The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 17, 2025


Can The Administrative State Be Right-Wing？ ｜ Guest： Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry ｜ 2⧸17⧸ 25


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per Minute

164.22723

Word Count

10,117

Sentence Count

557

Misogynist Sentences

6

Hate Speech Sentences

16


Summary

Pascal Emanuel Gobry is a French journalist, blogger, and writer who writes about the American founding and its relationship with the administrative state. In this episode, Pascal and I talk about his writing, his interests, and his views on the role of the state in American politics.


Transcript

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00:01:28.940 Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. If you're watching the live stream right now, just want to let you know I am actually in London at the ARC conference. So this is recorded. If you have any questions or super chats, always appreciate the support. But obviously, we won't be able to respond to them today. Joining me today is somebody who I'm going to be watching.
00:01:58.920 I have been talking to on Twitter for a very long time, but I've never got to speak with in person.
00:02:05.260 We got we got talking a little bit about the administrative state and we're going to talk about that, but really just kind of explore a lot of what's going on in the global political situation and the United States.
00:02:15.960 He is Pascal Emanuel Gobry. He runs the Policy Sphere podcast and news organization. Thanks for coming on, man.
00:02:25.040 Thanks, man. It's it's great to be here. Same back to you. I've loved your stuff for a very long time. Be looking forward to this for a very long time.
00:02:32.940 So for people who might not be familiar, maybe haven't seen your work on Twitter, what's your background? What do you do? How do you find yourself working in politics today?
00:02:42.040 Oh, man. Yeah. So first of all, the possibility that there's somebody who doesn't already follow me is sort of, you know, I don't I don't consider that to be a possibility.
00:02:52.540 I am a Twitter niche micro celebrity. I am a French national, but I've been interested in American politics for a very long time.
00:03:03.720 And so I started writing about it for various newspapers and organizations.
00:03:08.100 Then I got a job at a think tank. And now I run this website called Policy Sphere, which is sort of right wing politico, you could say.
00:03:17.800 Politico for the good guys. We're not getting any USAID money.
00:03:23.380 I was going to say, how much are you on the take? Right, right. Well, exactly. Exactly.
00:03:28.240 Well, that that segues into our conversation about the administrative state, joking aside.
00:03:32.980 And I also have a more general interest podcast, which is called the Sphere podcast.
00:03:37.960 Excellent. All right. Well, people should definitely check out your work.
00:03:40.320 Like I said, been enjoying your Twitter account for a very long time.
00:03:43.960 And people should certainly follow in the odd chance that they may not currently if they're like one of the five people.
00:03:49.440 Right. That have not have not followed. Now they have the opportunity.
00:03:53.360 But yeah, the thing that started this possible conversation is you were responding to someone who had pointed out the idea that Adrian Vermeule
00:04:03.280 and Patrick Deneen generally saw the administrative state as being able to coexist, jives with the possibility of the American founding.
00:04:15.860 It's in the spirit of it. It could be part of this.
00:04:18.980 Now, I found that interesting. I haven't specifically seen.
00:04:21.940 I know that Vermeule feels that way. I haven't seen Deneen write a lot about this.
00:04:27.240 I've read, you know, two of his books and I enjoy his work in general, but I'm not I'm not exhaustively familiar with everything that he's written.
00:04:35.800 So you've read only two of his books. That's very high level.
00:04:39.920 Yeah. Well, yeah. Very 30,000 feet.
00:04:44.940 The point being, I have not seen their arguments specifically on this issue other than Vermeule kind of, you know, talking about the possibility of Leviathan being used for good.
00:04:55.520 But could you maybe lay out a little bit a general you don't have to own their case, but a general idea of how they feel that this could work with the American founding and its principles?
00:05:05.940 So, OK, so that's that's an interesting way of putting it.
00:05:10.760 So obviously, I'm not speaking for either Vermeule or Deneen, neither of whom I've met, although I've corresponded with them and I and we know people in common.
00:05:20.780 But obviously, you know, they speak for themselves. I don't speak for them.
00:05:23.740 In terms of the relationship to the American between the American state and the American founding, I think that's very interesting because I think that the American founding is actually a lot more complicated than than either.
00:05:36.440 There are the sort of obviously the left wing woke story we all know is false, but there's a kind of normie con story where there were all like evangelical Christian conservatives from 1975, which is not all which is also not true.
00:05:49.680 And in particular, if you look at the tension between Hamilton and Jefferson, I think Hamilton had a sort of very, frankly, imperial vision or at least a sort of, you know, muscular vision of the future America that he envisioned, which he envisioned as a sort of a much bigger nation than the 13 colonies, whether he envisaged it, you know, going all the way to the Pacific.
00:06:17.960 But he envisaged it as this sort of, you know, New York financialized society, his own draft, his own first idea for the Constitution was something a lot closer to the British Constitution with essentially like the president as a king and a sort of parliament that's kind of a watchdog and more, but really a very strong executive.
00:06:43.160 And so, you know, did all of the founding fathers want an administrative state?
00:06:52.020 No, obviously, you know, Jefferson was on the opposite end of the spectrum and he had this sort of very sort of agrarian and so on vision.
00:07:00.840 But like the idea that this is totally alien to the founding, that the founding fathers all wanted this sort of, you know, agrarian, no government, quasi anarchy where, you know, there's basically like five guys in Washington and nobody knows what they're doing and nobody cares.
00:07:22.000 That's the only thing they envisaged.
00:07:25.340 I don't think it's true historically.
00:07:28.680 So, yeah.
00:07:30.660 Yeah, no, I think that there is a huge problem.
00:07:34.320 Like you said, obviously, the left's narrative is wildly and comically bad, but the right's narrative is often very simplistic.
00:07:42.380 It's the idea that the founders collectively had a unified vision and they could just uncover the vision of the founders, then we would know the direction in which the United States should move.
00:07:55.760 And the tension between kind of the mercantile, urban, imperial side of the United States and its rural, agrarian, you know, more anarchist understanding has basically been the story of the entire United States.
00:08:12.660 I come from a region that was conquered is the proper word.
00:08:18.420 And so, you know, we know.
00:08:20.280 Where are you from?
00:08:21.160 I'm sorry.
00:08:21.560 I'm from the South.
00:08:22.600 So, okay.
00:08:23.260 Yeah, so the war of northern aggression is still the way it's going to be.
00:08:29.100 The war of northern aggression.
00:08:31.100 And so we have an understanding.
00:08:34.940 If you're not part of this kind of mainstream narrative, if you're part of the people who may have been reconstructed, you know that you're not necessarily plugged into some unified understanding of the United States.
00:08:47.320 That actually this has been the, whether it was the whiskey rebellion or, you know, the annulment crisis is everything else that's gone through American history.
00:08:56.600 There most certainly has not been this one vision of kind of where the United States was going, which works to its advantage and its detriment.
00:09:05.940 In one, you know, instance, it means we haven't had to have a large amount of official revolutions in the United States.
00:09:13.100 We kind of just pivot, you know, France has got its republics.
00:09:16.720 We're like, no, it's just one republic the whole time.
00:09:19.460 Like, we just kind of kept the same thing going, even though we've radically changed the way that the government operates.
00:09:25.460 It's like the famous South Park episode where, you know, the American thing is like everybody's got every opinion.
00:09:32.100 That way we can we can pretend that we were always doing the same thing all along or something that precisely.
00:09:39.860 Yeah. So so this so this idea that Americans often, especially conservative Americans, take of that there being a unified founding just doesn't quite hold up.
00:09:48.100 And you can even see this. It's funny if you read like the Federalist Papers, you can see Hamilton fighting about like, well, no, you really do need to give you the control of your militias over to the United States government, the federal government, so that we don't have to have a standing army because we all know how dangerous standing armies are.
00:10:04.620 And the Hamilton's like, but we're definitely going to make a standing army. Right.
00:10:07.000 So that's even inside the documents in which they're kind of arguing for the current Constitution, we don't necessarily see a consistent understanding of kind of how America is going to operate.
00:10:18.920 So I think we can leave to the side this idea that it does or does not work with the specific spirit of the American founding, because like you said, there are at least two and probably many more which we could ascribe this to.
00:10:32.800 So I guess the next question is, do we think that an administrative state is good, is a positive thing, not just for America, but for countries in general?
00:10:45.060 Right, right. Yeah. So that's that's the thing that sort of got me to respond to you.
00:10:50.300 And then we decided to talk about it is you were sort of associating the idea of administrative state with sort of like imperial decline.
00:10:57.320 And I don't think I mean, you know, I'm biased.
00:11:03.180 I come from France. We're a country that was built by the administrative state that invented in a way the administrative state.
00:11:09.160 I mean, you have precedents with the medieval church, the Roman Empire, especially, but certainly the modern administrative state.
00:11:17.320 And and and and it's sort of it's it's a country that's sort of impossible to imagine without a strong government.
00:11:25.900 And so a couple of points I would make one of the points that Vermeule makes and that like sort of really changed my view on this, because I have I have friends on the other side of this, people like you've all lived in and so on and so forth.
00:11:41.820 And the sort of anti the point that Vermeule makes is that the power of the administrative state was not stolen.
00:11:51.180 It was given by Congress. So if you have a sort of like I'm it's condescending to say eighth grade level.
00:11:59.680 That's not what I meant. But it's the sort of normicon understanding of the Constitution is you don't need an administrative state because Congress makes those decisions.
00:12:07.660 And what we found under every party, every administration for over 100 years is that Congress doesn't want to make those decisions.
00:12:16.800 Consistently, what it does is say.
00:12:19.880 I'm going to, you know, I, Congress, in order that these decisions be made, will hand a bit of my power to an agency or a bureau or whatever I'm going to create.
00:12:34.580 And I'm going to say, you know, there's going to be money to staff experts to make those decisions because I, Congress, doesn't don't want to make those decisions.
00:12:42.920 And it's sort of, you know.
00:12:46.600 One of the great conservative or right wing or whatever virtues is to sort of acknowledge reality, right?
00:12:53.040 Like every single time you gave Congress the power back, it's sort of like, I don't, maybe it should be, but it won't.
00:13:03.260 And it doesn't. And it never has in 100 years.
00:13:05.700 And so, like, so you have all of these schemes, you know, that conservatives come up with of, oh, we're going to, you know, we're going to defund this agency or we're going to streamline this, blah, blah, blah.
00:13:19.440 It's like, okay, fine.
00:13:20.760 But, like, at the end of the day, somebody's going to decide, you know, how to regulate some bit of the spectrum for the frequencies for 5G phones, right?
00:13:33.140 Like, somebody's got to decide that.
00:13:35.340 And Congress is going to say, I don't know.
00:13:38.660 You know what I mean?
00:13:40.780 99% of the time.
00:13:43.480 And so, at the end of the day, some decisions have to be made about how we organize certain things.
00:13:52.880 And at the end of the day, in every modern country that I'm aware of, these decisions are made by a class of people.
00:14:03.140 Whose job it is to make those decisions, who are experts on those decisions.
00:14:07.460 And there's nothing wrong with that.
00:14:09.140 The problem comes when those people are unpatriotic, when they're sort of captured either by private interests or by an ideology like, you know, wokeness or gay race communism or whatever you want to call it.
00:14:23.940 But, like, the idea that there's a problem in and of itself with having this, I just disagree.
00:14:36.200 And it's not just that it's good.
00:14:39.080 It's sort of necessary.
00:14:40.820 You know, the example with the standing military is very good.
00:14:45.680 Like, if you're going to operate, you know, if you live in a world where a military needs to have F-22s, you can't have a militia with guys who are doing this, like, one weekend a month.
00:14:57.880 You need professionals who, like, study special things to fly and maintain the plane.
00:15:05.060 And that means that you need other professionals to sort of do the accounting and so on and so forth.
00:15:11.020 And, like, you can say, oh, you know, the Pentagon, it's very efficient.
00:15:16.440 It's very inefficient.
00:15:17.880 It should be reformed.
00:15:19.000 It's corrupt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:15:20.460 But to say, oh, you know, we don't need anybody whose full-time job is to work on this stuff.
00:15:27.340 We can just, you know, you know, citizens will do it part-time and whatever.
00:15:33.260 And, like, Congress will make the decisions.
00:15:36.040 And, like, no, you don't.
00:15:38.200 Like, if you want, you know, if you want F-22s and, like, cruisers and, like, tanks,
00:15:45.500 that implies a class of professionals whose job is to purchase, design, maintain, blah, blah, blah,
00:15:54.120 the tanks and the boats and the planes.
00:15:56.400 And that implies an administrative state.
00:15:59.280 And so it's true for military stuff.
00:16:01.500 It's true for the civilian stuff.
00:16:03.360 So a couple things there.
00:16:05.220 I'm with you that I think that formalization is a positive step in governance.
00:16:11.580 I would just rather us say what is true and necessary and acknowledge the truth and necessity
00:16:16.540 of those things rather than put us through nine steps of something that can't actually
00:16:22.480 work so that we're doing this kabuki theater about where power actually lies and where decisions
00:16:27.280 are made.
00:16:28.280 So to the extent that, yeah, every time we try to hand power back to Congress, they basically
00:16:33.760 hand it back to administrators.
00:16:35.600 It's a fair point.
00:16:36.740 But at that point, the question is, why do we have Congress, right?
00:16:39.580 Like, what's the I mean, it sounds like a joke, but I'm not joking even a little bit.
00:16:44.140 Like, if if you if if Congress is useless, if in the modern world, it literally cannot operate
00:16:49.920 a government and refuses to operate a government, then just cut it out, right?
00:16:53.520 Like, just just get rid of it.
00:16:54.800 Like, it's unnecessary.
00:16:56.520 Just have the executive appoint, you know, the agencies that he needs to do to get this
00:17:02.100 done.
00:17:02.380 I don't understand why if if these people are entirely incapable of managing the responsibility
00:17:09.060 handed to them or in any way stimming the power of other agencies in which they should
00:17:14.560 be the check on them, then there is literally no reason for them to exist.
00:17:18.380 In addition to this, there's also the problem of your you're, of course, correct that the
00:17:25.080 maintenance of an F-22 requires a professional force.
00:17:28.020 You can't you can't just, you know, get your you get your minute men together and have
00:17:32.460 them run a fully involved carrier group.
00:17:35.740 That's just not how that works.
00:17:37.500 However, there's some key things that get changed when you shift to this mode of understanding
00:17:43.700 and governance.
00:17:44.480 You can't have a real republic that runs like this.
00:17:49.300 Everyone from, you know, Aristotle to Machiavelli recognize that, like, military service is what
00:17:56.060 makes you a citizen in a republic.
00:17:57.420 This is also what the founders of the United States believe, which is the actual reason
00:18:01.420 the Second Amendment exists, because you're not supposed to have a standing army.
00:18:04.200 You are the standing army.
00:18:05.300 Yes.
00:18:05.400 That's what makes you a citizen.
00:18:06.940 And so that that's why things like the franchise expand infinitely because remove the only real
00:18:13.900 requirement for being a real citizen.
00:18:16.520 And so there's no reason that 16 year olds from Guatemala shouldn't be voting in American
00:18:21.340 elections because nobody has to serve.
00:18:24.320 So what's the actual restriction?
00:18:26.760 And so when we shift the nature of the military service, we actually fundamentally change something
00:18:31.820 about the structure of the government and citizenship itself.
00:18:35.360 And we actually make republicanism impossible.
00:18:38.400 So we need to get rid of Congress and the idea that we're a republic in any real sense.
00:18:43.000 Again, I'm not advocating for this one for another.
00:18:45.420 I'm just saying these are the logical formalizations of the actual governance model we're advocating
00:18:50.560 for.
00:18:50.980 So if we're going to do this, let's not pussyfoot around about it.
00:18:54.240 Right.
00:18:54.380 Let's just say what we're really doing.
00:18:56.540 So what we're doing is we're shifting in what Gautama Mosca called from a feudal society
00:19:01.740 to a bureaucratic society.
00:19:02.900 So we're always oscillating between one of these two ends.
00:19:07.120 And so the bureaucratic society is just going to have real fundamental differences in the way
00:19:12.080 it can understand political power and it comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
00:19:16.840 For instance, having the F-22 means we can maintain parity with China.
00:19:20.840 It also means that we lose to goat herders in Afghanistan.
00:19:24.400 Not directly, not because of the F-22, but the model of country that produces and maintains
00:19:31.420 an F-22 loses to goat herders.
00:19:33.900 Not because they can defeat F-22s, but they can defeat the kind of nation that models itself
00:19:40.020 in a way that maintains F-22s.
00:19:42.180 That's a cost that is not built into the raw military technology.
00:19:46.160 Yeah.
00:19:46.300 Theoretically, we could murder everybody in Afghanistan with that F-22 if we wanted to.
00:19:50.420 In reality, the kind of government that creates F-22 won't do that.
00:19:55.020 And so therefore, you're in a situation where, yes, you have superior military technology, but
00:19:58.920 you can't defeat inferior political forces with it because of exactly the type of politics
00:20:05.100 you're practicing by creating that regime.
00:20:08.660 Right.
00:20:09.460 So, I mean, so many things.
00:20:13.320 Yeah, there's a lot there.
00:20:14.040 Pick which one you have.
00:20:15.060 Oh, yeah.
00:20:16.320 So, first of all, with, you know, enormous...
00:20:22.880 So, no.
00:20:23.520 First of all, how red-pilled are we allowed to be on this podcast if we're talking about
00:20:28.100 getting rid of Congress within the first time?
00:20:29.920 I mean, obviously, we're relatively red-pilled at this point.
00:20:33.160 I mean, no.
00:20:34.260 Well, so your first question was about the American founding.
00:20:38.340 And so if we're trying to work within the existing American constitutional system, I think, again,
00:20:44.460 I don't think it's...
00:20:46.160 And maybe that framework is just, you know, it's been gone, you know, since the War of
00:20:51.980 Northern Aggression or since the New Deal or whatever, and we're never going to get it
00:20:56.900 back.
00:20:57.240 And we need Red Caesar and blah, blah, blah.
00:20:59.320 Maybe that's true.
00:20:59.980 But putting that aside, within the context of the American framework, such as it is today,
00:21:07.740 I don't think it's crazy to say, look, Congress is going to, like, set broad guidelines and sort
00:21:16.340 of appropriate, like, chunks of budget.
00:21:19.420 And then the executive is going to, like, figure out the details, essentially.
00:21:26.220 That's not, you know, that may not be exactly what Washington and Jefferson had in mind, but it's also
00:21:33.980 not, you know, it's not the Death Star.
00:21:39.180 Okay, so that's one point.
00:21:41.000 Secondly, I mean, with enormous respect to the Italian School of Political Science, which
00:21:48.860 is, you know, I bow, the idea that there's two categories of society, either feudal or
00:21:57.700 bureaucratic, I just disagree with.
00:22:02.100 I mean, those are certainly two categories that exist, but the idea that there's a clean
00:22:06.780 separation, I think you have two fundamental...
00:22:11.000 ...questions, which is, who has the guns and who has the money?
00:22:17.720 And so, in a feudal society, it's very clear who has the guns and it's very clear who has
00:22:24.180 the money.
00:22:24.620 It's the aristocratic caste.
00:22:29.460 In a bureaucratic society or in a non-feudal sort of advanced society that has a bureaucracy,
00:22:36.860 that's the kind of distinction I would make.
00:22:39.640 Having a bureaucracy doesn't necessarily mean that the bureaucracy sort of controls the
00:22:44.580 country as a class, right?
00:22:46.920 And so, if you look at, for example, France in the early modern era, it had a bureaucracy,
00:22:53.640 but it also had a sort of feudal system, but it also had a king.
00:22:59.540 Do you know what I mean?
00:23:03.460 It wasn't either or.
00:23:05.820 It was this sort of complicated mix where you had aspects of a modern state, aspects of an
00:23:11.200 ancient state.
00:23:12.140 And I'm not saying, you know, that should be the model that the U.S. should go to.
00:23:16.620 I'm just saying, you know, the idea, oh, if you accept that you're going to have a permanent
00:23:22.220 bureaucracy, then automatically you become like this stagnant, you know, late Chinese
00:23:27.900 empire where everything is decided by some, you know, person in an office who never sees
00:23:34.300 sunlight and there's no innovation and there's no vitality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:23:39.800 I just don't think that's true.
00:23:41.660 I think that it's, just as if you have a standing army, it doesn't mean you're a military
00:23:49.260 dictatorship.
00:23:50.060 You know what I mean?
00:23:51.060 I should clarify that Moscow saw this as a continuum, not a binary.
00:23:55.400 So we're moving towards one or the other, but yes, you can clearly exist, you know, in
00:24:01.500 the middle, you know, somewhere you may be closer to the feudal, closer to the bureaucracy.
00:24:05.480 These are the extreme ends you're going to be ending up in, not, oh, well, the minute we
00:24:09.860 have three bureaucrats, we've clicked over into late stage decline empire.
00:24:14.840 That's not exactly what he was presenting.
00:24:17.280 Okay.
00:24:17.840 Okay.
00:24:18.180 Well, well, well, that's, that's, that's, that's good to know because that, that, that
00:24:22.580 was the impression I got from your tweet that that's the argument you were making.
00:24:26.260 And I was like, no, like you don't actually, uh, I mean, maybe sometimes societies just
00:24:33.400 decline, right?
00:24:34.380 And there's nothing you can do to stop it.
00:24:36.280 I don't think that's true of, I don't think that's necessarily true of America in the 21st
00:24:40.940 century.
00:24:41.300 I think, and this is, and maybe we, this can start off a sort of broader conversation about
00:24:47.300 the right and the future, uh, of America and this new golden age where we're making America
00:24:53.600 great again, um, I, what I would like the American right to understand, uh, and I'm going to say
00:25:02.540 this in my very arrogant French way, I'm explaining you how things are, uh, is that, you know, in
00:25:12.000 a modern world where you have political enemies using government can be good.
00:25:17.360 And so I, I was just writing something about this, like, uh, Chris Rufo, who I admire, who's
00:25:25.820 great, wrote this thing about dismantling the department of education and he, and he outlined
00:25:32.420 how you do it, blah, blah, blah.
00:25:34.520 And, and this is also good because I knew you used to be a teacher.
00:25:39.160 Like if, you know, the big ideas we block grant.
00:25:42.140 And so currently the department of education says, you know, if you want federal funding,
00:25:48.900 obviously, you know, education is, is the state.
00:25:52.140 So you don't, you're not forced to take it, but in practice, you're forced to take it.
00:25:56.480 And if you do take it, then you have to agree to this and this and this and this and conservatives
00:26:01.460 want to block grant it, which means the government still writes you, writes states checks based
00:26:07.280 on how many students they have, how many low income students they have and so forth.
00:26:10.760 But there's no strings attached.
00:26:12.680 And that means you can fire a bunch of bureaucrats.
00:26:15.040 Okay.
00:26:15.680 Well, you know, do you think that schools in California are going to stop teaching that,
00:26:22.300 you know, America is a racist, sexist hell hole because they get a blog grant instead
00:26:28.600 of a department of education, uh, mandate?
00:26:32.820 No, I, I think, I think that we should use the department of education to make the Californians
00:26:39.620 teach their children correct things about American history, about the American founding.
00:26:45.460 I think we should take the 1776 commission, uh, report, which was this thing that's Trump
00:26:51.860 set up in his first term in response to the 1619 project.
00:26:56.940 And just, and, and, and, and say, if you want department of education money, you have to
00:27:03.780 apply the 1776 commission curriculum.
00:27:07.100 And we're going to have, we're going to have bureaucrats in the department of education
00:27:14.200 that are going to make sure that you comply and it's going to be their job.
00:27:17.800 And they're going to live, live in Washington, DC and receive a government salary and go into
00:27:22.220 a government office to do their government job, which there's nothing wrong with.
00:27:27.980 You know what I mean?
00:27:28.980 That's, that's just one example and one among many.
00:27:33.060 So I want to be clear.
00:27:34.460 Uh, I'm not allergic to power, um, which should be, I know you aren't, which is why I wanted
00:27:39.660 to have this discussion with you.
00:27:40.940 Yeah.
00:27:41.620 So, so I'm, I'm not a libertarian and I'm not even really a conservative, uh, in the
00:27:46.440 sense of, of how government should be structured or how power should be wielded.
00:27:51.040 I don't have a particular problem, uh, with power, uh, but here's the way I think about
00:27:57.380 it.
00:27:57.680 Um, you have basically three ways you can do this.
00:28:01.020 Like I'm with you that ultimately if power exists, it's probably going to get used.
00:28:05.220 And so it might as well be used for some, for something good instead of something bad.
00:28:09.140 So you have like three ways you can go about doing what we're talking about here.
00:28:13.460 You can go, um, uh, kind of the way you're talking about, which is basically we need an
00:28:19.460 anti-fascist crusade for wokeness, right?
00:28:22.040 Like we need a German style.
00:28:23.920 We're erasing this, uh, alien ideology that perverted the state.
00:28:28.640 That's a good analogy.
00:28:29.360 Yeah.
00:28:29.820 Right.
00:28:30.100 Like if you, if you want to make like, sorry, but even bureaucrats aren't going to make
00:28:34.580 California teach that America isn't racist unless they literally start throwing
00:28:38.880 people in jail.
00:28:39.880 Like that, that's, that's how you solve that problem.
00:28:42.320 And it can be solved.
00:28:43.480 We know that anti-fascist crusades work, but one got ran in the United States before it
00:28:49.140 ever happened in Germany.
00:28:50.620 Like you can reconstruct people like that can happen, but you, you need to be comfortable
00:28:57.360 with the idea that you're going to be putting people in jail.
00:28:59.840 You're, if you need to send the 82nd airborne to escort kids to school, then that's what you
00:29:04.800 do.
00:29:05.160 Like you need to make peace with that is the way in which you're going to do it.
00:29:09.400 And you need to not do it halfway.
00:29:10.860 Like half a revolution doesn't work.
00:29:12.740 You either get it all root and branch or you don't do it all.
00:29:15.660 So one option is to just reconstruct the lips, right?
00:29:19.320 That, that, that's one option.
00:29:20.540 The other, the next option is to try to do a kind of a Curtis Yarvin, a woo thing, right?
00:29:28.480 Like where we, we get enough of the dark elves together and they, they write the beautiful
00:29:33.840 plays and television shows and books and everything that changed the elite culture.
00:29:39.240 And then this, you know, trickles down and it just, you just charm everyone into this
00:29:45.400 idea that, you know, progressivism is dead.
00:29:47.620 We don't need to have a reconstruction because you just recognize what is culturally ascendant
00:29:54.000 and you move along with it.
00:29:55.240 And to be clear, I don't think these, these, these are the hard three options.
00:29:58.780 There's stages in between, but these are the three.
00:30:01.300 And then the third one is, uh, you actually do real federalism and you just partition.
00:30:07.140 Like you actually just say, all right, California is in charge of California.
00:30:10.880 Florida is in charge of Florida, uh, you know, and, and, and you actually, um, whether formally
00:30:16.240 or informally separate the amount of governance overlap as much as possible and do what the
00:30:22.400 founders did intend, which is for them to have this, this level of, of, I'll, I'll go on to
00:30:27.580 the next point cause I don't want to go on to that forever.
00:30:29.200 But what do you think about those, those options in the past that should be taken?
00:30:33.660 Yeah.
00:30:34.000 I mean, I, uh, so federalism doesn't work for the simple reason that everybody has to
00:30:40.660 agree to it.
00:30:42.900 Uh, and I used to tell this story in private.
00:30:46.080 I'm going to tell it in public because it happened in public anyway.
00:30:48.480 Uh, before Chris Hayes was on MSNBC, you know, Chris Hayes is, uh, I had, and this was during
00:30:56.920 the tea party.
00:30:58.560 Um, I had this conversation with him and I said, well, look, why don't we do this?
00:31:04.320 Like, you know, and New York and California get to be super communist and in exchange,
00:31:09.060 Texas and well, back then Florida was a purple state, but Texas and Alabama get to whatever.
00:31:14.260 And I will never forget his response.
00:31:17.560 He said, no, because it would mean that somewhere, someone in America would get paid less than
00:31:22.760 minimum wage.
00:31:24.120 Right.
00:31:24.180 He needs to conquer the world.
00:31:25.420 His only solution is to conquer everybody and rule them.
00:31:27.900 Yes.
00:31:28.240 And I thought like, literally that, like, that's what's, you know, that's the thing you're going
00:31:33.240 to fight over.
00:31:34.960 It's like someone somewhere might be paid less than minimum wage.
00:31:37.800 Anyway, I thought that was the, so, you know, you may not be, you know, they're never going
00:31:44.940 to let you just grill.
00:31:46.760 You may not be interested in libs.
00:31:48.580 The libs are interested in you.
00:31:49.660 The federalism is dead.
00:31:52.400 Uh, the reconstruction option.
00:31:54.540 I mean, I would be for it.
00:31:56.720 Absolutely.
00:31:57.500 I just don't think it's possible under the current regime.
00:32:01.520 Uh, uh, what I, what I was thinking about, which is.
00:32:07.800 Under the current regime.
00:32:09.740 And I'm just going to coin a phrase and you're, you're in Europe, you know, you can, you can
00:32:13.620 ask around about this, which is what I would call the Orban option, which is a, an option
00:32:22.080 that respects the forms of this, of a sort of liberal regime and actually respects them
00:32:28.560 in the sense, you know, it's not like Russia where the elections are completely fake, right?
00:32:32.520 It's their actual elections and you can, you know, their real elections and like nobody
00:32:37.480 gets sent to jail for having the wrong political opinion, including, you know, having accidents
00:32:42.980 and things like, it's not true.
00:32:44.560 Like there's no, you know, there's no political opposition in Hungary, like cowering or, you
00:32:50.560 know, no, no Orban opponent is like afraid at night that the secret police is going to knock
00:32:57.600 on his door.
00:32:58.200 It's a real liberal regime in that sense.
00:33:03.020 But it's also an illiberal, illiberal regime in the sense that he has cultivated all these
00:33:10.460 ecosystem of institutions.
00:33:12.320 Um, in the way that the left has, um, uh, that sort of, that, you know, help him get reelected
00:33:25.320 and so on and so forth.
00:33:26.340 That's obvious, but also sort of steer the society in the right direction and ensure that
00:33:31.360 things are healthy and so on.
00:33:32.660 And I, I just, you know, in, in, in terms of like a second Trump administration, you know,
00:33:40.740 we may or may not be, have a second regime and all of that, and we can fantasize about
00:33:45.120 that or, or fear it or whatever.
00:33:47.720 But in terms of, you know, talk, talking about or thinking through like what, what the people
00:33:55.460 in DC should do now, what they should aim for in terms of something that's realistic,
00:34:01.500 but sort of accomplishes things, uh, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's one option
00:34:09.280 that I think about and, and that I don't think it's thrown enough into the mix because
00:34:15.280 on the one hand we have the neocons and on the other we have the, the sort of, the sort
00:34:22.960 of Caesar pill people who, you know, totally respect, but I don't think Trump is an American
00:34:30.100 Caesar.
00:34:30.440 So, no, I, I don't either.
00:34:32.980 And what you're discussing right now is something of the soft reconstruction option, right?
00:34:38.140 It's somewhere between the, between Yarvin and reconstruction where you're, you're, uh,
00:34:43.600 encouraging heavily people to choose the correct option, uh, through social incentives, some
00:34:50.440 which are probably harder than Yarvin would necessarily, uh, uh, suggest he wants it to be
00:34:56.800 all charm.
00:34:57.800 And you're, you're talking about, no, I want institutions.
00:35:00.720 I want power wielded.
00:35:01.960 I want people to be encouraged and incentivized to make these decisions, but I'm not looking
00:35:06.880 to put them all in jail.
00:35:07.840 Like, I'm not looking, I'm not looking to outlaw the publications that, you know, talk
00:35:12.920 about, you know, you know, transing people, but I want the discussion of that to be so
00:35:17.960 socially poisonous that anyone who would do it would just be immediately drawn, taken
00:35:23.760 out of polite society, just naturally without any kind of state action.
00:35:27.180 Right.
00:35:27.940 Um, I mean, that's, that's my difference with, with Curtis and, you know, he has this analogy
00:35:33.100 of the rocket, you know, in order to put a rocket in orbit, every single thing has to
00:35:38.380 go right.
00:35:38.900 And if one thing goes wrong, it's the same as if everything goes wrong.
00:35:42.620 Uh, uh, and I, and so it's either all or nothing.
00:35:46.220 And so I disagree with them on that.
00:35:49.200 Uh, I, I, I think there are, I think there's a spectrum of options and I think there's like,
00:35:56.880 there are some options I don't like, such as the sort of normie conservative, but I think
00:36:03.060 there's a menu of options over there, many of which are realistic.
00:36:10.040 Um, and so that's that, that, you know, going back to the discussion about whether an administrative
00:36:17.020 state is good.
00:36:17.860 I mean, that's, that's a good, like, let's put serious lawyers on our side and serious
00:36:24.200 sort of bureaucrats on our side, staff, the department of education and, and tell them
00:36:30.700 use whatever current law, resources, budgets, obligations, tools you have to try to get.
00:36:41.140 And as you put it, like, you know, it may be impossible to get California to change without
00:36:46.380 the 82nd airborne, but you know, before we send the 82nd airborne, we can, we can already
00:36:53.080 try, you know, if nothing else, it gives us the, uh, the, the rationale, the cost of
00:36:58.580 spell as to why they have to go.
00:37:00.300 Right.
00:37:00.440 And then afterwards you're like, all right, well, we tried everything.
00:37:03.620 So this is on you.
00:37:04.720 Right.
00:37:05.260 These rebellious Californians, yeah.
00:37:07.760 They're, they're, they're, they're treacherous ways have simply defied.
00:37:11.420 Yeah.
00:37:11.780 Yeah.
00:37:12.380 Our, our softer attempts to encourage them to move in the correct direction.
00:37:16.640 Yeah.
00:37:16.780 No, I, we're, we're going to point, uh, Tucker Carson is carpetbagger governor of California.
00:37:22.360 Yeah, that's right.
00:37:23.420 He's the, he's, he's the radical Republican, but in the actual sense this time.
00:37:27.860 Um, so, uh, I would agree with a lot of that.
00:37:31.960 Look, Yarvin has softened his stance on this.
00:37:33.860 He's come up, you know, he came out with that essay, uh, you know, a couple of days or a
00:37:37.920 couple of weeks ago about, uh, how he apologized to Rufo and actually it does look like Trump
00:37:42.020 is going to be able to make some headway.
00:37:43.920 Ultimately, he's still kind of hedging his bets on the ability to completely reform the state,
00:37:47.660 but there are, there, he backed off his hard line.
00:37:51.060 There is no incrementalism.
00:37:52.280 There's only, you know, the switch.
00:37:54.100 Uh, and so I, I think that that is an interesting development and I want to be clear, uh, practically
00:37:59.600 we're aligned, like, like in practical politics here, you and I have the same prescription,
00:38:04.300 right?
00:38:04.680 Like I, the Leviathan exists, whether I like it or not at this moment, whether it's good
00:38:08.980 or not at this moment.
00:38:09.780 And so while it exists, it needs to be used for good, like, and there's, it's not going
00:38:14.940 to sit there neutral.
00:38:16.020 It's not like, Oh, if I don't touch the gun, then the gun doesn't exist that, that, you
00:38:20.080 know, I'm not operating in that fantasy land.
00:38:21.920 I'm not a conservative in that way.
00:38:23.340 And so, uh, I I'm with you that to the extent that it exists, you need to be using it for
00:38:29.340 your benefit.
00:38:29.860 I'm not arguing against, you know, I'm not arguing against political action here.
00:38:33.120 I'm not for neutrality.
00:38:34.660 I'm not, uh, ah, the government and its power scares me.
00:38:37.300 Like that is not my argument here.
00:38:38.880 The thing I want us to think about, and again, this could just be inevitable there.
00:38:43.000 Like you said, civilizations just fall.
00:38:45.260 So this could just be this, this is the morphology.
00:38:48.040 Like this is the way we go.
00:38:49.820 There's nothing, you know, there's nothing here, but to do the best we can in these moments
00:38:53.560 and these times.
00:38:54.440 However, because this is a hobby horse of mine, because I've spent a lot of time thinking
00:38:59.260 about and trying to understand this issue.
00:39:01.180 It is something that I at least want the conversation to be had about.
00:39:04.520 Even if at the end of the conversation, the answer is simply, well, these are the way
00:39:08.740 that this is the way that the world works.
00:39:10.540 This is the way that political, uh, realities move.
00:39:13.380 And therefore we can't take any action on this.
00:39:15.760 I do want us to think about the fact that there is a specific logic to bureaucracies and
00:39:21.580 really, you know, you, you pointed this out with France and it's an important distinction
00:39:26.220 here, right?
00:39:27.380 The, the, the, uh, again, one of the core things about, uh, from Italian elite theory
00:39:31.740 from Italian political theory is, um, you know, the iron law of oligarchy, right?
00:39:36.820 It's going to exist.
00:39:38.180 Anyone who says organization is saying oligarchy, that's just the case.
00:39:42.180 So there's going to be some level of this.
00:39:44.640 I am fully acknowledging that the thing that Mosca in particular warns about is when we
00:39:50.560 move from that situation, which you were talking about, where you have the nobility and you
00:39:54.500 have the King and you have the church and you have the bureaucracy and you have the merchant
00:39:57.840 class and you have the, like you have all these different influences, all these different
00:40:03.040 social spheres and each one of them accrues power and influence in different ways.
00:40:07.840 The way that the church accrues influence is fundamentally different from the way that
00:40:12.440 the King or the nobility or the bureaucracy acquired these powers, right?
00:40:17.660 And the thing he warns about, the reason he said the America, America had become a true
00:40:21.560 oligarchy was that all of these spheres had been collapsed and that there was only one way
00:40:28.380 to actually operate an organization.
00:40:32.200 It's not, it's that everything became a bureaucracy.
00:40:35.300 It's not that the existence of bureaucracy itself is the end, but once everything becomes
00:40:40.400 bureaucracy, then you've got no fire breaks, right?
00:40:43.420 Everything just rolls through because all of the ways that your business, your church,
00:40:47.960 your government, your neighborhood watch, everything operates exactly the same way.
00:40:52.640 And so once the poison gets dropped into one, you know, the head of the bureaucracy, it just
00:40:56.780 runs through the whole thing.
00:40:58.840 And so the thing I really want, and again, I understand this is a much longer ask, but the
00:41:04.980 thing I want us to think about in America while we're doing this is yes, I want the Leviathan
00:41:09.180 aimed the right direction since it exists.
00:41:11.620 But while we have this power, I also want to re-empower, I want to give different structures
00:41:19.000 to these community and regional organizations.
00:41:22.900 I want them to gain their ability to organize in a different way so that next time the left
00:41:29.380 has a hold of this monster's tail, not that, oh, we got to get rid of it because once you
00:41:34.260 build something, the other guy is going to build, I'm not doing that.
00:41:37.120 But once we have more robust communities and we have organizations that organize in fundamentally
00:41:44.220 different ways and draw their power base in different ways, we create a situation in which
00:41:49.180 we are less likely to see wokeness just burn through a civilization like we saw it.
00:41:53.640 That is really what I'm looking for.
00:41:56.420 Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that.
00:41:59.760 I mean, I fundamentally, my sort of political perspective is the political perspective of
00:42:07.700 like the French medieval aristocracy or the French aristocracy circa 16 something.
00:42:13.460 uh, and, you know, you described it perfectly, which is that this society, which is really
00:42:20.600 the matrix from which the rest, every, every other, this sort of like turn of the millennium
00:42:26.900 European society, everything else that is Western came from that, right?
00:42:32.340 Um, uh, it was a, it was a society that had these different groups in a sort of hierarchical
00:42:41.720 order.
00:42:43.180 Um, and so not, not, not, none of them were dominant, you know, sovereign is he who decides
00:42:50.800 the exception, right?
00:42:51.660 The king was the head, the, the, the summit of the pyramid.
00:42:56.480 Um, and so if there was a clash of sort of perspectives, the king could sort of hand, hand,
00:43:02.160 hand down the decision.
00:43:04.100 And so it wasn't the kind of checks and balances out of the U S constitution, but it was also
00:43:10.180 much more complex and sort of much more, uh, responsive and less, and not at all tyrannical
00:43:18.680 actually, in the way we mean of tyrannical with sort of brute arbitrary power.
00:43:24.240 Um, and so this idea that there needs to be several orders in society, several different
00:43:31.080 kinds of power centers or influence centers.
00:43:33.940 And, and it's not just an organic, it's not just a legal separation in the sense of, oh,
00:43:41.240 there's the legislative, the executive, the judiciary.
00:43:43.960 It's a sort of sociological and even spiritual, uh, separation in the sense that, you know,
00:43:51.500 the church, the merchant class, the, the, the warriors, the bureaucrats, and so on and so
00:43:56.400 forth.
00:43:56.960 They didn't go to the same schools.
00:43:59.260 They, you know, I mean, they share deep sort of Christian principles, patriotism, but they
00:44:04.680 have different worldviews.
00:44:06.180 They come from different places.
00:44:07.640 And so they're actually different, right?
00:44:09.480 That's the problem with American society is you have, in theory, you have, you know,
00:44:14.480 Hollywood, Silicon Valley, DC, New York.
00:44:18.680 In theory, these could all be different power centers, except they're all run by the same
00:44:23.200 people who went to the same schools and went to the same private schools.
00:44:26.460 And therefore it's this kind of like, you know, unified Borg.
00:44:33.860 Even though one of the, one of the greatest things about America is that it's this giant
00:44:38.900 nation, the size of a continent.
00:44:41.520 And so historically it's been the best at developing these sort of rival power centers, distinct
00:44:48.480 cultures and subcultures that were, you know, New York interests versus Chicago versus the
00:44:55.480 South versus the West.
00:44:57.360 And, and they were debating and they were all proud Americans, but it had different, you
00:45:02.740 know, a rancher from the mountain West had a different perspective from a New York banker
00:45:07.060 and blah, blah, blah.
00:45:08.280 And that, that was what worked.
00:45:10.340 And so to your point, how do you, you know, once, once we get rid of the left in one way
00:45:21.500 or another, and I'm not, I'm not saying necessarily helicopters, but like, you know, a better relocation
00:45:30.300 where, where the left is not viable as a, as a political or cultural force.
00:45:39.080 Let's put it that way.
00:45:42.740 Reconstructed.
00:45:43.260 We'll stick with our reconstruction.
00:45:44.240 Yes.
00:45:45.960 I mean, there's a prudential argument for federalism, right?
00:45:50.220 The best argument for federalism is practical.
00:45:53.260 It's just like, I, as a fan of bureaucracy, I will admit, like, it's very difficult to run
00:45:59.420 a continent sized nation of 350 million people from one city.
00:46:03.920 It just is.
00:46:04.960 And so the, the sort of practical argument for saying, all right, well, now that we have
00:46:12.040 sort of calmer politics, that we're not in this sort of existential struggle for the soul
00:46:17.760 of America and the future of civilization and debating, you know, whether we're going to
00:46:22.240 castrate children or what have you, we're, we're now among adults.
00:46:26.500 We can, we can make, we can have grown up discussions about grown up things.
00:46:32.680 Well, of course, like, of course, you know, there's a ton of things that it makes most,
00:46:38.180 more sense to be decided in Austin and Tallahassee and Sacramento than DC, because they aren't
00:46:45.220 bound up right in those other debates, right?
00:46:48.220 The reason the left wanted to increase the power of federal government is because they
00:46:52.760 wanted to use it to impose it on other people, right?
00:46:55.600 The reason the Republicans wanted to maintain states' rights was because they didn't want
00:46:59.880 these impositions.
00:47:01.000 And so, you know, and so in that way, the idea of saying, well, of course, state control,
00:47:10.900 local control, they're, they're very good things.
00:47:14.600 It's just, you know, what, what I disagree with, and I understand you weren't making this
00:47:20.360 point.
00:47:20.640 I'm just, I'm just saying, you know, that's the better argument for it.
00:47:25.160 Instead of saying, oh, you know, local control is the way we get out of the thing.
00:47:31.800 No, it isn't.
00:47:32.780 But it, it's still a good idea.
00:47:34.880 And it's a much more natural and easy idea.
00:47:37.920 Once you've sort of removed existential stakes, stakes from the politics, it becomes much more
00:47:43.760 natural to say, well, of course, like, yeah, we're going to run this will locally.
00:47:48.300 I mean, why wouldn't we?
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00:48:19.020 See aircanada.com.
00:48:20.060 One of the things that I think poses a particular problem for the United States really is its
00:48:27.440 doctrine of equality in this area, right?
00:48:31.060 Like, it's hard to form social spheres that are distinct without some level of understanding
00:48:36.880 of hierarchy.
00:48:38.440 And in the United States, we kind of, we didn't, we never had, obviously, a formal church.
00:48:43.560 We never had an ancien regime.
00:48:45.820 But the way we got around that was specifically what you were talking about, which was regionalism, right?
00:48:50.900 The way that we broke up the spheres was geography instead of class or, you know, that kind of thing.
00:48:57.140 And that worked until, you know, we got the train and the telegraph and then the radio and the TV.
00:49:03.380 And then all of a sudden, you could rule the whole, you know, continent from one place instead of having to have all these different.
00:49:13.460 As soon as the intermediate institutions became unnecessary for the government's maintenance of the state, they all atrophied, right?
00:49:23.160 And so that kind of fell into disrepair and everything just kind of became this one gray goo across all of the United States.
00:49:30.620 And so technology is a problem for our regionalistic solution here.
00:49:35.580 But, you know, interestingly, I don't know, have you read any Gilles Deleuze?
00:49:39.780 I mean, I've read, I have, I've never read an entire book.
00:49:44.320 I don't blame you.
00:49:44.960 It's, it's, it's awful.
00:49:46.520 But, I mean, the ideas are interesting.
00:49:49.300 I mean, they were the worst generation in terms of just, I'm just talking about the quality of the writing, like even putting aside their, their opinions.
00:49:57.780 They're terrible.
00:49:58.740 It's not the translation, let me assure you.
00:50:01.760 If you, if you're reading Anti-Oedipus, you kind of just want to drop your brain into a blender.
00:50:05.360 But, but, but I will say this about Deleuze, his, his concept of de-territorialization and re-territorialization I think is particularly useful because the idea here is basically all of these non-bureaucratic, non-market-based domains, like the spiritual, the aristocratic, the martial, these things, were basically dissolved.
00:50:29.560 Everything that was kept in those domains was de-territorialized and re-territorialized into the market, which is why your average megachurch runs more like a business than it does a church.
00:50:41.080 That's why your government runs more like a business than a government.
00:50:44.100 Your military has, you know, is elevating people who can give TED talks and so people who can lead warriors, like all of these different classes that were kind of kept over from the older regimes and echoed in the American experience have been hollowed out and re-territorialized in this, in this way.
00:51:06.020 And what that's done is allowed for, you know, again, the management of an entire continent efficiently and better bureaucracy.
00:51:12.480 But again, it's brought us to this Moscow point where everything is lined up exactly the same way.
00:51:17.280 It all runs exactly the same way.
00:51:18.760 And so I wonder, can America change this system, change this reality about the administrative state and bureaucratic government without radically changing the structure because it no longer can insulate itself with just the geographic distance and difference?
00:51:36.820 Yeah, that's, that's, that's a very good observation.
00:51:41.380 I mean, one immediate answer, which is only a partial answer, but I think it's a big deal is America no longer has, no longer has freedom of association.
00:51:52.820 And if you restore freedom of association, you're already like enabling a lot of new things, new spaces to be created and different, I mean, this is, you know, Tocqueville's observation about America, like two observations about America.
00:52:10.780 First of all, Americans talk a lot about liberty and freedom, but really they're the nation of equality.
00:52:15.780 And like the, the central American idea to talk to Tocqueville is not liberty, it's equality.
00:52:21.660 And number two, and this is, this is a very dormy con cliche, but it's true.
00:52:27.340 It's a nation of joiners.
00:52:28.740 It's a nation of free associations and so on and so forth.
00:52:32.800 Like it's, it really is something that's, you know, natural to you guys.
00:52:38.480 And, and, and it's, and it's something that all of us admire about American life.
00:52:44.560 And it's very, very degraded now relative to where it was in the fifties and, and, and in the 1900s.
00:52:52.180 And I'm sure in the 1850s, but it could return, right?
00:52:58.080 If, if, if, if you, I was going to say, if you're right, if you reduce the size of.
00:53:04.480 I mean, but, but you, you, you see my point here, you're following my logic.
00:53:09.600 If you detoxify politics, if you restore freedom of association, I think that you will see a lot of, I'm sounding, I'm sounding so normie.
00:53:20.940 I think you will see a lot of little platoons.
00:53:23.160 I think, you know, churches will become more important to social life and so on and so forth.
00:53:27.480 Well, I know that's only a partial solution to the problem you're, you're describing, which is totally real.
00:53:34.860 But it's, I, it's not nothing.
00:53:37.260 Yeah.
00:53:37.880 I mean, to, to be fair to the normie cons, like de Tocqueville specifically said that the problem that association building in America solves is our individualism.
00:53:48.960 Right.
00:53:49.620 Like, like, like this is all, all the normie cons talk about the little platoons and the, the, the, the associations and never talk about the fact that Tocqueville was saying that they were the solution to individualism, which is a rampant problem in the United States.
00:54:01.940 And so the way that you, you solve this is, but as you're saying free association is critical to this and I'm a hundred percent on board with you.
00:54:09.160 Like free association being returned to Americans would be a radical change, but that radical change, um, first would be described as Nazism.
00:54:20.180 Like they're going to, like, it's going to be treated as if you're trying to bring the third Reich, but also, um, it naturally produces a disunified de bureaucratic.
00:54:31.000 Uh, uh, I don't know the proper word to use here, but anyway, it, it reduces the chance that you could have a unified bureaucracy because the, uh, freedom of association necessarily creates particularities that makes it difficult to manage large blocks of people.
00:54:44.920 And that's why one of the many reasons free association had to be destroyed because, uh, you, you have to turn, you know, you have to destroy the middle class.
00:54:53.120 You have to destroy all of these associations that were bolstering, uh, American communities, but holding down centralization across the American empire.
00:55:02.140 And so by reintroducing, uh, that free association, you're necessarily going to break down the ability to wield large amounts of, of, uh, you know, unified power across the entire homogenous, uh, culture, because it's particularized again, entirely in favor of, but this is what I talk about.
00:55:20.060 This is what I mean when I talk about this, I'm not allergic to power in theory.
00:55:25.020 I'm trying to re-instantiate, uh, an order that is more organic in its desire to have multiple forces that check the excesses of bureaucracy rather than necessarily being like, oh no, government power itself is the problem.
00:55:39.540 Right.
00:55:40.220 Right.
00:55:40.880 And so, uh, so on the bureaucracy, I mean, again, like there's a laffer curve to bureaucracy.
00:55:47.200 If we're going to check off normie con concept, there's a laffer curve to bureaucracy.
00:55:51.620 So, you know, it's, it's possible to have too much bureaucracy and if the bureaucracy starts to sort of suffocate, which is absolutely like a risk, a, a, a perennial problem.
00:56:03.940 And one that needs to be managed is like, you know, uh, uranium, right.
00:56:12.920 Um, uranium is always going to be radioactive, but it's still a very good source of power.
00:56:18.520 Um, and you can manage it, uh, with regard to free association, I mean, I, I just disagree with your history of it.
00:56:28.480 And this is a much broader conversation, but I think that the end of free association in America is like a hundred percent about race or 97% about race.
00:56:36.720 Oh yeah, for sure.
00:56:38.360 And then it was sort of leveraged by, you know, especially feminists and in general by the administrative state to sort of like make life difficult for everybody and sort of break down these sort of, um, abilities by communities and so on to self-organize and therefore be less controllable.
00:56:58.020 But fundamentally it was about the, the sort of reconstruction 2.0 of, of the sixties.
00:57:05.820 And so.
00:57:06.120 But we're kind of saying the same thing here, right?
00:57:07.560 Like, like whether you feel like that's the impetus or not, the result is once you, once you dissolve these particular communities about along whichever lines they're organized, that's the revolution necessary then for the state to centralize the power.
00:57:20.860 That's the power that's then freed up by that destruction of association.
00:57:24.620 Yeah.
00:57:24.900 Well, the, the, the point I'm making is that there's no necessary conflict between free association and bureaucracy, right?
00:57:32.280 There, there can be a kind of, uh, balance, uh, right.
00:57:38.360 I, I don't, I'm trying to, I'm trying to find an example of, that's not in the American context of, uh,
00:57:50.860 uh, well, I mean, there's a very famous example, which is, I mean, I'm sort of making your point here, but in the, the, the French revolution, um, I mean, they banned, they banned private associations, right?
00:58:07.620 The, the, the, the, the French revolution banned the guilds and so on and so forth.
00:58:12.000 Uh, and that was very much a kind of a liberalization that also made the sort of the power of the administrative state possible and sort of remove barriers to, to the administrative state.
00:58:26.640 Uh, so I guess I'm hoisted on my own petard right now.
00:58:30.420 If the example you reached for is the one which, which reinforces my point.
00:58:34.620 I'm talking, I'm talking myself into agreeing with you, which is, which is a great demonstration of open-mindedness and, uh.
00:58:40.840 Yes, not going to stop you in the slightest.
00:58:43.060 Yeah.
00:58:43.440 I mean, I, uh, no, you, I mean, yeah, I agree.
00:58:47.720 Like, I agree.
00:58:48.640 There's always a tension between the sort of bureaucratic center and the sort of bottom-up free association kind of thing.
00:58:56.520 I, I just, that's just, that's just one of the tensions that has to be managed in life.
00:59:02.860 Just like, you know, the tension between man and woman, the tension between boss and worker, you know what I mean?
00:59:09.000 Uh, and the idea that, you know, it has to be one or the other, or if you have one, then, you know, you have to kill the other.
00:59:18.860 Um, I just, I just don't think so.
00:59:22.460 Yeah, again, I, I think that there, and there might be, and I said this from the beginning of our discussion, even on Twitter, it might be the truth that simply bureaucracy is a reality of the modern world and that its consequences are inescapable and this is just the direction that all modern states have to go down.
00:59:40.260 I'm not ruling that out.
00:59:41.820 Like, I, I'm not, I'm not a, entirely a determinist, but I'm, I'm, I'm more, uh, comfortable with the idea of fate than most, I suppose.
00:59:50.020 And if this is the manner in which all societies move and our society is one of many societies, then this might end up just being the manner which move.
00:59:59.340 But in the meantime, as you're saying, there, this doesn't have, there's a continuum here.
01:00:03.520 This, we're not, it's, it's not a binary.
01:00:05.380 We're not stuck one or the other.
01:00:07.040 Uh, and so if there are healthier versions of this, uh, path, if we can moderate this in some way, if we can achieve a certain level of balance in, so at some level, then I think that's ultimately what we should be doing.
01:00:21.960 So, uh, I know that we wanted to keep this about an hour, so let's go ahead and start wrapping this up.
01:00:27.840 But before we go, uh, where can people find your work?
01:00:30.660 Is there anything you want to point them to?
01:00:31.960 Sure.
01:00:33.380 So my Twitter is at P Gobri underscore E N.
01:00:39.080 That's very easy to say.
01:00:41.620 Uh, I have a website, which is a political news, uh, policy focused news website called Policy Sphere.
01:00:47.600 It's for sort of very policy focused people.
01:00:51.540 And I have a sort of more general interest podcast, which is called the Sphere Podcast.
01:00:57.080 Excellent.
01:00:57.620 All right, guys.
01:00:58.120 Well, like I said, make sure to check him out, especially on Twitter.
01:01:00.340 I can definitely recommend his work there.
01:01:02.380 And of course, if it's your first time on this channel, make sure that you subscribe, click the bell notification.
01:01:07.800 So, you know, when the streams go live, if you'd like to get the broadcast as podcasts, make sure you subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show on your favorite podcast network.
01:01:16.800 And if you'd like to pick up my book, which discusses many of these issues in detail, the total state, you can do that both in print and an audio book.
01:01:23.740 It's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, all of that stuff.
01:01:27.240 Once again, sorry, guys, this one isn't live, so we can't answer any of your questions if you haven't been there.
01:01:31.800 But really appreciate you coming by.
01:01:33.780 And as always, I will talk to you next time.