Well, whiskey, come and take my pain, my moneys, my ry, oh whiskey.
Why think alone when you can drink it all In with Ricochet's Three Whiskey Happy Hour, join your bartenders Steve Hayward, John Yu and the International woman of Mystery, Lucretia. Where the slap it appen?
David?
Ain't you baby? On the show taps? Gotta give me and let that why?
Welcome everybody to this new experimental version one point zero of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour on Substack. I believe this is the first time we are recording live on the substack platform, rather than using entities hosted and created by the People's Republic of China, so advances every day. It's a great way to start out the new year. I'm joined by my co hosts Steve Heywards. Steve, where are you? What are you doing? What's on that misbegotten T shirt?
You called? It's a Reagan Library T shirt? I'll have you know. Oh, you just just traced yourself as usual.
And Lucretia, where are you? And what is that lovely sweatshirt you're wearing? To open the new.
Year, Blado's Cave Search and Rescue Team that's pretty cool.
I'm not a big.
Person on wearing shirts and things that say things or advertise things, but this one was so cool I had to make an exception.
Is uh now, Lucretia that sweatshirts open to so many different interpretations? I mean, would you say that John Rawls is the head of the search and rescue team?
Oh?
My god, I would never say that.
I was about to say, John, But the of that T shirt is obviously lost on you because you're going to be the first person to be rescued by it.
And you just pro and you just what.
Well, the great opening to the year and listeners and those who've joined us live and I see they're growing and growing already. The insults pour it on Steve not fitting into the and to the mobile version of the sub stack, which requires you to love at it vertically rather horizontally. Very good, mister Fennel, I love it. Keep him coming.
Oh he's the one to talk. Never mind, Okay.
We decided to spend the very first episode of the two hundred and fiftieth year of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence by talking about the American regime. If that's what you want to call it the declaration of independence revolution where it sits within this broader debate we are having right now in the worlds of political theory and constitutional law and everyday politics about whether we
are in a post liberal age. So I thought this would be a great way as the host for this first episode to kick off the is it sesquid centennial year?
Semi quinn It's it's it's semi quin centennial. It rolls right off.
It's yeah, I got it wrong. All I know is that the Washington Monument on July first had a great display on it to kick off the two fiftieth. So oh, Steve was just frozen, drinking, making himself larger and not fitting in that little box. So now he's unfrozen. So let's start off by asking first, I think we'll start with Lucretia, what is in your mind liberalism and why is it under attack?
Now, well, I'll let me start with the first one. Liberalism, in the most basic sense, actually means liberated from politics.
That's what liberal. You are liberated when you are liberal.
That's what traditional classical liberalism means in the most fundamental sense, and it means that in a way that is that not really all that important, that classical understanding of it, except that when you say liberated from politics, it means that politics that you have a sphere of autonomy, a sphere of privacy, personal autonomy into which the government does not and should not intrude. That's really what we see
when we look at lack a classical liberalism. So if we start with that idea, our founders are considered classical liberals in the sense that they believed that government should be for in the first place, proscriptive, not prescriptive as the classicals would have had it right, meaning that laws are in place to prevent you from doing things that you shouldn't do, rather than to guide you to do
those things that you should do. I know Steve's looking at either he's stuck or he's thinking I'm being oversimplifying here, but I think it's important to keep it kind of simple, and so our founding father's classical liberalism builds on the
basic notion of natural rights. Natural rights being those things that human beings possessed prior to antecedent to any society, social structure, or government, and government then exists, it's instituted for the sole purpose of protecting those natural rights, which unfortunately are insecure. They are not non existent absent government,
but they're insecure absent government. And so that leads to all of the things that we find in our wonderful Declaration of Independence, that claimed of the self evident truth of human equality. That's how we know we have natural rights, because no human being is born so superior to any other that he or she's the ruler over others. That
means we are all our own rulers. That means we have the natural right to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, and that government is instituted again just for the purpose of securing those rights. And it is that understanding which we think of as classical liberalism, because it is in fact a recognition that government isn't the end all and be all right.
Steve that well, yeah, let me stuff up with Steve. That definition. Is it so capacious that it would conclude Justice Kennedy's decision and Obergefell upholding gay marriage as much as it would uphold Richard Epstein's utter defense to the limits of property rights.
Is a no to the first and probably yes to the second. No to the first because the problem with justice. Kennedy better stated in the famous Mystery of the Universe clause right, which was what was that in casey?
What? What case was that? In one of the other?
But over a fella is the culmination?
I think, sure, exactly this in the Universe clause it says, what is something like every individual gets to find their own theory of the meaning of the universe. It's just ridiculous. And so in other words, rights become detached from nature, which is an important point. I thought for a minute, Lucretia, your first sentence threw me, and then you recovered. I thought, at first you said liberalism is the what do you say that the individuals detached from politics?
I thought, oh, my.
Goodness, no, no, no, yes, I get I think that.
I thought politics liberate, that's it, liberated from politics.
I thought you were about to go full Carl schmid on Us with that opening, which come back to me. But I do it a little simpler, John, which is what we call classical liberalism, although it's not really clascle. We can say in some ways not if you think the classics of antiquity, but it's lock and mill right.
So we see in a few points I say, it's you know, a government by consent, individual, natural rights, property, and then also you know democracy, although that's gotten very sloppy, but you know, he was big for parliamentary supremacy, which was representation right. And then John Stewart Mail is what he's the tribune of radical individualism. You know, everybody can pursue their own self chosen ends, with the only limit being you harm somebody else.
Right. So then we talk about now the big hot new thing is post liberalism.
And I'm sort of interested that this is having such a moment because most of the arguments being made are not brand new. They've been around a long time, and they've come from both the left and the right. At the left relief forever because they hated Lock. That's Caral Marx hated Lock right, and the progressives hated Lock, and some conservatives, starting with Burke, hated Lock right. Burke said locke second Treatise was and I think on the quote
is the worst book ever written. But what Burke had against it wasn't so much natural rights and so forth. I though Burke's poblematic. He didn't like the right to revolution, as it's explained in Lockey in terms. He thought that that doctrine of natural rights was an invitation to revolution. And there are people as early as say the French thinker Joseph de Maistra, who said that Locke should be implicated as the real cause of the French Revolution, not Rousseau,
which is the way I think that we do right. No, Luke, I completely agree with the creature that that's wrong. I'm just saying that this is an old argument from the right. And then there's more I say. I think more interesting versions like I went and justed off for the first time in thirty years Robert Nisbet's Quest for Community, you know book for the fifties, where just remember that what the liberals have been saying for a while, going back
to at least Lewis Hart's We've lost community. This individualism is terrible. We've lost community and belongingness and togetherness. And I think I've used this once before, but it's a long time ago. Lucretia will remember our great late friend John Weddgreen who said communitarianism is just a chicken shit word for Socialism's I've always liked. I think it's absolutely right. I'll stop there. We can go through particular points of all this as we go. But that's liberalism. It's not
clear to me exactly what postliberalism means. While there's a few people we can grab a hold of, including our great friend Adrian for mules.
Let's move on then, and I think both of you agree that the Declaration of Independence again which we're celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this year, is the expression of classical liberalism, maybe one of the finest expressions of classical liberalism, very much inspired by John Locke, and under attack these days for both the left and
the right. And we've talked a law I Think on the podcast us about the attack from the left through the who I Think is symbol which is symbolized by the sixteen nineteen Project and the idea that the Founding was aimed really to preserve slavery. I just read or listened to Gordon Wood, another of my favorites but not yours, say that this is the sixteen nineteen projects. It's not history, it's more like political propaganda. But it's also under attack now.
The Founding is under attacked from the right, from post liberals. And so let me ask you both I'll try my own definition of post liberalism, ask you what you think of it. Postliberalism is, and then most importantly your response is when we come back after this ad break, hopefully
for the micrib welcome back back, everybody. I hope the last commercial forced everyone to experience pangs of hunger and to rush out to McDonald's, use your gift cards on the app, and they automated robotic chiosks to order your pre formed spam. Phil A I love it makes me
hungry just thinking about it. So my looking at the works of Patrick Denin who's a professor at Notre Dame, and Adrian Vermule, a good friend of mine who's a professor at Harvard Law School, in their writings, which are advanced this idea of a common good conservativism in denise case or a common good constitutionalism in Mule's case, they both argue that the classical liberalism that both of you
have just described has failed. It has failed, I think, in both of their views by destroying the institutions and communities around which traditional society was formed. That the liberalism's quest to unleash individual autonomy has resulted in the decline of the family decline in religion, upswings in drug use and aimlessness and welfare, and that liberalism because it has
no superior moral values that people should follow. As Lucretia put it, it doesn't have a system to make you do things, and only tries to impose a negative liberty. The postliberals say that this lack of a morality has led to the collapse of our society, and they would argue that we have to return to a understanding of politics or understanding of constitutional law that allows for the imposition or that they would say imposition sounds too promotion
of positive morality in the citizenry. I think that's why I think I'm trying to be fair. I'm not being trying to.
Be fair John so well appreciate.
Let's start with Well, let Steve has a quot he wants to read, and it's a standing both standing between Steve and the quote. Is that someone's standing between me and the chief.
Yet, Yeah, don't get in a way this will be an analogy free segment least. Well, First of all, two quick things. One is I think we ought to put it this restate what how you open John?
Uh?
You know, at the bi centennial in nineteen seventy six, there was this one little leftist effort called the People's bi Centennial Commission to trash the Founding, and it was Jeremy Rifkin and a bunch of no names, and you know, they got some attention, but not much. This year, we're going to see a ton of it from the left, you know, the sixteen nineteen project you mentioned. But then at the same time we're going to see challenges to the Declaration from the right. And so, for example, we
mentioned Deneen. I came across this quote from Denean from a speech he gave recently, where he said, I'll do some quotes here. We don't need a return to the Founding. He said that conservatives are supporting a philosophy of pro offlicacy and hubris and the Founding is another quote here, a highly tandentious and abstract understanding of America that rests on libertarian wish casting about the Founding. So we're gonna hear that from the rights saying, you know, we really we shouldn't be.
Looking back for help to the Founding and all the rest of that. Now common good.
I've got a lot of points, but I'll just make this one and turn it over to Lucretia. It is true that common good under liberalism is set to represent merely the sum total of individual preferences, uh, and and that or or the sum of political accommodations we make through the bargaining of our legislative process. And I think that's mistaken. I think the founders did have an idea of the common good, and and uh, you know, and that's what.
Can be and should be recovered. And I'll stop there. I have a lot more observations, but that's my opener.
So I want to I want to sort of take it back and blame Steve a little bit from his opening for the pro First of all, John Stuart Mill has nothing to do with what our founder's understanding of classical liberalism was and the idea that those Europeans can't mill. All of those people have messed up modern people's way of thinking. That's problematic, But the real problem John gave it, I thought an excellent sort of a summary of common good, constitutionalism,
common did whatever. Those things are just silly failures to understand what's really happened here in America. The founders had classical liberalism, which did indeed put the emphasis on the individual. But there's nothing in the Framers, in the Framers thought, even in the things that they put together, that dismisses the idea that virtue and a virtuous citizenry is necessary.
The reason we have lost, for instance, communities, those associations that Topevill talked about, you know, so brilliantly, and how they were in many ways the genius of America. The reason isn't because of you know, some emphasis on individualism and the Framers, it's because of progressivism. It's because of progressivism that says, first of all, there are no such things as natural rights, human beings are not equal, but that we don't want voluntary associations. We want everything done
by the government. And when you've got I mean, you take away the allegiance people have to churches, to their communities, to their neighborhoods, because you replace them with governmental programs, you replace them with the idea that government doesn't need to be watched against, it doesn't need to be guarded against.
It's a good thing.
Think about the stupid team ges stupid comment, and one of the last things that came up, we don't want we don't want this to happen. We want PhDs making our decisions in the government. We want elites making decisions in the government. I know a lot of PhDs.
I am one.
You don't want us making decisions there. Oh, anyway, that's another struct the idea that that smart people will be public spirited and are much more. I guess you could say put the preferable to those community associations.
That's all because of progressivism.
That is a an aberration from the founders.
It is not a necessity from the founders.
And it took decades of progressivism to destroy the ideas that the founders put out there. It wasn't that they were in and of themselves inherently destructible. It was a massive and quite successful effort on the part of progressivisms to progressive. This ex progressives to destroy the American founding. And that is the thing we need to be talking about every single day in two hundred and twenty twenty six.
So there's one way to understand what you're saying, Lucretia, is that the common goood constitutionalism or postliberal idea is an overreaction to the perversion of liberalism that occurred during the progressive era. So progressive era attacks the founding As you say, they have quite a bit of success, for you know, about sixty years, seventy years, it starts to recede, I think in the eighties, but it's made a comeback under Obama. But the reaction is we need of post liberals?
Is we need another American revolution, we need to overthrow you know, whereas you could just say, I think what Creatia's point maybe is why isn't why isn't the proper response just to return to the founding principles of our revolution and constitution. Don't need to have a holy new revolution and overthrow the liberal regime in America because we've gone of course? Is that fair? And then, Steve, what do you think?
I'll respond quickly, Stephen, and let you have a lot to say about what I said. I didn't even know if it's an overaction, it's just a failure to understand the importance of ideas.
Here.
Steve had a great line he wrote in and we had an email chain going back and forth between the three of us, and one of the things he said is these common good constitutionalists have this idea that maybe they can replace whatever with a kind of Catholicism, and he said they should understand it's going to be Protestantism if we ever get common good something. I'm actually much more concerned that we get Islamism.
If you want.
Collectivism, if you want community, if you want all of those things, the most powerful ideals out there right now. Obviously, if you've been watching the horror that is New York City in the last two days, we don't have to worry about Catholics taking over this country, despite what Candice Oman thinks.
We have to worry about Islam.
And I believe that in my heart of hearts because to the extent that we have destroyed a belief in any kind of supreme being or something greater than themselves. It has left many, many people out there desperate in the search for meaning, and Islam is a very powerful, ugly, but compelling thing to turn to. That's why you see all these dumb twits putting on their he jab, you know,
the Redheads. I saw one of the things that the twenty twenty six things we need to do in twenty twenty six, we need to ban Gingers from becoming Islam.
Sorry, go ahead, I'm done.
I'm in personally not really terribly worried about Islam becoming the state religion of the United States.
But Steve go ahead, Well maybe certain local communities it might.
But well, first of all, I think I think I have a book titled suggested Lucretia, which is dumb twits, and they're dumb tweets.
I think that's a nice ring to it.
But dude, it doesn't work anymore because now they're exes.
Okay, all my exes, we'll figure something out there. There's a country song to behalf of that.
Now.
First of all, John, I am for a counter revolution if it involves toppling Woodrow Wilson's statues everywhere.
But that's not what they want.
Yeah, I know.
So, first of all, I do think I'm not sure if you meant to imply it or not. I don't think, say, Adrian Vermule or I and Patrick Denin are calling for theocracy. I mean the word to use is integralism, and I'm not sure is it actually ism like environmentalism.
Not really.
What it means is we should integrate, they think, and because they're Catholics, are of Catholic social teaching, which has always been very political. Going back to UH you know, the common good and social justice as it was understood rightly by the Catholic thinkers a thousand years ago. Okay, I get all that, uh, and have some sympathy with the concepts. The problem is it's built on our distortion. I'll restate what Lucasia was saying and do it this way.
Some of the critiques made of liberalism is that, well, it ignores virtue. Virtue has either disappeared or been fully privatized, in which case it's not really public virtue at all. That's Alistair McIntyre's attack on liberalism. For example, I've already mentioned common uh uh common the problem of the common good in liberalism being reduced to just to some total
of individual preferences. In other words, there is no there is no real concept to argue about about what is the best regene right, it's you know, whatever whichever way are individual choices and political compromises take us to. And that's also attacked from the left as well, and that rootless individualism that was the complain of people like you know, Russell Kirk and others. So my problem is is, all right,
what is postliberalism, what does it look like? What are the doctrines, what are the institutions there, It's beyond vague. This is just sort of a complaint. And I'll say lastly that all those complaints about the lack of virtue, that there's no view of the common good implied or contained in the American Founding or our documents, seems to me completely wrong. And there I just refer listeners to what I think is the classic work of the last couple of decades, and it's Thomas tom West's book on
the Founding, whose title is escaping me right now. I'll try and find it for the show notes. But he's written a very comprehensive treatment about why virtue, the common good rightly understood by the classics, and the place of the individual and our social connections was very richly contained
in the American Founding, and we deliberately rubbish that in part. Sorry, Lucreche, I'll just defend myself briefly the reason to mention Mills to associate with the founders, but he is a key turning point in defending what happened to the liberal tradition in the twentieth century. And so today, if you know college campus is to extend they even try. They start with Mills on liberty as the first text of how
to understand liberalism and the liberal tradition. And we love his free expression ideas mostly, but that is also a deflection that sets the stance for the progressives.
I'd put it that way.
I was wandering around because I was looking for that book of West's yes, something like, well, there's one vindicating the founders as one version, and then there's another one Steve's.
I want to say, so Tom West, teacher, my teacher, Steve's teacher, Perry Jaffa. I'll probably get it wrong. Steve so helped me out with the quote. But it was our Founder's government limited the ends of government. It did not limit the ends of man. But when we talk about the ends of man, and it is not that sort of oh what would it be, just this as anything goes kind of idea, the stupid thing said by Kennedy, your.
View of the universe.
Now, the ends of man are still available to us. Through studying philosophy, through studying reason, through studying nature, we discover what it is.
That makes man happy.
And you know, Joffa's best example of the proof of that is that the Declaration claims to or makes the claims that when we exercise our absolute natural right to revolution, By the way, I don't want that to slip by. When we exercise that and we institute new government, we do it according to what our safety and happiness the alpha and omega of human life, safety and happiness. It's a purely Aristotilian statement. The it's not just our safety.
It's not just a sort of how Besian we're going to make sure that we're not, you know, constantly in fear of awful, horrible, violent death. No, it's our happiness. But happiness is not idiosyncratic. It is defined by man's nature and by nature's God. And what the last thing I'll say about this, Steve, is the reason that we don't want to substitute some kind of Catholic integralism or
any of those other things. You're right that a thousand years ago Catholic social justice had some really wonderful things to say. That was in the days of theocracies and uh, you know, god divine right of kings and monarchies. What our founding did was say we're going to separate those things. They can be teachable moments and all of those other things, but they're not going to be part of our public policy that we are not going to turn to Catholicism or Episcopalianism or Okay.
Okay, we got to take we got to take a break before you listen to the religion, Lucutie. So so let's let's let's just pause there. Let me ask you all to address this next question when we come back, which is I take the post liberals to be saying, so you make the appeal as Lucretia just did, to the Founders and their views. Steve just pulled out Tom West, whose book is called Vindicating the Founders. Well, Post Liberals,
their argument is, suppose the Founders are wrong. I mean, you're just appealing to them as a source of authority, doesn't actually inform us about whether they're right or wrong. And I think, to put the best face on the post liberals, they are just saying we should return to classical views of politics, to Aristoltelian views of mixed regimes, and as Steve said, trying to the poll us the city, molding people into a vision of where they follow substantive virtue.
So let me leave you guys with those thoughts, those questions and then we'll justin them when we come back from this next break. I'm not sure. I'm sure McDonald's has now dropped us as an advertiser after my praise of it as a spam related so I'm guessing that this will next be some kind of commercial for guns
or ammunition. Welcome back, everybody again. We're on the first episode of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour of twenty twenty six, where we felt we'd kick off the new year and celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence by trying to address some of the deeper issues rather than current events, which is our want, and talk about this movement of postliberalism and his criticism of the Founding and so, Steve, why
don't you pick us up? I think I, right before the break, asked a series of questions reaction to Lucretia's praise, which I share of the Founders. But the post liberals say, but the founders were wrong. Look at the terrible social statistics that you can look at in our society right now, the rise of illegitimacy, the decline of families, lack of religious belief, growing levels of addiction, and welfare people not working.
They claim this is all a result of untrammeled personal autonomy and personal decisions unaffected by government, and they call for a return to classical understandings the purpose of government.
Well, so, first of all, we were going fast. Let me get the actual book titles down right. The west book I'm talking about is that I can show what to viewers. Here is called The Political Theory of the American Founding. Subtitle Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral
Conditions of Freedom. I think this book is the comprehensive reputation is written ten years ago of a lot of the postliberalism we hear now because earlier book you mentioned John this is like twenty years ago called Vindicating the Founders. Subtitle here is raised Sex, Class and the Justice in the Origins of America. This was a pre refutation of the sixteen nineteen project and all of its cognates both.
I highly recommend Rush Limbaugh read this book and couldn't shut up about it on his radio show when it came out, and round back around two thousand, I think it was Let me pick up three things here, and by the way, listeners, you should know that we're going to be periodically revisiting how this debate over the declaration
unfolds as we approach July fourth. So I think several of these will one actually stop and spend you know, half an episode or more, And one of them concerns happiness, what is meant by the pursuit of happiness?
And maybe you know all what, We're going to have a conference at the spring.
I was just about to mention that we're going to do a conference and we may.
Get, you know, multiple shows out of the content of that second religion. I think, Lucretia, I think you will agree that your summary of that was maybe too summarized in this sense again and in the whole whole episode that goes through the so called separation of church and state in some order, but I mean, it's a short placeholder. You remember John Adams famous comment that how's it go? The Constitution of America is made for a religious people
and it's not fit for any other kind. And you think it was George Washington Bright and so that should be laid out I think.
In a patient of tail. The third one, though, is so John, you're.
Questioning to get directly to it the criticism of postliberals, but not just postliberals, is that one way it's put is that modern natural right, modern liberal tradition lowers the sites it's built on the low but solid ground of modernity. That's one of the famous phrases.
And Leo S.
Fauss had I think the best phrase of all for some of this. He said, Locke in liberalism because it's a materialist. Here, I'm an attacking you, John, because you're a defender of materialism.
He said.
The problem with materialism and what someone a simpler mind like Russell Kirk would say is rootless individualism is it would generate. And his phrase was the joyless quest for joy. I think that's a great phrase, and I think that's.
I'm sorry, but the quest for joy is not joyless. I enjoy it all the time. Who these idiots, Well, these are philosophy professors. Of course they have no fun. Yeah, but you see you look at I mean, one way you could go aft. This is what do we hear about these days? Oh we're so polarized. Everybody's mad, you know, everybody's angry and grumpy. And by the way, I think that is on purpose by progressive So they like that because it allows more opportunities for the government to intervene
in our lives. So that's a that's a feature, not a buve for them. So they complain about polars it's terrible. So they're really saying is if we're polarized, we're going to manage your lives. And if we're not polarized, it's because you agree with us. It's heads wind tails you loose. That's how this argument works.
But I do think there is something about that the whether Trauss or anybody else, or even some of the more sensible liberals like Wilson Kerry McWilliams, who is Patanine's teacher at Rutgers, they're saying there's something unsatisfying about liberalism. And you know, the complain about materialism has been around a long time in various vulgar and simplistic ways.
Can I just interrupt just for a second. So Daneen went to Rutgers, so he had to spend four years in Camden and Trenton. So as a Philadelphian, I now understand why I wants to destroy civilization as we know, and it moved to a more primitive society without technology or medicine. Right, of course, anyone who has to live in New Jersey for that long would have such a pessimistic views from you.
Okay, starting to interrupt, Steve, go ahead, I know.
I'm not okay, So.
Answering your question in the simplest way, I would ask Deneen or I actually did ask Bermule, and he had no answer for me other than some sort of appeal to bureaucratic vaticans bureaucracy. That's a long story. We don't have time for here. But here's the real point.
Can I just pause there and just put the setting for people?
Will?
I'm sure talk about this later. But last year, Lucretia, Steve and I went to the University of Milan with Adrian Vermule and we had a panel sponsored by a great friend of ours, Alis What do you call Alessandro? I don't know if we want Amandia, who's a professor
of political theory at the University of Milan, Catolica. They're great university in Milan, and I just want the listeners to imagine in their minds, uh, what it was like for Lucretia and Adrian to have cocktails sitting next to each other it was I had a video, I would have copped immediately, oh yeah, or put it on steps back. But we did have that event, and we'll talk about it. I guess as we talked about it throughout the year. It was an epic confrontation. But Lucretia, sorry to interrupt,
go ahead, So he responded. He responded by praise of the administrative state. Yes, if I remember the you criticized him, and I believe Adrian criticized you for your attachment to outdated eighteenth century ideas of natural law, which he agrees our nonsense on stilts, to use the famous Bentham phrase. And then he said, if that the administrative state right, the agencies can be relied upon to guide us and make the right choices.
Well, and I think John, that you're correct. I do want to go back to the earlier point, but.
I want to say that that I think that that the way you just framed that is the administrative state, properly constituted the only answer to our societal and political ills. And I see a lot of good people out there kind of writing that. You know, we've got to embrace the administrative state.
We just got to do it right.
We've got to embrace government regulation and those sorts of things. So I agree that that's a really important point. I want to make it much simpler for a moment, and I want to say, Okay, Adrian, okay, any of you other people tell me what it is about the Founder's
view of human nature that you think they got wrong. Now, the first and most important point about that is that the human nature that the Founders described and then used as the basis for all of their political theories, they believed it was permanent, that human nature did not change.
It did not change. And because it.
Does not change, we may never understand it fully. But our quest should be first and foremost to understand nature, human nature, our place in the world, all of those nice things that philosophy does, and especially political philosophy. But if it doesn't change, then our quest is to know it. What is most important about our current situation is across the spectrum, with very few people in the middle getting it right.
Only getting it right.
Is that there is no such thing as human nature, and that human nature is maliable and it can be made into anything you want it to be.
That's, of course Marxism and communism.
But it also seems to be to some extent these people on the right who want to deny that there's a fixed and unchanging human nature with which.
We must.
With which we must take account and take into account in order to form a political society.
That's good. Now, you could argue, I think.
That the political society we formed, maybe it wasn't so great.
But you have to start by saying either yes or no.
The founders were right there that there's a permanent, unchanging human nature that we can know, and then you can argue whether or not their political system they put together is consistent with that. If we believe Abraham Lincoln, there's none of these problems that Deneen or mule ever, he believes just the opposite. That the materialism built into our political system, the protection for natural rights for property, the belief that human beings should do everything they can to
maximize their own individual talents and propensities. All of those things, according to Jefferson, gave us the best and freest country, the best regime in the history of the world. I don't see these people actually taking up Lincoln's view of the matter.
Bring it on. Let me first, art of Steve Tubai. I think that should share some of the things, share some of the views you set out. I think they, like the few set out in the Federal's papers, would think of man as fallen. I would think that man is not perfectible. I don't. Maybe I'm misreading them, but I don't think the post liberals are like the Marxist and that they think human nature is malleable. Don't they actually? I mean, if there are Aristotelians, aren't they really Aristotelians?
And if they are, and don't they right? I think that human nature is unchanging too, but that society has to be more interventionist to stop people from right doing things, harming themselves. And that's also in the Federal's papers, although the government they designed is not as strongly interventionist.
Well go ahead, Steve, sir, well, can I introduce a new vector in all this? Because and so let's remember that that Adrian Vermule directly and openly in his book on Common Good Constitutionalism saying I'm inspired by Carl Schmidt. And now the left goes crazy, and some people on the right, you know, our good friend Phil Magnus is on the warpath against people like Vermule, people who cite Schmidt, and Okay, Smith's right, But here's the But here's the
thing about Schmid. It's not just him, but he's the one who put it most forcefully in the thirties when he briefly joined the Nazi Party, right, a big air in his part, But he said, the problem with liberal momocracy is it's.
Weak, and it's inherently weak.
And it will not be able to defend itself against challenges from you know, communism or fascism. That was early Schmidt, and I think that he is. I think there's a lot to be said for his critique, which is very dense and difficult. So you look out the world now and what do you see In Europe? You talk about democracies unable to defend themselves, and increasingly, I think we're now seeing it in the last few weeks here in this country. You know, things like the welfare fraud in Minnesota,
which may be a nationwide phenomenon. Right, we're now starting to wake up the possibility that welfare fraud and abuse is not a small amount of money. It's a huge amount of money that's really exploded in the last ten to fifteen years beyond his previous dimensions. How come we're not able to fix this? How come that we've totally
failed that something is big. Not to mention our failing education systems, defending the border until Trump came along, you go on a long checklist of how our democracy is showing the same kind of weaknesses European democracy. And so that's part of their critique is that look this, uh you know, never mind uh for now the particular challenges about the neglect of virtue and the common good, but democracy itself is now a matter that's in doubt.
Why no, no, not you said anything you said was wrong.
It's just so stupid.
I mean again, it's because the founding fathers built welfare into the constitution.
They built in you know, come on, I mean that.
It's it if you cannot separate the abomination that was progressivism, and it's an incredible influence on our political situation. If you cannot do that, you you don't deserve to talk about what the the uh what kinds of solutions there are to our our current problems. You can't talk about the problem with fraud if you don't recognize that a our elites who govern us are incapable of doing anything out of the public interest. I mean, that's a stupid
progressive idea. And again, if you don't think it's serious, look at Katenji and you know the fact that she wasn't impeached for saying that is proof that we don't
take that seriously enough. The idea that you've still got CNN and all those other people somehow trying to to what would the word be, cover up for or dismiss or distract from the fraud going on by Somali's in Minnesota, because first of all, it might be racist, and second of all, all the money is actually being funneled back to Democrats, and Democrats have to you know, succeed no matter what I mean, the idea that we could criticize the founders in the midst of all of these things
is going on just makes these people just seem stupid to me. They're not intelligent, they don't have answers to anything. They're looking at the wrong problems and offering the wrong solutions to the wrong problems, and right in the house to say it drives me crazy.
Let's take the break here. And before we do, also, we got sent in a longish version of fan mail by our friend Phil Munos at the University of Notre Dame, who hearing that we were going to discuss this topic, sent us an essay he's drafting where he made the argument. Yet another problem with postliberalism is that they portray the
Founders as believe. And I think Lucretia is making this point of portray the Founders is believing in untrammeled autonomy, and he actually says all of the rights are subject to the idea of reasonable restrictions, that itself also comes from natural law. And that's his effort to save the Founders from his common good constitutionalist friends. So well, let's talk about that when we come back after this break.
One of the friends of the podcasts, Phil Migno, is a professor at Notre Dame, taught Like the Three of You at the Claremont Graduate University, programmed Like the Three of You by Harry Jeffer At All You all, Mark March and Lockstep. As far as I can tell, I just like to loong because you guys go to good restaurants.
So Phil says, you know, Phil, Phil's effort to uh, you know, respond and this, at least in this piece which he's working on sent to us is to argue that the I guess his argument is that the common good constitutionalists or this pro postliberals, uh make a straw man of liberalism, that they pretend that justice Kennedy's you know, you know, the right to pursue whatever you want to is the meaning of liberalism. The garment should get out
of the way. Yeah, that's not real liberalism. His argument is the kind of liberalism that conservatives should depend is the ones, as you said, rooted in natural rights and that that view has a significant restriction, which is that you can exercise your natural rights so far as they are reasonable. Still to me that I don't hear you guys answering the question that I put to you those how can you tell that your view of natural rights is superior to the moral view that the common good
people are selling? So you can in the crew to say, you know, the Founders are right. Why are these people so stupid not agreeing with the Founders and they just say the Founders are wrong. I think it's kind of interesting they say they're wrong because of the consequences, right, because of the statistics that we're seeing in society. What is your response to that? Phil I mean, I would think they could say, back to Phil, well, that's what
we've been doing all these years. Liberalism, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, rights are subject to reasonable restrictions. They they for many years and continue to restrict Second Amendment gun rights to reasonable restrictions. We're going to get a
comment from Lucretia on that. I believe that still doesn't tell I still doesn't answer their fundamental attack, I think, which is, why should we think the Founders Even if Lucretia's right about describing why they thought, what they thought, and how they thought, but maybe they were just wrong. They need prove it well that their view is Look at all the social problems we have today, they would say, that's again, that's that's so simplistic.
They're not caused by the Founders, They're caused by the progressives.
Go ahead, Steve, I'm sorry.
Well, oh, I mean, first of all, Phil is the goat when it comes to understanding how religious liberty should be understood in American guest socialism.
Although he's ultimately wrong about its judicial application.
But well, well we'll have to be.
Because Philip believes that the courts ought not to recognize exceptions for religious groups from government regulation.
Well, okay, we are we back to those Smith versus employment.
Yes, yes, he's a big fan of Smith. He's the last existing fan of Smith versus Yeah. All right, but we will. I'm sure we'll have a whole podcast this year about we should do that religious liberty and the Supreme Court and well maybe we'll have fill back.
I think we should.
In fact, actually, John, I just want to say this, and in case the listeners out there who contacted me on on X and we went back and forth because they were actually asking some really her spicacious questions about religious liberty and trying to understand what it is which courts got us where we are and so forth. So I think it would be wonderful for us to do that one of these days. Sorry, editorial comment.
We could also have a reader's mail bag episode, which everybody all the other podcasts seemed to have on this last week. I was so bored, See John, I don't care what they think. I don't understand why we are to broadcast our views to them, but we are. So yeah, Steve, go ahead.
Well, first of all, let me see if I can do this very briefly. It's important to understand. I know Phil understands it's important to understand that for the Founders, the idea of natural rights in the classical liberal tradition and religious influence were reciprocal and mutual properties. In other words, you take, by the way, this as much in my
mind right now for reason I'll come to. Maybe you think of George Washington's famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport and what's at seventeen ninety four whatever it was, when Washington's president, and he's said, you know, you now have the same natural rights as everybody else, because it's your right of conscience.
I'm paraphrasing badly.
And but he adds that so long as you or anybody else, he's really saying, demean themselves and respecting everybody else's rights, we're good. And that differs from say, what did Britain have? They have the Toleration Acts. Right Toleration Act of seventeen eighty eight says we're now going to tolerate nonconforming religions. We won't throw you in jail anymore for being an Anabaptist or whatever the heck they used
to do. In Britain, they still had religious tests for public office in Britain until well into the nineteenth century. So the point is, and now I do remember Washington's words, is it now no longer that toleration is spoken of as though it's by one group of people allowing some other group of people to enjoy their natural rights, I mean of religious liberty. So we've lost that sense of the reciprocal and mutual nature of religious liberty and our
other civil liberties. Footnote here read Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom in Virginia. What's seventeen eighty six?
I think it was?
Now why that this is all very much on my mind, and this is a brief diversion, but I'll just plant it here for now. In the last ten days or so, or maybe last two weeks, I've noticed something from the groper right online and you know, the followers and Nick Fuentis and stuff. They're saying, Judeo Christian tradition is a modern formulation. It's a post World War two thing because our response to Holocaust America is a Christian nation, full stop.
And I just think this is wrong, theologically, mistaken historically, but also being done in very bad faith. I can see where this is going and it's really got me worried. I'm really quite upset. I'll stop there. I have sequels to.
That, but I'll just mention that, yeah, I agree to really quickly.
I want to say, I read something that Tucker Carlson somebody else had quoted, and what we should not, what we need to do, is blame Jews for the fact that we have only fans that we have, you know, young men doing nothing but porn. It's not Islam's fault. We should be embracing the uh, the moral strictures of Islam and recognize that there's no such thing as Judeo Christian values, that Islam and Christianity are actually much closer.
It just scared me to death.
All you've got aside, because that deserves much more conversation than we have time for now. I just I would go back for just a moment and say, what you have to do, actually, John, is look at what it is that human nature is. You do have to decide for yourself, and in a free society, those kinds of decisions deserve to be debated. They deserve to be openly debated.
I would argue John, that you who claim not to believe in natural rights, come to the same conclusions as you and I almost always agree on outcomes on some of these things.
I mean, certainly on the important things.
And I don't tell people that street.
There is a reason, and that's because even though you say you're not convinced, you're not. You didn't find our friend Phil's uh reasoning all that telling I don't know that you disagree with the outcome. And so part of what I'm I guess I'm trying to say, and I'm not doing a very good job of it, is even the outcomes themselves are an indication of whether or not
the views of the founders were right. And what I would say the problem with these post liberals is not that they're looking at outcomes that we have today and determining that they're bad. Most of the time I agree with that. They're they're putting the blame in the wrong place. Again, They're asking the wrong questions and thereby giving the wrong solutions. I believe if you if human beings go back to the question of what is human nature really? Do we
have freedom of conscience? Are that is the human mind free? As Jefferson told us, If you start asking those questions and get below all of the nonsense. Then I think
you actually can move forward. Marxism looked at some of those questions cave a very different answer, and that seems to be much more compelling in our in our modern day, I get the idea that we want to push back against welfare state, or at least make the welfare state a more efficient thing, you know, different things that postliberalism wants to do.
Those things I understand.
I don't like the fact that that, you know, young men would rather watch porn than actually have sex with women, which will excuse me for me, I don't mean to be crude, but that seems to be a major problem in our society today. I think all of those things are our genuine problems. The question is, if you're going to find the solution, you have.
To ask the right questions. Does that make any sense?
Yeah?
So John asked one question we have to try to answer, so let me try and do it. And maybe process was a question because I've probably well the question was.
The question was, how do you account for the decay that we've seen by all the social measures you think of?
And uh, and doesn't that imply I'm not sure you meant this, John, But doesn't that imply that the founding was defective. That's what a lot of the post liberals says, our founding was defective. Right, Well, look, I mean I think there's a couple of things to be said about it. One is, again the founders, I think we're pretty clear on this that the our system of republican government could not survive unless the people remain virtuous. However, you want
to understand that. That's a long subject. But they understood that. And I think this is overbroad. What's that?
And Lincoln did too, right, and and this is overbroad.
But a lot of our a lot of our troubles can be traced to the decline of individual virtue and and also institutional corruption. And but the broader question it raises, which I'm not going to try to answer, but say, this is the broader question is uh, this gets back with the classical question. But this, I mean the ancient Greeks who first thought about politics seriously, right, is there any political system that can survive a long time? Can you point to any example of a political system that
has not failed? Eventually, this brings up the people say, are we following Rome? You know, the client and fall of the Roman Empire. They got a thousand years out
of it. Not that well, okay, But the question is, you know, you know, our founder thought that they were building something that would last, the new order for the ages, right, And one question is what is it about human nature, the defects of the selfishness of human nature, the defects and laws of human nature very much on the mind of the founders that make it inevitable that even a well constructed constitutional order is going to have its crises.
We came through some of them before. But you know, there's nothing guaranteed about all this. So it's one thing to go to fight off the left about this. It's dismaying right now that we have to fight off some of our friends on the right at the same time.
I'll just conclude there. We can say a lot more about all of that, but there's a broader question than just the particular Yeah, go ahead.
And you're going to disagree really quickly. I'm just going to say Lincoln warned about exactly that, and he said, if we did not continue to venerate the founding, because it really you know, the whole idea of taking every single citizen through the arguments of the Federalists and so on, is probably not.
But we need to have a.
Certain political religion which venerated the founding. And again, if we had never had progressivism, I know that it's silly to talk that way, but might we not be in a much better position if progressivism had not become the dominant ideology in our country? And could we not still be in a place where we were we had a citizen, a citizen ree who understood the principles of the Declaration, who understood that they needed to be virtuous. You know,
let me just give a silly, silly example. In places like San Francisco, they they in California in general, cashless bail, making certain kinds of theft not really a crime at all, and then people were absolutely surprised that crime skyrocketedt doesn't that teach us a little bit of something about human nature? And is that any different in twenty twenty six than
it was in seventeen eighty seven? And so I do think it's possible to have real understanding about human beings and what is necessary to push them in the right direction so that they can in fact be virtuous citizens mostly self governing. Okay, sure, when you have a shoplifting is no longer illegal to essentially you have people who will who is still not shoplift. How do you get
those people? How do you get those people? And those are the questions that I know that people like vermil want to ask those questions, but they're not asking them in the right way. They're just saying it's all the founder's fault for its radical what it was it the individualism?
Well, no, that's wondami.
But okay, yeah, I know essentially they're saying the same thing.
Okay, let's call it to a halt. We're at the hour mark and we should allow people to get on with failing to meet their New Year's resolutions. So nobody's getting to the gym, I'm sure already. But let's close with our usual Babylon bees from Lucretia.
Okay, most of my Babylon bes are Somali related, so I'll try to pull a few others.
I'll start with this one.
Speaking of New Year's resolutions, Planet Fitness offering convenient new two week membership for New Year's.
That's good.
Waltz announces eight billion dollar grant to Somali company to investigate fraud. The funniest thing about that.
Though, it's stupid ass.
Snopes got on there and said, oh no, no, this isn't really true. This is this was false news put out by that satire Christian website Babylon Bee. So Snopes actually called it a lot. God those people. I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little editorializing here for just a moment, changes a bit. The Babylon b Nope strike that the Three Whiskey Happy Hour would like to inform Tim Waltz
that we are now a functioning daycare in Minnesota. Right, I know, Okay, last one man achieves American dream of working hard and paying taxes for fifty years so he can fund fradulent Somalie daycares.
Yeah, not funny, Okay, right, that's true. So always drink your whiskey neat and buy more books. It's Steve, How is AI going to welcome in Happy New Year twenty twenty six?
Well, I'm in apart from format just to give you my new Year's resolution and to get revenge for you for the way you've gone after us in this episode. My new Year's resolution is to give up all forms of positivism, legal, logical, philosophical, the whole bit. And this is one resolution that I am positive I could achieve.
So there, Well, that's.
A great way to start off the youth, Steve, and as you choose to violate all the traffic laws when you drive. Okay, everybody, it's been great to start the new year with all of you. And thanks to everybody who watched on the sub Stack live stream, we have hit triple digits for the first time. I hope we can going and see you. We will be back next week.
Thanks sometime, right, okay, bye bye.
Ricochet joined the conversation.