Arthur Brooks is the author of a new book, Love Your Enemies, and the head of the American Enterprise Institute. He s also the founder of the conservative think tank, the AEI, and a regular contributor to the New York Times. In this special episode, we talk about the Dalai Lama s advice on loving your enemies, and how to deal with people who disagree with you, and why it s so important to do so in a culture of contempt. He also talks about why we should all be more civil to each other, and what it means to be a decent human being in a fraught culture, and the best way to do that is to learn to love your enemies. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve listened to the entire thing. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your news and updates, and tell a friend about this podcast by using the hashtag and on social media! to let us know what you thought of the show and what you would like to see us do in the future episodes. Thanks for listening and share it on your stories and your thoughts on the show! Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius for sponsoring the Sunday Special with a discount code at linktr.ee/thebigbenapodcast . if you like the show, leave us a rating and review the show on iTunes, and we'll give you 5 stars and a review on the next week's episode will be 5 stars, and Ben will get 5 stars too! and you'll get 20% off the entire show next week for the rest of the week's ad-free version of the podcast next week! Thank you, Ben Shapiro destroys blank blank dot coms ! as well as 5 stars next week, and free shipping, free shipping throughout the entire world! Thanks again for listening to the show next Tuesday, Ben and I'll see you next Tuesday! - Thank you for supporting the show next Monday, next Wednesday, next Friday, next Saturday, next week Monday, June 17th, July 9th, Tuesday, July 5th, September 6th, 8/7th, 9/8th,
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00:01:33.000Arthur, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:01:41.000One's a junior at Princeton, and one is a farmer in Idaho, and they both think you're cooler than I am.
00:01:45.000Wow, that's very flattering, and I really appreciate it.
00:01:48.000Well, you know, your book is called Love Your Enemies, and it says how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt.
00:01:53.000And I have to get the elephant In the room out of the way immediately, which is that people are going to be asking how is it that Ben Shapiro of Ben Shapiro destroys blank fame could possibly be interviewing you and taking seriously the question of loving your enemies, people who disagree with you.
00:02:07.000And so I want to go through sort of what you mean by loving your enemies and also what is the best way to do that in a really fraught culture.
00:02:16.000How did you come up with this idea that the biggest problem we have in the culture is us not loving our enemies?
00:02:21.000Well, as I'm looking around, and look, we've been going through the same trials and the same tribulations.
00:02:26.000Those of us who are on the political right, we've seen a lot of bad things happen.
00:02:30.000We've seen just the way that the whole discourse has been spoiled, and not just by people on the other side, by people on our own side as well.
00:02:38.000I thought to myself, you know, what's the big problem?
00:02:40.000And people say, well, we need more civility.
00:02:42.000or we need more tolerance, that's garbage.
00:02:47.000I mean, if I said, "Hey Ben, my wife Esther and I, "we're civil to each other." You'd be like, "Oh man, dude, you need some counseling." Or my employees at the American Enterprise Institute, they tolerate me and say, "Bad scene, man." These are not high enough standards, basically.
00:03:02.000I started thinking to myself, what do we need?
00:03:03.000Well, when you go back to the sacred texts, but the pillars of philosophy in the West, what you find is that there's this subversive teaching, which is basically to love your enemies.
00:04:09.000I mean, how do we deal with, are there gradations, in other words, to the enemies that we ought to love?
00:04:13.000Are there the domestic political enemies, meaning, you know, President Trump's enemy of the people press, and Democrats versus Republicans?
00:04:19.000Or are there like a legitimate group of people that it's okay not to love?
00:04:24.000And the main point that I'm making here, when I'm talking about how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt, I'm largely talking for an American audience where we have started to suffer from something that political scientists call motive attribution asymmetry.
00:04:39.000Big fancy term so that academics like me can get tenure.
00:04:42.000But basically what it means is that when you feel that you're motivated in your ideology by love, but the other side is motivated by hatred.
00:04:51.000Now this is something you typically see in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but what political scientists are finding for the very first time is that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals are displaying the same level of motive attribution asymmetry As Israelis and the Palestinians.
00:05:06.000In other words, we're treating each other internally in American politics as the other, as the enemy.
00:05:29.000We're talking about warfare and people overseas that want to kill us.
00:05:32.000But I'm telling you, when I'm looking at somebody on the political left in the United States, I can disagree.
00:05:37.000But that person should not be treated with contempt.
00:05:39.000Not by me, not by you, not by anybody watching us.
00:05:42.000And if we can get past that, that is the source of our strength.
00:05:45.000And I'll admit, when I read the book, I mostly see my own shortcomings in it, things that I can do better.
00:05:50.000And you tell the story in the book of the first time that you sort of experienced the use of love in order to overcome what you felt was somebody who was attacking you, somebody who wrote you a long email going after one of your previous books, and how you responded to that.
00:06:01.000I wonder if you might want to tell that story.
00:06:02.000Yeah, so, I mean, this happened a long time ago, and it was, I was actually, I recalled this because I asked none other than the Dalai Lama, while I was making this documentary film, and I said, what do I do when I feel contempt for another person?
00:06:22.000But then I remembered, I mean, Dalai Lama is a tough person.
00:06:25.000He was exiled as a teenager from his homeland in Tibet.
00:06:28.000He was just rolled over by the communist Chinese.
00:06:31.000And he spent every day for the last six decades starting each morning praying for the communist Chinese leaders that they'll live good and happy lives.
00:08:37.000What it turns out was that, and look, it took me a long time to remember that because I was stimulated in that memory by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
00:08:46.000I remember the feeling of not just a power, but of warmth.
00:08:49.000You know, and his point is when somebody treats you with contempt, and Ben, man, you're going to be treated with contempt like, Next time you go out in public, because I've seen it, and you're super good at responding to ideas.
00:09:00.000But you're going to be treated with contempt.
00:09:15.000And misguided ideas have deleterious consequences for society.
00:09:18.000But when you answer somebody with whom you disagree with enough respect to show them the disagreement and to do it with love, you'll change at least one heart, and that's Ben's heart, and that's Arthur's heart, and maybe, maybe the other person's heart as well. - So what do you do when somebody comes at you, and it's not just a contemptuous argument about your ideas, what if somebody comes at you, and the way that people have tended to do this lately is to call you legitimately morally deficient.
00:09:40.000So you give the example of, you're somebody who is pro-gun rights.
00:09:45.000And the implication is put forward after Sandy Hook that the reason that you are pro-gun rights is because you don't care enough about dead children.
00:09:51.000Or the reason that you believe what you believe on welfare policy is because you're a vicious racist.
00:09:57.000How is it possible to be warm hearted?
00:09:58.000Now, I'll admit, my typical strategy when someone calls me a racist is to say, "Well, you're acting like a jackass.
00:10:03.000"You have no evidence that I'm a racist." Obviously, you are now acting like a jackass because attacking people without evidence makes you such.
00:10:10.000That's a pretty hostile way to do it, but it feels like the only way sometimes to shake people out of the stupor of slandering people with those sorts of names.
00:10:17.000And I also am worried that if I say, listen, let me explain to you all the reasons why I'm not a racist.
00:10:22.000I can't grant credibility to even the statement because the statement is so off base.
00:10:26.000What's the best way to handle something like this?
00:10:28.000So, yeah, when somebody says, you're a racist, or, you know, prove to me you're not a racist, it's like, it's when did you stop beating your wife?
00:10:35.000I mean, it's just, it's an unanswerable question because the premise is entirely wrong.
00:10:39.000Okay, now, the first thing to remember is that in point of fact, the person is behaving like a jackass.
00:10:45.000And you're utterly within your rights to say so, but that misses a core opportunity.
00:10:50.000You take the person on very, very vigorously, but in terms that basically says, I understand the position that you're coming from, which is that you have a huge concern about racism in our society, and I share that concern with you.
00:11:03.000Don't even take on the charge that Ben Shapiro's a racist.
00:11:06.000That's idiotic and everybody knows it.
00:11:25.000How are those people going to be persuaded?
00:11:27.000They're going to be persuaded by the force, not just of the force of your arguments, but the way that you make those arguments, the mercy that emanates from your heart, the love that you actually show, the respect that you show for other Americans.
00:11:38.000Look, those people who are attacking you, They're not all bad people.
00:11:41.000They're really concerned about legitimate things.
00:11:43.000They just don't know how to express it in the right way.
00:11:45.000And they've never gotten proper direction to treat another human being with respect.
00:11:50.000So you can turn it around and say, look, I don't like the way you just talked to me, but I do share the concerns that are written on your heart.
00:11:57.000So I'm going to talk about those concerns because I think I've got a better way to address them that maybe even you do.
00:12:03.000But at very least, I want you to consider those things.
00:12:12.000So one of the things that you talk about in Love Your Enemies is the fact that the amount of contempt in our politics has been rising very, very rapidly of recent vintage.
00:12:20.000Do you think that that's a result of the polarization of politics, or do you think that polarization in politics is a result of the contempt?
00:12:26.000I feel like it's a bit of a chicken or the egg question.
00:12:28.000Yeah, I think it's what economists would call an endogenous situation, where one is actually causing the other, and we're in a vicious cycle.
00:12:34.000And that again, once again, is a big opportunity, because once you cut the cycle, it's no longer downwardly spiraling, and it requires that people who are in the public eye.
00:12:43.000I mean, I'm very blessed to be in a position where I get to talk in public, you even more, and you have millions of people who are watching this show.
00:12:49.000And you can actually cut that cycle of contempt and show other people, more importantly, how to do it.
00:12:55.000Because, you know, what you say, people are going to, they're going to follow you because you're a leader under those circumstances.
00:13:00.000So sure, polarization leads to contempt.
00:13:13.000He's brought thousands of people back together who would have otherwise gotten divorced.
00:13:17.000And one of the many things you and I agree on is that a good society must be based on stable, happy families that have love for each other.
00:13:25.000So this guy, I mean, he really is a modern-day hero.
00:13:28.000And he notes that what predicts divorce is not anger at all.
00:13:33.000I mean, thank God I'm married to a Spaniard.
00:13:50.000These are the things that really predict divorce.
00:13:52.000I mean, John Gottman can counsel somebody for an hour, counsel a couple for an hour, and know with more than 90% accuracy if they'll be divorced within three years by looking for those signs of contempt.
00:14:01.000And those are the same things that destroy relationships at all different levels.
00:14:05.000Friendships, collegial relationships, and in point of fact, that's what's happening in America today.
00:14:10.000That's the reason that people can't talk to each other, that one in six Americans have literally stopped talking to a close friend or family member because of the election of 2016.
00:14:24.000When it comes to this problem of contempt, one of the questions I guess I have is that it's very tied, I think, to humor.
00:14:30.000So, if you wanted to look at, you know, the chief progenitors of contempt in American politics, I really wouldn't look to our politicians first.
00:14:36.000I'd look to somebody like Jon Stewart, because Jon Stewart spent years basically showing a clip of somebody making a face at that person, and then that was the cue for the audience to laugh.
00:15:09.000And one of the things that stimulated this book, Love Your Enemies, is I saw myself on TV behaving with contempt and treating somebody with mockery, using humor.
00:15:18.000I mean, I've been telling jokes my whole life.
00:15:20.000I was the wisecracking kid in the back of the class.
00:15:23.000When I was growing up, I mean, that's the reason it took me until I was 30 to graduate from college, but that's another story.
00:15:28.000And okay, and I saw myself doing it and I thought, that's not right.
00:15:32.000That is, that actually, I'm not living up to my own values.
00:15:34.000I mean, these people are, they disagree with me, but they're, they're not evil and they're certainly not stupid.
00:15:41.000And, and, you know, The key moment came for me, Ben, and I'm sure you've had this experience too.
00:15:45.000I was at this political activist rally in 2014, a couple of years before the 2016 election.
00:15:51.000And, you know, I do like 175 speeches a year.
00:16:21.000They're just Americans who disagree with us on politics.
00:16:23.000And this lady afterwards, she said, actually, they're stupid and evil.
00:16:27.000It was actually kind of funny, but I thought to myself, that's not where I want to be because I can't make progress.
00:16:34.000I'm in the business of persuading people so that we can get more dignity, so that people can be lifted up in their dignity and so we can explore the limitlessness of human potential that we can do.
00:16:44.000That's what America is supposed to be all about.
00:16:48.000That's why the Shapiros, who I suppose three generations ago were probably like bailing out of some godforsaken shtetl someplace and, you know, coming someplace where they could build their lives.
00:16:58.000They wanted someplace where they had radically equal human dignity.
00:17:01.000And the Brookses too, by the way, who are moving west one step ahead of the law.
00:17:16.000We got to bring people in and show them the blessing that really is this country.
00:17:19.000That's the point of your new book, which is such an important book.
00:17:22.000- Thank you. - The blessing of what the West really can bring and how we can celebrate these ideas to lift other people up. - Well, in a second, I wanna ask you about the efficacy of contempt because I wanna ask if there's a market advantage to contempt.
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00:19:01.000You can just skip the argument entirely.
00:19:03.000Or you can just completely destroy an actual idea through use of contempt.
00:19:09.000And then by leaving that out of your arsenal, you're basically surrendering to the other side.
00:19:13.000And I think that that's where you're seeing a lot of the passion come from on the right, particularly when you have folks who are being hit with the intersectional identity politics or group politics, being called racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
00:19:24.000And they just want to say, listen, socialism is dumb.
00:19:28.000Are there some ideas that are so bad, in other words, that they have earned contempt even in the current contemporary debate, do you think?
00:19:33.000There are lots of ideas that have earned contempt, to be sure, but there are no people in America who've earned contempt.
00:19:39.000Because I really want to dig in on this, because I think that we live in a time where ideas are so tied into our own identity.
00:19:44.000And we've convinced ourselves really since the 60s that the personal is the political, and that my politics are me.
00:19:49.000So if you and I disagree on tax rates, and then I attack your tax policy, and I say, you know, I think it's a foolish tax policy, I think it's fallen apart everywhere it's tried, then you take that as a personal affront, and now my contempt for your idea has been interpreted as contempt for you.
00:20:30.000This is an incredible source of power.
00:20:31.000Now, it's much easier to go contemptuous on a particular person and to destroy a particular person.
00:20:36.000But let's remember, it's ultimately a self-defeating proposition if we're trying to bring more people into our way of thinking.
00:20:43.000What it does is it locks down our particular base.
00:20:46.000And we have a president of the United States who's good at base locking.
00:20:49.000We have his entire opposition in the Democratic Party, 57,000 people who are running for president in the Democratic ticket at this point.
00:20:56.000All but a couple are basically using the same rhetorical techniques as President Trump.
00:21:01.000But that's an ultimately self-defeating proposition because what you've got is warring tribes.
00:21:05.000You're never going to actually bring people into a meaty coalition of those who share certain values such that we can make progress until you can persuade other people.
00:21:15.000That takes leadership by guys like you and me.
00:21:18.000People who actually have an audience of people out there who are listening to the way that we communicate with other people, who see us pass on the opportunity to treat other people with contempt, to vigorously assert the correctness or incorrectness of particular ideas.
00:22:02.000But when you can do that, and when I can do that, people will follow, and that's the beginning of a movement.
00:22:07.000It seems like a lot of that is really tied down to interpersonal contact, meaning that it's much easier to have conversations with people in person, via phone, than it is over social media.
00:22:17.000Social media seems like a machine for spinning up contempt, especially Twitter, where you've got 280 characters now to say what you've got to say, get it off your chest.
00:22:25.000I remember there was a situation recently where I got into a little bit of an online debate with Pete Buttigieg, who's one of the guys running for president on the Democratic side, one of the 57,000.
00:22:32.000And it started to go sideways, and at a certain point I said, why don't you just come on the Sunday special?
00:22:44.000I mean, really, we're always looking for Democrats to come on.
00:22:46.000But they are afraid, specifically, of the kind of antipathy that they think they're going to receive.
00:22:50.000Or maybe they just don't want to be challenged.
00:22:52.000But I'm happy to have folks on the Democratic left on the show, for sure.
00:22:57.000But it was that feeling of diffusing that came from, I had a name, he had a name.
00:23:01.000You talk in the book about the culture of anonymous social media and how Counterproductive it is to the kind of anti-contempt you're looking for.
00:23:09.000I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
00:23:11.000So I'm on social media, you're on social media, you have tons of people who are following you on social media.
00:23:15.000And there's a real temptation when we're on social media, and you know, we're dealing with one-on-one people, we have lots of friends, we have lots of people who disagree with us.
00:23:23.000You know, if I were to ask everybody watching us today, how many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?
00:23:45.000We dehumanize ourselves by becoming anonymous.
00:23:48.000And as such, we lower our moral standards.
00:23:50.000I mean, we're here in the Los Angeles area.
00:23:53.000I live in Washington, D.C., and one of the big problems that we have is people are terrible to each other in traffic.
00:23:58.000I've got a way where I could solve that, where everybody has to put their name on a bumper sticker on the back of their car and their house of worship.
00:24:12.000So, you know, so the problem that we have on social media is the ultimate traffic problem, where people de-individuate themselves, they dehumanize themselves, they lower their moral standards, and they engage in behavior they don't like.
00:24:23.000Well, then they're gearing it toward people who really are publicly putting forth their actual identity.
00:24:40.000But in so doing, what you've done is you've taken on a phantom.
00:24:43.000You've taken on somebody who doesn't actually exist.
00:24:45.000So one of the things that I recommend, I mean, for the self-preservation of these social media companies, they're going to have to stop giving platforms to anonymous users.
00:24:52.000Because little by little, people are figuring out that social media is no fun and is decrementing their happiness.
00:24:57.000Good studies show that more hours on social media, less happiness.
00:25:00.000And by the way, that's also true for Ben and Arthur.
00:25:21.000And you feel your chest tightening and, you know, people, what they don't understand is, you know, they're just some guy sitting on his sofa and he's called Bernie Bro 2020 or something.
00:25:39.000But in point of fact, it's a mistake for us to engage at all with people who are anonymous because you're going after people that in a very real way, in a very human way, They don't exist.
00:25:50.000You gotta love your enemies, by which I mean people who, it turns out, weren't your enemies, but those are people.
00:25:56.000And people who will not divulge their identities or give part of anything, anything of their humanity, anything of their story, they're saying I'm actually not a human being.
00:26:03.000For all you know, it's a Russian Twitter bot, and so not worth engaging.
00:26:07.000So, in your book you talk about, and we've talked a little bit here, about the gradations in terms of, you know, who's worthy of contempt.
00:26:15.000But, you know, in the United States, the idea is that we are, while we think that we may be enemies, we're actually not enemies, we're brothers in the sort of Lincolnian formulation.
00:26:25.000And the reason I want to ask that is because as certain people on both sides become more radical, I think right now the left is moving in a radical direction faster than the right is.
00:26:33.000Donald Trump is actually in policy somewhat of a moderate Republican.
00:26:36.000The left seems to be moving pretty dramatically in a far left direction, including embrace of democratic socialism.
00:26:43.000You talk about these sort of moral values that you still think unite Americans.
00:26:47.000What do you think those moral values are?
00:26:58.000Because one of the things that I've noticed is that leaders throughout history who are truly aspirational, they're not populist.
00:27:04.000Because, you know, populism is fundamentally not leadership, it's followership.
00:27:07.000It's basically, and you've made this point a hundred times, I stole this from Ben Shapiro, but there's a parade going down the street, a populist is a guy who says, there's a parade, I better get out in front of it, they need a leader.
00:27:16.000Leadership is something that says there's a better future.
00:28:05.000Because it talks about how these Judeo-Christian values, these Western values, are a gift to the world.
00:28:12.000People, even if they're not religious, we have a lot of people watching us who are atheists, who are secular completely, but they believe in the equality of human dignity.
00:28:53.000We're going to work together to try to help Americans live up to those standards, even though we haven't hit them yet.
00:28:58.000I mean, I certainly agree with all of that.
00:28:59.000I wonder if there are active opponents to some of that.
00:29:01.000And the reason I say that is because you point out Jonathan Haidt's moral matrix.
00:29:05.000Jonathan's been on the program, Professor Haidt, and we talked about the five factors, maybe six if you include liberty, which he added later.
00:29:12.000And you talk about how conservatives and liberals still believe in a couple of them.
00:29:19.000But even those ones, As Professor Haidt has recognized, are seen in almost diametrically opposed ways.
00:29:25.000So fairness for conservatives is fairness in the meritocratic sense, the idea that we all have equal rights but that the outcome is not going to be equal.
00:29:32.000And fairness for many on the democratic side is fairness of outcome, which is directly opposed to fairness of meritocracy.
00:29:38.000When it comes to compassion, on the right side of the aisle, the value system tends to be, well, compassion is me helping you find a job, develop a skill set, care for yourself.
00:29:46.000And compassion on the left side of the aisle is, how do I create a system whereby you don't have to care for yourself, whereby we are caring for you?
00:29:55.000So if that's the case, then even the most basic values, the ones that are necessary for us to be playing the same game, so to speak, Have those been radically undermined, or do you think that there are bridges that can still be built?
00:30:05.000And the reason is because, let's take something like fairness, where the right really does focus on meritocratic fairness.
00:30:11.000It's, don't take something that somebody else earned.
00:30:13.000And the left really does focus much more on redistributive fairness.
00:30:17.000The idea of redistributing, somebody has more, somebody has less, the person who has less needs more, you take it from the person who has more.
00:30:30.000You believe that there should be a welfare state and so do I. I mean, I believe that the free enterprise system, one of the greatest accomplishments ever of the free enterprise system was our ability to support people we've never even met.
00:30:40.000It's an incredible thing that no system in history has been able to accomplish and it's because of capitalism.
00:30:46.000Because of the largesse that came from capitalism, and it's such a blessing.
00:31:05.000And they don't think that merit's garbage.
00:31:08.000They think that America's great because they want their kids to achieve, and they're kind of proud to live in a country where people can start companies and do great things.
00:31:16.000They just, they want a little bit more redistribution.
00:31:18.000Now, you find radicals, and when I say this, I mean that approximately, depending on how you count it, the 7% of people who are true polarizing radicals in this country who don't see any common ground.
00:31:29.000But if 93% of us, give or take, I actually do believe that there can be some common ground, that we can work together in some way, shape, or form, that I'm going to be bridging that meritocratic redistributive divide, and I'm going to be really forgiving.
00:31:42.000I'm going to be as generous as I possibly can to the people who don't agree quite as much with my meritocratic values, so that I can try to get some fairness that bridges that gap.
00:31:51.000Okay, so in a second I want to ask you where you came from because your story is really fascinating and I want people to hear how you got from French horn to what you do now.
00:32:00.000But first, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the very first thing they did was to make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their government.
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00:33:28.000So, I want to ask you about your personal story, because as a person who also grew up as a classical musician, your story is pretty amazing.
00:33:33.000I mean, you started off as a musician in Spain playing the French horn, and here you are doing public policy and data analysis.
00:33:41.000How did you get from one place to the other?
00:33:43.000It's not the typical path, and it's certainly not linear.
00:33:45.000I mean, when you say, how do you become the president of a big national think tank, the answer is not, you know, play the French horn.
00:33:52.000I started classical music when I was four years old.
00:34:56.000And I met her when I was on a tour in Europe, and she lived in Barcelona, and the only way I was going to have a bid at trying to, you know, I had to go all in.
00:35:04.000I had to quit my job, move to a place where I never learned the language.
00:35:07.000I'd known her for a week at this point, but, you know, I called up my dad's dad.
00:35:12.000This gives you a little bit of insight into the warped world here.
00:35:16.000I said, Dad, I met the girl I think I'm going to marry.
00:36:24.000And furthermore, I thought capitalism was great for rich people and bad for poor people.
00:36:28.000And I grew up in a left-wing environment, and I knew nobody who cared about economics or business, but I was learning that two billion of my brothers and sisters had been pulled out of poverty since I was a child.
00:36:40.000And I learned That it came from five things.
00:36:49.000Five things pulled two billion of Ben and Arthur's brothers and sisters out of poverty since 1970.
00:36:53.000It was globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and the culture of free enterprise spreading from America all around the world.
00:37:44.000And then I became president of the greatest think tank in the world, the American Enterprise Institute, where people fight every day for dignity, for potential, and who believe that the free enterprise system is America's gift to the world.
00:37:55.000But in an artistic way, because the fact is that, unlike most economists, you're a story-driven person.
00:37:59.000You talk about this in Love Your Enemies.
00:38:01.000The idea that story is really what connects us, and while you can know all the stats that you want to know, in the end, what's really going to allow you to connect to other people is the ability to identify with them on a one-to-one level.
00:38:14.000When you're trained as an economist, you start believing that the force of your arguments is going to win people over.
00:38:19.000And I wish it did, but I lost arguments for 15 years.
00:38:23.000People would talk to me about the minimum wage.
00:38:25.000And I would say, "Don't you understand supply and demand "and you're raising the cost of labor?" And people would say, "You're just a hard-hearted something, something.
00:38:34.000"And you just wanna put more dollars "in the CEO of Walmart's pocket or something." And I thought, "No," until I realized I needed to tell a human story.
00:38:43.000Look, I mean, the people who really want to fight for a higher minimum wage, God bless them, they have a really good intention.
00:38:49.000You know, there was a long time when people on the political left weren't fighting to make work pay.
00:38:54.000And people who want a higher minimum wage, they're fighting to make work pay.
00:38:58.000That's a really good objective, until I finally had enough generosity to say, that's an excellent objective.
00:39:04.000I completely agree with that, because work brings purpose.
00:39:50.000Well, you talk a lot in the book, at least in the beginning, about the 2016 election, what you think happened there, what drove the president, because Trump breaks a lot of these rules, right?
00:39:57.000President Trump is a master of the use of contempt.
00:39:59.000It drips from everything that he says.
00:40:02.000He can be vicious and brutal and very effective in his political warfare.
00:40:06.000And you talk specifically about sort of a group of folks who you believe felt dispossessed by current politics and were looking for a leader to kind of restore a feeling for them.
00:40:14.000And you specifically are talking about Yeah, that's a great question.
00:40:17.000Something that I've contemplated a lot.
00:40:31.000And I know that you're not this huge fan of President Trump, yet we're both trying to understand the dynamics of what's going on in the United States so that we can help our country.
00:40:38.000You know, the people on the left have always said there's this income gap.
00:40:42.000And people on the right have always said there's an opportunity gap.
00:41:00.000You know, they have enough space to live in.
00:41:02.000But the truth of the matter is that it's basically that that system in our culture has said to poor people, We don't need you.
00:41:08.000The basis of dignity is to be needed, to be needed by your family, to be needed by your community, and indirectly to be needed by the economy.
00:41:16.000We've been moving away from that for a long time.
00:41:18.000That was exploded, that was exacerbated massively by the financial crisis of 2008.
00:41:23.000And people who were in positions of authority and power, they didn't seem to understand that there was a dignity gap.
00:41:29.000And when people feel that they are not needed, man, they're going to fight back.
00:41:33.000They want somebody who's going to fight for them.
00:41:35.000You know, Donald Trump, his ideas may have been good, they might have been bad.
00:41:39.000His ideas about, you know, I'm standing in front of a coal mine or a steel plant saying I'm going to open this thing back up, you might have said, that's a bunch of claptrap, that's not right.
00:41:48.000But finally, somebody was fighting for people who felt that their dignity had been attenuated.
00:41:56.000I mean, if Donald Trump as a coercive leader is ultimately not successful in his bid, I mean, look, he's got the best economy in decades and his popularity isn't very high.
00:42:03.000I'm not gonna say, I'm not a political prognosticator.
00:42:05.000I'm not a meteorologist in the weather of politics.
00:42:09.000And I don't know what's gonna happen, but whether he's successful or not successful, we have to take a lesson about dignity from this.
00:42:16.000And that comes from making every single person needed.
00:42:24.000Less needed to their families, which is to say that it splits families apart, it creates incentives for that.
00:42:29.000Less needed in their communities by fragmenting our communities.
00:42:33.000And most importantly, in the case that we've seen over the past 10 years, unnecessary to the economy by creating incentives for idleness, by making it harder to find jobs.
00:42:42.000This is the oracle on how to bring dignity back and how to fix this situation for the United States.
00:42:47.000This is such a fascinating debate to me, because what I've seen is that there's sort of this continuum when it comes to the dignity gap and the power of work, ranging from Tucker Carlson on sort of the populist, I would almost say, left, to Orrin Cass, who's somewhere in the middle.
00:43:01.000Did you just say that Tucker Carlson's on the populist left?
00:43:03.000I mean, he sat in the chair that you're currently sitting in, and he legitimately said that he would outlaw self-driving cars in order to preserve Yeah.
00:43:13.000for people who are driving trucks, for example.
00:43:14.000And he's been—he's spoken in his book, his new book, he talks a lot about regulation of the economy, specifically in order to prevent technological progress, because he believes that they're a group of people who are going to be put out of work by that technological progress.
00:43:28.000That policy is almost indistinguishable in certain ways from Bernie Sanders' policy.
00:43:31.000And so when it comes to Tucker on cultural issues, he's of the populist right— When it comes to issues of economics and regulation, he's in many ways closer to the populist left.
00:43:42.000Then you have folks like Orncaste, who are kind of in the populist middle right, who have suggested regulatory reform, but he's also suggested the idea of a certain amount of redistributionism.
00:43:57.000Because it seems to me that If we feel we're in a transformative moment, if we feel that we're in a moment where technology is obviating an enormous number of jobs for people who don't graduate from college, then is the solution to that redistributionism?
00:44:15.000Or is the solution to that maybe something else, which is, for the first time in a long time, returning to finding meaning in something other than simply going to a factory and doing a job?
00:44:23.000Okay, so this is – I'm not a populist.
00:44:47.000I mean, the whole idea that somehow it's either no skills and desperation and trying to, you know, hit the brakes on technology so that self-driving cars are somehow illegal or you have to go to college.
00:44:58.000Those are, that's an insane dichotomy as far as I'm concerned.
00:45:00.000The truth is we've lacked imagination in this country because we have a completely screwed up educational system.
00:45:05.000We have an educational system that is great at serving guys like Ben and Arthur, and it's really, really bad at serving people who have all kinds of visuospatial skills.
00:45:14.000You know, it's crazy that our standardized testing in this country looks at verbal and quantitative, but doesn't look at visuospatial skills.
00:46:03.000What we need to actually do is to beef up the vocational and technical education system in this country so it's just as important as going to college.
00:46:09.000We need an apprenticeship system that we could experiment with at state and local level.
00:46:14.000There's all kinds of policy solutions to this, but the cultural question is the biggest one of all, which is actual respect and dignity that goes to people who don't have college educations because they have so much to bring.
00:46:26.000Three million people are going to be thrown out of jobs when we have self-driving cars, but we have seven million unfilled jobs in this country today.
00:46:33.000Look, I go to places in eastern Kentucky.
00:46:36.000We just shot this documentary film, partly in a place called Inez, Kentucky, where President Johnson kicked off the war on poverty, and you see unemployed people next to unfilled jobs.
00:46:46.000I talk to people in manufacturing all the time who they can't find workers.
00:46:51.000That's not because we have too much technology.
00:46:54.000It's not because we have to make it illegal to innovate.
00:46:56.000It doesn't matter how much you make it illegal.
00:46:59.000It's going to happen one way or the other.
00:47:01.000We have to embrace it and we have to skill up and we need an educational system that treats people with equal dignity whether they go to Harvard or not.
00:47:10.000And this is one of the areas where I really think that it gets into uncomfortable tension because a lot of folks in conservative and leftist circle, liberal circles, they focus a lot on what the government can do to make these things happen.
00:47:24.000And it seems to me the vast majority of this stuff has to be done through social fabric.
00:47:27.000When I say social fabric half the time, I think I'm using a euphemism for religious community, because the truth is that there are a couple of factors that I think were here three generations ago that are no longer here.
00:47:37.000One of them is the belief that there's a community that is larger than you, that is going to help take care of you if, God forbid, something happens to you, and government has been used as a substitute for that.
00:47:45.000And the other is that you know that that community exists not just in your city, meaning that When I was talking to Tucker, and I thought it was a fascinating conversation, because Tucker took the position that you should never have to move from your hometown.
00:47:56.000He said, should you really have to move from the place where your grandparents are buried?
00:47:58.000And I said, well, you know, there is this biblical call to Abraham, and just in the Joseph Campbell hero's journey, every journey starts with somebody calling you to adventure.
00:48:07.000So America was always about that call to adventure.
00:48:09.000But the call to adventure exists largely because I, as a Jew, I can pick up and I can move to anywhere I know that there's a Jewish community and I can walk into somebody's house and I know that they're going to be able to take care of me and they're going to help me out because we share a certain fundamental fabric together.
00:48:24.000And I think that it's broader than my social community, my Jewish community.
00:48:27.000I think that it extends also to many religious Christians.
00:48:29.000I think that it extends to conservatives.
00:48:31.000But in the absence of that social fabric, I think it's going to be very difficult to build the sense of comfort that you can move somewhere and start anew.
00:48:39.000How do we rebuild some of these key components?
00:48:40.000Because we live in a time when people have the greatest ease of travel we've ever had in human history, when, as you say, there are lots of jobs available to people who want them, and people are not moving, when there's this almost feeling of malaise, to use a Carter phrase, that is set over the country, where we feel like we're in a dying community, and if we tell people to pick up and move from those communities, that's a political loser.
00:49:03.000Telling people to pick up and move from those communities, if you tell people, the best decision you can make is to Graduate high school and then get any job that you can possibly get and don't have a baby out of wedlock.
00:49:13.000This is considered by a lot of folks in American politics to be discriminatory and terrible.
00:49:29.000One of the things that we've forgotten, both on the political right and the political left, I mean, the political right has become pretty libertarian over the past few—and I've got nothing against my friends who are libertarians, but you've got to remember that that stuff does not work unless the fundamental moral code is existing underneath it.
00:49:48.000Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations 17 years after the theory of moral sentiments.
00:49:53.000I mean, he believed that we're not dignified, we can't handle a market system unless we actually have our morals together, that we understand and serve each other, that we have a concept of a greater purpose.
00:50:04.000That's the reason he thought that The Theory of Moral Sentiments was a better book, a more important book than The Wealth of Nations.
00:50:09.000He went back to it at the end of his life and worked on it.
00:50:11.000You know, what we've forgotten in this country, on the political right and left, but especially on the political right, is we're all wealthy nations, no theory of moral sentiments.
00:50:20.000We have to remember that none of this stuff works.
00:50:22.000I mean, you know, capitalism is a machine.
00:50:37.000You can drive it to work and support your family, or you can get drunk and drive it into your neighbor's living room and run over them while they're watching television and hurt them.
00:50:46.000Capitalism actually requires morals, and this is the thing that we have to remember.
00:50:49.000So therefore, what I would like to encourage people who are watching us to remember is that in America, in an entrepreneurship-based society, we're not just looking for the next innovation that's going to make us richer.
00:51:00.000We have to be looking for the resurgence of our ideas through social entrepreneurship that will bring our culture back.
00:51:06.000What really great entrepreneurs should be doing, spiritual entrepreneurs, cultural entrepreneurs, people that are thinking about what the gears should be for a really great America.
00:51:16.000And by that, I don't mean a richer America, just a more prosperous America.
00:51:19.000I mean a healthier country where we're happier and where people want to live and people want to raise their kids, where people have a greater sense of adventure, where they have a greater sense of community.
00:51:28.000That requires the best minds watching us right now to think about themselves as the entrepreneurs that are going to truly bring the country back.
00:51:35.000That does not necessarily mean developing an app.
00:51:38.000What that means is developing a congregation, maybe, and that's the kind of entrepreneurship.
00:51:43.000Man, if we got back to that idea, that, by the way, is the entrepreneurship that made America what it is today, between the Civil War and the First World War.
00:51:50.000That's the self-improvement and the tent revival and the temperance and the abolitionist spirits that went into the social entrepreneurship.
00:51:59.000That made it into a congenial environment that drew your great grandparents here.
00:52:04.000That's why they're not in some town in Ukraine.
00:52:06.000That's why they are in the United States.
00:52:07.000And if we want to give people the courage, we have to create the ecosystem that will inspire their courage.
00:52:13.000If we want them to get a U-Haul, instead of just being depressed about what's going on, we have to create an environment where they have that kind of confidence.
00:52:22.000Just the kind of confidence that you're talking about.
00:52:24.000And that requires the innovative spirit, the frontier spirit, that we've kind of lost in this country and we've got to get back.
00:52:31.000So I want to ask you a base political question because we haven't done any base politics at this point.
00:52:34.000So I want to ask you, you talk about the distinction between conservative and libertarian and how much of a social welfare state there should be.
00:52:42.000What do you think should the social welfare state look like?
00:52:44.000And full disclosure, I tend toward the more libertarian on this.
00:52:47.000My view is that You know, the vast majority of social welfare should be done at the non-governmental level by religious communities, ideally.
00:52:53.000And then if there are people who fall through the cracks, that's where local government comes in, then state government, then federal government.
00:52:58.000But you talk about sort of the certain levers that you think that we can tweak in social welfare.
00:53:03.000Where do you see the ideal social welfare state being?
00:53:06.000What do you think that that level looks like?
00:53:08.000I mean, I could probably put dollar figures on it.
00:53:10.000We could kind of go through the spreadsheets on it.
00:53:12.000That's why God created the American Enterprise Institute, is actually to come up with dollar figures on this.
00:53:16.000But as a philosophical principle, I have pretty solid libertarian roots like you do, but they're more morally based than practically based.
00:53:25.000I'm not really that concerned about how much it costs.
00:53:28.000What I'm concerned about is the deleterious spillovers that happen to people at the margins of our society.
00:53:33.000And so the key thing for me is using our policy ideas, using our intellect, using the blessings that we've got on behalf of people with less power than Ben and Arthur.
00:53:51.000You know, this idea that we exist such that we can help people with less power than we have, that can mean a lot of different things.
00:53:57.000I don't care that much about the money.
00:53:59.000I mean, I realize that you run out of other people's money sooner or later.
00:54:03.000What I worry about is the extent to which we've designed programs that demobilize people, that hurt people, that marginalize people and leave them desperate.
00:54:11.000One of my colleagues, Charles Murray, who wrote Losing Ground in 1984, he pointed this out.
00:54:15.000The problem with the welfare system is not how much it costs.
00:54:17.000It's that it harms the people it's supposed to help, and that's the fundamental problem.
00:54:22.000So my libertarianism, to the extent that we can call it that, is based on that.
00:54:26.000For the principles, how much it costs, then we're actually getting into accounting.
00:54:33.000Well, what works, the criterion for what works, is does it make people more needed or does it make people less needed?
00:54:39.000And welfare programs from April 23, 1964 when Lyndon Johnson went to Inez, Kentucky until today have been making people less needed, more comfortable and less needed.
00:54:55.000I'm absolutely willing to spend actually what it takes if we have a welfare system that will enhance the necessity of people and as such to build up their dignity.
00:55:05.000Okay, so at the very end of your book, Love Your Enemies, you give a bunch of tips for people how to actually get beyond your own feelings about this.
00:55:12.000As I say, there's a concept in Judaism called Musar, and Musar is the idea basically of people trying to convince you to be better at being a human being.
00:55:37.000To begin with, the most important thing to keep in mind is that when somebody treats you with contempt, you have to see it as an opportunity.
00:56:03.000I mean, it's very tough psychologically to say, no, no, you understand.
00:56:07.000Every time that there is some rejection, that's an opportunity for us to react to the rejection in such a way that people are inherently morally attracted to it.
00:56:15.000So the first thing to keep in mind is that we have mastery over ourselves.
00:56:29.000If you're treated with contempt and you answer just like that with contempt, then the time between stimulus and response has been minimized because you're not the master of yourself.
00:56:38.000You can make the decision to answer with contempt, but typically we don't.
00:56:44.000So what we need to do is to take that time and say, huh, I was just treated with contempt.
00:57:14.000His politics were all messed up as far as I'm concerned.
00:57:17.000He was wrong on most things, but he was really good on communication.
00:57:20.000And he's very clever in a lot of ways.
00:57:23.000And one of the things that he did, and a lot of things that people on the political left have done from time immemorial, is to stand up to the man, is to have a sense of the man.
00:57:32.000Well, we need to do that right now too.
00:57:34.000I mean, again, not to treat anybody with contempt, even the man, but to remember that 7% of Americans are profiting from the current environment.
00:57:42.000Now, I say this with appropriate humility because sometimes it's been me.
00:57:48.000And I don't want it to be me, and that's why I've written the book, and that's why we're having this conversation, and that's why I'm so grateful that we get to talk about it, because we haven't been perfect, but we want to be better.
00:57:59.000They don't want the current climate of contempt.
00:58:01.000All the people who are unrepentant about this, who are getting rich and powerful and famous and getting clicks and making money and getting elected to office, that 7%, we need to Leave them behind.
00:58:12.000I mean, it's time for us to turn that off and to think about what we can actually do to lift other people up.
01:00:59.000Remember that when you go out of the house and you're talking to friends and you're talking to people who disagree with you, you're in mission territory.
01:01:08.000Nobody kicks down the door and threatens somebody unless they join the church.
01:01:12.000They try to make it beautiful, and they try to make it good.
01:01:15.000And that's what we can, that's what I can certainly be better at, and that's what I'm dedicating the rest of my life to doing.
01:01:19.000So, I have to ask you, because you famously, you've been a famous vegan for a long time.
01:01:24.000How did the vegan, I have to ask you this because I've been getting this question more and more on college campuses, and I really do think that in a hundred years when there are actual appropriate meat alternatives for children, this is going to be one of those areas where in a hundred years people are going to look back and say, you used to kill animals for food.
01:01:43.000So my wife is always, I mean, all good things in my life come from my wife.
01:01:46.000I mean, it's, you know, everything I've learned about love, everything I've learned about my Catholic faith, all that stuff comes from my wife.
01:01:52.000And my wife experiments with different diets from time to time.
01:01:55.000And I have to say, it always kind of bothered me.
01:01:57.000I mean, eating, and again, I'm not, you know, I'm gonna get a ton of email from this.
01:02:12.000But for me, I felt more comfortable getting my sources of protein and getting my nutrition from plant sources for a bunch of different reasons, both health and ethical reasons.