Don Robby Corleone | Interview: Robert P. George

This episode of The Remnant is brought to you by our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation. PLF is a national nonprofit law firm with more than 200 active lawsuits representing Americans hurt by government overreach. Across the country, PLF is fighting to free up more land and resources. They represent a California family who have oil reserves but can't drill because of a state ban. Alaska lumber companies that can't operate because of a federal rule. and a retired pediatrician in Florida whose property was wrongly declared a wetland. And they represent all their clients free of charge because they believe all Americans should live fearlessly in pursuit of happiness. If you agree, check out the Pacific Legal Foundation at pacificlegal.org slash flagship. Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? Daniel Jiggins! Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Very excited about today's podcast in part because we've had almost biblical levels of calendar mix-ups on this. And we've been trying to record this, I think, for two months now. It's been pretty depressing, very frustrating, lots of blame to go around. But we're finally here. We finally worked it out. And my guest today is Robert P. George, who's the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He's also a hillbilly banjo picker from West Virginia. That's true. And he's a whole bunch of other things. He is one of these guys who, you know, it's like when they talk in The Godfather about how if Don Corleone, if the old man dies, we lose half the judges and half the political connections. That's sort of Robbie George, but in a good way on the intellectual right. He knows everybody. He's and he's connected to everybody. And so we're not going to run through all of that. But, Robbie, welcome back to The Remnant. It's a pleasure to be back on with you. My colleagues at Princeton, I think, would resonate to your identifying me with Don Corleone. I think they'd like that a lot. All right. So as everybody knows, we have a way of doing this when people have a new book out and you have a new book out. It's called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. It's a collection. It has some with some co-authors, which we don't have to get all into. But what's your book about? Well, Jonah, my vocation as a scholar is to seek the truth and then in my fallible way, knowing that I'm not going to have it perfectly right, nevertheless, having done my best to seek the truth, figure out what the truth is, to speak the truth as best I understand it. And my vocation as a teacher, as a professor, is to form the young men and women who are entrusted to my charge, to themselves be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. So the book is about that. It's about the question, what does it mean in our time to be a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker? How do I do that? How do I understand truth? Why do I value truth? How do I muster the courage to speak the truth when speaking the truth is unpopular or risky or requires sacrifice. So I've been at this for 41 years now. I'm in my 41st year of teaching at Princeton, my one and only job. And I decided to kind of put together the essays that I've written over the past 10 years that pertain to truth seeking and truth speaking. And so the title of the book is simply Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. Maybe this will be a fruitful way to get at this. There's this new book out. I cannot remember his name. I can't remember it because it's so hard to say. It's Georgios Varouxakis. I'm sorry. I'm sure that's not correct because he probably doesn't go around listening to people sounding like they're choking when they try to say his name. But he's got this book about the history of the idea of the West. And he makes a provocative claim that it's really a 19th century phenomenon. And there has been pushback on this. But he makes a strong case that it sort of, it kind of solidifies as a concept in part to sort of account for how to deal with Russia, Auguste Comte, right? He has this idea where he starts talking about the West as a construct. What in your view is the relationship between the Western tradition and the idea of speaking truth and seeking truth? Is it a central part of the Western tradition? Is it something that moderns have sort of retroactively imposed on it? Is it different than other traditions? Well, it's an ancient idea. It's not something that moderns have come up with. In fact, to some extent, modernity has been marked by a deviation, even a skepticism about the very idea of truth or the possibility of attaining truth. But the commitment to truth-seeking goes all the way back into antiquity. There are really two main streams of the Western tradition, Athens and Jerusalem. So if we look at Athens, we look to the figure of Socrates, especially as presented to us by Plato. And of course, then Plato's great student, Aristotle. These great thinkers of antiquity, and we should mention some Roman figures as well, like Cicero, are dedicated to truth-seeking. They press the importance of being in touch with reality, living by what's genuinely the case, and not with illusions or delusions or lies or fabrications, however convenient they may be. They stress the importance of truth and therefore of seeking truth and therefore of speaking truth. Why is Socrates murdered? Because he's speaking the truth as best he understands the truth. When it was very expensive to do that if you held the things that he held. And of course, Plato holds him up as the ideal. Now, we have different images of Socrates from other writers, such as Aristophanes, but Plato's Socrates is a truth seeker and a truth speaker, and he pays a very heavy price, the price of his life for it. What's the other stream of the Western tradition? Jerusalem, the biblical tradition, should go without saying that the Bible is very concerned with the concept of truth, with living by the truth, with being in touch with the truth. In the New Testament, the figure of Jesus, very Jewish figure, by the way, the figure of Jesus in the New Testament says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. When he's confronted by Pilate, when he's on trial, eventually, of course, subjected to crucifixion, he says, I come to bear witness to the truth. And Pilate responds with that famous question, what is truth? So you can see that both of these principal streams of the western tradition of thought have right at the foundation right at the core the concept of truth and its importance so we should back up so truth in this sense is not just being honest right the truth you're talking about is that there's an objective reality that lies outside of ourselves that what is true for one person is true for all people i mean not what's your favorite ice cream kind of truth, but like what is right and wrong is a universal precept. So explain to me how that ties into natural rights. So like, what do we start? What do we back up? What are natural rights? How are they different than other kinds of rights? And how should we think about them? Okay. Rights, the concept of rights is sometimes just equated with entitlements. If the law says you're entitled to a driver's license, if you're 16 years old and you're not visually handicapped and so forth, then you have a right to the driver's license. But there's not a natural right to a driver's license, obviously. If we speak more specifically of the idea of natural rights, we best understand them as contrasted with rights that are merely conventional. So it's the natural as opposed to the conventional rather than, let's say, the natural as opposed to the unnatural or the natural as opposed to the artificial, although the idea of artificial gets closer to the idea of conventional than anything else. But I think the best contrast is between natural and conventional. To say that a right is a natural right is to say that it's a right that exists not as a mere convention, but as a reality that is not something we human beings make up. It's not simply posited by human beings. It's not created by human beings. We can grasp it. We can understand it, but we don't manufacture it. And we are bound under it. So if I have a natural right, let's say, to life, then you are bound, you have an obligation to respect my life. You have an obligation not to make my death the precise object of your action, to deliberately kill me, murder me, or something like that. when Jefferson and the founders in the Declaration of Independence say we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and among these are life liberty in the pursuit of happiness he's there referring to natural rights not to merely conventional ideas or conventional rights or or legal rights or positive law. He's talking about objectively true realities. And so one of the things you write about in the book that I'm very sympathetic to because I've written a ton about it myself is that one of the things that's steering us away from a conception of natural rights or moral truth is the primacy of feelings, right? Sort of the regime of feelings. Exactly right. I think a lot of my listeners sort of know where I come down on feelings. I think the romantic era never ended and whatnot. That's right. But, you know, when I think about Robert George, Robert P. George, I always have to do that because I'm friends with Robert A. George. And he's also a friend of mine. And then in the old days before the Internet, when, you know, accounting was done on a ledger with a pencil and we had snail mail and stuff, people would confuse the two of us. And he would get my checks since we wrote for the same journals. He would get my checks and I would get his hate mail. And it sounded to me like a terrible deal. I have a similar relationship with Jeffrey Goldberg where we get each other's anti-Semitic hate mail all the time. But the way I always remember it is that he wrote that piece for the New Republic in 2004 endorsing John Kerry. And I was like, ah, so the A stands for apostate. You know, I started getting valentines from my liberal colleagues at Princeton when that appeared. Congratulating. And I wrote back to every single one of them and said, nope, wrong, Robert George. You should be congratulating me, but not for that. You should have done a more Straussian reading of the text. All right. So on the feelings thing, it feels to me, and tell me what I'm wrong, but it feels to me that part of the argument of the natural right movement in our position is obviously you emphasize the role of reason, but there is also this emphasis that you get from a lot of people about moral intuitions. And how is that different than feelings? Give me your case about the feelings thing in general, But then the follow up is, how are we supposed to distinguish between feelings that feel like they are backed up by our understanding of how the world is supposed to work and feelings that actually are leading us astray? Like, what is the heuristic that you would employ? Okay, so let me begin at a very general level. The historians are fond of breaking up the eras and the epochs into the age of this and the age of that. I'm sure you've heard it many times. So some historians will characterize the medieval period as the age of faith. Now, what do they mean by that? Why do they do that? Well, what they mean is that for the medievals, especially the great medieval thinkers, whether we're talking about those of the Christian traditions, such as Aquinas and Anselm, or the Jewish tradition, Maimonides, or the Islamic tradition, figures like Aburreus, for the great thinkers of the medieval period, the ultimate touchstone, ultimate touchstone of truth and therefore of goodness, of justice, of right, of virtue, is conformity with the teachings of the faith, conformity with the teachings of the religion. Now, there's some truth in that, although it's an oversimplification, and it can be misleading. It can be misleading if we take it to mean that the great medieval thinkers, again, of any of the three great monotheistic traditions, disdained reason. Quite the opposite. They did not disdain reason. They exercised reason. They glorified reason. They wanted their views to be as reasonable as possible. Much of what we think correctly about reason is actually rooted in insights of the great medieval thinkers. They're often not given credit in our own time for them, but they should be. But there's still some truth in the idea that ultimately the final, the ultimate touchstone for the medieval people of truth and goodness is conformity with the teachings of the faith. These same historians then will turn to the Enlightenment, or better still, the Enlightenments, because there was not just one enlightenment. There were different enlightenments in different parts of Europe, the German enlightenment, the French enlightenment, the Scottish enlightenment, the British enlightenment. But for enlightenment thinkers, again, across those different countries and regions, for the enlightenment thinkers, they would refer, historians refer to them as the figures of the age of reason. Now, what do they mean by that? Well, they mean that for those figures, the ultimate touchstone of truth and goodness is conformity with the findings of rational inquiry, for example, in the sciences. Now, again, there's truth in that, although it's an oversimplification, and it can be misleading. It can be misleading if it causes us to suppose that all of the great or most of the great Enlightenment thinkers were atheists or secularists. Some were, especially among French Enlightenment figures like Voltaire. But many were not. I mean, you begin that list, of course, with the great scientist Isaac Newton, who was very deeply religious. There were many others who were as well. Still, there is truth in the idea that for the Enlightenment figures, the touchstone of truth and therefore goodness and justice and virtue is conformity with the findings of rational inquiry. Well, if the medieval period is the age of faith, or to the extent that it's the age of faith, and if the Enlightenment era is the age of reason, then in what age do we live? And here I very much regret to say, It seems to me we live in the age of feeling. And I say that because for so many people, especially but not exclusively young people, so many people, the touchstone of truth, therefore of justice, of goodness, of right, is conformity with one's own feelings. even to the point where you know many people today believe that ones being male or female isn't a matter of objective biological truth it's a matter of how you feel if you feel like female you're female whether you're biologically male or not if you feel like a male you're you're a male and and so forth and and and so on and that's just one example from thousands hundreds of thousands that we could choose that show us that people today tend to treat their feelings as either determining or giving access to truth. Now, notice that in the age of feeling, people are not old-fashioned moral relativists. I remember when I was first starting out in my academic career, the typical cocktail conversation or conversation in a freshman class would be someone would pop up and say, well you know there's no such thing as objective truth there's just opinion you have your opinions i have my opinions and therefore we should be nice to each other and not impose on each other because there's really no such thing as truth so in the age of of feeling you find people who are caught up in the ideology of feeling willing to be quite authoritarian to shut down other people who they regard as enemies of social justice or they regard as racists or bigots or or something they won't brook disagreement and that's what led to the woke era and the cancellation campaigns and all the stuff that we're so familiar with and that you know although we've had a bit of a vibe shift still haven't completely gone away our libertarian friends will criticize the robbie George Kraut as saying that all they're doing is reifying their own moral intuitions and saying no this is natural law If they find something icky right to use a polite evenism if they find something that offensive they reason backwards from that to say no this is actually natural law objective truth And then they find they use reason to get there. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that. That criticism from the libertarians, but you'll hear it in good faith. People who feel it that way. Right. He's like, I certainly think there are people for whom that is true. That doesn't mean it is true about everybody who's accused of it. You know, there are people who said, well, look, same-sex marriage is just icky. And then they claimed that they were finding natural law arguments against it. And other people said, oh, no, that's just your moral intuitions and you're gussing it up. I'm not making that accusation in either direction. I'm just saying that's sort of part of the argument. What is the method? What is the mathematical formula or the logical formula, the heuristic that you use to distinguish your feelings about something, your emotional intuitions about something versus your intuitions actually ratifying and being a sign that there is an objective truth out there? Does that make sense? I think so. Let me see if I can get at it. So, of course, a lot of libertarians, and I think most sophisticated libertarians, are themselves natural rights theorists or natural rights thinkers. Somebody like Randy Barnett in my area in constitutional law, for example, is every bit as committed to the idea that there's a natural law and their natural rights as I am, although he draws certain libertarian conclusions from it that are different from conclusions that I draw. We agree on a lot of issues, even when it comes to policy and constitutional law and things like that. But where we disagree, he tends to be in the more libertarian direction, and I'm in the less libertarian direction. But I think I see what you're putting your finger on here. So the first thing I would say is in the age of feeling, people will identify what's right and therefore to be done or permissible to do with their wants, desires, feelings, in that sense, passions. So the truth, how conveniently, lines up with what they want for figures like Plato and Aristotle. you don't figure out whether something is worth doing or should be done or even may be done by figuring out whether you want to do it rather the whole point of inquiry what we could call philosophy the whole point of the exercise is to subject one's feelings to rational scrutiny so that you can determine whether an impulse or a feeling or a passion that you have is one that should be acted on because it's in line with the human good, in line with human well-being, in line with human flourishing, or ultimately out of whack with it, contrary to it. To move forward many centuries to Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail and his treatment of natural law or his ideas about natural law is embodied in that letter. He says that there are two kinds of laws. They're just and unjust laws. How do you tell the difference between the two? Well, just laws are in line with natural law and divine law, which are not exactly the same thing, but natural law is what you can know about morality in virtue of reason. So just laws are in line with natural law, divine law, and unjust laws are out of line with it. How do you know which are in line and which are out of line? By looking at their impact on human well-being. so a good law will uphold human dignity uphold human personality elevate the human spirit a bad law will ultimately degrade it now we can have debates about what does elevate and what does degrade and those debates can sometimes be very difficult and complicated then the right answer won't necessarily be clear and reasonable people of goodwill can disagree about the answer take For example, the case that you raised about same-sex marriage, you can have a debate about it. But what you're debating in rational terms, you're trying to figure out the correct answer to is whether these types of relationships or those types of relationships elevate us as human beings or ultimately debase us as human beings. It's an inquiry into human well-being and fulfillment, an inquiry into the human good. And to get a little bit technical, it's integral directiveness. So in my contribution, which I made along with my former student, Sharif Giergeson, Ryan Anderson, to the same-sex marriage debate in our book, What is Marriage? Man and Woman, a Defense? We made the case that a sound understanding of marriage is one that does not reduce it to mere sexual romantic companionship or domestic partnership. Because if you do have an understanding of marriage that reduces it to that, which would then enable you to authorize same-sex partnerships as marriages, then you would have no principled basis on which to consider marriages required to be closed sexually rather than open, monogamous rather than polyamorous, groups of three or four or five people being married together. something that the state should be involved with at all, something that is for a permanent commitment till death do we part, as opposed to something like five years renewable, a term contract or something like that. Now, critics of ours made counter arguments, but the argument proceeded back and forth on the basis of those rational considerations. Was our logical case, in fact logically sound? Did it hold up? Did the inferences that we were drawing, were those inferences warranted? And similarly, when we criticized writers on the other side, those who were supporting same-sex marriage, the question was, do their inferences hold up? Can they defend a revisionist understanding of marriage that treats it as a form of sexual or romantic companionship or domestic partnership? But what we weren't doing was just throwing our feelings, reporting our feelings to each other. We were trying to figure out what uplifts, what elevates, what ennobles human beings and what ultimately debases and degrades them. Hold on one minute. We got to pay the light bill. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. So let's get out of the same-sex marriage part of it, just because as I'm sure you're more aware than I am. It's a bloody shirt for a lot of people and take something that I think serves a similar purpose, which is the death penalty. I think there are morally sound, very serious arguments for abolition of the death penalty. And I think there are morally sound, very serious arguments for keeping it. I guess my question is, and you can pick some other issue like that if you want, but I think it's a neater and tidier way of doing it. I have lots of friends who are philosopher types. I count you among them. I have lots of friends who are political scientist types. And then there are people, I guess you're more in the third camp, which is constitutional theorist types who are kind of between the philosophers and the political scientist types. Why is it in these debates that we should be deferring to the political philosophers and not necessarily, say, the political scientists. Because when I hear you say, does a law elevate the common good? Does it improve dignity or however you put it? I can tilt my head and hear a philosophical pragmatist talking or shutter a utilitarian or even a legal consequentialist or whatever you're supposed to call it. And I know you're none of those things, right? But if you talk to a normal average human being and you say, well, does this law, the way we should think about it is, does this law make society or make people better off? They might want empirical explanations. Like, does it increase per capita income? Does it, you know, does it affect them in tangible ways rather than in these very abstract ways when you're trying to make the argument? I like abstractions. I'm just trying to like get at why is the Robbie George method of reason at a very high level of abstraction the best way to be persuading the public to follow the path that you want to be on? Well, most of the kinds of interesting issues that people debate that have moral valences have different dimensions, some of which have to be addressed by methods of social scientific inquiry, some of which depend on historical analysis, for example, especially but not exclusively for originalists and constitutional interpretation. History really matters, so getting the history right matters. And then they have normative dimensions that can be addressed or addressed fully only by resort to some sort of philosophy. Now, that doesn't resolve the question, which school of philosophy is correct? That's a debate within the world of philosophy. But philosophers who have different perspectives on what the correct philosophy is, philosophers representing different schools of thought, for example, Peter Singer, a utilitarian, or me, a natural law theorist, or some of our friends who are Kantian deontologists would have different ideas about what sound philosophy is, how you do philosophy. But we would all agree, and I think our political science friends and our historian friends and others would agree, that when it comes to certain sorts or aspects of questions like the death penalty, same-sex marriage, abortion, distributive justice, that in addition to whatever the historical and social scientific aspects of the question are, there are these normative aspects that are going to require somebody to do philosophical analysis. Now, ordinary citizens have to kind of do it all, right? In order to be voters and responsible citizens, they have to think about, you know, the best they can about history and social science and philosophy. They're doing it in a very informal way. They don't have PhDs or JDs. They're not doing technical analysis, but they're still drawing philosophical judgments or working on the basis of understandings of the actual social impact, the empirical social impact of this policy or that policy. So I'm certainly not arguing for a kind of imperialism of the philosophers. All I'm claiming is you can't dispense with philosophy. It's not the only thing you need. By itself, it's insufficient to resolve most of the interesting debated questions, but you can't do without it. You need more. It's necessary, but not sufficient to doing our best to get at the right answer to these kinds of questions. Yeah, look, I'm ultimately very sympathetic to that. I'm a Chestertonian in many respects. I'm a big believer in the importance of dogma and i want there to be some settled questions that get the let the philosophers go off on retreats and argue about but like i don't think it's in anyone's benefit for society to have a big just asking questions serious debate about bringing back slavery right i think it's better that that question's just settled and we don't need to debate it anymore. Just taking it back to the death penalty for a second, actually, I don't know. What is your position on the death penalty? Well, I'm heretical from a conservative point of view because I'm opposed to the death penalty in principle, and not just because it fails to deter. I think it may very well deter or could be carried out in such a way as that it would deter. The sentence, in order to be an effective deterrent, would have to be carried out more promptly than we carry it out and with less rigmarole and therefore less protection for those accused and subject to possible capital punishment. So my view of it is not a pragmatic one. I think as a matter of principle, it's always wrong to deliberately intend the death of a human being, whether that human being is yourself or somebody else. And I think that the more traditional teaching that the prohibition on direct killing is a prohibition restricted to the direct killing of the innocent at the end of the day can't be philosophically sustained. I could go into the argument if you want me to. That's fine. And therefore, I would revise the traditional principle, no direct killing of the innocent, to simply comprehensively say no direct killing. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm a pacifist. It doesn't mean that I don't think there can be justified wars in which people get killed. but i think killing in self-defense is not a form of direct killing or in the defense of you know uh and against an invasion or or something like that now on the other hand this relates to perhaps the issue that we have now with the uh alleged drug boats in uh in the caribbean i think if you can capture people and once you have captured people or you've disabled people, injured people, so that they cannot be actual combatants, you can't finish them off because they deserve to die. So that's my position. And I've come to that strictly philosophically. I have no emotional investment at all in opposition to the death penalty. I get as angry with horrible people who murder other people as anybody else, and I can't claim that I shed tears if they're executed. So it's not an emotional reaction to me at all. My emotions actually go the other way. I'd like to see, you know, that no good so-and-so, you know, done away with for good. But as a rational philosophical matter, having, you know, worked the thing through as best I can in thinking through the relevant principles and what can be sustained logically and what can't be sustained logically, I've reached the conclusion that I don't think that the death penalty is ultimately defensible. It's a good example of going against your feelings, actually, because my feelings go in one direction. Yeah. But I think it's also a really good example of how the prudential considerations can lead to a difference of degree that becomes a difference in kind, right? So, like, I, philosophically, I do not have a problem with a death penalty, um all things being equal but if it's so difficult to implement i i am not a fan of the deterrence argument um i think ernest van den hogg had it right when he said that it's morally wrong to kill one person to send a message to another person but it can be the kind of thing that that if if societies decided they want to do it as a deterrence effect the only way i think you're absolutely right as a as a practical matter you have to do it much more quickly and if doing it much more quickly means much more, many more mistakes than maybe it, then it, it ceases to be a prudential thing and starts to become a moral thing. Like one thing I think every single person who is in favor of the death penalty with any conscience whatsoever agrees on is that no one should be executed who doesn't deserve to be executed, right? Like no one wants to execute an innocent, a wrongly accused man. And if the only way to make the death penalty work is to accept a much higher tolerance for executing the wrong guy, then it becomes a moral question instead of a prudential question. I mean, you see what I'm saying? It can cross over because the implementation problems are so difficult. Can I give you a counter argument to that, though? Sure. Yeah. So defender of the death penalty might well say, well, look, you know, we'd all be opposed to deliberately executing an innocent person. That clearly is morally wrong. But that doesn't mean that mistakes, the fact that there will be a mistake, even many mistakes, means that the death penalty is in principle wrong or wrong inclined as opposed to degree. Because we do all sorts of things to make life better on the whole that end up inadvertently with a lot of people dead. When we set the speed limit at 65 rather than at 25 on the highways, that's going to mean more deaths on the highways when we build a bridge or a skyscraper. Not at all surprised of two or three people in the course of building a really major bridge, especially years ago, are killed when we mine coal. And the argument would be that you pay a price. It's inadvertent. These are not intended deaths because there will be mistakes. But on the whole, the net deterrence effect justifies the mistakes that that will be made and in in principle logically that's that's fine argument that's there's not nothing wrong with that yeah i i've made that argument in other contexts like it drives me crazy when joe biden or lots of democrats who say it if it saves one life it's worth it when they talk about like say gun control or something like that if that were the policy if that were the the the credo for policymakers then we would set the speed limit at five miles an hour. Exactly. Right. Definitely would save a life. Right. Yeah. But my point was, I don't believe it. I don't subscribe to the deterrence argument. So killing somebody to send a signal to somebody else, like the, I'm with you enough to say that the death penalty is a morally significant different thing than traffic deaths Right Is it the state actually saying we are going to take this person life and having a higher tolerance for error i mean everyone going to draw their line somewhere about this but but anyway i i want to move on because i have i've been trying to avoid getting at you know some of the uh gorilla the elephants in the room here And let me try it, sort of get us on the path this way. You know, I mentioned before philosophical pragmatism. I'm like one of the only people I know who really detests it. And I think William James was a really interesting, honorable, smart guy, but I don't like pragmatism. Capital B pragmatism. I think John Dewey is a lot less defensible. Yeah, yeah, there you go. There you go. But one of the things I am convinced about is that pragmatism was a tool by a certain breed of intellectuals and philosophers in the progressive era to delegitimize competing schools of thought. It wasn't really to build up their own serious philosophical project. It was to use the pragmatist razor to slice and dissect anybody who disagreed with them. So you're the ideologue. You're ensorcelled by these crazy ideas. We're just trying to do what's pragmatic, what has cash value, what works and all of these kinds of things. and I see big slices of the American right today basically using a similar playbook. It's not pragmatism. Some of it you can say is consequentialism. You can call it a bunch of different things, but at the end of the day, the common good constitutionalism or a lot of the, what we calling post-liberalism or nationalism and all of these things, I am deeply skeptical of that. They are really, I don't mean about any specific intellectual, but as movements, they're basically about power. There are basically an effort to delegitimize institutions and ideas that stand in the way of them being in charge of the movement, getting to the define things, getting to set priorities and whatnot. Are you worried? Let me put it this way. Are you worried that I'm right? Well, I am worried that you're right about the rise of illiberalism on the right. We've just been through the woke era. We're not completely out of it, but there has been a vibe shift. There's some breathing room right now, at least on college campuses that you didn't have even two or three years ago. But that was very repressive to intellectual life, and it was very illiberal. And now I see it happening on the right. I see a similar kind of illiberalism on the right. uh jonah i'm going to be giving uh this year of the honor of giving the um it was supposed to be the 2025 but because of the government shutdown it will now be 2026 kellogg lecture and jurisprudence at the library of congress and uh it's a lecture that's been given by many of the greatest um political um and moral philosophers of our time but so far every single one has been a liberal I'm going to be the first one who's who's not a progressive. So I've decided to devote it'll be on April 9th at the Library of Congress. I've decided to devote my Kellogg lecture to a critique of liberal secularism of the sort represented by the previous Kellogg lecturers. Nice figures like Ronald Dworkin, who was one of my teachers, actually, and a whole string of figures who are like that. secular i'm sure rawls will come in that those guys yeah rawls will come in but given the rise of what i perceive to be illiberalism on the right i've developed the lecture so i'm in a way i'm glad about the government shutdown delaying the lecture because uh i i've gotten a little more perspective on what's going on now although i will devote a good chunk of the lecture to a critique of liberal secularism of the Rawlsian, Dworkinian sort, I'm going to add a substantial critique of the right, the current right, or those elements on the right that are illiberal, because I want to make the case to my fellow conservatives, and I am a conservative, old school conservative, I want to make the case that the answer to Rawlsian type liberalism is not illiberalism. We should not be enemies of basic civil liberties. We should be the greatest defenders of them, but we can defend them on a sounder basis and develop a more credible conception of them, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and so forth, than liberals like Rawls and Dworkin can do. So it's going to have two dimensions now, the critique of the liberals, the progressives, but also a plea to my fellow conservatives not to abandon what's good about the liberal tradition in a certain sense, the sense in which we talk about liberal democracy or liberal education, liberalism in that sense. We shouldn't be illiberal. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Remnant Podcast. I love intellectual history. I've done this riff several times on this podcast. I apologize to listeners who are tired of me doing it this way. Love intellectual history. Think it's really important. Can talk about it all day. But I've come to the conclusion that in a lot of cases, the ideas are lagging indicators rather than leading indicators. And that it turns out that there are certain movements that are looking for avatars or bumper stickers or books that they can say, see, this is what we're really about. But those ideas were already out there. Charles Rice, The Greening of America. Garbage book. but they wanted some intellectual totem to say, ah, this youth politics thing is real and it's very, very, very, very serious and all that kind of thing. And so the idea is the lagging indicator rather than the leading indicator. I can make a case that Herbert Crowley's promise of American life was a lot like that. Absolutely. Right? The environment was ripe for someone to write a book saying you can do what you want. And I find that an enormous amount of the, stuff from the illiberal right or the new right which is like the fifth new right depending on how you count i find that a big chunk of it is just simply we need we need to say something right you need to have some argument for what we're doing but really what it is it's about power and so when you're talking about the the the what i think was the unlawful killing of those guys in the water in the Caribbean, you know, in the broader context, the entire operation was pretextual. It turns out it really wasn't about drugs. It was about taking oil. And I find that that this is my problem with the broader right these days. There are there are some good people out there. You know, there's people like you. There's my friends, you know, from National Review, where I was at for 20 years, you know, my colleagues at AEI. But in terms of where the national debate is framed, I find politics exhausting because the people in charge of the sort of populist right, the liberal right, whatever, they are making arguments not based in fact or reason, but they're making arguments based in this sort of like post hoc. We must justify what the movement wants. We must justify what Donald Trump is doing rather than this is what we think is right. It's very much that, you know, was in Andrew Levin, whatever the guy from 1870, there go the people I must go with them for I am their leader. And or, or Ferris Buellerism, there goes a parade, let me get in front and pretend that I'm leading it. And I like arguments. I like ideas. I like this tradition of reason in the West of, of arguing about facts and stuff. And I find that the people with the loudest voices and the most influence these days in terms of, you know, the raucous right, let's just say. Their use of arguments is is entirely mercenary and and bad faith. And I find that it's very depressing to me to see the extent of that influence and that mode on what passes for the American right these days. Couldn't agree with you more. there's been a rise of a kind of neo-paganism a Nietzschean Schmittian approach to politics on the right winning power is what it's all about not trying to gain power in order to advance certain things we believe in because they're good and true and right a power for its own sake or power to quash the people we regard in Schmittian fashion I'm referring to the the philosopher ultimately a nazi philosopher carl schmidt to crush our enemies in the schmidtian sense of dividing up the world into into friends and enemies and in that way it's anti-religious it's anti-philosophical even when a patina of religion and philosophy is placed over now i don't want to sweep a too broad a brush here i mean there are there are there are people on i think what you were calling the the the new right who who are not neo-pagans but there are a lot of people on the new right who are including some who think of themselves or certainly present themselves as being religious uh or being committed to the to the tradition of natural law and natural rights they're actually not they're anti-philosophical in the same way that i think you rightly put the finger on dewey and pragmatism as being anti-philosophical it's it's it's more of a of a of a method a technique for clearing the room of philosophical arguments so we can just get down to doing you know what we because we're the elite or we're the well-educated or we're the sophisticated want to do we who know better we who are the experts that drove a lot of early progressivism for sure um so i'm worried about that i don't want that to be us. I don't want that to be the conservative movement. So that's why I want to fight. I want to fight to restore and maintain to the extent it hasn't been lost, the integrity of the conservative movement, which is a movement that's always been built on faith and reason. It's an anti-pagan, in the strict sense, it's an anti-pagan movement. And to the extent that it's been infiltrated by these neo-pagan Nietzschean, Schmittian ideologies, I think we've got to push them out. So I'm working on a book and I'm thinking through what it means to be a conservative in all sorts of different ways. One of the things I've come to the conclusion of, at least provisionally, is that I consider myself a classical liberal. I assume you in many ways consider yourself a classical liberal, not just a classical. Classically mean, Bostonian, Tocquevillian? Absolutely. Yeah. At the same time, when people say classical liberal, it turns out there was never a, like when we say classic Greece, there was a place and a time when that existed. There was really never a time when classical liberalism was in charge, that it wasn't contested, that there wasn't incredibly diverse and heterogeneous. And what one person meant by liberalism was different than what another person meant by liberalism. But if I see liberalism in the American tradition, historically in the sweep of human history, quite radical. And I think that Americans are sort of like the, you know, the chartists who came to America from England. When they were in England, they were radicals or the 48ers from Germany who were radicals when they wanted liberalism and democracy in Germany. And then they come to America and they start calling themselves conservatives because what they're trying to conserve is the birthright that you have here in America that was considered a radical and dangerous idea in their home country. Absolutely. And so as a matter of, if you're, let's say you're teaching a seminar and you want to explain to somebody absent current controversies and current labels and just use philosophical, philosophically well-grounded terminology. What exactly is the difference between conservative small c conservatism and small l liberalism in the anglo-american context uh small no by small illiberalism do you mean classical i mean madisonian yeah madisonian de tocqueville they're not maybe a little montesquieu in there you know i mean like you know that's the you know little hayek you know right um how is that what what is the because you know patrick let's put it this way patrick denean says why liberalism failed and his basic argument is that it was doomed it's failed because it is it of its success yeah right is that this is this is the inevitable consequence of liberalism because liberalism was essentially wrong from the beginning right in the sense that he means liberalism because he's definitely grounding it in the classical period to some extent what does it mean what it was the philosophical difference between a conservatism and and a liberalism so american conservatism our conservatism is a tradition within small l or classical in the sense of madisonian toquevillian liberalism and it's to be distinguished from european conservatism european conservatism traditionally was blood and soil or thrown and altar conservatism where a people a nation a society's unity and strength were rooted in ties common ties bonds of of um ethnicity or or uh race or shared religion or a shared culture and cultural history or allegiance to a to a monarch that's the ancien regime right that's that's european conservatism american conservatism was never that that the whole idea of american exceptionalism is that we are not which america which conservatives like me have always defended often against progressives who want to reject the idea of american exceptionalism american exceptionalism doesn't mean hey we americans we're great we're better than other people you know we're the best ever we're the goat uh no we're made on the same stuff we have the same flaws and foibles and faults as other human beings what's exceptional about america is that our strength in unity is not rooted in blood and soil we're thrown and alter common ties of race or ethnicity or religion or cultural history or a monarchy or anything like that rather they're rooted in our shared commitment to certain principles. The principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Madisonian system, the one that Tocqueville shed so much light on in his own writings. He's coming to visit us from Europe, and he sees there's something rather special and interesting about America, some things you wouldn't expect. Religion is flourishing here, where it's disestablished, rather than back in Europe, where it's established, and so forth. And we American conservatives have always been defenders of American exceptionalism. Now, sometimes when you say what I just said, Jonah, people will say, especially people like Patrick, Patrick Deneen, will say, no, wait a minute, you know, that idea of a creedal nation, the reduction of America to an idea, that's a gross oversimplification. There's no such thing as a purely creedal nation. But I wasn't saying, nor is anybody who believes what I believe, saying that America is just a creed or just a creedal nation or that culture doesn't matter. But we're saying that the creed matters, too, and it matters centrally for us in a way that no parallel creed matters for Europeans. and it matters because that creed has critically helped to shape the culture that sustains the creed to the extent that we are able to, in fact, sustain it and remain faithful to it. So yes, if you're a conservative the way I'm a conservative, you are a Madisonian, Tocquevillian, old school liberal. You're not a Rawlsian liberal. You're not a Kenyan liberal. You're not a progressive. You're not staying with the predecessor in my chair at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson and saying, ah, get rid of the Constitution. It's a Newtonian document and system unfit for a Darwinian age. You sort of revere the founders and their handiwork, their principles of natural law, natural rights as embodied in the Declaration. The Constitution with its federalism and its system of separation of powers that make sure that power is always accountable, that people are always exercising power with some accountability. um yeah that's what american conservatism is all about and that's what i want to preserve and that's what i want to restore john i'm with you um i'm you know when i wrote my first book i said america can never be fascist because their dogmatic american exceptionalism commitment to particularly on the right like my whole point of it was that it's a slander against modern conservatives to call them fascists because of the right's dogmatic commitment to the constitution to the wisdom of the founders, to individual rights, to free markets, all of these things that are not fascist. Among the things I got wrong in that book was how dogmatic the commitment really was on the right. That I mean I think it dogmatic for you and me and for a few other people but it turned out that it was much more fragile much more soluble than I thought it would And so I rejected horseshoe theory for the longest time because I was much more with Richard Pipes who said that communism and fascism or Bolshevism and fascism were both heresies of socialism. And that it was ridiculous to say that the further right you got in the Anglo-American context where you became more libertarian was also to say you became more fascist, right? It just made no sense. Once you let go of the classical liberalism, right? Once you say that conservatism isn't about conserving that tradition of classical liberalism from the founding, from et cetera, then horseshoe theory makes a lot of sense, right? If I'm against industrial policy for the left, why wouldn't I be against industrial policy for the right? But now we're living in an age where you know you're a socialist if you believe in left-wing industrial policy but you're not if you believe in right-wing industrial policy to me it's just industrial policy and i guess the question i have is i mean where how did it is it all trump's fault right is it just that yeah people had to bend to the power of his the cult of personality and and and turns out that they didn't believe that really believe this stuff anyway they were just saying it because they claim to i mean you can take the pro you can take the abortion issue the number of people who are who fought cats and dogs against the slightest modification of things by a bush right or even a reagan just sort of went quiet with capitulated to trump when he when he took the pro-life plank out of the platform i mean i raised cane and and tony perkins to his credit uh family search bounce were where he's came, but an awful lot of conservatives who regarded themselves as pro-life just rolled over and played dead. And Trump removed it for 40 years, I think, I think it was four decades. Liberal Republicans or so-called moderate Republicans, people like Arlen Specter, people like that, Robert Packwood, tried to remove the pro-life plaque from the platform. And God bless conservatives, pro-lifers fought tooth and nail to defeat that and they won. And along comes Trump and it's gone like that. And nobody puts very few people put up a fuss. It was terrible to see, actually. Is Trump the leading indicator here or the lagging indicator? Was the commitment to modern conservatism, Buckley, Reagan, whatever label you want to put on it. was it really paper thin or it was really just the seduction of, you know, I make this point all the time that when Acton coined the phrase power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. He wasn't talking about the person in power. He wasn't talking about the czar or the King. He was talking about the intellectuals who made up and the historians who made apologies for people who abused their power. I see that kind of intellectual corruption all over the place. And I'm just what is what is your theory of the case about how we got to where we are on this front? Well, I don't think that people were being insincere. I do think, though, Trump perceived that people were to put it in Trumpian terms, tired of losing. They this is what gave us the concept of the flight 93 election. You remember that they had the sense and they weren't wrong that progressives had control, had gained control, monopoly control of the great institutions of society, not just academia, which it had had for some time. But certainly, yes, academia, journalism, the professions, law, even medicine. There's very few things woker than contemporary medical education. businesses corporations what remember woke capital you know you're hard to get woker than the than the black rock boardroom or something like something like that and this caused i think enormous frustration among ordinary decent americans to whom trump then ended up my parents my entire family in west virginia they're very disappointed in me because i wouldn't jump on the the the trump trade these are not facts these are not uh these are not people who are insincere with their commitment to reaganite buckleyite uh conservatism but i think to some extent they were vulnerable to trump's appeal precisely because of the sense of desperation that the left has a lock on everything that that our form of conservatism had not showed any capacity to stop the collapse of the country and of its ideals, the trashing of the country, the imposition of really crazy DEI policies, transgenderism, all this kind of stuff. And I think that Trump made them an offer. He was the guy who would stand up to the elites. He was the guy who wouldn't be intimidated by them or bought off by them. And it worked. yeah obviously i think there's a lot of truth there and i'm glad you pointed out that your family are not fascist i wasn't trying to say that anybody who supports trump is a fascist i know lots of i have people in my family who support trump but i will say there are people in the trump orbit and especially on social media who say some pretty fascistic things um and we don't have to do chapter and verse on it oh no there's it's getting really bad i mean it's i mean you know it's i mean the the fact that nick fuentes has the i had never i guess i'd heard the name, but until the whole crazy thing with the Heritage Foundation, I mean, I didn't have much of an idea of who Nick Fuentes was. I was shocked when I found out the kind of following the guy has. That's a legitimate ground for worry. Shouldn't panic about it. It doesn't mean that we're going to have death camps in two weeks or five years, but we should worry that a character like Fuentes has the kind of following or has, or look at what's become with Candace Owens. And there's just crazy stuff going on on the conservative side. And somehow we've got to get people back to sanity, to what Lincoln called the ancient faith, that what conservatism really should be about, which we should be conserving, are the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Conservatism isn't just about winning however we can win or getting power, however we can get power. It's about conserving those principles and institutions. So obviously, I very much agree with Adam and violent agreement with that. I would say we should let listeners know in case they don't know that you resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation because of the craziness that was going on there and the Tucker Fuentes controversy and whatnot. but to bring it back to your writing and one of the themes of your book about feeling so i used to write all the time about how i disliked populism the one exception in my entire life was um the tea parties where i thought this is kind of sui generis in the sense that you know they were walking around with copies of the constitution and i would talk to them about Hayek and they would clean up after themselves at protests and they would get permits and they wanted the government to leave people alone. Right. It was the great libertarian prophecy of we will rise up, take over the government and then leave people alone. And I had the sympathy for the Tea Party crowd. But generally speaking, I've never liked populism. When I used to write about populism from the right in the pre-Trump era, people liked it. It was, you know, to my credit. And then all of a sudden came this era where all of a sudden populism was good. I think, you know, the lessons of the Tea Parties were part of it. But my problem with populism remains, which is that populism, much like the cult of youth, both of these things are the tip of the spear of a politics of feelings, right? There's this idea that is inherent in populism, you know, that if you have enough people who are angry, then all of a sudden that makes their position correct. That, you know, we get into these arguments where people say, you know, nothing's good is going to come from this. And you say, well, you don't understand how angry people are. I was like, no, I do understand how angry they are. You're like, when was the last time you made a really great decision when you were just incredibly angry, right? And that's, but that's what populism does is it says that there's this moral integrity and authority to laar the crowd. And in my view of conservatism and of liberalism or however we want to use the labels is that the one man with the law on his side is right. Right. And when I say law, I don't necessarily mean any unjust law, but I mean the kind of natural law kind of position, right? The man who stands up to the mob and says, you're not going to lynch this man today is right. And the mob is wrong. And the glory of our system is that the indivisible political unit of our system is the individual. And even though the right to pursue happiness is a collective, is best realized in community, the right to get it is an individual right. And we now live in an era where it used to be when the left embraced youth, oh you don't understand they're so passionate they're right and it's like oh by definition young people are more ignorant than old people when i used to beat up on the left for their cult of youth stuff i got lots of praise for it i now see a cult of youth thing on the right oh well you don't understand fuentes has a lot of followers and i was like you know anti-semitism is very yeah he knows what time yes and like the idea that because a larger number people of anti-semitic i have to give more room to anti-semitism i i don't get the moral logic of it at all which brings me back to this your pagan point about power is that it's it's it's power worship it's feelings it's passions and it's it's not a principled argument of any kind as far as i can tell well that's what i want to get people back to making and appreciating and trying to actually live on the basis of principled arguments you know seeking truth and speaking truth On populism, John, there may be forms of populism that do not fall into the vices that you're talking about, that don't simply end up being an angry mob. You probably knew and remember my late friend Jeff Bell. Do you remember Jeffrey Bell? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. in the early 1990s wrote a really interesting book it got very little attention but somebody's going to rediscover it because it's so relevant to us today called populism and elitism do you remember the book i do probably know because you got so little attention at the at the time and jeff there outlined a populism that kind of anticipated the tea party populism i interpret tea party populism and i i like you i spoke at some tea party events and always appreciated in enjoyed the people, and they were good people. I didn't perceive it as fundamentally ideologically libertarian. I perceived it as committed to the ancient faith, to constitutional principles, including quite centrally the principle of limited government, which I think gave it its libertarian sort of dimension. But it was fundamentally about the Constitution. They would bring copies of the Constitution. They would read from the Constitution. When I was invited to lecture at their picnics. It was about the Constitution. I had that hat on rather than my philosopher hat on. And I think that's what Jeff had in mind, that ultimately, the preservers and protectors of the Constitution are not the elites. They're not the professors. They're not the journalists who fancy themselves, right? We are the people who, in the end, defend the Constitution against the mob. I think Jeff's basic insight and hope was that it would be a populist movement, the American people themselves being the protectors of their own constitutional principles and their own constitutional liberties. And I think that the Tea Party was an aspiration to do that. It got eclipsed by what came afterward, and it's a very different populism today and far less commendable. I think that's fair. I mean, all poisons are determined by the dose guy. you know i have big problems with people who call themselves nationalists but but a little nationalism i mean i think roger scrutin was right the analogy i always use is it's like salt right it's like a pinch of salt brings all the flavors out and ties the dish together a little too much salt kind of ruins it and way too much salt is like essentially lethal inedible i i find the same thing about, um, populism, a little populism in service to the, an idea is valuable. Populism becomes self, self-worshipping very quickly. You know, what is it in Robert Penn Warren's all your King, all the King's men? Uh, the guy says, uh, your need is my justice, right? Or my, one of my favorite quotes is from, um, William Jennings Bryan, where he says the people of Nebraska are for free silver. Therefore, I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later. I like arguments. I think democracy is about arguments. I think the liberal arts are about arguments. I think liberalism properly understood is about arguments because it countenances the possibility that people of good faith are going to disagree on things. And we live in a pluralistic society. Populism is really hard on the idea. It really has a hard time processing dissent. And I think that that's the problem. It's that it's not that populism is always wrong. It's a too much of it makes you drunk and the right because of social media, because of the way you can monetize it, all these kinds of things. It has gotten drunk on populism and it's lost its appetite for making arguments. You know what else is basically arguments? I learned this from the great philosopher Alastair McIntyre. Traditions. traditions or ongoing arguments like, you know, the Jewish tradition, the Catholic intellectual tradition. If you look at these things, they're arguments. It's the rabbis arguing with each other. You know, it's the scholastics arguing, arguing with each other. It's an ongoing structured set of arguments. Jonah, it's been wonderful to be along with you again. I know I've abused your time. I just, there's no, no, no. You're giving me an opportunity to rant. But anyway, thank you so much for doing this. It's always a pleasure. You have an open invitation to come back anytime. And listeners, I should remind you, the book is called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. Robbie George, thanks for being here. Thank you, Jonah. See you next time. Okay, Robbie George has left the studio. I want to apologize to Robbie. I want to apologize to listeners. It was probably too self-indulgent here. Part of the reason was, like we literally have had this on the books. on the calendar and, and messed up two, three times now, no need to get into all of it. Part of it was I had to reschedule at one point. And then we had a mix up on the calendar thing. And I did all my homework for this two months ago. And, um, lots of happened in like the last two months. And so I feel bad that we didn't talk enough about the book, which really is a wonderful piece of work and is covers a broad swath of really interesting things and is worth diving into and i will be maybe on the solo i'll talk about it more i hope it doesn't come across too obviously that i was sort of flailing around um a little bit but and robbie definitely deserves more and uh you really should if you're interested in natural law and serious philosophical engagement i highly recommend um robbie's book and then also i just you know it's so rare i find somebody who wildly outranks me among eggheads and among influencers on the right who actually agrees with me about so much that I probably sort of talk, as they say on CNBC, I talk my book too much. I really liked his last point about traditions also being arguments, which I think, you know, attributed to McIntyre. I think he could also, it's a very Chestertonian point. G.K. Chesterton, you know like to describe tradition as democracy for the dead i've always kind of believed in that and it's not that you know in a democracy you get a vote you don't get a you don't automatically win but you have a say i think in tradition the past has a say you need something that tethers you as a society grounds you um that explains your cultural and psychological and political muscle memory in ways that are accessible to a large number of people. And tradition is one of those things. It doesn't mean tradition is always right, but I think tradition always, because sometimes traditions are wrong and need to be overthrown, but tradition should always be listened to. And one of the things about, and Robbie is absolutely right, tradition itself is an argument. Maybe I'll talk more about that on the solo. Anyway, thanks to Robbie George. Thank you guys for listening and um i'll see you next time no you won't this is a podcast