History and America’s Decline | Paul A. Rahe

the order that we live in that we take for granted is fragile and it can just disappear overnight people in France learned after 1789 you can wake up one day come on you are in Desperate condition and I hope we don't get that far it would be a wonderful thing if there was an Insurgency within the Democratic party against the craziness [Music] Professor Paul Wright is Professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan after studying at wadham College in Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship he completed a PhD in ancient history at Yale and is taught in a quite a range of universities Across America in the years since in 2009 he wrote a book called Soft despotism democracies drift which considered or generated a lot of pretty considered and sometimes heated debate as well as writing very important books and articles he's a well-known and considered commentator on modern society and politics he brings an immense grasp of history and politics to bear on our current circumstances Paul thank you so very much for joining us today your reputation as a historian is absolutely superb and having read some of your work I can understand why um can I begin by saying does the state of education and particularly the teaching of history in the western General but in your country in particular have something powerful to say about the way in which we now seem to be ignorant of the lessons of History [Music] well I don't think that I could assert generally that those who teach history in our institutions of Higher Learning uh our apt to address those questions there's been a generational change and I think politics and maybe culture as well are generational and there's been a move away from thinking seriously as historians from about military Affairs that died out quite some time ago almost nowhere in the United States is military history taught uh diplomatic histories disappeared too uh many many institutions during Vietnam had diplomatic historians rather than military historians now they have neither economic historians this next to No One teaching economic history in the United States and the last thing that's dying out is political history now one consequence of this is uh history majors have declined radically because if you do not talk about things that people care about no one's going to come and so um just as literature departments are losing their way in the United States and losing their clientele so history departments uh have begun to lose their clientele now I don't encounter this directly because I teach at an oasis I teach at Hillsdale College and sometimes people ask me what's it like and I say Williams College 1955 with girls and I can add and with African Americans because this was an abolitionist college and it has always been open to African Americans um but we have a curriculum that's very similar to what the curriculum would have been like in 1955. and uh the the consequence is I only encounter this when I go to conferences or when I meet with students from other universities now I've been here for 15 years and in those 15 years it's been a transformation and the transformation is largely generational uh and what I would say about what's happened in the academy starting in literature moving into history and who knows where else it will go is the driving force is nihilism there is a kind of hatred of the inherited order without any notion of something to put in its place for all that was wrong with Communism they had an idea of what they wanted to put in its place now what they did put in its place was a monstrosity and it involved the deaths of hundreds of millions of people um now what we have is simply hatred of the inherited order and the problem with that is though the inherited order is anything but perfect it's by historical standards awfully good I mean if you take the situation in the United States this is a country where um Ordinary People live very well and they live very well because of natural resources of course but also of good public policy with regarding economic matters good public policy with regard to political matters and the key thing in with regard to to um political matters is that not be too difficult for there to be a redress of grievances if I may use the old English English phrase which is to say uh from time to time ordinary people have an opportunity uh to judge those who rule them and it's a real opportunity and what you prior to the current period what you saw in American history is a moving back and forth between two separate political leads to major political parties in which throwing the Rascals out as we Americans sometimes say was very commonplace uh and the consequence is you had a public policy that was extremely responsive to felt public needs yep now I won't argue that this was always perfectly rational in fact surely it was not always perfectly rational but it was more rational than you would get if you would get an uh a political party that is firmly in constant power and can't be moved out of power uh so the the the inherited system um articulated under the Constitution uh that was uh framed in the late 18th century adjusted in modest ways subsequent to that time has served us very well and what we're looking at is an attempt to overthrow that system by um breaking all of the rules that are not written into law all the unwritten rules the morries and manners that govern the way the majority party and the minority party operate towards one another in the House of Representatives and in the United States Senate uh the unwritten rules about how you conduct yourself in elections the written rules about how you conduct those elections all this is being overturned in the interests of getting a kind of Monopoly of power and those who are Desperately Seeking this Monopoly of power know what they want to get rid of no idea what they want to put in its place there really isn't a kind of positive program and so there's going to be tremendous conflict for example I mean one of the elements of this is to force everybody back into living in cities people don't want to live in cities and the cities are becoming a nightmarish place to live if you defund the police and force people to live in the cities it's going to be hobbsy and Nightmare in which life is going to be nasty brutish and short and you can you can see the resistance to this because demographically it's been a tremendous decline in our cities Chicago has fewer people living in the city limits than they did in 1920. really yes uh and the in New York City it's fewer than lived there in 1950. there's hardly a place outside the Sun Belt where there hasn't been a major move out of the Cities to the suburbs but also to other places and the reason is people like to live in circumstances where they feel safe where the schools are tolerably good you can just go down the list now if you notice I'm talking about bush wildlife who cares about schools if they don't have children uh and uh who cares about children and that's people who are actually married and stay married uh they're the people who are abandoning the cities uh and I don't see I think Chicago is going to go the way of Detroit you know which is a black hole yes uh and think about the choice as an example of this in 1950 Detroit was the wealthiest city in the United States per capita the wealthiest the motor car industry yes good jobs and then uh it declined somewhat by 1968 you had the riots in 1968 and the riots never ended I mean there's a sense in which the riots took place in 1968 and then you had crime on a grand scale and just continuing uh the automobile industry what remained of it in 1968 moved out there's not a single automobile in the United States made in Detroit now uh and people moved out uh and then it became completely unlivable you know if you go there and you were to tour Detroit what you'll see is ruined buildings beautiful churches with everything collapsed inside uh the the the guardian in Britain did a a photographic essay of this about oh 12 years ago it's just breathtaking it looks as if Detroit had been bombed but it wasn't so you can you can destroy civilization and that was done there and there's a move in that direction now uh and it extends into changing the curricula of grade schools junior high schools and high schools the curricula of universities has already been changed and the higher increase in the University then filters back into the education system yes oh yeah it starts at the top and it works its way down kindergartens people have Overlook that but it's the basis of learning starts in the kindergartens it does and um the the you know there are other things that have developed that have influenced this the post-world War II Mobility made divorce easy when in my father's gen my father was born in 1902. in his generation if you worked at Gulf oil company which is where he worked and you abandon your wife for a floozy you'd be fired and the reason is the wives of everyone else in the business would not tolerate what you had done and their husbands were obedient um uh it's not like that now let's you're painting a picture really of and I think this is common it's not just America of course a strange situation where the elites who are the great beneficiaries educationally living standards opportunity to travel send their kids to good schools who now loathe their own culture yes their own home and one subset of that that seems to be very significant because of course the elites have money and they have wealth is that there was a time when Corporate America when the business Community created the jobs created the wealth made America the home of opportunity the global leader that it was but Corporate America and the tech leaders and bosses now are amongst the most critical of our society and they have the capacity to Resource people who are wanting to reinvent it in their pursuit of power and they're doing it big time yes on a very Grand scale um there was a book published a few years ago maybe 10 years ago called coming apart um and the it it looked at White America only uh to avoid controversy I think and the theme was there really were two Americas developing uh one which one would have said would have been the lower middle class um and which was the backbone of the country when I was growing up uh and they were the people least likely to divorce to abandon their children they lived on the edge of not starvation but they lived in tight circumstances and they were extremely disciplined all that discipline's gone now and the family breakdown is just astonishing then there's the sort of middled upper middle class they marry late but they marry and stay married they don't have any argument about Fidelity about family or any of that but they behave in that way one other dimension of what you're talking about is the elite stretching down into the majority of people who went to college has a kind of seething contempt for the people who are not in the elite um I first noticed this when Obama first ran for the presidency he made a comment about those who clutched their guns and bibles and it was a kind of patronizing when Hillary Clinton ran I was not very happy with Donald Trump too vulgar seemed to me to be cruel I almost voted for Hillary Clinton but there was a point when she talked about the kind of people that weren't with her as deplorables and irredeemables and it was the irredeemable part that bothered me that's Protestant theological language for those who need to be cast into the outer Darkness I listened to that and I thought I wonder if they're going to have re-education camps next um and step by step that kind of rhetoric of contempt for people who aren't on your side has become standard we now have a president who talks about uh people who voted for Donald Trump as fascists I mean it's simply remarkable uh and um when you talk about people that way they get angry and they stay angry furthermore you are teaching the followers of your party how they should treat the people they come into contact with who are of that sort that's to say uh who are sympathetic to Donald Trump um the neoliberal global order the rules-based international order which became a kind of universal order after the Cold War for a while anyway um produced enormous wealth yes uh in this country and it led to the emergence of this particular class that thinks of itself as righteous um you know it's as if the old puritanism has returned in a new form the same intrusiveness the same self-righteousness uh and a propensity for treating ordinary folks plumbers electricians small businessmen with a kind of seething contempt I've not seen this before in American Life uh those in positions of responsibility if they had such opinions about their fellow citizens kept them to themselves if someone in the 1970s had referred to those who supported another political party one of the two major political parties in this country is fascist that would have been the end of that person's career yeah it would have been over the people in their own party would have destroyed them uh so there's something that has happened and the people who have profited most from this rules-based order are the ones who are most hostile to this rules-based order what an irony yeah it's um and again I think it's generational I grew up in the wake of World War II I was born in 1948. and um patriotism and a pride in American institutions was the common coin of the realm and with some reason we had come through the first two world wars rather well and we were caught up in the Cold War and we weren't doing perfectly well but we were doing tolerably well and that managed actually to last until about 1980 Maybe 1988. uh the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a sea change in American life I don't think it became visible until the Obama Administration uh and I don't quite know how it will end um in Britain they have there's a phrase that gets used for certain periods of time between elections called the Silly Season yes okay the United States is going through an elongated Silly Season in which one of our political parties thinks the real problem in American life is that biological males can't use women's bathrooms and they want to shove that down people's throats uh and all of this sort of uh people in charge of the culture Netflix Amazon Prime and so forth they're trying to make propaganda films and TV series pushing this kind of thing it's getting very hard to find a good movie yes now the effect of it is no one's watching this stuff um I mean what they don't understand fanfics are certainly discovering that yes they are uh and Amazon Prime as well they're canceling series that they thought would be the thing um one dimension of this that may be true is our upper middle class lives in a bubble they don't actually know people who think otherwise and um I'll give you an example of this when Trump was elected the New York Times Center reporter to Hillsdale College on an anthropological expedition to you know look at the natives um and he was shocked because uh he was an older guy he'd been there Beijing uh station chief at one stage and he discovered what we were teaching was what he was taught when he was in college the New Yorker just sent someone here whom I met with last week oh again she's essentially been sent here on an anthropological Expedition and I think she was similarly shocked because you know if you live in the Beltway between Washington and Boston and uh don't go out into the world you don't meet anybody that um is upset with the kind of direction that they want to go and there really is no understanding of it but there's a subversion of institutions look sending the FBI to raid the home of a former president would have been Unthinkable in the past uh and uh that it it's simply done now is remarkable you're a historian doesn't this absolutely just evidence the truth of the old adage that those who don't learn the history are destined to repeat it I mean as a historian surely you despair that that all of these Elites are so unaware of the lessons of history that they are actually repeating it well provoking differences treating people with sarcasm the Maori Antoinette line let them eat cake right have they learned nothing from history well always history simply not taught it's not really taught I mean I know we're repeating they haven't they haven't studied but look I think we've had the neoliberal order for 30 years um there is a propensity to suppose that the world that we live in will just go on as it has in the past and there's a blindness to history in the sense that a blindness to the fact that all orders are fragile in character you saw that as I understand it um uh somewhere 15 years or so ago you actually predicted that the political system was in for a big shock now it took a little bit longer to happen so do your credit I think you were seeing that there was trouble Brewing well it it when you know it was when Obama became president I don't know if you you know what his um uh uh the the the he wanted to transform American politics and um he framed that not in terms of a new deal or the you know the Great Society or something along those lines but in terms of a completely new order now Obama was timid and he gave one speech at Georgetown and it didn't get picked up and he sort of dropped the phrasing um but that was what was intended and uh it has become the program of his party which is we must transform the American political order not make this change here or that change there for a redress of grievances or to cope with some problem that um uh had not come up before that sort of thing has gone on forever and that's the the agility of democratic institutions is to cope with circumstances that change no it was the notion that the order itself was evil okay when you overturn an order what you get very often is a horror um the man who understood this best was Edmund Burke yeah and he understood what's the French Revolution yes well but before the he's thinking it's Cromwell all over again yeah that's what he's thinking and you know in that book that he publishes in 1789 very early he predicts Napoleon he lays out where it's going to end if you take an inherited order and simply overturn it and start from scratch you will end up with disorder on a scale that will produce that will will only end if a Cromwell comes in and puts the cap on things or if a Napoleon does the genius of the British system and of the post-revolutionary American system has been the capacity to make adjustments yeah uh and and the conviction that the inherited order is pretty good now this is um I want to put this in another frame a slightly different frame because I think there's there's something else going on that's vitally important um and that is uh there was one great flaw in the neoliberal world order in the rules-based system which is that it could be exploited by powers that weren't committed to that system under the Aegis of the neoliberal liberal Global Order you could practice mercantilism and at the same time that we've had this transformation of politics that involves entering the Silly Season in which you reject everything from the past without having any kind of intelligent plan for what to put in its place can I interrupt that just remember you say President Obama said we had to transform things in other words he wanted to get rid of the order we have yes there's no question I accept that and you're saying that this is now common amongst Elites that's the push yes they don't have any idea of the end state did President Obama have an idea of what he that's a pretty profound thing to say yes you had a president of the United States who gets there under the established order makes all sorts of votes and commitments really to maintaining the Republic and all the rest of it wants to overturn it doesn't actually believe in it at all but doesn't have an alternative Vision that's right it's it there's a vision of what's evil which is what is given that's why I call it nihilism in other words there's nothing knee hill uh at the end of The Thing what makes this particularly dangerous though is the uh neo-liberal Global Order is finished and that has to do with the rise of China yeah um I don't mean that part of it can't be salvaged but that would take a real effort and there is a kind of blindness I mean if someone were to ask me what do you think of the president's from the first bush to today I would say that they bear comparison with Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister of Great Britain they averted their gaze from something developing that was a very great threat and they left us in effect disarmed if you would ask me isn't it called communism well except it's not exactly like the old communism the old Communism had one great virtue and that was that that was um their farming system which didn't work um which meant the Soviet Union was Collective Farms were disaster and they stuck with it and in China too Ukraine was once the bed Bros code of Europe it then became pathetically unable to feed itself that's right it's as clear as a bell and China too and and the effect of it was that um they were weak yeah China is much stronger than the old Soviet Union and that's the difference yes and so my point really was we'd gone to sleep if we'd known our history again right known that communism always demands power right it always insists that loyalty is given to the party it can Brook no opposition and it's therefore very dangerous but we pretended it wasn't right isn't that really the well there was a dream if if we make them Rich the middle class will grow up the middle class will assert itself we also ignored the cultural heritage of Russia which is autocracy yeah they've really never known anything other than that except for very brief periods and the cultural heritage of China which is autocracy and the continued interest in China existence in China the old Communist party that had grown wise in one particular they realized that you needed Commerce um and so they've grown much much stronger and so year after year from the first Bush on we ignored it and the United States concentrated its attention on Afghanistan Iraq uh wasted enormous material wealth on it and far worse enormous moral capital on uh yes and so there's going to be a tremendous challenge at a time when the Elites in the United States don't believe in their own country yes yeah and I don't know what the consequences of that will be one possibility is the Silly Season will end they'll wake up and they'll think oh we've got to defend this country because in the end they do know that their own well-being was produced by the system that they think in their sort of childish self-indulgence that they want to destroy uh can you think of anything worse than defunding the police in major cities where there's high crime well if it's a response to Black lives matter I'd have to say I would have thought if you thought it through you'd realize that the very most common people or the most common cause for police help come from black women of course so and it's not yes and and this did not come from Black Americans that's my point yeah this was a sort of upper middle class dream yeah the black you know black or African-American women particularly I would have thought the very people we say are subject to violence and racism and all sorts of terrible things the ones most endangered I got it oh and then here's the next thing we we we have a d incarceration movement yes which is sort of closed down the prisons and send them out to kill people and of course they're doing it and we have practices in New York and in places in California in which um uh you can commit a crime and there's no bail and you can you can commit a serious crime and there's no bail so there's there's a notion that that which protects persons and property which is policing the courts the prisons isn't evil uh they don't have any program to put in its place that's going to make policing unnecessary or less necessary so you will pick that point up I think my broad figures are right since I left school in the mid 70s America's population is roughly doubled but the prison populations increased by 750 percent yes they're nearly all male but we're not allowed to talk about the boy crisis right and the sort of social factors that are meaning so many and I say we because we've got the same problem in other Western countries true I agree we're not allowed to talk about the dysfunctionality of the environment in which many of them are growing up in right it's the elephant in the room the main social problems in this country are not being discussed and The crucial one is the family uh the uh and it is it was once largely a black problem uh it is now a universal problem uh I I have a former student uh uh I was about to say a young black woman but she's not that young anymore I'm quite old yes yes it does it does we were chatting about this and she was asking what's Hillsdale County like and I said it's the south side of Chicago but it's white and then I just and I said they don't do cocaine they do methamphetamines and she's looked at me she says it's class isn't it and there is a sense look when I was growing up politics turned on class is something substantial and it's not going to go away and it needs attention now in theory uh you know we're in the world of class race and gender except no one really talks about glass or does anything about class and we are as a country treating those who are not in the upper middle class abysmally we're depriving them of their police were allowing the schools to go down the tubes we're hiring teachers who are illiterate I mean that's a big part of the story and because of the power of the teachers unions you can't you can't say anything about that and we're focusing on our attention on who gets to go into the girls bathroom uh and on on a critical racial theory that asserts the white supremacy is the main problem well there was a time when that's that was true and I lived in that time I lived through it and it's no longer the case black Americans don't like critical racial Theory it's bunk they don't like racial categorization well it's bunk and it does the margarita Martin Luther King campaigned against that very concept right right so we've got and I say nihilism because there's no rationale behind all of this there's simply a hatred of the inherited order on the part of people who are rich and self-indulgent in any number of ways I don't mean just personally but they're sort of self-indulgent in their politics it's the Silly Season and they're following fashion in the Silly Season uh and it will end one way or another because it will get repudiated at some point ordinary Americans are going to put up with this for too long it could be that by various tricks elections can be won for a while I don't know what's going to happen in 2022. I mean you run out of money one day a lot of this is sustained by a lot of money flying around yes appreciating people you know that that's another problem we have not had a genuinely uh responsible Administration in Washington since Eisenhower that far back that far back Eisenhower paid down the debt of World War II we had a huge debt at the end of World Trade massive it was uh the order of 130 of GDP I think that's right and then you turned around on top of that Truman to his great credit borrowed another 13 billion in the money of 1948 for the muscle plan yeah which Europe could not have been reconstructed well and and Truman also fought the Korean War which was very expensive and helped reconstruct Japan that must have cost money as well yeah that was America at its peak right uh okay in the aftermath Eisenhower cut budgets and he kept the taxes High um I think he would have been better if he'd cut the taxes some because I think the the the the the take from cutting the taxes would have exceeded the loss from from uh what you lose when you cut taxes but leave that aside he did that and he began paying that debt down not to nothing but to the level where it was inconsequential in terms of um uh sustaining the value of the currency see what we could have now after um 70 years well not 70 years 60 years of malfeasance is we could have a currency collapse yes and what would cause it would be if we cease to be the reserve currency internationally yes I think that is a serious possibility it is certainly what the Chinese the Russians and so forth will try to accomplish uh and look the Europeans created the euro in order it's very timely yeah um uh so I you know I look back we were profligate um Kennedy was not so bad from Johnson on we were profligate uh but no one was as Prof look at as we are now I mean it's mind-boggling yes and now we've got the reality he's going to spend a lot of money in the Ukraine right which is after covert ought to be yet another warning but it's time to put some shots back into the locker you'll start to put something aside for the next rainy day yes because it'll come oh of course it'll come it'll come and it will uh be larger than Ukraine I think Ukraine is manageable because the Russians are the Russians I I can't believe the idioceton not knowing there'd be resistance I mean they're right next to you your your intelligence people can surely tell you everything that's going on in Ukraine um and and they send in these tanks in the spring where they can't leave the roads or they end up in the mud all you have to do is knock out the first tank in the last tank and then you can wipe out the rest of them when you please or just starve them to death in between it it's um but no there's there's um reality is going to bite and I think it's going to bite pretty soon if it doesn't begin biting in 2022 it will bite by 2024. because [Music] um Ordinary People know something is very very wrong and the the the the the data shows that doesn't it really oh yes and and increasingly yeah the other thing is some of the um sort of permanent features or semi-permanent features of American politics are beginning to change I'm not sure that the black vote is safe for the Democrats anymore and if you got 20 percent of African Americans voting a Republican it would just upend everything and it's very clear that the Hispanic vote is not safe for the Democrats anymore so let me put it this way when I was growing up the Republican party was the party of small business and big business Democratic party was the party of the unions and the segregated South uh the two parties really changed I flipped yes I mean look at the map of America and the red and the blue right it's reversed yes over the last couple of decades yes and it's it starts with Clinton because he's the one who makes an appeal to Hollywood he's the one who makes an appeal to the uh hedge fund operators to the um uh to the financial classes uh and it was pretty successful at that uh and the Republicans uh really by Dent of of Donald Trump's Acuity with regard to who was aggrieved uh have become the working class party yeah they may become the party of the working stiff not the white working class but the black working class as well that could easily happen uh because the cities are going to get worse and worse with this defund the police business and with the election of DA's who won't enforce the law [Music] um it's interesting times can we round out yes uh because you've been very generous with all the time but you're understanding of History is very deep and the Republican experiment here was really about the sanctity of the individual and one might be one way of putting it you know there was an enormous effort put into trying to ensure that government was Downstream of culture and that was driven of course by the beliefs of the day so you could say beliefs shape the culture and values sure they then shaped the government and the government was to be kept in its place right we're reversing that in a big way now we're becoming Downstream it seems of government and it's handmaidens the wealthy Elites and the technocrats or or the expertocracy um and it seems to me that this in part has led to the sort of almost suffocating Mission group where government is involved more and more and more and more in every aspect of our lives right and I don't know I people seem to almost welcome somebody else making a lot of decisions for them but B it's led to an enormous level of cynicism and disengagement at the same time right over familiarity by government as bred contempt absolutely and virtually all of our institutions are held in contempt the percentage of Americans going to college has gone down now my own view is that ought to go down by about a third because uh I don't have this problem teaching at Hillsdale but I I taught at the University of Tulsa for 24 years and I would say about a third of the entering freshmen there was no purpose in their being in college that'd be better off with a good tried yes they weren't there to learn and uh I would I'd give a talk early on when I was young and stroppy at the beginning of term in which I would say uh somebody told me the other day that there's some people who come to this University who want a degree but not in education and I'd say I can't believe anyone would waste money on that but if there's anyone in the room today uh this isn't the class for you if that's your view one-third with self-identify and drop one third really yes and this is private school not a public school uh you remind me uh and uh I became department chair and I discovered that the administration judged uh departmental needs on the basis of enrollments and that they counted um uh anybody who'd been there after the first week is enrolled and so I stopped giving that talk and what would happen is they would take the first exam and fail it and I would never see them again they would fail the class because they didn't even come didn't take the other exams now they shouldn't have been there in the first place and the University was committing a crime in accepting them they wanted their money I that at uh and that's you know the the number of 18 year olds in the United States about 15 years ago just dropped off a cliff the end of uh the baby boomlet the children of the Baby Boomers eventually finally got married had children and then it stopped um so almost every American University is desperate for Warm Bodies and that includes famous places like say Oberlin College which I think in the last 10 years has made their class so to speak twice really yeah they just can't they can't get them to come now it's very expensive and uh uh I it would be very good for the country to downsize higher education it's just there's too much of it and in my time in higher education um it's gone from being a rather Spartan operation uh in which the food was not very good um to being rather luxurious um and most of our universities now are a cross between a country club and a brothel and that's about all they are uh and you could any I I don't think there's a state university in the United States that you couldn't get through without doing reading I can remember I had a student who transferred into the University of Tulsa from the University of Oklahoma and I said what was it like and she said well you could go to class or you could do the reading but you certainly didn't need to do both so it's been dumbed down and the financial pressure of the drop in the number of 18 year olds has caused a further dumbing down and then there's something else that's going to to flood this we used to have for a considerable period we had vast numbers of Chinese students and they paid uh tuition at the sticker price no discounts so huge money for schools um a a high proportion of them did not speak English well enough to do things so you had to have courses they could pass and it's corrupted higher education and in a great variety of places at in East Lansing Michigan State University there were whole neighborhoods that were Chinese now that's dropped off so there's going to be an economic crisis in higher education much greater than what we've seen they're going to be schools that close lots of them it's an opportunity to rethink who should go to college and it isn't everybody and sending everybody to college means college has to be reconfigured as something everybody can do um the other thing is the curricular terrible the things you need to know about your own world about the world beyond our Shores you can get through without doing any of that um uh the the um it could be that the crisis of the neoliberal global order which we have now entered fully as it's become visible with the Chinese move into the South China Sea the the crushing of Taiwan of Hong Kong and uh the Russian move into Ukraine it could be that that causes a sobering up and well we just had we had the emergence of responsible statesmanship which is not what we have right now well we hope it does and we hope it happens in time yes and the trouble is um when you're thinking in military terms uh what counts as in time it's gotten shorter and shorter yes I mean it um uh given the fact that America was sort of a great aircraft carrier far from everywhere in with with industry World War II there could be a gradual buildup the next time there's a war it may be over in a week or two weeks it um but it it's a reminder of what historians know or ought to know which is that the order that we live in that we take for granted is fragile yeah and it can just disappear overnight as people in France learned after 1789 you can wake up one day and it's gone and then you are in Desperate condition and I hope we don't get that far um it would be a wonderful thing if there was an Insurgency within the Democratic Party against the craziness it's happened before yes and it could happen again well Paul look you've been very generous with your time really appreciate it and the great thing about what you're doing is that you are equipping in as much as you get in front of some Wonderful Young Americans a cohort of people who May well turn out to be critical to the leadership of tomorrow so thank you it could well happen uh that is certainly our aim at Hillsdale College and I'm having the time of my life [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

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Length: 54min 25sec (3265 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022