Traversing Ideologies: American Politics, Secularism, and Historical Thought with Justin Clark

Join the intellectual odyssey with our guest, Justin Clark, public historian and director of digital initiatives at the Indiana Historical Bureau, as we weave through a labyrinth of political ideologies, historical narratives, and the evolution of secular humanism. Unlock the mysteries of midwestern republicanism, dissect the transformation of political legacies from Robert Ingersoll to the Clintons, and explore the intricate dance of ideas across the spectra of socialism and atheism. With an ear to the past and an eye on the present, we navigate through controversial waters, challenging assumptions and redefining the landscape of modern discourse.

Our discussion spans a remarkable range of subjects, from the clash of atheism and postmodernism to the funding intricacies behind political movements. We scrutinize prominent thinkers like Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, critique the New Atheists' scientific missteps, and delve into the utopian traditions that thread through American history. As a co-host of Red Reviews, I bring a unique perspective on Marxist humanism, inviting listeners to join a conversation that dares to question and seeks to understand the complexities of our shared political tapestry.

As we conclude this thought-provoking episode, we celebrate the critical minds that have shaped our understanding of American culture and politics, from Sidney Hook to Gore Vidal. Reflecting on the nation's imperialist endeavors and its revolutionary aspirations, we honor the dichotomous nature of the American spirit. Engage with us on this riveting exploration of historical and political narratives that promises to enlighten, provoke, and inspire.

Chapters

• 0:00 Marxism, Atheism, and Historical Thought
• 15:34 Discussion on Hitchens, Chomsky, and Politics
• 24:11 Debating Secular Humanism and New Atheism
• 31:52 Connections in Right-Wing Political Circles
• 37:27 Debating Political Ideologies and Influences
• 41:21 Whither Memetics and Atheism?
• 52:57 Influence of Sidney Hook and Christopher Lash
• 1:03:33 Debunking Steven Pinker and American Historiography
• 1:08:08 Exploring American Utopian Traditions
• 1:11:36 Political Figures and Ideologies Analysis
• 1:24:15 Impacts of American Imperialism and War
• 1:32:58 Reflections on American History and Politics
• 1:40:43 Political History and Media Influence
• 1:54:33 Justin Clark's Online Presence

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:35

Hello and welcome to VARM blog. Today I am with Justin Clark, public historian and director of well digital initiatives director at the Indiana Historical Bureau, which works with the Indiana State Library. I think those is a good degree. One of those is a bad one From Indiana University of Kokomo and Masters of the Arts and Public History from Indiana University of Indianapolis and your research focused on the work of the free thinker Robert Ingersoll, a figure that we'll come back to. It's interesting because I think Ingersoll was kind of revived as a thinker with the new atheist to some degree, him and HL Mencken. Mencken's legacy is much more well.

Speaker 2: 2:44

A little mixed to be to understand it Contested.

Speaker 1: 2:48

I mean, you know there is a right supremacist conference named after Mencken, although I don't think that's entirely fair to Mencken's legacy. It's not entirely unfair either. But yeah, ingersoll is is. Uh, ingersoll is interesting because ingersoll to me represents midwestern republicanism and what I would probably call its heroic bourgeois phase, and with that I mean like when the capitalist party that represented the clearly capitalist faction was actually probably somewhat progressive and put that in appropriate scare. Quotes in history which you know, similar to back when Karl Marx was writing for Republican newspapers in the United States, which I think people are often surprised to learn, that so much of Marxist writing was journalism in the US.

Speaker 2: 3:43

Go ahead. Yeah, absolutely yeah. He wrote for the New York Tribune Horace Greeley's publication, which was a title that was digitized by the National Digital Newspaper Program. It was part of one of the first rounds of ND&P digitization in the mid to late 2000s. So a lot of people don't realize that you can actually just go and read Karl Marx's original editorials as they were printed in the New York Tribune online at the Library of Congress. You can also read a lot of the Daily Worker there too, which has also been digitized through Chronicling America. And yeah, it's pretty amazing to think about that and of that period for sure.

Speaker 1: 4:24

Yeah, I mean it seems like something actively suppressed about American history. Yes, Yep, but in some ways Ingersoll to me represents kind of the high point of that phase. Ingersoll to me represents kind of the high point of that phase. He's a figure that you can kind of link with someone like Ambrose Bierce who, outside of his almost rabid hatred of socialism Ambrose Bierce was in all other ways fairly progressive, but he really did hate socialists, um, but but there's definitely this republican tradition that is kind of muddled even by the early 20th century. That inglesol kind of represents. Um, I was going to talk to you about that. I, I can't. I don't know if I became familiar with you first through your work on free thinking or your work on socialism. You're also the co-host of a podcast called Red Reviews, which I think is you and I. I believe you represent the secular humanists. Wow, my southern accent came back for a second. The secular humanist. Wow, my southern accent came back for a second. The secular humanist, um, like social democratic side. And then you have a.

Speaker 2: 5:44

Can you have a canadian anarchist co-host, I believe yeah, yeah, that's the way I would just sort of describe it. So my colleague, cory johnston um, and I uh, cory and I have gone way back. We've. I've been on his show back in the days when he did other shows and we started doing Brad reviews about three years ago, and yeah, so I am sort of so he's the anarchist and I am the broadly the Marxist. So the way I would mostly describe myself is like as a Marxist, humanist or a sort of libertarian socialist, something along those closer to those lines.

Speaker 2: 6:17

And so we have a really interesting rapport with one another, mainly just because I find that we try to do the show where we try to be as fair to the books that we discuss as possible and we try not to kind of spout maybe a particular line but try to open up people's ideas to the long, rich tradition of socialism and the history of socialism, and so it's a lot of fun. And so we do books. We've talked about Marx, we've talked about Lenin, mao, we've done Trotsky, we've done libertarian socialists like Anton Panachak. That was one we just recently did about Marxism and Darwinism, which is a classic pamphlet that Panachak wrote in the early 1900s. He was a council sort of council communist, and so we try to give a rich tradition of the history of socialism to people on the show and try our best to sort of give our two cents and kind of try to represent the writers we're discussing as best we can and sort of let people make up their minds on their own where they kind of fall.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Yeah, um, I I enjoy your, your podcast. Obviously, I discovered you through, um, I believe, instagram, actually somewhat embarrassingly.

Speaker 2: 7:29

Um, that's okay, I think it was. I think I had listened to some of the stuff you had done with Doug Lane on pop the left, and then and I love this stuff you guys were talking about back in the sort of zero books days. Now, obviously, doug's doing his own thing and you and you guys are still doing stuff with sublation, which I think is great. Um and uh. And then, yeah, if we followed instagram, we've sort of been acquaintances ever since and it's really great to finally, uh, kind of have a yeah, so this might go all over the place, but I do want to tie into the one of the things I've noticed.

Speaker 1: 8:05

You've talked about a lot of figures that were more important to me at an earlier age and you kind of wrestled with also some key, let's say, hang ups with new atheism and that version of secular humanism. Um, you know, my, my four way into this world was, uh, you know, I remember watching a Peter Hitchens, um Christopher Hitchens debate, which I believe I've actually discussed with Ben Burgess too. Okay, cool, um way back, this would have been like while the Iraq War was still going on, and feeling like if you split the brothers and combined half of each of them, you might have a decent human being. It's probably fair. Oh no, so it was, although I will also say, say somewhat surprisingly for me, my favorite of the four horsemen atheists who had any real clout, dan didn't. I never really understand how he got thrown into that categorization.

Speaker 1: 9:14

That's a good question yeah, yeah, I mean like there's a lot of stuff that we have to like. We wind our minds back to 2005 now, yes, 20 years ago.

Speaker 2: 9:25

But yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2: 9:27

So so with Dennett, yeah, I think Dennett is interesting because he's the one who sort of gets the reputation is like the quiet one or the nice one, the quiet one or the nice one, although I think his, his style of, of intellectual is very similar to, like, stephen pinker, where he comes off sort of soft and nice, but then when you actually read what he's saying, he's like kind of extremely arrogant and often comes off like, in some respects, like, um, he sort of overplays his hand or he suggests things that are like ridiculous, like so, um, a few years ago I did a retrospective review on Daniel Dennett's book breaking the spell and and, uh, sort of breaking down what the problem with the book was. Because his whole big claim with that book was well, I'm, I'm the, I'm really going to bring sort of a natural history element to religion. I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to study religion through sort of a rational, scientific lens, and no one's really doing that. But I am and it's like, what are you talking about? Like, if you look at the history of philosophy, you know, if you go back to Hume, like you know, dialogues concerning natural religion, or Kant or John Locke right, the reasonableness of Christianity. They're always wrestling with those questions between religion and rationality and religion and science. That's a constant debate.

Speaker 2: 10:43

But the other thing that he's really frustrating about him is his defense of memes, which I mean. Memes exist on the internet as fun little pictures, but memes as Richard Dawkins conceived of them were not accurate and were not true. And so I started reading in the scientific literature about how memetics as a field of study kind of fell apart in the mid-2000s and in fact the Journal of Memetics kind of closed in like 2007, 2008, saying basically this is a dead field and that the sort of general wisdom with sort of how culture evolves is something called GCCE, which is gene culture co-evolution, which seems very rational and reasonable. It's like that genes evolve over time based on conditions and cultural attitudes and cultural artifacts evolve based on those said material conditions and they mingle together. You know, as Marx maybe would say is in a very dialectical way and that's kind of the consensus.

Speaker 2: 11:42

But the thing that I found most frustrating about Dennett in that book was he says later on in the book he says like we have a department of health, you know, for illnesses like for outbreaks. But we also should have like a department of like, basically like cultural health, where he says like we should be fighting against like bad ideas, and I'm like this sounds very much like committee of public information. This is like very like like palmer raids, it's like it's. This is the issue I have sometimes with science writers is they have no concept of history, so they just kind of say something and then they don't really think through the consequences of that or look for some historical analogies and so, yeah, I just thought I was like well, this is like extremely authoritarian and problematic and you know, and it's essentially against the whole idea of free thought. So I don't think that Dennett is the worst of the four horsemen. I think, by and away, by a mile, the worst is Sam Harris, who I think is a complete idiot but and a racist.

Speaker 1: 12:36

I feel like I've been a war with Sam Harris longer than I've been a leftist. Actually, since he wrote the End of Faith, I've been like so you're a cultural chauvinist, which means you're some kind of racist. Your arguments are the belief in action perfectly mirror each other, except when they don't you justify and people like tell me he doesn't do this and I'm like go back and read the book he justifies bombing people off of perceived belief.

Speaker 2: 13:10

It's not ambiguous. Yes, well, it's not ambiguous at all. And if you look, especially with Harris, I mean I think the most frustrating thing for me with him is that he's just genuinely kind of an incurious person. You know, like I have, I've not listened to his show in years, but I would imagine it's. I mean, I can't even imagine what he might be saying right now about the middle East. But, like you know he's, he's written columns where he says, like why I don't criticize Israel and like why we should be doing, you know, you know racial profiling, essentially.

Speaker 2: 13:40

And the thing that he does is what I call the Harris two-step, which is that he creates this thought experiment, which is so absolutely insane that it would never happen in reality, which then makes his position, which is also nuts, look reasonable in comparison to it. And he does that with the example of the nuclear first strike, example in the end of faith, where he's, like, he talks about, like well, what? Imagine that there's a bomb in Los Angeles and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, dude, that maybe that's the case, but, like, in general, that's not something that happens all the time, and normally you wouldn't respond to that with like blowing up LA, like it's just.

Speaker 2: 14:16

It seems like a very odd thing to me, um, and also I always like to note this thing too, which is that how did sam harris become who he is? Because he seems like he kind of came out of nowhere and, uh, he's a nebo baby. So his mom was susan harris, who was the co-creator of the golden girls tv show, yeah, and so know, when he talks in his books about, well, I went to Stanford and then I took a break and I did these meditation retreats and I'm like, how are you in your 20s and 30s being able to afford all of this? And it's like, oh, because you're just kind of a, you're kind of a leech off your mom's money. That makes sense. And so, yeah, no, I, I, I despise Sam Harris and I think that he, his style of thinking and specifically Michael Brooks, is the only great Michael Brooks, his responses to to Sam Harris, his critiques of Sam Harris, are what pulled me out of the sort of new atheist lens and then, specifically, what actually put me towards the left, because that was at that point where I recognized sort of that the secular movement or, for lack of a better word, the atheist movement's a dead end, um, and is extremely politically regressive and and I abandoned it, um, and so, yeah, I think that.

Speaker 2: 15:35

Uh, yeah, I think, in my opinion, my favorite is hitchens, like I think my my favorite is Hitchens. Like I think my favorite is Hitch, but like I acknowledge his extreme limitations, especially post-2001, when I think he just lost his goddamn mind, but that's you know.

Speaker 1: 15:49

Yeah, well, I was going to talk to you. I was looking at your discussion of Hitchens, yeah, and my reading of Hitchens. I remember reading God is not great. In fact I've read, I think, every word the man's actually put in a book. I'm pretty close to it as well. Yeah, even his more ludicrous stuff about Jefferson and Orwell, yeah, I the.

Speaker 1: 16:20

The thing I always found interesting about hitch is people assumed hitch was the most bellicose of the three of them, but he was actually the least bellicose of the three, one of the one of the. One of the things that makes him interesting is he was the only one, even during his weird neoconservative period, who was a critic of Zionism. Yeah, even during his weird neoconservative period who was a critic of zionism? Yeah, um, you know, um, that said, I mean his debates with chump, his debates with chomsky is like fuko's debates with chomsky, in a way that it's an interesting way to put you back in the problems of a different left. It's funny that chomsky has apparently just been talking for long enough that we can bring him up in several major shifts in left-wing thinking.

Speaker 2: 17:07

Um, yeah, I mean, he's the fact. The fact that he's the dominant american left-wing intellectual and has been one for maybe going on two, three generations now is either like, wow, like the staying power of him, or oh, wow, that's limiting, like there's a limitation in that. But like oh, but anyway, yeah, we can, we can table that for a second, but yeah oh yeah, oh yeah, that is my just agree with you.

Speaker 1: 17:39

That is my weird take on chomsky. He's both the best and worst we have and he's been the best and worst we've had for a long time. And people like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, he's better than 90 of the sectarians and stuff we get, or the democrats, yet effectively he ends up being the same thing. Yeah, so what? What do you do with that? Um, but, but it's interesting because I think you can kind of get like the fuko uh chomsky debate was a debate that when I first listened to it, when I was in my 20s and I was not a leftist yet, I thought that fuko.

Speaker 1: 18:16

When I listened to it about seven years ago again, I thought that Chomsky won, and when I listened to it last year I was like I don't think either of them won. I think this is a mystified conversation. And similarly with Hitchens versus Chomsky on the Iraq War, where I just I saw where Hitchens' frustrations were coming from, but his answer to it seemed insane even to me at the time I I had grown up uh, you know, I, I grew up in the heyday of, like hitchens, being the leftist who hated the clintons, and I also hated the clintons as a teenager and that was weird um I was too.

Speaker 2: 19:10

Wow, we're very similar in that.

Speaker 1: 19:11

Yeah, we're probably about the same age and range yeah, yeah, I'm 33. So yeah, oh no, I'm a decade older than you. I was. I hated the Clintons as a teenager, when Clinton was in office.

Speaker 2: 19:23

I dislike the Clintons as a teenager late teenager, early 20 something in college when I read no One Left to Lie To because that's when I read that. I read most of Hitch when I was in college. Like I read God is Not Great when I was 19. And I read a lot of that stuff at that point. I was in college. Like I read God is not great when I was 19. And I read a lot of that stuff at that point. And yeah, I could go ad nauseum about how I feel like the Clintons were the death of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party has never really recovered from it since. But yeah, we can table that for another time. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 19:52

I mean in some ways. I mean the Clintons are interesting in that they represent that, that the contradictions of the new left led to the atari democrats. The atari democrats became the dnc, and what the dnc is is a is a weird triangulating right-wing monstrosity, of which both biden and obama limped us along through. Yeah, even before I was a Marxist, I kind of saw that. I remember thinking in Obama's first administration like, well, actually Obama's first administration is what radicalized me, probably more than anything else the. I have been a radical in my teens. I've gone through this very conservative period You've probably heard me talk about it, won't go into detail again, uh, but the Obama's picking not just the Clinton administration but the right wing elements of the Clinton administration.

Speaker 2: 20:55

Yes.

Speaker 1: 20:57

Um, to kind of prove that they were not going to, you know, to radically change. Much was very much a moment of. We've been bamboozled, and I remember my friend celebrating the Obama victory in 2008, like because for those of you who are in your 20s, the odds were particularly bad time to even be a liberal. Much left to leftist.

Speaker 2: 21:24

Yeah, this is true, especially if you go into a rural high school, like I did. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:29

Me too. I lived in, I lived in central Georgia, so like, in fact, I left the country shortly after this and stayed away for for like almost a decade, um, but uh, I remember thinking, oh, something has gone very wrong, um. And I also remember thinking this about what I saw, to tie this into our first conversation what I saw with new atheism, yeah, um, because, well, I will say that the right-wing character of new atheism is interesting in so much that the average new atheist did not become a right-winger.

Speaker 1: 22:05

They became depoliticized and became some kind of liberal, really like, if you that's right, um, but the people who were the most committed to it, with the exception of like, oh, what's his name? These were the second string, new, uh, new, atheist. Um, he was the biologist who was a left winger. Uh, jerry coin. Yeah, jerry coin oh, not jerry coin, no your coin ended up being kind of a right winger actually.

Speaker 2: 22:37

Uh, I'm thinking of his, of essentially like his left wing doppelganger, and I think it's PZ Myers, pz.

Speaker 1: 22:42

Myers, exactly. I thought Coyne was a better scientist, but ended up being the worst political thinker.

Speaker 2: 22:47

Yes, that's true.

Speaker 1: 22:48

And PZ Myers, who I thought when I was in that world made the most ridiculous. Like we must not accommodate to religion, no matter what blah, blah, blah. And Like we must not accommodate to religion, no matter what blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like like what do you think is actually at stake here? Like and I remember even then and like I said, this was this is around 2005, 2006,. Me thinking man for people who are supposedly materialist, you guys really think that like ideas around metaphysics like dominate the entirety of people's thinking?

Speaker 2: 23:23

Yeah, this is a very, very, very good point. This is something I've written about too in my review of Michael Brooks's excellent book Against the Web, where he kind of goes into some of this that they don't view religion, say we would, you know, as sort of a phenomenon that grows out of material conditions and thinking about what would make somebody religious. It's also the problem that the new atheists a lot of them, ironically enough don't really understand that religion is more than the sum of its specific metaphysical beliefs. Religions are far more than that, so like. They are often institutions of communal experience and community building and social justice, and they kind of often brush that to the side.

Speaker 2: 24:09

My favorite was Michael Shermer. In his book the Moral Arc made the argument that essentially Martin Luther King was a secular humanist and that his religion didn't really matter that much, which I thought was a bit odd. But Schirmer is a problematic altogether. I mean, talk about somebody who by all accounts should have been canceled but wasn't for his own personal behavior, and I won't go into it. But anyway, yeah. So they have this weird, detached, extremely idealistic way of looking at religion, even though they expect everybody to be it. But, but, but, yeah, but, anyway, yeah, so it's. So. They have this weird, like detached, extremely idealistic way of looking at religion, even though they expect everybody to be like these hardcore materialists.

Speaker 2: 24:46

The other problem that they do is and I call it the cult of reason, where they use the architecture, the sort of rhetorical architecture of rationality to justify whatever they're saying. So their whole argument is like, no matter how, how irrational or logical something coming from them seems, um, they sort of bathe themselves in the, the, um, the sort of the, the clothing of rationality, and somehow negates the fact that what they're saying is actually nuts. Um, sam harris does this a Part of it's because he's also he speaks very calmly, so like if you could imagine like an insane right winger at CPAC saying screaming what Sam, like Sam Harris's words, we would think that person was an insane person. But because Sam Harris is like this sort of boring, you know, speaks in a very boring, anodyne way, he kind of gets away with it, and so I think that that's a real problem too. Is that just because you say you're being reasonable doesn't mean you're actually being reasonable?

Speaker 1: 25:45

yeah, I remember, uh, yeah, at one time I was gonna sit down with a former friend of mine. Um, I used to do a show called mortal science and kind of trace what happened to the new atheists, and particularly the kind of second and third generations I always would point out. Why do we call them new atheists? Well, they were trying to distinguish themselves from two other groups. They were trying to distinguish themselves from the 70s secular humanist movement which they had. They didn't have contempt for but they thought was not radical enough or something.

Speaker 1: 26:19

Yeah, they thought it was squishy Right and then they were also and I think people miss this trying to distinguish themselves from the old atheists, by which they meant Marxist. Yes, you know, it's just like there was an implicit anti-communism in a lot of what they did, an implicit anti-communism in a lot of what they did. Uh, and the only person who was explicit about it, weirdly, was hitchens, when hitchens was also the softest towards communism, like it was um, but he was more like I remember when he called his old trotskyism a secular religion. And I also remember the baits that sam harris had with with Scott Atran way back in the day and that's what kind of started getting me out of it. I was, you know, I had actually kind of gone through the reverse.

Speaker 1: 27:12

I was a secular, conservative, anti-war person in the early aughts. Anti-war person in the early aughts, um, because my, my contact with the left and the ultra globalization movement was a left that I think that I kind of figured was dead set on being um, minoritarian, no matter what, like they took pride in it, uh, countercultural for good and for ill, and easily manipulated, because they had no real like they basically operated off of piecemeal moral concerns and I had not developed an understanding that this was kind of. You know, the way I would explain this today with the Gen X and very, very early elder millennial left, like you know, those of us explain this today with the gen x and very, very early elder millennial left, like you know, those of us who came up in the in the 90s, in the early aughts, is that we were dealing with the seeming delegitimization of marxism from, uh, from the fall of the soviet union, which we have grown up through and had no real narrative for how to handle that and no real narrative of what an alternative would be. But we'd also seen left liberalism, as shown to us in new dealism, and the new left be utterly decimated by its, by its own victories. Actually, you know, it's just obvious, yeah, yeah, uh, if it wasn't just clinton, it was blairism, it was the stuff going on in latin america in the 90s, um, with the exception of hugo chavez, like there was just, it was just a period of, of whitewash, and we kind of had a mixture of an inchoate anarchism, some of which I don't, I, I, I miss, but also a kind of moral critique of not even capitalism per se.

Speaker 1: 29:04

It wasn't even coherent enough to say we were morally critiquing neoliberalism. It was like morally critiquing corporate society, ad buster style, and I rejected that. I just was like that's anti-systematic, it's weirdly moralistic, but I can't figure out what actual moral basis it comes from, and I ended up on the anti-war right. The anti-war right, however, was a gaggle of things that would later be manifested in trumpism, where you had like, uh, cultural and racial nationalists hiding out and and at that time speaking in code, and I think people like sometimes were like well, how did you not know? And I, and at that time speaking in code, and I think people like sometimes were like, well, how did you not know? And I'm like dude, they spoke in code, like, even if you were in the movement before. Weirdly, even in the very conservative time period of the 2000s, the right felt safer speaking in code than it does now, where I'll just say it outright directly absolutely.

Speaker 2: 30:00

Yeah, I agree with that a thousand percent and my trajectory is very similar to yours. So, like my, my political radicalization also happened in the first obama years. Um. I worked on obama's campaign in 2008. It was actually my high school senior project, um, which was a lot of fun, because then you could like put up your big red, white and blue, like tri, trifold, like tricorder thing in the gym for all the this senior project day, and you have this big poster of obama and you're pissing all these rednecks off, which is kind of cool, but um, at least that's how I felt at the time and uh, but I found his, uh, his, his, his first moves to be extremely disappointing to me, and at the, there really was no left that I could really identify with. This is like 2009, 10, 11.

Speaker 2: 30:44

And so the only real alternative was the libertarian right. And that was when, you know, like a lot of young people, that's when I discovered Ayn Rand, and I read Ayn Rand and became kind of an objectivist and became involved in the libertarian movement and really left it for a variety of reasons, but the main ones was sort of figuring out what you did, which is, oh my God, all these people are speaking in code and they're not really saying what they actually believe. And then also just kind of recognizing two things One, a lot of them are sort of neo-Confederates, so they they very much believe in sort of the lost cause, bullshit about the civil war, um, and that you know, lincoln was like the dictator par excellence in the south, was like the noble cause. It was all about states, rights and the right to rebel, and all this instead of like, well, what was, why were they doing that? Why were they deciding to secede from the union? As if no one knew the cornerstone speech that alexander stevens, the vice president of the confederacy, gave in 1861, where basically clearly, flat out says in that speech, we are separating from the union because we want to maintain slavery, like it's very clear, it's also in the confederate constitution. So they just kind of lie.

Speaker 2: 31:52

And then also recognizing the corporate network that funds all of this stuff, which the left doesn't really have a corollary to. You know, really, why would it? You know, and? And so, unless you, you count Jeffrey Katzenberg giving the young Turks $20 million or something like that, which I don't, but you know, but you recognize, well, it's all funded by the Kochs and all these are kind of connected and you end up like you know, charlie, and it sunny in philadelphia where it's like you've put the connections together and you're like, wait, this is all connected by dark money and it's fucked up. And so you're like I'm done with this, like I'm done, yeah, um, but yeah, so I had a very similar. I was, I had a very, very similar trajectory yeah, interestingly, I mean.

Speaker 1: 32:33

One thing I'll say about the paleo conservative world and the aughts is that it overlapped like we were on the same side and opposing bush as the libertarians, um, uh. But I remember even then going how are these dudes defending gary north, who's like like, uh, like going and standing for rush dooney and also talking about a minimal state, like that doesn't make any sense. They're dominionist, like yeah, um, or you just, and, and Thomas Woods is weird Neo Confederate stuff. I'm naming names here.

Speaker 2: 33:08

Oh yeah, thomas Woods. Yes, well, it's, it's. He's a weird mix of, like libertarianism, neo Confederateism and Catholicism, like you, confederatism and catholicism like you put all those together.

Speaker 1: 33:21

That's because I've read two or three of his books, so oh yeah, he's a trad calf.

Speaker 1: 33:24

Yes, weird trad calf also he makes rod dreher look slightly normal compared to yeah I mean, he also wrote a book that was like the anti-max weber, where he was like no catholicism is what gave us capitalism, and I'm like what it was like okay, in the absolute loosest, weirdest sense, kind of maybe but like no. But then I also started meeting people like Hans. Well, I didn't meet Hans Hermann Hopp. I did have the misfortune of meeting Richard Spencer in this world, but people forget he was the arts and culture editor for American conservative during the during the first part of the Bush administration.

Speaker 2: 34:06

I did not know that. That's interesting. I did not know that.

Speaker 1: 34:08

And then he joined something called the is it the, the something policy Institute out of Augusta, georgia, which is where I was born?

Speaker 2: 34:17

actually it was the EPI yeah, epi.

Speaker 1: 34:20

Yeah, economic, which is not at all. That's a right-wing nationalist group that took a very normie name so you wouldn't know what it was.

Speaker 2: 34:34

Oh yeah, these organizations are really really good at that, like Students for Liberty, which was an organization that I was involved in in college. That was an outgrowth of the youth section of the Ron Paul campaign and even when I was a libertarian I didn't like Ron Paul and part of it was I didn't love how religious he was. You know, at that time I was a Randian atheist and I thought like like I didn't like that. I didn't like his views on abortion. Part of the appeal of Iran to me was that she was an atheist and that she was pro-choice. Those were the two things those are like kind of big things for me at that time.

Speaker 2: 35:11

But yeah, no, I think you're right and and you think about you know, the people that I kind of met when I was involved in it were people like I met john stossel, uh huh, yeah, um, who wears and who in person wears an absolute mountain of makeup, like he is. He is caked up to be on television. Never seen someone have so much makeup on tv. Um, I met tom palmer, who was a part of, like, kato. I met david bows. I met, uh, I met gary johnson. You know I'm not some of those people.

Speaker 1: 35:42

They're more marginal yeah, yeah, the more, um, I would. What's interesting about the, the names that you're listing? I would consider them like some of them are clowns, but I don't consider them necessarily evil. Yeah, I agree, whereas some of the people I dealt with in the paleo-conservative world, when we were united against Bush, you didn't see it. Because, also, you're doing a double move, because you're rejecting neoconservatism but you're also rejecting the left as it existed. And then all of a sudden you wake up and you're like oh, joe Sobrin's over here.

Speaker 1: 36:24

I wonder why he got kicked out of writing for the National Review. It must have been war stuff. Oh, no, it wasn't that. It was because he perpetuated a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. You know which? Buckley was okay, what you're doing, as long as you never actually did it. You know what I mean. Like buckley was very cool with that kind of stuff, as long as you were smart enough to keep your mouth shut about what you were implying, yes, but sobrin said it out loud and directly um, uh, similarly, uh, gary john. I remember ron paul and lou rockwell were in this orbit, as was, yeah, later, fun people like uh, oh, who's that cult guy who did free thought radio? Um, oh, oh who became a nationalist.

Speaker 2: 37:16

He became a white is. That Is that.

Speaker 1: 37:17

Stefan Molyneux. Yes, stefan Molyneux. Yes, I mean he was. I will say even the right wingers considered him culty, even in the Bush administration. But there was stuff about it. I remember being profoundly torn about Ron Paul, because I thought it was interesting that Ron Paul indicated to me that there is an anti-imperialism latent even in the conservative side of life, uh, and yet also that he was horribly reactionary, hanging out with people like Lou Rockwell and Hans Hermann Hopp. And Hans Hermann Hopp was one of those people who's like, yeah, feudalism is good because it's really capitalism, which a is wrong, but b also like what? Like the good stuff about capitalism is that it recapitulates feudalism through private ownership. Like that's yeah, that's, that's a good thing like, yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

Speaker 2: 38:09

And and, yeah, I think you're right about paul.

Speaker 2: 38:11

I mean that was what attracted me to some of some of his uh, you know, his ideas was mainly just the fact that it was like, oh, here's this, like old crotchety dude from Texas who kind of gets it about the, about the U?

Speaker 2: 38:24

S empire, and like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

Speaker 2: 38:27

But you know, growing up I mean to be frank, I mean like the people who were more interested, who were more influential on me about ideas of American empire were, you know, were people like Gore V, um, who, uh, who I've written about and I and I've talked about a lot and and we did an episode of red reviews on gorvidal and um, you know, outside of like, you know, left politics or whatever, like gorvidal is probably my favorite author and reading his like pamphlets in the early 2000s, like as a middle schooler, high schooler, were important to me in terms of learning about the big, big difference between the Republic, like his conception of the Republic, which is in some respect kind of like idealistic, right, but the empire, and that the, the, the Republic, always seeds ground to the empire.

Speaker 2: 39:11

And and just hearing somebody talk about it in that way was like compelling to me because I could, I could get that, um, so yeah, but yeah, I think I think for for a lot of us you know, who are sort of disappointed in the Obama era and sort of disappointed in left liberalism in general, we were all kind of in the wilderness for a while, and maybe it's a wilderness we've never really left because of the wreckage of the last 15 years you know, yeah, I I uh, you know I I hate to be on the.

Speaker 2: 39:44

The millennial left failed kick.

Speaker 1: 39:45

But um oh no, I agree with chris katron on this. I think he's right. So, yeah, well, I I've chris, uh, uh, I I refer to chris as a frenemy of the show because he's sort of he's sort of my problematic mentor. I mean, you probably know that, um, I came, I left the platypus affiliated society in 2013 but, like um, I was, I was educated by them. Um, the, the, the millennial left thing is interesting, but I think about the context of us all being in the wilderness and what it seemed to move from from my perspective living through it, you know, and and you lived through it too. So you can kind of give me your. We're only separated. Actually interesting. If dead lane was here, you'd have like 10 years.

Speaker 1: 40:32

Yeah, that would be really interesting talk, but when you think about, like, what the left was prior to 2007, um, and then what the financial crisis coalesced for me I mean for me the financial crisis led me to considering two things. One, that the new atheist movement had no serious thing to say about a lot of the primary things in life, and the more I heard them talk about ethics and whatnot, I was like your ethics are absurd. You're arguing that they're objective off of. I don't know what you don't want to deal with meta-ethics. You don't want to deal with anthropology. Don't know what you don't want to deal with. You don't want to deal with meta ethics. You don't want to deal with anthropology. I remember having the same problem as you with, like, this memetic theory that you're operating off of is literally a fucking analogy.

Speaker 2: 41:29

Like yeah, um, and when you recognize brief, like in something I write about in the dennett essay that I wrote, is that our modern conception of memetics actually comes from a book that Douglas Hofstadter edited called the Mind's Eye. It came out in the early 80s. Daniel Dennett was like an editor on that book too, and the idea of memetics of course comes the meme comes from Richard Dawkins. You're right, it is an analogy. When Richard Dawkins writes about it in the Selfish Gene, he's not talking about it as if it's like as if memes are a real thing. He's using them as an analogy to describe what he thinks genes do. But what happens is Dennett kind of gloms onto this idea and kind of goes crazy. And so what they do is the chapter that Richard Dawkins is attributed to writing in that book, the Mind's Eye, is a chapter that's a Frankenstein's monster of his writing, where they pull from here and they pull from there and they edit it all together to say something that he didn't actually originally say.

Speaker 2: 42:37

And so right out the gate with the idea of memetics itself and how it caught on in sort of the scientific literature started with a deception, like right out the gate. It started with intellectual dishonesty, at least in my opinion. And so when you know that and you go like, oh you, so they basically moved Richard Dawkins' words around to say what they wanted them to say rather than what he was actually saying and this is the most charitable you're ever going to hear me be about richard dockets, by the way, but um, but yeah, I just I think that that is really really, really telling about the, the limits of that worldview and the limits of of the new atheism, for sure well, one of the things I remember about the new eight, about the second tier, new atheist, and particularly the british contingent, actually probably more than the american, as they were really at war with something I am still kind of at war with, although I think like blaming post-modernism quote-unquote is lazy, but um, you know to go full colette on things.

Speaker 1: 43:33

I don't even know what post-modernism is and I've studied it um, it's a bit like quantum physics.

Speaker 2: 43:38

If you think you know it maybe you probably don't right, um, and it's not.

Speaker 1: 43:42

It's not also, it's also falling out of fashion to even talk about in in academia. Now, yeah, in fact, I was just at a history, uh, an intellectual history conference where, like, the one person who was talking about post-modernism was like the old crotchety person and we were just all like what, um, uh, which is just it, which is wild to me given my own and like my own training was in the aughts where, like and I, I got trained both in the humanities well, I got trained on the humanities but I got trained both in literature and in kind of analytic philosophy, um, and I wrote in anthropology and I remember hitting, getting in debates with like Derridians and Heideggerians and stuff a lot in the aughts. But one of the things I noticed that people use this attack on Heidegger to do was to throw sociology, anthropology, anthropology of religion, out the door. And in fact, one of the things that I'm not going to be charitable about Dawkins about is in his book the God Delusion. He literally starts trying to make every other field evolutionary biology, yes, like including, like cosmology and like alternate and like theoretical physics, and it just, it like clicked my button that something was going off here that, like you know, even at the time I remember critiquing, like I was like what's with that chapter in this book, like why are people not talking, pointing out that that chapter's nuts, like it, like this, that it's wild speculation, uh, by a responsible scientist, but one that you know by the time that we're encountering him, you know, in the aughts and in the late 90s, he hadn't really done science in a long time, actually he'd been mostly professor of scientific communication, yes, um, and he had him brought himself in this battle versus the post-modernist who he believed were somehow the same as like pseudo historians, and I admit that the worst of that was anti-intellectual, I mean, yeah, and it made stuff like um, you know, uh, michael Schirmer's bullshit uh seem

Speaker 1: 46:18

seem very appealing. Um, one of the things. I think it's easier to fight this today as, like the later generation of Michael Schirmer style bullshit like the like, the, the Peter Boghossian, james Lindsay style, oh yeah, like pseudo repeat of the Sokol hoats from like, I guess seven years ago now. Um like hoats from like I guess seven years ago now. Um like, which was published in a pay-to-play journal anyway. Um, yeah, uh, but which is a very different thing than like sneaking a bad article into social text. Um, what I found interesting about that is that socal, in the context of France, thought he was defending old socialist materialism, actually against these post-Marxists who had just used metaphors to go to absurd lengths and had abandoned any rigorous conception of materialism for whatever. And what James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian thought they were doing was fighting the Marxist who had corrupted applied social science, a field not to talk shit, but a field that's not really known for having strong methodologies in the first place.

Speaker 2: 47:37

Yeah, it's like evolutionary psychology. It's the same as the same problems yes, uh, what we?

Speaker 1: 47:43

that was another fun thing about the new atheists they just took evolutionary psychology on face value. And I remember to go back to pz myers a bit and it's important that while we separate him from jerry coin, yeah, pc myers actually started like waking up from his whole, like pro new atheist alone. Like we don't make accommodations into debates about evolutionary psychology because he's like wait, if you understand comparative biology you can't make these generalizations that they're making. And also some of them are just wrong, like they're just ignoring. Like. I remember reading uh evo psych paper that got published in a journal that was arguing about how blue and pink are like naturally evolved color associations. Yeah, yeah, on gender history would know that like those associations switched in the late 19th, early 20th century and beforehand they were reversed. So trying to like tie that into this to savannah evolution hunter-gatherers is like ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 48:51

And then I started reading because I was, I just got out of an anthropology program and a forensic anthropology program but I started reading like marshall solins and people like that, and realizing like, oh no, these evolutionary psychologists like they're just ignoring with the anthropo, they're ignoring the anthropological data.

Speaker 1: 49:07

It's not just that like this is a debate over what it means, like they're just bracketing huge amounts of even forensic anthropology out and this is largely speculative, based off of assumed modules. And honestly, this is a problem that I have with Chomsky, because Chomsky does do this too. He assumes that, like you know, modules are based on biological things, the substrata and the brain and their material and and and genetic and this and there is a human nature, and while I admit that, like the daniel everett critique of that ended up being a little bit bullshitty, um uh, I have realized that it's impossible to prove chomsky's. So it's just impossible to prove if those are like convergent things that would just happen because of outside things, or if they genes, if you're looking at something that you can't find explicit gene triggers for.

Speaker 2: 50:04

Yeah, it's pretty tricky.

Speaker 1: 50:06

Yeah, intellectually, I mean, the new atheism would be intellectually confused because it seemed like a response to the. What is interesting to me about it is that it was a sincere response to a particular political fusionism that has now sort of gone away but we have forgotten about it, like the relationship between evangelical christianity, although greatly overstated about how far that actually went, and bush it made a policy. This is one thing that I always say, like I, I don't think dominionism had much to do with bush policy at all no, it actually.

Speaker 2: 50:52

It held far more influence under trump than it did under bush right.

Speaker 1: 50:56

I mean interestingly and what? What is interesting about that is that Trump is actually a more secular president than Bush in a lot of ways, and yet the religious right had more influence on his administration.

Speaker 2: 51:12

Because it's purely transactional, like, the big difference is that, like, bush would talk a good game about certain things, whereas Trump would actually give them what they wanted. Um, and I think that the I mean I'm with you on that that. Yes, people often overstated the case about the evangelicals and power, but I do think Christian nationalism is a real problem, um, and I do think it's something especially with this whole Project 2025 stuff with Trump people need to be wary of, because, you know, I mean, the current Speaker of the House, mike Johnson, is a Christian nationalist and he was in a closed-door room basically comparing himself to Moses. So we're like, we're in, we might be through the looking glass a little bit with these people, but there is something interesting at the heart of the new atheism that I'm always kind of intrigued by is that there were antecedents to it, and one that I think is very important is that sort of there was the path that was taken and the path that was not taken, and I sort of used two intellectuals in the 20th century to kind of explain that in the secular movement, one is Corliss Lamont, who is a name that most people don't often know, but Corliss Lamont was kind of one of the founders and fathers of secular humanism in America.

Speaker 2: 52:26

Um, he was also a socialist, he was also a Marxist, um and uh, and was one of the one of the early founders and supporters of the ACLU. So a man who was firmly on the left and often got pilloried for it, you know, got sort of swept up in the chaos of the McCarthy years. But you have Corliss Lamont, who is sort of this secular humanist of the left, and that's just the path not taken. The secular humanist movement never really went to the left. It always sort of stayed kind of normie, centrist, liberal. And part of that is because of the other person that I'm going to mention and that is Sidney Hook. So Sidney Hook, who started as a Marxist and became a neoconservative His story is very similar to Hitch, although I would say Hook did it far more successfully and perhaps more grandly. I mean, I think he got like the presidential medal of freedom or something.

Speaker 1: 53:24

Yeah, the presidential medal of freedom. He also was like the left wing, like cover for the Congress for cultural freedom, which yes. One of the reasons why I'm always like, hey, be careful when you call Christopher Lash a conservative, because he pointed out how many people were under the congress for cultural freedoms um, uh, uh clutches and pointed out that they were probably cia before it was declassified. Like yes, like like he just happened to be right.

Speaker 2: 53:57

Yes, well, and I'm with you on this too, because I've written about lash and, and he's one of my favorite authors and thinkers and he is a man of the left, um, but he is a man who is, who is both on the left and sort of at war with it at the same time, in the sense that he is very much critiquing the sort of cultural, uh, what he calls, I think. What does he call it? He calls it like, the, like, the, the, the medicinal turn of politics where, instead of politics being about sort of real, tangible struggles for improving people's lives, it turns into this sort of like medicalization, where it's like we're all going to therapy and therapy sort of replaces politics. That's a lot in his book, the Minimal Self, which I really really like, but yeah, no, it's interesting to me. So, like you see all of it there, and to me the new atheism is sort of like very much a part of that whole end of history.

Speaker 2: 54:51

Non-ideology, radical. You know the extreme center, you know, as Tarika Lee called it, and so it was this sort of abandoning of ideology. Like, look, extreme center, you know as, as Tariq Ali called it, and uh, and so it was this sort of abandoning of ideology, like, look at us, like we don't believe in religion, but we also don't believe in political religions like communism or Marxism, um, and so it was a way of sort of um kind of washing their hands of that, because they knew that if they were more strident on the left politically in a time in the 90s that it would be. You know, you would have to be treated as sort of persona non grata or just not treated like as someone of importance at all. But in my opinion, the road that the, the human, the broader secular movement took was hooks. It took the hook route instead of taking the lamont route, and and I think we've sort of paid the consequences ever since.

Speaker 1: 55:39

Yeah, that's, that's actually. I've never even thought about putting putting Lamont and hook as kind of two options of where you could have gone. But but you know, hook really is in many ways he's, he's the, he's the most successful anti-communist and that he took American pragmatism and Dewey pragmatism and people wonder why I hate John Dewey so much, but there's a thousand reasons but anyway and used it to create an alternative. And particularly when the new left kind of washed up on the shores of history. For you know, for a variety of reasons that are complicated, to go like I, to be honest, one of the things I like about lash, as a corrective, because you know, uh, for all of my um dallying with chris katron, one of the things that I used to argue with them about was like, well, it couldn't have started with the new left, Like the problem had to be older than that, and Katron would say yes, but then would not tell me what the problem older than that was, um, and like. So I started trying to figure that out and I had read lash actually as a right winger, because when I was coming up in the early, honestly, only people leading lash were right wingers, weirdly, I mean, but very, and it was not like it wasn't right wingers of the George Bush persuasion. They didn't give a shit. It was. It was like Roger Kimball from new criterion and the people at first things like, and it was based off of his last three books, and particularly the Critique of Progress book, a book that I am lukewarm with to this day. I mean, I like I love Lash, but I do have problems with him, even as kind of a Lash scholar.

Speaker 1: 57:28

But what Lash gave me was a way to look at the American left, to break it off from the European left, because what you often have is we talk about Europe until, say, the 1930s, then we talk about the United States, then we talk about Europe again because the 70s is embarrassing for the American left, and then we talk about the United States and what Lash made me look at was like, was like no, there's a history of the left that's actually rooted in socialism that goes back a long time. I mean his history has gone back to, like the 1870s, um, and that they're problematic, like it's like some of these problematics are actually old, specific to the united states, and you need to look at that. And I would say one of his kind of unstated contentions is that the left doesn't know its own history and thus is doomed to constantly make similar mistakes, but even more so. So, like you, like the way lash seems to view it is like oh, we're back in the cycle again, but this time we're going to go further into this cycle of culturalism or a privileging countercultures or whatever. And Lash doesn't hate the counterculture that's a misreading of Lash but he is skeptical of it because if it never remerges with the main culture, it is not definitionally a mass movement.

Speaker 1: 58:58

And how can you possibly have a left that's meaningful, that's supposed to liberate everybody, if everybody, in fact most bodies, are not in it? Definitely on the sydney hook as traitor train, um uh, which you know. It is kind of an interesting thing to think about today, because I, I do, you know, even to me, when in the aughts, if you were to tell me what was the most the most interesting, prestigious, rational skeptic or new atheist journal, I would have said skeptic magazine by michael, by michael schirmer, one of the only benefits, I think, to the ought tens in this crazy coulette. James lindsey bullshit, you know james lindsey, who is channeling the conservative, uh, eric vogel, and and the other and the arch reactionary eric uh, I mean von kuhnlin, um, which no one knows. That's where people like lindsey's getting his ideas from. Is these mid-century reactionaries? But when, when Lindsay's talking about, like Marxist, all being secret Gnostics, that's where that comes from and he's not citing his sources.

Speaker 2: 1:00:10

It's like Jordan Peterson with Stephen Hicks. It's the same thing. So I'm like Peter. When Peterson's talking about postmodernism and his ideas about postmodernism, they are cut whole cloth from Stephenhen hicks, who's an objectivist. Um, and the objectivist you know sort of history philosophies that kant was like the worst thing that ever happened ever, and then hegel was even worse and then marx was even worse, like, and it all goes back to how kant was awful and peterson says the same stuff. So I remember when peterson became popular and I started hearing that I went wait a minute, I know where this is coming from. It's very weird when they don't you know. It's like I know you're getting this, but the people you're telling this to don't know that.

Speaker 1: 1:00:48

And that's the weird part, and also, frankly, the left doesn't know it, so they don't know how to counter it. Yes, that's right. One of the reasons why I was kind of I was gonna talk, get back to it gold verdal. But one of the things I like about a lot of your shorts that you have clearly read a lot of right-wing literature. Now that I know that you are libertarian, it makes sense, um, uh, I find that often, uh, trying to get uh libertarian, trying to get like left wingers to read right wing literature and you can sometimes get him to weird, you know and I say this as a person who might be contributed to it by doing a long series on Dugan but you can sometimes get him to read the weird European reactionaries like Avola or whatever, but trying to get him to read like a libertarian is like pulling teeth. Yeah, um, because I'm like, no, like, like you need to understand. Yeah, libertarianism stupid, I get it like, but it's more persuasive once you understand its first premises than you think, unless you undermine its first premises.

Speaker 1: 1:01:59

Another thing that got me off of that I mean, I, this, I, I got into this before I even was a leftist, but it moved me there around 2005 I was like dealing with john lock and I had this admiration for john lock kind of uh, coming out of the hitchens, you know radical centrist enlightenment, blah, blah, blah. Steven pinker although I've always hated Pinker, I'll get back to that later I was like I remember reading the Better Angels of Art History and going like there's some of the most Scotty shots, scotty Scotty scholarship, not can't speak today that I've ever read. Like he's using like library popular books to make statistical arguments about deaths and stuff. It was just bizarre.

Speaker 2: 1:02:42

It's wild what steven pinker can get away with. Um, if you just look at his citations, a lot of times when he's citing something that he's sort of presenting as a scientific fact, it turns out he got that from like a new york times columnist and it's like who may have, may or may not have pulled that idea out of their ass, like it's. The big issue I have in the Pinker book, briefly, is he makes this argument that violence was worse in prehistorical times, based on like percentages of those who were killed rather than like total deaths, and I'm like, but that's kind of a squishy way of kind of of saying it. Yeah, maybe they killed 20% of those people, but that's 20% of what? 5,000? Whereas, like you know, 27 million Soviet people died in World War II. That's infinitely worse than anything that may have happened thousands of years ago, even if it's just a percentage.

Speaker 2: 1:03:34

I always thought that was a very slippery argument that he makes and I'm just like, no, and Pinker's the worst at it, because like he comes off as this, like very nice Canadian guy, but when you actually read him he's an asshole. He comes off as like a pretentious, arrogant ass, and there are people who've done amazing work. Just debunking him I mean I think Jason Hickel, the guy who, who's the the degrowth guy he wrote like a whole paper on just like basically debunking one page of one of his, of Steven Pinker's books. It's kind of incredible. I can't remember which book it is. It might be enlightenment now, but but yeah, it's just kind of laying out that like, and Pinker also is like a terrible intellectual historian, like I don't know if you ever read enlightenment now, which is one of his later books. Oh, it's a terrible fucking book.

Speaker 1: 1:04:19

I want to even a centrist Well, I don't know that he's a centrist liberal, but let's say even in a person as not Marxist, as say, jonathan Israel.

Speaker 1: 1:04:33

Yeah, you know, I wanted to take the Jonathan Israel books and bludgeon Steven Pinker to death with it. I just remember reading Enlightenment now and being like how can you read any historiography Of the Enlightenment and just ignore this shit, ignore the debates, the contradictions, the long tradition, ignore this shit like the like are, ignore the debates, the contradictions, like the, the long tradition? I mean one thing I wanted to kind of talk about one of the things I liked about your show and like your approach to intellectual history and it's actually it may be kind of an intellectual accident, but because you come out of the free thought movement and also went through libertarianism, which now I know and makes stuff makes a little bit more sense, um, I now see why you seem to know like american history a lot better than a lot of leftists do, because that is kind of a problem that a lot of leftists do not know pre-1930s american history like at all.

Speaker 2: 1:05:30

um, um but uh, yeah, they don't. And I think the big issue, the big problem with that is and and you know, and it's I'm trying to figure out how to way to articulate this because, like for me, they're the problem I have with a lot of like traditional, like american historiography that most popular audiences get um, or popular or popular conceptions of American historiography as interpreted through the left. A lot of it is that sort of like America with like the three Ks and that like America, the United States is like the worst country that has ever existed, ever and it's committed the most atrocities and it's not the other. Now, I'm not going to deny that the United States has an extremely dark history in terms of the fact that this country was founded upon the genocide of one people and this enslavement of another. I'm not going to deny that. But and this is where I think it's really critical is that it's dialectical in the sense that you have all of those awful things but you also have the idea of governments instituted upon men and that they're instituted for the sake of the governed, and the idea of freedom of speech and the idea of freedom of conscience, the Bill of Rights, these Enlightenment ideals that have been solidified in popular government. That's pretty radical too, and a tradition that we should celebrate, even if we know that the people who wrote it were deeply problematic in and of themselves. And so for me, and so for me, it's always about looking at the contradictions inherent in American history and acknowledging that they're dark, but but not but not throwing out all of the baby with the bathwater.

Speaker 2: 1:07:07

I think there's a lot of good in American history that you can see too, whether it's Thomas Paine, you know, and fighting, you know, sort of the godfather of social security, or you have, um, obviously Eugene Victor Debs, who Ingersoll was a very close friend to and Ingersoll was a sort of huge influence on Debs rhetorically. Debs wrote about it a lot, and you think about the populist movement, the real populist movement of the 1890s that was on firmly on the left was, you know, if you understand the history, you can see there's a lot of good there, you know. And for people who want to learn more about it, I mean there are two books I always tell people to check out. One is the S word by John Nichols, which is a terrific popular history on the history of socialism in America, and the other book is Marxism in the United States by Paul Bull. Both of those books are great because they show where a lot of the different currents of socialist thought come out in America. Some of it comes from sort of the spiritualist tradition and the religious traditions of socialism that exist in America.

Speaker 2: 1:08:08

Right, we go back to Robert Owen. You know the Owen utopian community was in New Harmony, indiana. It's in my neck of the woods, it's about two hours south of where I live. Was in New Harmony, indiana. It's in my neck of the woods, it's about two hours south of where I live. So there's that rich tradition there. You have the emergence of the spiritualist movement, the New Thought movement of the late 19th century. You have the Bellamy Club.

Speaker 2: 1:08:27

So Edward Bellamy, looking backward, the classic novel about utopian socialism in America, and then obviously Upton Sinclair and others. It's like there's a very rich tradition to be proud of here that we shouldn't say everything about America is awful, because it isn't. There's a lot of good about America, and acknowledging what's bad actually makes the good stuff about America, the things that we can be proud of, look even better in comparison. So that's kind of the way I try to approach it is is to just not be so sort of like quickly moralistic and try to get at the real material reasons why the United States became what it became. And that's what I try to do in my work.

Speaker 1: 1:09:14

Yeah, I was actually thinking about this. Maybe this is a good way to kind of wrap this up, but also build towards your work, and by wrap this up, this still might be a fairly long conversation. So a warning. I wanted to talk about how this is manifested in the contradictions and interesting contradictions of Gore Vidal, one of the things you might not know about me, but Gore Vidal was also a key influence on me when I was coming out of high school, and what's interesting about him is the same impulses in him that moved me to the left as a teenager and then back to the left in my late 20s is also what led me to the right. His talk about the Republic and Republican virtues, and then he doesn't use this language. I think this language is clarified by me by people like Michael Sandel, the kind of left communitarian who talks about, like, the problems with the administrative state, although again he also acknowledges that's been recuperated by right-wingers now Yep, but what the Republic was and what?

Speaker 1: 1:10:17

Like the progressive period of, like what I call the progressive period of bourgeois culture. Uh, before progressivism, I mean, interestingly, I think progressivism is a has an actual history that's very mixed um at best, yes, um, uh, that's me being generous. Um, agree, yeah, but there is a kind of high bourgeois culture that is like wrestling with its racialism, realizing it needs to that there, you know, the contradictions of that is are are becoming clear to people. It does lead to weird things. My observation that apparently, outside of John Brown, nobody could be good on both the native Americans and on, uh, uh, enfranchising black people. You could either be good on one or the other. I I still don't have a good theory as to why it is. It's just a historical observation. Um, one of the weirder things about the confederacy is, like, about, you know, 40 of them were wildly imperialistic, but then there was another, like actually larger number of them who are, who were actually like concealatory towards the native americans, which was weird given the rest of the stuff. Uh, and I say that also, people should be aware agrarians and neo-confederates will hide behind that. Um, that's something you should know. Um, uh, and even people who seem rational.

Speaker 1: 1:11:36

I think you mentioned, uh, uh, gregory johnson. Not gregory johnson. Gregory johnson's a white nationalist. Um, the other johnson, gregory johnson, yeah, gary johnson, yeah, gregory johnson is, uh, the one of the lead publishers at countercurrents, who is, was a. I don't know if that still exists, but it was a white nationalist, alt-right publication kind of to the right of VDARE, and if you know how bad that is, you know what we're talking about. If you don't, then maybe you're a better person than me. Vdare was a kind of paleo-conservative, racial outlet ran by a former editor of Forbes named for Virginia Dare, which is supposedly the first white child born on the continent, if you want to know the reference. Anyway, just so I'm not slandering Gary Johnson, because he's not Gregory Johnson. Greg Johnson is a much worse character.

Speaker 2: 1:12:36

No, gary Johnson strikes me as being. I don't think he's a terrible person, I just think he's a bit of a political neophyte. I just don't think he's that serious as a political entity. And, yeah, he's somebody that you would rather him be the leader of the libertarian movement than, say, people in the Mises caucus now who are legitimately fascists. So, yeah, I mean, I would much rather, I would much rather the libertarian party be what it was like 10, 15 years ago under people like Gary Johnson than it is now it's. It's really gotten far, far worse.

Speaker 2: 1:13:12

But to to talk about Vidal, you're right, I mean, I think that I think to understand Vidal is to understand one really crucial element about him, which is that his grandfather was an enormous influence on him. So Thomas Pryor, gore Senator, tp Gore, senator from Oklahoma, who starts his political career as sort of a populist more on the left, ends his career certainly more on the reactionary, isolationist right. So Vidal always has these kind of currents going in him, where his anti-imperialism is also informed by an isolationism which, for good or ill you know, sometimes I make the joke that you know the United States has done a century of not isolationism. Maybe we should give it a try, but but you know there's that element to it. So you know when, when Vidal was in, when he was going to, you know, primary school or whatever, when he was in because he didn't go to college this is another interesting thing about you know he he went into the, he went into the army and then and then became a published author. So he was very much an autodidact and most of what he learned but he was in the political debates. So you know he was alongside the sort of the America firsters and this and that the other. So, so a lot of Gore Vidal's political opinions.

Speaker 2: 1:14:59

By the time you get to him as a sort of mature thinker he's on the left but he sort of got to those positions in this sort of sort of securitist way where he kind of goes through the right to get to there's an idealization of the Republic. But at the same time there's also a very grim reality of how the empire kind of grew. And you know for him, you know the, the, you know the United States up until about World War II was like not that much of an empire, and then it sort of becomes one, um more so after world war two, although he writes in his novel empire more about, like the spanish-american war, and a lot of it can be tied back there. But the national security state, the era of anti-communism, the truman years, you know the, the red scare, the lavender scare, going into mccarthyism uh, these all were the formative years in which he became a writer and I think they informed him deeply. So I think that's what makes Vidal interesting is that he doesn't always fit neatly in a box. You know, he's not always explicitly on the right, he's not always explicitly on their left, he's always sort of himself. And that kind of is frustrating at times because you wish it'd be a little bit more consistent, but it's also refreshing at times because you're just like, oh, he's thinking through this in real time because he, you know, he actually cares.

Speaker 2: 1:16:06

And the one thing that I think I've realized over the years is there's somebody who's read most of Corvidal's books now and it's sort of been doing a retrospective of his work over the last couple of years is that Hitchens is a is a lesser version of Gore Vidal, um, that that Hitch is not as that, that Hitch is Hitch wants to be Gore Vidal, so bad and writes like him and and sort of has the same impulses as him, um, but is never quite as good, um.

Speaker 2: 1:16:35

I mean, I think, if you, you know, I think that you know Gorbachev never. He wrote a lot about religion, like his classic book like Messiah, which is I think one of his best novels, which is about a cult, and or books like Life from Golgotha, which is like his like tragic comedy about Jesus. It's very good too. But he wrote an essay in the 80s called monotheism and its discontents which I think is like a harbinger of things to come like. If you read it it reads very much like something the hitchens would have written or dawkins would have written 10, 15 years later and you just go like, oh gore was there before they were, um, to sort of kind of tying it back to that um yeah, absolutely, yeah, I mean I.

Speaker 1: 1:17:14

I remember reading gore vidal's's Critiques of Reagan when I was like 17 and it blowing my mind what he didn't cut. I mean to be fair. The other person who caught it is an equally problematic character, jg Ballard, who in no world is a left winger but also in no world is a left winger but also and no world is a right winger. He's very strange actually to try to. He seems to be of that period that kind of produced Vidal that turns against empire. In his case he turns against the British empire, doesn't trust leftists because what he's seen happen with them in the 50s, 60s and 70s, um, and he sees them as like actually ending up protecting the empire in some ways, um, uh, but it's very much on the cultural pulse of where particularly the united states is going, which is interesting because he's not from here. But those two figures, actually in my, in my early teens they were very influential to me and I read perpetual war for perpetual peace, which is a great book. But the interesting thing about that book all right, one is it mounts a defensive Timothy McVeigh that kind of leaves out his white nationalism, although, yes. Two, not to be fair to macbay. But macbay's one of these people where, yes, he had the turn of dyers on him, but I've like, his actual relationship to nazis is a little bit more opaque. Um, and he wasn't.

Speaker 1: 1:18:52

He was also a sincere anti-imperialist, and this is sometimes when I, when I wore people like, like I think you had, I think to be a good leftist in america, you have to be an anti-imperialist. And this is sometimes when I, when I warn people like, like I think you have, I think to be a good leftist in america you have to be an anti-imperialist. But being an anti-imperialist is, in america in specific, does not make you a good leftist. If you look at who the anti-imperial league has been, it's always been a weird coalition, going back to like the 19th century, of right-wingers and left-wingers in the United States, which is different than Europe, where most of the right-wingers are pro-imperial. And so Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace is a very fascinating critique of the Clinton and Bush administration, I think from the left, but also mounts a pretty passionate defense of Timothy McVeigh, which is a very strange book.

Speaker 2: 1:19:38

It's very strange. Yeah, and those articles were ones that came out of his articles for Vanity Fair. Yeah, I think that's true and I think that maybe the most charitable read of it is not so much like a defense of McVeigh, so much as it is an explanation and not rationalization, but just providing the public with a real, I think you know, probably the most romantic read of it, in the sense that because Gore Vidal's core argument about Do you Think that they is that not so much the white nationalist stuff, it's not so much the Turner Dinery stuff, which is there and it's important and it should not be denied, but what he's talking about more than that, is more so that mcveigh was extremely alarmed by ruby ridge and mueco and seeing. You know, and again, that's a complicated history too right because, like, because the branch davidians were people who.

Speaker 2: 1:20:32

It was absolutely a cult, where david koresh was isolating people from their families, where they had a huge cache of weapons. It's not clear cut, but you can certainly say that the United States overplayed its hand in that situation, which led to the deaths of, I think, 83 people, including children. And so you see that when the United States exports its violence around the world in the form of empire, it doesn't take very long for that violence to come back. And that's why, like when people like I while I understand people's impulses about gun control and I get that like I just don't think that that will always solve every problem with mass shootings in America.

Speaker 2: 1:21:13

Because I think, because because it really gets to the heart of the United States is, in my opinion, the most violent society on Earth. We have more military bases all over the world, we, we bomb more countries than almost anybody else, we, and we kill our own people more than almost any industrialized country and or at least, if it's not the most violent, it's certainly one of the most violent. And that, the, the empire, has consequences, not just for what happens abroad, which you know. Sometimes most americans who are not politicized don't really care about, right, um, or they care about some sort of mild moral impulse. But at the end of the day, like that, violence comes home.

Speaker 2: 1:21:56

And the way that it comes home is Oklahoma City. The way it comes home is 9-11. The way it comes home is the mass shootings that we've seen in my lifetime go up precipitously and it's the violence that you constantly see in our country. That's, I think, the stuff that Vidal's trying to get at in those essays on mcveigh and, I think, in the most charitable read. But I absolutely agree with you that it's important not to um make a hero out of mcveigh, like sometimes how people make a hero out of the, the unabomber, which I find very odd too, um.

Speaker 1: 1:22:33

But yeah, left-wing, you're celebrating the un bomber. Even left wing, anarcho, primitivist have you read everything he's written yes, exactly this is.

Speaker 2: 1:22:43

It's just it's, it's it's eco fascism is what he's advocating for, and so yeah, but that's part of the broader problem of the left, where it's that?

Speaker 2: 1:22:53

You know, maybe I'm more old school in this regard but, like I'm very much on the left of the idea of a politics of hope and progress, that that's what the politics of the left are for me, that today can be better, that tomorrow can be better than today, that we can actually build a better future for ourselves collectively. That, you know, not everything about industrialization is bad. It's just that when you have it in the pursuit merely of profit, not in fulfilling human needs, that's when it can kind of go off the rails. You know that sense of hope and optimism is something that the left doesn't often have, and I think it's part of the reason that it limits itself politically, because, you know, people don't really want to hear a doom and gloom message all the time, and that's not to say people don't need to be realistic. I think you do need to be realistic, but I do genuinely believe you need to have a politics of hope, not optimism. You have to have hope without optimism, as Terry Eagleton calls it.

Speaker 1: 1:23:51

I feel like you're brimping my response.

Speaker 1: 1:23:56

You're impting my response, no, as a person who thinks that part of my pessimism is actually about hope, because one of the things that I want to clear away is these false notions. My warning about Vidal is not a critique of Vidal. I think it's something interesting about the impulse that we have in the United States and maybe in settler countries in general. I might also extend this to Latin America and Canada, actually, but in the United States it's a hegemon of that world in particular, even in a multipolar world, you still got to focus on us, unfortunately, or fortunately. What I would say is that, you see, the impulse that brings you to both Marx and Pat Buchanan can actually legitimately and seriously start in the same impulse.

Speaker 1: 1:24:56

When I, like my realization about who pat buchanan was, when it was, when I realized that he pulled the john dewey and wanted to, like he thought us entering world war one was defensible but not world war two, and I was like what, like that? Like, yeah, I mean, like, look, I don't think we went into world war ii for good reasons, don't get me wrong but like, like, uh of, I mean there's a reason why that's the us where everyone fucking focuses on it's, because it's the one where, like, we're clearly on the good side, even if we're also gonna be quiet about the fact we're on the same side as the ussr, um and china, and and, and and it's one of the few wars we actually won yeah, that too, um, uh, particularly in the 20th century.

Speaker 1: 1:25:42

Um, I mean, I I think the american wars that we don't talk about are actually really instructive. The war of 1812, um, uh, the um, which every now and then, when Canadian liberal royalists get on my nerves, I say we should finish, but as long as Canada exists, the Monroe Doctrine is not no but, the one that I am actually most fascinated with the problematic of is the Mexican-American War, which I think is so War II sort of cut their teeth in World War I.

Speaker 2: 1:26:30

All of the principles of the Civil War also cut their teeth in the Mexican war Grant Sherman, lee, jefferson Davis, lincoln, like all of them, right, lincoln gives that passionate speech where he says show me the spot, you know where we were attacked, right, and he's like, and you know.

Speaker 2: 1:27:01

And what's interesting is that the young Lincoln would often be at odds with the old Lincoln, the Lincoln in the White House, because the same arguments that Lincoln is saying on the floor as a member of Congress, as a junior member of Congress, are kind of arguments that you could use against him as president, right, in terms of usurping of presidential power. But yeah, the Mexican-American War is so important because it is one of the most baldly imperialistic wars and it's one that the public largely supported. I mean, lincoln lost his re-election to Congress largely as a result of the fact that he gave this speech and his constituents in Illinois were actually very much in favor of taking over the Mexican territories. So you have this weird interplay where a lot of the key figures who would be there a decade and a half later fighting the Civil War were there in the Mexican-American War and often, you know, either on the right side of history or the wrong side of history, depending on where they were.

Speaker 1: 1:27:55

But I think Lincoln's case is certainly instructive side of history depending on where they were, but I think Lincoln's cases is certainly instructive. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean there's. I mean there's also. My favorite weird story about the, about the Mexican American war, is how racism and anti-imperialism of one dude, an ambassador from Polk, actually ends up with us not taking all the way down to Mexico city. An ambassador from Polk actually ends up with us not taking all the way down to Mexico city. It's because he felt bad for what he saw. But then he went back and appealed to it, like his, from what I could tell from his diaries. His ambassador was like well, how am I going to get people to not continue to pursue this? Let's talk about how. The unwashed Brown people there are more of them once you go past texas yes, like yep, yep, you know that's my vulgarization of it, sure but, what's funny about that is I actually learned that late in life when I was living in mexico.

Speaker 1: 1:28:53

Like I was not taught that anywhere in the us. I found it in some books, weirdly on texas history, but it was uh, it was something. I was like man, you really need to understand that. We really need to understand the mexican revolution. I mean, like you want to talk about something weird that's quiet in america. Like there is a revolution in 1914 also, like right next door, yeah, that we know almost nothing about.

Speaker 2: 1:29:21

Like yes, that we had, and we had at the time a president, woodrow wilson, who used the strong arm of the military to, in some respects, very much repress it. So it's like, yeah, people don't realize. It's like, oh, we sort of pseudo invaded mexico right before we invaded puebla, yeah, like we invaded.

Speaker 1: 1:29:41

Like. We invaded puebla in the mexican revolution, like and like, yeah, like. Funnily enough, I learned that from a warren devon song that tells you how fucked up our history books are yeah, but um but I was like, yeah, yeah, I mean the other conflict I think it's important and instructive is also the the spanish-american war oh yeah, that's a huge um, because you know, as somebody who studies the late 19th century, that's my specialty um, you, you think about how the the sheer brutality of that conflict.

Speaker 2: 1:30:17

You know whether you think of the reports of the Philippines, these congressional hearings that they have on the Philippines, about the war crimes that are committed by the Americans. The Philippines essentially, for the next 50 years, becomes a colony of the United States and its last colonial overlord, its last sort of protectorate, was Paul V McNutt, who was the former governor of Indiana. So that's how I kind of know more of this story, because Paul V McNutt's a very, very interesting political character. He was sort of FDR before FDR. He takes office as governor of Indiana in January of 1933, and he pushes forward to all these slew of reforms and very progressive reforms. And then FDR knows that like, oh my God, this guy has all of my politics, is very popular and he's extremely handsome. It'd be easy to say with McNutt that he had the FDR politics and the Warren Harding good looks, because he had this big white shock of hair. And so FDR is like, well, what am I going to do with this guy? I know what I'll do, because at the time Indiana governors were term limited. They could only be in office for four years. So in 1937, fdr is like you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to send you halfway across the world and make you high commissioner of the Philippines. And that's exactly what he does, basically gets rid of one of his political rivals. He's like I'm going to pawn you off on this other side of the world and and and, so that you don't become a serious challenge to me in 1940.

Speaker 2: 1:31:42

But anyway, yeah, I mean I think the Philippines is a very, very instructive example. Obviously, cuba is a very instructive example too. And the fact that that you know that the, the Spanish American War is also very much shaped by the media right, we think about the Hearst Papers, right, the yellow journalism of the period, remember the Maine, all that kind of stuff. Right, so it's a war that's built by the media for the media's purposes, right? So when people say like, oh, wow, all that stuff, like during Desert Storm, when they had it on CNN 24 hours a day, I'm like, guys, they were doing this a hundred years before that. With the Spanish American war, it was just, instead of being 24 hour television coverage, you know it was, you know 12 hour newspaper coverage in the dailies and the evening papers. So the Spanish American war is, I think, very instructive too.

Speaker 1: 1:32:29

Yeah, that's actually an important thing If you want to understand how we get to world war one. I mean, yeah, yes, there's a franco-prussian war and all that stuff in europe which is important. I'm not, I'm playing that yep, but like modern warfare is kind of invented between the franco-prussian war and the uh, american civil war, and then the modern media response to warfare really becomes clear in the spanish-american war and um, and it's also interesting how that's taught. I will say to defend my high school history teacher not English teacher, excuse me I did learn about the papers. What I did not learn about was how thorough the Philippine suppressions were and how long they went on.

Speaker 2: 1:33:12

Yep, I didn't learn that until college myself.

Speaker 1: 1:33:15

Yeah, it was one of those things where I was like we did what? And they still talk to us.

Speaker 2: 1:33:27

It's pretty wild when you think about it.

Speaker 1: 1:33:29

Yeah, it's one of those things as I always think about it when I think about Vietnam, because one of the things I'll tell you going to. When I lived in the Republic of Korea, I visited Vietnam and I was amazed at how little they hated us. But then I thought about it for a while and I was like, well, when you win, you kind of don't need to be resentful, I guess. Yeah, no one likes a sore winner.

Speaker 2: 1:33:56

No one likes a sore winner. Yeah Right, yeah yeah, no one likes a sore winter. No one likes a sore winter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.

Speaker 1: 1:34:01

Um, um, you know, um, but yeah, if anyone ever wants a, a, a disturbing history lesson about your own history as an American, and you're ever in Mexico city, go to Chaput Lapec, where there's a, where there's a shrine to the, to the eight soldiers who died defending the Mexican flag. You like, jumped off the mountain of Chaput Opec okay, that in and of itself jingoistic story. Whatever, what you you know, I'm not, I'm not here to promote Mexican nationalism either. But when you realize, however, why it happened, it's like, oh, we were being assholes in Mexico City and like just decimating a training facility to, to, to put our flag up there, and we basically chased eight not very well armed teenage military recruits off of a cliff.

Speaker 2: 1:35:02

It's a realization, yeah no, it certainly is, and that's what gets to the heart of like the thing that I kind of grapple with a lot as an as a, as an American historian who studies America, and America is my subject is is there a version of the United States that is possible, that would be consistent with my own politics? That's really like that's the you know, and I don't know a good answer to that. Like I have some days where I'm like no, no, they have to start from scratch. You know they have to do the Jefferson thing. They have to do it every 20 years, just tear it up and start over.

Speaker 2: 1:35:43

But there's a part of me that's also like, well, there's a huge disconnect between my conception of the republic and my conception of the empire. My conception of the republic is the public, the, the, the, a society which does strive towards improving people's lives. That does strive, you know, the better impulses of us as a country, right, um, and you know that's why, like, one of my favorite historical figures, thinking of vietnam, is lyndon johnson, because lyndon johnson is a great embodiment of like the republic and the empire all rolled up into one. Because you know he was this. You know texas politician, new dealer, who, more than anything, really just wanted to, like, give poor people health care and like, uh, and build schools and stuff. Now, mind you, some of that was self-serving. He wanted to be remembered by history. So you have all of this like great society, which in a lot of ways, helped improve the lives of many millions of americans. All of us, to a certain or greater or lesser degree, have been benefited by a lot of the work done by the Great Society.

Speaker 1: 1:36:44

In fact, I would say, a lot of what we attribute to the New Deal is actually the Great Society. Yes, that's right.

Speaker 2: 1:36:49

And the thing is is that the Great Society could and should have been the fulfillment of the New Deal. But why didn't it happen? It happened because of Vietnam and that's the empire and at the end of the day, in that sort of tortured web of mid 20th century American liberalism, the sort of thought it could do it all and have it all, it was sort of destroyed by its own ambitions. And that's HW Brands is a great historian from Texas there's a great book on this called the Strange Death of American Liberalism relays a lot of this out. He sort of argues that the Vietnam War was sort of a schism in liberalism that the liberal left, the liberalism, has really never recovered from yet.

Speaker 2: 1:37:30

And I would argue, I think he's right and because, if you think of it, had Lyndon Johnson basically said you know what we're not doing?

Speaker 2: 1:37:36

Vietnam, like, why am I caring about this pissant country halfway across the world? I'm not doing anything with this, you know, as he would say in his sort of Texas Hill Country, you know vernacular, he would probably be beloved today, like people would love him, like he would be considered not just like one of the greatest presidents but maybe the greatest one, you know, in the sense of the domestic achievements Civil Rights Act, voting Rights Act, medicare, medicaid, you know, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Secondary Education Act, immigration reform, like if you look at all of that he did and that era and how successful he was, and it was all undermined by a land war in Asia. And I think that that's a really instructive lesson for us, which is that you know, we cannot cede to the empire. We must fight for some version of the republic. Whatever that might be seed to the empire, we must fight for some version of the republic whatever that might be.

Speaker 1: 1:38:27

Um, yeah, well, you know, this is uh, as my last thought. Uh, this is why I always get a little bit worried when we start viewing our I'm not an anti-electoralist, I want people to know that um, but why we start putting our hope too much in politicians who are structurally unable to, or refuse to in certain cases, really oppose the empire, alexander Cosser-Cotest, and that that that will undermine your legacy. Yes, and you're absolutely right. I mean to me the two most interesting presidents of the 20th century and the three presidents I hate the least, which is of the 20th century, because I hate most of them Eisenhower, I'm mixed on.

Speaker 1: 1:39:30

I hate him, but I also think he's also, weirdly, the most honest, which is a very bizarre yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:39:37

He's certainly the most honest about American militarism, and part of that just comes from him being a actual veteran. You know, instead of like. You know, just like a sort of a snap crackle, like sort of Cracker Jack politician like Truman or Johnson, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:39:53

Yeah, I really hate Truman. I mean, I'll give, I'll give him credit for opposing Taft Hartley, but then he's the first president to immediately use it. Yep.

Speaker 2: 1:40:08

He has very, very few wins the veto of Taft-Hartley desegregating the armed forces and advocating for a national health care plan in 1948. Those are the three things.

Speaker 1: 1:40:22

Other than that, I truman was an absolute disaster like for us to recognize israel, which caused a problem, like, yeah, we just go. Um, uh, if he hadn't done that we would have actually had a moral victory. Uh, one moral victory on the ussr, um, anyway, um the my. My point, though, on the presidents is is Nixon and Lyndon Johnson are two figures of two sides of this old liberalism that also get tied into. You can't accuse me of being totally economistic, but I do think it is interesting that they run out of steam on the heels of the post war boom faltering. But it also causes the. You know, it isn't the economy that undoes Johnson, it's the war, and then it's the economy kind of that puts Nixon in a situation where he starts acting irrationally. If this is my theory on on what cause? He doesn't know how to handle what's going on economically and he's already effective. I mean he not only won an announcement, I mean like if he, if he had not, if, if Watergate had not happened, he would have probably won, oh for sure.

Speaker 2: 1:41:44

Like people meet, like guys. Like if you want to know any sense of just how crazy that whole election cycle the Nixon reelect was like one, just read Nixon land by Rick, excellent book on that. But if you want to read like more of a contemporaneous account, that's like super fun to read. It's fear and loathing on the campaign trail. 72 by hunter s thompson yeah, that, that book is great. That book is excellent.

Speaker 2: 1:42:11

Like him like basically flat out making up this story about ed muskie, like taking like drugs on a train, is like amazing. But anyway, like you're absolutely right, I mean I think that nixon easily would have won re-election, um in 1972. I mean it was one of the most, one of the biggest blowouts in american history, um, precisely because the Democrats were in such bad shape on the national level, right Because of the war, right, you have these clear divisions in the Democratic Party over the war. You have, you know, sort of the hardhat Republicans, these sort of working class. Some are pro-union people who go for Nixon because they see him as more connected to their interests. Ie, they're not really thrilled with busing or they're not particularly thrilled with integration. So there's part of that.

Speaker 2: 1:42:51

And then also, if you just look at the 72 campaign in general it was a complete mess. I mean, you know, I mean that was when they instituted more reforms so they tried to make it more democratic. But obviously the VP pick was a huge mess I like. So the governed picks. Eagleton turns out eagleton had received electroshock therapy. People lost their minds over that because people weren't as in touch with that kind of stuff as, say, maybe we would be today. Um, and so eagleton's off the ticket, and then they, and then eventually it's sergeant shriver and it's like a whole thing. Um, yeah, I really feel like the beginning of the Democratic Party's like descent into absolute crapdom starts with the 72 election. It's when it starts to abandon its working class impulses, ostensibly as best as it could as a bourgeois capitalist party, but like it starts to sort of let go of its more working class impulses and starts to side with, like, you know, like, like the, like the trial lawyers and the sort of the activists and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 1:43:48

This is an interesting thing to think about because I agree with you and what makes that interesting is, like most people view 72 and the mcgovern campaign. Even some leftists read harrington also. Let's just hope people go back and read what Christopher Lash said about Michael Harrington in 1968. Yes, like ooh, does it still feel relevant? And it shouldn't?

Speaker 2: 1:44:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:44:14

Yeah, it's true. I was both reading that and then Hal Draper talking about the 68 election and the problems of lesser evilism, and both of them just made me feel like fuck man. Nothing has changed in like longer than I've been alive and I'm not young anymore.

Speaker 2: 1:44:33

Yeah, yeah, it's very, very weird. It's very weird. Like it's, you know, there's like, especially for me as a historian, like for me. That's why it always drives me nuts when I hear, like newscasters or you know, like your sort of clickbait, will they go like, well, this is completely unprecedented in our history. And it's like no, it's not like you.

Speaker 2: 1:44:54

You know one of the things that the indiana historical bureau, that we do. It's very important when we work on any kind of historical project because we do our historical marker program. You come to our state, you see these blue and gold signs to tell you a little bit about history. We run that program. One of the things that we avoid on those is is superlative. So like first, last, greatest best. We avoid all those because if you say someone so and was the first of this, you can almost always find an historical antecedent to them. Um, and so I always drives me crazy when people like, oh, that was an onion that was unprecedented, or like never happened in our history drives me crazy. The one that drives me nuts is when people say we've never been so divided and I'm like do you? Do the 1860s mean nothing to you? Like, do the 1960s mean nothing to?

Speaker 1: 1:45:39

you 1960s, 1970s, like fuck man the 19, like even the 1990s? I'm like, do you, man, even the 1990s? I'm like, do you guys not remember the streak of right-wing terrorism that happened after Ruby Ridge?

Speaker 2: 1:45:53

Yes.

Speaker 1: 1:45:56

I lived through it. I definitely remember it and I remember talking to people older than me about this and I'm like what magic power does CNN have over you that you have just forgotten living memory, like yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:46:13

I mean, I really blame it on cable news.

Speaker 2: 1:46:15

It's a form of brain rot, like you're more informed by nothing than you are by watching cable news.

Speaker 2: 1:46:20

And the problem with cable news and sort of that whole cycle is that it's it's a perpetual now, there is no future, there is no past, it's only now.

Speaker 2: 1:46:30

And the other issue is that I especially I think in the last 50 years or so especially, or even 60 years, especially with the advent of television um, is that our we have a politics in America that's not really politics, where it's a lot of it's a lot of anti-politics, where we sort of talk horse race stuff or like, oh, this polls, well, you know, you know, like the Steve Kornacki guy on MSNBC, he's like all right, well, these are the suburban moms that voted for Trump in the South Carolina primary this year, and here's their educational status, like this kind of stuff. I'm like well, this is all. Define what the hell that means for one, did America ever have one to begin with? Like what does? Like it's just, it's a lot of pablum and rhetoric that is not really backed by anything, and so because of that, I think it gets people into a space where they just don't remember Even things that happened in their own lifetimes. They don't even remember.

Speaker 1: 1:47:37

Yeah, it's it is a weird space. That leads me to my for real last question. Okay, you operate as well. A weird space that leads me to my for real last question. You operate as well as on the podcast scenario and on the YouTubes.

Speaker 1: 1:47:50

Like me, I do not venture into Instagram TikTok because I can't actually say anything in less than an hour, so that may be a moral failing on my part, but you do. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about TikTok space and Instagram space because I have found, even in two-minute chunks, some of the best stuff on history on TikTok space, but I've also found the worst stuff I have ever seen in my life in TikTok Instagram space, and what's weird about it is I have very little control over it, which is not true on YouTube. I mean, it's kind of bad on YouTube because I don't see it. But one of the weird things about TikTok space is, while, yes, it has an algorithm tunnel every, every now and then, even if you're not in that, you'll get weird shit from another, from another, from an internal that you don't normally encounter and I'm like oh, someone doesn't believe mars is real, um or uh, like like you know.

Speaker 1: 1:49:00

Um, it is sort of horrifying because, like I thought facebook was bad at proving to me you can't say no one's too stupid to believe that. But like uh, tiktok has really made it very clear to me that, like there are some people doing much better public education on history, science, history, religion and stuff than I remember existing at all in the 1990s period. I mean, I think people forget that, like in the heyday of media control, it was still really shitty. It's just that the conspiracy theories weren't obviously political. Um, like, how many ancient alien slash and people make fun of the history channel for that now. But like, even go back to the discovery channel in the 90s.

Speaker 2: 1:49:44

You've gotten people like uh, doing ancient alien shit with oh, yeah, like something that goes even all the way back to the 1970s. There was, you know, I think, a show that letter nimoy hosts in the 70s called the unexplained. It was sort of the same thing it was bad.

Speaker 1: 1:49:59

I used to watch reruns of it on and like as a kid I was fascinated with it. Now I'm like, oh my god, it's terrible, like it's like winter.

Speaker 2: 1:50:07

Nimoy, I had faith in you I know right, not particularly logical, sir um uh, yeah, are those weird time life conspiracy books.

Speaker 1: 1:50:17

I think you may remember those too from like the 80s, um, but so I don't want, I don't want to idealize. I think there's this tendency now because of the perpetual. Now I'd be like, oh, like we've never lived in an era of more misinformation. If we went back to the old gatekeepers, we would have less of it. I'm like, well, we would have some of the weirdest shit would not happen, I would agree with you. But like, I don't think you remember cable, like like in the 80s and 90s, uh, conversely though, it does seem like tiktok and instagram is a weird idea, war space that also you don't have a lot of control over. So I want to ask you, as a left advocating historian, uh, who you know? One of the reasons I follow you is you do little clips on stuff like this, little reviews and and all this. How do you find interacting in that space?

Speaker 2: 1:51:11

So that's a great question. So, for me, the best way that I do it and it's taken me a long time to get to where I'm at with it and have a healthy relationship with it, because sometimes you can get into sort of Twitter battles or TikTok comment wars or things like that but for me really, my goal is to be be myself and to be as as as um authentic as I can. Um and at the same time, you know, engage in things that I think are in good faith and just try not to engage in things that aren't. So you know I've posted things where people have left. You know terrible comments where I just don't really I don't really follow up on it. I may even delete the comment if it's like. You know borderlines and cyber bullying and then other stuff where they make a point in my comments and I go.

Speaker 2: 1:51:59

That's great, because that means you're going deeper than the clip or the post that I made. You know, because basically, an Instagram caption is 2,200 characters that include spaces. So anytime I'm writing anything for Instagram, I'm keeping that in my mind of like try to economize as much as possible, which you know. As you can see, I can talk a lot too. So it's about finding ways to create content that is authentic to yourself, that tries to be informative, that tries to pull the best out of the comments that you get, and for the bad comments you just sort of you, either if they really are just like gross, or they say something nasty about you or whatever, you just delete them and move on, or you try to address them as best as you can, um, and so that's the best I do.

Speaker 2: 1:52:48

You know, for me it's about having a certain level of separation from it. I think some people live on social media all day long and I don't Um, and so part of it's for my own mental health and my own sense of like being able to complete work and actually like read things and get things done. But it's also just that. You know, I always see my social media as an entry point to learning about a topic. So if I make a minute long video about a book on FDR or I make a you know, 2200 character Instagram post about a Vietnam veterans memoir, which I did recently, you know it's a. It's a beginning of a conversation, it's not the end, and so my hope is that people will engage with it a little bit and and learn a little bit from something and and hopefully that encourages them to go wow, that's really interesting. I'm going to go learn more now, because that's the way I look at it. I don't see it as the be all, end all. I see it as the beginning of a conversation about history.

Speaker 1: 1:53:49

Yeah, I think that's a great way to approach it. Justin, I'd like to thank you for coming on the show. This has been a broad-wanging conversation. Hopefully our listeners get something out of it. But since you write and post about this stuff more let's say limitedly when can people find your work? And note that I'm going to post all the links in the show notes for people to find your work too. But let's just go ahead and plug on that.

Speaker 2: 1:54:17

Great, thank you. Well, thank you so much for having me on, derek. This has been such a pleasure. I've had so much fun. I feel like we've had a really interesting, wide-ranging conversation on all the topics that I love to talk about, so it's really, really fun. So thank you so much for the opportunity to come on your show and have this great conversation.

Speaker 2: 1:54:34

So people can find me at justinclarkorg that's my website. You can find all of my writing, you can find what I do in my regular day job with the state library and you can find all the episodes of my podcast, red Reviews, which I do with Corey Johnston, and if you want to check out more of those episodes, you can look at them on my website. Or you can also follow us at the Skeptical Leftist on YouTube. You can also find me on Instagram and threads and TikTok. I'm also on Blue Sky, although I don't really post there much on very often at Justin Clark PH.

Speaker 2: 1:55:07

Ph stands for public history, so you can give me a follow there. And then you know I regularly write for the truth seeker magazine, which is the oldest free thought publication in America. I'm currently working on an article, a sort of retrospective, on Stephen Jay Gould and his idea of non-overlapping magisteria, sort of the debate about religion and science. His book rocks of ages turns 25 this year, so I'm kind of doing a review of that for the what will be the spring issue of the May issue of the truth seeker. So that's where you guys can find my work All right.

Speaker 1: 1:55:40

Well, thank you so much, and people Thank you.