Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. On this edition of “Think Tank,” we will
talk one on one with social critic and economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. Tom Sowell’s new book, “The Vision of
the Anointed,” argues that the assumptions and beliefs of America’s liberal elite have
created 30 years of disaster in education, crime, and welfare policy. What are these assumptions? Are they wrong? Where are they leading us? A conversation with Thomas Sowell, this week
on “Think Tank.” Joining us today is Thomas Sowell, a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of many books that have cast
a critical eye at American society, including “Inside American Education” and “Race
and Culture.” His latest book, “The Vision of the Anointed:
Self-Congratulation as the Basis for Social Policy,” has been called a broadside against
the received wisdom of America’s elite liberal intelligentsia. Tom Sowell, why don’t you start out and
tell us what “The Vision of the Anointed” is about. What is it? Tom Sowell: Well, it’s, one, a vision that
the problems that we see in the world are due to the fact that other people are just
not as bright or as compassionate as they are and that there are all these solutions
out there waiting to be discovered and they have them and that these solutions are to
be imposed upon the rest of us by the power of government through taxation or in other
ways. And what’s really crucial about it is that
their passion is so much greater than the passion on the other side, largely because
what they have involved is more. Ben Wattenberg: Who is they? Tom Sowell: Oh, the media elite, the academic
elite, political elites. And the reason we talk about their vision,
even though they obviously in their opinions, is that the basic set of underlying assumptions
about the world are very similar. And because these assumptions are the prevailing
assumptions, the need to find evidence for them or to offer proof is much less. If something happens, they’ll explain it
in a way which will fit that vision. For example, when they find that prenatal
care is less among blacks than among whites and that infant mortality rates are higher,
they immediately assume this is because of society’s neglect, and therefore if only
the government will step in and provide more prenatal care, then that problem solves itself. But in reality, other groups have even less
prenatal care than blacks and don’t have any more infant mortality than whites. But they don’t ever get to that second stage
because once they’ve seen something that fits their conception of how the world works,
that’s sort of the end of it. Ben Wattenberg: Let me go back to that idea
of who the they is. I mean, in your cosmology, are these liberals? Is that what they are? Tom Sowell: Yes. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard,
Stanford. Oh, the Edward Kennedys, the — all the usual
suspects. Ben Wattenberg: Let me — Tom Sowell: But it’s more than those particular
people because this mindset goes back at least 200 years. Ben Wattenberg: Who does it start with? Tom Sowell: I don’t know where it starts,
but you could find it in the 18th century. If you read William Godwin, “Inquiry Concerning
Political Justice,” in 1793, you have the whole vision laid out just as it was in the
1960s. But the 1960s were a crucial point because
that’s when this vision became dominant. Ben Wattenberg: This sort of arrogant vision
that we know best? Tom Sowell: Oh, yes. Ben Wattenberg: And don’t even have to subject
it to normal forms of proof? Tom Sowell: Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Ben Wattenberg: Now, let me read you something
that Speaker Gingrich wrote in his book “To Renew America.” He said, “Since 1965, there has been a calculated
effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization and replace it with a culture
of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them.” Do you buy that? Is that basically what you’re — Tom Sowell: Yes, although I would limit to
those who are sort of at the top of this kind of thing, because further down the people
believe things because so many others believe them because they’re in the air and so on. Ben Wattenberg: You know, I was particularly
interested in — what he said was that it is “a calculated effort.” Now, do you believe that the people, “the
anointed,” as you call them, are sitting around in a conspiratorial mode calculating,
as Newt Gingrich says, and saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do”? Or do you just think they’re wrong and this
is what they believe and they have this certain arrogance about it? Because those are two very different ideas,
you know. Tom Sowell: Well, this is why I made the distinction
between the leaders and the others. I mean, I think that when people say things
like, “More American wives are battered on Super Bowl Sunday” — you see that — “than
any other time of the year,” and there’s not a speck of evidence for that, that is
calculated because they — oh, I mean there is no data that could even be misinterpreted
that way; in other words, because there is no data, period. And so, yes. But I think that 99 percent of the people
who believe it are not calculating. I think one of the reasons that it flies without
even being challenged for evidence is that there is a certain vision of how the world
is, and in that world, men are oppressing women. And therefore when you say something like
this, it fits the vision, and that’s the end of it. There’s no demand for evidence. Ben Wattenberg: You have in your book sort
of a series toward the beginning of how the actual process works of forming one of these
ideas — Tom Sowell: Yes. Ben Wattenberg: — and selling it and rejecting
the proof. Maybe you could just kind of march us through
this as a model of it. Tom Sowell: All right, there’s a four-stage
pattern. And in the first stage is what I call the
crisis. And so we’re hyped to believe that something
is a terrible crisis for which something must be done. And what was fascinating to me in doing the
research for this book is that very often the thing that’s said to be in crisis has
often been getting better for years on end, but that gets ignored. In the second stage — Ben Wattenberg: For example, infant mortality,
to use one of the things you were talking about before. Tom Sowell: Well, I’m thinking about teenage
pregnancy and venereal disease. Those things were getting better. Teenage pregnancy was going down for more
than a decade before sex education was introduced. Venereal disease, syphilis in the 1960s had
only half the incidence that it had in 1950. So all of these things are going down, yet
we’re said to need sex education to deal with this crisis which has been manufactured. Again, this is where the calculated part comes
in. Now, 99 percent of the people who hear this
don’t know that, but the reason they accept it is because they also share the same vision,
and because this is consonant with that vision, they don’t have to ask for evidence. Ben Wattenberg: All right, so what’s stage
two? Tom Sowell: Stage two is — Ben Wattenberg: The first one is there’s
a crisis. Tom Sowell: Yes. Ben Wattenberg: They establish a crisis, usually
an artificial one. Tom Sowell: Yes. Then stage two is the solution. You have a solution for this crisis. In this case, you have sex education in the
schools. And then at that point, you say, “If we
do this, this will lead to beneficial result A.” The critics say, “No, it will lead
to detrimental result Z.” Stage three are the results. You put it in and directly you find detrimental
result Z — namely, venereal disease and teenage pregnancy take off into the stratosphere. And then stage four is the fascinating part
in which they simply say, “No, that doesn’t prove that this was a bad policy because there
are many factors. There is complexity. It’s simplistic to blame it on this.” Well, they run through this routine on so
many different things, including crime. Similarly, they said, you know, in 1960, Judge
Baselon said we just desperately need to have some kind of change in the criminal justice
system. Now, in 1960, there were fewer murders than
there had been in 1950, 1940, or 1930. But again, that was completely ignored. And so now we have the revolution of the criminal
justice system. People say, “No, if you put these new things
in, there will be more crime than before.” They put them in. Almost instantly the declining crime rate
turns around and heads up again. And they say, “No, it’s simplistic to
blame this on this. The root cause is in the neglect of society,
and all the rest of it.” So it’s heads I win, tails you lose. Ben Wattenberg: So to go to that earliest
example that you gave, you think the increase in venereal disease was caused by sex education? Tom Sowell: I don’t have to say that. I don’t even have to believe that. All I have to say is that they — Ben Wattenberg: But do you? Tom Sowell: Oh, I think it’s hard to explain
otherwise. I mean, you know, you don’t get social changes
that drastic in a few years without some particular cause. But the argument doesn’t depend on that
at all. The point is, they created the crisis artificially. The evidence shows there was no crisis. But they would not even subject it to any
empirical test. If they want to show some other factor came
in and really caused this, I’m happy to hear that. Ben Wattenberg: Why would a group of liberal
intellectuals or politicians or media stars or whatever, why would they sit around and
decide to dismember or dilute the criminal justice system if they thought in advance
that it would raise the amount of criminality? Tom Sowell: Oh, they didn’t think that,
but the point is — Ben Wattenberg: They just thought wrongly
that it would be — that it would help? Tom Sowell: Yes, but it would also give them
an enormously larger role than they had before. I mean, a judge who just sits there and applies
the laws that have been passed by the legislature has a very minor role. But if he takes the expansive, judicial activist
role, then of course he’s on the leading edge and he can look for the hosannas and
all the rest of it. Ben Wattenberg: How does this play out in
the realm of something you have written about, which is affirmative action? How does that process — what’s the 1,
2, 3, 4 on that? Tom Sowell: I haven’t worked it out like
that, but certainly there is no interest whatever in finding out empirically whether things
have been made better or worse for minorities as a result of this program. And in fact, if you bring up evidence, they’ll
say, “Ah, but things would have been even worse had we not done this.” Similarly with the War on Poverty, you can
show how dependency on government was going down, poverty was going down before this program
was ever put in. And within a few years, dependence on government
was going up, and after a few more years, the absolute number of people in poverty was
going up. Ben Wattenberg: Yeah. I read that in your book, but the absolute
number of poverty is not the relevant data. The relevant data would be the rate of poverty,
and the rate of poverty, in fact, in the 19 — I worked for President Johnson so we have
to establish that. Tom Sowell: Yes. Ben Wattenberg: You know, so I mean the line
we took was that during the 1960s, during the Kennedy-Johnson administration, poverty
did in fact go down sharply. And then the rate since then — not the absolute
number because the country has grown larger — the rate has sort of bounced around at
about flat, somewhere between 12 and 15 percent. Tom Sowell: Yes, but don’t forget, this
was sold to the country not on the grounds that if you transferred money from A to B,
that B would have more money. That was not the argument. The argument was that dependency would be
reduced, that you would, quote, “invest in people,” as Bill Clinton is now saying
now that people have forgotten what was said in the ’60s. This will then — you give them job training
and all those kinds of things, parenting skills, the whole bit, and this will then be an investment
that will pay off in the future because there will be fewer people dependent upon the government
than there were before. And I go through a great number of people,
from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson, The New York Times. Again, all the usual suspects said all these
things. Ben Wattenberg: Lyndon Johnson was not a usual
suspect, Tom. Tom Sowell: Well, he was the primary suspect,
all right. But the fact is that was never tested. And when there were all these wonderful retrospectives
held down in Texas and other places about this, the first order of business is to evade
the criteria that they themselves set up when they set this out. And so no matter what happens, if it’s a
failure by the original criterion, then we just find another criterion by which it will
be a success. Ben Wattenberg: Well, let’s just examine
that for a minute. I have — a friend of mine from those old
White House days was listening to, again, Gingrich, shortly after we had this great
Republican revolution in 1994 — great meaning huge, not necessarily wonderful. We shall see about that. And he kept hearing Newt Gingrich use the
word “opportunity” — “this conservative opportunity society,” “we have to provide
opportunity.” And I was talking to him, and he said, “You
know, Gingrich uses that word ‘opportunity’ almost as much as Johnson did,” which is
what you’re saying, that that was the rhetoric. It was called the Equal — OEO is the Office
of Economic Opportunity, and that’s what it was. Now, so if liberals were talking about opportunity
and now conservatives are talking about opportunity, and I’m sure you’re for opportunity — Tom Sowell: All God’s children got opportunity. Ben Wattenberg: All God’s children got opportunity,
so what is your problem that liberals said we ought to create programs for opportunity? And in point of fact, I mean just to — I
won’t say play devil’s advocate — a lot of the things that came out of the Great
Society, building all those junior colleges and community colleges — Tom Sowell: Oh, I would disagree entirely. That was a tragedy of the first magnitude. Ben Wattenberg: That was a tragedy? Tom Sowell: Yes. Ben Wattenberg: Why is that a tragedy? Tom Sowell: You have millions of people who
have absolutely no desire for an education using up billions of dollars of the taxpayers’
money and not only not getting an education themselves, but making it more difficult to
give an education to those people who came to college with an idea of getting one. Ben Wattenberg: Now, you say they have no
desire for an education. I mean, nobody is herding them into these
community colleges and into the junior colleges and into the state universities. Tom Sowell: Oh. Oh, oh. Ben Wattenberg: I mean, they have a desire,
obviously. Tom Sowell: No, they do not, obviously, because
lots of things go on in those places that are not education. I mean, where else can you find so many young
people of the same age and opposite sex in one place, a nice convenient place to be? But anyone who has taught in a lot of these
places, this ferocious desire for education as such is not terribly visible. And I’ve taught at places where we’ve
gotten, you know, the upper 10, 15 percent of students, I mean UCLA and whatnot, and
neither I nor my colleagues found this great desire for education as such. They wanted to be in ivy-covered buildings
for four years in order to get more money when they graduated and have a good time while
they’re there. Ben Wattenberg: So you think the great American
ideal, which has really been shared by both parties and both ideologies over recent decades,
to allow more people to get into higher education, that that is a bankrupt idea? Tom Sowell: Oh, to allow is one thing, but
to subsidize people at enormous cost with no real sign that this is producing what we
intended it to do — Ben Wattenberg: Well, when you say subsidize,
I mean talk about a junior college or community college. I guess that’s subsidizing. It’s below cost — Tom Sowell: Sure. Ben Wattenberg: — tuition, but it does allow
kids who do not have the money to go to Amherst or wherever to start a college education. I mean — Tom Sowell: People did that before the Great
Society. I did it before the Great Society. My whole generation did it before the Great
Society. Ben Wattenberg: You are saying that the great
humanitarian political impulses of the 1960s have been, almost without exception, bad? Tom Sowell: Well, there were some good ones,
but I’m saying that the assumption that on the education front — I mean, I would
defy you to find a large number of people who have actually taught these students who
really think that they’re out there thirsting for knowledge. If you think — Ben Wattenberg: Suppose they are thirsting
for a better job, and we have set up a society where you have to be credentialed with a certain
amount of college. So aren’t they able to get a better job
because of their credentials? Tom Sowell: No. This is the fallacy of composition. You know, if one person stands up in the stadium,
he sees the game better, but if they all stand up, they don’t all see the game better. As long as — you know, if you have a degree
and the other guy doesn’t, then you get ahead of him in the employment line. But we’re not going to all get ahead of
each other in the employment line by all getting degrees. Ben Wattenberg: So this whole idea that I
guess again both liberals and conservatives are saying is that, at this particular moment,
1995, we have to get more people into the education system because that’s the way
to compete. And we look at the data, and we see that the
people with more education are earning more money than ever before relative to the people
with less education. That’s all a fallacy of everybody standing
up in the stadium? Tom Sowell: People who fly on the Concorde
— kids who have flown on the Concorde undoubtedly will make more money than people who — kids
who have only gone on buses. That does not mean if we put a lot of people
on the Concorde, we’re going to raise the national income. Ben Wattenberg: We would increase the revenues
of the Concorde. Tom Sowell: Yes, which they desperately need,
of course, but that’s another story. Ben Wattenberg: All right, and just to review
the bidding, you date the full-blown nature of this situation sort of in the 1960s. Is that right? Tom Sowell: Yes, yes. Ben Wattenberg: I mean, and that’s — everyone
on the conservative side starts — I mean “genesis” is mid-1960s. That’s when the world started. I mean, and I’m not arguing with that necessarily. I — Tom Sowell: Well, not necessarily. I would say, “the fall in the garden.” Ben Wattenberg: Right, okay. All right now, since the 1960s, the United
States of America has won the Cold War, remained a — while a lot of people, including a lot
of — mostly conservatives were saying, “Oh, America has lost its nerve.” And we, because — Tom Sowell: I don’t think it was mostly
conservatives. Ben Wattenberg: Well, I recall an issue of
the Public Interest in the mid-1970s saying, “Has America lost its nerve,” with a whole
bunch of conservatives saying, “Oh, my God, it’s terrible, we’re” — Tom Sowell: Well, this is Jimmy Carter’s
era. Ben Wattenberg: Well, maybe that’s right. But, so since this terrible event 30 years
ago, when the ’60s dropped upon us, we have won the Cold War. We have continued to grow in affluence, in
professional skills. We have absorbed about 20 million immigrants. We are the wealthiest, freest country in the
history of the world. You would agree with all of that, roughly? Tom Sowell: Well, I disagree entirely with
your base period. Ben Wattenberg: No, no, it’s your base period. Tom Sowell: No, no. No, no, no, no. None of these things — Ben Wattenberg: You established the 1960s. I didn’t. I trapped you. Tom Sowell: No, I’m saying that all those
things that you talk about began long before the 1960s. They faltered to a great extent under Jimmy
Carter. They were resumed with a renewed vigor in
the 1980s under an entirely different kind of vision. But I’m talking about the social decline
of the country because the social decline is all the more striking because here is a
country that is prosperous. You can’t blame the crime rate on the fact
that there is more poverty. There is less poverty. There is more affluence. It’s not due to foreigners because, as you
say, we’ve won the Cold War. All the normal things that you might blame
all this on aren’t there. It’s not because of diseases because science
has conquered more diseases. It’s all because of self-inflicted wounds. And I’m saying these are the people who
inflicted those wounds, and this is why we shouldn’t listen to them anymore. Ben Wattenberg: What are the nature of those
wounds? Tom Sowell: Crime. Ben Wattenberg: No, no, no. I — Tom Sowell: The disintegration of the family,
the disintegration of the educational system. And it’s not going to matter — we’ll
be like the man who gained the whole world and lost his soul. Ben Wattenberg: Is there a common root to
all of those problems other than you heard them from the anointed class? I mean, is there something — Tom Sowell: Yes, yes, yes. Ben Wattenberg: Is it big government? Is that what — Tom Sowell: No, no. It’s the notion that ordinary people cannot
be trusted to make the decisions that they’ve been making, that they must be preempted,
either by judges, in the case of crime, or by the schools taking over the indoctrination
of other people’s children behind their back and against their protest, or what was
the other one? The family. Taking money from the taxpayers and subsidizing
behavior as well as encouraging it and legitimizing behavior that has turned out to be enormously
self-destructive, undermining the family in a thousand different ways. Ben Wattenberg: Tom, you write in your new
book, “The Vision of the Anointed,” available at all bookstores, about the “Teflon prophets.” Tom Sowell: Yes. Ben Wattenberg: What is — Tom Sowell: Well, I think my favorite is Paul
Ehrlich because he has been so consistently wrong on so many things. One, predicting mass starvation, I think it
was in the ’70s or the ’80s. But predicting that we’re running out of
— running low on resources. And Julian Simon made this famous bet with
him that he would offer to bet anybody a thousand dollars that they could name a set of resources
and name a period of time, and at the end of that period of time, those resources would
not be more expensive, as they would be if they were really running low, but would be
either stationary or falling in real terms. And Ehrlich rushed in with his list of 10
resources, and he decided we’d come back at the end of 10 years. At the end of 10 years, not only was the bundle
of 10 resources cheaper in real terms than it was before, every single resource he named
was cheaper. Ben Wattenberg: Let me raise a final point
here. You make this vigorous attack in “The Vision
of the Anointed” that we should no longer listen to these people. That’s sort of the basic — they’ve been
wrong, they don’t prove their points, it’s hurt us. Who should we listen to? Tom Sowell: We should listen first and foremost
to our own experience. You seem to be saying, well, there must be
alternative saviors. We should stop looking for saviors. I mean, the society has not existed for thousands
of years because it had a succession of saviors. It’s existed because it has institutions
and processes through which people can realize their own goals. Ben Wattenberg: No, I understand that, but
you are attacking people who would like to lead us and tell us how the world works. Tom Sowell: No, no. No, no, they don’t want to tell us how the
world works. They want to take over the decision for us. They don’t tell parents how they ought to
teach sex education to their children. They put this material in the schools behind
the backs of the parents with instructions not to let the parents see it. That’s the problem. Ben Wattenberg: Okay, but we live in an open
and democratic society. Now, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public are listening
to this program, I hope, and they’re saying, “Boy, that guy really makes a lot of sense.” But basically, it’s been a negative proposition:
Don’t listen to these people, don’t do this, don’t do that. Tom Sowell: No, no. Ben Wattenberg: Who should — Tom Sowell: Don’t let those people run your
lives. Ben Wattenberg: Okay, but how do you practically
— Tom Sowell: I think it’s a non-problem,
Ben. It’s a non-problem. Those people are adults just like you and
me. They have been running their lives for thousands
of years. They don’t need me to tell them what to
do. Ben Wattenberg: But this is a — Tom Sowell: It’s not a question I want to
take over from people on the left. I want them to continue to make their decisions
as they see fit. Ben Wattenberg: Right, but this is a democracy. They have to vote. Tom Sowell: Even in a democracy, they can
live their lives as they see fit. Ben Wattenberg: Who should they vote for? Tom Sowell: Oh, good heavens. They’ve been voting for whoever they wanted
to without my help for 200 years. Ben Wattenberg: But some people are voting
for the people who are listening to these anointed people. I mean, give the audience some advice. Tell them what to do. Tom Sowell: Well, last year, in 1994, without
any help from me whatsoever, they changed who they voted for, and so it’s a non-problem. Ben Wattenberg: You say without any help from
you, but you and your confreres in the conservative movement I think have had an influence. Tom Sowell: But it wasn’t because of this
book, obviously. Ben Wattenberg: Not because of this book,
but because of your earlier wonderful books. Tom Sowell, thank you very much. And thank you. Please send your questions and comments to
New River Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20036. We can also be reached via email at thinktv@aol.com
or on the World Wide Web at www.thinktank.com. For “Think Tank,” I’m Ben Wattenberg. Announcer: This has been a production of BJW
Inc., in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content.
Submission Statement:
The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts -- and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites. These elites -- the anointed -- often consider themselves "thinking people," but much of what they call thinking turns out, on examination, to be rhetorical assertion, followed by evasions of mounting evidence against those assertions.
Thanks for this! I haven’t watched it yet, but I’m always happy to find a Sowell interview I haven’t seen yet.