Glenn Lowry is an esteemed American economist and public intellectual whose research and commentary delves into the intersection of economics, race, and social policy. In his recent memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, Lowry reflects on his experiences in academia, moments of personal turmoil, and his political shifts over the course of his career. In today s episode, we discuss the difficulty of political messaging and policy crafting around racial inequality, the trajectory of American race relations since the Obama administration, and Glenn s relationship with religion. We also discuss what Glenn views as the real tragedy of race in America, and the lasting damage from the national racial reckoning of the summer of 2020. Stay tuned to hear more of Glenn Lowry s profound insights on these issues and much more on this episode of the Sunday Special. I really appreciate it. I ve been a big fan for a long time of his extraordinary amount of work, and I m really looking forward to hearing what he s got to say about race, culture, and identity in the next few years. -Ben J. Koppel, The New York Times bestselling author of The Black Conservative: How to Be a Conservative in a Post-Civil Rights Era and the host of the podcast, Rachel Maddow, New York Magazine s newest book, How to Think Like a Conservative: A Black Conservative in the 21st Century: How To Think Like A Conservative in 21st-Modernism and How to Get a White Conservative in America? (New York Times/New York Magazine) is out now, and will be available in paperback on November 18th, 2019. (Coming soon, exclusively on Amazon and elsewhere.) Join us on Podchaser, Subscribe to our newsletter, PodChaser's Instantly Learn more about the show on Nov. 19th, 2020, and more by becoming a Friend of the Righteousness and Other Things? (listings are available on PodCharity? ) Thank you, Ben Kaspor, Ben Sowell, Jr. & Jason Rowley, Jr., & so much more! Thanks, Mr. Sowell & Co., a great man of the Great Man of the Best of His Goodness, by Mr. Burt McCartan Jr. is a Greatness, etc. & much more, etc., etc. & so on and so on & so forth
00:00:06.000When the real violence on the streets of America today is these miscreants and these THUGS running around with automatic weapons, firing them aimlessly out of automobiles at their gang rivals and stuff like that.
00:00:20.000I mean, and you don't have any engagement with that problem.
00:00:24.000Instead, You convert it into a white domination problem?
00:00:30.000So that's the kind of truth that a black president needed to pull the covers off of and he failed to do it.
00:00:38.000Glenn Lowry is an esteemed American economist and public intellectual whose research and commentary delves into the intersection of economics, race, and social policy.
00:00:45.000Born on the South Side of Chicago, Lowry's academic prowess led him to become the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33.
00:00:52.000Now, as a professor at Brown University, his research has challenged conventional wisdom and sparked critical discourse on issues like affirmative action, criminal justice reform, and racial inequality.
00:01:01.000Lowry's salient commentary on the Glen Shawn substack and as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute highlight his depth of knowledge and often heterodox views.
00:01:08.000In his recent memoir, Late Admissions, Confessions of a Black Conservative, Lowry reflects on his experiences in academia, moments of personal turmoil, and his political shifts over the course of his career.
00:01:17.000In today's episode, we discuss the difficulty of political messaging and policy crafting around racial inequality, the trajectory of American race relations since the Obama administration, and Glenn's relationship with religion.
00:01:28.000We also discuss what Glenn views as the real tragedy of race in America and the lasting damage from the national racial reckoning of the summer of 2020.
00:01:35.000Stay tuned to hear Glenn Lowry's profound insights on these issues and much more on
00:02:00.000First, I kind of want to start, I mean, it does cover the topic of your book, obviously, with sort of your history politically, because here you call yourself a black conservative.
00:02:07.000For a long time, you consider yourself a moderate or a liberal mugged by reality.
00:02:12.000So now in the title of the book, you're calling yourself a conservative.
00:02:16.000Well, I could approach it in a number of ways.
00:02:19.000As an economist, I could talk about kind of libertarian ideas on the economy, markets, property, prices, limited government, free trade, that kind of thing.
00:02:30.000As a person who is a born-again Christian at one point in my life and very fervent believer, Less so now, but still with great respect for these traditions of religious search for meaning in life.
00:02:44.000You know, I tend to be conservative on the cultural side.
00:02:48.000But from the racial point of view, the quote, conservatism has mainly to do, I think, with embrace of a kind of autonomy, self-determination, personal responsibility, not blaming the white man, more Booker T. Washington kind of, you know, bootstrapping kind of response to the existential challenge that being the descendants of slaves confronts Black Americans with.
00:03:30.000So I would say on all three of those, economics, culture, and Black self-determination, I have finally, at this late stage in my life, come to embrace a conservative identity.
00:03:43.000I guess that's a dangerous political move because you can be as groundbreaking a thinker as Thomas Sowell and just get completely marginalized from the public debate, treated as though you basically don't exist if you are openly declared a conservative early enough.
00:03:55.000I mean, I've been saying literally my entire political lifetime, which now goes back about 20 years, that if I could pick one person to be President of the United States, it would be Professor Sowell.
00:04:03.000But Professor Sowell, in sort of mainstream economic discussions, has never even mentioned, despite so much of his amazing work on things ranging from race and discrimination to just basic economic knowledge and decisions type work.
00:04:16.000Why do you think it is that black conservatives, particularly in the economic sphere, or people who even are perceived that way, you, say, Roland Fryer, why does that marginalization happen?
00:04:29.000That's such a good question, Ben, and I'm so glad you mentioned Tom Sowell, who's a great man, an epic figure of the 20th century, one of the great intellectuals of our lifetime.
00:04:39.000I mean, you know, you can name book after book and Jason Rowley's written a pretty good biography of him and whatnot, but Thomas Sowell is a towering figure.
00:04:46.000I keep saying he should get the Nobel Prize, just like they gave it to Friedrich von Hayek and they gave it to Gunnar Myrdal.
00:04:52.000They can give it to a generic thinker.
00:04:54.000He doesn't have to be a technical, you know, kind of mathematics, kind of fetishizing, you know, he's a big thinker.
00:05:02.000But anyway, I'm not answering your question.
00:05:04.000And I think there's a certain expectation that if you're Black, you have a kind of progressive, what they're going to call progressive or kind of critical, you know, that you have to be in an anti-system mode, that there's some kind of rebellion that's part of the authenticity.
00:05:25.000And so when you see somebody comes along who's whose worldview is grounded in something other than resistance to struggle or domination, who kind of embraces the reigning cultural paradigms and whatnot, then they want to marginalize them.
00:05:49.000I'm not sure I understand the problem, since I'm kind of, in a way, a victim of the same set of forces myself.
00:05:57.000One of the things I wanted to ask you, and I want to get to your critiques of the left, which of course have made you very controversial, but one of the things that I think that's fascinating, from what I've read about your book and what I've listened to you talk about with John McWhorter and other people, is sort of your take on why the right has been Historically unable to reach out to the black community or to black voters, so to speak, in some ways that are kind of unique.
00:06:24.000So when I hear you talk about race very often, or when you write about race, you write about race in a way that you've talked about here as Essentially, it should be made less relevant to the question of personal autonomy and responsibility, that people should be taught that the decisions to make their life better are effectively in their own hands because teaching them anything else is counterproductive and useless.
00:06:47.000And yet, one of the things that you've talked pretty openly about is that conservatives, when they speak that language, are not speaking that language properly.
00:06:53.000And then when they speak to black Americans very often about that sort of stuff, it comes off less as an act of sympathy and pragmatism and more as a sort of alienating language with regard to black Americans.
00:07:06.000How it's said is maybe not how it's heard.
00:07:09.000I've heard you talk about that, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what do you think are the main obstacles to a conservative or libertarian message in speaking to black Americans?
00:07:19.000I think that's a hard question, at least it's a hard one for me.
00:07:23.000The thing that came to my mind, I don't care what you know until I know that you care.
00:07:30.000You can't really get my attention and tell me anything that I might otherwise be disinclined to believe that I'll take credibly until I'm persuaded that your basic commitments are consistent with my flourishing and not antagonistic to it.
00:07:46.000So the suspicion that the motive is racist or a lack of concern altogether, that the prescription might be free market, bootstrap responsibility, but the motive for it might be indifference or hostility to the person as opposed to a desire that they flourish and a thinking that this is the best way to do it.
00:08:09.000And, you know, if I were a white conservative being told that I had to curry favor with the sentiment of this population in order to get them to take me seriously, I might balk at that.
00:08:22.000I remember back in the 90s when I started pulling away from conservatism a little bit for a period of time, being at a meeting where the great William F. Buckley said, In effect, the metaphor was, you can't say that the doctor doesn't care when he's dealing with a terminal patient, and he moves on to the next case.
00:08:45.000And I thought at the time, oh, how horrible that was, how horrible.
00:08:48.000And he was merely saying, You know, what Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a way, was saying to Richard Nixon in that famous benign neglect.
00:08:58.000He says, I think it's time for the race question to endure a period of benign neglect, meaning, you know, let's move on to other stuff.
00:09:06.000And people get from that the message that you don't care.
00:09:10.000You know, I want to go back to that period in your life because I find that particularly fascinating.
00:09:14.000I want to get to kind of the before and then the after also.
00:09:16.000But that period which you do talk about in your new book, that period where you moved away from conservatism, I think is instructive for conservatives in speaking about race.
00:09:24.000So maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, what were the forces that propelled you away from conservatism and toward a sort of view of yourself as more moderate or even left leaning?
00:09:36.000Some of those forces were not as flattering to me as others.
00:09:40.000I mean, so the unflattering was like, I was feeling alienated from other African-American intellectuals, and I wanted to be rehabilitated.
00:09:49.000You know, in other words, I'd been out in the wilderness with Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams and people, and I kind of wanted to get back into good graces.
00:09:56.000And with the likes of the Cornel West and the Henry Louis Gates Jr.s and the Anthony Oppys, the kind of what I call the Negro cognoscente in my book, I mean, the kind of intellectual elites amongst African-Americans, because You know, being from the South Side of Chicago, being a black guy, I mean, having a certain identity I wanted to be.
00:10:15.000And, you know, I was getting pressure all over the place, even from my own family, even from my own children.
00:10:19.000You know, I was getting pressure about my politics.
00:10:22.000So maybe I was succumbing to that a little bit.
00:10:25.000The mass incarceration issue, there was a while where I was very agitated about the sharp increase in the size of the prison population and the racial disparity in it and all of that, and I leaned left in those years on those issues.
00:10:41.000But there were also other things that were going on.
00:10:47.000You know, the speculation about the intrinsic intellectual inferiority of African Americans.
00:10:52.000I mean, you know, forgive me, as I told my friends at commentary when I wanted to write a critical review of the bell curve, and this Norman Podhoretz and Neil Casadoy, they said, no, thank you, because we're not piling on Charles.
00:11:04.000And I felt bad about that because I felt like I was protecting my people.
00:11:15.000I, as I said, became a Christian and was moved in a way about social justice kind of questions from that point of view.
00:11:25.000It was an African American congregation, AME, Pretty conservative theologically, but also a sense of responsibility for uplifting the Black community kind of thing.
00:11:37.000So there were various pressures and stuff that were.
00:11:40.000There were some books I write about in my book, my reaction to The Bell Curve, to Abigail and Stephen Thornstrom's book, America in Black and White, and to Dinesh D'Souza's book, The End of Racism.
00:11:54.000I had problems with those books, which I could go into, but we don't want to waste our time on that kind of thing.
00:11:59.000Actually, I might want to waste my time for at least five minutes on that sort of thing, because I think that it's instructive as to the approach that conservatives should take when they discuss these sorts of issues.
00:12:07.000Because obviously, you're not only somebody who's open to conservatism, you're somebody who is.
00:12:12.000And yet you found the messages of those books particularly alienating.
00:12:15.000And I think that that is something that's worth conservatives, people who very likely listen to my show, talking about.
00:12:21.000Like, what exactly is the best way to discuss issues that were being taken on by Charles Murray or the Thernstroms or Dinesh in those books?
00:12:30.000And how do they differ from your message with regard to race, which is a message of taking ownership of your own life?
00:12:39.000Okay, well, I don't have to be right about this.
00:12:40.000This is just my opinion, and this is 25, 30-year-old stuff, in a way, going back to the 90s.
00:12:45.000But I already said my problem with Merriam-Hernstein, which was, in a way, a kind of defense of the race.
00:12:51.000It was a kind of—the intellectual agenda here is hostile to the essential interests of African Americans to characterize our subordinate social status as the result of intrinsic or inborn deficiency.
00:13:08.000Now Charles Murray, who is a friend of mine, would say that's not what I was saying.
00:13:14.000But certainly that message was in the air and there was a disquiet that I had with that whole project.
00:13:23.000He has a long career now to stand on, and you can look at his corpus of work.
00:13:29.000That book, The End of Racism, and I wrote a review in the Weekly Standard about the book.
00:13:51.000He had this political correctness book, Illiberal Education, which I thought was a good book.
00:13:58.000And then he comes along with this, and he undertakes to sort of summarize from a 20-something conservative intellectual activist kind of perspective.
00:14:22.000I wrote that review in the Weekly Standard.
00:14:24.000And as far as American Black and White is concerned, it was sort of this point that I made earlier, which is, you know, are we going to stop caring about whether we get this problem right?
00:14:39.000The problem being the residual subordinate status of African Americans given slavery and Jim Crow and all that, or are we just going to move on?
00:14:47.000And in a way, I thought they wanted to move on and I didn't want to move on.
00:14:51.000So I took the opportunity of a long review in The Atlantic, which Cost me their friendship.
00:15:26.000But the task of any policymaker is to determine Number one, what would be the most effective corrective to that, if it can be corrected without violating the rights of others?
00:15:35.000And two, trying to actually Create some sort of metric whereby you can determine how much of a given disparity is a result of past discrimination.
00:15:47.000It seems as though the conversation goes, okay, I fully acknowledge that the terrible history of early redlining, let's say the 30s, 40s and 50s, that that has tail effects in terms of familial wealth.
00:15:59.000But how does that measure into today's income disparities?
00:16:02.000How does that measure into today's wealth disparities?
00:16:04.000And even if you acknowledge that it measures in a certain percentage, In today's wealth disparities, how is that wealth disparity corrected for by, say, bad mortgage policy as opposed to increased income trajectory, which would lead presumably to future wealth?
00:16:18.000I mean, the reality is that there are a number of minority groups who had literally no familial wealth when they arrived in the United States and now have tremendous wealth because of those income trajectories that actually generate wealth generationally.
00:16:29.000You know, it seems like whenever you get down to those brass tacks, Very often, people want to avoid that second question.
00:16:35.000They want to go back to the original question and then suggest that you're just not acknowledging the reality of historic discrimination and its aftereffects in modern life.
00:16:44.000And then they conflate that with the idea that there is current discriminatory policy, which, as you talked about, even in Anatomy of Racial Inequality, the idea of contract racism, the idea of legal racism, that's been gone for a long time in the United States.
00:17:00.000There might be contact racism, as you talk about.
00:17:14.000It's also very difficult to determine, as you suggest, what proportion of any given disparity that you see today is due to that as opposed to other things.
00:17:23.000In economics, we have this concept of stocks and flows.
00:17:26.000The stock is the wealth you have at hand.
00:17:29.000The flow is what you're incrementing and adding to that on each annual or monthly basis.
00:17:35.000And the long-term disposition of the stocks depends upon the flows.
00:17:39.000So people are looking at a wealth disparity and they're saying, see, history has bequeathed this, but they're not asking where does wealth come from?
00:17:50.000If you don't get the flows right, the stocks are going to revert back to their disparate condition in the long run anyway.
00:17:57.000You're not going to really solve the problem.
00:18:00.000Wealth creation, I think, is the issue, not wealth inheritance.
00:18:04.000I think too much emphasis is placed on inheritance.
00:18:06.000But I want to say this to African Americans and anybody else who's listening.
00:18:10.000We're in the 21st century, and to live looking backward and to base your argument on what you owe or are owed, what, you know, repair, repair for the historical, as opposed to the forward-looking, Which is the 21st century where, you know, China is coming and is here, technology is moving, telecommunications politics is so fluid.
00:18:35.000I think this backward focus is both kind of analytically wrong, the issue is going forward, but it's also kind of corrupt.
00:18:47.000I mean, it's a politics of dependency.
00:18:50.000Who is the audience when you say wealth disparity?
00:18:54.000It's the people who have wealth whom you're asking to give you some.
00:18:58.000You empower them with the ability to determine whether or not you flourish, when it's really your responsibility whether or not you flourish.
00:19:07.000Now, that last point that you're making there obviously has been made by people like Shelby Steele, which is that, you know, when it comes to the sort of white guilt community, so much of this politics is not being aimed at black Americans.
00:19:18.000A huge percentage of this politics is being aimed at upper-crust white liberals who seem to regain moral superiority by declaring that only they can correct this problem.
00:19:26.000If you just give them enough power, then they will correct all the wealth disparities.
00:19:30.000And so, they're very happy to use the revolutionary fuel of this sort of argument in order to generate power for
00:19:36.000themselves because then only they can fix.
00:19:37.000They gain both moral superiority in the sense that they have
00:19:39.000beaten their chest and talked about the historic discrimination of the country,
00:19:44.000but not me. I'm dissociated from that. And also, if you give me the power, I alone can fix.
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00:21:20.000So when I look at kind of the state of racial America right now, one of the things that's happened even in my lifetime, and I'm still relatively young, I'm 40, and so, you know, even in the course of my lifetime, I feel like the sort of apex of racial harmony in the country was approximately 2007-2008.
00:21:35.000And you can see this in the polling data, that about 2008, there starts to be a slight decrease
00:21:43.000in sort of how Americans are feeling about race.
00:21:45.000And then it just dives off the table in 2014.
00:21:48.000In 2013, 2014, it just falls completely off the table.
00:21:51.000You opposed Barack Obama for president in 2008.
00:21:51.000You opposed Barack Obama for president in 2008.
00:21:55.000I did also, when I read Dreams for My Father, on an ideological level, it seemed to me
00:21:55.000I did also, when I read Dreams from My Father, on an ideological level, it seemed to me
00:22:00.000that he was arguing for a pretty Marxist, materialist view of the world,
00:22:00.000that he was arguing for a pretty Marxist, materialist view of the world,
00:22:05.000that the reason that people do bad things is because of wealth inequality.
00:22:09.000He has a section in the introduction to Dreams from My Father that I still cite
00:22:14.000as I think one of the most damaging things that he ever said that nobody ever noticed,
00:22:17.000where he says that, when I see the despair, whether it's in Jakarta, Indonesia,
00:22:21.000whether I see it in young, dispossessed terrorists, basically, in the Middle East,
00:22:26.000or whether I see it in the South Side of Chicago, it's always coming from the same sort of feeling
00:22:33.000The notion that black Americans in the South Side of Chicago are committing terror acts
00:22:39.000in the same way as, say, a radical young Muslim who's 18 living in the Gaza Strip or something.
00:22:44.000First of all, lumping all that together in sort of this Marxist materialist way is bizarre.
00:22:47.000But it then led to him creating, in 2012, in that campaign, a sort of coalition of the dispossessed.
00:22:53.000And we're still seeing that politics played forward today.
00:22:56.000I've made the argument that basically 2012 broke the country and we're all living in the after effects of 2012.
00:23:01.000That Barack Obama was elected by a large margin in 2008 on the promise that he would be a post-racial president.
00:23:08.000That he and his very person, by uniting black and white, was going to move America beyond the key issue of division in the United States, that of race.
00:23:16.000And now we are going to be one America.
00:23:18.000Not white America and black America, just America.
00:23:23.000And then it turns out in 2012, when he was a pretty unpopular president, he decided to start saying things like, Trayvon could have been my son.
00:23:30.000And Henry Louis Gates, the officer, acted stupidly.
00:23:33.000And he started pretty obviously pandering to particular racial constituencies, not just black Americans.
00:23:39.000He also started making overtures to Latino Americans with policies on illegal immigration.
00:23:43.000And it was basically, I'm going to cobble together this coalition of non-white Americans
00:23:47.000and college educated white liberal women.
00:23:49.000And that will be the winning coalition from here on in.
00:23:51.000And when he actually lost votes between 08 and 12, and then he won the presidency
00:23:55.000over the most milquetoast human being ever to run for president, Mitt Romney,
00:23:59.000characterizing him as a vicious racist in the process.
00:24:02.000That actually set up this bizarre nether region we've been inheriting politically since 2012,
00:24:08.000in which Democrats believe that they can just get out the racial base by pandering over and over.
00:24:13.000And Republicans in response have said, okay, fine.
00:24:16.000Well, if you're going to turn white people into a racial constituency,
00:24:18.000then I guess they're a racial constituency now.
00:24:20.000And so you have this really bad racial dynamic that was set up in fact by a politician
00:24:34.000Well, it was Trayvon Martin, and you're right.
00:24:35.000He did say, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
00:24:37.000And Eric Holder was there whispering in his ear, and so was Michelle and all these other things.
00:24:42.000He wasn't what looked like it could have been a more challenging re-election campaign than it turned out to be, but I agree about Milk Toast Mitt Romney.
00:24:55.000A strategy that the Democrats have doubled down on.
00:24:58.000I don't know if Biden's craven, obscene kind of pandering to the black vote with this very insulting and infuriating patronization and this dwelling on, you can't make it in America ten times better.
00:25:14.000You have to pretend, you know, the Ku Klux Klan is coming to get you and I'm the only thing that'll save you from it.
00:25:20.000Well, I mean, you know, and maybe it does have its origins in 2012.
00:25:26.000So my take on Obama was, what's the point of having a black president if he doesn't tell the country the truth about race?
00:25:33.000You have an opportunity, I mean, to really move the needle on race.
00:25:38.000And actually, race relations get worse, not better, after he serves.
00:25:43.000And my account for that was, I never thought about the 2012 effect that you're talking about.
00:25:48.000My account for that was more forward-looking.
00:25:50.000It was like, he's only 60 or 60, 58 or whatever he is when he leaves the presidency.
00:25:56.000He's going to be ex-president a lot longer than he was president, and he's got a kind of reputational management problem.
00:26:02.000He can't be that guy who pulled the cover off of the fraud, which is the racial narrative of white supremacy and structural racism, when the real story is A failure to seize opportunity opened up historically at the end of the 20th century, and to take advantage of the possibilities of developing, acquiring, accumulating, building, and achieving on the part of African Americans.
00:26:42.000When the real violence on the streets of America today is these miscreants and these THUGS, Running around with automatic weapons, firing them aimlessly out of automobiles at their gang rivals, and stuff like that.
00:26:56.000And you don't have any engagement with that problem.
00:27:01.000Instead, you convert it into a white domination problem?
00:27:09.000So that's the kind of truth that a black president needed to pull the covers off of, and Obama was as far away from doing that as you could possibly be.
00:27:19.000He brings Al Sharpton into his White House as an ambassador to black America.
00:27:25.000He has contempt for the historic responsibility which was bequeathed to him when he was elected president to change the conversation on race in this country.
00:27:33.000He could have done it, and he failed to do it.
00:27:37.000I think that there are also some political aftereffects from 2012, to give my hinge theory some more meat on the bones.
00:27:44.000The theory that Obama trotted out politically, which was that there would be an emerging minority-majority coalition that would be undefeatable for the rest of time.
00:27:53.000When he beat Romney, I think the Democratic Party swallowed that line wholesale.
00:27:56.000And so Hillary tried to campaign on that same coalition.
00:27:59.000The problem for Hillary is that there was no way she was going to generate the kind of turnout numbers that Barack Obama did in the black community.
00:28:05.000And so when she lost, instead of them saying Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and Obama was a uniquely good candidate in many ways, instead the Democratic Party said, well, this must be racial revenge.
00:28:15.000This must be America rejecting the legacy of Barack Obama and swinging over to this Racialist, racist, terrible, white, supremacist Donald Trump.
00:28:27.000And meanwhile, on the Republican side of the aisle, because there was this buy-in to the idea that Democrats would now win every election from here on out because of the demographic changes in the country, when Trump won, it became he's a miracle worker.
00:28:38.000Because only a miracle worker could defeat that machine.
00:28:40.000And so that meant, when you fast forward to 2020, that Democrats kept doubling down on the same Barack Obama strategy from 2012, but all the rules had changed because of all the early voting and all of this.
00:28:49.000And meanwhile, when Trump said, I didn't lose.
00:28:51.000A lot of Republicans went, well, of course he didn't lose.
00:28:59.000And so now you fast forward to 2024, Biden's running the same campaign, except he's been president for three and a half years and been terrible at it.
00:29:06.000And he is experiencing the Hillary 2016 effect, which is people don't want to vote for him.
00:29:11.000People aren't going to show up for him.
00:29:12.000And meanwhile, Trump has the right believing that he's a miracle worker.
00:29:15.000So we're now set up for a situation in which either way the election goes, There's a high probability, I would say, of significant chaos.
00:29:24.000I wish I could argue with that, but I can't.
00:29:29.000I wanted to say something about something you said earlier, which was that they make, with the affirmative action and the structural racism narrative and the white supremacy shibboleth, They make whiteness into this bugaboo.
00:29:47.000Then when white people start actually trying to defend themselves, they call it racism.
00:29:53.000Okay, those were not your words, but that was something I took from what you said.
00:29:57.000If you keep labeling people a constituency group, they start to actually see themselves as a constituency group.
00:30:01.000You can be forced into a room with other people, and if everybody outside the room is clamoring for you, that they're coming after you, you're going to start to see some solidarity emerge inside that room.
00:30:12.000You're the interviewer, but I almost want to ask you whether you think Trump is going to win the election here in 2024.
00:30:20.000I mean, listen, I don't, I wouldn't put money on this election, you know, not for hell or high water.
00:30:26.000Although I have, I went from a person who did not vote in the 2016 election because I was so dissatisfied with the candidates to a person who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, knowing all of his flaws to a person who literally fundraised for Trump this time around.
00:30:42.000Number one, I know what Trump looks like as president, and I do believe that the system has done a pretty good job of keeping Trump in check.
00:30:47.000This is why when people talk about Trump's a threat to the democracy, the only person who's been institutionally checked in my lifetime is Donald Trump, actually.
00:30:54.000For good and for ill, as it turns out in this latest criminal conviction case, where the institutions are being militarized against him for ridiculous reasons.
00:31:02.000Joe Biden, because he actually knows how the system works, He's an actual dangerous potential tyrant.
00:31:09.000I mean, I think the amount of tyranny that he's been able to actually pursue
00:31:13.000as president of the United States is so far beyond anything that Trump pursued.
00:31:16.000Whether you're talking about using the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
00:31:20.000to try to cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans, or whether you're talking about the militarization
00:31:26.000of the DOJ to go after Donald Trump, while simultaneously the DOJ is exonerating him
00:31:32.000for the same kind of stuff Trump did on classified documents
00:31:40.000Joe Biden, to me, because he knows how the government operates and because there are so many people sympathetic to him inside the executive branch, I think a lot of poison slips through the cracks.
00:31:49.000The way I tend to think of it, in metaphorical terms, is that if American government and American institutions act as sort of a sifter, They are designed to sift out the worst elements and let the sand that's okay kind of drop through.
00:32:03.000Well, Trump is like a case in point of a person for whom the sifter works beautifully because everything that he does that's incredibly dumb is a giant rock.
00:32:10.000Everything that he does that's incredibly dumb is like, the election was stolen.
00:32:14.000And then it turns out the institutions are built for that.
00:32:16.000And so the rock just remains in the sifter.
00:32:18.000And so what you end up in the after effects of Trump's presidency are pretty good economic policy, really good foreign policy, too much spending, but nothing that is really kind of earth shattering.
00:32:27.000Whereas for Biden, because all of his sins are ground down to fine dust, it just goes right through the sifter into whatever the politics are.
00:32:37.000And so he's able to get away with an enormous amount because he's doing kind of smart people corruption as opposed to stupid people extremism.
00:32:49.000I have a hard time forgiving Trump not stepping aside after the 2020 election, notwithstanding the fact that I...
00:32:57.000agree that there were irregularities and there were dynamics at work in that election that he had every right to feel he was unfairly dealt with by.
00:33:09.000I mean, the suppression of that laptop story, the massive mail-in voting and stuff, the delay in announcing the outcome of... I mean, anyway, he had his day in court.
00:33:43.000I think that there's a huge number of Americans who are just going to stay home this time.
00:33:47.000This is why I think that Trump does have some systemic advantages.
00:33:50.000People who really like Trump, especially people who are now militarized by what just happened in New York in this criminal trial, I think that those people are going to walk over broken glass to vote for him.
00:34:00.000I mean, I'm going to, again, I went from somebody who did not vote for either candidate in 2016 to somebody who literally donated money to Trump's campaign in 2024 and co-hosted a fundraiser for him specifically because Joe Biden is a terrible, awful, no good, very bad president and he cannot be president.
00:34:15.000This is why I say like the institutions of the country, when people say that it was a coup, well typically a coup requires you to actually have control over the military to the extent that you're going to like walk into Congress and just declare that Donald Trump is remaining president.
00:34:28.000I mean, what you had was a, was a riot that got out of control.
00:34:32.000Many of the people who went in, Actually, we're just kind of foolish and wandering around.
00:34:36.000I mean, I know some of the people who went in and literally not everybody who went into the building, even like treating all those people as though they were committing the same criminal offense is ridiculous.
00:34:44.000But, you know, the idea that that was on par with like the Civil War, for example, that to me is such a deep misread.
00:34:52.000And it's now being used to justify such exorbitant use of the institutions to stop Trump, that this is the kind of political dynamic that looking historically really does scare me, is that when you have a political dynamic, Where the other side is so quote-unquote dangerous that literally any and all means at your disposal are useful and necessary and okay, morally justifiable.
00:35:12.000In order to stop that side, nothing good comes from that.
00:35:16.000I mean the instruments of tyranny typically pre-exist the tyrant.
00:35:20.000And this is what I'm seeing is that the instruments of tyranny are being created in real time.
00:35:23.000The militarization of law enforcement, the expansion of executive orders, the willingness to end around the Supreme Court, like all these things are being created in real time and we're watching it happen.
00:35:33.000And both sides are now just figuring out, okay, who can I elect to use that against the other guy?
00:35:38.000Well, this might be a biased opinion, but I think the left are much more sinners with respect to the trashing of institutions for short-term political gain than the right.
00:35:48.000I think the effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court because of this abortion issue is just horrible.
00:35:56.000It's, you know, they want to, you know, pack the court.
00:36:01.000I mean, I think the lawfare thing, we're going to disqualify Trump.
00:36:10.000How did my partner, whom I disagree with strongly, John McWhorter at the Glenn Show, I disagree with, he said, tie his shoelaces together, just, you know, encumber him.
00:36:19.000And I said, you're messing around with the rule of law.
00:36:22.000You're going to mess around with the rule of law in order to handicap a candidate?
00:36:26.000I mean, think about the trade-off there.
00:36:31.000I don't trust anything I read in the New York Times.
00:36:33.000Not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, but because the New York Times sold its soul to the devil to keep Trump from being able to be president or to run the country once he became president.
00:36:46.000So they've created a bonfire of their own credibility, and they're sacking the institutions along the way, largely to keep the populist sentiment that Trump embodies from finding its expression at the top of American government.
00:37:02.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:38:17.000Donald Trump is a giant, pulsating, throbbing, orange middle finger.
00:38:21.000That's what he is to all of these people who believe that it's totally okay for them to Rip the guts out of the institutions and wear their faces around like Hannibal Lecter.
00:38:32.000You mentioned it earlier, that vaccine mandate thing.
00:38:54.000I mean, between that speech and the worst speech I've ever seen a president give, Biden in front of Independence Hall declaring his political enemies basically traitors to the country.
00:39:05.000This kind of language is never good in any country ever.
00:39:08.000I mean, truly, when you have both sides declaring that this is the final election, this is a change from when I was growing up even.
00:39:15.000I don't remember Republicans saying about 1992 or 1996 or even 2000 or 2004.
00:39:21.000If John Kerry wins in 2004, there will never be another election for president in the country.
00:39:43.000If you actually believe that, you would have a physical duty to go out and do something to the candidate of the other party.
00:39:48.000If you truly thought that person was Hitler, you would actually have a moral duty to go out and do something about it.
00:39:54.000If what you thought you were prohibiting and stopping was tyranny.
00:39:57.000But I'm afraid that that's actually where we're going, is that if you keep saying it over and over and over, then an era of political violence that looks more like the late 60s and early 70s, I don't think that we're that far away from all of that.
00:40:10.000The only thing I think that's preventing that is weakness and laziness, frankly, on the part of the radicals.
00:40:15.000Well, let's be responsible in our position as public spokespeople to know that even when we talk about it hypothetically, we kind of feed into something that's not at all healthy for our body politic.
00:40:29.000I'm just saying, I hear you loud and clear, and I just assume you're not talking about it.
00:40:35.000Yeah, I mean, so what this raises is if we're looking at, you know, the issues that face the country right now.
00:40:42.000Given the polarization, given the fact that now so many institutions have been thoroughly corrupted in the minds of whichever party is sort of out of power, that if you're a Republican, you think that the media are completely corrupt and so you just don't believe anything they say, not just some of what they say, anything they say.
00:40:58.000You look at the university system and you say, not only do I hate the universities, I'm not sending my kids there anymore, I might not hire from those universities anymore.
00:41:06.000And if you're on the left, and right now the Supreme Court is controlled by people who
00:41:10.000are originalists, you look at the Supreme Court and you say, I'm not going to pay any
00:41:15.000So if we don't have our institutions in common, and we don't have the federal government in
00:41:18.000common, and we don't have religion in common, because religion has largely fallen away in
00:41:23.000American public life, then where do we go from here?
00:41:27.000Because, you know, I don't know if you're by nature an optimist or a pessimist.
00:41:31.000To me, it seems the only way that anything can be rebuilt here is delegation of as much power as humanly possible to the most local level possible.
00:41:38.000Because it seems to me that community and social fabric can only be built ground up and we just keep fighting over who gets to try to wield the baton to build the top down.
00:41:47.000Yeah, I'm going to be a little bit more conservative in the small-c sense about the institution.
00:41:51.000I mean, here I am at Brown University, so I'm embedded within the Ivy League and this whole machine that is, I think, sometimes rightly characterized as over-the-top and beyond the pale and unredeemable and so on, because there are a lot of problems here.
00:42:08.000On the other hand, you know, I have some amazing students here at Brown, and they're not just whip-smart.
00:42:15.000But they're really hungry to be liberated from the party line.
00:42:22.000They long for engagement that's challenging and whatnot.
00:42:26.000They may come in with a certain set of predictable views, but they love to be challenged about them.
00:42:35.000So I'd hate to see it that we, in a revulsion at the elites, Threw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, because there's a lot of potential good here.
00:42:50.000But I don't have a solution to the problem, so maybe I should just shut up.
00:42:55.000I know, I mean, I think that nobody really has, I mean, there have been a few solutions positive.
00:42:59.000Frankly, I'm glad to see some of the donors putting pressure on the schools to actually start trying to live up their supposed original principles as opposed to simply playing an inside-outside game with radicals on campus as we've been seeing over the past few months.
00:43:12.000I mean, the insanity to me of you have people who are violating the law, who are sitting on campus.
00:43:18.000We know that if their cause were a right-wing or racist cause, for example,
00:43:24.000that those people would be cleared out forthwith.
00:43:26.000There certainly wouldn't be full-scale negotiations with the boards of the colleges.
00:43:32.000And so when you see people like that, I'm very glad that donors are starting to wake up to that.
00:43:37.000Hopefully that will have some sort of impact on the running of these institutions.
00:44:25.000There has to be a good reason to get rid of the thing and a plausible alternative to substitute for the thing before you can just get rid of the thing.
00:44:45.000Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about, so a lot of your book in late admissions is about sort of the combination of the personal and the political.
00:44:53.000And that's really a fascinating thing that nobody else has done.
00:44:56.000It's an audacious book in the sense that you really sort of bury your soul in the book.
00:45:01.000And so, you know, can you talk a little bit about what you think that relationship is?
00:45:05.000Because, you know, those of us who are in the realm of ideas, you know, and do it professionally, we like to think that the thing that's driving us is the ideas.
00:45:14.000But in your book, you make very clear that that's not always the case.
00:45:17.000How should we think about politics and philosophy in sort of a more realistic sense, in terms of how does that cross streams with just life and how we actually live?
00:45:28.000Gosh, I don't know if I have anything of general importance to say about that.
00:45:34.000I could only kind of talk about my own experience.
00:45:38.000And, you know, I was on the right, then I moved left, then I moved right again.
00:45:42.000And I've talked about that a little bit already here with you.
00:45:46.000I mean, I used to be a technical theoretical economist, an academic in the purest sense of the word, who wrote abstract mathematical modeling type economic theory papers for the academic journals and talked to 500 people around the world about those papers.
00:46:05.000And that was my life and my graduate students.
00:46:08.000And I got a job at Harvard, a young, talented black economist.
00:46:13.000I was the first black to have tenure in the economics department at Harvard in 1982, and had the anticipation that I was going to go on in that vein as an academic theorist.
00:46:28.000Maybe I had a little imposter syndrome.
00:46:29.000Maybe there was this affirmative action kind of boomerang thing that happens when, you know, you move somebody along so fast and whatever.
00:46:35.000But the bottom line is, I kind of lost confidence in my ability to succeed in that kind of work at Harvard, and I moved over to the Kennedy School of Government and became a more applied, policy-oriented, political economist.
00:46:54.000It was something that I had worked on in my thesis, something that I had an interest in as an African American.
00:46:58.000And so I became what fully developed as a Black conservative social critic of the neoconservative stripe in the 1980s.
00:47:09.000So how does that relate politics and personal in a way?
00:47:14.000I became more political because of a personal professional crisis that I was having, which relates to politics in a way because it's linked to affirmative action and the fact that I was brought in self-consciously as an African American to take that position at Harvard and that influenced the way that I handled those responsibilities or failed to handle them as the case may be.
00:47:36.000And we've already talked about how I broke with some of my friends on the right like Dinesh D'Souza and Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom and Charles Murray about what was going on in the 90s and about how that had also personal connections for me because my identity, you know, longing to be, to come home again and to be embraced caused me to, I think, be more antagonistic to some of my conservative compatriots than I otherwise might have been.
00:48:04.000You know, when I get asked a question about how my personal life should affect my politics,
00:48:10.000I want to try to advocate for staying true to the sense of the intellectual framework that
00:48:22.000you're committed to and not being pulled by the tug of war that goes on with popularity,
00:48:29.000audience capture, appealing to other people, you know, going along to get along.
00:48:34.000You know, even if you're cutting against the grain, you know, stay true to what you think is the actual right thing.
00:48:39.000I mean, that's kind of the lesson that I draw from my various vacillations.
00:48:43.000I've ended up back on the right, and I think I was right all along.
00:48:48.000I mean, I think the institution of the family is the foundation of modern civilization.
00:48:57.000I think we know who men and women are based on their chromosomal inheritance.
00:49:01.000And I think the idea that you would try to undermine that subtle understanding in human culture is pernicious in the extreme.
00:49:07.000And I think the idea that that project of undermining that subtle understanding within human culture, the fact that it could go without being criticized within the academy in a systematic way, without seeing it for what it is in the long-term historical context, that terrifies me.
00:49:23.000That's a kind of corruption of our intellectual life.
00:49:27.000Anyway, I know I digress a little bit, but I mean, I was right in my conservative instincts all along, and I regret that I strayed from them in order to carry favor with my co-racialists.
00:49:37.000So, you mentioned a little bit earlier your kind of journey religiously to Christianity, and then you said that you're to some extent a believer now, but how does religion play into all of this?
00:49:50.000I've made the case, I had a book now, a few years ago, called The Right Side of History,
00:49:55.000that was really about sort of the history of Western civilization and how predicated
00:49:59.000Western civilization was on certain fundamental religious precepts.
00:50:03.000Things like made in the image of God, equal before God, free will, the idea that you have
00:50:07.000a mind capable of grasping actual objective truth, which is a point that Alvin Plottinga
00:50:13.000made, this sort of idea that there is no such thing as abstract truth that is graspable
00:51:23.000And the idea that you would have to have some such embrace of an unproved, first-mover kind of primal commitment before you could even have anything that you called logic.
00:51:36.000I mean, I think that's a nice and interesting idea.
00:51:40.000In my own case, I was at a point in my life of crisis.
00:52:15.000And I think that made me more credulous than I otherwise might have been, you know, being a high-flown academic who doesn't believe in magic.
00:52:23.000You know, you tell me a man was Dead, and now he's raised from the dead and he lives on?
00:52:28.000That's the vehicle to connect me to the creator of the universe?
00:52:32.000That's asking a lot from a guy with a PhD from MIT who thinks of himself as a modern man.
00:52:39.000But I did come to believe, and it did really revolutionize my life.
00:52:44.000And it's a long story, perhaps longer than I can tell here, as to how it is that I came to have doubts.
00:52:49.000The doubts became creeping, and the crevice got bigger and bigger, and suddenly I couldn't find my faith.
00:52:56.000And I try to talk about that in the book.
00:53:00.000But I say, even here, I'm in my eighth decade of life.
00:53:05.000I'm not going to live forever, you know, mortality and all of that.
00:53:10.000I think it's kind of an open question.
00:53:12.000I think I don't want to be so arrogant to presume that I know the answer to the question, you know, about the existence of God and so on.
00:53:22.000So anyway, call me an agnostic at this stage in my life, but I have great respect for the fact that people are grappling with this enormous issue of what is the meaning of life?
00:53:35.000What's the foundational belief that grounds all of our strivings?
00:53:42.000I think there's nobility in the quest for an answer to that question.
00:53:47.000So when it comes to, you know, go back to the racial issue briefly, when it comes to the racial debate,
00:53:51.000it seems like the racial debate has gotten markedly stupider over the course of my lifetime.
00:53:57.000You know, when I was at Harvard Law, one of my professors, there's Randall Kennedy.
00:54:01.000Randall's a really interesting guy, right?
00:54:05.000Yeah, I mean, there is this kind of fascinating conversation among racial academics that has completely been sidelined in favor of Ibram X. Kendi and Kimberly Crenshaw and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most overrated writer I have ever read in my entire life, bar none.
00:54:22.000The idea that Ta-Nehisi Coates is some sort of phenomenal author He is so purple, his metaphors are mixed.
00:54:30.000But it's not just that I hate his writing.
00:54:32.000Like I think that his thinking is incredibly messy and deliberately attempting to obfuscate issues.
00:54:38.000And I feel like to that end, I actually would prefer Ebermack's Kennedy
00:54:43.000who just says the dumb thing out loud.
00:54:45.000Ta-Nehisi seems to sort of paste over the dumb thing with layers of colorful adjectival use.
00:54:52.000And Ebermack Kennedy is just like, nope, I'm gonna say the thing right here in front of you.
00:54:56.000But it does feel like our racial debate now is incredibly, incredibly dumb.
00:55:02.000And I don't know whether that's a good thing because maybe that means that it's clarifying
00:55:05.000in a certain sense and we've reached sort of apex woke and now we're receding.
00:55:08.000Or we kind of keep sliding down that chute.
00:55:12.000Well, I have an interested position in this debate.
00:55:16.000I am also a contributor on the questions that people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi address, and I have issued my very negative assessments of both of those authors on many occasions in the past.
00:55:30.000I won't try to I like your formulation, though.
00:55:34.000At least Ibram X. Kendi is straightforwardly dumb.
00:55:36.000Ta-Nehisi Coates has to give me a long set of paragraphs and metaphors in order to make the same dumb point.
00:55:44.000I think there's merit in that assessment.
00:56:28.000I mean, people have no idea what that's costing politically to the country.
00:56:33.000They talk about January 6th, but the summer of 2020, I think, towers over January 6th in terms of the damage to the fiber of the country, the serial disorder, defund the police.
00:56:49.000Anyway, I could go on for a long time about that.
00:56:52.000I mean, I think that the summer of 2020, which is the great ignored period in American history,
00:56:58.000because it is clearly the most, between the COVID lockdowns and the giant riots
00:57:03.000in the middle of the summer, it is clearly the most,
00:57:06.000it is an inflection point in American history, the summer of 2020.
00:57:09.000And the willingness to sort of gloss over it as though it never happened,
00:57:13.000and to pretend that none of it ever happened, the lockdowns never happened,
00:57:16.000that you didn't have Kamala Harris talking about bailing people out of jail,
00:57:20.000the fact that the Democratic Party was kind of complicit in those riots, and trying to use that,
00:57:25.000as I've said before, the revolutionary jet fuel in the engine of the Biden election.
00:57:30.000You want to talk about breaking trust with the American people that I don't think has really ever been repaired or even attempted to be repaired.
00:57:45.000I lived my entire life in Los Angeles.
00:57:47.000They locked us in our houses starting in March and then they would not let us come out unless we were rioting on behalf of George Floyd.
00:57:54.000And so at about the time that my wife was being Double locked down because we weren't allowed to leave our house because there was curfew because of the riots that were happening blocks away.
00:58:03.000And she was hearing the helicopters swirling over our house in a fairly nice area of Los Angeles.
00:58:07.000And we were also locked down because of the lockdowns.
00:58:10.000It was about that time she turned to me and said, maybe we ought to take a look at Florida.
00:58:12.000And I don't feel like I'm alone in that.
00:58:14.000I mean, that's sort of... Again, the willingness to just pretend that none of this ever happened or that it was normal is the part that's astonishing to me.
00:58:23.000Yeah, and I think you have to blame the journalist establishment and the academy because these are really fundamental things in American history.
00:58:36.000Jacob Blake was a guy who got shot in the back by cops in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and it caused riots.
00:58:42.000The circumstances of him getting shot by cops was, long story short, he was kidnapping his girlfriend's children, who may have been his own kids, and her car, without her permission, and she called the cops.