everything else I mean I see central bankers are now hot in for inequality and climate change goodness gracious what are you guys doing as just one small example but deal with it let's let's turn to universities because that's I'm reluctant because you know we live in universities so there's a tendency to navel gaze about our own but that certainly is is the place not just on the cultural thing Victor's written quite about it so he's our special guest then I'll invite Victor to think about where things are going one recent column to get you going is you've written about the coming up so lessons of universities if classes being can be delivered at a distance why pay so much to go to campus on the other hand if you're not learning anything it worthwhile why do anything maybe students outside science and engineering aren't learning any much at all isn't the university also a sort of a durable institution for forming the elite of a country and in a way that you can't replicate on zoom' yeah it was I think we've got about 20 universities if their attraction as a brand like a cattle ground come to Stanford Harvard Duke Princeton and then have the experience and that's the synonym or a euphemism you'll meet somebody from Goldman Sachs's kid or you'll meet you'll connect your metric and you'll be you'll be entrenched and embedded within the you take that away with distance learning and then you have to ask yourself why do I pay seventy thousand bucks to stay in my basement to take teleclasses when I can download a nobel-prize guy from Europe for $1 and so that's that's something that's we got to remember how we got here the university did not use to educate half of American youth it was about a third or quarter once we sold everybody on getting this brand it's about half now and a lot of people in the university are not qualified they're political hacks and a lot of students would be much better off being autodidactic and getting a vocational skill because Neal's right the fuel that's driving this this cultural revolution is a profile of a pajama boy life of Julia unhappy person who was from the middle class they went and got their - Studies degree 67 years they worked on and off and they got 70 or 80 thousand dollars in student debt and they're part of the 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt and guess what they look up themselves and they say I'm 24 my grandparents came out of World War 2 they bought a home they got married they had kids they bought a car they had a savings account and I'm a barista and aoc somewhere or I'm in Portland OR Seattle and this is supposed to be so cool and I'm so articulate but I know nothing I have no real skills I have no marketable skills and they get frustrated and angry and they are useful idiots for people a little bit more what woke about how they can be foot soldiers in the revolution how do we stop all of that I think one big different a couple that I really think it would be really important to give people who graduate a simple choice if you want to go into K through 12 you don't have to go through that awful school of education and doctrine ation and you can get a MA for one year just like we do with parochial schools with bas and you can teach I had the misfortune in the Cal State System of teaching my classes in Greek and Latin in the School of Education so I would listen to them next door and it was all indoctrination race class gender and non-stop if you gave a student and said you got an English degree you want to be a sixth-grade English teacher you can go over there and get your credential or you can just spend a year and get an MA and read Shakespeare either way we don't care I don't think you'd have a school of education left the same thing about tenure we need to go back to five year contract spelled out this is what it is and then you go on if you don't fulfill them you don't you don't get one there is something I want to rip on this there's something hopeful that I saw in the aftermath of the George Floyd tragedy the left realized that police unions are a problem that you can't fire bad cops and that the police unions have pushed policing to ever expand sooner or later they may discover the teachers unions have robbed a generation of black kids and poor white kids and many other people on the lower end of American society from any hope escaping because what you mentioned is perfect common sense and it is perfectly forbidden by teachers unions and John we need it we have this this ritual that we have an entrance exam a sthiti SAT I know they're trying to get rid of them but the idea is that if you come from my high school where I graduated that my a was not as comparative competitive as a guy from Palo Alto say so we had the SAT AC okay fine they say standards matter why not have an exit test because I have a hunch that somebody from Hillsdale would score much higher than somebody from Stanford my own after teaching at both universities so if we had a national exit exam to get your BA in credential your BA I think that would be very valuable because it would make these curricula a little bit more sensible about what skills constitute education and then we got to do something about this nexus of huge endowments huge amounts of money and this tax-free income that is really inordinately spent on therapeutic Social Services ifs ministers diversity inclusion all that stuff Provost let me yet let me just I hate to out Victor Victor but universities are as has been documented extremely political you look at party affiliations and it's like in the ninety nine percent actually being a Democrat is to right-wing in many parts of universities and they are moving explicitly to activism universities are as you said getting rid of the SAT for entrance even though the SAT was a great way for people a generation ago to overcome the racial and economic prejudices of university admissions committees my dad got into Yale because he was able to take a test and prove that a kid from Berkeley High actually might know something in the 1950s which was assumed that he wouldn't but they are now universities are asking for activists an activist is someone who knows all the answers and needs only to go in and and put them into place and the universities themselves are moving to activism I just saw two examples Columbia has now joined Stanford to to start a school of climate with an explicit mission for activism now what is a tax-deductible tax supported they get lots of money from the federal government set of institutions that are allowed to run essentially a huge hedge fund on the side and a football team yet are devoted to political entirely political causes on entirely one side of the political spectrum that seems like a undesirable outcome and I've noticed the Trump administration is talking about it's gonna put IRS tax deductible status in the crosshairs which will be interesting to see how that one how that one question that we should think about is is why there are no new universities because one of the big differences between our time and and past periods in American history is it in the past when people were dissatisfied with the existing colleges they created new ones the the billionaire's of an earlier era of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century early 20th century created some extra or institutions whereas today's saga to name just two Stanford Chicago but but today's wealthy seem content to continue giving money to already very wealthy institutions and I think that is a kind of decadence it seems to me that we're confronted with such a profound problem particularly in the ideological skew of universities that the ratios of of liberals to conservatives or Democrats to Republicans are just enormous know that the only reasonable response because I don't think you can capture institutions back once they've been completely taken over by one side is to create new ones and that would be a kind of lesson of American history if you don't like these universities well create some better ones that's where the larger issue I think comes up if you want to social climb in the era of financial philanthropy you know giving money to Hillsdale College or founding a University devoted to classical liberalism is not gonna get you a lot of points on profit circles of San Francisco or the tech giants if you want and to do it you to well you have to sell that your university is gonna get students into good jobs and the elite well the New York Times isn't gonna hire from these places the people who run the HR departments at tech companies in our more and more oligopolistic industry are not gonna hire from these places so you have a it's not just starting a university as was possible in the old days where it was just really really good and you could hire well University of Chicago got got good by hiring Jews which Harvard would not hire it's not enough to just be really really good so it's harder to break in than you think I do think that the these demonstrations and and the activity of faculty and op-eds and a lot of the things that we have associated with the universities especially this new genre of this pathetic re-education camp like letter from administrator to the larger community where we apologize were so steeped in endemic and we're going to do the fall after telling everybody they're going to lay off this person and they're going to cancel this sports program and they're going to do this then they just fall all over themselves to say to all of these new administrative bloat positions are going to appear to pacify the mob with given all of that I think there is a sense in America that these brands should be really questioned they remind me of sort of coke when Pepsi came out they're just they're old they don't certify that the people who graduate can speak or write well or think logically they don't have a historical spectrum of reference they're not very educated in economics or science you know nothing about military history so their studies people - studies you know gender studies really studies and I think a lot of people well I just I just would like to say I know it's this may be a self-selecting group of students who I work with but I am super impressed with what the students I work with those my what the adding courses at the GSB and and at the Freeman spogli Institute and and I think that maybe one of the greatest hopes maybe for reform might be what the students themselves demand and I think what you'll tend to see or maybe the most vocal students on fringes of issues but in my experience I I know that you know obviously at Stanford you have an immensely talented group of young people and those with whom I've interacted are well motivated they're intellectually curious and they are reflexively opposed and resistant to being fed any orthodoxy now I think that that's that's a positive I believe that we may be at the apogee you know of the rise of the new left and the foisting of this orthodoxy on students in certain universities and and and it's been on the rise I think since the end of the Vietnam War I mean I've not studied this I think this is worthy of a more focused research but it was the Vietnam War that encouraged especially students in the humanities to get student deferments to stay out of the war by you know continuing to study English literature and history and social sciences and sociology and then these depart in you know in the crucible of that opposition to the to the vietnam war began to just reinvent themselves over several generations until departments are dominated in some cases by those who adhere to the orthodoxy of the new left and i'm going to be super simplistic in this but that orthodoxy is essentially all of the ills of the world prior to 1945 were due to colonialism all of the ills of the world after 1945 were due to capitalist imperialism and you know I'll tell ya Orwell was right when he wrote into 1984 if you controlled the past you controlled the present and what happened is a lot of the interpretations especially of American history in that period of time have made it into secondary education and in in many ways this is a curriculum of self-loathing and America is seen not as a continuing experiment and self improvement founded on on principles of life liberty the pursuit of happiness the Bill of Rights but instead instead it is founded on perpetuating perpetuating slavery perpetuating inequality it's our think that what we have to do in many ways is administrate auricle corrective to break the orthodoxy to teach all of the flaws in our history to teach near the failure of reconstruction to teach Jim Crow and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to teach separate but equal but then but to teach it in the context of the vast improvements what thomas sol talks about in in in in his interviews recently so i would just welcome really maybe academia we're casting as part of the problem which of course it may be but can't academia be part of the solution as well you say that you sound that you found this island of students but i do think they're self-selecting i i think all of us talk to Stanford Review students so I have a few classic students that wander in I gave it I just give you one example I was asked to teach a class on hydrology water issues and that was kind of controversial very nice kids kind of people that you're referencing so I walked in and I said well somebody tell me what balls are on a pump silence will somebody tell me the difference between a gravel pack and an open bottom well silence can somebody give me any ratio of depth of well to electrical horsepower two gallons per minute pump zero how about irrigation drip versus mini-jack versus furrow versus sprinkler zilch this is hydrology Sandford so what do they know John you can you can tell me right now what that class is about well they didn't know property rights to water either and the ability to resell the highest bidder I asked the Parian water rights and I asked about 19th cause I'm gonna I'm in an irrigation district that has the 19th century water right to the Kings River but they all knew that water transfers are bad that reservoirs are bad that they're the delta smelt is an iconic figure and they didn't know anything but they had this bad combination of being very confident and very ignorant about water and I I mean it was a complete waste of time and these people are going to be turned it loose and get into the tech world and the government world and the regulatory world and then they're going to come down here to Fresno County and they're gonna tell some guy who's working all day long thousand acre farm this is wrong and you can't do that well by the way that pond is an inland waterway and we're going to come and sample all of its water so I'm you know I'm hoping that we get the things we've talked about can restructure and there's some really you're right HR there's some brilliant wonderful kids at Stanford but every time I find them not that I'm saying that they grab a take to Hoover alone but they seem to be I don't know they kind of beaten down or they're in little cells they remind me of Maquis in the French Revolutions their problem right now is you can't put I'm Sol on a reading list where there will be a protest outside in front of your in front of your or Charles Marie I actually know that one for a fact but I think what's happening it's not quite so bad what's happening is so far at universities it has been duck hire a whole bunch of administrators send a bunch of letters out to pacify the mob people have realized that these majors don't get you jobs certainly what Stanford is doing is focus on science and engineering learn to program computers learn some math learn how to learn how to run some statistics and do big data you'll get out competent you'll know how to actually do something and that's where the university has value-added the problem with that is there was some value to and the humanities are dying there are no jobs the humanities people don't want to take they only take the classes if they're forced to as a matter of requirements or if they had some interest in it and add the false notion they were going to learn something about it in those classes the sad thing is you you get people who do know some math and some equations and how to actually program a computer but they are uneducated as citizens as thinkers they they win that when that person who actually might have learned the navier's stokes equations in his physics class is then presented with a hydrology problem in the Central Valley he doesn't know the difference between I can't get this right a gravel bottom or a muddy bottom well but gee so you need educated citizens as well I think the universities can survive by moving themselves to detect things and as an economist what happened was in the 80s a huge salary gap emerged in the 80s and 90s people who went to university we're doing tremendously better than people who weren't because there was this demand for skills then we made the classic mistake of a rich people Drive Cadillacs so give everyone a Cadillac and they'll get rich and people went to universities on borrowed money and nobody noticed it mattered which major you took and so we started producing this vast number of people who have lots of debt and and and really don't know much Victor pointed out I think a danger of this in many other parts of the world Zack Victor has a great column on how this leads to revolution the 9/11 hijackers were all university graduates who had been given majors and things that there were no jobs in that is when when you expand on that thing and give people aspirations and debt and useless degrees you do create a group of people who know just enough to be dangerous sorry go ahead Neal I was gonna make a similar point that one of the lessons of history is that if you have a big increase in the supply of graduates but so limited opportunities for them that that is your revolutionary intelligentsia and one of the reasons that I take seriously what we're seeing in American cities this year is that we've seen very similar things in cities all around the world in the past 12 months remember last year all the extraordinary scenes from Hong Kong to Santiago by way of of Beirut and a very clear pattern emerged when I delved into it in all the countries where there were large-scale protests there had been massive expansion of higher education in the recent decades so I think one clear lesson of history is that the expansion of higher education as an end in itself is actually a distinctly hazardous and surprise but the other more cheerful lesson that I want to offer it is an 18th century lesson in the 18th century the universities of Europe were not particularly dynamic places my alma mater Oxford was particularly stuck in the doldrums of previous intellectual era and most of the intellectual excitements of that period that we call the Enlightenment didn't happen on campus at all that happened in networks of intellectuals corresponding and communicating with one another not necessarily reliant on on an a tenured chair so I'm hopeful that one of the the developments of our time the emergence of an intellectual dark were a network of disaffected intellectuals who've quarreled in various ways with their institutions whether universities or magazines this is actually one of the healthier developments and I I sense that there is a tremendous appetite amongst intellectuals for real freedom and they see their appetites being checked by the institutions were there Bay well thanks to the internet it isn't quite so difficult as it used to be just strike out independently so I'm going to try and end this conversation on an optimistic note I agree that actually there are many students I don't think it's just a minority who had deeply frustrated by the Great Awakening and really disliked the atmosphere of intimidation that exists on campuses today in such a stark contrast to the campuses that I remember when I was a student there they're definitely fed up with this and I think a great many professors and writers are fed up with it too and the Liberals are coming to realize that and in fact the real threat to Liberty doesn't come from Donald Trump the supposed tyrant that they were so terrified or four years ago that the real threat to their liberties as intellectuals actually comes from the left that is sinking in that's part of the significance of the Harper's letter it's part of the significance of Barry Weiss leaving the New York Times and it's part of the reason that we're having this conversation on good fellows because Hoover is one of the few institutions one of the very few left where it's still possible to express conservative sentiments as we've done on this show and not tremble in fear of your future employment let me just riff on that because I think is incredibly important point I started with pushing the idea that the institutions of civil society had been taken over by the far left and enforcing conformity well the answer is create your own institutions you know we've seen in the legal camp out of how important the Federalist Society was to give home to to conservative thinkers you maybe agree with them or not but it is the home for conservative legal thought that otherwise is stamped out by the academia by the Bar Association and so forth well similarly if you if you we need not just individuals who can speak out but institutions that can help those individuals when you're being Twitter mobbed will help you when you're being fired will give you legal help will give you this the support that you need in order just to express the basic fact of I may not agree with what you say but I defended the death your right to say it which is that that that's what's in danger right now does not just it is institutions and as long as the internet isn't censored it will be useful a very useful way for us to be able to create such institutions which the left now wants to the the sensible left wants to be able to talk as well as we do they're just as worried my worry is that internet self-censorship censorship by the woke staff is already pretty darn strong and the move to censor it by government is stronger still so I hope we have the opportunity to create contrary institutions in support of people's freedom to talk Victor what would Socrates say could we end with that Socrates never said at the Plutarch said he said and he said he was a citizen of the world he was a first globalist so he was uh but I mean he was a victim of the mob and he was sort of a current remember the army lawyer Robert Welch you have no decency to McCarthy when he was convicted according to Plato's tetralogy of dialogues and enact ancient Athens when you were convicted of something you proposed the punishment to the the mall the jury mall and you it was kind of a psychological tension because if you asked for too little they got angry and did too much of you ask for too much they showed sympathy and gave you little so he said that after being found guilty of introducing new gods and corrupting the youth he wanted a free meal every day on the expense account of the democracy and that ended up with drinking the hemlock so he had contempt and he could have broken out according to the Euthyphro many times and he chose not to but I do think we need some people this CEO of Goya foods is a good moral example when they were trying to cancel him out the other day he said you know what do your best I'll you do your worst I'll do my best basically is what he said and we need more people to stand up like Socrates did and say it's not going to happen anymore as far as I'm concerned I wish we had one editor of a major newspaper one university president just one one guy at Harvard or Princeton or Stanford one person New York Times Washington Post said I don't know what's going on the country but I am not firing anybody in this editorial room and I'm not giving in to any demand right now until I study it and we have a consensus I just not going to do it and I think it would I mean it's an improper metaphor but it would be a Napoleonic whiff of grapeshot it really would it would tell people we're not gonna take it anymore and I think it would start to dissipate because horses are already dissipating but we've got to push it along there are so many institutions where if you want to climb in your institution you you cannot possibly do that the central banks are that way right now I brought those itbefore universities media everywhere I guess if a couple of people atop have the courage to speak out all on their own that will help but boy is it deep ingrained you're not you're young Neil and I have here at Hoover but I have a lot of people that I correspond with them on a lot of PhD exam and they literally cannot get people to serve on their PhD exams they can't get jobs they're ostracized blacklisted because they're conservative or even moderate as you said conservative can mean you're a liberal Democrat in the university so I think we all need to help those people in any way according to our station and tell them they can be confident that they won't be punished and we're gonna try to help them get a job or get some type of employment there has to be an underground railroad so to speak to help ok and everybody for this episode of the good fellows will be back next week with a new conversation on behalf of the good fellows myself HR McMaster Neil Ferguson and our special good fellow guests Victor Davis Hanson as well as everyone here at Hoover stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the Hoover Institution to help you stay informed thank you very much see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 246,474

Keywords: H.R. McMaster, John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, Pandemic, COVID-19, coronavirus, political order, stanford university, Hoover Institution, hoover institute, victor davis hanson, the classicist, free speech, freedom of speech

Id: llt3aKFslJo

Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020