In this episode, I talk about the growing intellectual rift between the right and left-wing wing of the conservative movement, immigration, trade, and the "Nanny State," and why we don't want to create a right-wing version of the leftist "nanny state" that was created in the name of helping certain communities in the United States. Instead, we want to dismantle the nanny state and its regulatory apparatus to help a different group of people, American workers and manufacturers. That's the opposite of what progressives have been trying to achieve over the last 60 years, and it's time to take a hard look at how they have failed to achieve their own objectives on their own terms, and how they should be trying to help other people achieve theirs. I also talk about why we should be concerned about immigration and trade with other countries, and what we should do about it, and why it's a good idea to have a government that focuses on protecting American workers, manufacturers, and consumers. I also discuss the role of the Great Society in helping minority communities, and minorities, as opposed to helping them achieve their goals through policies that coddle and coddles them, rather than helping them, in order to help them achieve them, as part of the larger agenda of the so-called "Great Society." I'm joined by my guest, Dr. Ferguson Ferguson, who is a professor of political science at the University of St. Johns Hopkins Law School and a regular contributor to the New York Times bestselling author. and host of the podcast First Listen. I hope you'll join me in this conversation about the emerging intellectual rift within the America First movement, and its impact on the political landscape. . Thank you for listening to this episode of the First Listen Podcast! and tweet me to let me know what you thought of it! and what you think of it in the comments you think about it? if you have any thoughts or suggestions for future episodes in the future of the show on social media questions you d like to be featured on the show? or are looking for a future episode of First Listen episodes on the podcast in the next week's First Listen podcast? , tweet me on Insta: or any other podcast you dm me on the first listen episode :) , or , and about it on Instapod or ;)
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:00.000I see an important, friendly, but nonetheless existent rift brewing in the America First movement among fellow conservatives.
00:00:08.000And the rift is this between what I call the protectionist or economic nationalist wing of our movement and the civic nationalist wing of our movement.
00:00:15.000And I think that there's a lot of overlap in rejecting the historical neoliberal consensus of yesterday on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration, on this idea that the United States is just some economic zone, but instead to go into the reasons why we reject that historical neoliberal consensus.
00:00:31.000A lot of folks on the right reject that consensus because they believe it is the job of the U.S. government to protect American workers and manufacturers from the competitive effects of immigration on labor and wages, from the effects of foreign products being imported into the United States and the prices that American manufacturers are able to command.
00:00:50.000That's what I call the national protectionist wing, the economic nationalist wing of the America First movement.
00:00:56.000That's different from what I call the national libertarian aspect of it, which is admittedly what I'm more partial to, which is the belief that the old neoliberal consensus caused an erosion of our national identity.
00:01:07.000It caused us to be dependent on foreign countries like China for even our own military industrial base and our own pharmaceutical supply chains, which erodes the national security of the United States of America.
00:01:19.000It's not a concern about economic protection of wages or prices.
00:01:22.000But it's a concern about the national security and national identity of the United States of America.
00:01:27.000The same goes for immigration policy for that matter.
00:01:29.000One issue with our expansive immigration and even illegal immigration policies in the United States is that it has eroded the national identity of the United States.
00:01:39.000I think we need heightened screening for the kinds of immigrants who are able to enter the United States of America based on their civic knowledge, based on their civic commitments.
00:01:47.000I think we should eliminate dual citizenship as a category.
00:01:50.000But that's a different way to address the immigration issue than to look at it through the lens of labor policy, which says that our sole or primary goal is to protect American workers from the effects of foreign competition when it comes to people who are willing to work for lower prices.
00:02:04.000I'm not criticizing that view, but I'm noticing for now, I'm noting for now a distinction in what I see as probably a very important but beneath the surface right now brewing intellectual rift In our own America First movement, and I think that that movement is going to be stronger if we're able to air a lot of those differences and discuss them respectfully in the open, rather than trying to sweep them under the rug.
00:02:26.000I gave a speech about this recently at the NatCon conference.
00:02:29.000I do believe that you don't just tell audiences what they want to hear.
00:02:33.000You tell audiences sometimes what they need to hear, or at least what your true beliefs are.
00:02:37.000But coming out of that, I was really looking forward to a separate conversation on an adjacent topic, which we're about to have today, which is the idea of the nanny state altogether.
00:02:46.000You know, we have historically the idea of a left-wing nanny state created by, you know, go back to FDR, go to LBJ, all the way down to the present, that was created in the name of helping certain communities in the United States.
00:02:59.000Now, in this case, the left-wing version of this was directed at helping Black Americans or minorities.
00:03:04.000And what we've seen over the 60-year project of the Great Society, the greatest misnomer of a policy agenda I think in American history, is that those very policies that were supposed to coddle and help and contribute to the flourishing of black Americans have actually had the opposite effect.
00:03:21.000It's been a betrayal of the very people who were supposedly supposed to be helped by those policies.
00:03:25.000I bring that up in the context of this discussion because I think conservatives would now do well to remember that we don't want to create a right-wing version of that left-wing nanny state.
00:03:34.000What we should want to do, in my opinion, is to dismantle that nanny state and its regulatory apparatus and the administrative state along with it.
00:03:43.000That's the defining fork in the road, I believe, for the future of the conservative movement.
00:03:47.000Do we want to reform and reshape that regulatory state and that nanny state to help a different group of people, American workers and manufacturers?
00:03:54.000Or do we want to dismantle that nanny state and its regulatory apparatus?
00:04:00.000Now, I think one of the ways we'll understand this for the future of the conservative movement is to look at actually where liberal policies, progressive policies, well-intentioned policies to help different groups of people, admittedly, over the last 60 years have actually failed to achieve their objectives on their own terms.
00:04:16.000And it's in that hope, it's an advancing of that conversation that we have our guest today on the podcast, Professor Ferguson, who I'm welcoming for the first time.
00:04:25.000I'm looking forward to this conversation.
00:04:27.000And Professor Ferguson, I think I'd look forward to diving deep into your work, not so much on the future of the conservative movement, though we can go there too, but your study historically of how some of the policies adopted in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society over the last 60 years have actually contributed to not the flourishing, but even the diminishment of success in the black community in particular.
00:04:52.000And your scholarship, I think, has been particularly illuminating, talking about the importance of potentially black economic progress and what that could mean and how that vision differs from the historical nanny state vision that's been foisted on much of black America from the progressive movement of the last 60 years.
00:05:07.000So I've enjoyed reading your books and your articles and welcome to the podcast.
00:05:11.000And I look forward to this conversation.
00:05:17.000So first, I wanted to at least give the audience a chance to understand your background a little bit before we get into the substance of this.
00:05:25.000What brought you to the issue specifically of Black economic empowerment?
00:05:30.000And how was that distinct from looking at economic empowerment more generally?
00:05:36.000And what perspective did you bring to this issue in the first place?
00:05:39.000Yeah, I've really been a member of the liberty movement all my life.
00:05:43.000I did my PhD in philosophy, wrote my dissertation on property rights and the Scottish enlightenment.
00:05:49.000And so I've been thinking about the institutions that undergird economic flourishing, you know, all my life.
00:05:57.000And so as I saw the issue of race become very, very hot after Ferguson, I noticed that, you know, the classical liberal movement has so many insights on race and discrimination.
00:06:13.000I had been hearing them all my years as an academic, and yet no one really sees us as a resource in that regard.
00:06:22.000So I thought somebody's got to bring all of these insights together into one place and show that classical liberal economists and philosophers Have been working on issues of minority exclusion from property rights, contract rights, and other economic institutions for many years.
00:06:39.000And what would you say are some of those insights that you think our movement has missed in that regard?
00:06:46.000Well, you know, you mentioned LBJ and the Great Society.
00:06:51.000I would actually go much earlier than that.
00:06:53.000Let's start with capital P progressivism at the turn of the century, which was eugenicist.
00:07:00.000This is something we downplay too much in our education system.
00:07:03.000This is a movement that believed in a pseudoscientific concept of race, Put blacks at the bottom of that and decided that in modern life, this is capital P progressivism, right?
00:07:15.000In modern life, life is too complicated.
00:07:18.000And so we have to put experts in charge.
00:07:20.000And what the experts are going to do is they're going to decide how to support the white Aryan male head of household and how to let other groups fade away.
00:07:29.000What was one of their ideas to do that?
00:08:17.000So historically, the logic that most ordinary listeners or Americans might have about the minimum wage is that it's designed to say that, hey, the workers who earn it deserve to be paid a higher price.
00:08:51.000Yeah, there's a wonderful book called Illiberal Reformers, which I highly recommend, where he goes through people like Kellogg, great economists, arguing in textbooks that were used across the country in 1906,
00:09:07.0001908, saying, look, and I hate to even use this quote because it's so disgusting, but they said things like, since we can't chloroform them now, We can disemploy them by raising wages to such an extent that no one will hire them at that rate.
00:09:26.000So if you're someone who speaks a different language who maybe the other employees don't like so much Someone with a disability, etc., you will be disemployed by this high minimum wage.
00:09:38.000And we have to remind people how popular eugenics was.
00:09:42.000John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson, you know, so many cabinet members, presidential cabinets, were on the boards of eugenics associations.
00:09:52.000This was a very popular movement in the United States and Europe.
00:09:57.000And this isn't like a long time ago for people.
00:09:59.000We're talking about like one century ago, 100 years ago in the United States or less.
00:10:03.000So say a little bit more about Keynes and Wilson.
00:10:05.000I think this is a side of their history that we don't necessarily often remember.
00:10:26.000At this time, actually, Eastern Europeans were a huge target as well as African-Americans and particularly the disabled.
00:10:33.000We should never forget how they were included.
00:10:37.000Keynes wrote a letter to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, in which he said, now that we've now that we've solved the quantity problem, we have to move on to the quality problem.
00:10:50.000And he was talking about human beings.
00:10:52.000So Keynes considered eugenics to be the zenith of modern science.
00:10:57.000This was what we were going to do next to create a utopian world.
00:11:01.000And so by purifying the races and getting rid of disability.
00:11:43.000So why do you think it is that, you know, a lot of the policies, and I suppose you could always have an independent justification to say that even if the originator of a policy had one intention, maybe the policy could be right for independent reasons.
00:11:56.000But your point is these were actually not some sort of side statements that we're putting together and some patching together in some revisionist history.
00:12:03.000These were indeed some of the goals of original progressive economic policy were indeed the same kinds of goals that informed their eugenic views.
00:12:12.000Is that hyperbole or do you think that that's exactly on target for what their actual motivations were?
00:12:18.000Like, was it a coincidence they were saying these things or were they actually inextricably tied to the kind of progressive vision that they advanced?
00:12:25.000Yeah, no, I think that they absolutely intended, and you can just read their words in Illiberal Reformers.
00:12:30.000He does a great job of unearthing all of that.
00:12:33.000They absolutely intended to disemploy these undesirable groups.
00:12:38.000And what was so strange about it is that they actually thought that if they did that, they would somehow just fade away.
00:12:43.000It was a leftover idea from the late 19th century, particularly with Black people, that they would simply stop working and sort of fade out.
00:12:52.000Because they would only work hard and improve themselves under the lash, under the whip.
00:12:57.000It was just an incredibly insane concept.
00:13:02.000And I think it went on to really influence things like the Federal Housing Administration's redlining.
00:13:07.000When we look at things like the way the federal highway system was built.
00:13:12.000In such a way as to divide one ethnic group from another and build a huge wall between them.
00:13:17.000Well, say a little bit more about that, about both redlining and the highway system.
00:13:21.000I think these are usually arguments that are invoked, as you probably well know, by the modern left as a way of citing the historical systemic discrimination against Black Americans, which, true as it may be, misses where the origin of that came from, which was actually from the so-called progressive wing.
00:13:40.000And say a word about why that counted as a progressive wing back then anyway.
00:13:44.000Yeah, I think this whole sort of worldview of social engineering that we need to move.
00:13:50.000Adam Smith called this the man of system idea, that we need to move people around like pieces on a chessboard.
00:13:56.000It's a certain mindset that assumes that central planning works.
00:14:02.000And so the notion that if we could just mow down what looked to us like a slum by putting the highway there, then we would solve that problem, right?
00:15:43.000So the notion of the federal highway system, Eisenhower saw some things in Germany that he liked in terms of getting tanks across the country very fast, but what he didn't necessarily think about is that handing millions of dollars to municipal leaders was going to create a political machine.
00:16:00.000And within that political machine, the municipal leaders were able to decide where they were going to put these highways.
00:16:08.000And we have records, on record, you can read this in the folklore of the freeways, of municipal leaders saying, you know, we could go through this industrial town and it wouldn't displace anyone, but instead, why don't we go through the N-word town?
00:16:29.000From 1948 to 1966, black poverty was cut in half.
00:16:34.000It was in the 80th percentile and it dropped into the 40th percentile.
00:16:40.000And that's because with all of that social capital, they were riding the post-war wave right out of poverty, which means that those slums were actually upwardly mobile working class neighborhoods that were on the verge of breaking out.
00:16:55.000And right at the moment that they were about to break out, we mowed them down with the biggest federal spending project in history outside of war, which was the federal highway system.
00:17:06.000And this sort of predated even what we would think of as LBJ's Great Society.
00:17:12.000Yeah, the Great Study sort of followed on this, but it was in the wake of this type of actual infrastructural project, federal government-directed infrastructural project, that had already planted the seeds for that demise.
00:17:26.000And don't forget urban renewal, which James Baldwin called Negro removal.
00:17:32.000Another social engineering idea, right?
00:17:35.000That we can knock down these neighborhoods and somehow these people will magically go someplace better.
00:17:41.000And so it's this top-down central planning mindset that is so incredibly destructive.
00:17:47.000And when you put billions of dollars into the hands of these planners, they will rework the face of the map of the United States of America in ways that destroys communities.
00:17:58.000Well, look, I think this is actually fascinating in light of, especially some of the issues I've been focused on recently, I talked about it in some of my opening remarks just a few minutes ago, in that there is a rift even in the modern conservative movement, right?
00:18:09.000Going in the direction of believing that we need that type of central planning, muscular state intervention, industrial policy to help certain communities in the United States.
00:18:22.000And what I'm trying to sort out as we understand the history of how well the track record of that has performed, which you and I agree is probably a pretty poor track record, were a lot of these policies at least advertised or even intended with the goal of potentially helping and empowering those minority communities?
00:18:39.000Or did it come from more of a place of actual just disdain and disregard for them in the first place?
00:18:46.000Yeah, I think that there was some language like that.
00:18:49.000So, for instance, with the Federal Housing Administration, it was sort of, we're better off, right?
00:18:53.000Whites are better off living with whites, blacks with blacks, etc.
00:18:57.000A little bit of, well, these are slums anyway.
00:19:00.000You know, these houses aren't in good condition, so they should be knocked down.
00:19:03.000But you also have plenty of evidence that that sort of motivation was not sincere, right?
00:19:10.000As you see in those municipal meetings where it's saying, this is our chance, you know, a little bit of rubbing their hands together.
00:19:17.000And so I think that some of it was quite nefarious.
00:19:20.000But I think it's good to point out that, number one, you can present it that way, and number two, people can believe that, right?
00:19:27.000And they can be well-intentioned themselves in supporting it, thinking that they're doing something good for the community when, in fact, they are destroying what the community took decades and decades and decades to build.
00:19:44.000Sometimes people forget exactly what that meant.
00:19:47.000This is right in the sweet spot of your area of scholarship.
00:19:52.000Why did you walk people through a little bit about what that exactly was, as opposed to just having it be a word that's bandied around like it is today?
00:20:00.000Yeah, the great book on this is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.
00:20:04.000And what you see is basically a grading of neighborhoods depending on their racial makeup.
00:20:11.000If the neighborhood got a certain grade, it was excluded from the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance.
00:20:19.000And what that meant is that basically it was impossible for the banks to extend those mortgages.
00:20:24.000And so you have cases, and once again, remember, Black people are employed, they're married, they may not have huge incomes, but they are certainly capable of paying a mortgage.
00:20:35.000So banks are ready and happy to make these mortgages in many cases.
00:20:40.000And the FHA literally steps in and says, no, you cannot do it.
00:20:45.000You can build this development and lease to them or something like that, but they may not get into a relationship of ownership.
00:20:52.000I'm not saying that black people never owned homes at this time.
00:20:55.000I'm just saying that this was a major obstacle and it affected many immigrant communities as well.
00:21:01.000So just to get this straight, historically, the status quo pre the FHA stepping in was that, you know, the market was working, people were beginning to in upward mobile communities, able to take mortgages, buy a home.
00:21:12.000But the FHA came in and said, no, no, no, we're going to actually grade these neighborhoods based on what different economic or social attributes, and say that in certain of those categories, they were going to limit the ability of banks to be able to make loans on the basis of that grading.
00:21:30.000And it hit both Black neighborhoods and integrated neighborhoods.
00:21:33.000And remember that around factories at this time, you would often have sort of a Black street and an Irish Catholic street and a Polish Catholic street, right?
00:21:40.000And so people weren't integrated on the same street, but they were often integrated in the same neighborhood.
00:22:16.000I mean, if a bank otherwise wants to make a loan that it's otherwise making, but the FHA steps in and says, no, you cannot actually make a loan to somebody who's in a graded community, was it this idea of protecting against credit bubbles?
00:22:27.000I mean, what was even the facial justification for that type of market intervention?
00:22:33.000You know, all of the quotes that I've seen were quite explicit that it was racial.
00:22:38.000It wasn't necessarily put in financial terms.
00:22:40.000The notion was that black and white people would live more peacefully together if they were separate, if they were in separate neighborhoods.
00:22:49.000Now, I may be missing a piece of information there, but that's what I've seen in official FHA documents.
00:22:57.000On what government authority did the FHA do this?
00:23:00.000Were there statutes that required them to do this, or did they just sort of take that as an administrative imperative that they just started to make through rulemaking?
00:23:10.000Yeah, I don't necessarily know all of the details, but it is interesting to think about the way that the FHA's actions mirror what we're dealing with today with the administrative state.
00:23:19.000Which is a bureaucratic institution that is sort of making law itself becoming, in a sense, a fourth branch of government that isn't in our constitution.
00:23:31.000I think we saw the beginnings of that in the early 20th century.
00:23:35.000What's the state of the FHA today, by the way?
00:23:42.000You make me want to dig into that today.
00:23:44.000Because one of my, as you know, for a long time it's been a hobby horse, but I think it's becoming more of a professional horse now, is really the dismantling of this regulatory state.
00:23:56.000And one of the things that's interesting for the conservative movement, we can kind of go here, is two different strands where we might be missing the plot.
00:24:04.000One is, close to your area of study, why conservatives have not been more successful in winning over Black support?
00:24:11.000Maybe the last year or four years may be an exception to this, but over the last 20, 25, 30, 40 years, why is it that in light of the history of progressive destruction of Black economic progress, is it the fact that Conservatives have failed to pick up the black support that otherwise would have offered a different path than the very political movements that destroyed their progress.
00:24:37.000Where do you think conservatives missed the plot?
00:24:40.000Yeah, I think this is basically the main reason I wrote my book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, with my co-author Marcus Witcher.
00:24:47.000Not only did we want to bring together all of these classical liberal insights on race discrimination, but we really wanted to give white conservatives a way to talk about our history of racial discrimination that aligned with their understanding, which we thought was correct, on economics, on the importance of private property rights, on the importance of contract rights, etc.
00:25:10.000And the reception that it's gotten has been extremely positive from white conservatives.
00:25:18.000It's a way to talk to the Black community, who, by the way, is the most religious demographic in the United States, is extremely socially conservative, is highly entrepreneurial, not in any way socialistic, even if the most centrist in the Democratic Party, as well as Latinos, The further left you go...
00:25:40.000That's an interesting observation, actually.
00:25:43.000And so we have a group of people here who, with a little bit of understanding and grace and intelligence on their history, we might be able to really win over to the conservative movement quite easily.
00:25:55.000But what we've had is not a lot of interest in doing that, which is incredibly frustrating.
00:26:01.000And think about some of the things I'm saying about the FHA or highways or urban renewal.
00:26:05.000It sounds what we might call left-coded.
00:26:08.000Like you said, these are things progressives talk about.
00:26:11.000So what conservatives have done is they've given the topics over to progressives rather than saying, well, wait a second, what's our account of those topics?
00:26:20.000Maybe we've got a better and more intelligent account that shows what was going on economically and in terms of social capital that we can present.
00:26:28.000So I want to say to conservatives, stop backing out of all of the conversations that progressives are in.
00:26:39.000So put yourself into one of those conversations, right?
00:26:42.000Let's say you're with a group of modern, let's just say, limousine liberals who talk about the effects of conservative deregulatory policy that doesn't give a damn about American workers or Black Americans and how this is actually callous to minority communities.
00:27:00.000Let's say you walk into that conversation, dinner table conversation.
00:27:04.000What's the first thing you say to show up in that conversation and maybe bring some of those people along?
00:27:10.000Yeah, I think a good way to start is thinking about the concrete.
00:27:13.000I say, well, you know, my friend Shamed Dogen fought for 10 years in the state of Missouri so that African hair braiders could braid hair without having to go to cosmetology school for two years.
00:27:24.000My friend Matt Paparaki at the Illinois Policy Institute fought for nurses who had turned their lives around after prison to be able to actually be licensed.
00:27:36.000These are women, 1,200 new nurses that have come into the economy because of that work.
00:27:42.000What about our Latino entrepreneur neighbors who are running tamales carts in the city of Chicago and the police are raiding them and turning them over until the Illinois Policy Institute was able to Let's legalize food carts in the city of Chicago.
00:27:58.000Let's think about people's real lives.
00:28:00.000Do you have to have a high school diploma to be a barber, to be a good barber?
00:28:15.000Because the established businesses are cronies.
00:28:19.000This is what Adam Smith warned from the very beginning.
00:28:22.000As soon as you become established, you want to turn around and use your connection with the state to keep startups out.
00:28:29.000So we have to be eternally vigilant against this abuse of regulation.
00:28:34.000And people need to understand that just because something is a regulation doesn't mean that it's regulating anything that needs to be regulated.
00:28:42.000It could just be a cronyistic effort to keep out competitors.
00:28:55.000So there's a deeper question here, which is, okay, there's this failure of, I think, the conservative, libertarian-minded, pro- I think that's a big part of what gave you motivation to be one of those people that actually rolled up your sleeves and did it.
00:29:15.000But do you think there's also an element of human nature on the other side here too, which is just to sort of animate a different perspective here?
00:29:25.000That even if you show up, there's something about just all of us as human beings, regardless of our skin color, but it applies to Black and Hispanic Americans every bit as much to anybody else to say that In the short run, you're always going to have a tendency towards going with somebody who's facially giving you the thing that you want, right?
00:29:45.000So there's a lot of these regulatory hurdles, government-created hurdles that in the long run have certainly worked to the detriment, as you and I believe, to the Black community, Hispanic community, and the American community more generally.
00:29:57.000But Nonetheless, when push comes to shove on who people are going to vote for or who people are going to gravitate to, there's something about our human nature that says, okay, but you're still the side that tells me that I still get to stay on welfare or collect a check or whatever a little bit longer.
00:30:13.000So even though you could make all of these arguments as you elegantly do...
00:30:18.000By making arguments of how this has actually hurt Black economic prosperity, for example.
00:30:23.000Nonetheless, that there's a human nature element to this that's going to always be addicted to the short term or what you feel like you need to get to tomorrow as opposed to what you need to get to to get to next year.
00:30:50.000We have to go back to the notion of bottom up.
00:30:54.000And so this is where, in the book, I talk about neighborhood stabilization and the neighborhood stabilization model of philanthropy, because what we have is bad charity that is driving out good.
00:31:07.000And what that means is that people have become addicted to those goodies that they're receiving that are actually trapping them and keeping them in a situation in which they can't actually transform out of poverty.
00:31:21.000And so the only option that we have now, besides trying to get rid of those, which are very hard to do, the only option we have now is to provide an on-the-ground alternative to people so that they can actually see a life without it.
00:31:37.000And so you have to pay attention to people like Bob Lupton in his book Toxic Charity and his work in Atlanta, or Bob Woodson in Washington, D.C., John Perkins or Brian Fickard's book When Helping Hurts.
00:31:49.000You have to actually listen to the people who are working on the ground and hear what they're saying.
00:31:55.000If the welfare state is having the terrible consequences that we know that it's having, let's not do the same things with our private charity, where we make people dependent on us, rather than helping them fight both the welfare state and toxic charity.
00:32:12.000And become self-sufficient, independent, and dignified in their way of life.
00:32:17.000And I truly believe that if you offer that to people on the ground, they will begin to see the trap that has been laid for them by the left.
00:32:27.000Despite the innate human impulse or whatever, the equivalent of eating a piece of candy before you actually eat your meal, to use a father of two sons, right?
00:32:36.000The analogy you might use in that context, despite that innate human impulse to go for the candy over what's actually good for you.
00:32:45.000You think that that is surmountable if the right people are actually showing up to make the arguments and demonstrate through bottom-up alternatives.
00:32:53.000You're confident that is sufficient to drive the kind of electoral and maybe political change that we would need in minority communities that on your argument have been voting against their long run interests for the better part of the last half century.
00:33:10.000A friend of mine asked me, I do neighborhood stabilization work, and a friend said, how do you get these kids to join the program instead of running drugs?
00:33:17.000I mean, you'd think that that would be so attractive.
00:33:42.000Whatever wonderful opportunities are out there for them, they are so far away from that isolated little couple of blocks that they have been living in, you might as well be offering them something in Japan.
00:34:12.000And so having something real like that Presents a true alternative to people who otherwise, you can say a lot of words, but it's never going to feel real to them.
00:34:24.000So do you believe that It would be the right way to get there.
00:34:29.000That would happen organically by simply rolling back the kind of government regulations and the regulatory state we've created that have created disincentives cumulatively over the years for the kind of bottom-up Hayekian revival that you describe.
00:34:45.000Or do you believe where we are that's actually going to require some level of Governmental policy to foster the creation of that garden or that community center where people are able to gravitate.
00:34:58.000What do you think the right answer is from where we are today?
00:35:41.000But what we need to do is not just roll back the bad government policy, we need to check ourselves, because what we've done, as Marvin Olasky pointed out in The Tragedy of American Compassion, what we've done is we've imitated that form of charity, ourselves, this faceless, relationless, handout mentality that has had the same effects, and we've made people dependent on us.
00:36:08.000And so we have to look at ourselves and the way that we go about doing charity in a more empowering, more dignified way, looking at poor people as people who have something to exchange with us.
00:36:25.000These are people with something to offer.
00:36:27.000And so we go in looking for opportunities to exchange, not to save a person.
00:36:33.000And you would say that that's more of a cultural shift in the culture of philanthropy, quite apart from the realm of government itself.
00:36:42.000We have a philanthropic industrial complex which is drunk on this handout mentality, and it's ruining neighborhoods just as much as the welfare state is.
00:36:52.000So we have to check ourselves first and undergo that kind of paradigm shift.
00:36:58.000And that's not really going to be done.
00:37:01.000Certainly, you don't want the government involved in redirecting the way that philanthropic industrial complex works, but it's more of a cultural revival within the world of charity and charitable acts itself.
00:37:14.000That's really part of what you're calling for.
00:38:53.000And so as we go in as philanthropists, instead of thinking of ourselves as knowing for sure what this neighborhood needs and just dropping these so-called gifts on people's heads, It would be much better if we could find these people, they're not hard to find, bring them together, empower them, network them, finance them, spiritually support them.
00:39:20.000And what we are doing is we're empowering them who are already trusted in the neighborhood, who already have all of the cred that someone needs in order to turn other people's lives around.
00:39:33.000And we are investing in them and their vision of their neighborhood, which requires some humility.
00:39:39.000It means that me, with my PhD in philosophy, I don't actually know what your neighborhood needs.
00:40:24.000Brian Fickard's book, When Helping Hurts, he starts the Chalmers Center.
00:40:27.000They'll work with your mission board at your church.
00:40:30.000True Charity is a wonderful organization that'll train nonprofits that want to flip that philanthropic model from hand out to dignified work.
00:40:41.000You can go to the Bradley Donors Fund, if you're a donor, and make sure that your money is going to the sorts of organizations that are oriented in this way.
00:41:15.000I think what we're seeing is a new strand of the conservative movement that actually is saying, no, no, no.
00:41:21.000We're actually going to define ourselves based on Using those same kinds of resources that were directed at maybe helping minority communities to help everyday historical blood and soil, longer term, on the ground here, American communities, including white communities or others.
00:41:39.000And I think that that's such a cautionary tale that you've told to suggest that even if this was going to be your objective of how you wanted to say, well, it's unfair that the government has so, in the last 30 years at least, dedicated its efforts to empowering certain groups of Americans at the expense of others, that we need to use those government tools to actually empower all Americans, like manufacturers or working class communities.
00:42:01.000You're seeing this strain of this in the protectionist wing of the conservative movement.
00:42:07.000What do you think that portends, where if you have the left that historically continues to focus on using governmental intervention and anti-state intervention to help their favored groups, and a conservative movement that now goes the other direction and says, you know what, we're going to use that same toolkit to actually empower our own preferred bases that have been ignored.
00:42:28.000What do you think that portends in terms of the dynamic between conservatives and liberals going forward?
00:42:36.000And one of the reasons is, and there's good evidence for this, populist movements all around the world, which are becoming more popular, if you look at the receipts on these movements, the economic receipts, they're not good.
00:42:49.000The outcomes of these policies are not good.
00:42:52.000We can see it over and over and over again.
00:42:55.000If you support that steel mill, right, and you protect steel so that you save that steel mill, what that does is it drives up the price of steel in such a way that your construction projects are canceled.
00:43:07.000So you save a few workers and you harm seven others, right?
00:43:11.000For every one you help here, you harm seven over there.
00:43:54.000I think that part of the issue, and this is where I'm sympathetic to where a lot of these folks are coming from in their motivation, but maybe missed the plot in their policy recommendations, is that the historical, you can call it neoliberal consensus or classical liberal consensus,
00:44:12.000Itself missed the plot in certain other ways that go outside the scope of the conversation we're having here, but had unforeseen effects of increasing US economic dependence on adversaries like China, which for independent reasons, you probably don't want an adversary supplying your own military industrial base,
00:44:30.000or even your pharmaceutical supply chain, just in the scenario of conflict Outside of the context of economic trade, there's the situation of geopolitical conflict that creates certain national security liabilities that you otherwise weren't able to have.
00:44:44.000You can think about it even in the context of immigration.
00:44:47.000The United States, as I alluded to at the beginning, is not just an economic zone, but if you have the loss of cohesion where you have a sufficient number of people in the United States that don't speak the same language or don't know the first thing about the history or the founding values or even the rights that they enjoy in the United States, that that creates a certain loss of national cohesion.
00:45:05.000And I think part of what's happened as I see it, from what I see it, is the understandable frustration with certain of those holes left in the neoliberal view, the reaction to that has been not to just correct for those issues, but to say, go far further and say, the reaction to that has been not to just correct for those issues, but to say, go far further and say, okay, we have a completely different vision of what modern conservatism
00:45:31.000And this is sort of where I land is I think the future of our own movement, I say our movement, we're talking about the conservative movement, is probably a fork in the road between what I call the national protectionists and the national libertarians.
00:45:45.000And I just think the discussion with you is so fascinating because you learn it from more of a progressive angle, the way in which that nanny state has so badly actually failed not only everybody, but the very people it was designed to protect.
00:45:57.000That that could actually be a cautionary tale for the national protectionists and the new conservative movement as well.
00:46:03.000And that's kind of one more reason, not just in convincing the left, but even in convincing some elements of what people might call the new right.
00:46:14.000Not of the fact that the old neoliberal consensus was right on everything, but the fact that you would go in the wrong direction if you simply tried to embrace the methods of the left of government protectionism and anti-statism, that that doesn't work even for the very people you're supposedly trying to save.
00:46:29.000And that's, I think, one of the underappreciated ways in which your work is particularly relevant for the conservative movement where we are right now.
00:46:39.000Yeah, I think that this is one of the reasons why I moved away from using the term libertarian to refer to myself and trying to be a part of the movement to reinvigorate the term classical liberal.
00:46:51.000Because classical liberalism historically has a minimal but very well put together concept of the role of the state.
00:47:01.000And so the state is small, but you have the beauty of the constitutional order and the separation of powers and appreciation for all that that entails.
00:47:12.000The importance of public goods are real.
00:47:17.000And so you need the state to address those.
00:47:19.000The term libertarian over time Started to mean something like anti-state, right?
00:47:25.000No role for the state at all, which is never what I thought it meant when I took it on as a young woman.
00:47:31.000And so now I say classical liberal simply to go back to that thicker, richer philosophical tradition That Scottish Enlightenment tradition that understood the importance of custom and tradition that overlaps so well with conservatism classically understood.
00:47:47.000And I think if we can re-present that to conservatives, we can say, of course, there are reasonable limits on these things.
00:47:57.000Don't let the pendulum swing so far the other way that you give up on the amazing riches that have come from, I mean, just wealth and flourishing that has come from the rise of global markets.
00:48:10.000Yeah, look, I think you raise a great point.
00:48:14.000I see my concerns about the rise of economic protectionism as a new form of identity on the American right, but one of my frustrations with what the libertarian movement, at least that label, has become Is that there is no vision for, even if we got to a place where the individual is so free of government intervention, okay, what then?
00:48:36.000There's still the separate question of human flourishing, as you talked about a lot of the focus of your work, is how do you rebuild that through civil society?
00:48:44.000Maybe even through philanthropy of the right kind.
00:48:46.000Whereas I think the classical libertarian, or at least the modern libertarian view, is so obsessed at the margins with With really focusing only on the absence of state intervention, that it has no theory of the case for what comes after.
00:49:02.000How do we actually live purposeful, meaningful lives, both at the level of individual and community?
00:49:08.000I think older versions of our classical libertarians, the Hayeks of the world, have been far more thoughtful about that more holistic vision that I think we have a little bit of a bastardized version of even the Mises or Hayek or whatever that remains for much more of a libertarian obsession have been far more thoughtful about that more holistic vision that I think we have a little bit of a bastardized version of even
00:49:31.000As opposed to asking the broader question of once you've removed the state, at least out of my life as a citizen from limiting what I can do, how then can I actually build up as a citizen how I can live a flourishing life?
00:49:42.000And so as much as I have my frustrations with the rise of economic protectionism and the conservative movement, I'm...
00:49:47.000I think those are some of my frustrations with the label, at least with the modern libertarian label has become.
00:49:53.000And in that sense, I think we probably share something in common, you and I in that sense.
00:49:59.000And so as director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia Chicago, I mean, obviously that's a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod institution.
00:50:08.000And what that means is that, you know, we see the relevance of institutions like the church.
00:50:15.000like marriage, right, and family as so important to the flourishing of a culture.
00:50:20.000And the wonderful thing about Black America is as much as they have suffered in this regard, the Black church tradition is a beautiful, stunning tradition with huge resources that can be reclaimed.
00:50:35.000And so instead of just beating up on the Black community, which sometimes it seems like that's what conservatives enjoy doing, that sort of spirit of just, of being a good conservative by being willing to say everything that's negative about a community.
00:50:52.000Instead of doing that, what if we went back to Douglas and Washington and the Black church tradition and Zoran Hurston, right?
00:51:02.000And some of these amazing figures and said, what if we just reclaimed what we already had and that was taken from us by these terrible policies?
00:51:10.000I think that would be a much more compelling And for what it's worth, I think even some of the people you mentioned there, I actually think are misportrayed.
00:51:24.000Even the way the left-wing media would like to prefer to caricature some of those other voices, I think actually creates a reinforcing perception that's where conservatives are.
00:51:35.000And my only view is if you put somebody else, if you put somebody in a box, that's the only place that they have to yet remain.
00:51:43.000And so part of what we need to do, I think, maybe is just to shed a lot of these labels altogether.
00:51:48.000I mean, what does the word libertarian mean?
00:51:49.000It was very different under Hayek than what it means today.
00:51:54.000That itself is morphing before our eyes.
00:51:56.000And instead, even talk more about the content of the country we want to create.
00:52:00.000On one hand, we see a regulatory state that has harmed and impeded the flourishing of the individual and communities, Black community included.
00:52:08.000But on the other hand, we also require sources of identity.
00:52:12.000At the level of the family, at the level of the community, at the level of the church, at the level of your nation that we're missing today that may not come through a top-down government enforcement, but could actually emerge through a better version of leaders in civil society stepping up and filling that void, not through toxic charity, but through charity of the right kind.
00:52:34.000And even through non-charitable engagement of the right kind.
00:52:37.000And I think that sometimes I think, you just think about it outside of the realm of political philosophy.
00:52:41.000I mean, labels, for me, whenever somebody tries to reduce me to a lane or a label, so like, what exactly are you?
00:52:51.000And I think it's no different for me than it is for most people that I think a lot of those labels in our modern politics have, I think, been confining rather than letting our own views be guided by the content of the actual country and vision we want to create.
00:53:09.000I think you are bucking today certainly a consensus that you illuminate by studying history.
00:53:16.000It's amazing how that works is you look back 100 years and it makes you look at progressive policies through a different lens today.
00:53:22.000But I hope this is the first of many conversations we continue to have.
00:53:25.000I learned a lot from you today and I hope more people are able to learn from you too.
00:53:30.000And not least of which would be people in the modern classical liberal or you could call it conservative movement to say part of what you need to do is actually show up and have the kind of conversation that you're having across the country because you might actually bring a lot more people along than you expect.