Strong Gods: The End of the Long 20th Century

Are the "strong gods" returning to American life — and what does that mean for politics, Christianity, and civilization?

In this episode of Project Cosmos, host Johnny Burtka is joined by a distinguished panel of scholars to discuss NS Lyons' essay on the long 20th century and the Return of the Strong Gods — building on Rusty Reno's influential work. 

Guests:
Tom West — Paul Ermine Potter and Dawn Tibbetts Potter Endowed Professor of Politics
Khalil Habib — Allison and Dorothy Rouse Professor in Politics, Associate Professor of Politics
Miles Smith IV — Assistant Professor of History
Daniel O'Toole — Assistant Professor of Politics
Rich Bacigalupi — Director, Deany's Days Foundation

Timestamps:
0:00 – Introduction: NS Lyons & the Return of the Strong Gods
0:19 – Why the left calls conservatives "fascists"
3:58 – Malcolm X, identity, and strong gods on the left
8:08 – The structure of progressive movements: weak gods as the ideal
26:43 – Is traditional Christianity making a comeback?
43:09 – Two versions of Christianity & the immigration debate
1:08:37 – AI, Silicon Valley & the political realignment
1:09:24 – AI as a threat to elections and public opinion
1:31:19 – Can the republic be saved? The role of the statesman

Project Cosmos is a production of ISI — the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Visit isi.org to learn more about our educational programs on Western and American civilization.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

So Richard and I were reading this essay by N. S. Lyons on the long 20th century and the return of the strong gods. And you had this interesting insight about how the left sort of worships the weak gods and that changes their perspective on the people that are worshiping the strong gods. Yeah, I like that.

SPEAKER_05 0:19

Yeah. I've noticed in the last couple of years, in particular, when you disagree with anybody who's particularly passionate about their position, that they tend to be more on the left, the knee-jerk reaction is to call you a fascist. And I had to think about that, and I was thinking in the beginning, maybe they're just throwing a bad name out. Like, hey, let's just call him the worst word I can think of, and have him then defend himself and why he's not a fascist. However, after reading uh the essay, the Lion's uh perspective on the strong gods and the weak gods, what I started realizing there's a possible answer, which is um more the progressive left side, if you follow the pathway toward worshiping the weak gods, which can be um more statism, more understanding, more dialogue, trying to understand and not really take a strong position on something, if you stand for something that might be more definite than that, you can see a fascist enterprise. As where someone wasn't just tossing a bad name out, they were actually just saying, you sound fascist to me because you don't believe in what I believe to be normal. And I found that to be fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 1:29

The thick attachments, the rootedness, the sense of place and people.

SPEAKER_05 1:33

Because if if you are, and I I come from the West Coast, Pacific Northwest, if if where where large communities are supporting DEI, they are supporting um the changes we're seeing in Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, if someone stands up and says, no, this isn't what America's about, um labels aren't good. People are created equal. If you start taking apart their argument that you hear, you can sound to them as an authoritarian. Whereas our side, my perspective, my perspective, would say, no, I'm being rational. People are equal. In today's world, personally, I believe there's space for all. When the discussion comes out to moving beyond the space for all into programmizing education to particularly maybe manipulate young minds, if you bring that up, that triggers the response. Because again, we're looking at it saying, yes, okay, this is the 21st century. People have the freedom to do what they want to do. Our laws are set that way, the Supreme Court has ruled on these issues. If you then dive deeper into where it can it's being programmized, you then become just as evil as the person who was saying we can't have these topics before they become normalized. It's it's it I see it quite a bit, and and that in that area in particular.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

I wonder about this idea of like fascism being something that's kind of leveled at conservatives. I'm from the Southeast, and my senator for most of my upbringing was Jesse Helms. And so I think that in some ways uh places like North Carolina, I think you can see it in the Midwest too. There's a thick, there's a thickness there, like a cultural social thickness that people are kind of it's it's not that it's innovative. I think we've kind of bought the lie that everywhere was neoliberal or classical liberal or something. I just don't think that's true. I think people are so almost it's almost a reclamation rather than innovation properly. And there are places that kind of haven't caught the reclamation yet. Maybe that's the West Coast, maybe that's you know, the urban northeast, wherever. But it's really more of a reclamation than innovation. The strong gods have always been there.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

Do you think the left gods are they actually weak, though? Like if you think of you know the riots, the summer of 2020, you know, burning down a significant portion of the country. Are those strong gods? Like if you look at Malcolm X is he worshipping strong gods, or is this weak gods?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Malcolm's worshiping strong gods. Like I think it's interesting.

SPEAKER_06 4:10

Wait, what are the strong gods?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

I think Malcolm X has a real sense of like racial identity, right? So like people, place, matter, matter to him. Now we I think we can do association, he's he's left-coded to us because he's African-American, but there's a famous, famous interaction he has with Russell Kirk, and they both kind of end up realizing, oh, we're kind of the same. He's just black and I'm just white. And so I think that in some ways, like Malcolm X doesn't code very differently from the the modern new right. He knows who his people are, he wants to defend them. He has a sense of who his people are, their cultural, their racial kind of kind of identity. So I think that we've accepted the idea that, well, because he's black, he has to go to the left. And I mean, would a lot of what we think of as black nationalism be properly leftist action?

SPEAKER_06 5:04

Yeah. I mean, I'm not disagreeing, and I don't know Malcolm X very well, but I do wonder whether the principal thing that moves types like him is it the identity that they want to preserve and they love, or is it opposition to the dominant class, let's say white, uh middle class males in particular? And is it the sense that that those people have benefited historically from injustice and we need to write the scales of justice now? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

I think leaving, if you can, I think we could if we could leave aside for a moment the Malcolm X case, which might be a bit of an exception, what Lyons, I think, is getting at is when he says the the return of the strong gods and following Rusty Reno's book, he means that uh in the face of the all the propaganda in favor of the open society uh of DEI, of compassion, of getting accepting alternative lifestyles, uh you know, accepting, essentially accepting the left in every way. Um that's been challenged. And and I, you know, uh Lyons mentions in particular Trump's uh closing of the border. He mentioned Trump's assault on DEI uh new in the new administration, and his attempt to get the bureaucracy to re to report to him directly. Uh these are three things that have that really run counter to the way in which uh the kind of consensus that has dominated our elites since World War II. So that's that's the claim in the book. And you know, whether that's true or not, I mean I think there's uh you know there there's something to it for sure. Uh what I think, however, is also true is that although in a way the open society ideal represents what uh Lorino calls weak gods, the weak gods of you know acceptance, restraint, compassion, non-judgmentalism. On the other side, of course, as you were as you discovered, no, you they're gonna come after you.

SPEAKER_03 7:16

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SPEAKER_06 7:31

Re-educational or else.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Yeah, that's guys like young men like lions. I think he's he's just like finally we get to say. These guys are bad. You should shut, you should all you know, stop attacking us for just trying to be regular people and having a country of our own.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

So, given the spiritedness of that position, the weaker gods, why why would you call that, or why would Reno call that the weak God when it seems like it's got spiritedness and real organization behind it? So I'm not as familiar with these terms.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

I think what he what what uh the reason why there's a there's a something of a paradox here is because going all the way back to the French Revolution, Robespierre, going back to Marx, going, and then we see it in contemporary liberalism, they always have this, this, these movements always have the same structure. In the end, you're gonna get complete liberty, you're gonna get to do whatever you want, to say whatever you want, live however you like. In the meantime, we're gonna crush any opposition with uh with whatever violence it takes and bring about this grand new order. So the weak gods are the ideal, the ideal that we're worshiping in the long run. In the short run, we've got to be tough. You know, yeah, that's riots. That's part of it. Got to break it.

SPEAKER_06 8:53

So you can say the goal is total liberation. And uh that means liberation from the effects of historical discrimination, the fact that some groups have benefited uh and others haven't, maybe through exploitation or oppression. Uh uh liberation from the unfortunate uh realities of biology, the fact that some people are gifted and others aren't. That's the promise. And I think it's with you, Tom, that that has consistently, in some sense, been the goal. It's always out there, it's always the hope. But I think this psychological thing happens. I think it's very common for people. What really matters is the opposition that stands in the way of the hope-for vision. And I think, you know, as the left has gone on, thinking about the utopia, the goal, that's mattered less and less. It's gonna take it vaguely out there. I'm not saying it's unimportant, but what's really important are the people standing in the way. They need to be crushed. And uh with the strong gods, weak gods, I think that's clear. You read these, Karl Popper, I was just reading for class, uh, who's who's uh, you know, the the the the defender of the open society and the Anglo world and gives us the term. Uh it really makes it clear for the do you have a to have a real open society? You can't have people who are truly committed to the closed society. And that, you know, and it's it's viewed in a kind of condescending way. Like in our infancy, we need community, we need a clear place, we need a clear leader, it's comforting, it resolves questions for us. Uh but people who are mature are rational and open to other ways of life. But in reality, that's not open to deep, serious commitments, which of course are necessarily opposed to each other and want to dominate. It has to be really commitment to suppressing those. And so the so the so just to be clear about this, the open society means suppression of or shutting down the closed society and commitment to it.

SPEAKER_03 11:00

No, okay, what about so let's say we go back to Christianity. Or you go back to the tower of one of them. Right. Okay, the nations are scattered, right? But then with the incarnation and you know the the founding of the church, right, there is a um there is an opening, right, where sort of all men are united, sort of they're brought into a kingdom, a kingdom of God, right? And then obviously that was sort of uh sort of assumed within the Roman Empire. So I'm curious, where does this idea of the is the open society that we disdain, is that because it's a perversion or a heresy of the Christian version of the open society? Or is this or is there a different origin of the open, or is Christianity not an open society at all?

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Well, I think I think that part of it is that we we're downstream from the 20th century, which is perhaps most the most clericalist century in history. What do you mean by clerical? I mean, like we we assume churchly authority in a much bigger way than anybody really between you know 1900 and maybe 1500 did. I mean, I think about the phrase, if you talk to about French Catholics, we use the phrase the Gallican Church. So there's a particularization, even Catholic churches, right? The Gallican Church, right, uh the Iberian Church. And so I think that what we've done is we've said, well, everything has to be universalized. And so anything that's not a universal is is pretty much somehow bad. Well, actually, like nations have lives, and religious expressions within those nations have have lives, right? Um no matter what type of Christian you are, uh type of Christian in the United States worships differently than in Japan or in Australia or in Saudi Arabia, wherever you want to point it, put it. So what we've done is we've sort of said, well, Christianity has this kind of universalizing effect. Maybe there's a moral system that's universalized there, but not necessarily a political or social one.

unknown 13:01

Right?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Christianity doesn't annihilate different people groups. And we've bought that, which is I think a 20th-century aberration of what Christianity is. Um like Christianity doesn't annihilate the family, Christianity doesn't annihilate political or even national association. And so the assumption that it does, I think, is an overrealization of a particular 20th-century polemic that's been adopted by most major communions, Protestants, Orthodox, Catholics, have all sort of drank from this well. But I don't know if that's actually what his Christian, what history, uh, what the history of Christianity does.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

I don't think Christianity really plays that role. I mean, on Aristotle's politics book two, which predates Christianity, talks about the fanaticism of theoretical revolutions. Um, there's a tendency when philosophy gets mixed with politics, that it becomes ideological, completely divorced from reality. And there's a desire to want to end the suffering and perceived injustices by redesigning society. And Aristotle warns about that, including imputing his own teacher, uh, somewhat, I think, a mischaracterization of Plato. But the point is it's just intentionally so uh yeah, I know he's aware, but um, but that's that's the best proof that there's something inherent in politics that attracts intellectuals who want to rectify political ills without understanding that politics is inherently just fraught with tensions and conflicts. Um, and Christianity was a uh stumbling block for the French Revolution. Um and and and that and to the extent that we're no revolution now, the obvious attack of Christianity indicates that Christianity doesn't uh accelerate it or is in any way, shape, or form contributing to it. It's identified by these revolutionaries as something to overcome.

SPEAKER_03 14:58

That was a sense of false universals, right?

SPEAKER_06 15:02

False universals that are in in the Christian view of the family and sex in particular is a problem for the open society liberals.

SPEAKER_04 15:10

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_06 15:11

Because that it teaches you there there are sex differences, different roles in the family, and uh and a more restrained sexual morality that's uh that's not permissive.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

And so Christianity creates lines, it actually doesn't obliterate them. And I think that's that's the 20th century sort of liberalism says, well, Christianity obliterates lines. Actually, Christianity creates lines.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Yeah, that's I mean the point of both both Reno and Lyons uh when they're talking about strong gods, they both mention Christianity. That's one of the strong gods that's coming back. That is the idea is that in public life for a long time, Christianity has been something you're not supposed to talk about, or you're maybe criticized.

SPEAKER_05 15:53

He makes a distinction on traditional Christianity. And that's implied, of course. If we look at what's been happening over the last 50 or 60 years in the, I would say more the Protestant side of the churches, and argue for Catholicism too, um, the churches have become more and more progressive. Their congregations have gotten older, which would lean toward the generation after World War II, but the younger generations are flocking to the evangelical, more conservative, more traditional, you could say quote unquote, Christianity, and where there isn't so much ambiguity in the teachings. And we're seeing that particularly in the last year. You're seeing the rallies on the campus, you're seeing there was a story on the news last week how a fraternity in North Carolina, I believe, forwent a party and had a Bible study. And it was one of the most popular events on campus, and other ones wanted to account. When in the world has that happened in our way at the time. So the the traditional Christian, we can't say Christianity uncover at all. It has I think there's a distinction between traditional Christianity and I don't know what the name would be, but the Christianity of the latter 20th century, which removes God from the picture and the other world in front of us.

SPEAKER_06 17:07

Yeah, right. I mean, so world teaching. Yeah, so we can have heaven on earth.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

So that's an all of me in the afterlife, things like that, otherwise existing.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

What's interesting is that that that type of Christianity that we're talking about, which is essentially some sort of like liberal stooge version of Christianity, is also deeply American. Right? So actually, the most transcendent part of Christianity is what allows for lines to be drawn, right, in sex and gender and even nations, political association. That's actually the oldest part of it. The new, the the Christianity that's most deeply American, as it were, um, 20th century American, is the leveling, everything has to be the same, androgynous Christianity. And those are the Was that around in 19th century American Christianity? I think it starts at the end of the night the 19th century. I think this is what leads to someone like Woodrow Wilson. Um, but I don't think it's in Christianity in the 19th century at all. I mean, there's a real sense of that Christianity creates a system to understand the things that are the hard things, so families, the things you can touch, right? Not these merely universal ideals. Um and so in that sense, I think Christianity is a preserver of the strong gods. There's almost this idea that Christianity is is is it fights the strong gods, right? Because Christianity is nice. And you think about all the the sort of polemics you hear about Jesus and kindness and whatnot. Actually, I don't know, Jesus was a pretty hardcore guy in a certain sense, right? Like he has a real sense of what it is to follow tradition, right? He has a real sense of law, right? Jesus talks about law in this really serious way, and laws draw lines. And so I think that to make Christianity a leveling force is to be actually doing 20th-century liberalism starring as Christianity starring as 20th century liberalism, and not Christianity historically.

SPEAKER_06 19:10

I mean, I would grant that Christianity is probably part of the story of this development. That's not to blame Christianity, but it is to say that the consciousness of the brotherhood of man, the universal brotherhood of man, um the universalist uh tendencies and some of the egalitarian tendencies in the modern mind, Christianity amplifies or brings out. I mean, it Cleel's right. That's already there. It's a potential show now. It's a bingo. It's a tendency that democracy can have to try to level, to get rid of um moral authorities and hierarchies and so forth, some Plato brings it out and Aristophanes and so forth. And you could say modern philosophy then uh is another important part of the story. But but you sometimes the way people portray this as a kind of development that is the secularization of Christianity. And uh I think what that misses, but we've kind of brought this out already, is the opposition uh between leading thinkers of the the left or its antecedents, some Enlightenment thinkers directly opposing Christianity and uh um and and you know promising human liberation.

SPEAKER_05 20:32

Well, I think there's the part of it, which we were having a discussion here just the other night. Um there's the the focus these days in the last 50 or 60 years, maybe even 100 years, has been on the forgiveness. It's been on the redemption. But very often you don't hear the second sentence, which is now go forward and sin no more. That part keeps getting forgotten. It's not told anymore. So when when the churches that we go today, and we we see quite a number of these, it's accept everybody, which is the teaching you should be open, don't judge, and so forth, is what we're taught. But then when you accept someone, and it's very clear in the New Testament, people come in, and Jesus forgives them, and then he sends them back out in the world to live a life on a new path with instruction around it. And we're not given that in our churches today, except for the ones which are getting very large numbers of people wanting that kind of instruction, some kind of moral authority in their life, because that moral authority has left.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Yeah. Well, I also think that to the degree that forgiveness gets typed as a political value is probably problematic. So I was talking about this today with students. We were talking about Andrew Jackson, not a particularly forgiving guy. Um there's something actually admirable admirable about this, because think about think about like we talk about forgiveness and meaning long suffering, all those things. Well, what happens when you're House has broken into. Like, do you do you talk to the burglars and make, hey guys, I just want to forgive you right now for breaking in to the house? It's all okay. No, you don't do that. And so what we've done is we've sort of taken these spiritual, these churchly values, and we've actually created a new theocracy wherein the political realm has to be subordinated to a churchly value. So that's which is deeply antithetical to the entire Christianity. You think even then back in the sixth century, right? Emperor uh Anastasius and the Pope Galatius are writing, like, here's your lane, here's my lane. And so I think in as much as we've we've kind of created a new, almost kind of liberal theocracy where we say, okay, well, you have to do these churchly values like love thy neighbor as thyself, which means no borders.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

That's not what that means. I think Miles is right to bring up the uh the early Christian understanding that church and state have two different lanes. And I think that's the key to understanding how Christianity can be both a universal religion and be one of the gods that's supported by Reno and by Lyons. In particular, I'd say uh Christianity is uh as it's has been understood in uh for hundreds of years by by many theologians, of whom I approve, all of them. Politics has its own realm, and uh and it's you know it's it's an in it's an independent realm. It's it's based on the reasons, based on natural law. It's based on no people figuring out what's good for human life, and that's why Christians can read Aristotle or Plato or Cicero and say, hey, they those people got politics right. And and knowing that distinction between the Christian message of salvation and the Christian message of moral teaching, which goes back to the pre-Christian, uh, is what enables politics to stand on its own two feet and not have to be subordinated to religious authority. And I think there uh the integrity of the of the political authority is is one of the key points that uh Lyons is trying to bring back. The strong God, and he mentions the border. You can't if you can't have a country of your own, you can't have politics.

SPEAKER_06 24:23

But I think there is a dangerous tendency uh among Christians, whether this is true to Christianity or not, uh, to deny politics its proper sphere. Uh how many Christian organizations, and this isn't a sectarian point, Catholic, Lutheran, what have you, are involved in human trafficking in America, because they take fighting immigration as one of the important moral purposes uh that the church must stand for. And I mean, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

I I wonder if um, it's it's theocracy. What they've done is they've basically said that the church gets to set the terms of political association.

SPEAKER_06 25:03

The mor the moral terms for political life and association. Can I just say this? I just think it's Machiavelli's nasty line. I don't know if this is fair or not, but he's you know, he's talking about when the Dominicans and the Franciscans uh bring Christianity back to its origin. So it's uh reforming it, but making it true. What they taught men to say is it's evil to speak evil of evil. And I have to say, I see that in a lot of Christians, especially a lot of learned Christians uh in our world.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

It's evil to speak evil of evil. Yeah. Yeah. That's the motto of the open society. Yeah, exactly. And the weak gods uh that that we're up against right now.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

Well, I think think like the idea, for example, that the church can determine who is a part of a polity or not is deeply antithetical. Like when Jesus says something like, render unto Caesar, like Caesar gets to decide who's a part of the Roman Empire, who's a citizen of the Roman Empire, and who who isn't. And that strikes so many, to your point, conservative Christians as deeply iniquitous. So wait, wait, are you saying that the church doesn't get to decide that thing? And the answer is actually yes. We like we are saying that. Like the state is actually who determines who is a part of this polity and who isn't. And for so many conservative Christians, that they they've they've right, we live in a time where Christianity is under attack. So the reflex is to say, well, actually, shouldn't we give the church that?

SPEAKER_06 26:34

Yeah. And we can hide out and do our own thing, and politics ultimately doesn't matter. We're gonna be okay in the in the end.

unknown 26:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 26:43

But it's actually the state's problems, not that.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Go ahead. Um I was I was gonna just raise the question of uh given this dispute between two versions of Christianity that we're talking about, uh is Lyons right that there is that the more the older kind of Christianity is making a comeback. Now we we know in some ways, yes, uh your report is is true. On the other hand, what I see in the society as a whole remains, you know, the old the old life is still in charge. And more broadly, you know, in terms of the things that that Lyons uh is you know mentions as examples of the open society, you know, open borders, DEI everywhere, bureaucratization. I can see, yes, I can see that Trump's made some headway. I can see how little headway Trump has made. I I can see that, yes, among younger people, there's definitely a kind of renaissance of really tough thinking on the right. Yeah, far more than any time in my lifetime. Young people in my lifetime were basically uh Mitt Romney conservatives. And today, yeah, there's a lot of that, but there's also a lot of people who think Mitt Romney's pretty pretty soft. Uh or maybe even not our friend. Yeah. As opposed to Trump, uh J.D. Vance and people like that. So yeah, we've made headlock. Is is it really right to uh to say we have a return of the strong gods, or is is that really a wild exaggeration? I think that'll take time.

SPEAKER_05 28:22

When there's a change, a tideshift, which could potentially be happening. We won't know that we're five or ten years down the road. But what we're seeing are such amazing examples of this. And I'll say this with all due respect to an absolutely horrible situation. The terrible most terrible thing that I think I might have experienced was when Charlie Kirk was shot. And the just within a week or a week and a half, when when Erica came on national worldwide TV and forgave the shooter from a Christian perspective. That hasn't happened in my lifetime, something of that impact. But she also left the justice to the state. And said, you know, I think an argument could have been made in the past was you forgave, but now why must there be a death penalty? That wasn't even on the table here. It was forgave. Because her job, as she saw it, and her belief was to forgive, and to go through that discussion was to change the world, I believe. And then put the ball in the court of the government, and then through its I could say reliance on strong gods in this case dealing justly with a horrific crime go forward. This is new. This is new, this hasn't happened, I believe, in in the recent times since since we're discussing since World War II.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

I think this is to Dan's point. You imagine like Christians get so far into like we need to put politics over here. Christians have worried so much about what the what the church is. They have not spent much time at all thinking about what the state is. I think that maybe to your point, Tom, and one of these small, small things that happenings that's happening is that Christians are thinking more seriously about what is the state, and Christians are trying to figure out they're doing political theology again, and these are small small small steps for sure. And I don't know how cons how how far they'll go out, but people are asking about what the state is again, and I think that's been kind of an alien disposition for Christians. We've been, right, libertarianism has been so powerful that we've actually tried to escape what the state was for a long time.

SPEAKER_03 30:39

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Miles, you're we're working on a book on kind of the military and Christianity in the 19th century. Could you sort of unpack what specifically kind of that relationship looked like?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah, well, I think what I what I came to grips with is that Christians in our own time, we really think that we need to go ask permission from the church for things like self-defense and for political action. Because how how man how many people sort of, I mean, to to the example, think about the conservative Catholic kid who's like, I think the border's real, and I actually think that there should be limitations on immigration, whatnot. I lived a lot of my life in Texas, my grandma's from El Paso. And so, like, what does it mean to be living in a border community and thinking, well, I don't know, I think we need to govern the border. I think there needs to be set limitations, while the ecclesiastical hierarchy is saying, actually, no, like these people need to be particularly included, like completely included in our ecclesiastical life, and we're gonna have programs. I don't know if they I don't know the Catholic Church very as well as I should, but like, are they hiding, you know, are they are they harboring illegal immigrants? And so that's actually a pretty important question because it actually gets to to this broader question. Who sets the terms for political association in El Paso, Texas? Is it the United States? Is it the governor of the state of Texas or is it the bishop in El Paso? Because that's a really important question for a Catholic who's trying to figure out what do you what do I do? Right? I think that there needs to be a hard border and that we need to regulate who comes in the United States. I don't think that's an iniquitous proposition.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

No, and that goes back to the very idea of uh political society as closed society. So one of the points that uh you know that I think needs to be mentioned in this context, the ideal of the open society is it is inherently anti-political.

SPEAKER_03 32:45

Was the Roman society an open society or Roman Empire?

SPEAKER_00 32:50

It was a closed society for a long time, and then it became increasingly an open society, and then you saw what happened.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

It was an open society for their acquisitions, both the nation society.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

But but I think you know, it's close, closed society means power means political society. It means you have a government that is just for this people. It means you have a social compact if you're a founding father, it's you know, that is made by Americans for Americans. You have uh laws that do not apply to Libya or Panavan. Although today we tend to think, you know, our laws apply to everybody in the world. And that wasn't the original understanding of what political society meant. When you do away with the idea of closed society and political society being the same, then you can't tell the difference between uh domestic politics, foreign politics, America, the world. And so when you have people like Robert Kagan saying the United States sphere of influence is now the entire world. Meaning we have a right to govern the entire world. Uh which means there's no longer politics there. There's just essentially the world state uh which is presided over by the elite bureaucrats, like his wife, Victoria Newland.

SPEAKER_06 34:09

Yeah, there are no meaningful questions, there are no meaningful divisions between people, and so they can all coexist and need rational management.

SPEAKER_02 34:23

Just to go back to one of the points that Miles made, um, within the Catholic tradition, there is a recognition of a I mean, I'll use the phrase that Tom's been using, um, you know, a closed society. I mean, there's an autonomy in politics that Aquinas recognizes, uh, Pope Leo XIII, St. Pius X, Rerum, all of that. Rerum. I've given passages uh of rare to students and asked them who wrote this. They think it's John Locke. He's talking about the right to private property. The government's role is to protect those rights. And I'm like, no, that's actually uh Leo XIII.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Well, and I think the 19th century Catholic hierarchy would sound completely anti-internist to the late 20th century.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

It's what Thomas said earlier. I mean, there's a recognition that I like the way you put it, the open society means the end of politics. But the Catholic tradition always recognized politics as a viable realm. In fact, it derives from God. Uh political authority derives from God. But that doesn't mean the church interferes. There's a space, a lane that's created. Um, but then there's a lot of confusion around that because now you live in an age where people have sound bites and sort of opinions about what the internet, what the church says or means. But um, like for example, I uh Cardinal Sarah uh is very uh uh against just open borders and immigration, and he's been on record multiple times talking about how Europe has destroyed itself because of these policies and that there has to be a recognition of national sovereignty. And he sees it, right? Doesn't he have actual reasons on the ground to see how this works? It does, but my point is he's deriving that from Catholic doctrine. It's it's not a it might be his opinion, but it's consistent with the But I think this is important.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Like there's nothing dogmatic for Catholics about open borders. Like, like there's like no Catholic should wake up and be like, I have to be an open borders person because I'm a Catholic. But I think there's this idea to be a good Catholic in a border community. I have to basically sort of receive any person who claims a sort of uh you know ecclesiastical, social, political.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

The only recent thing I've heard was uh the current Pope Leo XIV, and I can't speak for him, and again, he's so new, I'm still trying to sort of figure out where he lies on certain issues. His emphasis is to see the human first, that he's calling on Catholics to do that. That doesn't mean the Catholic tradition would be okay with violating a nation's laws. In fact, it's just the opposite.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

But is so here's the question Is are there things downstream from saying see the human first? Because when we say something like see the human first, do we actually say, well, they're human? And so ultimately that ends up transcending something like borders. And I don't think that's the natur, I don't think that's a natural conclusion, but I think it happens a lot, right? Like we get to the point, and it's not just Catholics, it's it's it's it's it's centrist and left with the city.

SPEAKER_02 37:21

It doesn't have to do with theology. I mean, there's secular philosophies that want to see a human first, and then before you know it, you're back to the the open society. But what I'm trying to say is that as as far as Catholic dogma goes, there's a there's a recognition of national sovereignty. I mean, it's it's a lower Aquinas, Victoria. Uh and like I said, many of the papal encyclicals. Now, is there is it tension free? No. Yeah. Uh but um but I just wanted to clarify that as yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

I don't think there's anything dogmatic for any kind of Christian communion about the obliteration of national sovereignty. But I think we're so many traditions, Catholic, Protestant, you name it, have gotten cooked into sort of, I mean, post post-World War II kind of internationalism, where the idea of maintaining a border, this the idea, think about how iniquitous it sounds to so many Christian Christians.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

That's Caldwell's book, about the reflection of the case.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

Chris Caldwell, yeah, Europe, the revolutionary in Europe. I recognize you have the Imago Day, but you cannot live here. Like that in itself is for so many people in the United States, it is a nearly immoral proposition. So I I I guess I'm getting hung up here.

SPEAKER_03 38:39

So I feel like um if you're I mean, if you're thinking about you know mass Muslim migration, like clearly like there's an imperative to restrict that because that would you know overwhelm, undermine kind of the foundations of a Western Christian society. But I think if you're looking back at, let's say, the Catholic Church up until the point of um you know the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of universal Christian empire with boundaries, right? Sort of between the civilized world and the barbarians, there was an understanding that it was an open society, um, but in the sense of open being Christian. It was a multi-ethnic society, but it was a Christian society, and they were there were borders, but the boundaries were there are certain groups that are beyond kind of civilization. And so I don't know. I guess I have a to me, there are certain claims. Theology in the Christian religion does make certain claims about the image of God on the human person, particularly on Christians, that could potentially supersede the national interests of a particular polity. But I but I think it's a different situation. You know, I would say, as a matter of prudence, even if the the most of the migration from Latin America is Catholic of a sense, clearly it is imprudent. It undermines the common good of the people of the United States. And I think we need to stop it. Similarly in Europe, but I I to me it seems like there is a uh there is a real possibility of um a sort of Christian kind of uh fraternity that that does demand certain obligations on a nation, you know, and actually perhaps might even shape a national interest.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

Well, I think you know, I think one of the reasons why Christianity has uh uh has shaped been shaped the way it has over the many years uh that it's been with us is because uh Christians, uh like everybody else read books, and they read books by philosophers and and and people have ideas and thinkers. What you find within the Christian tradition for that reason, in part, is uh debates that mirror or reflect debates that take place also among secular philosophers. And so, for example, this debate uh should there be a single dominant way of life that the whole world should adopt? Or can there be separate countries with separate ways of life? Sure, that was a big question, that was a big issue, very practical issue, leading up to the 30 Years' War, the Treaty of West Failure. Sure. You had earlier Catholics like Aquinas who for whom uh that attitude, the attitude, the post-West failing attitude for Aquinas was like second nature. That was the way he thought. Like politics, you know, war is justified when there's an attack. And that's what it's for. It's for defense. It's not to go out and uh Muslims and make them all submit to the sword and become Christians. Uh that was that was some people some Christians thought that way. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_03 41:58

But I think I think that perspective makes sense. Your perspective that you're outlining in Aquinas, I think that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

But I think that like you think about how capacious of a place that Aquinas gives in on kingship for monarchs to act. I don't see, because I grant what you're saying, especially this idea of Christendom, is real, but I think that Aquinas doesn't see a world in which, I mean, so he's writing in the 13th century, I think of Philip Augustus and the kings of England, Philip, France, they know I'm a French king and they're English. And so even there, there's not a principle of nationality per se, but there's something that draws a line that says you're a them and we're an us. And even though we're both Christians, we reckon that we recognize the them-ness and the us-ness of our respective polities. And I don't think Aquinas obliterates that.

SPEAKER_03 42:52

Yeah. Well, I mean, the whole point of incarnation, it's like you have, you know, the eternal logos and be but he becomes incarnate in a particular form. And so, yeah, the whole world and I it ideally would enter into the kingdom of God, but the particularity would not be abolished because that's the whole beauty of Christianity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Trevor Burrus, Jr. One of the striking things to me about our conversation is how how particular we become about specific about what the meaning of Christianity is. In the Reno presentation, his book, and in the and in The Lion's Commentary, they both uh are very studious, they studiously avoid getting too specific. In fact, there's even a kind of abstract quality to their arguments. We need strong gods, but they don't actually tell us what those strong gods are. Which strong gods. Yes, yes. That's right.

SPEAKER_06 43:39

Why do you think they do this? Either the real god or reason has to tell you which strong gods are. But wait, hold on.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

We're gonna No, I'm I'm saying that that uh they probably yes, I think they had a good reason for they thought of why they didn't want to do that and they let it down. They're playing it safe, they're right now playing it safe in the sense of let's fuck. Focus in on the left. Yeah. What we would call the left, what they call the open society propaganda, which is focus in on their content, their on their way of life, what they've imposed upon us, and what's bad about that and how we can do better.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

Now, earlier you had mentioned when I when I asked about the question why the strange strong odds and weak odds, although they're getting reasons, was that the reason that you were thinking of?

SPEAKER_00 44:25

Well, I've I've I like I liked the I think the metaphor is very useful for uh for us because uh it helps to bring out uh not so much the means but the ends. Uh Dan was pointing out earlier, you know, the the promise ultimately is, you know, we're gonna do away with all level with all discrimination, all order of rank, all moral standards, all religion. That was that's the promise of the open society. And by by by negating all of that, uh Lyons is able to say, uh, we don't want that. And so anyone who has a political point of view, even though they might disagree among themselves, will recognize, yes, we don't want that. In a way, what Lyons is saying is we want to return to a world of politics where we can have that fight again about what is the good instead of pretending, hiding behind this leveling uh tendency and pretending that it's all neutral, right? It's just neutral administration.

SPEAKER_06 45:25

Yeah. I want to um uh uh amplify that point and then raise a uh a question. Um, and partly connected to what you were saying earlier, Tom. Uh it seems to be the open society, to get clear about it, it means waging war on the closed society, uh, or it means waging war on politics, a war to end all wars. Uh, and it is especially militant in that regard. And to be very clear about this, it requires force. I mean, it's not just an abstract thing. It's not just, you know, we're we're we don't like people who are intolerant, right? We need to shut them up and use political force to do it. Uh you could say the optimistic thing or the the good sign in our time, and this is partly just a consequence of World War II in particular, is that the left in Western societies is still, you know, we'll qualify this, but still not that comfortable using political force to completely silence, lock up its opposition. You could say it's legit from legitimizes. No, it certainly certainly makes space for, legitimizes, even encouragements, I would say, uh extra-legal violence on the part, you know, of the crazy people who follow their uh deliberate anti-fascist propaganda. But still, it's not the same thing as armed militant communists locking people up, shutting them down, waging war. Uh now, the flip side of that is that to have strong gods prevail politically, you also need force. You need, you know, real arms. And uh and there, it seems to me, it's not so clear that there is an obvious movement on the right that truly and and with force, with real force, uh will bring back so-called strong gods. So there's a it's still, it seems to me, a kind of, we don't know what the future will look like, but it doesn't yet seem like a hard right or a communist militant organized left is coming. And then so my question is, what you know, what what do we expect to see? Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

Well, I I think the the thing I've kind of thought about is a statuary. So um I'm from the South, a lot of old Confederate statues have been taken down. Like, what would it look like to live in a world where people just said, you know what, these guys had their problems, but they're ours. So just on that principle alone, like the the the principle of the ours-ness, and it can be something other than confederate statuary, it can be the certain customs or whatever, just the sense that they are ours, like that strong god of you don't even have to call it localism. Maybe it's more maybe it's scaled higher into nationalism, like just the sense of this is ours, and so we're and so we're taking it and keeping it, and we don't care how you feel about it.

SPEAKER_06 48:37

So I would say that that what you're talking about, Miles, I suspect is what many of us want, which is not a full-blown return to the strong odds, but let's call it sane liberalism. Conservative liberalism, per se. Yeah. Uh in other words, where traditional ways of life and belief and faith are allowed and permitted, and and the people who practice them are actually protected by the state. Uh and I guess, you know, question is whether that's whether that's possible uh again, whether it can be recovered. I mean, I'll say this, and I'm um I don't fear uh like a return of the radical right, uh mostly because I just don't see it happening. Maybe I'm naive in that regard. Um mostly when I hear the the craziest ideas either expressed by those who fear the right or by members of it, let's say the radical right, it just seems like LARPing fantasy. It's not like something we're gonna see. But then I also wonder whether return to a kind of sane uh liberalism where reverence for the strong gods, if not the politics of the strong gods, is possible, if that makes sense. You guys can tell me if that's yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:01

Well, I think I just wonder if we can keep talking about strong gods, like there's something like hearkening back to you know 1850 or something. And like the strong gods, it's 1998.

unknown 50:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

That seems to be actually something that people are actually looking for. It's just want to go back to the same world of maybe the 1990s. But even that for some people is just it's that's too much.

SPEAKER_03 50:22

Well, even that's sort of like Rod Dreyer always describes, you know, Victor Orban's hungry. It's just sort of like the West in the 1990s. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 50:31

Exactly. Yeah, yep. But that's but that's not saying that's the ideal, but I suspect that's what most people would be just fine with.

SPEAKER_01 50:38

But even that's coded as egregiously right, Wayne. Which to me says less about the right and more like like we so much of this, like even the strong odds conversations really centers the right in the dialogue. And I wonder like how much of this is really just about the left having their own civil war and that civil war pushing elements of the left further and further and further left. And so is it is it even valuable to sort of talk about the strong gods? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:09

I will say I'll say that uh I think the um I think that what one of the reasons why Trump got elected, and one of the reasons why people like Reno and Lyons can talk about return to the strong gods, is because the left over overreached drastically. So if the left had continued on as it acted during the 1990s, this the supposed halcyon age of the 1990s, they probably could have gotten their way without any opposition, any significant opposition. But once once Obama and his followers and you know began to attack more aggressively, white people, males, Christians, uh people care about borders, people who care about guns, people who uh care about God. Uh then people began on the people who who were on the right began to feel personally attacked. And they were they were angry and they were fear afraid. Rightly so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 52:09

I'm threatened if my kids' well-being is threatened.

SPEAKER_00 52:12

The world world we're in. Uh they they the left has created that by this yeah, it's by this over overreach, this insistence.

SPEAKER_05 52:21

So I the question you're asked, is there is there an ideal here? Is there a standard that we can look for in the strong gods and the weak gods? Taking a chance, I'll I'll bring up Teddy Roosevelt, for instance. Okay, so in the early 20th century, he came forward as a leader that I would say portrayed, encapsulated more of a strong god approach. He's national sovereignty, working in the interest of the country. Um and what he did to, for instance, settle scores around the world, whether it's in our hemisphere or with the Japanese and the Russians, wasn't because we took sides with one of those two. It was because to bring stability to a region. Therefore, America's interest could be pursued along with the interests of other nations, but that was still respecting our sovereignty and our right to act on our behalf, but not to take sides necessarily and not to conquer and not to expand an empire. Um, that's one side I see of his legacy.

SPEAKER_06 53:21

I think he was more imperialist than you think. Well, sorry, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 53:24

But then the other side of it, though, is the bureaucratic side, right? Did he then start, was he a precursor to the open society? I don't think that might have, I don't think that was his intention. We creating, for instance, the Park Service or creating, you know, the FDA or things like that. But it was the precursor of, it was solving a problem or serving a need that he saw as in the interest of our country and the interest of our sovereignty. But then it was future administrations and then took it and ran with it. So I I I look at that one as as possibly a balance between them, but you know, you guys may know more than I do, but I see that one as a potential balance.

SPEAKER_00 54:02

So I think there's some truth to that because uh what Roosevelt, one of the big differences between Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, and today's left is that Roosevelt thought that uh European civilization was the best. We we have science, we have Christianity, we have civility, we have morality, we have the law of service, as they used to call it. Uh and and his idea was we uh we in the West have that. And we can have a condominium of Western nations to spread this over the non-Western world. So the initial imperialist, he is an imperialist.

SPEAKER_06 54:44

Yeah, it's an uplift of manager.

SPEAKER_00 54:45

But the initial imperialist impulse was bring these people into civilization, raise them up to a genuine high standard. In other words, a strong God. I think the problem with is the problem that Roosevelt ran into, that whole imperial project that he represents, ran into is in practice it didn't work. In practice, it was exactly what Rudyard Kipling said in his poem, White Man's Burden. Yeah. Because although everyone takes that poem to be a kind of celebration of Western imperialism, actually every stanza ends with the line, it's not going to work.

SPEAKER_05 55:20

Or they're going to go right back to their old or is it going to last, right? That's what we have to see. That's you can look and you can't answer, but you won't know the answers to these questions for another five or ten years. Because what happens when the next administration comes in? What happens when you know future issues arise? Will there be the fortitude to deal with them quickly and succinctly or not? I mean, I would say history is actually on what the side of your setting is that it probably won't last. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 55:44

Well, with what happened in the after after World War I, you know, which was fought precisely as the what was the first war-to-end wars. This is one of many we've engaged in.

SPEAKER_01 55:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:55

The American people revolted. They said, we we saw what that means, we don't want that. And so they went back to what is today disparaged as isolationism, which in reality was the older American foreign policy, the older American attitude, which wasn't. We're a close society, we're all about ourselves. Yeah. We're not about fixing the world. And what Trump has represented to many, to many voters and young people is why don't we get out of that? Yeah. Why do we have to just try and fix the world and while in the process, destroying it? So, yeah, I think I think there's a prospect, uh, future prospect for that. But we do, again, you know, this is this indicates my concern with these articles and this hopefulness of which they're putting people putting too much hope in Trump, maybe. Because uh how much has Trump been able to do? How much will he be able to do? He's up against so much, so much momentum, so many interests, so many congressmen, I won't describe them, but uh problematic congressmen.

SPEAKER_03 57:03

So if you have like a I don't know if you call it uh call it an oligarchy, you know, sort of attached to an empire, like how do you how do you break the oligarchy and restore the republic, you know? Well, like historically.

SPEAKER_00 57:22

Then you have, as you suggested when you uh sent the email around about what we might talk about, you know, may maybe collapse is the only way. Uh you know, that that somehow or other some kind of a crisis has to happen that would lead people to become upset and angry and and then you could have significant change. But under our current, you know, we're so wealthy now. I mean, the average American is still not that concerned about the direction of the country. Uh even the Trump supporters, I mean, how many of them are actually going to show up in the midterm elections? Not very many. Yeah, and you know, until something really drastic happens and is kind of driven home in a way that people will feel.

SPEAKER_03 58:05

So do we it's like do you want the drastic thing, or do you just want it to coast for like outcome is a real political realignment.

SPEAKER_06 58:17

Yeah. That is a very solid populist majority that is built on the back of just kind of bread and butter success, policy successes, to put it that way, securing the border and things like that, that allows um Republicans to win elections the old-fashioned way. Yeah. That's the I'm not I'm not I'm not betting on the optimistic scenario, but I'm telling you, that that would be the hope.

SPEAKER_05 58:42

Are we witnessing a shift in the parties to populism on both sides? Is is it it seems to be trending that way? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_06 58:49

Yeah, I mean, yes, but in on the in the Republican Party, they're still a massively lethargic part of the Republican establishment. Uh many judges, the majority of the Republican Party in Congress. And just you see, at every level, state local party chairs. You know, we've got to act. Uh so I don't know. I'm I'm not like Tom, I guess I'm not that optimistic, but that would be the hope. And then you could have an enduring Trump-vance political legacy. And yeah, then I agree. The alternative is you need a massive crisis, an economic crisis, a debt crisis, or something like that. But of course, that could go horrible. I mean, I mean it's more it's itself bad and could lead to even worse. You know, so you then you have the Mandani revolution potentially, you know, of the nation as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

Yeah. More likely it would go bad if there was some kind of a crisis that would lead to a change of government. But yeah, I think that you're right, though, uh uh to emphasize there are still possibilities.

SPEAKER_02 59:56

Politics in America, like anywhere, is about coalition building. And I just don't see populism on the left having any appeal beyond what's happening, say, in New York City. And I don't even know if it's that popularly in California. It's so hard to get a real read what's going on in America in terms of where the people are. But when Trump recently won, it was clear that there was a realignment. And I think I was watching a number of social media and YouTube and others, just people who had traditionally voted Democrat are just seeing certain things that are very appealing in the direction Trump's going. The question is, is it Trump that they're attracted to, or is it a set of principles that could move forward beyond his last term? And that's where you can't predict because you don't ultimately know uh what the party really consists in. Um he had a he has a personality and an ability to market himself and market ideas, whether you like him or not. He knows how to connect with the middle, and that's who swings elections. So it really depends on coalition building. And I don't see the left seems to have aligned with a segment of the population that is just out of touch with the rest of America. I don't see in a fair free election world, I don't see that gaining any traction. I just don't.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:20

Rich, I'm curious on the the realignment with the tech kind of uh, you know, whatever, tech companies, uh tech titans sort of realign sort of aligning with the Republican Party. What's your thought on do you think that sort of marriage uh can hold? And then also what role do you see you know AI and all these kind of emerging technologies playing in the future? I think it was always there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:44

I mean, I spent a career in Silicon Valley uh before I moved up to Washington State. And I I believe that the the you can say in the 90s, 80s, 90s, into probably early 2000s, everybody always thought Silicon Valley was just lost. It was left, but the the most amazing innovations came out of there is because that's how they got their money. You wouldn't get funded if you came out anything other than the California Democrat. And those days that was very powerful. Well, what we're seeing now, and I'm not going to judge people's political persuasions, but you've seen some luminaries come forward. You have Elon Musk, you have Larry Allison, just to name two very well-known people, who have come out and said, hey, we're going to do something new here. We're going to build and innovate in a direction that we believe is right. Um it's not conservative, necessarily Republican, but it's definitely not, as we would say, the what we experienced during COVID from Silicon Valley, which was draconia. Yeah. Yeah. They're bucking that trend and they're bucking it with their own money in some cases, but also they're getting a lot of money thrown out. So I look at Silicon Valley technology. I've I've always seen it. It's but where can you get funded? You know, and and what perspective do you have um politically that will either help or hurt that? So that's my my feeling on that. Um we even saw, I was in a conference in Seattle um just uh three weeks ago, um, and uh Washington Policy Center put on a uh their annual dinner, and they had uh the president of Microsoft on a talk, I believe it was the president of Microsoft, uh Brad Smith. And he was talking about how Microsoft is having a difficult time existing in Puget Sand because Washington State has gone so far left that the talent with the money is leaving the state because of new issues, new new taxes put forward by our by our legislature. So they're losing the wealth to other states, but they're having a difficult time recruiting new people to come to the state because they know if they enrich themselves as a Washington state resident, the hammer's gonna come on. They are capitalists at the core. And if they can operate better in a different state, they'll move there, even no matter what damage was done in the state they're leaving. Now you talk about AI going forward. Um that's very interesting because there's a lot of debate right now on what is AI. Is it true intelligence? I don't think so yet. It's very, very, very powerful computing over very large networks and extremely deep data sources to come up with information in a rapid-fire sense that we find amazing. So we think it's intelligent, but I don't think it truly is. He said yeah. Yes. I'm curious. That's to be the terminator story. Well, that's that's to be true. But but what we are going to see, and this is gonna be fascinating as we go forward, is industries that once thought they were immune from um well, their jobs were secure from technology innovation because they were the smartest ones in the room, are not so secure anymore. I think you're gonna find the legal firms, legal industry, you're gonna find accounting, you're gonna find engineers, you're gonna find even a big swath of the coders that developed these programs are gonna find themselves redundant. So I think something we're gonna find in the next 10 years, maybe 15, as we look back on this, are whole new sections of highly educated professionals without a trade. And that I think is gonna be that for me is the biggest question on AI. I think it's the same time when people said, what happened when the taxis came and you didn't need horse-drawn carriages anymore? Or the personal computer came and you didn't need secretaries anymore. Now we're in that, and are these people, what do they do?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:36

Learn diploma. That's the new thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:38

I think the beauty of this and the good side is that if technology takes on certain portions of the professional world, that frees up the human mind and the human spirit to then innovate new places for these people to go. So I see it as a positive uh multiplying factor on where we're gonna go. But yeah, other than that, I I I I I still don't. You can buy A terminator if you want, but I I I we'll see. Skynet isn't quite here yet.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:04

Johnny, part of the reason why I told you I don't predict politics is precisely my concern with AI, the manufacturing of opinion, the surveillance that it's being used with people who run these companies boasting of swinging elections in other countries and then the suppression of speech. It's impossible, on the one hand, one, to get a real read about where the American citizens are, and then creating uh low information voters deliberately. So to me, that's the biggest concern, especially when you want to talk about politics. Then you're gonna have a world where people just vote on what they think is real, um, and as opposed to what's really a threat. Um so much of policy is just now just shaping public opinion. But it used to be public opinion shaped by representatives of a state or citizenry, but now it's in the hands of very wealthy people, major corporations who are now aligned with politics. And if you can manipulate public opinion, which is what drives a lot of American politics, how do you it trying to predict where politics is going to go with that is like trying to predict where a market's going when you've got market makers manipulating information. You just don't know. So, what's the role of the statesman in that? Well, even before that, I mean uh Rich had made a really good point about AI and how it does have an impact on markets and jobs, and those are obviously very important. But in a country where you're you you have a representative republic and you need not low information but high information voters, what I'm seeing as a big threat is AI, the algorithms, the clear bias that's built into them. And most people can't distinguish truth from reality. And so the biggest concern in American politics and in any representative government is public opinion. And that's why each party wants to have a space where they can debate ideas. But if you can manufacture public opinion, not get it to grow organically so you can see where the country's at, and then have a statesman either lead or moderate, you have now a real threat to American liberty. And it's obvious the reason why there's so much interest in who owns TikTok, who owns uh Twitter or X, is because people have recognized that if you have that, that's like the ring in that uh the ring uh the what is it? The Lord Lord, that's that's that's the ring of power. One ring too. The problem with that is those companies are not aligned with the people. They're aligned with government and they're aligned with big money. And there's some who've even been who run these companies who form powers in some cases. Well, well, well, but by I I forget the name of the company, but there was the CEO boasting about how they played a huge role in swinging elections in Europe. You're literally that's a violation of natural rights. That that is that is a real attack on politics. And Tom earlier had correctly said that when you have an open society, you're going to destroy politics. But there's a thousand ways you can also destroy politics. One of them is by literally attacking its foundation. Montesquieu, in the spirit of the laws, talks about how in Athens somebody tried to manipulate the elections in the voting, and he was immediately uh apprehended and executed. And Montesquieu says, now that's how you deal with something so crucial as the bedrock of any free society. And yet there's been very little concern, at least publicly stated, about Russian interference. Any any any any interference, but you can also manufacture opinion not just about politics, but even certain direction uh a country should go. And then if if people are uncritical, they'll be in a very, very bad direction. Now, what does a statesman do to do? Uh the first step is to just recognize what kind of regime you're in. You can we're not a theocracy, we're not a tyranny, but we can slip into despotism if there's no awareness of what threatens the fragility of liberty, and just stick to the constitution. If you erode people's ability to assemble and to fruit and to speak freely, you've destroyed politics. So I think there has to be real serious thought given to what to do. I don't have solutions on what to do with that with the social media, but it's pretty obvious that if it was benign, very wealthy, powerful people wouldn't be interested in it. But there's clearly an arms race as to who can develop the means to sway public opinion. And I think that politicians, and I don't, I'm not very hopeful, have to be very clear on crossing those boundaries where you erode the principles of our country. Then it doesn't matter what politics in America is like because you're not getting consent of the governed. And that's another principle. So what if that principle is already eroded? I don't know that it is. I mean, I I think we still have, I think America is still extremely healthy. I think America has a real sense of rights. They may not be able to articulate them as well as Tom can, but I think America has it in its blood. There's a recognition that their life belongs to them, that consent is simply just, and that there are certain rights that are given to us by nature and nature's God, and not by government or oligarchs or corporations or other foreign countries. And I think that's just in America's instinct. And I know that by contrast, I mean, we immigrated to this country. It was very visible to us that Americans have a real strong sense of rights. They don't, they again, that they that they they're not John Locke, but they've somehow internalized it. And uh and I know that it's still there because they st because people who want to sway public opinion still feel the necessity to justify their position by manipulating opinion so they can get an artificial consent. So it's there and it's assumed in American politics. I think you need to make this a big issue. The problem is you live in an age of disinformation and we're distracted by things that really um don't affect us immediately. This is something that affects us immediately. But it it politics has become theater and a circus, and I think you need to refocus on things like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:02

I would add on the plus side, uh most of my most of my adult life has been living with almost a total monopoly on organs of public opinion by the left. You know, it used to be just the networks, like two, like when I was a kid, three three networks. Yeah. Then later it was, well, a couple cable networks, but basically not much different. Major newspapers all echoing each other. Still has still often true, it's often true, but then you have now you have the internet. So I was thinking the difference between Nixon, when they were going after Nixon in uh 1973 versus going after Trump uh in the last, you know, the last couple of years. We we couldn't really find out what was going on with Nixon. That was all buried. The media all being lockstep, buried all the all the stuff shenanigans that were going on to falsely persuade Nixon that he was about to be indicted and got him to resign, concealing the fact that his own intelligence agencies and the military were working against him, working with the media, coming up with, I mean, the stuff insane stuff in retrospect. No one knew. With Trump, it came out like stuff came out right away. The sabotaging of the election, there was immediate discussion in 2020 of all the stuff going on. And uh, and now you know, there's a there's a lot of easy, there's a lot of ways, not easy, but you can find out what's going on. Like you say, you can get on X, and there's some certain accounts you can go to. Uh, you were talking about that too. You can find out stuff. Uh, yeah, exactly. And that didn't used to be true. It's it's hard to get rid of all that.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:42

Even yeah, you can manipulate algorithms, you can you know, I just want to add one thing to that. Um, not to get academic, but Tocqueville talks about the importance of newspapers and free speech in America. And you would think that he would have an argument for some limited restrictions on speech. And he says actually no, unbridled. Why? Because he thinks one, the second you start to censor, it becomes a slippery slope and an arbitrary, like, well, why not censor this? So he said better not to do it. The other thing is he warns against having a dominance of national media with one or two voices. And so the polit the political equivalent or the intellectual equivalent of the Electoral College for Tocqueville was to decentralize public opinion. And he wanted local papers. Today that would be something like uh what Tom's talking about, this period after Nixon, where you now do have multiple voices. What you have to worry about is misinformation. That's a topic for another day, but at least that kind of freedom of speech has allowed people to hear competing merits.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:45

Well, wouldn't you say that the openness that Tocqueville recommends allows for people to say things that others would call misinformation or disinformation?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:54

And it allows for a consciously partisan press and that's our our idea of print and media is so deeply wet into World War II. Right? Like we we had a a place where Franklin Roosevelt basically decided that the government needs to be the referee of information. And historically in the United States, the free press regime is that even the government, the government isn't the referee. The government's a player on the court. The government, the difference is the government has a gun, but he's still just a player on the court of public opinion, just like everybody else. And I think that that's counterintuitive for Americans downstream from World War II, where there was an official line that was proposed in the interest of national security. So neutral media is a creation of the 1940s.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:44

Well, what's related, I mean, your point is related to Dan's. And what's interesting to go back to Tocqueville is he thought there are two ways you can try a case in America in a jury system. But also, if the person is wrongly convicted of something or accused of something, but if the state is going after them, that's a real tyranny. And he thought local papers and muckreaking, yeah, that would be a means to be able to at least sow some doubts and then really raise the bar for uh better air on the side of the wild west. And that was his view. And and it's extremely it, it's it's very timely for us because we're in the grip of this. And um again, that was to go back to your point. I'd like to look, what would a statesman do? I think they have to defend freedom of speech and freedom of association.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:31

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Against the control of uh particular artisan oligarchs.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:37

Um there's but there's a vested interest for them to protect that, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:16:41

Yeah, no, it's a it's a danger. I mean, I guess maybe in some disagreement with Rich, I do think that the original algorithms for a lot of the main sites are written by men who lean to the left. You could say there's a thawing and opening up to the right in Silicon Valley, but I worry that um the major social media uh uh companies right now still come from the left. And then I think um the regulators in the European Union uh very much want to filter out uh whatever COVID information, election stuff. Uh and and of course you guys probably agree with me, uh the the the the left would do all of that here and and is intending to. Maybe we're a few steps behind. Maybe we don't need to.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:27

It's not even a left issue. I think any partisan, any ideologue, whether we're right or left, it's all selective censorship. It's just whatever your sacred cow is. And Tok feels very clear on that. Better not better better to have an open space for dialogue than to even begin that very arbitrary decision to censor.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:46

But also the question we were talking about earlier on AI, even though I went deep into the the easy answer, which was no the the man against machine paradigm, I think Khalil really opens the door with with the man against man and and how you cannot have politics in in censored speech environments. And what we tend to think of censoring is still a 20th-century definition of censoring, which is what you said isn't distributed. Okay. But I think there's a new form of censorship showing up, and I'm not sure if maybe manipulation, if there's a word that exists between manipulation and censorship, that's what I'm getting at here, is we, no matter how much we think we're in control of our data streams, and we may turn off one social network and go to another one thinking, okay, finally I'm free. That algorithm is watching everything you're doing. And it's confirmation bias like we have never seen before. And those people feel like they're getting, and I can conclude pretty much all of us and those people, feel like you're getting your truth. And your truth is really interesting when you go to talk to people on the other side of the political equation when they don't have a darn idea of what you're talking about. So we're all in our own again. You're like, wait a minute, how can you not know that this happened, this happened, this happened? This is national news. Well, it's not on that person's algorithm stream, and then they bring up all kinds of um debates or issues, and you're like, where in the world did you get that? So we think we're free, we think we're intelligent, what's going on right now, we're being manipulated. Now, the thing that frightens me, if you think about AI, watch what's going on with the ability to create video and images and voice. So, what happens in the next midterm election when one week before the ballots drop, or one week before the polls open, depending what state you're in, um, a video shows up of the candidate of a we'll say, my likely my guess it would be against a Republican candidate who is taken either out of context or a video shows up that is absolutely detrimental to their campaign and their message. And it seems to most every person who's watching it that it's legit, but it's actually not. It was made to destroy the campaign. And that candidate only has one week or two weeks to refute that. I argue that that that it can't be. That's my worry. Because if you're watching now, it's all fun. You can create videos of your dog, your cat, your mother, your girlfriend, whatever, your wife, husband. But what happens when it's used maliciously against a campaign? I believe that is gonna be one of the next forms of man against man. And if we think about, you know, war and battle, I don't know if we're gonna go hot or not. I hope not, I pray not, but I do believe it's gonna go in the technical world strong. And you can eliminate people just as easily out.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:36

I don't know. To me, the world after COVID is a world where people are much more skeptical and doubtful about anything playing by major news sources, any sort of. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:47

One question I have is is the wild west of ideas, is that the ideal?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:53

Like, I mean, because I think it's going back to our strong gods point, you know, how you how can there be a return to the strong gods with if it's just as free-for-all.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:01

Yeah, wouldn't we want our strong gods to be hegemonic?

SPEAKER_06 1:21:06

I want it to be strong, I want it to be the strong governments if if they're powerful, shut down the Wild West. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:15

So the mid-20th defensive America from making the case. I mean, politics. If there's gonna be politics, meaning if we're gonna once again bring back fights about what is the right way of life for America, there has to be a back and forth, but as you say at the same time, and yeah, there has to be some kind of conclusion. Yeah. Otherwise, every everything remains uh everybody remains at odds with each other and the war goes on. I want to get to the conclusion, right? Yeah. That's what we want to define the 21st century. Well, I I would say, you know, but back to the Tocqueville period. One of the, you know, Tocqueville certainly emphasizes the themes you're talking about, uh, Kilgilder. But one of the other themes he emphasizes is this map, this amazing consensus in America on what's what's right and wrong, you know, what the status of Christianity in American life, you know, how do you understand uh what you the importance of liberty and what it's for, yeah, and how do you use it? Um that's all that's what I think people like Lyons mean by a world a world of strong us. You know, you have a strong sense of what your community stands for, of what's of what the good things are we need to aim at, what what uh what justice is.

unknown 1:22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:27

And among the things that Tocqueville actually talks about is Americans who came and settled the country came with habits of self-government that are pre-tudor England. And then you get a layer of the principles of the Constitution on top of that. And those are our American version of strong gods. So you don't have to go that far back. It doesn't have to be this wild, you know, cosmic sense of the pagan gods and return of the gods or whatever. Um, but uh it just literally when Toefil arrives, he says he was struck by the amount of freedom people would live within without abusing it. Protestants, he says, would give their daughter daughters a long leash when it came to dating, and they could choose their own husbands, and divorce rates were rare, unlike in Europe, where you have arranged marriages and there were constraints on everything from courtship to what you could speak. And so what struck him was America's real strong sense of liberty. It was always enlightened, even their self-interest was governed by some enlightened understanding of self-interest. But we're losing that because we're competing with cosmopolitan interests, universal interests, as opposed to just what's in the interest of the United States. And all of those things, I think, are healthy, and Toefill recognizes them and wants to find ways to help support it.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:45

But so what these guys are are bringing out nicely is that uh you can have openness and debate, you can question the government, but that only really works on the basis, broadly speaking, of you could say a shared orthodoxy. A shared consensus about what is basically a good political order, what is justice, what is moral behavior. In thinking about this issue, I think of this um you know, there's a Supreme Court case, early important open society Supreme Court case where the court uh announces that there is uh what is it, the the only const the the only star in our constitutional constellation, something like this, is that there's no established orthodoxy. You can't um promote an established orthodoxy. And that's of course not true. It's not possible for any community, and it certainly wasn't true of the older republic. And so while uh I think we don't hope for uh nasty, vicious, strong gods, some kind of shared orthodoxy must return. And only on the basis of a shared agreement about what's good, healthy, important, can you then allow speech, debate, pushback, and so forth. That was the older regime.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:02

Yeah, I agree completely. The degree to which, and to Tom's point to the degree to which that sort of tofu in America has been seen as kind of vibrant pluralists, you'll hear this word applied to the United States in the pluralistic. Well, pluralism about pluralistic about what? Right. Everybody mainly speaks English. Everybody's largely Protestant, and even Catholics in the older republic, right? There the debates between Protestant and Catholic aren't that big. They're actually relatively narrow. It's interesting to see who gets proscribed in that era. The Latter-day Saint movement does, for example. Why? Because everybody hates polygamy. And so even something like that is considered sort of beyond the pair. And obviously the Latter-day Saints get rid of that and and whatnot, but what you see is there's actually a relatively unified order here in the early republic, right up until the 1960s. I think that that what we call pluralism starts far later. And so we like people are quick to say, well, look at the look at the the diversity that comes into you know the American Republic in the in the Golden Age. I say the Golden Age.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:30

So I think we've overstated the differences. Yeah. I mean, sorry, I don't mean to pick. I think your general point is right, Miles, but I do think the country moved to the left with the waves of Southern and Eastern Europeans that came into the country in the late 19th and early 20th century, and anarchist movements, assassinations, bombings, I mean, a lot of labor violence, communist activity in the country. Uh and some of these people become serious progressive voters, and the progressives partly make their case by, hey, we can establish order uh in light of all the problems so that these this this new wave of immigration is promoted. So I don't I don't I guess that's a that's a that's nitpicking at your general point, though.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:13

No, I think it's a it's a worthwhile nitpicking. I think that the question is like, can't I think Catholics become pretty good Americans? Of course. And so I think that's politically electricity. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we need to submit to Rome.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:28

Strong God.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:29

All your problems uh but I think this is this is important because like we we've we've rendered pluralism as this thing that basically says you can be whatever you want to be and we can create a unified America. And I don't think I don't think that's what's going on in the Golden Age. I don't think that's what's going on. It never turns out we never have had pluralism, ever.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:49

We will we only put claim to.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:51

Right. You know No, that's that's a absolutely true.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:54

Oh yeah, you know, uh oh yeah, oh yeah, we're pluralistic, you know, you can get whatever you like. No, submit it. When did that change? You're an example. Mormons? You know, we'll accept any religion at all, but you can't have play, you can't have polygamy. Right. Because monogamy is the right way to do marriage. And that's point B, the way it's done in America. And they feel free to not become American citizens. And they get with the program. We'll keep you in the territories forever. And they get with the program. Was it 1896? They drop it in Utah becomes the state. They adjusted the doctrine. And the same thing is true now, right? You will submit to talking about how transgenderism is the greatest thing ever. And you don't want, you don't want to do that, your your life is over. We'll wreck your career, we'll tell your employer to, you know, we'll tell your friends, we'll we'll we'll uh nuke your Facebook account, whatever. I mean, this is this is life. This is uh and of course we in when America was in the older dispensation in America, you can have these disconsenses because it was it was what I would involve a civilized consensus. We're very tender today about talking about actual civilization. So we'll use metaphors like strong ones instead of saying we had the we had it right. You know, really, one wife at a time is the right way to do it. That's moderation. And one husband, one one to a customer, right? The American And similarly with all of the other qualities of a moral character, when the founders talked about the need for virtue, they weren't sitting around agonizing what in the world can virtue mean? Well, the Plato has one view. No, they got a consensus on what that was. Yeah. And I think that's the kind of thing that has to happen again if there's going to be that kind of republicanism. I do think the future of republicanism is in severe doubt because it's very difficult. I think it'd be very difficult to bring back anything like that kind of consensus.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:59

Yeah, it seems to me that like a return to Christianity is really the only thing that could save us, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:04

And self-government. And again, I mean, when when Tocqueville is at pains to remind Americans of how important it is to reclaim your right to govern your life within the boundaries of the principles and the end and purpose of our government. Obviously, Christianity plays a huge role, but we're losing that. We're losing people, people are losing interest in governing locally, and there's no real governance on a national level. How do you have an impact on that? Um, in fact, Tocqueville even warns don't get distracted by the national scene because your real liberties are local. Um, and so I think if if you want to bring back the topic of the return of the strong gods through an American context, I think just a return to the recognition that what makes this country so unique, what makes it a civilization, is it's grounded in principles and but that are contingent on actual self-governance from moral virtue right down to local participation and actually advocating for your life because government's not going to do it for you. They grow like anything else, and it restricts that space. So I think it is possible. I mean, I am somewhat optimistic, but I think you know, the return of the strong odds, whatever that means, has to be within the American context, and we have a very viable tradition.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:19

And on that note, we'll wrap up.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:21

Thanks, guys. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that was fun.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:24

Thank you for watching Project Cosmos, Conversations on the Future of Civilization, which is a production of ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. If you're a student, professor, or lifelong learner who wants to get more involved with ISI, visit isi.org or follow us on social media to learn more about our educational programs that teach the foundations of Western and American civilization and what it means to be a great and good man or woman today. That's ISI.org or like and follow us on social media. Thank you.